Less bigotry and more scrutiny, please

Martin Shipton

The other day I was shocked to read a post on X from Andrew RT Davies. Against a smirking picture of the man himself that may have been taken in his kitchen, he had written: “Conservatives will ban election campaigning in foreign languages.”

Beneath the picture and the message was a slogan stating: “Standing up for the Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend.”

There are various points to be made, which I’ll return to in a moment.

But my first thought was to email my editor and express incredulity at RT’s post. I wrote: “Can that really be official Tory policy?”

He responded with a link to a Sky News story which read: “Election campaign leaflets and posters published in foreign languages would be banned ahead of polling day under Tory proposals.

“The Conservative Party is hoping to make it an offence to distribute election material that it says is ‘not native to the British islands’.

“The party has tabled an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill that would achieve the change if passed.

“Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: ‘Campaigning with different messages in a foreign language is a deliberate ploy to exclude those who do not speak that language. It is not in the service of integration. It is about cynically driving a wedge between groups.’”

Sky News’ story made it clear that the move had come after unsubstantiated claims of “dirty tricks” during the Gorton and Denton by-election campaign last month. A Green Party leaflet had been printed in Urdu and Bengali on one side and English on the other – a fact seen as “very controversial”.

Bigotry

My initial reaction was to despair yet again at the bigotry of RT and to deplore his use of racism for political ends. On reflection, though, I found the fact that this horrible attempt to stigmatise minorities had already become official Tory policy deeply disturbing.

With all the challenges facing Wales and the UK as a whole – made significantly worse by idiots like RT and Kemi Badenoch who campaigned for Brexit – do the Tories have nothing more substantial to offer than this spiteful attack on people who are more comfortable reading political leaflets in their mother tongue when it isn’t English?

Surely we should want such people to participate in our democracy rather than cutting them off from exposure to it.

What is especially reprehensible about communicating political ideas to people in the language they best understand? There seems to be the implication that messages are being conveyed in Urdu and Bengali that are not being conveyed in English, and that English-speakers are being excluded from the messaging as a result.

I don’t read Urdu or Bengali, as it happens, but I haven’t seen translations from those languages of what was said in Green Party leaflets distributed during the Gorton and Denton by-election campaign that differ from what was being said by the same party in English.

Much of the messaging concentrated on the evils of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, logistically supported by successive Tory and Labour governments.

But why stop at banning political leaflets? Why not ban all forms of written and verbal communication in languages other than English? And ban foreign language books, while you’re about it: reading them is decadent and could turn you into a polyglot. Heaven forbid.

Family voting

This leads to a further point about so-called “family voting”, where members of a family go into a polling booth together and vote in accordance with the patriarch’s instructions – issued presumably in a language that Reform UK eavesdroppers couldn’t understand.

Greater Manchester Police say they found no evidence of such conduct on polling day in Gorton and Denton and won’t be taking the matter further. But is anyone surprised that Muslim voters would vote against the bigotry they encounter from Reform UK and, increasingly, from the Tories? Do Farage and Badenoch really think that young Muslims would vote for them given half a chance?

What RT and the rest are doing, of course, is seeking to appeal to racists who would rather people who prefer to read leaflets in Urdu and Bengali weren’t here at all.

To its shame the Conservative Party, in its pathetic bid to ape Reform UK, is endorsing such sentiments.

‘Foreign’ languages

RT’s attack on “foreign” languages also includes Welsh, of course. Just like Reform when it announced its list of Senedd candidates and refused to use the new constituencies’ Welsh names, RT has insisted on stating that he stands up for “Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend” rather than the official Welsh version of its name, Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg.

He’s going out of his way to make it clear that he has no respect for the Welsh language. It would be good to think that anyone in the constituency who has been educated through the medium of Welsh, or who simply supports language rights, accords RT the same level of respect on polling day and votes appropriately.

This week’s YouGov poll suggested that he and all other Tory MSs but one could lose their seats in May. In a way they deserve such an outcome for letting Reform seize the initiative and drag centre right politics to the extreme right.

Instead of offering a compelling alternative vision, the Conservatives have glimpsed Reform’s success and tried to become a part of it by adopting its policies. In Wales, the most egregious example has been the relentless attack on the Welsh Government’s Nation of Sanctuary programme, the vast majority of whose budget has been spent on resettling refugees from Ukraine following Putin’s brutal invasion of their country.

The way the Tories, who when it was launched supported the programme, have turned against it and sought to mischaracterise it as handouts for small boat people is unforgivable.

‘One Nation Tory’

In the 19th century, Disraeli was the Conservative Prime Minister who devised the concept of a “One Nation Tory” who stood for reconciliation rather than division. There’s an element of idealism in it, of course, but that applies to left wing philosophies too.

We’ve had compassionate Conservatives in the past, with David Melding perhaps the best example. But the writing was on the wall for his kind of Tory when he decided to stand down in 2021 because otherwise he would have been deselected in favour of a hard right caricature.

Today most of such caricatures have defected to Reform, while those in the party who’d be inclined to stand up for One Nation Conservatism have all but given up the ghost.

“Get Brexit Done” may have been a successful rallying cry in 2019, winning the now largely irrelevant Boris Johnson a comfortable majority. But it unravelled in 2024 when Starmer’s Labour Party won a stonking majority with just 33.7% of the vote.

The new Senedd after the May election is likely to be deeply polarised. A Plaid-led administration would benefit from an intelligent opposition that provides scrutiny and critical thinking of the kind the likes of David Melding used to bring to the table. There’s small chance of that now.