Douglas Carswell used to be interesting. While never a particular friend of the New Statesman, the former Conservative MP who defected to Ukip in 2014 was a thoughtful enough politician to ring up for a chat about the future of Britain’s right.
The man who ran against Tony Blair in Sedgefield in 2001, masterminded the first ejection of a House of Commons Speaker in 300 years during the expenses crisis, triggered a by-election in his own constituency of Clacton when defecting to Ukip, and made a citizens arrest of a shoplifter in Boots had some worthwhile things to say about the individual’s relationship to the state.
A fan of direct democracy, he called for proportional representation, open primaries, recalling MPs, and generally something he called “start-up politics”. He had big dreams of technology resurrecting grassroots political engagement: “iDemocracy”. I remember him once telling me about a plan he’d pitched to David Cameron when he was prime minister to “Spotify the Tory party” – modernise it to meld to the needs of its supporters with a localist agenda and tiered online system for membership. I don’t think Cameron ever got back to him.
This was kooky, free-market stuff. And while the uber-Brexiteer was reviled as a right-wing libertarian by the online left, which dominated Twitter at that time, he was generally seen as Ukip’s acceptable face. His worldview as a classical liberal moderniser jarred with the Little Englander mentality driving that Ukip surge in 2014-15. He wanted to build a “future-facing Ukip” and quickly came to fall out with the party’s leader Nigel Farage over immigration. Carswell was pro, denouncing Ukip voters’ “angry nativism”, calling Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech wrong, and describing immigration to the UK as a “story of success”. “Britain today is more at ease with the multi-ethnic society that we have become than once seemed imaginable,” he said.
Well, what a difference a decade – and four years in the Bible Belt – makes. Carswell now speaks the language of the blue-tick right. Head of a free-market think tank in Mississippi since 2021, his main participation in British politics today is to post on X about deporting “savages” and “invaders”.
His latest poison pixels? “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free”. In essence, a call to deport all Muslims or Arabs from Britain. From tunnelling through the sewer of his X interactions, it appears to me that four forces have changed Carswell’s politics. The first three are Islamist terror attacks: the Manchester Arena and Parsons Green bombings of 2017, and the murder of David Amess MP in 2021. The fourth is what he characterises as the complicit response of the “lanyard-wearing classes” – a recent coinage by the Blue Labour peer Maurice Glasman to symbolise liberal progressive professionals and their groupthink managerialism.
Carswell has long been Twitter-happy, even when the app was more of an echo chamber for Remainers and Corbynistas than racists with Substacks. Watching the dystopian image of Britain plastered on X from the prairies has surely had a radicalising effect on him. As one policy adviser close to the Blue Labour project fretted to me recently: “X is becoming for the radical right what Twitter was for the Corbyn people in 2017; they’re drinking their own Kool-Aid and assuming opinions on X are shared by the country as a whole – when actually this is pretty eccentric stuff.”
But Carswell’s descent from blue-sky-thinking to the language of the gutter is a common one these days. It’s the same spiral that led a Remain-voting, Boris Johnson-backing Robert Jenrick to spitting down the lens about “alien cultures” with “medieval attitudes”. It’s how free-marketeer Liz Truss went from loosening visa rules as prime minister to sharing a stage with Steve Bannon as he called Tommy Robinson a “hero”.
And that radicalisation from the top is seeping down through some parts of Britain too – in Basildon, where a mosque was vandalised with St George’s Cross graffiti; in Halifax, where a man was filmed throwing water at a woman, while appearing to ask if she arrived by small boat; in Canary Wharf, where an UberEats driver was mobbed by men in balaclavas.
Carswell was always a man of direct democracy; perhaps this is what he meant.
[See also: How the small boats crisis convulsed Britain]
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