Theresa May’s Idea Of ‘One Nationism’; And A Divided World

The Conservative Ideal of “One Nation”

Theresa May, the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, has been in office for just three months, and yet already she has emerged as a consequential figure – and not just in Britain. Americans might take careful note of the way that she articulates a powerful center-right message.

Inevitably, as only the second female prime minister in British history, such side issues as her fashion style – including the inevitable comparison to Kate, Duchess of Cambridge – have attracted much attention. Following her footwear seems to be an almost fetishistic obsession with the Brit media.

Yet what really matters are May’s ideas, and those are sure to echo into the US, because she is seeking to create the sort of national majority that American Republicans have been striving, unsuccessfully, to create for the past quarter-century.

Of course, the hottest issue in the UK is Brexit, which Britons approved on 23 June. And while that issue is specific to the UK, the larger implications of the vote have reverberated into every country that is confronting unaccountable multinational organisations – that is, all countries. One political figure who has grasped this larger populist point is Donald Trump, a staunch opponent of NAFTA, TPP, TTIP, and all the rest. This summer he tweeted, “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!”

Meanwhile, when she took occupancy of Number 10 Downing Street in July, May’s crisp declaration about leaving the European Union (EU), “Brexit means Brexit,”marked a decisive shift from the pro-EU stance of her predecessor, David Cameron. And while the process of extricating the UK from 40 years of entrapment in the EU will take time under the best of scenarios, May seems sincere about Brexit – even if, as we shall see, the proper watchwords for Brexiters must always be, “Trust, but verify.”

Moreover, in establishing a new tone for the Conservatives, May has gone beyond Brexit; she has put forth a vision of Britain at home as “One Nation”. That’s a venerable conservative concept, neglected of late, that reaches back to the 19th century, to the era of one of her greatest Tory predecessors, Benjamin Disraeli.

Today, “One Nation” is just as important, even if – more precisely, because – the venerable verities of nationalism and patriotism are colliding with two new and horrendously bad ideas from the left:

First, that nations should be submerged in multinational superstates such as the EU and the UN;

Second, that nations should be divided into constituent identity groups, based, mostly, on ethnicity or gender affiliation.

In other words, the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, is pursuing a simultaneous agenda of supra- and sub-nationalism. That is, nations ought to be subordinated in some new kind of EU-like bureaucratic empire, and, simultaneously, the peoples within a nation ought to abandon patriotism and solidarity in favour of a new vision of multicultural groupthink.

In the meantime, many on the political right have quietly imbibed this same post-nationalist thinking: if the left is openly disdainful of patriotism, many “conservatives” have been quietly dismissive, preferring to subsume national identity in an idealised global “free market”. Yet either way, the result is the same: we get not only sovereignty-submerging trade deals, as well as open-borders arrangements, but also – – whether conservatives want them or not – economically catastrophic “climate change” agreements.

For her part, May has staked out a position in opposition to both the globalist left and the globalist right. The clearest expression of her views came on 5 October, when she spoke to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, England, saying Britons should “reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and … embrace a new centre ground.” And she added tartly, “If you think you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Continuing, she promised “a country that works for everyone.” And May then spelled it out; it would mean fairness for all, regardless of wealth or status: “Everyone plays by the same rules and … every single person – regardless of their background, or that of their parents – is given the chance to be all they want to be.”

Okay, that might sound like an all-purpose, all-party political platitude. Yet to clinch her argument, May immediately got down to brass tacks, addressing the watershed issue of 2016, Brexit. When Britons voted for Brexit, she declared, they voted for change:

Moreover, she said, Brexit was a harbinger of a “quiet revolution”. And here an American might add an aside: “quiet revolution” sounds a bit like “silent majority”. That latter phrase, of course, was Richard Nixon’s 1969 formulation describing the American middle class. We might further remember that the “silent majority”, and all the understated bourgeois virtues that it evoked, was a key to Nixon’s thumping 49-state landslide re-election in 1972.

Meanwhile, in the Britain of 2016, May proclaimed that Brexit was not just a vote to change Britain’s relationship with the EU; it was also a vote “to change … the way our country works – and the people for whom it works – forever.”

If Brexit goes according to plan and is finalised in 2019, the UK will indeed have been massively changed for the better. For example, there will be no more European Court of Justice issuing sovereignty-busting dictates. (That court, incidentally, is not to be confused with the separate, and equally imperious, European Court of Human Rights.)

Perhaps most importantly, once Brexit is achieved, Britain will face no more risk from the “free movement of peoples” – that being the epochal self-inflicted wound within the EU, most disastrously in Germany. The open-borders ideology, we might add, seems to be the sine qua non not only of the EU, but also of the American left.

To further illustrate trans-Atlantic globalist thinking these days, we can examine the 2016 Democratic platform, which includes no fewer than 12 paragraphs on immigration, mostly promising welfare and citizenship to foreign nationals who have violated US immigration law – and to their families, too. And for good measure, Hillary Clinton has promised a 550 per cent increase in the number of Syrian refugees coming to the US.

More recently, on 19 September, the Clinton campaign tweeted that yes, the peoples of the world have a “right” to come to the US. And just this month, via WikiLeaks, we learned that Hillary Clinton said, in one of those notorious paid speeches to a big bank, that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” And in another WikiLeak, she is quoted as saying that opponents of open borders are “fundamentally un-American.”

Indeed, if one had to pick a single issue that unites the whole trans-Atlantic elite, from Washington, DC, to Paris, to Berlin, it would be just that: an unshakable belief in open borders.

Yet for her part, in London, May has grasped that real people – that is, the governed, as opposed to the governors – don’t share that anti-nationalist, pro-migrationist ideology. And so in her speech, May addressed directly this top-down mismatch, this ineffable arrogance of the ruling class:

May’s willingness to confront the ruling class – make that the sneering ruling class – was the most powerful point in a powerful address. In getting inside the heads of the snobby condescenders, May expressed the justifiable anger that tens of millions of Britons have been feeling. And then she went even further, directly addressing the public:

If you’re one of those people who lost their job, who stayed in work but on reduced hours, took a pay cut as household bills rocketed, or – and I know a lot of people don’t like to admit this – someone who finds themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration, life simply doesn’t seem fair.

No, it doesn’t seem fair. And if change doesn’t come, well, May delivered a bleak prophecy:

We can pause to note: deep divisions in a society might serve the purposes of the divide-and-conquer multiculturalists, or the infernal aims of anarchists on the left or the right, but such splits are the opposite of sound One Nationism.

Speaking to her fellow Conservatives, May offered a different vision – a positive vision of unity: “We are a country built on the bonds of family, community, citizenship.” And so we might stop and savour that last word, “citizenship”. Here May is making a point that globalists can no longer bring themselves to make: citizens of a country ought to have greater rights and privileges than non-citizens.

Yet at the same time, of course, citizens also have duties. Invoking populism as well as nationalism, May cited the importance, no fewer than four times, of rich people, and of big corporations, paying their fair share of taxes. And she also declared that every citizen has an obligation to cooperate with the authorities to “fight terrorism”. Thus we can see: in May’s view, it’s impossible to have a solid country if certain groups get to play by a different set of rules than everyone else. As Rudy Giuliani said when he was mayor of New York City, there should be “one standard”.

May is attempting to follow through: the new home secretary, Amber Rudd, citing the threat to the middle class of “cheap foreign labour”, has pledged administrative measures to stop foreigners from “tak[ing] the jobs that British people should do.” Yet Rudd’s proposal generated a sharp reaction, and so its status is now unclear; the emerging compromise policy seems to be restrictions on the immigration of unskilled workers only. That will be disappointing to some, but it still rates as progress.

Meanwhile, American Republicans might draw inspiration – at least a debate over protecting jobs has begun. Over here, according to new data from the Pew Center, a full 77 per cent of Americans think that imports hurt American workers, and 80 per cent think outsourcing hurts American workers. So many Americans might ask: will the US right ever have a country-first Amber Rudd of its own in a position of authority?

The Crisis Of The Multiculturalist And Globalist Left — And May’s Opportunity

Needless to say, all this talk of standing up for British citizens has raised plenty of hackles on the left. In September, a prominent Labour Party member of Parliament,Diane Abbott, told a cheering leftist crowd that Brexit “added another turn of the screw to rising racism.”

And on October 6, Jeremy Corbyn, the harder-than-hard-left leader of the Labour Party, tweeted out, “Conservative Party leaders have sunk to a new low this week as they fan the flames of xenophobia and hatred.” Thus we see the left’s label for everything the right wishes to do on behalf of citizens: racism.

Indeed, much of the worldwide media is on board, too, with this left-wing line of attack. Reporting on the May-Rudd effort to crimp the hiring of non-citizens, Bloomberg News used the words “Nazi Flashback” as a subheadline.

All this precious PC notwithstanding, it should be glaringly obvious that no country can have open borders and still be a country. And yet mostly because of the Republican grip on Congress in the last few years, the Democrats in America, fevered as they are with open-borders enthusiasm, have managed to avoid that rendezvous with geopolitical reality. Still, Democrats might yet get their opportunity to implement their open-borders “dream”, as Hillary Clinton has said.

Meanwhile, in her Birmingham speech, May took the promise of One Nationism even further. After hailing such great Tory prime ministers as Disraeli, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher, she also offered praise for a Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, who served from 1945 to 1951. Attlee is best known for establishing the National Health Service (NHS); as May generously said of him, he had “the vision to build a great institution.”

To be sure, many Americans, especially on the right, regard the idea of “national health insurance” with distaste. And of course, the farcical failures of Obamacare have deepened that distaste.

Yet at the same time, as we think about the problem of delivering health care to millions, we might reflect on the practical reality that some sort of public provision of health insurance is inevitable, indeed desirable. Yes, one can fully mock the foolishness of Obamacare – financing sex-change operations, etc. – and still realise that something had to be done to protect the vulnerable. Indeed, we might pause to note that the very poor have long had Medicaid; the “hole” in the pre-Obamacare system was the working class, which has, of late, become increasingly Republican. The politically shrewd Republican of the future will not be at all eager to defund his or her own voters.

Indeed, even today, all but the most fire-breathing Republicans accept that the common GOP campaign phrase “repeal and replace” has to mean just that – repeal and replace. Or, as a political realist might conclude, just leave it in place. Which is to say, whoever wins in November, some sort of health-insurance provision is certain to survive.

It’s worth recalling that the NHS, too, had plenty of problems when it was launched in 1948, and those problems were a factor in Labour’s defeat three years later. And yet when the Conservatives were returned to power in 1951 cunder Churchill, no less – they never attempted to repeal the NHS. And the same held true when Thatcher came to power in 1979; the Iron Lady steadily increased NHS funding.

Indeed, to get a sense of just how central the NHS is to British political thinking, one might think back to the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in London. More than four minutes of that extravaganza were devoted to, yes, the NHS. And one of the arguments made by Brexiters during the recent campaign was that if the flow of funds to the EU could be cut off, funding for the NHS could be increased.

An American needn’t agree with the choice that the British people have made on the NHS to nonetheless respect it – it is, after all, the choice they have made. Indeed, as the Brits reminded the world on 23 June when they voted for Brexit, it’s their country and their sovereignty, and, assuming that they successfully escape the EU, they will do with it what they please.

In the meantime, ideology aside, we can pause to admire the political genius of May’s rhetorical stroke: her embrace of Attlee is exactly the sort of big move one makes to win the middle, and even to win over voters from the other side.

Indeed, as the left-leaning New Statesman headlined it, “Theresa May’s Tory interventionism should terrify Labour.” The magazine added, “In her speech, she shrewdly embraced what voters like about Labour while condemning what they don’t.”

Moreover, as The Telegraph, the leading right-of-centre newspaper in Britain, observed, “The most appealing parts of Labour’s programme reach back into folk memories of Attlee and the world of unionised factories.” We might quickly observe that for various reasons, including automation, it’s a certainty that neither Britain nor the US will ever see a return to the hulking factories of yore. And yet at the same time, we can readily see the sentimental appeal of the old forms of comradeship and solidarity. And we can see that even today, ordinary people are still clutching for something solid to hold on to, however much it must be refined and updated. So the question is, which party will make that offer of comforting solidity and security to the voters? On behalf of her party, May has an answer: the Tories will.

In the meantime, we might note, Attlee’s party, the Labour Party, is moving way-y-y to the left under Jeremy Corbyn, who is, to be blunt about it, more of a communist than a socialist. Thus it’s even easier for May to occupy the vital centre. And yet of course, if Corbyn loses the next general election, now set for 2020 (although it could be sooner), it’s possible that Labour will rebound to the middle. And yet if May’s party has already occupied that middle, Labour will still be frozen out.

Closer to home, we can observe that the American equivalent of May’s embracing of Attlee would be for the Republicans to embrace Franklin D Roosevelt, who was America’s leader during the mid-20th century – roughly the same period in which Attlee led Britain. Like Attlee, FDR was undeniably on the left, but the passage of time has ratified, even hallowed, many of his works.

Smart politicians, including Republican politicians, have long seen the value in championing at least some parts of the New Deal legacy. In 1982, for example,President Ronald Reagan made a special point of honoring the centennial of FDR’s birth at a White House ceremony; two years later, of course, Reagan cruised to a 49-state landslide. Obviously, more was going on during those years than just a commemoration of the 32nd president, but by embracing the memory of FDR, Reagan helped to prove that he was a mainstream leader for all Americans.

In the years since, not every Republican has felt that mainstream imperative, and that’s no doubt a reason why GOP presidential nominees have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.

In particular, we can consider FDR’s landmark legislation on behalf of working people – that is, Social Security. After eight decades of steady existence, Social Security has a vital place, we might say, in the hearts of most Americans akin to the place of the NHS in Britain. Social Security is, in fact, the political expression of America’s own kind of One Nation conservatism. To be sure, some rote-ideological Republicans still seek to tinker with, or even privatise, this profoundly popular social-insurance programme, but they do so at their own political peril. And of course, the social-insurance programme itself always endures.

So perhaps Republicans need new missions cor, if one prefers, softer targets. As I have argued (here and here), the GOP would be well-advised to embrace the memory not only of Franklin D Roosevelt, but also of his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president. Yes, many of their actions are controversial to this day, but they were undeniably American patriots, and they were jointly dedicated to both national greatness and national cohesiveness.

And that counts for a lot. Because today, as the Obama-Hillary Democrats move to the left, pursuing divisive multiculturalist policies, plenty of voters, especially working- and middle-class voters, are feeling thoroughly abandoned. And so they would perk up at the thought that a Republican was now picking up the muscular Rooseveltian mantle.

Yet now we can pause to note a quirk in the May story: earlier this year, when she was a cabinet minister in David Cameron’s government, she was opposed to Brexit, albeit quietly. In Brit parlance, she was a “Bremainer.” And so it was other Conservatives, notably Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who led the insurgent Tory campaign in favor of Brexit. (For arcane political reasons, both Johnson and Gove failed to inherit the Conservative Party leadership, although Johnson is now May’s foreign minister.) Indeed, mindful of the struggle ahead, May has loaded up her Cabinet with pro-Brexit “Eurosceptics.”

The Legacy of Nigel Farage, and New Challenges to May

Yet the greatest hero of Brexit isn’t even a Conservative at all. That would be, of course, Nigel Farage, former head of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP. Over the last two decades, Farage held up the torch of British sovereignty and built UKIP into a genuine force; its candidates earned almost four million votes in the 2015 national elections.

Moreover, UKIP still has a vital role to play. For starters, it can keep up the pressure on May for Brexit – no backsliding! If one visits the UKIP website, one sees the key message, “Help us ensure that ‘leave’ means leave.”

Indeed, since the Brexit vote, there’s been a fervent debate, egged on by the UK MSM and big business, over the merits of a “hard Brexit” or a “soft Brexit” – which is to say, the more “enlightened” classes want the soft option, keeping the border open to both trade and migrants and thereby depriving the populist-nationalist meanies of their victory. In particular, The Economist, that uber-globalist London-based magazine with international ambitions – it long ago endorsed Hillary Clinton – will never cease seeking to reverse Brexit completely. Sample headline from October 11: “Brexit is making Britons poorer, and meaner.”

In addition, the basic question of whether or not there’s to be a Brexit at all has flared up: the UK Parliament has insisted on, and will get, the right to scrutinise Brexit, and perhaps even vote on Brexit. As prime minister, May by definition possesses a majority in the House of Commons, and she’s not likely to lose it so soon in her premiership. And yet, as students of history know, anything can happen in the pressure-cooker of a legislative chamber.

So it’s at least possible that Parliament could vote “no” on Brexit, thereby throwing May’s government into crisis and perhaps forcing new elections. May and Brexit would probably prevail in such an extended struggle; it’s hard to believe that the case for staying in the EU has grown stronger in recent months, as the myriad political miscalculations of that leviathan have come home to roost: Britons, too, can see that some parts of Paris have turned into third-world-style tent cities under the onslaught of the immigration that the EU favours, and in October, Otmar Issing, the first chief economist of the European Central Bank and a major player in the creation of the Euro currency which is at the heart of the EU, said bluntly, “One day, the house of cards will collapse.”

So the EU seems even less enticing than it did on 23 June, when Britons voted for Brexit. Still, May’s leadership is facing a severe challenge, as opponents seek, at minimum, to convert a “hard” Brexit into a “soft” Brexit.

So we can see: the work of the UK Independence Party is nowhere near done. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that if everything goes according to May’s plan, the actual moment when the UK is no longer a part of the EU is still some two-and-a-half years away. In the meantime, as another British prime minister, Harold Wilson, famously observed, “A week is a long time in politics.” So even if we concede that May has the best and most sincere intentions concerning Brexit, Brexit-minded Britons are fortunate to have UKIP on the scene as a watchdog.

Interestingly enough, Raheem Kassam – a former top lieutenant to Farage, now editor of Breitbart London – is now running for the leadership of UKIP. As Kassam told the BBC, “I will carry on Farage’s legacy.” Later, in an op-ed, Kassam added these words of warning about May’s government:

Think you can trust the Tories with no one looking over their shoulder but Jeremy Corbyn? Britain has made that mistake too many times before. Theresa May might talk a good game, but she was Home Secretary for six years – the same six years in which we saw record immigration into the UK, legal and illegal, and of course an issue very close to my heart: a rise in Islamic extremism. Britain needs UKIP more than any other Party.

Some will say, of course, that Kassam is being too hard on May, because she has become a convert to the Brexit cause, and maybe always was a quiet Brexiter.

Indeed, if May is anything less than sincere, she has fooled her critics on the left. Here’s a sample headline from a British critic, Clive Irving, writing in The Daily Beast about her government: “Rude Britannia: The Rise of Hateful Little England: After the Brexit, hate crimes have exploded and Britain’s new government fuels an economic disaster by purging universities and businesses of foreigners.” It’s obvious from the context that “Little England” is a pejorative term for English nationalism, which Irving and his ilk regard as inherently “xenophobic,” “racist,” “intolerant,” etc. Interestingly, in the past, the phrase “Little England” was used to insult those Englanders who opposed the empire. Yet now, times have changed: the left, once proudly anti-imperial, now supports empire in the form of the EU and catcalls the anti-imperialists.

Thus we can observe: if May has enemies such as this on the Bremain left, she’s probably not herself a closet Bremainer. Yet still, it’s her obligation to prove her bona fides, and there’s one way to do that – by completing the Brexit mission. In the meantime, we are reminded that third parties, such as UKIP, can play an essential role in a democracy: keeping the major parties honest.

Britain confronts other issues too, of course. And here we should bear in mind that May has been in office for only a brief time; we don’t yet know how she will handle a crisis.

And sure enough, crises are brewing. Here’s a disturbing 7 October headline in the left-leaning newspaper The Independent: “US Muslim preacher ‘who advocated beheading of gay men allowed to lecture in the UK.’” The article details the activities of a Muslim cleric, one Hamza Sodagar, who has been speaking and agitating in the UK on the “need” to kill gays. Sodagar has said,

On that particular trip, Sodagar came and went without a notable incident – other than, of course, spreading his poison.

Indeed, we can observe that such hateful preaching has been common enough for a long time, even as ISIS, of course, has been more recently putting such barbarism into practice. And for the most part, LGBT groups have chosen to look the other way, because the needs of “progressive” unity were thought to take precedence. Yet finally, some LGBTers are waking up to the reality that the Sodagars in our midst really do mean it: they aim to kill.

One such figure is the longtime LGBT activist Peter Tatchell, who called for revoking Sodagar’s travel visa. As Tatchell put it,

And here we might linger over the irony of Tatchell’s situation: he is a longtime member of the UK Green Party, and the UK Greens (as well as the American Greens) have been staunchly on the side of open borders; that is, they favour allowing more Muslims, adequately vetted or not – assuming such vetting is even possible – to come to the West. Only now, in the wake of a long string of terrorist attacks, some of them aimed directly at gays, has the LGBT community begun to rethink its alliance with leftist open-borders globalism.

Thus we come to the immediate question for Prime Minister May: What will she and her government do about Sodagar, as well as all the other Islamist inciters who are on the loose? For instance, what to do about whoever has been distributing leaflets at a London mosque urging the Islamic faithful to kill those who insult Mohammed?

To be sure, the British government is taking some bold actions that might be judged as distinctly illiberal by trendy American standards. For example, the government recently ordered the effective closure of a Muslim school that was teaching the beating of wives and the killing of gays.

Yet given the enormous dimensions of the problem – the affront to civilised values, as well as the jeopardy to homeland security – it’s still an open question as to whether May will consistently match deeds with words, taking decisive action against all the hideous Islamist threats Britain faces. So once again, we can see the enduring value of UKIP as a watchdog upholding a sturdy vision of populist nationalism – and public safety.

In the meantime, Americans, too, might wish to think seriously about government policy toward the likes of Sodagar. The man is, in fact, an American citizen who has, along with his followers, felt free to post on YouTube and Facebook. Here in the States, do we really think that such freedom to incite deserves to be protected? Don’t we, too, care about being one harmonious nation?

American policy on these matters is still in flux. And sadly, we know this much: Hillary Clinton wants to accelerate the Obama administration’s policy of indiscriminately welcoming in more Muslims.

In addition, in Britain, as in the US, there’s the re-emerging problem of crime – which is sometimes, although certainly not always, connected to the issue of immigration. Here’s an 10 October headline from The Telegraph: “Killer of renowned scientist should not have been in country after overstaying his student visa, court hears.” The article details the case of an alleged murderer, Femi Nandap, born in Nigeria. Nandap came to the UK on a student visa, and, while overstaying that visa, was charged with possessing a knife and assaulting a police officer – charges that were later dropped. (And yes, this initial miscarriage of justice happened when May was home secretary in the previous government, although there’s no evidence of her personal involvement.)

In the meantime, while still on bail, Nandap returned home to Nigeria, where he was treated for mental illness – an illness apparently exacerbated by heavy marijuana smoking while living in the US. Then he stopped taking his meds and returned to the UK; soon thereafter, he allegedly killed a 41-year-old scientist, who was walking out of his front door to drop cards in the mail celebrating the birth of his first child. As the authorities seek to piece together the chain of mistakes that were made in this tragic case, the grieving widow was moved to say, “If such tragedies keep occurring, why has there not been concerted action to address this?”

Yes, that is the question: where’s the concerted action? For a while to come, May can blame such horrors on the laxity of her predecessors at Number 10. Yet soon enough, the street-crime problem, along with the jihadi-radical problem, will both become her problems. Then we’ll find out if the prime minister’s actions match her promising rhetoric.

But for the time being, May has the stage with her message of Brexit plus One Nation. Americans seeking the same sort of nationalist emancipation should wish her well.

This piece originally appeared on American Conservative and has been republished here with permission.