How the political right lost its way (and why Frank Bruno is an Englishman)

The right is lost. It embraced the woke identity politics of the left as its new ideology. And people tell Frank Bruno he isn't English. Which, if you think for a few seconds, is obviously nonsense.

It was St George’s Day and Frank Bruno, great boxer, sometimes troubled soul and national treasure posts about being an Englishman:

“Afternoon Happy St George's Day I am proud of being an Englishman I have travelled the World been to some beautiful places but I love England we all moan about it what's wrong and trust me there is loads wrong but the people the culture entertainment music sport I love and thankful for being born in England. When the national anthem was played at events I fought in I was and continue to be proud of my country”

Back in the day when Frank was joshing with Harry Carpenter and we cheered him on in his fights there was no sense at all that Frank Bruno wasn’t one of us. There were, there always were, a few racist, ‘no black in the union jack’ sorts but most of us simply loved Bruno as epitomising something about our culture: self-deprecation, bad jokes, banter but kindly banter, pride in nation and people. Plus hopefully flattening some American or other in a boxing ring.

This week Frank’s innocent post was greeted by a cascade of responses from people - mostly, I suspect, unfit middle-aged men - telling one of England’s best loved sportsmen that he isn’t English. Accounts littered with union flags, proclamations of patriotism and Reform UK logos trampled all over Bruno’s sentiment by telling him that, because he is black, he can’t be an Englishman.

“...being English cannot apply to someone born of foreign heritage and ancestry; therefore, you cannot claim to be English…”

“English is an ethnicity. Bruno has no English heritage. He is of Jamaican and Dominican heritage. So, no, he isn't.”

There were, of course, plenty of supportive comments but most of the responses from people laying claim to patriotism, bedecked with the flags of our nation, symbols of Christ and assertions of righteousness wanted to tell Bruno he isn’t one of us. For these men, Frank Bruno, Ian Wright, Denise Lewis and Kris Akabusi cannot be English because their skin is the wrong colour. The political right that these men claim to support is infected with the same identity politics created and promoted by the left. For this new right people are defined by DNA not by what they love, what they do and what they achieve.

“If it's not an ethnicity then why did I list it as my ethnicity on the census? 🤔 Are you saying that the British government is wrong?”

I didn’t complete the ethnicity section in the census - and nor should you. Asking these questions is an impertinence and exists only to indulge the special pleading of people with chips on their shoulders. And the populist right - Reform, Homeland and a clutter of other ethno-nationalist groups - is now just another bunch of people pleading for attention because of identity. The sort who are offended by a black man celebrating his - England’s - national day.

If this is what it means to be right wing then you can count me out.

Across the Atlantic another form of right wing politics is playing out. For sure there’s some racism but, as Douglas Murray gently explained to Joe Rogan, now the doyen of the cry baby right, facts don’t stop being facts because some conspiracy theorist indulges your prior prejudices. They tell us the “Intellectual Dark Web”, a deliciously vain self-description, is heterodox but, too often, the intelligence is absent but the untruth is plain to see. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson both hosted Daryl Cooper, essentially a Nazi-apologist, giving him long, uncritical space to deny the extent of the holocaust and to denigrate the character and record of Winston Churchill.

All this sits alongside the disaster of Trump’s indulgence of Putin’s Russia, another of those ideas promoted by this ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ of right wing isolationist cry babies. And, as we saw from Douglas Murray’s encounter with a comedian called Dave Smith on that Joe Rogan show, there’s a growing anti-Jew sentiment on the political right in the USA. These ideas dovetail with the ethno-nationalism of believing Frank Bruno can’t be English (something he shares with Jews in the minds of this new populist right) and add to the mix a lust for the thwack of Putinesque or Trumpian ‘strong’ leadership. As we saw with Trump and Vance meeting Zelensky, any challenge to this strong man ideology results in floods of petty rage and a cry baby ‘I won’t let you play with my toys’ response.

I’m not an especial fan of Douglas Murray seeing him as an intellectual version of Tommy Robinson, at least on the subject of Islam, but his criticism of Joe Rogan (and by implication Tucker Carlson and other pundits from the US right) for platforming historical revisionism and antisemitism was right. In the USA, the collapse of support for the moderate (and progressive) left created the space for a nativist right to win power. But if that nativism spills over from legitimate concerns about immigration into any form of ethnic absolutism, we enter a dangerous place. The nature of American demographics makes this less likely (Rogan would be unlikely to engage with white supremacists in the way he and Tucker Carlson indulge those who hint at Jewish control of politics and media or claim the Nazis weren’t so bad after all) but in Europe there are majorities that can be exploited by the sort of person who says that Frank Bruno or Maureen Lipman aren’t English. And the collapse of the European left opens the door.

There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when conservatism was the dominant idea of the right. Today the right focuses instead on ideas that derive from the acrid pond of critical theory and identity politics instead of an aim to preserve the enlightenment values and liberal economics that made our societies strong and our peoples rich. There is a bitterness to the politics of Trump, Farage and Le Pen that was never part of what the right believed. Some of this is directed at the failure and corruption of great institutions - the law, media and parliaments - but much slips beyond this anger to attack minority religions, ethnic groups and businesses trying their hardest to navigate the crazy world of equalities top trumps.

“I’ll stop the boats” quacks Farage and his followers don’t hear what he says, they hear instead a distortion of those words, a hall of mirrors version where ‘stop the boats’ becomes ‘sink the boats’ and control immigration becomes remigration - ‘send them home, they aren’t English’.

If this is what it means to be right wing, I don’t want any part of it.

I am a conservative in the tradition of Disraeli, a man who was sneered at by political opponents as ‘that jew’ but who set out the basis for a strong, compassionate and outward-looking politics. Dizzy’s ideas matter - care for the institutions of state, protect our traditions, and direct politics to the task of making ordinary people better off. If the right falls, instead, into the rabbit hole of identity - seeing the Somali criminal as a criminal because he is a Somali not because he is a criminal - then it joins the very world of ‘woke’ that it screams about. Conservatives should be trying to live Martin Luther King's dream of a nation where people “...will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

This isn’t an argument for mass migration or for ignoring the features that describe people but rather it is a plea to stop demanding that we count how many black people there are and how many are bad. This, the politics of identity, destroyed the left’s traditions of commonwealth and, I fear, will devour the right too. We will, you need only look at the demands for data on ethnicity and crime to understand, find ourselves making people fearful of or hating every Somali not dealing with the Somali criminal. We should deal with crime firmly, taking the criminals off the street, deporting them if necessary but we should stop our obsession with counting black people. It does not help make anyone safer and it results in the painting of good, innocent people as a problem simply because of the ethnic or cultural box in which you’ve decided to dump them.

The right is lost. It has embraced the woke identity politics of the left as its new ideology. And people tell Frank Bruno he isn't English. Which, if you think for a few seconds, is obviously nonsense.