"The rainbow and the crescent"
Tracking the right
A couple of days ago, Unherd, the aggressively illiberal online publication owned by the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, published a piece by Brad Evans on the legacy of the 7/7 bombings. The essay is pretty empty all things considered; it’s the sort of thing i’d normally skim as i read through the right-wing press in the morning before i forgot all about it. But it has a few lines sprinkled in that have become increasingly common over recent months in this sort of milieu.
The first is the insistence that Britain is descending into a kind of hyper-violent anarchy. The country’s is, for much of the right, hurtling towards ethnic and social breakdown, even civil war. I won’t go in to this too much, partly because i hope to be able to write something more fully on this in the coming months, but it’s interesting to see the right hype themselves up in this way.
There’s no doubt that the problems in Britain are stark, and that there is plenty of anger and fear about. This reaction of the right, though, i think, is less a reflection of that very obvious and deeply engrained sense of decline and decay, and of passions enflamed by this, than a kind of online echo chamber. At present, on the right, there’s a strange rhetorical circle, whereby one writer or commentator makes a wildly hyperbolic prediction of social breakdown. This is then picked up and amplified by several more commentators, who then in turn ramp up the apocalypticism another notch, only to be further quoted and requoted in the comment pages of the Speccie and Telegraph again. All to prove that in fact race war is just around the corner.
It’s strange to see it play out so clearly in real time, and it definitely says more about writers themselves than it does about the condition of England. There’s also a poorly repressed glee in much of the coverage. In projecting these nightmare scenarios of ethnic conflict, the right seems to be actively trying to conjure up their infernal obverse: white racial consciousness, to counter the identity politics of the left.
What is clear in all of this, though, is that the right have not learnt the lesson so forcefully presented to the left over the past decade: just log off. Then again, we all have column inches to fill.
Anyway, here’s Evans: “Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still.”
“Twenty years on,” he writes, “we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponise.”
There’s also a couple of places that Evans does the “multiculturalism is leading to mass violence” thing. We must heed, he says, the “worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism”. It’s easy to see this slide into the kind of sinister discussions of ethnicity we have seen online in recent months. In fact, here’s an extra from a profile of Robert Jenrick, published by the NS yesterday:
The day before I went to see Jenrick, Neil O’Brien, a Tory MP and close ally of his, had posted about the almost three-fold rise in babies born to non-British mothers since 1997, and Matthew Goodwin, a former academic turned shock jock, had told the Spectator that Englishness was an ethnicity, separate from British identity. This is new and radical territory for Britain’s political class, and would have been alien to them in the 2010s.
When I raised this debate with Jenrick, he notably agreed that there was an English ethnicity but had no interest in the question. His concern was Britain’s cultural identity, not questions of race and religion, although I was unsure where one set of concerns started and the others ended. “By 2030,” he claimed, “almost a quarter of the population will have been born outside the UK. I think that’s an astonishing statistic. There aren’t many successful countries in the world like that – cohesive, integrated countries – and if that is how events play out, we’re going to have to work immensely hard to integrate those people. Not many other countries have experienced that.” He brought up central Luton, home of the far-right influencer Tommy Robinson, where he said that almost 50 per cent of the population were born outside the UK. (In the 2021 census, 38.4 per cent of Luton’s residents were born outside the UK.) “That’s almost without precedent.”
Returning to Evans, he does to his credit warn against a repeat of the War on Terror years, which led to a “widespread demonisation of Islam”. Yet he seems more concerned with “the calamitous corrective to this [which has been] to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.” His proof here is the failure on “grooming gangs” and, bafflingly, the “disastrous response to the Southport attacks”. (I don’t know whether he means the failure of Prevent and the police to stop the events from happening, in which case it was precisely the over-focus on Islam that was at fault, or whether he thinks Axel Rudakubana is Muslim (he isn’t) and thus the reason he committed the murders was religious (it wasn’t), though perhaps he’s taking about the race riots that followed, which would be a big stretch considering the context the sentence is in, but whatever).
This would all be so much culture wars chaff if it weren’t for the fact that the last time i checked, Evans was vaguely on the left. I can’t say i’ve ever followed his work closely, but his last published book came out with Repeater and, strangely, has blurbs from both Paul Mason and Neil Kinnock.
One of the more obnoxious rhetorical moves of the British right over the last few years has been the claim that opposition to the genocide in Gaza is grounded in little more than tribal allegiance to Islam. We’ve seen this before – it’s merely a bad repeat of the “Islamo-leftism” stuff from the 2000s – but it’s becoming grimly prevalent in recent months. When someone like David Goodhart says, in the Evening Standard, that “London’s Gaza battles are a sign of things to come as diasporas fight it out on our streets” or when you read in the Critic that the “riots after Black Lives Matter, Gaza and the Southport murders can all be seen as expressions of the slow intensification of ethnic identification”, then you’d be forgiven for imagining that the reaction to the events in Palestine were confined to the streets of Tower Hamlets, and not a mass, multiracial movement driven by the widely felt revulsion at the world’s first live-streamed genocide.
In that same NS profile of Jenrick i mentioned before the writer, Harry Lambert, quotes James Orr, a Cambridge-based religious scholar and a leading figure in the new harsher more ethnonationalist right in Britain. This, Orr said at a recent conference organised by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, is a product “of an unholy alliance between ‘rainbow and crescent’”
Evans’s version (“Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine”) may be more sober, but in the context no less glaring.