The Tories Just Told You Who They Are Now

Nick Timothy's attack on Muslims praying in Trafalgar Square was a calculated audition - and the whole party showed up to back him.

Earlier this week, 3,000 people gathered peacefully in Trafalgar Square to break their Ramadan fast - a lawful public event, open to people of all faiths. Nick Timothy, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and the man who would be in charge of law and order in a Conservative government, described it as 'an act of domination' aligned with 'the Islamist agenda.' Nigel Farage called it 'a group of people attempting dominance over our capital city.'

Domination. Dominance. Two men, supposedly from different parties with different political agendas, reaching for practically the same word to describe the same thing: 3,000 peaceful people breaking their Ramadan fast together in a public square. That’s more than a coincidence. It’s conscious convergence. And we need to be clear about what’s driving it, where it will take us, and how our decrepit democratic system provides little protection for those who want a different future for our country.

When it comes to the anti-muslim agenda, Timothy has ‘form’…lots of it.

He didn’t just stumble into this latest scandal. He has spent a career building a political brand on precisely this ground. As a special adviser at the Home Office, he helped design the “hostile environment” immigration policy - the one that produced the Windrush scandal. He played a role in the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham, which a New York Times investigation later characterised as an “Islamophobic hoax”. He campaigned against Labour’s Islamophobia definition, calling it “rigged” and urging supporters to “stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws.” He introduced the Freedom of Expression (Religion or Belief System) Bill, seeking to clarify that the Public Order Act does not cover criticism of religion.

Each episode escalates on the last. Each positions Timothy as the person willing to “say what others won’t.” And each plays directly to the right-wing media ecosystem - GB News, Talk TV, The Spectator, The Telegraph - that any future Conservative leadership contender needs to win over. And it’s working (for him). Bookmakers rate him one of the favourites to succeed Kemi Badenoch when the day comes.

Which brings us to Badenoch herself - the would-be Prime Minister who chose to pour petrol on the fire.

If Timothy was just another new-intake MP naively entering a political minefield, you might expect his leader to display some appropriate contrition, give him a very public rap on the knuckles, and move to close the matter down by directing the media to an important new initiative to have the swimming baths in Huddersfield upgraded. But that is not who Timothy is, and that is not what happened.

Badenoch did not reprimand Timothy. She did not distance herself. She called Timothy “fantastic” and said the event “should never have been permitted to take place.” She then introduced a claim that women had been “pushed to the back” - a claim the event organisers called ‘totally untrue’ and for which no evidence was ever produced.

The leader of the official opposition went further than the original post. She did not merely tolerate the culture war. She accepted it, amplified it, and fabricated details to sharpen it - in the same week she launched her local election campaign.

That is a clear departure from Conservative Party history. Edward Heath sacked Enoch Powell for the “Rivers of Blood” speech. William Hague forced John Townend to apologise for claiming immigration was making Britain a “mongrel race”. And Iain Duncan Smith sacked Ann Winterton for telling a ‘joke’ that involved a Pakistani man being thrown out of a train window. Previous Conservative leaders understood there was a line. Badenoch has decided the line is the strategy.

So, why exactly are they doing this?

Most media commentary on this issue focusses on the surface facts, and misses the underlying structural drivers.

That coverage rightly acknowledges that the Conservative Party is locked in an existential fight with Reform UK for right-wing voters. But it usually fails to mention that under First Past the Post, that fight is all or nothing. There is no mechanism for two right-of-centre parties to push their own agendas _alongside_ their political neighbours. Under FPTP, one will win the seat. The other will get nothing. So, recognising that Reform has the momentum with voters right now, the Tories face a difficult choice: either absorb Reform’s voters or be destroyed by them.

That is why Timothy’s language is indistinguishable from Farage’s. It is not ideological drift. It is a structural incentive. FPTP forces mainstream parties into a race to the bottom with their closest opponents - and the only way to win is to become indistinguishable from whichever of them appears to have the upper hand. The electoral system is dragging the official opposition toward the politics of the far right.

And once they get there, what stops them?

Not Parliament. Timothy’s post was on X, not inside the Commons. It drove a week of national debate, forced exchanges at PMQs, and positioned the entire Conservative Party - all without a single word being uttered in a place where rules, standards or accountability apply.

Not the standards system. There is no mechanism to hold a shadow cabinet member accountable for describing a lawful religious gathering as an act of domination. No committee hearing. No investigation. The only remedy on offer was Starmer demanding Badenoch sack Timothy - which she refused.

Former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve put it plainly. If the demand that such events “shouldn’t happen again” applies only to Muslims, he said, “it is an act of discrimination against them without any lawful basis. To achieve it you would have to enact discriminatory legislation targeted at Muslims. Is this what Nick Timothy is advocating?”

A former Tory law officer, spelling out that his own party’s position logically requires religious discrimination. And still: no democratic mechanism to do anything about it.

The triple system failure

This is a story about three systems failing at once. An electoral system that incentivises the race to the bottom. A democratic infrastructure that has no way of holding politicians accountable for choosing the bottom of the barrel. And a ballot box that cannot function as the last line of defence - because the same electoral system is designed in a way that presents most voters with Hobson’s choice every election.

Think about what happens when you go to vote at a general election. Millions of us are cajoled into voting tactically - backing the least-bad option rather than the candidate we actually want. In seat after seat, voting against a party’s bad behaviour is a luxury the system does not permit. And for the millions whose votes are simply discarded - wasted in safe seats where the result is a foregone conclusion - the ballot box is not a mechanism of accountability at all. It is an empty ritual.

The problem is not just Nick Timothy. Politicians will always chase votes. Ambitious ones will always court media attention. The problem is a system where chasing those votes and courting the media means mimicking the far right, where doing so carries no democratic consequence, and where even the voters who object have no reliable way to make it count.

But there’s hope…if we’re prepared to take a stand.

That is why Open Britain is fighting for fundamental reform of our democratic system. It’s a dry, technical subject, far too tedious for most ordinary people to think much about while they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their families. But, as this episode demonstrates, it is a matter of fundamental importance to everyone who wishes to have a say in their own future, or at least not to have that future dictated by small group of well-funded and well-connected extremists.

If you believe we should all have access to fair information on which to make our democratic decisions; should have fair influence over the issues in the national debate and the people who make the rules we live by; that all our votes should count so they deliver fair representation in Parliament; and that those in power should be held to the traditional rules of British fair play, then you’re on our side. Join us…we’ll be glad to have you on board.