The Enemy Within (Remix)

Rishi Sunak reheated an old 80s hit with a fascist backbeat and the opposition and most of the media joined in on backing vocals.

Previously: If Starmer wins, The Sun won't be wot won it...
The myth of Murdoch the Kingmaker most serves the man himself.

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Since Office
Enemy without — beaten him
& strong in defence
Enemy within —
Miners’ leaders
Liverpool & some local authorities
— just as dangerous in a way more difficult to fight
But just as dangerous to liberty
Scar across the face of our country
ill motivated
ill intentioned
politically inspired

— excerpt from Margaret Thatcher’s notes for the “enemy within” speech to the 1922 Committee, July 19 1984

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Thatcher’s notes read like a poem from an alternate universe evil e.e. cummings, but she intended to double down on them at that year’s Tory Party conference before the Brighton bombing fatally changed the course of that event. A draft of the speech she never gave were released by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation in 2014. It revealed that she had planned to say:

We meet today as free people in a free country. But everyone of us here senses the shadow that has fallen across this freedom since last we met. The shadow I speak of is the violence and intimidation which has scarred and wracked the coal industry, and particularly the working miners and their families…

… The shadow grows darker as influential men and women in our society question, even repudiate, the ideas of Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

From this dark cloud falls an acid rain that eats into liberty.

It can be seen above all in the natural home that these views and voices now find in the Labour Party. It explains why that party is so muted in its condemnation of picket violence; so muted in its praise for the hard-pressed police; so muted in its support for the tens of thousands of working miners; so muted in its advocacy of an NUM ballot; but so willing to trumpet the cause of the present NUM leadership in its extreme and uncompromising objectives. Yet the Labour Party in its present form, infiltrated by extremists, riven with factions, still stands upon the stage as the (principal) alternative to the Conservative Party in governing Britain. That, Mr. Chairman, is the measure of the shadow which has fallen across freedom since last we met.

In the closed-door speech to Tory backbenchers, from which the phrase “the enemy within” was still briefed and leaked to political journalists, Thatcher was attempting to link the Falklands War (a victory over “the enemy without”) to the miners’ strike (making British citizens “the enemy within”). Had the party conference speech gone as she’d planned, she would have folded the Labour Party into the same category, tying it to her apocalyptic vision liberty burned and extremism rampant.

On Friday night, in a hastily convened statement to the nation from Downing street, Rishi Sunak offered a cover version of “the enemy within”, a modern remix of the same divisive and authoritarian rhetoric dressed up in the saintly robes of a call to unity. The leader of the party of Lee Anderson, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel et al. lectured the public on “extremism”. Meanwhile, his message to the electorate of Rochdale, which made George Galloway its MP and elevated a hitherto unknown local independent, David Tully, to runner-up status, was effectively “you have the right to vote as we see fit”.

There was delight in The Daily Mail where Quentin Letts, just back from supper with the Sackville-Bagginses, wrote excitedly:

To the authentically British backdrop of drizzle, a distant heckler and the piccolo patter of a Downing Street tree sparrow, Rishi Sunak confronted the 'poison' of Islamist and far-Right extremism. It needed saying and it needed saying well. Our Prime Minister did that.

…'Forces here at home trying to tear us apart.' Those simple words were, when you thought about it, astonishing. Yet their truth was incontestable. This was a call to the breach in the walls, a Harfleur summons to fight enemies within. Yes, enemies within. We might once have associated such a phrase with despots. But that is where our passive laxness has landed us…

And as [Sunak] finished, defiant and deadly serious, the heckler was heard no more. But the little sparrow hopped and sang. Harmony had won, and so it must. 

This was not a call for harmony but a demand for compliance. If the protestors that Sunak so cheaply derides were marching for a cause that the Mail supported — a new Countryside Alliance, perhaps — Letts would be quick to detect the tyrannical tinge, the authoritarian over-reach from a government that’s already ratcheted restrictions on protest to previously unthinkable levels.

Letts clears Sunak of the charge of despotism because what he says suits the editors of the Daily Mail and its hereditary proprietor Lord Rothermere. He describes the speech’s tone as “sustained, insistent, very Rishi-ish decency… done without shouting and without party rancour” with a columnist’s love of poisonous politeness. Of course it was political. Keir Starmer’s embarrassing rush to endorse it was not a sign of bi-partisan unity but proof of an elite consensus against dissent.

In The Sunday Times, Tim Shipman’s weekly fairy story of government briefings and fantasies shows how Sunak’s team wants his statement to be seen:

Tacking to the right on the culture clash over political extremism, [Sunak] called for a police crackdown on Islamist and far-right protesters. He was seeking a position tough enough to placate the right of the party, enraged by his decision to suspend red wall MP Lee Anderson for making allegedly Islamophobic comments, but in a tone designed to appeal to moderate voters concerned that the government does not appear to have a grip on mob violence.  

What mob violence? Shipman joins the Westminster press pack’s geek chorus singing that tune without any evidence. Even more than usual, it’s apparent that his work is a mishmash of stenography and myth burnishing rather than anything that resembles questioning journalist. While he quotes Sunak’s critics in the Tory Party, it’s gossip column stuff that privileges what he and they think are ‘snappy’ lines:

A leading rebel — who once boasted that those seeking to oust the prime minister had a “grid of shit” to throw at him (and saw No 10 mock the rebel plan as “just a shit grid”) — this weekend said the rebels needed to make no efforts of their own when Sunak makes regular errors: “It’s now just a grid of their shit.”  

A Prime Minister taking to a podium outside Number 10 to frame the result of a single by-election as “beyond horrifying” before promising more crackdowns would prompt far more criticism and analysis in a healthy political media climate. Instead, hacks like Shipman frame events as part of the ongoing narrative and understand them only as tactics rather than as moral choices.

On the Today Podcast, Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan presented an episode — before Sunak made his speech — which asked, “Mob rule: Where should we draw the line on protest?” The framing implicitly accepted the Prime Minister’s earlier premise that “mob rule is replacing democratic rule” and during the discussion, Rajan called Lee Anderson “an extremely interesting figure in modern British politics”. Anderson is no more interesting than any other bloviating bar room prick but in the world of British political commentary he’s a ‘character’.

Just like Shipman, Robinson and Rajan approached the issues as if it’s all a game, a pair of commentators talking tactics, even as one team takes to an empty pitch and boots the ball repeatedly into the goal while complaining loudly about being fouled.

In the Mail on Sunday, Robert Jenrick, Immigration Minister under Suella Braverman when she encouraged right-wing extremists to descend on London and violently ‘defend’ the cenotaph from a march that went nowhere near it, penned an unhinged rant under the headline Why does the Left consider it Islamophobic to want to expel the cancer of extremism from Britain?

He wrote:

Alarm bells should be ringing. But even now, after one of the darkest days in our democracy – when Parliament caved to threats of violence from a mob of Islamist and far-Left extremists – there remains a state of denial in our political and media establishment. Many are worried that they will be smeared as ‘Islamophobic’ for exposing Islamist extremism, even though doing so is in no way anti-Muslim.

The speaker caving to pressure from Keir Starmer to help him avoid an embarrassing parliamentary defeat on Gaza has now entirely transformed into a story of “the mob” forcing capitulation to its violent demands. It will become the historic record through repetition as it suits the Tories and Labour alike to wallow in apocalyptic fiction.

Jenrick continued:

This goes to the heart of our democracy – currently the rule of law is being violated because a cohort of extremists are perceived to be above it. It is a damning indictment of the failures of multiculturalism that many espousing profoundly hostile and illiberal views are British citizens. This is the consequence of people living parallel lives in segregated neighbourhoods, rarely mixing with people from different communities. 

I agree, there are many “people living parallel lives in segregated neighbourhoods” who “espouse profoundly. hostile and illiberal views” — many of them are MPs, often with GB News contracts, which reward them handsomely for a few hours a week of additional hate preaching on top of the publicly-funded hate preaching in parliament.

The same grim, mirthless joke could be applied to another line from Jenrick’s screed:

Currently the rule of law is being violated because a cohort of extremists are perceived to be above it.

On Trevor Phillips’ Sunday show on Sky News, the Chancellor and modern Cockney rhyming slang term, Jeremy Hunt, refused multiple opportunities to name a group — which isn’t already proscribed — that was ‘hijacking’ the Gaza marches:

There’s a reason for that — neither the government nor the opposition wants to put a name on “the enemy within” when the amorphous blob called “the mob” is terrifying and inhuman without any of the inconvenient need for facts.

Where columnists do offer examples, as in Camilla Tominey’s Telegraph column (Britain is fast becoming a failed state. Faith in the system is beginning to collapse), they strip them of context and string together individual and often isolated events into proof of terrifying trends:

Crime appears to be out of control, with videos circulating almost daily of machete-wielding thugs trying to carve each other to pieces while a bewildered public helplessly looks on. In the old days, anti-social youths used to be given a clip around the ear. Now people are scared of even approaching them for fear of being attacked. The other week, we had reports of a man threatening a bus full of passengers in south London with what was alleged to be acid – as if carrying around corrosive substances has now become a new norm.

… With Britain giving every appearance of becoming a failed state, is it any wonder that people are giving up any sort of responsibility, even for themselves and their families?

Elsewhere at the Telegraph, Nick Timothy, a prospective Tory parliamentary candidate still squatting as a columnist and trading off his time as a catastrophic co-chief of staff for Theresa May, argues — in direct contravention of the evidence of our eyes and ears — that criticism of Islam is being banned. His long essay, designed, as so much of the Telegraph’s output is, to terrifying its readers, builds up to a series of demands for greater authoritarianism:

We must shut down TV channels that broadcast hatred. Charities that promote extremist beliefs should be closed down. Foreigners who spread Islamist ideology should be deported immediately without appeal. The burqa should be banned in public places, and the hijab banned for school children. Islamic supplementary schools should be investigated and regulated properly. The dual jurisdiction of our national law and Sharia law must end, with Sharia marriages criminalised. Public funding for mosques and Islamic centres must cease. When new mosques are built, they must be without minarets and in a way that is sympathetic to the surrounding architecture.

Those policies are framed in a way that we are meant to see as unarguable. Who could argue against the closure of charities that “promote extremist beliefs” or the removal of “foreigners who spread Islamist ideology”? But it’s important to remember that Timothy is closely involved with Policy Exchange, a think-tank that helped push the Trojan Horse myth, and that he and his friends have their own extremist positions, albeit with the support of the government.

We are back firmly in the territory Adam Curtis detailed in The Power of Nightmares — though in truth, British political opinion and government policy in the Prevent era has rarely strayed far from it. In the series, first broadcast in 2004, explores — especially in the third part (‘The Shadows In The Cave’) — how politicians on both sides of the Atlantic used the threat of terrorism and fear of Islamism to give them renewed moral authority. In his narration, Curtis says:

In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power. 

Sunak’s ‘enemy within’ remix, with backing vocals from Starmer and a massed choir of columnists and commentators is an attempt to regain credibility and respect. It is also a way of reframing various kinds of criticism and dissent under the same banner of serious threats and violence. Compare Harold Wilson handling hecklers in the clip below (“Your material is no better than your aim!”) with Robert Colville, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies and co-author of the last Tory manifesto, tweeting that:

[The] protestor shouting angrily in the background of [the] Sunak speech kind of proves his point… 

There is a class solidarity between politicians and the media — enhanced by the often utilised revolving door between them — that has metastasised contempt for criticism into an agreement that everything is a threat, that every objection is violence. That consensus has brought us into this new era of “the enemy within”, with Muslims at the front of its ranks but any kind of dissenter included by default.

Sunak’s speech was the most cowardly kind of fascism — in truth, there is no other kind — and the instant support from Starmer and the media cheerleading that followed are no less terrifying. It is rhetoric that sings about unity but demands conformity, which speaks about “British values” and “tolerance” but expects you to get in line or join the ranks of “the enemy within”.

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