Nostalgia, extremism and the Conservatives

Lee Anderson wants his country back. Perhaps he could hitch a lift in the Tardis, Doctor Who’s time machine, back to the good old days. Things aren’t what they used to be after all.

Remember the days when milk was delivered to your doorstep in glass bottles and the postie called twice and had time to chat? When the web didn’t suffocate us with moral choices? When a man was a man and a woman knew her place? When things were simpler, cut and dried?

Except of course they weren’t – simpler – at least not for those without the power or the wealth to crest the waves of change, cocooned in an elevated world of privilege and certainty. Life for the rest of us, at ground level, has always been an obstacle course.

So when three-parties Anderson (Labour, Tory and now Reform UK) told his new comrades when he signed up last weekend “I want my country back”, what did he mean?

Anderson may be confused but the question is not frivolous. Anderson is not alone. As the present becomes more complicated, more nuanced, the longing for an earlier, more familiar past becomes more seductive. This was, in part, the impulse that drove Brexit. It’s the driving force behind the fundamentalism of Reform and their fellow-travellers, the New Conservatives.

But which England does Anderson want to go back to? I say England, as opposed to Britain, because it is in England that this blurring of identity, this predicament, seems to be most keenly felt. Scotland and Wales, with strong, national and political identities and a greater a sense of belonging, nurtured through language and myth, seem less tortured.

But England? This England that is now so diverse, so “liberal” that it provokes visceral opposition among nationalists — which version of our green and pleasant land does the silver-haired bad boy of the Right want to go back to?

Is it the pre-Common Market country of the 1950s, of tight-knit working class communities, pubs with separate saloon and public bars and curled up sandwiches, imperial measures, and colonies that still stretched across the planet?

A time when class structures were rigid and social mobility was glacial? When Anderson would not, in a million years, have been appointed to a senior Tory party post? Or Priti Patel or Kemi Badenoch been appointed to the Cabinet?

Is it the in-between Britain, Cool Britannia and the Swinging Sixties: a time of sweeping social change when a radicalised new generation in America and Europe demanded reform and equal rights for blacks and women? A time when Mary Whitehouse, formidable scourge of the permissive society, fought (and lost) against the spread of porn and Playboy clubs? Or is that when the rot set in?

Or is it, when all is said and done, a predominantly white Britain he’s after without all the messy stuff that change throws at us: immigrants to power a growing economy, boat people that test our moral canons, mosques punctuating inner cities filled with empty churches, transgender loos, generous welfare payments and social justice?

When Anderson says “the whole democratic system is rigged” – by whom and in whose favour? When others on the Right speak of doing the “will of the people”, a phrase Boris Johnson trademarked as he scythed through our constitutional conventions, do they speak of democracy? Or this just populist rhetoric that’s useful when getting your own way is uphill work?

Anderson, like many working-class Britons, has gone full circle. Born and bred, as he likes to say, in his Ashfield constituency, a former Nottinghamshire mining town, he stood on the picket lines with his dad in the miners’ strike 40 years ago. It was a tough place to grow up. Now he’s an MP (perhaps not for long), wears sharp suits and mingles with the great and the good.

They say Left-wing movements are incubated in the warm salons of the middle classes while those on the Right are frequently propelled by the working class. There’s something to that. I recall covering the 1972 dockers strike in Liverpool. Many arriving for the morning shift carried the communist Morning Star. Just as many the Daily Express, the quintessential right-wing empire paper.

In the great scheme of things Anderson’s defection to Reform doesn’t matter. His arguments are muddled. He wants faster responses from the NHS, but he doesn’t want foreign health workers to plug the yawning staff gap.

But in another, narrower sense, his defection does – at any rate for the Tories. It opens the door for greater fragmentation and, very possibly, more extremism. His exhortations to “take our country back” (like Make America Great Again) are a blank canvass for people to paint their grievances on.

Faced with electoral oblivion, the party is splintering into half a dozen or more factions in readiness for the day after the general election. Each has their own vision of the country they want back. With the possible exception of the 100 or so One Nation Tories, most of the rest want a return to full-throttle Thatcherism, mixed in with varying degrees of anti-wokery and ultra-free market economics.

Unlike Anderson, many are under 50 (Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, leaders of the New Conservatives, for example l) with an unshakeable belief in their own version of the truth. They want to move fast and break things and they don’t much care who gets hurt in the process.

The problem with nostalgia, much like wishful thinking, is that it’s like a warm bath: comforting and reassuring before it turns cold. Rose-tinted retrospection feels good until reality kicks in. Fantasy economics feels even better until the bond markets strike.

But conjuring up feelings of loss, regret and longing is a bitter-sweet pastime. In a political context this turns – or is skilfully turned into – anger, prejudice and hatred. The hostility towards pro-Palestinian marches is as much about Muslims in Britain as it is about Israel in Gaza.

One of the truly disturbing aspects of the last few months has been the desire to suppress dissent by chipping away at the norms of our unwritten constitution. We have Boris Johnson and his contempt for Parliament to thank for that.

Having said all that, the great temptation is push extremism away, to consign it to wings, out of sight and out of mind. That’s a mistake. Time and again history has taught us that prohibition can be as dangerous as appeasement. We have to deal with the world as it is.

Combatting politically-motivated violence is one thing. But suppression of views we don’t like merely opens the door to yet more extremism and unhinges the democratic system which is designed to cope with stress by concentrating too much power in the centre.

I’m not a fan of Anderson’s, but I recognise he has grievances and anxieties. I think Liz Truss is verging on bonkers, but she has a point of view. But without a shared interest in democracy or a common vocabulary I can’t have a civilised conversation with either of them.

And you can’t be two-faced about it. How can Rishi Sunak call out extremism when his party has trousered £10m from a man who says that Diane Abbott makes you want to hate all black women and should be shot?

Politics, here and in the US but also to a certain extent in Europe, has become dangerously polarised, worse it’s become incoherent. It will be interesting to see how the debate on Michael Gove’s attempt to redefine extremism develops.

But in a robust democracy, a democracy that has nothing to fear from fanatics, cancelling people because you don’t like what they say is a fool’s errand. You can’t cancel extremism.

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