Fight, fight, fight,” senior Tories urged for years. Now they express shock, and condemn the results, when people prove stupid enough to have taken them at their word. While racist thugs will always be with us, governments can create either an environment that curbs them, or one that encourages them. Across its 14 years in power, the Conservative government encouraged them.
The story senior Conservatives kept telling was of “outsiders” threatening all we held dear. Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, the groups they targeted were Muslims, and asylum seekers and other immigrants. Others were demonised less often, though no less harmfully: for example, Priti Patel, now a leading contender for the party leadership, targeted Travellers, and pushed legislation through parliament that could destroy their travelling lives, as well as those of Gypsies and Roma.
As Sara Khan, the last government’s social cohesion adviser, points out, the Conservatives repeatedly glossed over the danger of far-right extremism. They failed to respond to her reports, or to change the law to curtail neo-Nazi movements. The government scrapped its counter-extremism strategy altogether in 2021.
Rather than developing a coherent policy, it chose to keep redefining extremism, to exclude the bigoted elements in its own base and focus instead on environmental protesters and peaceful campaigners contesting the unfolding genocide in Gaza. The police kept warning that the far right was the fastest-growing terrorism threat in the UK, but the government did nothing.
Instead, it appointed people who could themselves reasonably be described as political extremists – some of whom were obsessed with Muslims and the “clash of civilisations” narrative beloved of the far right – to produce highly biased assessments of where extremist threats might arise.
Repeated statements by Conservative MPs – sometimes subtle, sometimes crude – could scarcely have been better designed to inflame racist mobs. When Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, falsely claimed that Britain was “sleepwalking into a ghettoised society”, and that “Islamists … are in charge now”, she was allowed by Rishi Sunak to stay on the party benches.
Robert Jenrick, now a contender for the Tory leadership, claimed in parliament, without evidence: “We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists.” Prominent Conservatives, sometimes with the party leadership’s apparent endorsement, repeatedly smeared the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, falsely associating him with radical Islamism simply because he was a Muslim.
The Conservatives leant heavily on culture war themes to distract voters from their own massive failures. Another leadership candidate, Kemi Badenoch, has specialised in this: she could be seen as the party’s most skilful and consistent distractor. Because the Tories had nothing to offer the people of the UK except chaos, dysfunction, the gradual collapse of public services and a cost of living crisis, they sought instead to refocus our attention on scapegoats.
Asylum seekers and other immigrants were the perfect foil. Not only could they be blamed for crises caused entirely by government policy – the failure of housing provision, an overwhelmed NHS, crumbling schools and all the other erosions of the public realm – but they could also be performatively beaten up. Attacking the weakest and most vulnerable people on Earth – those who have been forced to flee their homes – delivers no improvement in the lives of people who already live here. But seeing others spectacularly mistreated can nevertheless make some people feel better about themselves. The Tories ramped up this sado-populism whenever they were confronted by a new scandal. Their choice of leadership contenders suggests they still know no other strategy.
Of course, they were amply assisted by the media: not just the Mail and the Telegraph, but also, shamefully, the BBC. We should never forget the extent to which the BBC changed this country by giving endless airtime to Nigel Farage and other rightwing extremists, while shutting out progressive voices. It built Farage into a major public figure, just as it built the recognition and momentum that Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both manifestly ill-suited to high office, enjoyed.
Now Elon Musk has not only allowed his platform X to be used by the far right to escalate conflict, but he participates himself, amplifying posts by some of the most malign sources of disinformation. He seems to revel in the prospect of civil war in the UK and Europe, repeatedly predicting it. Paul Marshall, the rightwing millionaire who owns the website UnHerd and part-owns GB News, appeared to share this enthusiasm. Although he denied endorsing them, he engaged with several posts from far-right accounts predicting civil war, including one that stated, with staggering historical ignorance: “Civil war is coming. There has never been a country that has remained peaceful with a sizeable Islamic presence.”
Musk’s platform is also being used to spread the myth of “two-tier policing”: the claim that far-right protesters are selectively arrested, while Black protesters can do as they please. It’s the opposite of the truth: Black people have faced institutional police racism and selective stop, search and arrest for decades.
The Conservatives’ Online Safety Act was supposed to address hate speech and provocations of violence on social media, but it achieves the distinction of simultaneously failing to prevent incitement to racial hatred, conflict and riot, and threatening peaceful free speech. When the act is fully implemented next year, its provisions are meant to be enforced by the regulator Ofcom. But Ofcom has already proven incapable of impartial regulation when applied to television channels. Without a legal mandate to do so, it has set blatant double standards, allowing Marshall’s GB News to make a mockery of the broadcasting rules, while continuing to enforce them against less partisan media.
Why? Well the political views of its chairman, Michael Grade, appointed by the Conservatives, might offer a clue. Watching the far-right instigator Laurence Fox on the BBC’s Question Time, Grade said he cheered: “I thought, at last – a voice for those of us who are so sick of the intolerance … the woke brigade.” Fox has done as much as anyone else to inflame the recent riots, suggesting on X that Muslims are “invaders. Islam needs to be removed from Britain. Completely and entirely. We are a Christian nation.” Grade, whose term as head of Ofcom runs until 2026, will have the job of regulating posts like this. The chickens are in charge of the Foxhouse.
Yes, the immediate authors of this mayhem are the racist thugs rampaging through our cities, and they should face the legal consequences. But let us not forget who helped to whip them up.
BBC