Jackboot tap-dancing

Coverage of the Nat-C conference either wilfully or complacently fails to call fascism what it is…

Previously:

Today’s edition was written on my phone while out reporting. Typos are a political act — like I said last time — and the perfect is the enemy of the good…

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What do you call an animal that waddles, quacks, and shits everywhere?

You’d say it was a duck but the minds of most of the British media when discussing the National Conservatives’ (Nat-Cs), it’s not that simple. Certainly, not when the f-word — fascist — comes into it. The usual argument is that using the word ‘fascist’ means you have no arguments. But what if you are dealing with fascists? Shouldn’t a journalist just say so. Well, you might say that…

Instead, the duck becomes a creature with ‘legitimate’ concerns; it’s a “thinker on the right”; a “right-wing radical” and the fact that it eats trash, shits everywhere and thinks only of itself and its narrow destructive desires doesn’t matter. The Nat-Cs have spent three days this week pushing ‘blood and soil’ fascist talking points from the stage, revelling in antisemitic theories like ‘cultural Marxism’ that go beyond dog whistle and become them shouting for their dog — who is named after the one in The Dambusters — in the local park in between rants about the “cabal that secretly runs everything” which has conspired to ruin their lives and steal all their dog’s treats too”, even as the crumbs from those biscuits are still clinging to their chops.

And yet, The Guardian ponders: Why are terms linked to antisemitism being used at UK conservatism event?

The author of that piece — deputy political editor Peter Walker — could have answered the question in four words: Because they are fascists. Instead he strokes his chin over several hundred words:

While there is little debate that the idea of cultural Marxism has antisemitic overtones and is closely linked to the far right, it is not uncommon for British politicians to use it.

… and why might that be? Because the right-wing political class and its accomplices in the right wing media have remodelled the Overton Window into a bijou cat flap; a narrow space through which far right notions can be laundered as “common sense solutions”

Meanwhile, over on Global’s podcast hit The News Agents, it’s trio of perpetually bewildered ex-BBC hosts — John Sopel (Sopes), Emily Maitlis, and Lewis Goodall — acted as though they had experienced a mind-wipe before the red recording light went on. Goodall’s immediate comparison with the Nat-Cs (“the hard right” rather than the far-right in his telling) was with the “hard left” (“who are the hard left, Chris?” ref. Reel Politik).

The lazy suggestion that leftists who want a better society and often demand little more than the kind of social democratic policies that are common in other parts of Europe and Scandinavia are the opposite side of the coin to far right speakers who attack the rights of LGBTQ+ people to even exist, demand women pump out more children, and — in Douglas Murray and David Starkey’s case — step onstage to casually minimise the Holocaust and other genocides is beyond ludicrous. It’s the dickhead debating point you get from some tool on Twitter; Goodall is considered a serious political reporter and analyst.

Just after I finished that episode of The News Agents, I found myself on Parliament Square interviewing members of a right-wing protest group attacking the Welsh government’s policies on sex education in schools. They have a right to protest, which I defend even if their views are uniformed and drawn from the most dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and hatred. But they faced no police ‘spotters’, no heavy-handed threats, no demand they turned off their loud PA system, or dispersed from the grass. A counter-protest by the Left would not have been so indulgently received. And on the same morning, members of Just Stop Oil were arrested for walking after a Section 12 was imposed by the Met to forbid slow walking in the vicinity of Parliament.

The media is squeamish about saying the f-word at the best and conspiring with the very fascists it refuses to define at worst. It means that, for many readers, listeners, and viewers, the true picture and danger of the far-right — which has the enthusiastic support of cabinet ministers including Suella Braverman and Michael Gove — is obscured; either through incompetence or malice.

If you wrote a parody of the British far right — an update of P.G. Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode — your editor would reject it as too on the nose if you called your baddies the Nat-Cs. The UK’s reality in 2023 is penned by hack writers.

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