George Monbiot writes:

“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. [Continue reading…]