‘I WANT to expose Reform for what they are . . . a reincarnation of Oswald Mosley and his fascists in the Thirties.’
So said the Conservative Party grandee and Thatcher-era minister Michael Heseltine in an interview with the Times this week conducted from his 70-acre residence near Banbury, Oxfordshire, where this unlikely social justice warrior has, among other ornaments, a nine-ton bronze bust of Lenin and ‘soaring greenhouses’ that he patrols in a golf buggy (you can check this out yourself as the enormously wealthy property and publishing mogul opens his gardens to the public for a charge of £16 per person at the turnstile. Canny round a pound note is old Mike).
The 92-year-old Tarzan – so nicknamed for his mane – has got the hump because the Conservative Party has combusted under the weight of years of disgraceful behaviour, and Reform appears to be replacing it as a genuine party of the right.
Fascism is a jibe I suspect we will be hearing much more of in the coming troubled years in Britain. It has been the go-to insult of left-wingers for decades whenever they are confronted by someone who does not agree with their views. Decades of poor educational standards has only made the misuse of the word more prevalent. For the benefit of the ignorant, then, we should remind ourselves what fascism is: an offshoot of the socialism that reared up in Europe after the Russian Revolution – Adolf Hitler was a race socialist where the Labour Party is class socialist. Fascism is totalitarian, completely anti-libertarian, high-taxing, pro-big government, stateophiliac and avowedly against private life and private property in all its forms. I don’t see any of that chiming with Reform’s outlook, which desires to slim down the state and encourage the healthy idea that people should be free to make their own decisions, spend as much of their own money as possible and generally look after themselves. Fascism is nationalistic, small c conservatism is patriotic; there is a big difference, and common sense in the matter was laid down by George Orwell as long ago as 1945.
Let us examine the second part of the Lord Heseltine’s outburst, that Nigel Farage is like Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists before the Second World War. Heseltine suggests that Farage is behaving towards Channel migrants as Mosley behaved towards Jews. It is an astonishingly irresponsible and specious comparison, not least because of the differences between their political beliefs as mentioned above.
Had his interviewer, the Times’s resident ‘centrist’ mum, Alice Thomson, really been out to challenge her subject she might have observed that it could be argued that Heseltine himself has far more in common with cranky old Sir Oswald than Farage: after the war Mosley became a proto-EU fanatic; he and his wife Diana published a magazine called, drum roll, The European, a title resurrected by the publisher and financial criminal Robert Maxwell in the Eighties and later by Tony Blair’s king of agitprop Alastair Campbell – and here we come to the agenda behind the interview: good old-fashioned Brexit Derangement Syndrome.
Heseltine was a euro fanatic: indeed the Westland affair which brought about his downfall in the Thatcher government in 1986 was at bottom a row about Europe v America. Like his old boss Edward Heath, he saw dancing to the tune of the Eurocommunist project in Brussels as good for business – and sod the consequences. If Britain was to be slowly strangled, indeed to exist only as a puppet of a largely hostile consortium of countries it rescued from fascism, that was an acceptable part of ‘managed decline’ – as long as the economy busked along from quarter to quarter. As the years went on it became clear that the majority of the parliamentary Tory Party believed that Britain could be steered and governed from elsewhere and any Danegeld paid to Brussels was worth it for financial opportunities. Heseltine’s mucker John Major was of the same mind. The Common Market turned into the EEC and thence to the European Union, the decaf version of the Soviet blueprint. Now market traders selling half a pound of tomatoes would have to watch their imperial measurements. Heseltine and co did not change tack in the face of this burgeoning supranational control-freakery. The international language of money spoke just that bit louder. A more considered strategist in the early Nineties might have foreseen what a Europhile Labour government could do with all that Major had tied us into. We soon found out when Blair hit Downing Street, and over the next decade narrowly avoided having sterling abolished in favour of the euro. What we did get was Tory cheap-labour heaven on steroids: a vast influx of eastern Europeans which undercut the British workers at the sharp end of labour market, an injustice that Labour top brass were not interested in and which Tory grandees, including Lord Heseltine in his stately pile at Thenford, must surely have greatly approved of as sound economics: sky-high immigration equals stagnant wage inflation and happy bosses.
The political class thought it had got away with the eastern European immigration explosion but, along with Blair’s alteration to immigration laws allowing whole families to join arrivals from all around the world, it can be seen now as the first shot in the Brexit wars of the following decade.
Heseltine is apparently entirely unrepentant about vast immigration and its effects. If he has regrets, he does not mention them in the interview. Does he consider the collapsing public services, the war-zone corridor triages of NHS hospitals (I dare say he goes private), the home shortages, the sky-high rents driven by uncontrolled mass immigration? The neighbourhoods changed out of recognition within a few years? The emergence of ghettos, radicalised Islam, terrorism, crime and now the country on the verge of massive social unrest/social disorder? His party drove Britain to this point as much as Labour, if not more since they have held power far longer than Labour since the war. The Conservative Party complacently accepted all the meretricious ‘modernising’ of the Blairite age, the ‘triangulation’ spin-doctoring whereby you mislead the public while pursuing hidden agendas, the growth of the bloated public sector mandarin class and the commissars of the quangocracy that really run Britain, the attempt to turn the country into an internationalist nowhereland. The Tories accepted it all, and they have been virtually destroyed by it. When a politician arrives who wishes to have a truly open conversation about all that, as Farage clearly does, Heseltine calls him a fascist. It is extraordinary – but also comical: in the interview Heseltine calls for cuts in the civil service. It appeared in the Times the same day the paper ran the story that Reform announced plans to, yes, cut back civil service bloat. Heseltine wants the Channel boat problem solved. Er, so does Reform. Yet when Farage says these things he is merely ‘going after the white working-class pub vote’ as Heseltine snobbishly puts it. That Brexit rage dies hard.
He is careful to say that he believes ‘the waters should be policed’ but opines that the Channel boat invaders are, quote, ‘not idlers, shirkers and rapists; they want jobs in circumstances many Brits will not do’. Well, I don’t know about that. News reports, asylum hotels and court proceedings suggest he may not be 100 per cent correct. And why don’t Brits want to do entry-level jobs? Because the pay has been pushed down by decades of massive immigration to a level that is useful only if you have arrived from a failed state – one inconvenient fact among many that Tarzan, lord of the financial jungle, would do well to think about as he tours his acres in that golf buggy.
