One of the best ways of ensuring you are consistently surprised by political developments is to concentrate exclusively on the politics of the mainstream. Follow the leading parties and the passage of legislation, but ignore the thrashing and screeching of the political fringe – dismissing those on the periphery as fanatics of little importance who can safely be ignored or satirised.
If this is the lens through which you view politics, you would likely have missed the gradual development of a new American nationalism and white identity politics which helped power Trump to the White House, as well as the coalition of previously obscure left-wing movements which coalesced around Corbyn when he ran for the Labour leadership. As today’s political outsiders could be tomorrow’s mainstream, it is folly to ignore them. And that’s why we should be paying attention to the realignment currently taking place on the British hard-right.
On Sunday, UKIP leader Gerard Batten addressed a rally outside Downing Street. This in itself is scarcely newsworthy – as last week’s local elections showed, UKIP is not the force it once was. But Batten’s attendance was significant, due to the nature of the event and what it represented. The protest was called by former EDL leader Tommy Robinson following his suspension from Twitter, ostensibly to support “free speech”. Batten’s fellow speakers were a virtual Who’s Who of the transatlantic hard-right, many of whom rose to prominence during Trump’s Presidential run. Former Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, Vice Magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes and Canadian right-wing activist Lauren Southern all delivered addresses (in Southern’s case via video link as she’s been banned from the UK).
What united most, though not all, of these individuals is their fierce criticism of Islam. Southern has written a book in which she identifies Islam, along with “Baby Boomers” and “Immigrants”, as one of three forces which have “screwed my generation”. McInness has claimed that “our balls are in Islam’s purse” and “trying to reform Islam is like trying to create functioning heroin addicts”, Yiannopoulos wrote a piece arguing that “The left chose Islam over gays” whilst Robinson has repeatedly termed Islam a “fascist ideology”.
Batten has a history of expressing similar sentiments. Last year he described Islam as a “death cult” and since becoming UKIP leader earlier this year, first as interim following the defenestration of Henry Bolton and then fully in April, he has pushed this position with gusto. On 24 March at a rally in Birmingham he gave Tommy Robinson an interview, where he asked, having noted its acceptable to hate the “totalitarian systems” of Nazism and Communism, “why can’t you hate the totalitarian system of Islam or Mohammadism?” Weeks later he granted Robinson a 45 minute long exclusive interview for his YouTube channel. On Twitter he has expressed similar sentiments. Referring to a story about the police allowing Muslims to pray in Hyde Park Batten Tweeted “British society is being forced to submit to Islam bit by bit, and in this instance the police are helping in the process”.
There is clearly a significant base of support for such views within UKIP. In the party’s 2017 leadership election Anne Marie Waters, an anti-Islam activist who has previously described the religion as “evil”, came second. Whilst Waters left UKIP to form her own Party, and was another of those who joined Batten in addressing Robinson’s “free speech” protest at the weekend, some of her supporters clearly remain. Moreover this trend is being backed by other UKIP aligned forces on the right. In March Leave.EU, formerly the unofficial second Brexit campaign which was closely associated with UKIP, caused controversy by attributing the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism problem to “Britain’s exploding Muslim population”. The next month the same group tweeted a graphic titled “Londonistan”, showing a grinning picture of London Mayor Sadiq Khan alongside figures about the number of Mosques and Churches in the city.
UKIP has already evolved considerably during its 26-year history. When the party was founded in 1991 as the Anti-Federalist League by historian Professor Alan Sked, it was a bookish Eurosceptic party, with some traditionalist and libertarian sympathies. Over time, and especially after Nigel Farage assumed the leadership in 2006, it added to this a strong nativist tendency. This coincided with a dramatic increase in immigration from the EU after the bloc expanded into Eastern Europe in 2004, and was the catalyst for UKIP’s elevation into a serious electoral force. It’s too early to say if UKIP is going through another such transformation, but it’s leaders clear flirtations with Britain’s anti-Islam and Trump sympathetic right means we’d be foolish to ignore this possibility.
This isn’t an untrod path. In 2013 the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was founded by a group of German economists and journalists who had come to regard the Eurozone as unsustainable, partly as a result of the Greek debt crisis. However the party soon moved to the right, a process which greatly accelerated during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, and many of its original leaders left. Ideologically the party is now broadly comparable with the French Front National or Austrian Freedom Party, with immigration and Islam edging out the European Union as its primary concerns.
Britain is currently one of only a few countries in Western Europe not to have a significant party of the authoritarian hard-right. Whether this has been the result of some intrinsic British decency, or our unusual electoral system, is beyond the scope of this article.
Either way, it could be changing. After the Brexit vote, UKIP is a party in need of a purpose, and a hard-right faction is doing its upmost to fill the void. Whether they succeed, and what happens if they do, remains to be seen. But if there’s one thing recent political developments have taught us it’s that we’d be naïve to assume the status quo will hold.
