Britain is Europe’s haven from the hard right

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I’m looking at the latest European map economist. Each country is colored red based on its level of public support for the far right: the higher, the darker the color. Populist Italy is Ferrari red. The same goes for Poland and Hungary. In France, where the National Rally is likely to win the next presidential election, and in Germany, where the AfD is second in the polls, the two countries are a bit like trout flakes. Spain, Portugal and much of Scandinavia are lighter in color.

U.K? Not nearly as pink as this newspaper. Only Ireland, Iceland, Lithuania and Malta (with a combined population of 9 million) fare worse. If we define the hard right as an external force and more extreme than a country’s traditional centre-right parties, then there is no hard right in the UK that cannot be ignored. One of the 650 MPs who represents a movement of this description is a conservative defectors He never won an election under his new flag. In the 2022 and 2023 local elections, the extremists will get almost nothing. Making fun of Britain’s unbuilt train lines. despairing of its featherweight politicians. Just give this country its due as a haven of moderation in Europe.

I could predict the reaction: whatever the establishment brand of the Conservative Party, they are themselves hard right. please. This Government has implemented a world-leading lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has enshrined in law and continues to pursue the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It supported Ukraine in words and deeds against Russia from the outset of the invasion, with little internal dissent. In what appears to be a disturbing display of conscience and principle, Boris Johnson is still serving in Kyiv more than a year after quitting Downing Street.

In all these respects, the Conservatives are guilty of what the alt-right considers to be heresy. This is probably the worst British government in my lifetime. (As of 2016, it no longer has “power.”) But lumping it in with Viktor Orbán or Giorgia Meloni is the worst, worst-case scenario. Which far-right party in Europe would fill three key national offices with people of non-white immigrant descent? In which work does the two heroines of Base, like Suela Braverman and Kemi Badnock, come from the East and West African generations respectively?

It should not be a liberal taboo to say that Britain is better than continental Europe at some things, including currently containing extremists. Or ask how the country does it.

One answer is a first-past-the-post voting model that favors established parties over challengers. Those in the UK fighting for proportional representation should view contemporary Europe as a warning rather than a model. There is a broader but somewhat dull lesson here: Political outcomes are often not the result of grand ideas or historical forces but of procedural rules. If there were no term limits in the United States, Barack Obama, who leaves office with positive approval ratings, might seek and win a third election, sparing Republican Donald Trump.

Another reason for Britain to target the far right is Brexit. Here, supporters and opponents of the plan can reach some degree of consensus. The first group can say, “The people’s voices are finally being heard. Imagine the resentment if Brexit never happened.” The second group can say, “We, ‘the people’, now see Populist thought in action. Never again, thank you.” Both sides are right. Whether as a release valve or as a salutary failure, Brexit has weakened the forces that led to it. June 23, 2016 was a victory, but British nationalism has yet to be restored.

We can delve into a deeper past to explain the failure of the British far right. For centuries the church in this country had been relatively weak. (Populists in France, Italy and Poland are often associated with a form of Catholicism.) There is also the vast nature of Britishness itself. With the creation of a single nation by the kingdoms of England and Scotland in 1707, the country was exposed early to the idea that statehood need not be based on a common ethnicity. Coupled with its geographical distance from the “East”, Britain is hopeless soil for a faith-and-flag, Russian-influenced Orbán-like movement.

Not so elsewhere. There has always been a kind of British liberal whose critical faculties fail him when it comes to Europe, as if cycle lanes and subsidized childcare excuse everything. Well, the likely outcome of the next UK election is a center-right government or a center-left government. It shouldn’t feel out of line to say that other democracies in Europe should be so lucky.

janan.ganesh@ft.com