Shifting the middle ground

There’s been much consternation about May’s conference speech and, by association, those of front-line ministers.

On the one hand there’s the observation that she’s suggesting there will be a bigger role for the state, and that there may be price controls for energy suppliers. This has led some skewed suggests that she’s economically to the left. To the left of something very much on the right maybe. But let’s accept it as at least being economically to the left of expectations.

On the other hand there’s been a swirling storm of anti-immigration talk supporting the supposedly commonly held opinion that immigrants are job stealing, benefit claiming layabouts. This culminated in the suggest that firms would need to publish lists of the foreign worker they employ which sounds like the closest you can get to appearing on stage in a Nazi uniform without actually doing so.

Left, right? What’s going on?

Well, for one thing the left/right designation is even more useless than it’s ever been. It’s almost impossible to talk about one or the other without qualifying it with “economic” or “social” or “immigration”.

So when May says she wants to rehabilitate patriotism what does she actually mean? Is it traditional right-wing parochial isolationism or does she really want a new patriotism based on something else? It’s really not clear and it really doesn’t matter: she’s not making the case for patriotism or appealing for people to be patriotic in any meaningful sense.

She’s doing what the Tories have done many times before: using co-messaging to redefine terms. In this case she’s announced a pile of policies that might be considered somewhere between xenophobic and fascist (or correct and fair, depending) whilst also saying that patriotism is okay. The implication is that the two are, in fact, the same thing: that putting foreigners on lists, demonising immigrants, throwing away human rights, (or saving jobs for natives and expelling nasty foreigners, again, depending) is a patriotic thing to do and that therefore it’s okay.

This process takes a notionally positive term and conflates it with a bunch of morally questionably ideas which then, they hope, will become the legitimised norm. (And by “questionable” I mean repugnant – if they weren’t, the recasting of them wouldn’t be necessary.)

Similarly, being opposed to those toxic ideas also puts one in opposition to the previous, inseparable, positive, meaning of the word patriotism and of course one wouldn’t want to do that. That’d be Bad.

So that’s what’s going on is this:  in the absence of any kind of organised political opposition May’s Tories are clearing the old centre ground, the old values or tolerance and acceptance and building a new normal in their own image. They are not claiming the centre ground, as May claimed, but renaming the ground they already hold as the centre.

Any future opposition, should it ever materialise, is going to have to follow them and fight from a position of being nearly the same but not quite as bad, or fight from a position of radical change. Neither seem like attractive options, strategically speaking. The vacuum on the opposition benches is allowing the conservatives to build a fortress that could take decades to pierce.