I find myself writing these more and more. One week it’s Farage, barking in the Mail about migrants poisoning the nation. The next it’s Braverman in the Telegraph, clutching her pearls over “woke extremism” while winking at the real kind. Now it’s Chris Philp, Shadow Home Secretary, borrowing the tone of a eulogy to revive the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: fear.
His headline claim?
“Islamist extremism is the single biggest challenge that we face as a country.”
Not poverty. Not ecological breakdown. Not the NHS bleeding out on a corridor floor. Not the fact that half the country can’t afford rent and the other half lives in fear of a knock on the door. No, for Philp, the enemy is eternal, foreign, and conveniently Muslim.
It’s classic Power of Nightmares stuff. Adam Curtis saw this coming two decades ago. When politics can no longer offer a better life, it offers protection instead. The nation becomes a bunker. The citizen becomes a suspect. And the enemy is always vague enough to expand as needed.
Philp is late to the party. But he is desperate to be heard over the noise. That’s why he laces his argument with tragedy. The murder of Sir David Amess, the horrific Southport killings. Genuine grief, callously marshalled to justify a programme of ideological policing and soft surveillance. It’s the emotional blackmail of the security state: mourn with us, then hand us the keys.
The numbers are rolled out like gospel: 94% of terror deaths, 80% of counter-terror cases. What is never said is how low the actual numbers are. How terrorism in Britain is extremely rare, how far-right violence is rising, how the police and military. He rattles off statistics (94% of terror deaths, 80% of counter-terror caseloads) but strips them of context. He doesn’t say that terror attacks in Britain are vanishingly rare. He doesn’t mention the far-right threat, even as MI5 warns of it. He doesn’t mention Prevent’s long-standing reputation for racial profiling and community harassment. The figures aren’t there to inform. They’re there to frighten.
Which is the point. Not to offer serious analysis. But to build a narrative. One where the British public is under siege, and the only salvation is a government that watches more, suspects more, punishes more. The Shawcross Review, which Philp wants implemented in full, doesn’t fix Prevent. It expands it. It lowers the bar for what counts as extremism. It blurs the line between belief and violence, between criticism and threat.
If you’ve ever marched for Palestine, criticised British foreign policy, or prayed in the “wrong” mosque, you’re already on their radar.
Philp isn’t acting like an opposition politician. He is auditioning for the next security state. And he is not doing it alone. Robert Jenrick is pulling the entire Tory front bench further into the authoritarian gutter, turning every crisis into a border, every tragedy into a crackdown. This is what the Conservatives offer now: no policies, no recovery, no future. Just enemies. The same script: Hostile Environment, Windrush, Channel pushbacks, attacks on “lefty lawyers.” The actors change. The plot stays the same.
We honour the dead by naming what kills. And what kills is not simply ideology, but the conditions that breed despair. Poverty. War. Alienation. Racism. Misogyny. The steady destruction of every structure that once offered meaning. But that story is too complex, too structural, too self-incriminating. So instead we get the fantasy of the hidden enemy, forever lurking, forever brown.
This is the Power of Nightmares logic. It worked for Blair. It worked for Bush. It worked for Theresa May’s vans. But its power is waning. People are tired of being told to fear while everything else around them collapses.
The real threat isn’t “Islamism.” It’s the politics of fear itself.
