Rerouting to Cable Street

The right-wing papers are delighted at Suella Braverman's speech and the uptick in fascist rhetoric; it's time to say, "They shall not pass" again.

Previously: Patrick Bateman for The Financial Times
Analysing one of the most brazenly contemptuous columns ever written.

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On the day that Suella Braverman remixed the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech for the new century, Janan Ganesh — a man who boasted in print at the weekend about being insulated from politics’ effects — dropped a column headlined Britain is Europe’s haven from the hard right in which he theorised:

It shouldn’t be a liberal taboo to say that Britain outdoes the continent at some things, including, for now, the containment of extremists. Or to ask how the country has done it. 

One answer is the first-past-the-post voting model, which favours established parties over challengers… The other reason for the UK’s inoculation against the hard right is Brexit… Whether as a release value or as a salutary flop, Brexit has neutered the forces that led to it. June 23 2016 was a victory from which British nationalism hasn’t recovered.

… the spread of plausible outcomes at the next UK election is a centre-right government or a centre-left one. It shouldn’t feel as transgressive as it does to say that Europe’s other democracies should be so lucky.  

Here’s a list of policies that may sound familiar:

Get Britain out of the EU ✅
Combat unemployment by buying British
Create genuine incentives to work hard and invest in our country
Modernise our trade unions; crack down on union extremists
Get tough with criminals. Bring back capital punishment
Put National Defence before Foreign Aid
Welfare: Put our old folk before immigrants

That’s a selection from the National Front leaflet distributed during the 1973 Hove By-Election. The party’s support ultimately collapsed because its demands and urges were further incorporated into the policy platform of the Conservative Party. In January 1978, Margaret Thatcher, then in opposition, told World In Action:

People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different cultureand, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. 

When the interviewer, Gordon Burns, asked Thatcher if she hoped to attract voters who supported the National Front, she was open about that desire while claiming it was her political rivals who had lost more supporters to the (further) far-right:

Oh, very much back, certainly, but I think the National Front has, in fact, attracted more people from Labour votes than from us, but never be afraid to tackle something which people are worried about. 

We are not in politics to ignore peoples’ worries: we are in politics to deal with them. 

Fifteen years earlier, in 1968, when Enoch Powell made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and his other racist interventions, he was condemned by Edward Heath (“I consider the speech he made in Birmingham yesterday to have been racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions. This is unacceptable from one of the leaders of the Conservative Party.”) and sacked from the Shadow Cabinet.

The following year, a former National Front official claimed to Paul Foot, that:

Before Powell spoke, we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches, we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the rightwing members of Tory organisations. 

Thatcher’s tactic — coupled with her genuine racist beliefs — was to reclaim those supporters by incorporating the rhetoric of the even more right-wing parties.

It is a method that has been utilised time and again by Tories, Labour, and Lib Dems in the years that followed. It’s there in David Blunkett’s 2002 claim that asylum seekers were “swamping” schools and surgeries in his constituency; in Margaret Hodge’s parroting BNP lines in 2006 (“[White residents] see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry."; in Nick Clegg’s 2014 call to “put the brakes” on immigration before “people begin arriving in numbers too big for our society to absorb successfully”; in David Cameron’s 2015 speech warning of “a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain”; Rachel Reeves calling for deportations to be ramped up last year; and it was there — a pulsating boil of bigotry — in Suella Braverman’s Conservative Party Conference speech. She told delegates, eager hacks, and the TV cameras:

Now one of the most powerful forces reshaping our world is unprecedented mass migration. The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming.

Because today, the option of moving from a poorer country to a richer one is not just a dream for billions of people. It’s an entirely realistic prospect. 

… Nobody can deny that there are far, far more people in poorer countries who would love to move to Britain than could ever be accommodated…

Even if we concreted over the countryside. Turned our cities into one vast building site.  And erected skyscrapers from Eastbourne to Elgin and from Hull to Holyhead. It still wouldn’t be enough. Demand will always outstrip supply. I know it. You know it. And the voters know it.

… In poll after poll, the British public have been clear: immigration is already too high. And they know another thing. That the future could bring millions more migrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable, unless the government they elect next year acts decisively to stop that happening.

Paul Foot died in 2004 but we needn’t resurrect him to get his perspective on the line taken by Braverman and the response of the Labour Party (Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, demanded more crackdowns). In 1995, when a sclerotic Tory regime looked likely to be swept away by an increasingly neo-liberal Labour Party, he wrote in the London of Review of Books that:

Every Tory attempt at ‘renewal’… pushes the Party closer to the abyss. Every poll indicates that they are losing more heavily than ever before. There is one possible remedy. Labour may be soft on immigration. The electorate may be scared away from its obvious intention, even at this late hour, by the prospect of hordes of foreigners being seduced into the country by Jack Straw. Several ministers, some for lack of any other strategy, some out of an instinctive xenophobia, press the Prime Minister to ‘play the race card’. 

… As always when a course of action is urged on him by his enemies in the cabinet, whom he describes as ‘bastards’, nice Mr Major rolls over on his back and pants happily in agreement. The Queen’s Speech makes it clear that immigration and political asylum will be an issue at the general election. 

… This is one of the many areas of modern politics where Old Labour meets New Labour. When the Tories play the race card they know for sure that they will not be opposed by Labour. There will of course be the usual platform squeals – ‘you’re playing the race card!’ – followed at once by panic-stricken attempts to trump it. 

Both parties will career through the campaign assuring the electorate that they remain implacably committed to the strictest possible immigration controls. Anyone interested in the basic case for and against immigration controls will have to travel far outside the normal political boundaries. 

Sadly, 2023 has far fewer journalists like Foot. Instead, responses to Braverman range from toothless analysis that wonders how it will ‘play’ with the electorate to simpering cheerleading from hacks as horrific as the woman they praise.

In The Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey — after swiftly dismissing the ejection of Tory London Assembly member Andrew Boff from the hall after he (quietly) heckled Braverman — critiqued the Home Secretary’s fashion:

Freshly blow-dried and dressed in a designer jacket and sparkly diamond earrings, the former chairman of the once influential European Research Group (ERG) was in crowd-pleasing mode as she warned a packed hall of grassroots activists that a ‘hurricaine’ of immigration was coming to British shores. 

Observers could not fail to have noticed that the previously rather unpolished politician was more poised and confident in her delivery than ever. Has oratorial as well as sartorial advice been sought?

Yes, and Hugo Boss did a lovely line in uniforms.

Tominey concludes with the textual equivalent of a fixed grin:

… it’s easy to dismiss as pound-shop populism – yet in positioning herself as the poster girl for the Right, stormin’ Suella has once again put the Conservative party in a spin.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, Tim Stanley — yes, him again — yuck yucks away:

… Suella Braverman… unofficially launched a leadership campaign that, after this very clever, very Right-wing speech, she is far more likely to win. It probably sounded even better in the original Hungarian.

Yes, Braverman is Victor Orbán with a better workout routine and a nattier outfit. Stanley’s delight is barely concealed. When I wrote about him recently, I noted his love of the phrase “what we’re all thinking” and here it comes again:

Immigration, she said, has become a hurricane. If the world wants to come here, no one can blame them – we’ve got Crufts and Angela Rippon – but even if we were to “concrete over the countryside”, there wouldn’t be room. Our borders have been porous too long (“hear, hear”); the Human Rights Act is the Criminal Rights Act (“Oh, quite right.”); it’s time to close the “asylum hotels”! On that point, the hall gave its lustiest cheer of the conference, relieved to hear someone saying what we’re all thinking.

‘We’ are not all thinking that, Tim. It’s just that you hang around in more jackboot-friendly company. The Telegraph is aching for a more strictly enforced dress code.

While Stanley — with his sketchwriter’s hat and bow tie on — hedges his bets; making sure to point out some of the hypocrisy at work (“Come on chaps, some of you surely employ a maid or own a holiday home, even if it’s just a small chalet in one of the cheaper Swiss cantons?”), Quentin Letts — the least popular hobbit in Hobbiton — went all in, with the roaring, tedious enthusiasm of a dickhead in an airport lounge:

Predictable voices will hate it. But even they must admit that Sou'wester Sue was, as they say in twister corridor in Kansas, one heck of a blow. What a wig-lifter of a speech. If Michael Fabricant was there, his topknot must have been blown all the way to Bolton.

Suella Braverman described an immigration 'hurricane' but she herself was a tornado making a determined path towards polite conventions, ripping elite etiquette from its moorings. The Establishment will be appalled. Tory activists (bar one) loved it.

…'The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming.' Wind of change: Harold Macmillan's term presaged the end of Empire in the 1960s. Politically, 'hurricane' took us to a different part of the Beaufort scale. Those critics she mentioned will almost self-combust. They will denounce her as the next Enoch. Mrs Braverman was unapologetic.

… A home secretary actually saying what she felt and thought? Aesthetes will be aghast. But isn't it slightly what politicians are for? Isn't it the whole point of party conferences? Mrs Braverman was aware of what was heading her way. Labour and 'their allies in the third sector, some of whom openly declare that they oppose national borders on principle, bleat the same incessant accusation: Racist, racist, racist'.

As ever, I wonder who Letts — handsomely paid by a national newspaper and, once again, employed by the latest scion of a media dynasty — thinks “the establishment” is. I am one of those critics who will denounce Braverman “as the next Enoch”. That’s because the rhetoric and intent fit.

Letts pretends — Letts Pretend? — that Labour is not almost as keen on crackdowns and dehumanisation. Next week, however, we’ll hear Keir Starmer and his team argue that they would ‘slash’ immigration numbers and vastly increase deportations. The immigration ‘debate’ — framed entirely as the ‘small boats crisis’ — is the clearest example of the ratchet effect in British politics: the ‘centre’ being pulled further to the right and the assumptions on which debate occurs staying firmly there.

The Sun’s leader column cheered Braverman’s speech, howling:

The Left loathe her and Suella Braverman today showed why. The Home Secretary’s Tory conference speech nailed the complacency and denial at the heart of Labour’s facile approach to mass illegal immigration and much else. It was superb for its blunt honesty.

The Left’s hand-wringing over small boat migrants and its pretence that they are all genuine asylum cases we must embrace at any cost . . . all of it is being rendered absurd and irrelevant by what Ms Braverman called the global immigration “hurricane” now under way.

Her critics need only look at the vast numbers pouring illegally across the borders of the EU or America, as well as ours, to know she is right.

That’s another crank of the ratchet. Starmer and his advisors will be desperate to tell The Sun that they are just as ‘serious’, just as ‘tough’, just as ‘brutal’.

These eager responses were published on the 87 anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street; an event that echoes down the years. The newspapers on the day after the event were as equivocal, addicted to bothsidesism, and intoxicated by the establishment as their modern successors.

The Times’ editorial on 5 October 1936 said:

The activities of both Fascists and Communists in this country seem to most people to be a tedious and rather pitiable burlesque; but the law rightly allows them, like other people, to express their opinions and to testify to their beliefs by the methods of procession and public meetings, even though… these methods are a great nuisance. 

It does not conform with their character or with their practice to accept the official advice so often tendered to them and to keep away from rival activities; and indeed, even if processions and meetings are kept apart at a presumably safe distance, it is often impossible to prevent disturbances being created by deliberate stragglers. 

The Jewish Chronicle’s editorial is even more shocking in hindsight; it called the anti-fascists in the East End “profoundly mistaken“ and argued:

Much as we detest the campaign that is being waged by the Fascists in this district, we cannot pretend to any feeling of satisfaction with this result. Its chief effect is to enable Mosley to pose as a martyr in the cause of civic liberty, and perhaps to win him new recruits.

In the October 9 1936 edition of The Jewish Chronicle, the writer Joseph Leftwich argued, in a letter headlined, ‘Fascism Not a Jewish Issue’, that:

Fascism is a movement to establish a political, social, and economic order based on the Corporate State, to which many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are opposed for various reasons, which, however, hae nothing to do with Jews as Jews. Fascism or no Fascism is a question for the country at large, and for individual Jews as individual citizines only, not as Jews. It is not a Jewish issue. 

In Rishi Sunak’s Tory Party conference speech, the section on immigration was short and packed with boilerplate sloganeering:

It is non-negotiable that you, the British people decide who comes here, and not criminal gangs. Those gangs ply a trade that leads to innocent people dying, we have a moral duty to defeat this evil – and we will.

I never pretended that stopping the boats will be easy. At the time I committed the government to delivering that goal the consensus was simple… there was nothing we could do about it. They pointed to four years of growing crossings and said ‘impossible.’ Well conference: they were wrong. It is not impossible and we are proving it. Small boat crossings are, for the first time since the phenomenon began, down 20 per cent this year. All while entry into Europe is up. We are by no means where we want to be. But don’t let anyone tell you we aren’t making progress. We are. And we will get there.

Our new law will ensure that if you come here illegally, you will be detained and swiftly removed. I am confident that once flights start going regularly to Rwanda, the boats will stop coming. Just look at how our returns agreement with Albania has seen the numbers coming from there fall by ninety per cent. I am confident that our approach complies with our international obligations. But know this, I will do whatever is necessary to stop the boats.

Sunak has kept Braverman close and in the cabinet because she would instantly become a thorn in his side as a backbencher and ramp but the shadow leadership campaign, but she’s also useful for saying the outright horrendous things that he believes but knows don’t fit with his “Reasonable Rishi” act. Thatcher borrowed the NF’s act; Sunak outsources it and the right-wing press applauds it.

While Braverman, Sunak and the rest preempt criticism by including some variation of the phrase, “Critics will call me racist but…” and commentators like Letts sneer at the very notion of identifying racist and, in fact, fascist rhetoric as precisely what it is, we have to ignore them and do it anyway.

Cheering from the right-wing papers and chin-stroking from the centrists will allow the ratchet to crank further rightwards. Like the alliance of anti-fascists who barricaded Cable Street and faced down the Blackshirts and the police out to aid them, we must say again: They shall not pass.

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