Yesterday, Donald Trump retweeted this by Katie Hopkins and the Tory Party leadership contenders refused to condemn it:
You could call it dog-whistle racism but then the idea of a dog whistle is that it has a certain subtlety which appeals to your target audience whilst allowing plausible deniability. This is more like a klaxon.
Katie Hopkins is a well-known controversialist here who made her name being a love-to-hate character on the Apprentice and later became a newspaper columnist for the Sun. Her contributions include wishing migrants to be shot down by gunboats and that we need a 'final solution' from British Muslims. I fully believe that she is a performance BS artist like Milo and Ann Coulter, though her followers do take her seriously.
Since Trump's retweet, only Rory Stewert - the moderate no-hoper contender - has said that this was wrong. Jeremy Hunt has come out and said he 'agrees with the sentiment' though 'wouldn't have used the same words'. Others have refused to condemn it. A lot of these politicians are affluent centre-right establishment types and have never supported anything so explicitly racist before so what is going on?
I think its two things. Firstly, its the typical fealty that UK politicians show to American power. Britain is no longer an imperial super-power so the best it can do is be BFF to American and do everything America says so that we can feel we have a 'special relationship' with them. This attitude is particularly prevalent on the right of British politics though it did also (for obvious and awful reasons) include Tony Blair.
The second thing is that Hunt and others are vying to get in the final two of their party leadership contest. Boris Johnson is certain to get that far but there will be one other contender in the final two who will be voted leader by the Conservative Party membership. That said membership selectorate is very right-wing and the 'calculation' that Hunt is making is that if he can 'out populist' Boris, then he stands a chance.
What of standards though? 'Londonistan' evoked the idea that Muslim immigrants are taking over the capital city. There is also an attempt to link immigrants with a crime epidemic. Not only does this lack an evidence basis, but it heightens tensions around issues of race. The UK Conservative Party is heading in a nationalist-right direction.
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