What an incredible fortnight (and a half) it has been in British politics – even by post 2016 Referendum standards! We have seen a Home Secretary openly defying the Prime Minister over an article she published in a national newspaper, undermining the London Metropolitan Police by suggesting favouritism and bias in policing of right-wing and left-wing demonstrations, and inciting a far-right mob to descend into the streets of London by wrongly suggesting a pro-Palestine demonstration may disrupt the Remembrance Day celebrations in central London; causing disruption and violence by far-right demonstrators instead.
The other extraordinary event was not so much the UK Supreme Court ruling that the Rwanda asylum plan is unlawful – which was a rather likely outcome –, but rather the UK Prime Minister’s (PM) defiant reaction to a ruling of the country’s highest court.
I think it is no exaggeration to state that over the past three weeks, the country has taken another step – actually two – towards fascism. I know many readers will recoil at the suggestion of any comparison of post-Brexit British politics with fascism, but bear with me...
Fascism beyond insult
I generally agree with the historian Robert Saunders’s astute warning “that we should be careful not to cheapen the term [fascism], out of respect to the millions who died under immeasurably worse political movements than [the Brexit Party, Boris Johnson, Brexit and the Right more generally].” That is undoubtedly true. However, there is a very real sense in which the words and deeds of the current governments and some factions in the Tory party have almost become textbook examples of fascist ideas and actions.
Mathew Feldman summarises the so-called ‘new consensus’ definition of fascism as a revolutionary nationalism characterised by a lowest common denominator, namely ‘fascism’s quasi-religious belief in a reborn community, refashioning itself through a revolution that was as much social and cultural as it was martial and revolutionary.’ (my emphasis)
Like Saunders, Feldman cautions against facile application of the label to today’s radical right groups, because ‘even if radical right groups today are most closely associated with the fascism of the past, most operate – and formally accept – the reformist context of liberal democratic hegemony. Even the worst offenders […] have not (yet) shed the framework of inalienable rights, the separation of powers, and primacy of the electorate that remains the hallmark of liberalism.’ (my emphasis)
Readers may agree that – in addition to the now customary references to the Brexit revolution and a British renewal –, the past fortnight’s events provide ample evidence that two of the three hallmarks of liberalism on Feldman list have been seriously threatened. And this time they have been threatened not by a fringe movement marching through the streets of East London, but by the people in government or close to the governing party. Braverman’s actions and the government’s response to the Rwanda ruling have indeed led to calls to undermine both our inalienable rights and the separation of powers.
The arsonist Home Secretary and the Black(T-)shirts
In her Times article, Braverman accused the Met Police Force of “playing favourites” by cracking down on right-wing protesters harder than on left-wing ones, in particular when it came to pro-Palestinian protesters in London, which she called “hate marchers.” That behaviour got her the sack. But the damage was done.
Braverman’s words encouraged far-right activists – like Tommy Robinson – to turn their islamophobia into opposition to antisemitism (despite often having attended not just Islamophobic but also antisemitic rallies). The result was hundreds of right-wing thugs (many dressed in black jackets and T-shirts) descending on central London and engaging in fighting with the police in their attempt to reach the Cenotaph where the Remembrance day celebrations took place. Robinson – like others clearly egged-on by Braverman’s comments - explicitly stated that "British men are mobilising for Saturday to be in London […] show our Government and show our police and show Hamas and everyone sitting around the world saying ‘Britain has fallen’ that there is a resistance."
Braverman once again excelled in her – quite literal! – role as arsonist in chief, stoking the flames of racism, xenophobia, and hatred, all in the name of a revolutionary nationalism that pretends to be saying and doing what people really think and want.
It is worth noting that the right-wing thugs fighting the policy and disrupting the Remembrance service hardly speak for the British people. An Ipsos Mori poll shows that Brits are primarily concerned for Palestinian (74%) and Israeli (71%) civilians, think the UK government should be a neutral mediator (37%), and blame Hamas (not Palestinians) for the conflict (32%) but almost as many (29%) say they don’t know. These figures starkly contrast with the heated political debate where extremists on both sides suggest there is only one acceptable position to adopt – either condemning Hamas and with it all Palestinians as terrorists or condemning the Netanyahu government and with it all Israelis – as quasi-fascist colonialists.
Regardless, the episode constitutes another shift to the right of the British political landscape. The Home Secretary and leader of one of the most influential factions in the Tory party has adopted inflammatory language that is barely distinguishable from that the right-wing thugs rioting in central London use. She is actively encouraging fascist groups to challenge our police and threatening fellow citizens exercising their right to demonstrate. Braverman is trying to ride the wave of the ‘Brexit Revolution,’ that put her faction in control of the Tory party, all the way to the top – in the process she is increasingly turning the Brexit project into ‘Blackshirts Brexit.’
While Braverman easily could be put into the ‘fruit cakes, loonies, and closet racists’ category of far-right extremists, the PM – despite firing her and despite seemingly moving to the centre by appointing the originator of that phrase, former PM David ‘Let’s-have-a-referendum’ Cameron, as Foreign Secretary – was not less radical in his reaction to the Rwanda ruling.
Refoulement or replacement?
The idea behind the so-called ‘Rwanda plan’ – a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Priti Patel in April 2022 – is very simple: Sending asylum seekers wo arrive in the UK illegally – e.g., on small boats – directly to Rwanda for processing of their asylum claims by Rwandan authorities, rather than processing them in the UK by UK authorities. The reason for its unlawfulness is equally simple: There is evidence that Rwanda does not respect the non-refoulment right of asylum seekers, and may hence send back applicants to their home countries where they may face prosecution, torture, and death. As a result, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Rwanda cannot be considered a safe third country. Sending asylum seekers there for processing would breach the UK’s obligations under domestic and international law.
Sunak’s response to the Supreme Court ruling was primarily aimed at appeasing the NatCon faction in the Tory party especially following his sacking of their ring-leader Braverman. It was defiant, petulant, and radical: Instead of accepting the ruling, Sunak promised to make the unlawful plan lawful by simply introducing emergency legislation declaring Rwanda a safe third country.
That may not sound spectacular, but it is. It means the UK government engaging 100% in post-truth politics. Suggesting that the UK Parliament can simply declare Rwanda to be a safe country for asylum seekers either suggests that the evidence provided by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights of major flaws in Rwanda’s asylum system (e.g. 100% rejection rates for asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen) is wrong, or that the fact that asylum seekers may face refoulment – and hence – torture and death is acceptable to the British government. Suggesting the former is post-truth – suggesting the latter is compatible with fascist disregard for human rights. Both are a direct challenge to centuries of liberal thinking about the separation of powers. A PM suggesting that the parliament he controls should adopt legislation with the sole purpose of defying a court ruling is just extraordinary.
And he was not alone. Tabloid newspapers are calling judges enemies of the people, MPs support suggestions to essentially abolish the separation of powers, and the UK’s governing party’s deputy chairman openly argues the law should be broken. All these may hardly raise any eyebrows in post-Brexit Britain, but a few decades ago, most people probably would have been shocked by a high-level politician of a major Western power to call on his government to break the law and abolish the separation of powers. We are in the process of normalising such acts and deeds and are thus taking hammer and chisel to two of the pilers of liberal democracy in our country: inalienable rights and the separation of powers.
The attack on the fundamental right of non-refoulment is now spreading. The Sunday Times published a piece in which Matthew Syed confidently states that migration from the Global South to Western countries is consciously orchestrated by authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea to destabilise the West. As a result, Syed concludes, we need to reject the allegedly anachronistic non-refoulment principle to disincentivise people to try and reach Western countries illegally. The non-refoulement principle seems to be in line to become the next concept on which Brexiters may project their anger. Syed argues that ‘all the unintended consequences associated with the refugee system can be traced back to the principle of non-refoulement.’
Syed makes some valid points – e.g., calling out Western hypocrisy about asylum politicises and pointing at the contextual differences in the immediate post-war context and current population sizes – and explicitly insists the rule of law should be respected and finding it ‘shameful that Rishi Sunak was unable to condemn the horrendous Lee Anderson for suggesting’ law should be broken, and the Supreme Court ruling ignored. (Indeed, under pressure from the NatCon fringe of his party, rather than condemning Anderson’s remarks, Sunak seems to be making them his own suggesting that Human Rights laws should be disapplied.) Even Syed’s more extreme point that migration is used as a weapon against the West is not entirely without foundation given recent examples from Russia and Turkey’s behaviour in the past.
But – and this is a massive but – anyone writing about asylum, immigration, and fundamental rights will need to be careful about making to sweeping and unnuanced statements that cross the line into conspiracy theory territory like, as Dave Vetter points out, the far-right Great Replacement theory, which has served as justification for racial violence.
Syed’s suggestion that law should be changed in a way to make refoulement possible, suggests a purely procedural, but not substantive, definition of the Rule of Law. It implies in practice that the fundamental reason why we have that rule – which in fact is key to provide any protection from prosecution worthy of its name – have become up for debate. A Telegraph columnist went as far as advocating ‘a bonfire of human rights laws,’ although that headline now seems to have been changed (it’s still in the web address though). That constitutes a fundamental attack on the liberal rules-based international system. The fact that the attack comes alongside procedural reassurances that the Rule of Law should be respected, may actually make the substantive point (that human rights are expendable) more dangerous still, obfuscating just how radical the views professed are.
Still, there is still a layer of civilising force of hypocrisy covering the government’s and right-wing commentators’ nastiness, which makes them stop short of spelling out the implication of the emergency legislation. It is that layer of hypocrisy that separates us from outright fascist rhetoric where the government would openly admit that asylum seekers’ lives are expendable. But as the UK Prime Minister moves into territory worthy of right-wing thugs – as Chris Gray astutely observed this week (“there is now effectively no difference between the kind of things the Brexitist populists say and those that the far-right ‘counter-protestors’ at the Cenotaph say”), the boundaries of what is acceptable are pushed further and further to the right. To but it brutally bluntly: The step from accepting to deport people you do not want in your country to a place where they may face death, to wishing that they face death may not be that huge.
The shape of things to come
What the past fortnight has shown above anything else is that truth does not matter anymore in British politics. Thus, Braverman’s claims that the police is tougher on right-wing demonstrators than leftwing ones, fly in the face of what has happened – say – to Republican protestors during the coronation or people attending the Sarah Everard vigils. Similarly, the Supreme Court’s decision has been presented by leading politicians as if it were the decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). That is shocking when a sitting MP – like Andreas Jenkyns – does it; it is even more shocking coming from the PM. The truth is, of course, that the Rwanda decision was one taken by a UK court based on its interpretation of English and international laws. But again, it is not about truth anymore. Truth does not matter in post-Brexit Britain and there is no point arguing about facts. Facts are not challenged by providing evidence to the contrary. Rather – just like the government is planning to declare Rwanda a safe country against all evidence, so the PM, Jenkyns, Braverman, and many others act in the knowledge that their obvious lies will be accepted as reality by a part of the population and thus become reality in their heads. That acceptance is not the result of stupidity or ignorance, but an active statement of a quasi-religious belief in an alternate universe that one is so committed to that its relationship with reality simply does not matter. Again, we are getting close to what Feldman says about fascism…
Reading Braverman’s response letter to her sacking (not a ‘resignation letter’ since she was sacked) is like looking into a crystal ball showing where the Tory party is headed. As Robert Peston summarises it, the ‘broken promises’ Braverman reproaches Sunak in the letter include: Disapply human rights legislation in immigration cases; scrap all EU retained law and the Northern Ireland protocol; defend “biological sex” and reduce legal immigration by reducing overseas student numbers and increase the salary threshold for work visas. Given Braverman’s leadership ambitions, the letter can be read as the possible Tory party manifesto after the next GE if the Tories do indeed lose it. Doing ‘whatever it takes’ to stop the boats sounds ominous when coming from Sunak; when the same sentence is uttered by Braverman it sounds dangerous and scary.
One election away from fascism?
The black(T-)shirts are marching and rioting in London again – the only thing that can save us is a comprehensive electoral defeat for the Tory party next year. To avert that fate, all the Tories have left are manipulating the electoral system (by increasing the campaign spending limits, making Tory candidates even more buyable and British democracy even more plutocratic and corrupt), throwing peanuts at taxpayers (national insurance cut in the autumn statement), and the promise of more culture wars (the appointment of ‘anti-woke Minster’ McVey). With these measures, the Tories seem to continue their strategy to encourage British voters to punch down, so as to prevent them from getting any ideas about punching up.
One may be tempted to think that as long as the Tories still respect elections and their outcome, all is well. Indeed, the ‘primacy of the electorate’ may be the one hallmark of liberalism on Feldman’s list that Brexitism seemingly does not undermine. Yet, primacy of the electorate is not necessarily incompatible with fascism. The constant reference to the 2016 Referendum as the expression of the will of a unified and immutable ‘will of the real people,’ may formally sound like respecting the ‘primacy of the electorate.’ Yet, the reference to the Referendum, which – as Chris Grey discussed last week – is alleged to have conferred to ‘Brexitists’ a mandate for all sorts of things beyond exiting the EU. According to Matt Goodwin it conferred no less than a mandate “to permanently end what he calls ‘Liberal Centrist Dad politics.’”
It is not a coincidence that Brexiters refer to the Referendum more than the 2019 General Election to claim a popular mandate to do all sorts of things. It betrays a deep-seated (fascist) belief that somehow – and despite all the talk about Parliamentary sovereignty – the Parliament is not the real expression of the will of the people (perhaps because here the supposed ‘singular will’ of the one united people is divided into a plurality of competing parties) and a more direct way of expressing that ‘will of the people’ is needed. In fact, there can be little doubt that Brexiters do not take parliamentary sovereignty seriously at all, but rather would favour removing powers from parliament in favour of the government. There have been various signs of this executive ‘power grab’ by various Brexiter governments since 2016 (see also the reference in a previous post on this blog). Support for crude forms of direct democracy (like a flawed single-majority, binary referenda) and for concentrated executive powers are very much in line with a fascist understanding of democracy where - government would “no longer depend on the intrigues and manoeuvres of conflicting parties, but on the will of the nation directly expressed.” These are the words of Oswald Mosely as cited by Robert Saunders.
I have been writing for a while that the next General Election – and the one after perhaps even more so – will be crucial for our country. The past few weeks have convinced me even more that there is one more General Election that stands between us and fascism. Of course, I am not arguing that we will soon have a secrete political police and concentration camps in the UK, or that we will descend into a pure autocracy like Russia. To cite Saunders once more: “While there is no serious challenge to democracy as an abstract principle in Britain, democracy comes in many forms. At present, we are at risk of normalizing authoritarian versions of democracy that seek to shut down dissent and minority opinion by labelling them as anti-democratic.”
In line with that diagnosis, what I am arguing is that the events of the past weeks have illustrated increasingly clearly that under Tory rule we are moving away from liberal democracy into something different. Given the events and trends described in this post, just like Trump 1.0 will pale in comparison with Trump 2.0 in case of victory next year, so the authoritarian version of democracy that the next Brexitist Tory government could impose on us would have a lot more in common with fascism than with liberalism and Brexit may reveal itself to have become Blackshirts Brexit.