Make fun of the UK’s unbuilt train lines, despair of its featherweight politicians, but it is doing better than the continent at fighting extremists
British home secretary Suella Braverman plays a game of table football during a visit to Bolton Lads and Girls Club on Tuesday. 'Which hard-right party in Europe would fill three of the great offices of state with non-white descendants of immigrants?' Photograph: Justin Tallis/PA Wire
Britain? Barely as pink as the Financial Times. Only Ireland, Iceland, Lithuania and Malta are paler still. If we define the hard right as a force outside, and more extreme than, a nation’s traditional centre-right party, then Britain hasn’t got a hard right to reckon with. One MP out of the 650 represents a movement of that description, and he is a Conservative defector who has never won election under his new banner.
It supported, in word and in deed, Ukraine against Russia from the start of the invasion, with little or no internal dissent. Boris Johnson is still batting for Kyiv more than a year after he quit Downing Street, in what seems unnervingly like a display of conscience and principle. It shouldn’t be a liberal taboo to say that Britain outdoes the continent at some things, including, for now, the containment of extremists. Or to ask how the country has done it.
The other reason for the UK’s inoculation against the hard right is Brexit. Here, supporters and enemies of that project can agree, sort of. The first group can say, “The people were heard, at last. Imagine the resentment out there had Brexit never happened.” The second can say, “We, ‘the people’, now see a populist idea in action. Never again, thanks.” Both sides are right.
Throw in sheer geographic distance from the “east”, and Britain is unpromising soil for a faith-and-flag, Russia-smitten, Orbán-style movement.