Suella Braverman’s Conservative conference speech could have been delivered by a populist, far-right continental leader such as Marine Le Pen and there are strong signs that is the way the party may be heading, European political scientists have said.
The UK home secretary warned delegates in Manchester this week of a “hurricane” of mass migration, suggested the Human Rights Act should be renamed the “Criminal Rights Act” and attacked the “luxury beliefs” of a “privileged woke minority”.
With ministers also embracing rightwing conspiracy theories around “meat taxes” and council-dictated shopping hours, and Rishi Sunak declaring it “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman a woman”, the “narrative is going that way”, experts said.
Braverman’s speech, which pitched a “law-abiding, hard-working, common sense majority against the few, the privileged woke minority with their luxury beliefs”, was “textbook populism”, said Matthijs Rooduijn of the University of Amsterdam.
“This was a populist, radical-right speech like you’d get from Le Pen in France or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands,” he said. “When it’s badly behind in the polls, in search of a new story, the question now is to what extent the whole party embraces it.”
Belgium’s transgender deputy prime minister on Friday described Sunak’s remarks as “hurtful and very disappointing” and likely to fuel transphobia, while Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, said it “bothers me to see Britain disengaging from the world”. Sunak allied with Italy’s far-right leader, Gieorgia Meloni, this week to force migration on to the agenda of a meeting of European leaders in Spain.
Usually combined with a rightwing or leftwing “host ideology”, populism divides society into two groups – a “pure people” versus a “corrupt elite” – and argues that politics should be an expression of the “will of the people”.
Rooduijn, who is lead researcher on the PopuList, a project involving more than that 100 academics in 31 European countries including the UK that classifies parties as populist, far right or far left, said recent Conservative party discourse and rhetoric also displayed key far-right markers.
“The most important are nativism – the importance of the nation – combined with the exclusion of various groups: immigrants, people of another race, it can be any group,” he said. “A form of in-group, out-group thinking.”
It was not yet fully clear, Rooduijn said, to what extent populism and a far-right ideology were a “core, defining attribute” of the UK Conservative party, which is why the latest edition of the PopuList – after long internal debate – did not list it as such.
“But it’s going to be very interesting to see how the party develops. There are certainly signs now that it’s not just about one or two speeches. If these ideas and arguments become consistent over time, we would see it as borderline far right.”
Daphne Halikiopoulou, a Greek-born comparative political scientist at the University of York and PopuList co-author, said the experts’ discussion about how to classify the Tory party would have been even tougher had it taken place now rather than last year.
“Things are moving quite rapidly,” she said. “Our rationale is to classify holistically, in terms of dominant ideology, and that’s not always easy when you’re talking about a mainstream party that has become more populist and radicalised.”
Halikiopoulou said, however, there was “certainly a sense that the entire narrative is moving that way”. Key to the party being classified as far right in future would be whether the arc was extended, she said – and whether some party officials rejected it.
Catherine Fieschi, a senior fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, said the Conservative party was comparable to some other mainstream centre-right parties in Europe, such as France’s Les Républicains.
“They are hard to read as single entities because they’re fragmented,” she said. “The Conservatives are certainly populist, and they are ultra-nationalist. But they are also pro market and pro free enterprise, and they are not – yet – really authoritarian.”
