Recently I wrote an article entitled Is Britain becoming like 1930s Germany?. At the time I questioned whether the comparison was fair and reasonable. However, on viewing this week’s National Conservatism Conference, I didn’t go far enough. Nat C, Germans and National Socialism has trended on Twitter for much of the week and all for the most horrific of reasons.
Who are the National Conservatives?
Kevin Roberts, president of US think tank Heritage was one of the key speakers. He repeatedly blamed “globalists” for most of the world’s political problems. He told the conference: “The new left, greedy, elitist, woke and globalist, has foresworn every principle their ideological predecessors once espoused: democracy, equality, diversity, justice.”
It should be noted here that “globalists” is a term associated with antisemitism and far-right conspiracy theorists, as Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, explained: “Antisemitism experts such as the Anti-Defamation League identify ‘globalist’ as a common antisemitic trope based on conspiracy theories about international Jewish power.”
If you aren’t feeling just a bit uneasy with this, Roberts went on: “It abhors religion, and Christianity especially, as well as the nation-state, political accountability and even objective truth. Their goal is not to win political contests but to end them altogether – to sweep away dissent and any subversive institution that dares facilitate.
“This new left is not in competition. It is at war with the West, with the moral, intellectual and social foundations on which our entire civilisation rests. Which is why it reserves a singular hatred for the kind of conservatism represented by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, by Brexit, by Viktor Orbán and, yes, by this conference.”
Unsurprisingly Secretary Suella Braverman continued the far-right theme of the conference. The Guardian recently reported that she stood accused of breaching the barristers’ code over her ‘racist’ language with complaints made against her by lawyers and faith organisations. These complaints against Braverman, who is a qualified barrister, were made to the Bar Standards Board and claimed that the home secretary had breached the code of conduct with “racist sentiments and discriminatory narratives”, as Russ Jackson goes on to discuss:
A Home Secretary with complaints being made about her conduct to the Bar Standards Board sums up the current state of UK politics.
Things didn’t improve with Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge. She told the conference that “cultural Marxism” is “destroying our children’s souls”.
As Nadia Whittome MP for Nottingham East pointed out: “‘Cultural Marxism’ is another antisemitic conspiracy theory supported by neo-Nazis and groups like the BNP”, referring to the Jewish Times who had condemned her words, quoting the government’s own independent adviser of antisemitism, Lord Mann, who said this was “just not appropriate for a parliamentarian to be using a term such as this.”
Could it get worse? Yes, it could
Could it get any worse? Of course. The conference then went into full-blown 1930s Germany with a tweet from the organiser saying: “I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century.”
David Henig expressed a view of these remarks that will undoubtedly be held by many:
You wonder what the publications – Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics, at King’s College London lists the Spectator, Times, Sun and even the Jewish Chronicle – and their advertisers think of platforming such extremism. Who would want to be associated with anything the National Conservatives are saying?
White culture is under threat
Historian David Starkey spoke on Wednesday morning telling the National Conservatism conference that “white culture” is under threat and attacked the Black Lives Matter movement as: “attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.”
He went on: “The idea that we are they are there to defend black lives is preposterous.
“They do not care about black lives. They only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture.”
Starkey then went on to claim that: “The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left; there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery.”
Well, it’s worth returning to Roberts: “Their [the new left] goal is not to win political contests but to end them altogether – to sweep away dissent and any subversive institution that dares facilitate.”
Let’s just remember that Jacob Rees-Mogg, quite remarkably, told the British electorate this week that: “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding that their clever scheme comes back to bite them. As we found by insisting on voter ID.”
That looks like an outright admission that our own government is trying to settle political contests altogether by their gerrymandering.
We now seem to have gone so far down the far-right wing slope, it’s possible to believe there is literally nothing these people won’t do in their quest to remain in power forever.
Are the alarm bells ringing yet?
Alarm bells should now be ringing for all of us across the political spectrum but particularly for moderate Conservative Party members who perhaps should leave the party now (in my view). No moderate Tory should be associated with their party right now.
David Gauke, who was one of the last moderate Tory Ministers until the great cull of 2019, said on LBC that the conference “gives the impression of a load of grumpy people who hate modernity and hate modern Britain, which will ‘put people off’ joining the Tories.”
Moreover, Sir Keir Stamer needs to wake up to the reality that we might well be facing the full-on rise of fascism in the UK. The Left and Centre-Left are the majority:
And yet he has ruled out any sort of electoral reform, such as Proportional Representation which the Labour Party membership supports, even though it’s something that terrifies these far-right Tories, as so eloquently expressed by Lord Peter Cruddas who told the conference: “If Labour wins a big majority at the next election, they will reduce the voting age to 16, they will abolish voter ID, and introduce Proportional Representation making it almost impossible for the Conservatives to win an outright majority in the future.”
It’s hard to understand why Starmer won’t back Proportional but given the evidence, does he want to enable far-right politics to become embedded in the body politic because he fears that something so radical might endanger his chances of entering Downing Street?
What do you think?
