Far-right conspiracists loved the Savile smear
In the Whitehall of my protesting days, if you’d walked up to within an inch of the leader of the opposition, shouted something unpleasant in his face and then refused to go away, you’d almost certainly have earned a kick in the nuts from a heavily booted member of the Special Patrol Group and a ride in a green paddy wagon before being charged with assaulting a police officer.
Not any more. Cameras and enhanced public accountability seem to have made the police much more reluctant to disperse groups of self-infuriated men engaged in intimidating other people. Seeing just how threatening you can be to a public figure or an opponent without getting arrested, while filming it for a YouTube channel called something like Freedom TV or Resistance GB, is a new sport.
For Robert Moore, an ITV journalist watching the monstering of Sir Keir Starmer this week, it all reminded him of events he’d covered in Washington 13 months ago, with “the same conspiracy theories, the same smears, even the same incendiary chants”.
Moore felt that such emanations “threaten all political civility”. And I think he’s right. But what exactly is happening?
Let’s admit some big world context here. An event as cataclysmic as the pandemic was bound to spawn conspiracy theories. The idea that humanity is subject to pointless disasters which are blind and lacking in intent or plan is annihilating. If you find it hard to believe that a princess can die in a car accident, or a president can be murdered by an under-achieving fantasist, how much worse to contemplate a virus or centuries of carbon emissions as being the cause of potential disaster.
How oddly reassuring to think that there is an undivine plan, that someone is making it up in order to profit from vaccinating you or to control you. The existence of someone infernally clever at least posits the possibility of someone counter-infernally clever. Donald Trump, say. Or you and your fellow savants.
But where once conspiracy theories were believed in serially, one at a time, now the fashion is for a mash-up. It’s not enough for the evil overlords to be venal and power-mad. Today they must also be that worst thing of all, child sexual abusers. After 40 years of genuine revelations and moral panics, what was once a preoccupation of the left has now become an animating obsession of the far right. So you not only fight for your freedom from enemy control but for the little children.
It’s more than 20 years since I started studying conspiracism, and though the motivations haven’t changed much, the forms and the consequences have. Large sections of left and centre-left opinion held that John F Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. Yet no one ever jostled a politician in Westminster because of that belief. The hundreds of silly leftish academics who bought the idea that 9/11 was an inside job confined themselves to websites, petitions, books and conferences. No one even demonstrated about it.
Except the American conspiracist Alex Jones. He would get up in your face with a bullhorn. He’d shout, intimidate, strut around the site of Ground Zero. He was on the absolute extreme, an impossible nutcase. And yet he turned out to be the model for what is happening now.
Today many conspiracists link theory with action in a way they didn’t in the past. Social media has proved not to be an atomising route to passivity but a spur to action. Come to Westminster where the bad people are: yell and throw things at them, film it, post the film, enjoy the aftermath. And do it all in the name of righteousness.
The Starmer incident was a low-intensity version of a movement which has grown throughout the democratic world. You can’t call it protest because its targets are too diverse, its belief system too conspiracy-driven, its tactics too intimidatory and the implied remedies are too revolutionary. In its desire to create confrontation it is not open to the usual negotiations and palliative approaches which disarm potentially violent movements.
It is particularly potent where it is allied to more mainstream grievances among groups with which it identifies, like the gilets jaunes in France or the truckers in Canada. Thirty barmpots on the street are a nuisance; 300 barmpots in great big lorries blocking access to city centres is another matter altogether. The feeling that you can bring the government down is a heady one, and it is easy for men who feel entitled to behave by their own rules to become intoxicated with the idea that they represent the majority. They don’t: 62 per cent of Canadians oppose the truckers’ protest. This makes it a form of what Sunder Katwala of the think tank British Future has dubbed “unpopulism” – populism the people don’t support.
Unpopulism achieved its most dangerous expression at the Capitol last year. And it did so largely because, in the US, conspiracy theories had jumped the species barrier dividing mainstream politics from the semi-violent fringe. The endorsement by the Republican Party in 2016 of a presidential candidate who himself had given active support to conspiracy theories – notably the Obama birth theory – marked a crucial moment.
By 2020 leading Trump supporters, including General Michael Flynn, were encouraging the supporters of the QAnon deep-state-with-paedophiles conspiracy cult. In the same year at least one QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was elected to Congress for the Republicans. Now follow the progress of the writer of Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance. A moderate Republican in 2016, Vance criticised Trump as an “idiot” and “offensive”.
Spool on to 2022 and Vance is standing in the primaries to be Republican candidate to represent Ohio in the US Senate. But his opponents are using his long-disavowed anti-Trump record against him. So who does he turn to for endorsement? Marjorie Taylor Greene. That’s how you get by in the Republican Party these days. It’s a disaster.
When Boris Johnson used the Savile accusation about Starmer in the Commons he almost certainly had no idea of its origins, let alone of its use on the conspiracist far right. I am prepared to believe that it was his carelessness that led him to adopt what seemed like a nice, shiny gotcha that someone else had offered him. But he crossed a dangerous line and gave encouragement to dangerous people. It is heartening that so many of his own party have seen the danger and called upon him to withdraw.
But the new problem of militant and Hydra-headed conspiracism is not really about our current prime minister. It is much more about combating ridiculous ways of thinking and reclaiming public space for the rest of us. Whitehall is our street, it doesn’t belong to the baying oaf trying to intimidate those he disagrees with.
The Times
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