The great Tory myth of the '15 minute-neighbourhood'

A studio video showed him, eyes down, ever so slightly squirming in his seat, as he told BBC Radio 4 that the government was not going to let councils “dictate” to people that they must access services within 15 minutes of their homes.

Like I said: “Oh my.”

Mr Bowie was giving a nod to a preposterous but surprisingly resilient internet lie: that local authorities, as part of a grand global plot, will use some of the most vanilla and inoffensive planning policies ever concocted to restrict our movements.

I am talking, of course, about the toxic “15 minute neighbourhood” myth, a favourite talking point of the very online far right who insist that a mysterious “they” is trying to control the world rather than making it more convenient for us to buy a pint of milk.

I very much doubt Mr Bowie believes this back story, or even what he said on air. But said it, he did.

This week’s Tory conference was a succession of such “oh my” moments, big and small. Many recent Conservative talking points – an MP, goodness, spoke seriously of the threat of “world government” – were so obviously based on fantasy that Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 had to ask one minister if we were entering the politics of “post-truth”? He may just as well have asked if the Tories were now also “post-conservative”.

I think we have reached the stage when we need to ask really awkward and, for now, mostly hypothetical questions about where Britain’s right is heading.

What if the Tories go total full mad bam? What if British Conservatives, like America’s Republicans, embrace not just nationalist populism but also alt-right reality-denying conspiracism?

Do not get me wrong: the party has not completely flipped, not yet. But we have a risk now, a risk that needs to be mitigated, by all of us, not least old school conservatives.

Just for those not paying full attention at the back, I am not predicting the Tories will turn MAGA. And I am certainly not forecasting that, if they did, a Trump-style captured conservative party would take power. I am a reporter, not a clairvoyant.

What I am saying is this: it is time to kick the tyres of our democracy, to ensure we have the institutions, political cultures and individuals that can either stave off such a hypothetical threat or survive it.

There is a theory, a perfectly credible one, that we do not need to worry too much about an alt-right or nationalist populist Tory movement.

It goes something like this: mainstream parties can veer away from the political centre but they always punished at the ballot box when they do. In other words: a radical right Tory party cannot win.

Proponents of this comforting idea will cite Labour. The main opposition party proved unelectable under Jeremy Corbyn, they will point out. But, with Sir Keir Starmer at the helm, the party now looks like a government in waiting.

The theory here is that liberal democracies are self-righting. And they sure can be. But, as 2016’s US elections and Brexit referendum showed, this is not always the case.

So how robust is the UK’s machinery of democracy? Well, erm, relatively but not very.

Our legislature has a lower chamber elected under a first-past-the-post system which enables parties to secure overall control despite securing something well short of majority popular support. That is sub-optimal any day of the week but, in the face of a mainstream party gone rogue, could be catastrophic. The upper house of our parliament is weak and unelected. So is our hereditary head of state.

Compare this to, for example, Italy where populists of various stripes have secured high office but found their options somewhat limited by constitutional checks and balances, not least an elder statesman president, Sergio Mattarella, who has more political nous and moral authority in his toenail clippings than King Charles III, decent cove as he may prove to be, has in his entire body.

Could regional or devolved governments offer some resistance to a radical right govt? Maybe. But these too are relatively weak in the UK.

A populist government, a British MAGA movement, might decide to ally with what some pundits call muscular unionists – or British nationalists – and seek to undermine local or quasi-national democratic institutions in Edinburgh, Cardiff or even Manchester or Birmingham.

Is it worth also applying stress tests to other institutions? Our independent judiciary and policing systems? Our free press? Or our TV and radio?

Britain has traditionally expected broadcasters to ensure fact-based journalism and political impartiality. Not any more, it seems. The new GB News, albeit currently flushing some of its more out-there voices, is an affront to reality-based discourse.

The UK’s systems, whether our parliamentary democracy or media regulation, often look like they were designed to enable goodies, not frustrate baddies.

That puts a lot of pressure on individuals to step up, especially if they are in the Conservatives. Decent Tories – and there are surely plenty of them – need to find their spines.

Democrats inside the party need to speak out when their Home Secretary adds some Enoch Powell “Rivers of Blood” laldy to her anti-immigration speeches. They need to jeer, not cheer, when their deputy chairman, groundlessly, accuses a journalist of making up quotes. And they should be challenging Mr Bowie.

I do not know the North East MP who dogwhistled the 15-minute neighbourhood conspiracy theory. From afar, he usually looks and sounds like a reasonable centre-right, pro-union democrat, not unlike a lot of his constituents. He needs to show this. And his local party and Scottish colleagues need to empower him to do so. Because – oh my – sometimes standing up for democracy means standing down from government if you are asked to do something totally unacceptable.