Are we all ‘far right’ now?

Terms such as ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ have been stripped of all meaning – and their debasement will have consequences

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Photo: Attribution: Hahahlol24452, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When the 2019 general election was announced, Labour shadow cabinet member Dawn Butler went on to Twitter (as it then was) and wrote: ‘The general election has just been called. This isn’t a normal election. It is the fight of our lives to save our country from the far right.’

She was talking, of course, about the prospect of voters re-electing a government comprised of figures such as Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and James Cleverly.

Butler wasn’t alone in seeing fascists under the bed. I encountered around that time others on the left – including the general secretary of my own trade union – who made similar statements. This was, they claimed, a battle between the forces of tolerance and far-right extremism.

These assessments were such an obvious and grotesque distortion of reality that I genuinely wondered if those who peddled them had lost their minds.

The absurd hyperbole seemed to be a hangover from the Brexit vote, which many on the liberal left (and some on the liberal right) considered to be a harbinger of a dark new age. Traditional conservative opinions were suddenly being declared beyond the pale, and those who expressed them characterised as Nazi-adjacent. (In fact, our current deputy prime minister, dare we forget, went so far as saying that comparing Brexit-supporting Tory MPs to Nazis was ‘not strong enough’.)

In the years since, the phenomenon has metastasised, with the labels ‘far right’, ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ now attached to pretty much anyone or anything that stands in opposition to hyper-progressive ideology.

Reform UK, for example, is now routinely denounced in these terms. Last week, Labour MP Richard Burgon said in a radio interview that our country was facing the threat of a ‘far-right extremist government’. It was a ludicrous statement. Reform is undoubtedly a party of the right – but one comprised largely of small-state Thatcherites, not strong-state fascists.