The richest man in the world and, as of 20 January, the most powerful man in the world will be uniting to attack the UK. The outstanding question is: what will the British right do about it?
I understand why some conservatives may be tempted to go along with their country’s enemies. I can see how the demands that we must pretend that men can be women and only whites can be racist so outrage them that any enemy of the woke becomes worth supporting.
I get it. Really, I do. In my darker moments I feel that same contempt for the worst of the left myself.
But conservatives claim to be patriots who love their country. If they mean it, they need to understand that Elon Musk and Donald Trump threaten the UK.
They are not on the right side in the culture war but seem to be on the far-right side, as they make clear to anyone willing to open their eyes.
To grasp how far we have fallen, imagine being a tech billionaire or the next president of the United States. Then imagine how lost in the dark corners of the web you would need to be to even know of the existence of a low-life limey thug like Tommy Robinson – a man so extreme even Nigel Farage is wary of getting close to him.
In the pre-2016 world, there is simply no way that Robinson’s name would have registered in Silicon Valley or Washington D.C.
Now the international far-right has made him an admired figure, who is validated and boosted by the supposed leaders of the West.
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Earlier this week Elon Musk demanded that the British authorities release Robinson from a prison sentence for contempt of court. The judge jailed him after Robinson refused to stop repeating false claims about a Syrian refugee boy who was bullied in the playground. (And let us pause to reflect on how manly it was of Robinson to pick on a bullied kid.)
For whatever reason, Musk in his hubris went on to falsely claim that Sir Keir Starmer refused to punish Asian rape gangs when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. He demanded that no less a figure than His Majesty Charles III punish Starmer by dissolving parliament and calling an early election.
Musk’s ignorance embarrassed him on multiple fronts. The King will not call an early election while Starmer commands a majority. And Starmer has one of the largest parliamentary majorities in our history.
Meanwhile, the grooming scandals of the early 2000s exposed the failure of the police and social services to protect white girls. They simply weren’t processing suspects for prosecutors like Sir Keir to put before the courts. More generally there was a horrible failure to treat victims seriously and a cowardly fear of accusations of racism.
We know this. We really don’t need another inquiry. We need the political will to ensure that the police and social services do their jobs without fear or favour.
The intervention of unhinged plutocrats, who know nothing of this country, and don’t even bother to hide their ignorance of our affairs, will help no one.
For it is the far right that Musk is promoting.
I know conservatives claim that the leftists call anyone they do not like ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ or ‘far right’. But, like the stopped clock or the boy who cried wolf, leftists are not always wrong.
It’s not just Musk’s support for Robinson that marks him out. I am old enough to remember when conservatives supported police officers who were under attack. Conservatives still might, but today’s far right does not.
When thugs laid into the cops in the summer riots, and threatened to burn Muslims alive in Southport’s mosque, Musk dignified the drunk yobs by treating them as soldiers fighting a ‘civil war’ against Keir Starmer’s ‘tyrannical police state’.
It is in Musk’s alliance with Trump, however, that the most serious dangers for the UK lie
In Germany, Musk supports the Alternative für Deutschland, a movement in the Tommy Robinson style that is so extreme that even Marine le Pen won’t go near it.
The Jam had a song called ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’. It spoke of being attacked by men who ‘smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs/ And too many right-wing meetings’. This appears to be Musk’s target audience.
It’s worth pausing here to take account of how academics define the far right. There are all kinds of populist movements to the right of traditional conservatism. But academics reserve the ‘far right’ label for politicians who reject democratic procedure. By this definition, it is not hyperbolic to call Trump a far rightist, because he was willing to see the overturning of a legitimate democratic result, and was prepared to pull the same trick if he had lost again in 2024.
It is in Musk’s alliance with Trump, however, that the most serious dangers for the UK lie.
His control of Twitter, and his apparent willingness to use it to target us with extremist propaganda would be bad enough on its own. On top of that there was an unsubstantiated story in the Sunday Times before Christmas that Musk was proposing to give Farage £100 million. It doesn’t seem to be true, or rather it isn’t true yet. If Musk were to offer anything like that sum to Farage in future, however, even Keir Starmer’s cowed and timorous government, which could not be further from Musk’s ‘tyrannical police state’, would have to intervene to protect British democracy from foreign interference.
What matters now is that, as of 20 January, Musk will be a member of a Trump administration, which gives every indication that it wants to turn the US into a hostile foreign power.
Its tariffs may cost the UK economy some £22 billion. Meanwhile and more seriously Trump is giving every indication that he will bow to Vladimir Putin and let him take what he wants from Ukraine.
Nigel Farage is Trump and Musk’s man and will sink or swim with them. But before others are tempted to follow Farage, they should recognise that the overwhelming majority of British voters have the good sense to see Trump as a threat.
Conservatives might also heed a warning from history about what happens in politics when you put another country’s interests before your own.
In the 1980s I and hundreds of thousands of others were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We were goodhearted people who were appalled by the nuclear arms race in Europe. Our demand that the UK unilaterally abandon its nuclear weapons became Labour party policy.
It was a disaster for Labour. Our good-hearted motives did not matter in the slightest. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory party could point out, quite rightly, that to say that the UK should scrap its nuclear weapons while the Soviet Union kept its weapons was to put the interests of the Soviet Union before the interests of the UK.
Are right-wing people in the 2020s about to make the same mistake, and put the interests of Trump’s USA before the interests of their own UK? Are they so lost in their hatred of wokeness they would rather fight a culture war alongside Elon Musk than the actual war against Vladimir Putin?
If they do, they will lose. And they will deserve to lose.
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