The American alt-right wants to set up shop in the UK

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The American alt-right wants to set up shop in the UK

For three days this week an American think tank called the Edmund Burke Foundation has been hosting a conference in London to talk up what it calls national conservatism in the hope of signing up the British right. 

So what? The NatCons didn’t exactly set the town alight – some spoke to a nearly empty hall – but they did draw a few big names and they represent a defiant new brand of Christian nationalism that

• isn’t shy about demonising illegal immigrants and believes unchecked migration will destroy the nation-state; 
• is even more strident on culture, or as one speaker put it: “faith, family, flag, freedom – in that order”; and
• could still tweak the course of the Conservative Party, if not ahead of the election it’s likely to lose, then afterwards.

Who are these guys? The Edmund Burke Foundation is named after Britain’s leading voice against the French Revolution but was set up in Washington in 2019. Its funding is opaque, but key figures include the Jerusalem-based academic Yoram Hazony and Christopher DeMuth, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan.

The NatCon UK audience is less easy to identify. Of the conference delegates who would speak to journalists this week – and many were told not to – none were Tory party members. Several had flown in from the US, keen to see if Trumpian politics could be exported. 

Much of the focus was on social issues. One delegate said he was a socialist and “not that keen on capitalism”. There were clerics and theologians who believe faith should play a greater role in public life and want bishops to be willing to “die on the hill” of gender identity.

For this group, social conservatism trumped immigration as a priority.

God squad. The NatCon conference was held in a church and many of its speeches were shot through with religion. Does that mean England is ready for a US-style Christian right or a version of Germany’s Christian democracy? In pockets of the electorate, perhaps. Danny Kruger MP, a former aide to Johnson, spoke of “normative” nuclear families with a mother and a father. Miriam Cates, a fellow backbencher, said the biggest problem facing the country was a decline in birth rates and a “cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls”.  

Right flank. For Suella Braverman, appearing at the conference had more to do with politics than philosophy. The home secretary attacked government policy in defiance of the usual rules on collective responsibility and her resignation from Cabinet is now baked into expectations back in Westminster. She used the event to draw a line between the right she seeks to lead and relative moderates who’re now openly calling her unfit for office.

Lost in translation. If England and America are two countries separated by the same language, NatCon underscored where the division lies. There is limited appetite, among MPs or the wider public, for politics laced with religion and a state that seeks to intervene in people’s private lives.  

Meanwhile in Bournemouth, A separate one-day event, run by the Conservative Democratic Organisation and funded by Lord Cruddas, aimed explicitly to ‘take back control’ of candidate selection and policy formation, and give it to members. Its implicit aim is to restore Johnson to the premiership.  

Four days of soul-searching left three questions hanging:

• On immigration: is the right counting on widespread anti-immigrant sentiment that voters in the UK don’t actually feel seven years after the Brexit vote?
• On nationalism: can it be infused with religion and harnessed as a new force in Western politics – or is that for Hungary and the past?
• On the future: should Rishi Sunak worry about being outflanked by movement Conservatives to his right whose potency he underestimates?

The short answers are yes, yes / no and yes. Tory leaders always have to worry as much about their right flanks as their left. But for now Sunak can probably sleep easy. Neither conference had huge numbers of attendees. And while the CDO had a quaint Englishness to it, NatCon felt like an attempt to transplant a Christian alt-right movement that (so far) doesn’t carry weight in the secular UK. 

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Photograph Leon Neal/Getty Images

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