In the hourly deluge of outrage and nonsense that passes for the national conversation, it was only another fleeting moment. But last Tuesday, as the TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer talked to Ben Habib – the Reform UK party’s “co-deputy leader” and its candidate in the recent Wellingborough byelection – about so-called small boats crossing the Channel, their conversation highlighted where the noise around that issue seems to be going: into places so inhuman and ugly that even a populist true believer such as Hartley-Brewer feels a pang of horror.
Their 11-minute chat took place the day after five people, including a four-year-old girl, had been killed trying to get to the English coastline from a beach near Boulogne, on an inflatable dinghy carrying 112 people. Reform’s belief, Habib said, was that the UK authorities should “use force” to stop such vessels entering our territorial waters, “and require them to turn round”.
Hartley-Brewer asked what would happen if the boat in question wasn’t seaworthy, or if the people clinging to it jumped into the sea. “The presumption in your question is that we have a duty of care to people who are seeking to enter our country illegally,” said Habib. “We have a duty of care to people drowning in the Channel, yes,” she replied. “We do.”
“Let’s not infantilise these people,” he said. “They have free will. They were safe in France: they paid good money to get on a boat seeking illegally to come … And I’m not going to be held to ransom by their claim that they deserve protection as soon as they get into our territorial waters.”
Whether he included children in that swingeing judgment remained unclear. But if people scuppered a boat, he said, they would have to “suffer the consequences of their actions”.
“You would leave them to drown?” asked his host. “Absolutely,” Habib said.
A Reform UK spokesperson soon insisted that any suggestion that these views were shared by its party leader, Richard Tice, was “ridiculous”, and that its answer to the small boats issue was “clear and simple: pick up and safely take back to France”. In a self-made video, Habib then tried to take back what he had said, and claimed Hartley-Brewer’s questions had been “childish and completely hypothetical”. But by then, his words had been loudly celebrated online (“If someone is threatening to drown themselves as a way to be let in illegally … let them,” was a typical comment under TalkTV’s YouTube clip), and reported in a spurt of news coverage that died down surprisingly quickly. Conjuring up the spectacle of people being left to die, it seemed, might now be just another contribution to the debate.
If that’s where we have ended up, there are two explanations. One is about years of dehumanising rhetoric that goes back to the term “bogus asylum seeker” entering the political vernacular in the mid-1990s. Labour politicians from the Blair-Brown era have a case to answer here, but Tories have been the most egregious offenders. That supposed moderate David Cameron, let’s not forget, once called people crossing the Mediterranean a “swarm”. During her time at the Home Office, Suella Braverman – who now talks about the failure of multiculturalism – said there was an “invasion on our southern coast”; while he was an immigration minister, Robert Jenrick claimed people crossing the Channel had “completely different lifestyles and values” to people in the UK.
These, moreover, were never just outbursts and mere pronouncements. The views they embodied have now been crystallised in the prospect of deportation flights to Rwanda – and, from a wider perspective, the Conservatives’ reinvention as what this weekend’s Tory-to-Labour defector Dan Poulter calls “a nationalist party of the right”. There is another relevant story to be told about the second force in British politics that fits the same description. To an even greater extent than Ukip, Reform UK has achieved the feat of being ostensibly opposed to the Conservative party while staying very close to it. It is also clever enough to combine its hardcore policy platform – built around the idea of “net zero immigration” – with the very modern sense of lols and bantz once summed up by Arron Banks, the longstanding ally and benefactor of Reform’s “honorary president” and majority shareholder, Nigel Farage: “The more outrageous we are, the more attention we’ll get. The more attention we get, the more outrageous we’ll be.” But at heart, what Reform is up to is something both deadly serious and grimly familiar.
About 15 years ago, our politics was briefly unsettled by a surge in support for the neofascist British National party. At the general election of 2010, the BNP proposed “a halt to all further immigration”, “the deportation of all illegal immigrants” and the end of what it called “the ‘asylum’ swindle”. As well as pulling Britain out of the EU, it said it would repeal “far-leftist social engineering projects, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, aimed at enforcing multiculturalism”, and that it rejected the “theory” of climate change. The people who came up with this stuff were a mixture of inadequates and monsters: they were never going to get anywhere near power and influence. But long after they left the stage, it is sobering to see how much of what they spewed out has now made its way into everyday politics.
Let’s be honest: the insistence that refugees might be left to drown is the kind of thing that used to be confined to the meeting rooms of dodgy pubs and white supremacist marches where the police always outnumbered the protesters. Now, it has been voiced by a millionaire property investor who was born in Pakistan, came to the UK when he was 13, and is now an enthusiastic member of a party with no end of influence. We now know that Ofcom has no issue with Farage presenting his nightly show on GB News during the forthcoming election campaign; and with Reform’s paranoid, parochial mindset also echoed by the Mail and Telegraph and soaked up by scores of Tory MPs, the party may well have a level of clout out of all proportion to whatever share of the vote it manages to attract.
What Habib said on TalkTV was surely a window into not just his party’s soul, but the warped mindset of a growing political faction that is tightening its grip on Conservatism. Self-evidently, it is following much the same script as a whole host of hard-right authoritarians: Donald Trump, the French politician Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. But these days, I keep thinking of a passage from the music and culture writer Jon Savage’s peerless book England’s Dreaming, taken from a diary entry in 1975: “Fascism here won’t be like in Germany. It’ll be English: ratty, mean, pinched”.
Because political success in the 21st century demands a few other qualities, it may also be trite, flippant and presented with a patina of modern diversity. But its defining feature will be the complete absence of common humanity that is already evident in the mainstream, which all of us – Tories included – ought to find utterly terrifying.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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