The Tory Party Bosses and the Elephant in the Room

I remember that when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister of Britain it all felt very, very '90s to me. The son of immigrants (indeed, Hindu South Asian-by-way-of-Africa immigrants, and not incidentally "looking the part" phenotype-wise, while being married into one of the first families of the neoliberalized Billionaire Raj Western economic analysts love every bit as much as they despise statist China) made a fortune in the financial sector then went on to a career in politics that saw him go as far as any non-royal can go in class-ridden, Old Regime-saddled Britain, rising to become the King's first minister. It all befit the Tony Blair-era vision of a "Cool Britannia" leading a globalized economy where immigrant-embracing multiculturalism and respect for "merit" above all else was the recipe for economic success, for as Calvin Coolidge might have had it at a later date the business of the world was business, and above all that type of business to which the City of London is so important.

But the year was 2022, not 1997. The headlong integration of the global economy underway by the second half of the '80s had stalled out in the wake of the Great Recession, and, if judging by the share of international trade and investment in the world economy the world remained more "globalized" than it had ever been at any point much before that, the order that Thomas Friedman sang along with the glories of Ken Lay and Enron in The Lexus and the Olive Tree was clearly fraying in practical terms, with this undoing whatever legitimacy the neoliberal vision of economic life had ever had with a public that was never really convinced by it, and instead actually kicked and screamed as the Pinochets and the Thatchers (with a little help from the Summerses and Shleifers) forced them into those Golden Straitjackets. Naturally the "market populism" had long since been kicked to the curb for lack of takers in favor of a more traditional nationalism, most certainly including an ethnic nationalism that did not sit well with a Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And indeed Mr. Sunak did not survive his first general election as either party leader or Prime Minister.

Certainly Mr. Sunak inherited a Tory party that had gone from disaster in disaster in policy and politics under an historic string of profoundly incompetent and uncharismatic leaders that fortune cruelly placed at the national helm in some very hard times (the smug, sanctimonious, really quite stupid David Cameron, the risibly undignified Theresa May, Britain's answer to Vladimir Zhirinovsky Boris "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" Johnson, the skill and application-lacking "disgrace" that was Liz Truss, etc., etc.) with all that meant for the party's public support. Still, their principal opposition in the Labour Party was under a hugely unpopular Blairite with a Blairite platform that could only ever be regarded as a brazen betrayal of his earlier promises. Indeed, contrary to the conventional wisdom the press endeavored to foster Starmer did not so much win by a landslide as win by default as the Tories' vote collapsed, with said collapse letting Free Gear Keir Starmer win with a lot less votes than Jeremy Corbyn had when he lost to Theresa May just a few years earlier. Instead, if anyone had an impressive showing it was the third parties, above all Nigel Farage's Reform UK, which made its gains very clearly at the Tories' expense--gains so great that the situation had a Strange Death of Liberal England feel about it, as I am sure someone in the British commentariat would have said if they (apparently no more literate than their illiterate American counterparts) EVER CRACKED OPEN A BOOK. Yet one would be hard-pressed to credit Reform with any special emphasis on or brilliance in speaking to the public's discontents with, for example, the course of the British economy, or the country's participation in ever metastasizing "forever wars" (just as one would not expect from a rich public school-graduated former functionary of Michael Milken's old firm predictably pushing a blatantly elitist economic agenda, no matter how much the illiterates of the press speak of him as a "populist"). Rather their specialty (as underlined by their core support deriving from older males from the provinces) has been appeal to that sort of nationalism, ethnic nationalism, racism, which sees a Sunak as having no business being in 10 Downing Street, or, when they cast aside their hypocrisy, even being in Britain at all.

Yet the mainstream of the British media hesitates to acknowledge that this could have been at all a factor in Sunak and his party's ignominious defeat in a manner that struck me as making a very marked contrast with the situation in the United States where it was a constant, even knee-jerk, response to accuse those who disliked Barack Obama of racist and xenophobic animus--in spite of the fact that he, too, gave the public plenty of reason to dislike him, so much so that this was, and remains, a cheap way of diverting attention from the Democratic Party's unswerving commitment to neoliberalism. In fairness the British press, for all its many faults (and they are legion), is somewhat better than America's at paying attention to policy rather than just politics and personalities, and somewhat more attentive to class and less attentive to "identity." However, from the Daily Mail to the Guardian their orientation here is not so different as to fully account for the paucity of such discussion, the British press displaying plain and simple cowardice about calling out the racism of the far right, a cowardice also much seen in an America when instead of charges of racism being a way of changing the subject, racism really is the issue. Those who imagine otherwise would do well to look at how not just the British tabloids whose owners hurrahed for the Roderick Spodes and their Blackshorts and sent Hitler congratulatory telegrams (in the wake of his conquests (if not more than telegrams), but the ostensibly progressive options among the major papers have played their part in normalizing and mainstreaming the far right. However, it can also seem that, just as Paul Krugman said of its American counterpart, the British elite on some level still think it's 1997--with this, certainly, having its reflection in the choice of Mr. Sunak's successor, and the continued decay of both the Tories' fortunes, and the ascent of Reform UK on the strength of nothing but disgust with the alternatives, and its spewing of poison against "foreigners," be they in Brussels or in Brixton.