Our new pro-brexit government must speak the language of liberty

For too long British politics has been undermined by ‘illiberal liberal’ ideas that few have dared to question

Next week, we shall almost certainly have a government which is pro-brexit. This has never happened before. My guess and hope are that it will make a big difference. Political leadership never works if it is half-hearted, as it has been throughout Theresa May’s three years. At last it can be whole-hearted.

My guess and hope both feel confirmed by the pre-emptive strikes by Tory Remainer MPS, including several ministers, this week. Almost all of them voted, in February 2017, to trigger Article 50, which ensures that “no deal” is the default Brexit position. Since then, they have found ever wilder devices against the no deal they legislated for, but have always evaded the logic of their opposition which is to rescind Article 50. They are increasingly, comically desperate.

Even funnier is the latest idea of some of them that they might make a “Humble Address” to the Queen, requesting her to go, as head of state, to Brussels and beg the EU for yet another extension. It is well known

that political arguments that drag in the Nazis are almost always discredited by doing so. For opposite reasons (Nazis being evil, she good), the same applies to political arguments that drag in the Queen.

Loopier Brexiteers used to mutter about Elizabeth II being forced by Edward Heath to break her Coronation oath. It is amusing to see Remainers growing loopier still; although one would be very sorry if Her Majesty’s imminent stay at Balmoral were disturbed by the sight of the by then unemployed Philip Hammond and the Eurofanatical Dominic Grieve waving their Humble Address as they stalk her across the moors.

Anyway, there will be time enough after the leadership election result on Tuesday to analyse the political twists and turns of the Battle for Boris’s Ear (or, just possibly, the War of the Two Jeremys). This seems a good moment to consider matters more widely.

My qualm before the storm is about language. Can our next prime minister and his team find the right words to carry enough of the country through the massive changes and conflicts which will ensue? After more than three years of struggle, the electorate will have prevailed over the elites. The voice of protest will have become the voice of power. What should that voice sound like?

Last week, I wrote about how our liberal order is threatened by a combination of its direct enemies, notably Vladimir Putin, and its supposed friends – most of them Remainers – who have shifted liberal ideas from being freedom-friendly rules of government and law to a series of coercive prescriptions designed to force people to conform to their idea of virtue.

This week, I want to reflect on how the assumptions of the illiberal liberals (hereinafter referred to as the “illiberals”) can be unpicked. It needs a language that is simultaneously moderate and tough. At present, most of our public discourse is neither.

In order to develop this language, it is as important to look at the questions the illiberals do not ask. Take the latest row over Donald Trump. It is indeed shocking that a US president could tell four elected representatives in his nation’s legislature to “go back” to look at the mess in the countries “from which they came”. (In three of the four cases, the country they came from was the United States of America.)

The BBC went after this for all it was worth. The question not asked, though, was about the views of the “Squad” – especially those of Ilhan Omar – which had occasioned Mr Trump’s outburst. Ms Omar has been noted for her anti-semitic tweets – for example, on Congress’s support for Israel, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” (Benjamins being a slang phrase for $100bills) – and her equivocation about terrorism. She seemed to dismiss the 9/11 Islamist attacks as “some people did something”. Her tweets show her relentless, victimculture hostility to mainstream America, which she condemns as racist. On the arc of extremism, Ilhan Omar stands in very much the same place as our own dear Jeremy Corbyn, not herself advocating violence, but standing shoulder to shoulder with the baddies who hate her country.

Why don’t the illiberals look at her? Only by seeing the context of Trump and Omar can you see the game each is playing.

Early in the Tory leadership race, when six of the candidates took part in the BBC debate “moderated” (ha, ha) by Emily Maitlis, in came a question from an imam in Bristol, about whom the BBC had done no due diligence. He complained about Boris and burkas. Before you could say Nick Robinson, all the aspirants had agreed to a spur-of-the-moment call by one of them, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid, that there should be an inquiry into “Islamophobia” in the Tory party.

By the next morning, it had emerged that the cleric asking the question was an extremist with a record of anti-semitic and misogynist remarks. Yet the Tories, who had given no thought to whether the concept of Islamophobia even makes sense, were saddled with their inquiry.

Yesterday, Mr Javid gave an interesting speech on related matters. In his own story of success through integration, hard work and a lack of sectarianism, he is just the sort of Muslim role model public policy does too little to advance. What he said about the dangers, from several directions, of extremism, was balanced in tone. He attacked the “send her back” chants at the Trump rally. I was glad the word “Islamophobia” did not pass his lips. And what he said in detail – condemning Islamist organisations such as Mend and Cage by name and removing Cage’s sponsor licence for migrant workers – was tough-minded. After having fallen off the tightrope in the leaders’ debate, he seems to be walking it more steadily now that we are about to have a new prime minister.

Take another example of questions not asked. On Thursday night, Nick Robinson presented Britain’s Brexit Crisis on BBC One. It gave a clear account of the Brexit negotiations, with some good inside stuff about British government cluelessness. Robinson, far from neutral, concluded that Brexit has “to be based on some sort of deal with the EU”, though his programme actually showed how disastrous it had been that the threat of no deal had never been seriously made.

What he barely touched on was the key prior question after the 2016 result: how, morally and politically, should a government behave when it has invited the voters to decide Britain’s constitutional future and they have done so in a way it opposed? It would have been fascinating to find out how ministers discussed this, if at all, and whether senior officials even thought of it for a second. Instead, the BBC/ Robinson view reduced it all to a piece of bungled diplomacy. Bungled it certainly was, but chiefly because it was misconceived before it started.

It has never occurred to the illiberals to look at Brexit this way, even though, in other contexts, they love talking up a liberation struggle. They loved the Arab Spring, which mostly failed. They hate the Brexit one, which now has a chance of succeeding.

The right language for our first Brexit government will be national, though not nationalist, because it draws on Britain’s unique history. But it will also be liberal, in the proper sense, because it is the language of liberty under our own law.