‘Telling us we’re all fascists doesn’t work anymore’

Poll after poll tells the same story: Reform UK is surging, while Labour and the Tories hemorrhage support. Is this just a flash in the pan? A protest against an unpopular, directionless government and an equally hapless opposition? Or could this be the crumbling of the old political order, ending with Nigel Farage in No10?

Rod Liddle, associate editor of the Spectator and Times Radio presenter, joined spiked’s Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss all this and more. You can watch the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Is the Labour government worse than you expected?

Rod Liddle: The first 100 days were excruciatingly bad. There were a number of missteps – one of them obviously being the cut to winter fuel payments. But Donald Trump taking office in the US did seem to stiffen the sinews of this government a bit. We saw Keir Starmer behaving with a certain adroitness on the international stage. Lisa Nandy and Shabana Mahmood started making intelligent, Blue Labour decisions by supporting the Supreme Court’s transgender ruling and opposing the Sentencing Council’s attempts to codify two-tier justice.

But there’s little the government can do now – both Labour and the Tories are strung out between two parts of an electorate with diametrically opposed beliefs. It’s not simply that there are differences. It’s that on every single issue – whether it be Net Zero, immigration, wokery and defence – you will find a completely different answer among Labour voters in affluent areas of the south than you would in the north. And I just do not see how either party can square those circles.

O’Neill: What’s your take on the Tories?

Liddle: Robert Jenrick is basically Ed Davey on ketamine – swooping in on passengers on the Tube one minute, popping up somewhere else the next.

I spoke to Kemi Badenoch recently. Her argument is that there is no use coming in with all guns blazing. You have to rebuild the trust in the party, and that takes time. The policies have to be thought out, well considered and not Faragist, as she put it.

But things are looking disastrous for the Conservatives. Like Labour, its fox has been shot by Farage. Kemi is a clever woman, and I know she’s committed to the job, but every complaint she makes about Labour is met with: ‘Well, you had 14 years.’ The Conservative Party is the most adaptable and resilient of all our political parties, but it is difficult to see how it comes back from this.

O’Neill: You mentioned Blue Labour. Do you think there is an appetite amongst the public for the return of ‘sensible’ left wing ideas?

Liddle: I’ve been saying for years, as have Maurice Glasman and others, that there is an appetite for a fiscally progressive party that is socially conservative – that’s what all three parties are trying to be at the moment. Frankly, I think my party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), is fucked, because Reform has taken our clothes. It’s taken our policies. It’s taken our slogans. It’s taken everything. We in the SPD can trace our roots back all the way to Aristotle, through Vico, through bits of Marx, through the Christian social teaching and so on. Reform can trace its lineage back to having heard what we said a few weeks ago!

But it has done this very successfully. Farage realised, much as JD Vance did, what the electorate is hungry for. The remarkable thing is that we could now head into the next election with not one of the main parties proposing a fiscally conservative budget. That’s a huge change.

Four or five years ago, when I asked certain people who they voted for, they would put their arm around me and shepherd me into a corner and whisper, ‘I voted Reform’. Whereas now, there’s no shame in it. Reform has become respectable.

O’Neill: Is wokeness running out of steam?

Liddle: The BBC no longer refers to Reform as far right – which it habitually used to, out of stupidity and bias. Culturally, things have changed. What we used to call the ‘woke agenda’ is surely in recession. People were frightened of saying, ‘No, I think someone with a cock is probably a man’. Or, ‘I’m not going to apologise for being white’. Two reasonable standpoints which, five years ago, would have got you into trouble, and now don’t.

That being said, our institutions are still very much in step with ideas that are on their way out. Personally, I don’t know what one does about that. Perhaps the best thing to do is the ‘DOGE-ing’ that both Kent and Durham councils will have, and which has been done very successfully in America. I also like Trump’s idea of penalising countries which use DEI targets. I think that’s terrific.

O’Neill: Do you think racial identity politics is on its way out, or do we still have a long way to go?

Liddle: The race stuff is far more difficult. We don’t really have the equivalent of a ‘TERF army’ to fight it. British and American universities are still espousing it – or still ‘decolonising’. It’s good that we have the likes of Badenoch and Suella Braverman, people from within black and ethnic minority communities, saying things like, ‘Do you realise how deranged this is? How dare you say that I’ve been subjugated, I’m the leader of the Conservative Party!’

But of course, it’s probably very difficult if you’re black in Britain, and have been taught that 300 years of wickedness on the part of white folk has led to systemic institutional discrimination against you. I don’t blame black and Asian Britons for cleaving to this. We all cleave to something.

Addressing history is the important thing. We should demolish the ludicrous idea that Africa’s economic and governmental problems were caused solely by colonialism. We should examine that honestly – and point to places like Ethiopia and Liberia, which had little or no experience of colonialism, and are doing exactly the same as the countries around them. But it will take years to get there, I suspect.

O’Neill: You’ve caught a lot of flak for raising these problems in the past. Is that still happening?

Liddle: There were certain subjects I simply wasn’t allowed to write about until recently. I was very anxious in 2020 to write about Black Lives Matter, for example. No one would have it. Nobody. I was called a racist, far right and a fascist. If you’re a journalist, you know how high your stock stands with the people you write for, so I was thinking, ‘God, I’m in real trouble here. I’m not going to be able to buy a loaf of bread soon.’

But then something happened… Trump got elected. The media suddenly started looking at questions like immigration and wokery. Though I dislike so many things about Trump, we have to hang on to his coattails a little bit, because his presidency genuinely altered the way in which all these issues are framed. You cannot keep saying it’s far-right extremists when it’s the entire fucking free world believing in these things. You cannot just keep saying ‘fascist’, because it doesn’t work anymore.

Brendan O’Neill was talking to Rod Liddle. Watch the full conversation here: