As the title suggests, this was written in anger and possibly has the virtues and vices thereof. 07/12/2023.

On the BBC today are two contrasting political spectacles. The first is at the Covid inquiry, where Boris Johnson is soberly answering Hugh Keith’s questions. It looks like political downfall, a reckoning for lying, for destroying the credibility of our public institutions. The second is of Rishi Sunak talking about fairness, stopping the queue-jumpers, standing up for ordinary decent people concerned about their public services, and the political and legal commentary on it. 

Except, of course, that Rishi is the proto-fascist, not Boris. I use the term to shock; we need shocking. There have been constitutional outrages in recent British history which were, in some ways, worse than the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill the Government just published, which attacked even older liberties and were more likely to go into effect: New Labour’s brief policy of indefinite detention under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, for instance. But this draft bill is still the most flagrant violation of the domestic rule of law by any government for, say, fifty years. First, because it is in open defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights, without even the pretext of a ‘public emergency’ allowing ‘derogation’. To disapply the Human Rights Act in a single case simply because you do not like it is extraordinary - as is disputing the European Court’s power to issue ‘Section 39’ temporary injunctions, which are surely a necessary part of any court’s inherent powers. The idea of a court which can only act after the wrongs it concerns itself with have been performed is ridiculous. Second, and worse, is to have overturned by legislation a judgement of fact that the highest court in the country made less than a month ago. A crucial point in everything concerning the Rwanda policy is that the Supreme Court only invoked the ECHR on a matter of procedure; the convention requires it to determine, independently of the government assessment, whether Rwanda was in fact a safe country. The need to settle the question of safety itself, the need for someone to decide on it, was created by the Refugee Convention; to overrule the court (even on the basis that it should not have the power to make such an assessment) is to say that its assessment could simply be declared wrong, as if Parliament could decide that black was white and up was down. 

Third, and worst of all, the Bill disapplies the Refugee Conventions, makes them inapplicable in domestic litigation around whether Rwanda is in general a safe country. This is quite unforgivable. The ‘international legal order’ is a cracked and rickety thing set up by superpowers for superpowers and whose power is, of course, utterly insignificant where it matters; nevertheless, of its many well-intentioned and dead provisions the principles of the Refugee Conventions are perhaps less nominally dead than others. They are also the most fundamental international instruments of all, much more so than the UN Charter, because they try to guarantee that no one should be a person without rights, a non-person, what Hannah Arendt called one made into the ‘scum of the earth’. They are the most minimal commitment, and also the most necessary, to the idea that no one should be that after so many were, in concentration camps and killing fields. 

The great disappointment of the litigation around the previous Rwanda scheme was that no court acknowledged what ought to be the fundamental reason for its illegality - that the Refugee Convention does not permit the offloading of asylum seekers at all. I think it is clear, if implicit, that it does not, since nothing in the convention makes sense if it does, and its basic principle is that asylum seekers must have their claims investigated wherever they are and however they got there. This principle is as good as sacred, and ought to be defended at all costs; you need such a principle to prevent endless shunting, endless rounds of it’s someone else’s problem, which as Arendt said was why refugees between the wars so rarely received help (this is also why irregularly arriving asylum-seekers are not ‘queue-jumpers’; they are the queue). The courts did not see this, but now the government has disapplied the Refugee Conventions explicitly anyway. 

You would know little of this from the coverage on the BBC, or the newspapers, and even less of its real significance. This policy has been subsumed into regular politics – what will Braverman do, what will Starmer do, what will the electorate do – so that its true implications are covered up. As I write, the only story about the Rwanda plan on the  BBC News homepage has the headline ‘Get behind my Rwanda plan, Sunak tells Tories’; as if the only thing one could possibly be concerned about is that the plan does not go far enough. That some members of the Tory party are worried about this is terrifying; it is more terrifying that the BBC does not realise how bizarre and dangerous this is. The Guardian is similar; it simply reports that Sunak thinks the bill will avoid legal challenge. 

Why is our political class so supine? I think the broad answer is obvious; they are in thrall to a centrist vision of politics as divided between grown-ups and crazies which was always ludicrous but now has prevented them from understanding even the most basic contours of political reality. After all, Sunak’s government has not just been extreme on this; the Public Order Act, the minimum service requirements, the blocking of the Scottish self-identification act, and the recent tax cuts, which imply an even sharper austerity than Cameron and Osbourne imposed, have all made this government by far the most constitutionally irresponsible, intellectually bankrupt, and economically foolish in my life-time – though Liz Truss would have been if she had had the chance. Yet journalists seem incapable of understanding that a nice man from Goldman Sachs can be much more extreme, more right-wing, crazier than Boris Johnson, whose main constitutional outrage was to prorogue Parliament a bit early. 

A contrast with America is revealing. One of the more remarkable things in recent American politics has been how an analysis of fascism, and of what to do about it, traditionally found on the left, has made its way into the sleepy centre and influenced both policy and comment. This analysis has two parts; the first, traditional, even hackneyed part, is about how strong fascism, or right-wing authoritarianism, is. Fascism is capitalism radicalised; classically it was Fordism radicalised, now neoliberalism. It is the product of the dislocations capitalism produces, its failures to bring everyone with it; it takes a shattered society and fuses it into a spurious unity where each member has a direct relation to the Fuhrer. Thus the only way to fully defeat it is, firstly, no cooperation of any kind, always remember who they are – no one wants to be the KPD – and secondly, counter-attack by undoing the social breakages capitalism produces. Invest, redistribute, energise the economy, support the labour movement – the Inflation Reduction Act is, amongst many other things, an almost too classical anti-fascist strategy. 

That’s the first bit. For the most part, the American centre adheres to that well; no one treats Trump as if he were any other candidate any more, and no one treats any of the other Republican candidates like that either. Occasionally CNN goes mad and invites him to a town hall, but it’s only CNN. We need much more of that, naturally, we need to remember that this is crazy, or rather we need to realise that this is crazy and then act accordingly. But we also need the second part, which is less well understood, which is that the new fascists are weak. That is in fact what distinguishes them from the old fascists, why you might call them neo-fascists, or, as I would like to say, proto-fascists, though that doesn’t mean they’ll become real fascists any time soon. The real, old-time fascists had fake labour organisations and writer’s unions, massive holiday camps, their own churches, and, most importantly, their own paramilitary organisations. The insistence by left-wing observers on fascism’s connection to atomisation has obscured how little early twentieth-century society was atomised compared to early twenty-first society. Those fascists had enormous powers to mobilise. By comparison these ones are pathetic; all the militias may be scary, but they’re not the SA. The new fascists have an army of Reddit users, not an actual army. And this applies to national politics as well; they do not have the power to overwhelm public institutions. As Corey Robin argued, Trump’s ascent to the White House was a ‘constitutional coup’, not a populist revolution; it was a matter of the Electoral College and the outsized power of the Senate. His main legacy was the result of another constitutional quirk: the power to appoint federal judges. 

These are, furthermore, all powers the ‘mainstream’ Republican party had been using in a counter-majoritarian fashion for about two decades. Such is true of Sunak, unelected and unpopular, swinging desperately between the right of his party and his liberal ‘Blue Wall’ voters. This weakness also explains why the usual gap between anti-elite rhetoric and pro-elite policy is so large, why both Trump and Sunak have made fiscally ridiculous and, for their parties, utterly conventional tax cuts; they are both essentially products of reactionary and anti-majoritarian forces within their constitutions, not revolts against them. Nevertheless, this weakness should not blind us, as it does to so many left-wing commentators in the UK, into dismissing the Rwanda plan or other damaging policies as electioneering nonsense which will be swept away with a new government– and not just because Kier Starmer will surely keep the Public Order Act and will be damaged by Hunt’s tax cuts. For in a sense it is precisely in their weakness that their strength lies. Precisely because their forces are atomised and feed on atomisation, because they must commandeer the usual constitutional channels rather than forcibly overwhelming them, these new authoritarians have the potential to be more permanent than the original fascists ever were – there’s no central organisation to smash, but many cells, hubs of activity, the Common Sense Group and the Guido Fawkes blog, GB News and UnHerd, Policy Exchange and the Telegraph, a flexible web which is constantly growing, changing, repairing itself, ready to throw up new leaders, new ‘ideas’, new miserable stratagems. Samuel Moyn has written of the strange complementarity between the dream of making war less harmful, the dream of humanitarian law, and the liberal post-9/11 idea of the ‘forever war’, of a War on Terror with an infinitely expandable geographical and temporal reach. A similar dynamic applies to the struggle against domestic reaction – that they do less immediate harm means that they can survive longer and insinuate themselves more easily – only we really do have to fight this one. 

That’s why, also, their activity should be called ‘proto-fascist’ – because it is always threatening to become the real thing but never quite does; it is in a state of suspended animation. Indeed if, as in this article, the word ‘fascism’ now always seems stuck between an analytical term (analysing what?), a mere historical denominator, and a cheap insult, it is precisely because right-wing authoritarianism today is constantly about to be fascist, flirting with fascism, on the way to fascism, and never the full-blooded thing – and this is its essence, not a temporary stage. Thus, ‘proto-fascism’ – or post-fascism, indifferently.

We in Britain must adopt this twin way of thinking of the enemy as both strong and weak, and, most of all, strong because weak. What would this entail? I think this: we must crush them, and (because), we can. The public is more sympathetic to immigrants than ever before – more socially liberal in general. It is more economically left-wing too. We can win, properly, and we should. Because if we do not, if we think only that they are weak, we will realise at some point – not the next election, maybe not the one after that, but some day – that they are strong too. And it is not just a matter of repealing the Rwanda policy, or any other policy; it’s a question of how you do it, whether Starmer sternly admonishes us that the Conservative immigration policy is unworkable or if he joyfully proclaims that he has undone the authoritarian corruption of our political institutions. To fight against proto-fascism requires and justifies a very different cast of mind than just beating the Tories one more time (though of course, as in America, it also licences a lot of self-importance). Starmer won’t do anything like this – having strangled his party, he has no Progressive Congressional Caucus to drag him towards it – but he should, and when he does not, anyone who cares about British democracy should scream at him that he must. Meanwhile, everyone else must understand what is being done, and increase the seriousness of their response accordingly.