As a logo to brandish on T-shirts and placards, MUGA may not resonate as effectively as MAGA, but it encapsulates the message that right wing politicians now peddle to the electorate. “Make the UK great again”, they proclaim, with all the fervour of Donald Trump.
President Trump’s stark warning that the US will no longer be a reliable defender of western democracies has provided them with the ammunition to try to justify a move towards dangerously short-sighted isolationism. In what was trailed as a “keynote” speech at Policy Exchange last week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch insisted that the UK should be emulating the US, putting the national interest above all other considerations.
The Trump regime, she insisted, was not authoritarian but simply upheld the values the UK also held dear: free speech, free enterprise and free trade.
This may seem somewhat at odds with Trump’s enthusiasm for punitive tariffs in an effort to force companies to do their manufacturing in the US, but Badenoch is not averse to espousing idiosyncratic views. In the wake of the disgraceful treatment of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the White House last Friday, she may judge that blatant fawning over Trump is best muted for a while, but it will still be there.
That is because she shares many of his views, particularly an aversion to widespread immigration. It is where she believes the Conservatives must out-tough Nigel Farage and Reform.
The campaigning messages the Tory Party sends to those it judges to be its supporters are peppered with sentiments aimed at driving home the anti-immigration message.
“Western civilisation is in crisis” yelled the headline on one recent outpouring. Picked out in red ink were the following two sentences: “Just look at Keir Starmer. He took a knee during the Black Lives Matter protests.”
That the prime minister should have chosen almost five years ago to join those protesting against the murder of George Floyd, was deemed sufficient to justify the Conservatives alleging only last month that he was not “robustly defending our values”. It is hard not to conclude that the implicit message here is that supporting the black community goes against British values.
Another Tory missive castigated the government for not going far enough to prevent those who come to the UK illegally from any route to citizenship. The message warns voters what the bill for welcoming some of these people might be, claiming that “the cost of those that might receive leave to remain status (is) currently standing at £234bn for the next 4-5 years”.
Not even Conservative Campaign HQ dared to leave out that crucial word “might”, but most recipients would probably be too incensed by the vast number cited to take note of its purely hypothetical nature.
The party is determined to pander to anti-immigrant feeling and, lurking not far below the surface, is a more specific but unspoken anti-Muslim attitude. The scandal of the “grooming gangs” that preyed on vulnerable young girls for years before being exposed has provided ghastly propaganda for those keen to feed that latent prejudice.
Robbie Moore, Tory MP for Keighley and Ilkley, put his name to a CCHQ email last month pushing the party’s demands for a full national inquiry into the events that involved “thousands of white working-class girls… (being) tortured and raped by gangs of men”. There is no need for Moore to spell out that these men were almost all of Pakistani Muslim heritage.
It is depressing to see the Tory Party stooping to this level in trying to win the support of racists. It is unlikely to be sufficient to stop them moving in ever greater numbers to Reform. Both parties now seem to think the only workable future for the UK is to pull up the drawbridge and rejoice in its island status, enjoying that mythical “sovereignty” that was so crucial to the proponents of Brexit.
But the world has changed since Britannia “ruled the waves”. The UK is now one small country with limited resources and shrunken armed forces.
If the UK is to thrive in the future, it will not be in splendid isolation but by accepting that success depends on working with its closest neighbours. While Badenoch exhorts the UK to follow the US example, ironically, it is Trump who is making it clear that the only slogan that now makes sense is MEGA – Make Europe Great Again.
