The hard right doesn’t speak for most voters. The progressive cause is not yet lost, but there is an urgent need for energy, purpose and clarity
L
abour has just one overriding task. Forget all the other missions and milestones: Britain faces a peril that was beyond imagining a short time ago. Saving the country from Nigel Farage is the urgent, patriotic duty of this government; it is vital that it prevents an extremist, racist, authoritarian takeover which would be against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population. Nothing else matters more.
The Labour government has come adrift. It lacks direction and purpose. Its many welcome policies are missing any thread to make sense of them. Now a new role and function have arrived, uninvited. It’s not a political choice but an obligation when the country is under attack from a poisonous enemy. Electoral malfunction risks gifting unrepresentative power to a nativist, xenophobic, divisive, anti-democratic, utterly mendacious party which spouts contempt for knowledge, science and expertise, let alone community and compassion, and calls it “common sense”.
Yet the government has vacillated. When ministers mumble in response to repugnant racism, it speaks volumes. Silence is not an option when the right is becoming so toxic. The former Conservative and Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, once a relative Ukip moderate, recently tweeted: “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free.” He marks the racist trajectory. Once he attacked Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech and praised Britain as being “more at ease with the multi-ethnic society”: now he speaks proudly what once was unsayable among Brexiters. Lucy Connolly, a woman from Northampton who received a year’s prison sentence for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers last year – after tweeting “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care … If that makes me racist so be it” – has become a free speech heroine platformed by the Telegraph and Reform.
