Donald Trump and the Far-Right Radicalisation of the Conservative Party

As the US President begins his plan for mass deportations, Kemi Badenoch's Conservative party is openly cribbing its political strategy from the far-right

Anyone wishing to know what is happening to the Conservative party under Kemi Badenoch, only needs to take a look at their official YouTube account.

At the very top of the page is what appears to be a new slogan for the party. Let’s take a look at it.

“We are going to give you your country back” is a phrase with a very definite set of associations.

Put simply, it is a phrase which suggests that the country is currently being possessed by a group of alien incomers, who must be forcibly extradited from the nation, so that it can be returned to its rightful owners.

It is, in other words, the language of the far right.

To see that this is the case only requires a quick look at Britain’s most prominent far-right group, the extreme Christian nationalist organisation Britain First.

Here’s a picture of some of their activists standing behind their own version of this slogan just a few years back.

Of course they are not the only people to use this phrase.

Another champion of it is the former Conservative MP, and noted Islamophobe, Lee Anderson, who also used it upon his defection to Reform UK last year.

Now taken by itself, you might suggest that this is all merely a coincidence and that the Conservative party surely isn’t deliberately trying to mimic the rhetoric and politics of the far right.

However, a closer look at other recent actions taken by Badenoch and her party suggest that the situation is actually even worse than it first appears.

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The ‘Invasion’

As I have written before on these pages, both Badenoch, and other senior members of her shadow cabinet, have become increasingly comfortable with using far right rhetoric.

Whether it’s the Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick labelling British Pakistanis as being from an “alien” and “medieval” culture, or Badenoch suggesting that grooming gang perpetrators are “peasants” whose houses should be burned down, the direction has been a clear one.

However, not only is such language used by those at the top of the party, but it is tolerated among all other levels of the party too.

Just last week, the former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman traveled to the US, whereupon she suggested that it was reasonable to ask whether Britain was at risk of becoming an Islamist state under the rule of Sharia law.

Now just a few years ago, such comments would have been grounds, not just for Braverman’s removal from the Conservative parliamentary party, but from the mainstream of political debate in the UK.

Yet under Badenoch’s leadership, such rhetoric does not appear to even merit the mildest of political slap-downs.

Asked repeatedly by me on Wednesday whether the Conservative leader agreed with Braverman’s comments, her spokesman refused to say, instead insisting that she had “not read” the comments, nor had she been briefed upon them.

Requests for comment from multiple other news organisations were also declined, or ignored by Conservative HQ.

Indeed far from distancing herself from the far-right, Badenoch and her party appear intent on actually legitimising their ideas.

On Sunday, the Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith appeared on the BBC, whereupon he was asked about the new Government’s relations with the Trump administration.

Now there are reasonable criticisms to be made on this front. The fact that both Starmer and his senior colleagues made very strident criticisms of Donald Trump in the past, and are now desperately seeking to curry his favour, is a reasonable point for an opposition party to make, albeit one with only limited relevance to the next five years.

However, rather than stick to that point, Griffith instead told the BBC that one of the key problems was that Starmer’s Government’s “attacks on free speech” had “gone down very badly” with Trump and his team.

Now Griffith didn’t make it clear exactly what he was referring to here, nor was he asked to by the BBC.

However, in the six months that Starmer has been in Downing Street there has only been one significant ‘free speech’ issue crossing his desk and that has been about the prosecution of those people who incited last summer’s racist riots.

The idea that these people were the victims of a “two tier” criminal justice system that punished their “free speech” in order to censor criticism of immigration, has been the single biggest talking point of the far right about the UK, on both sides of the Atlantic, over the past six months. Indeed Elon Musk, whose every unhinged word is apparently hung on now by the Conservative party, has made it the central plank of his own attacks on Keir Starmer.

So is it really the Conservative party’s position that such prosecutions, of people who deliberately incited the violent assaults of refugees, British Muslims and other ethnic minorities last summer, shouldn’t take place?

Because if it is then that marks a truly dangerous shift in the direction of a political party that until recent years, portrayed itself as being in the centre ground of British politics.

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Normalising the Far Right

One of the main reasons the Conservative party is heading in such an increasingly extreme direction is that it is receiving incredibly little pushback for doing so.

The Labour Government, which has adopted a flawed policy of refusing to engage in ‘culture war’ debates with the Conservative party, consistently refuses to rise to the bait by condemning their opponents’ lurch to the fringes.

And without that pushback, the rest of the media is refusing to do so either.

Earlier this week my colleague Josiah Mortimer exposed how Nigel Farage had been posing for pictures with a group of far right activists.

Those photographed palling around with Farage included a man who had previously boasted that “I f*cking hate P**is*, called for the stoning of Iranians in the UK and suggested that a female MP should have been raped.

Now, you might expect that such associations for the leader of a party, which is currently in joint-first place with Labour in the average of opinion polls, would be worthy of further interrogation, or comment, by the rest of the British media.

Yet in the days that have followed, not a single other news organisation has so much as bothered to follow up on the story.

Instead, what we are seeing is an increased normalisation of these people and their ideas, by many of the same media organisations that allowed Trump and his own far-right ideas to become normalised in the United States.

In America, the result of that normalisation has been the re-election of a far-right criminal president, who is currently launching mass deportations and crippling trade wars with its closest allies, while his billionaire robber baron adviser is given the keys to the entire federal state apparatus.

This is not an agenda that appears to alarm the UK’s main opposition party.

Just this week, Badenoch applauded both Trump and the leader of Argentina, Javier Milei, for taking a “chainsaw” to government regulations.

“Defend our culture”

The end result of such radical deregulation, as we have already seen in Argentina, is the collapse of fundamental state protections and the impoverishment of the general population.

And if that is the direction that the Conservative party, and its fellow travellers in Reform, really want to take this country in then it is surely something that their political opponents, and the British media should really be spending a lot more time talking about.

Because for all the talk of “taking your country back” the reality of the sort of extreme right-wing agenda pursued by the likes of Trump and Milei, is that it only further concentrates power at the top, while removing the human rights and state protections enjoyed by everyone else.

That is the logical end point of all far-right movements, whether they be in the distant past, or in the modern day.

And with Starmer’s Government and most of the British media, apparently unwilling, or unable, to provide a meaningful opposition to what is happening, it leaves the rest of us in a very alarming position indeed.