In the early 1900s, the Conservative and Unionist party’s mounting panic about defeat by the Liberals led it into a familiar place: the gutter, from where it repeatedly warned of the danger posed by people entering the UK from abroad. “The whole scum of Europe may come to this country,” said one particularly charming pamphlet, “by merely concocting stories about being political or religious ‘refugees’, however improbable their stories.”
A century on, this particular song remains much the same. As opinion polls and local election results highlight the Tories’ vertiginous slide from their landslide win in 2019, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, speciously connects people who cross the Channel in so-called small boats with crime, and says they “possess values which are at odds with our country”. Her ministerial colleague Robert Jenrick echoes those poisonous arguments, and insists that “the number of people who are willing and able to reach the UK today is astronomical, and vastly outnumbers what we are capable or willing to take as a country”. Whatever the past worries voiced by Conservatives about their reputation as the nasty party, the Tories have seemingly relapsed – tilting towards the far right, but also tapping into a nasty element of their own enduring political soul.
