In a fortnight’s time, a remarkable two-day political conference is going to be happening in central London. The people speaking in its debates and discussions come almost entirely from the political right: they will include the home secretary, Suella Braverman, her cabinet colleague Michael Gove, and a host of voices from media outlets such as the Daily Telegraph and GB News.
What will sit at the heart of proceedings, says the event’s official blurb, are “the idea of the nation” and “the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing”. The foes and bugbears that will be decried include “political theories grounded in race”, and “a powerful new Marxism”.
The banner under which everyone is coming together was conceived in the US, and in the context of recent(ish) European history it may have a somewhat unsettling ring. But there it is: the people who will be addressing audiences at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster between 15 and 17 May are seemingly happy to endorse the theory and practice of “national conservatism”.
The international initiative its organisers shorthand as “NatCon” – which has branches in the US, UK, Hungary and the Netherlands, and staged its first London gathering four years ago – is an offshoot of the Edmund Burke Foundation, an American thinktank-cum-pressure group founded in 2019. In June last year, its prime movers published a stark statement of values, seemingly designed to decisively turn the page on the economic liberalism propagated by mainstream parties of the right since the 1980s, and develop the kind of chaotic populism associated with figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson into something much more moralistic, and highly organised and codified.
National conservatism, they say, is a movement that wants “a world of independent nations”, societies centred on the traditional family (“built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman” and therefore spurning “ever more radical forms of sexual licence and experimentation”), and a big official role for Christianity (“which should be honoured by the state and other institutions both public and private”).
It also has a deeply defensive view of what constitutes national communities and how to sustain them, which leads on to one of the new credo’s defining features: its main advocates say they reject racism, but also claim that modern immigration “has become a source of weakness and instability”, and that countries may need to go as far as imposing complete moratoriums.
The plain fact that high-ranking members of the government – as well as Tories such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and the leading Brexiter David Frost – are more than happy to be associated with all this might seem concerning, to say the least. But the intersection between national conservatism and the Tory mainstream is actually well advanced.
If you understand it as a mixture of authoritarianism, nostalgia and an insistence that immigration somehow threatens to corrode countries’ very idea of themselves, two things become instantly clear: its long history as an enduring facet of the Tories’ collective soul; and its recent spectacular revival, triggered by our exit from the EU, supported by networks of influencers in both the old and the new media, and now centred on Braverman’s Home Office. In a British context, you might think of NatCon as the spirit of that old Tory ghoul, Enoch Powell, revived and updated for the age of Brexit and Twitter, and now running rampant.
For proof, consider the language the government is now using around immigration. Relatively recently, the arguments Tory high-ups used when they were making the case for new restrictions mostly focused on questions about resources: crudely put, whether an already strained state and social fabric could cope with large numbers of new arrivals. Now, their case has as much to do with things that are usually summed up in the word “values”, thinly concealing a tangle of ideas about culture and nationhood that appear to have much more sinister echoes.
Last week, the Home Office minister Robert Jenrick gave a speech at the Policy Exchange thinktank, scattered with sentiments apparently copied straight from NatCon texts. Conservatives, he said, “should not shy away from their belief that the nation has a right to preserve itself”, nor from the insistence that “excessive, uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion of the British public”. As usual, such words as “excessive”, “uncontrolled” and “illegal” were mere fig leaves: as far as his message to the public was concerned, the intention was seemingly to frame all immigration as a threat to social stability and the integrity of the UK as a national community.
The people trying to come to the UK in what politicians have styled “small boats”, he said, “tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK”, that seems a toxic suggestion which is now an in-built part of the government’s messaging. Via an evidence-free association with crime, Braverman also says the attitudes and behaviour of those crossing the Channel are “at odds” with British values, much the same rhetorical device she used in her recent attacks on British-Pakistani men.
From there, it is only the smallest of leaps to the kind of arguments Powell used in his notorious “rivers of blood” speech, when he said that immigration from the Commonwealth suggested “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. In response, the Tory leader Ted Heath sacked him from the shadow cabinet; now, by contrast, neo-Powellism grips the party, and may only be an election defeat away from seizing complete control.
There are obvious reasons for that: a lot of Tories’ deep beliefs, coupled with a cynical sense that embracing NatCon-style ideas may magically allow them to make political capital out of their own failures. Thirteen years of Conservative government have created no end of insecurity, poverty and powerlessness – but those things have also sown exactly the kind of resentments that national conservatism trades on. Its inward-looking hostility to “globalism”, moreover, opens the way to pinning the failures of Brexit on hostile outside powers, and thereby adapting the old habit of Tory flag-waving to a zeitgeist full of paranoia and conspiracy theory.
In 2020, tellingly enough, one of the guests of honour at a national conservatism conference in Rome was the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the inventor of “illiberal democracy”. When he sat for an onstage interview, what was striking was not so much his answers as the questions that preceded them. “There are many people at this conference who would like to build a movement, a party, to make as much difference in their countries as you have,” gushed Christopher DeMuth, a high-profile American conservative who will also be the London event’s presiding chair.
Here was vivid proof of where this old yet new strand of politics is going, and something Keir Starmer and his colleagues ought to quickly realise: that as its divisive nastiness seeps into our politics, rather than nervously leaning into national conservatism, they ought to ruthlessly expose it.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
