Last night, Reform held a rally in London, at the Excel Centre. I did not attend - I thought about doing so for journalistic purposes, but I had other stuff on - yet I have watched certain portions of it on YouTube. The most fascinating part for me was the speech given by Reform’s newly announced candidate for London mayor, Laila Cunningham.
Cunningham was born in London in the late 70s to Egyptian immigrants. She was a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service at one point and has seven children. She also represents a branch of Reform that is deeply interesting to me. Thatcherite in its soul, and dare I say it, small “l” liberal in its outlook. Don’t believe me that this tendency exists within Reform and is evident in Cunningham? Here’s a quote from her speech:
“Londoners have had enough of being divided. Pitted against each other. Because in Reform it doesn’t matter who you pray to or who you love, what your sexual preference is, if you believe in this country, if you stand up for Britain, then you are a Londoner that we all stand with.”
It’s a notable quote in that it’s something that I could imagine a Labour politician saying, yet I could not imagine a current Tory one using those lines.
The reaction to Cunningham’s candidacy has been striking in the days since it was announced. It echoes the divide within the Reform Party, one which simply mirrors the divide within the right across the west. Is the mission a form of ethnonationalism combined with an extreme form of social conservatism, or is it a Hayekian, small state, freedom-focused future they want?
Part of the problem for the right, who are currently in the ascendancy throughout the west, is that most of the time, this split is not discussed. In fact, most of the time, the right tries to pretend it doesn’t even exist. The pretence that Thatcherism and Christian Nationalism are one and the same, with no issues to divide them, is maintained. Despite the obvious, yawning contradictions that throws up.
To some extent, Reform’s success so far has rested on ignoring this fault line. It has been smart of them to do so. Yet Laila getting the mayoral candidacy in London has brought this split to light.
Several notable figures on the British right have got rather upset by Cunningham running to be Reform mayor of London. “I don’t want a second Muslim Mayor of London,” said Dan Wooton. “I make no apologies for that as a proud Christian Londoner. London needs to be rescued from the Islamists.”
There was worse from other people, but the Wooton comment covers the basics. It’s about what the right in Britain actually wants or does not want, and there is no consensus across the right on what that is. Again, they can’t even admit there is a problem here.
This would be a lot more serious a problem for the right if the left weren’t in such a hole. The end of 2024 represented a last chance saloon to turn things around, one that was throughly rejected across the western world. I think we are going to have mostly governments of the right for the next decade as a result, not just in Britain, but everywhere. Even the left-leaning governments that we do have now, such as the Labour government in Britain or the Liberal government in Canada are both situational (in Britain, he Tories failed so badly, mostly because of Brexit, letting Labour win, and in Canada, because of the Tories being associated with Trump and Trump having talked up his whole Canadian invasion malarkey, the Liberals unexpectedly won), and in both instances, those parties had to pitch themselves to the right of their preferred comfort zones.
It’s possible that the madness of King Trump does enough to discredit the right but I severely doubt it. It comes back to Trump v Harris again - people dislike the current left more than they dislike any of the contradictions or kooky stuff that is coming from the right. Until that changes, stuff like whether the right likes Laila Cunningham or not should matter to you, if you care about the country and its future.
These are the people who are going to be in charge soon, after all. I even think Cunningham could win in London - if the split on the right doesn’t act to defeat her, at least.
Your quote in the third paragraph, from Laila Cunningham, just sounds like a candidate saying what she thinks her (multi-ethnic, multi-faith) audience want to hear.
Why shouldn't we think that she's cynically pandering to her audience now, only to change her tune if elected? One tactic of the hard right in the UK is to import cynical lying from the US hard right.
It’s weird how this article refers to right and left when it means far right and centre right. The only thing left about Labour is in its past. The present PLP is about where the old One-nation Conservatives used to be, pre-Thatch.
The Overton window has shifted so far that anything ‘left’ is outside the frame now. It is time that this was acknowledged and that a a new language for the political spectrum was devised. Until that happens articles like this will sound increasingly detached from reality.
The problem is not that the left has been rejected by the voters, it’s that there has been a determined and sustained push to move the Overton window right. This has meant that anything even vaguely ‘leftish’ is now portrayed as extreme and fantasist. There is this assumption that views that would once have been seen as hard-right market-fundamentalist are just ‘realist’. This despite the obvious failure of the whole neoliberal approach which collapsed in 2007-8 but staggers on in its new, more deadly, zombie form.
This resetting of the habitable political space has been achieved through control over most of the media, but also by the capture of mainstream politics by those representing a minority interest - that of wealth. They have created think tanks and funded schools of thought (mainly economics based) that promote a certain view of human nature and society dynamics.
Unless this is acknowledged and countered, the relentless rightwards move will only end when it destroys itself, and probably the rest of us, through its own greed and self-focus. By failing to challenge the repositioning of political geometry you are guilty of accepting it, and of impeding genuine efforts to resist the rightwards surge.