Letting the far right one in

A curious juxtaposition

Last month, had you understandably wandered away during a speech delivered by “Matt” Goodwin say, or Romania’s leading ultra nationalist to the inaugural conference of Liz Truss’s CPAC GB at Dockland’s Intercontinental Hotel, and found yourself in the windowless side room serving as the marketplace for various sympathetic organisations, you would have come across a peculiar combination.

Side by side were the stalls of Lord Toby Young’s Free Speech Union – a regular feature at UK New Right decline-fests - and the far more exotic one belonging to a group that I had imagined had given up the ghost with the fall of the Berlin wall – the US-based John Birch Society. Back in 1962 the red scare JBS had the distinction of being the subject of an early Bob Dylan song, the “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”.

In this online era no one except the Orban Hungarians goes in for printed publications any more, which makes these stalls a colourless affair, but the suit-and-tied young Americans of the JBS, did have a book to push to us Britons. Fabian Freeway was published in the US in 1986. Written by a Rose Martin the book tells the tale of how the Fabian Society, founded in the late 19^th century by British intellectuals, and dedicated to a strategy of gradual change towards socialism, was in fact a conspiracy of dangerous proto-communists, who have largely succeeded in their plot of subverting the Western world. Never mind Lenin or Mao, this thesis suggests, the true progenitors of Leftist tyranny are George Bernard Shaw and Clement Attlee.

Anyway, this is what the slightly grumpy missionaries of the JBS were selling, and as it happens, it was a bizarre theory that several sources on the British New Right had already embraced. Enthusiastically.

My fellow conspiracist-hunter Matthew Sweet (whose biography of the extraordinary Barbara Cartland is hitting the shelves right now) noticed a few months ago that one of the main presenters on NewsUK’s Talk TV, Alexandra Phillips, was both writing and broadcasting on the subject of the Fabian plot. Ms Phillips, a former Farage-era UKIP employee, former Brexit Party MEP and now a journalist-activist on behalf of Reform, had been doing “some digging” and had discovered just how influential and sinister the Fabians were. Without anyone but Phillips (and the John Birch Society) noticing, all Labour prime ministers had been Fabians and a number of key Fabian policies had become the law of the land, having been endorsed by unsuspecting Parliamentary majorities.

One such Phillips discussion brought together a strange red-braced barrister called Steven Barrett – who is an ever-present on online New Right broadcasts, and is taking the Fabian plot message to a series of the other well-funded podcasts that now populate the YouTubeosphere – and an intense young man billed as “Joseph Robertson” who was clear that the Fabians had aimed all along at the cultural, moral, religious and economic destruction of the English demi-paradise that had previously existed (presumably when the Duke of Wellington was prime minister). More on him anon.

Crossover

So that’s what the residual viewers of Talk TV saw and heard. It was easy enough to mock. To someone like me brought up in the Marxist-Leninist purple of British communism the idea that the Fabians were an ultra-successful revolutionary sect is just funny. You might as well indict the WI or Weightwatchers for their dangerous commie subversion of the English Woman.

But then it cropped up again at the beginning of July, in a much more potent form. Thanks in part to his sponsor, Elon Musk, the Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe became the first and only UK MP to make a guest appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast in the US. Five minutes listening to the plummy monotone of Mr Lowe would be more than enough for most people, but Rogan managed to remain fascinated for over two hours. There were a million views of this podcast in the first day after its transmission, and excerpts will remain radioactive until the end of the world.

Most of the interview concentrated on the everyday stories of how immigration and wokeness were destroying Britain and Europe, how people like Rupert Lowe were persecuted for telling the truth but how the popular revolt against the establishment was now well underway.

But a section, quite capriciously, dealt with the Fabians. Lowe was keen to tell Rogan and the Americans the story, essentially, that the John Birch Society had been telling them for nearly 70 years. It was the same insinuating conspiracist nonsense that Phillips had been putting out a few months earlier. Rogan interrupted Lowe’s revelations with occasional “Oh, that’s crazeee!” especially when Lowe told him that the Fabians’ crest had once consisted of a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a rare example of a sense of humour on the early British Left. Thus had the Fabians openly declared their nefarious secret plan. Watching a clip from this part of the show I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that Umberto Eco was still alive.

What I am asking you to take note of here is the crossover. The Fabians hadn’t been a thing on the British Right until the last few months. Then suddenly a series of public people, most notably Phillips and Lowe – one associated with Reform UK and the other with his own rival party – are banging on about the Webbs and H.G. Wells.

Tacking the Lowe Road: war on the Right

Such agreement is now rare. In recent weeks Phillips has used her show on Talk to run a campaign of denigration against her fellow Fabian-fingerer, Rupert Lowe. Beginning with Restore’s “moronic” decision to stand a candidate in the Makerfield by-election (thus splitting the hard Right vote), by last week she had graduated to yelling at the camera – no exaggeration, this - that “Rupert Lowe is the most preposterous, pompous, pathetic, pointless politician in the world.”

One reason for her most unbalanced response to Lowe was the intimation in one of his recent farmside video chats that she had been Nigel Farage’s mistress (an impression once shared, according to the Daily Mail, by an earlier Mrs Farage). Another reason was the fear Restore might jeopardise Reform’s chances of success.

And the third, and for our purpose most important, was the fact that Lowe and his party have given the game away. To adapt Michael Caine, in public the New Right were only supposed to hate the bloody Muslims but Restore have instead begun to say the big thing – we aren’t racists, but we think race is fundamental to nationhood and it’d be better if there were fewer you-know-whos around. That’s not the message Reform is ready to send. They were only supposed to blow the doors off, but Restore are destroying the whole van.

If Talk TV is the most online critic of Restore, the Daily Telegraph has become its newspaper scourge. Writing in the Telegraph to complain about her persecution at the hands of angry Restore activists, Phillips outlined the philosophical chasm that had opened between Reform and Restore.