First, we need to pin down what it is that we're talking about. As with any political idea, there are different ways of defining right-wing populism; but it is probably accurate enough to say that the phenomenon has three broad elements:
- Right-wing populists claim to act in the interests of the broad mass of "the people" or "the nation", rather than a particular class or interest group.
- Their agenda is grounded in a commitment to conservative ideas - nation, race, religion, the patriarchal family - rather than left-wing ideas about social revolution and the abolition of inequality (although it may incorporate some left-wing elements, as in "national socialism").
- They claim that action is urgently needed because the nation is currently in the grip of malign forces - an alien, unpatriotic élite which despises ordinary people. This element lends itself to conspiracy theories which purport to explain how the élite got there and how it operates.
There were already traces of all three elements in the nineteenth century. As the franchise was gradually extended, "the people" became a political force for the first time. Conservative politicians - most famously, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Randolph Churchill - tried to build a mass following among the new voters under the slogan "Tory Democracy". Conversely, some observers noticed that progressive politics attracted some wealthy people of liberal views who had no real understanding of the people whose interests they claimed to represent (see, for example, the satirical novel The Monks of Thelema (1878) by Walter Besant and James Rice). But no-one really drew all these strands together into a coherent political philosophy which could serve as a basis for a mass movement.
Disraeli came closest. He worked out a theory in which Britain had come under the rule of a rich, unpatriotic "Whig oligarchy", while the vast majority of the country was composed of salt-of-the-earth peasants who were devoted to the monarchy and the Church of England. But Disraeli was a colourful character, and in Victorian Britain his theory stood out as decidedly eccentric. He was successful enough at the ballot box, but it is doubtful that many of the new middle- and lower-income Tory voters knew or cared about the old boy's musings on the "Whig oligarchy".
The first right-wing populist movement in British history emerged in the twentieth century, and you have probably already guessed what it was. Yes, that's right - Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Mosley's rhetoric exalted "the people" and claimed that they were the victims of the "almost limitless corruption of a decadent system". A fascist disctatorship would be the instrument through which they would win back power for themselves:
The will of the people shall prevail. The policy for which the people have voted shall be carried out. This is the essence of good government in an enlightened age. This is the principle which is denied by the system misnamed democracy, which in degeneration is more appropriately called financial democracy.... When the Government elected by the people is incapable of rapid and effective action private and vested interests assume the real power of Government, not by vote or permission of the people, but by power of money dubiously acquired. [Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live]In Mosley's narrative, the part of the corrupt unpatriotic élite was played by international financiers and newspaper barons, at least some of whom were presumed to be Jews. Mosley took this rhetoric straight from continental European fascist movements, who had got it in turn from earlier conspiracy propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this line of thinking, liberal democracy is a fraud: it holds out the promise of popular rule, but in practice it means the rule of weak, corrupt politicians who are manipulated behind the scenes by wealthy, treacherous minority groups. The true will of the people can be executed only by a strong leader who is in tune with the soul of the nation and can cut through the deceits of parliamentarianism and sham freedoms. Precisely who the treacherous minority groups were differed according to who you asked. The most elaborate conspiracy model was put forward by the leader of the French far right, Charles Maurras (1868-1952), who thought that traditional, Catholic, royalist France had been taken over by the "four confederate states" of Jews, Protestants, immigrants and Freemasons. This lunatic theory went back to conservatives' attempts to explain why the French Revolution of 1789 had happened: the common people loved the King and the priests, so it must have been a conspiracy. This history is of more than just academic interest: Steve Bannon, the alt-right caporegime who is getting friendly with Boris Johnson, is a fan of Maurras. It is also useful to bear the history in mind when listening to Brexiteers complaining that the "will of the people" is being thwarted by politicians in Parliament and their élitist Europhile chums, or when confronted with exchanges of tweets like this:
After fascism was defeated in World War II, hard-right politics in Britain fell on hard times. It took mass immigration in the 1950s and 60s to resurrect the right-wing populist cause. The National Front was formed in 1967; but the real rebirth of the populist right came in the form of Powellism - the movement against immigration and EEC membership associated with Enoch Powell. Powell was a middle-class Conservative who seems to have wanted to be accepted as an aristocratic establishment man. From the 1960s onwards, however, he turned into a blood-curdling demagogue, winning the support of large numbers of nationalist working-class voters in the process ("Many Labour members are quite good Tories"). The rise of Powellism is associated with the old lunatic's 1968 "rivers of blood" speech - famously, the first expressions of grassroots support for the speech came not from wealthy shire Tories but from London dockers and meat porters. Powell was prepared to knife his own party in pursuit of his mystical, Wagnerian idea of nationhood - when Labour promised a referendum on EEC membership in the 1974 elections, he persuaded enough of his supporters to vote Labour that the Conservatives were narrowly denied a return to power.
Powellism did not begin in 1968. The parliamentary debates on Britain's first anti-racist legislation, the Race Relations Act 1965, show that all the motifs that were later associated with Powellism were in place several years before Enoch opened his mouth. Here, for example, was a speech made by Lord Elton (who was a member of the Labour Party):
Wherever there has been mass immigration there is widespread and deep seated resentment—not prejudice against the colour of the immigrants, but resentment against their overwhelming numbers, against their sudden arrival, and against the varied social evils to which, not the individual immigrant but the mass immigration itself inevitably gives rise. And yet, if ever a dweller in a back street wishes to voice his legitimate grievances against some distress or disorder in his neighbourhood, he knows already, only too well, that somebody, and very possibly somebody far removed from the back street and from contact with immigration, is likely to accuse him of racialism....It is worth noting here that the phrase "liberal élite" first gained popularity in the 1960s - although it also experienced a big jump during the New Labour years, as Tony and Cherie Blair (and Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman, et al.) were a propaganda gift for those who wanted to get people to believe that the country was run by a well-heeled, out-of-touch élite.
My Lords, those who live in these back streets can be extremely caustic about advice on racial problems emanating from the Cotswolds or from Hampstead Garden Suburb, or even from Westminster, if the source is someone who is not living in close and constant contact with an area of mass immigration. As one of my correspondents wrote to me, "Let her come and integrate with us in Plaistow". These people feel that their legitimate grievances have been ignored by politicians, of all Parties, who have constantly hesitated to discuss them in public. At the General Election, there was something very like a general conspiracy of silence as to immigration....
Powellism faded out in the 1970s, as Britain's economic problems came to eclipse immigration as a political issue and the 1975 referendum devastated the anti-European cause. The first postwar wave of immigration had subsided, and anti-immigrant politics didn't regain its purchase until the second wave began to get going in the 1990s. Margaret Thatcher inherited many of Powell's former supporters, but Thatcherism really came from a different political tradition. Sure, Thatcher had half-baked ideas about British greatness and the weakness of the "wet" establishment; but her electoral strategy was that of a conservative capitalist rather than a Powellite populist. She didn't have the imagination to understand Powell's romantic nationalism, and her policies were aimed not at "the people" as a metaphysical entity but at what she called "our people": middle-income voters who thought that Labour had mishandled the economy and held back aspiration.
The seeds of the next upsurge of right-wing populism were sown on Tony Blair's watch. A mixture of Blair's disregard for Labour's core working-class vote and his incompetent immigration policies created a fertile ground for populist nationalism. Conservative politicians weren't sure how to respond. Some experimented with right-wing populism; but the liberalising current in their party was strong in those years. The smarter Tories realised that swing voters in marginal constituencies were left cold by the sight of the likes of Ann Widdecombe denouncing the metropolitan liberal élite. The conversion of the Tories to Blairite centrism was exemplified by their ruthless ditching of the anti-EU obsessive Iain Duncan Smith, who had been unexpectedly elected as leader by the party's unreconstructed membership, and their embrace of the hoodie-hugging David Cameron.
Yet if the Conservatives were happy to flirt with centrism, there was another vehicle ready to take advantage of the growing demand for a more robust form of rightism. UKIP had originally been founded in 1993, and for many years it had served as a home for right-wing ex-Tories who were more likely to be the establishment than to want to burn it down. The archetypal UKIPper of the 90s was a retired stockbroker who would buttonhole you in a golf club bar and complain that joining the Euro would mean the Queen's head being taken off our money, not a skinhead on his way to a Tommy Robinson march. But this changed. During David Cameron's years in office, UKIP's support took off, as it turned into a smash-the-system party which courted voters who felt disaffected from the political mainstream. The British Election Study found that it had more working-class supporters than Labour, which explains Nigel Farage's hastily discovered love for the NHS and criticism of the Chequers deal as a "sell-out to the global corporates". UKIP is now courting social media trolls whom mainstream politicians would once have refused to touch, as well as embracing outright conspiracy theories (such as "cultural Marxism", an American alt-right theory which claims that modern liberal politics are a disguised new iteration of communism).
I think I have said enough now, and the point does not need to be laboured. History is not destiny, and political ideas are not necessarily tainted by their origins. But there is reason to be suspicious of a movement whose history can be traced back through Enoch Powell and the Blackshirts to Charles Maurras and the Protocols of Zion. There is also a point to be made about the follies of conservative politicians who think that they can partner with right-wing populists and expect to keep control of the outcome - but that will have to wait for another time.
