It’s Badenoch but it could get worse

Something very bad is happening in British politics and it’s very dangerous

Without getting too stary-eyed about this, I seem to remember a time when British politics was a hell of a lot more civilized than it is now. The system has always been adversarial and at times it got pretty heated but the really nasty stuff was largely confined to the fringes where it slunk around the edges without sticking to the sides.

The problem is that the edges are now centre stage. The leader of His Majesty’s opposition cannot even bring herself to defend Jess Phillips, a long time campaigner on issues relating to child and female abuse, who has been accused by the vile Elon Musk of being a ‘rape genocide apologist’. Nor has she reprimanded her front bench colleague, Robert Jenrick, for his racist comments about people from Pakistan who he claims are prone to committing the most atrocious of crimes.

There was a time when using this sort language would have invited summary expulsion from the front benches of the House of Commons. But Mr. Jenrick is still there.

Meanwhile Ms. Phillips, the minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, has been forced to live under close police protection as Tory MPs bay for her blood.

Common decency dictates that political opponents, especially those who aspire to government, should draw a clear red line around naked racism and threats to colleagues in parliament, regardless of their political affiliations. This happened when two members of parliament were killed by politically motivated assassins. Would it happen today? Worse still would the victims be blamed for motivating their killers?

Ms. Badenoch displays a depressingly high level of toleration for bad behaviour among her colleagues. Yet she leads a party that in the past had no compunction over ridding themselves of racists, such as Enoch Powell. Its current leader insists she is starting afresh and does not show much enthusiasm for her party’s lineage.

She is, admittedly, in a difficult position leading a Conservative Party, reduced to a mere 120 MPs and absorbed by internal squabbling. It is left groping for rebirth by employing increasingly desperate means.

The Tories have become mesmerized by the rise of Donald Trump in America, absurdly believing that something good will happen if they attach themselves to his Make America Great Again agenda (they really need to look more carefully at what it says on the tin which, unsurprisingly, contains no mention of Britain).

Added to this they are petrified of losing support to Nigel Farage’s frenzied Reform Party. Outflanking the extreme right is a mugs’ game but this has not stopped Tories from heading for this precipice with predictable consequences.

An argument could be made that this slide away from decency and the traditional behaviour of mainstream British politics is nothing less than a reflection of the way that society has slid into greater extremism.

It could also be said that far from being a British phenomenon extremist politics is on a rampage through the world from America onwards where the mad and bad are now occupying the top tables.

Moreover blame for this shift to the rabid right is being squarely laid at the door of left liberal forces accused of being asleep on the job, failing to notice that their agendas are no longer in line with working people who are beset with anxiety over what the future holds and feel that those who were once said to represent the working class have wafted off on a wave of political correctness.

There is an element of truth here but right wing populists have very little to offer to improve the lives of ordinary people, aside from wild promises and a consistent attachment to a golden past, much of which never existed and most of which was a darn sight worse than the present.

However they do have the gift of the gab and the skill of deploying easy to understand narratives untrammeled by mere facts.

The ease with which these narratives are spreading and the electoral success of the extreme right has produced a sense of fatalism elsewhere in the political system. The fight back is often way too timid and stupidly based on following extremist agendas.

Where a more vigorous approach has been adopted, for example in Poland, courageously in Georgia and magnificently here in Britain where racist rioters were put back in their boxes, the fight back has succeeded.

You need to take a very dim view of society if you believe in the inevitable triumph of people who wish to undermine the essential decency underpinning democracies that have a consistent record of delivering peace and prosperity.

Focusing on the noise and disruption of the rabble is disastrous as Britain’s Conservative Party will discover as they become fixated by the idea that their road to salvation lies buried in the gutter of vile extremism. It is sad to see Britain’s historically most successful political party reduced to the state it is now in but it is not inevitable that it should sink further. If does so, it will be eclipsed by the far right. So, if nothing other than self-preservation motivates a rethink, a rethink is urgently required.