Copyright newstatesman
In April 1968, Enoch Powell gave his infamous and racially inflammatory “rivers of blood” speech, with which, polls showed, an unnervingly large chunk of the British electorate agreed. The next day, the Tory leader Ted Heath sacked him. The Times had described the speech as “evil”; multiple shadow cabinet ministers had told Heath that if Powell didn’t go, they would. It is hard to have faith a similar speech would receive the same response today. The rhetorical temperature concerning immigration, hardly cool to begin with, has recently been hitting new highs, and few prominent figures on the right have felt moved to speak out. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch did see fit to condemn pro-Palestine marches: she did not do the same with the largest far-right street protest in history. She did, however, suggest that anti-asylum protests like the one in Epping could be dealt with if we took steps to rehome asylum seekers in camps. Other ideas that once seemed extremist and verboten now seem, for the right, to be well inside the Pale. This week it was the turn of “rising star” Katie Lam, who suggested in the Sunday Times that large numbers of people who came legally and have indefinite leave to remain “will need to go home”. This, she claimed, would create a more “culturally coherent”. For some reason, my dog just started barking. Do not assume this is just a new MP trying to make a name for herself as a hardliner: it’s a position reflected in a draft bill presented by shadow home secretary Chris Philp back in May which, hilariously, no one had previously noticed. The bill, British Future’s Sunder Katwala has noted, would mean revoking legally settled status from up to 400,000 people, with no exceptions for having a British spouse or children. The FT’s Stephen Bush reckons its terms are so stringent it would mean deporting a greater proportion of the population than Uganda’s Idi Amin did. There has been some push back from within the party, admittedly, but it is notable who is not pushing back. The plan is “broadly in line” with party policy, says Badenoch’s office. All this is terrifying – yet it’s hardly the only example of the British right drifting into territory that would have seemed extreme very recently indeed. A few weeks ago, Robert Jenrick was uncovered complaining that the Birmingham district of Handsworth was “one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to” because he “didn’t see another white face”. Again, while the remarks were criticised in most quarters, those quarters did not include Kemi Badenoch’s office. He remains her most likely successor. If the opposition front bench are drifting ever rightwards, though, that’s at least partly because that’s where the tide is going. A significant share of the electorate looks set to vote for Reform, just as vast number of Americans last year opted for Trump. The Express journalist Christian Calgie, meanwhile, was recently caught cracking jokes on X about deporting Zarah Sultana, a serving British MP. He apologised, with the traditional talk of mental health and a social media break – but if he’d lost his instinctive grasp of where the line was, that’s at least partly because the line has been moving, unnervingly far and upsettingly fast. The theory that the left hunts traitors while the right seeks converts is hardly a new one: so familiar is the idea that the left’s own internal power struggles are dressed up in issues of doctrinal difference that I can simply put “People’s Front of Judea” and you can fill in the rest of the argument yourselves. What is less often discussed, though, is the corollary to this: that the right’s very different culture means it sometimes doesn’t worry about purity enough. Movements, like states, need to control their own borders, and some ideas should be off-limits not because they are unpopular (the Tories’ latest wheeze is), but because they are wrong. We may struggle to come up with a national consensus on many issues. But surely we can all see that deporting retired NHS staff of Britons’ own spouses or children because they didn’t earn enough or don’t have the right bit of paper is simply not something government should do. Change the rules going forward, by all means; but promises were made, and lives and families built upon them. How have we reached a place where wrecking those lives is even up for discussion? And yet this idea, apparently, is no longer off limits at all. It is indeed broadly in line with Tory policy. Nigel Farage, incidentally, is in favour of mass repatriations, too. Ted Heath led the British right in a very different age. Partly that’s because he didn’t have Reform to contend with – if you’d called him an “elitist”, he’d surely have been baffled you meant it as an insult – but partly too because he didn’t have the internet. Heath will surely have been aware of popular support for Enoch Powell. But he didn’t have a buzzing box in his pocket to remind him of it, and how easily it could be mobilised against him, let alone an app owned by a foreign billionaire designed to radicalise his own views. It is striking that Calgie’s apology went down far worse with the population of X than his original offence. Perhaps the conservative soul has changed. But if the right’s problem is ideological hygiene, then perhaps it’s because it’s swimming in an open sewer.
