Séamas O'Reilly: Authoritarian nationalism has been a long-running political project

A protestor is removed from the audience during Home Secretary Suella Braverman's speech during the National Conservatism Conference at the Emmanuel Centre, central London. Picture date: Monday May 15, 2023.

As we speak, a few miles up the road from where I live, the UK’s National Conservatism conference (NatCon23) has come to an end. 

It was a strange, sad, and alarming affair, in which a grisly clown car of right-wing heels tumbled on stage to advocate for British nationalism.

There, they barked tired broadsides against wokeness and made urgent calls for a resurgent, patriotic conservatism they think the national psyche is lacking. 

Speakers railed against “cultural Marxism” — a term synonymous with antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence on public consciousness — and claimed that “the Left” has destroyed Britain at every political level (despite the Conservative party being in power for the last 13 years, and for 31 of the last 44). 

Just in case such statements seemed a bit fascist, others were on hand to put you at ease. 

Take reactionary author and commentator Douglas Murray — perhaps the epitome of Hannah Arendt’s formulation of the “banality of evil” — who argued that nationalism should not be thrown away as a political force, “just because the Germans mucked it up twice in a century”.

FIERY AND GARBLED

If this all sounds quite extreme, then rest assured you’re sane. 

The conference is so extreme that, just three years ago, the Conservative party reprimanded MP Daniel Kawczynski for attending, stating that “his attendance at this event was not acceptable, particularly in light of the views of some of those in attendance”. 

This year, at least seven Tory MPs spoke at the event, which included a fiery and garbled keynote address from the sitting home secretary Suella Braverman.

I’ve lived here for a while so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but I reserve the right to be a little shocked, just as a treat. 

For all my blackhearted cynicism, I was genuinely alarmed to see Jacob Rees-Mogg breezily admitting that the Conservatives had engaged in gerrymandering at the recent local elections, a practice he then decried solely because it inadvertently hampered their own voters. 

But, at root, this conference was merely the most prominent example of a political project that has been going on for much of the past decade, and the century which went before: the attempt to make authoritarian nationalism not just respectable and mainstream, but the dominant plank of British politics.

In fairness, if your party has been in charge of the country for over a decade and delivered complete ruin to its economy, institutions, and quality of life, while becoming mired in innumerable scandals, incompetence, avarice and cruelty, you can’t exactly run on policy. 

Trapped in electoral freefall, we are witnessing their attempt to retain relevance by digging in. 

In words even those attending NatCon23 might agree with, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once wrote: “The old world is dying, the new age is struggling to be born”. 

Anti-Left nationalism has, then, clearly been anointed midwife for this difficult birth, enabling its adherents to ignore policy, and instead make emotional appeals to whichever culture war hatreds are within reach. 

Allowing you to ascribe blame to all those minorities, university lecturers, and woke lawyers who are actually responsible for your failures in government, because the Left simply don’t love your country as much as you do.

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

SCRAWLED IN CRAYON

The reason I fear it might work, is that Britain is very, very weird when it comes to the topic of, well, itself. 

Last summer, while launching a Tory leadership campaign that would last longer than her eventual premiership, Liz Truss released a poster bearing the natty slogan: “I love Britain. We are a great country.” 

I was initially struck by the uncanny sense that it had been scrawled in crayon by an oxygen-deprived toddler and, later, by the fact she emerged victorious shortly afterwards. 

Or consider a more recent question asked on a New Statesman podcast: “Does King Charles actually like Britain?” 

Couched within it was the implicit — even chilling — premise that the king doesn’t actually like Britain, and this is something every Briton should prepare their bodies for the shock of dealing with. 

On the one hand, it’s a question so broad it makes almost no sense, like asking if someone likes food. 

We could even, if we so desired, grapple with how the question pertains to nationalism’s most popular advocates: in what sense could they possibly love Britain if they hate its every constituent part, from large swathes of its population to its art, laws, values, and institutions?

IMPLICIT FEAR - AND FASCISM

All of that is mere window dressing for the question’s central weirdness. 

Namely, why would anyone possibly give a shit? It’s hard to imagine any local formulation of it that makes sense at all. 

“Does Leo Varadkar actually like Ireland?” is something only an insane person would either ask, or have any interest in hearing an answer to. 

“Does Michael D Higgins actually like Ireland?”, “Does Bono actually like Ireland?”, “Does the Tayto Man actually like Ireland?” 

It’s not just that “liking” Ireland is a meaninglessly abstract concept, it’s that the implicit fear that someone might not like Ireland, carries zero resonance for us. 

This would almost be worth congratulation, if Ireland was not herself seeing fascist thugs burning refugees out of their encampments, and a resurgent far-right presence creeping more steadily into the nation’s headlines, week by week.

For now, I will limit myself to Britain’s woes, and my fear that its wounded sense of its own past glory, its paranoid cultural memory of once being a more useful player on the world stage, renders the English breed of authoritarian nationalism more potent than our own. 

Claiming to love Britain while spreading undiluted hate about everything its modern society stands for, has long formed a large bulk of the country’s press and, since Brexit especially, a major plank of its political mainstream. 

Whether it will turn the tide electorally remains to be seen, but the worst people in British public life are ready to give it a go, and that should frighten us.

That Gramsci quote may be worth revisiting in full. “The old world is dying,” he wrote in 1930s Italy, “the new age is struggling to be born: now is the time of monsters.”