It was once known as the “centre right”, and this was the year it definitively perished. It never had a coherent political philosophy, but it tended to blend deference to the perceived needs of large business interests, the championing of so-called traditional values that were actually longstanding prejudices, and admiration for established institutions. Above all else, it supposedly offered a cordon sanitaire, preventing anything further to the right from acquiring political legitimacy.
That hasn’t quite worked to plan. Nigel Farage now claims his populist-right Reform party has a higher membership than the Tories: if true, it is the first time in British history that members of a rightwing rival have outnumbered the Conservative party’s. Nearly two decades ago, then Tory leader, David Cameron, dismissed Farage’s Ukip as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists mostly”; but today, Cameron’s party has ceded ideological ground to its challengers and the current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, is fighting Reform on Farage’s terrain.
What is behind this shift? More than a decade of Tory economic policy has brought about stagnating living standards and crumbling public infrastructure. Unwilling to fix problems of its own making, the party has used divisive topics to divert public attention and create scapegoats to shoulder the burden of blame that should be its own. Thatcherism offered council-house sales and privatisation: short-term bungs that had a devastating long-term cost, but which at least bought off swathes of the electorate at the time. No equivalent exists today. Instead, the Tories feel increasingly compelled to imitate a form of politics they once rejected as too extreme or, at least, too vulgar.
Despite his Ukip-bashing, Cameron played a pivotal role in making immigration the toxic centrepiece of British politics, and was a key architect of Brexit. Former Tory peer and party chair Sayeeda Warsi voiced her concerns about key Cameron ally Michael Gove’s views about British Muslims. Zac Goldsmith’s vile Islamophobic campaign for London mayor happened under Cameron’s watch. Liz Truss was one of the rightwing firebrands promoted by Cameron’s “A-list”.
Brexit was a watershed moment that saw the party adopt a populist demagoguery that breached the walls of any remaining cordon sanitaire. Theresa May lobbed grenades at it with her notorious 2016 “citizens of nowhere” speech. Boris Johnson found himself applauded by far-right extremists. After her benighted premiership tanked, Truss joined the US far-right speaker circuit, savaging the “deep state” alongside the likes of Steve Bannon.
But this isn’t a Britain-specific phenomenon. Witness the Trumpian takeover of the Republican party. It was made possible by the party’s establishment endorsing conspiracism and Islamophobia. Take Republican ancien regime stalwart Liz Cheney, now recast as a supposed “moderate”: back in 2009, she indulged conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
Across Europe, the same trend can be observed. Austria’s People’s party was the first to cross the old dividing line by forging a coalition with the far-right Freedom party in 2000; 24 years later, a more extreme incarnation of the Freedom party secured first place at the same time as the People’s party surged rightwards. In Hungary, the ruling Fidesz party metamorphosed from centre right to proto-fascist. In Italy, the so-called centre right is a junior partner in a government led by the far right. Germany’s Christian Democrats have shifted right, while the far right in the country surges.
Elements within the old media, not least outlets led by Rupert Murdoch, helped bring us here by serving up a relentless diet of bile against minorities – Muslims, migrants, refugees and trans people. Today, Elon Musk uses the new-media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, as a crude instrument of rightwing radicalisation.
None of this is to be sentimental about the old centre right, which from the 1980s onwards increasingly offered sink-or-swim economics and military adventurism. It is to recognise that democratic norms are no longer in fashion, and the consensus over what is “too extreme” has collapsed.
On each side of the Atlantic, mainstream rightwingers – in politics and media – embrace positions they would previously have resisted. From naked bigotry to disinformation to treating opponents as dangerous national threats, the trend is clear. Where will it end? Here, there is no obvious answer, because the borders of the mainstream right are no longer policed. The tragic truth is that the western world may only get this out of its system when confronted with the consequences of such an ideology. A grim reckoning awaits us.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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