The rightwingers who now dominate the Conservative party see enemies everywhere they look. In parliament, “collaborators” with the European Union, who will force Britain to “surrender”. Behind them, shadowy financial backers such as George Soros, singled out by Jacob Rees-Mogg as “remoaner funder-in-chief”. In the universities and the media, the promoters of “cultural Marxism”, an alien ideology that must be rooted out, according to Suella Braverman. And above all, an unaccountable liberal elite that stands in the way of the hopes and aspirations of the British people.

Once these claims were mostly to be found on the far right – but the current Tory leadership has placed them at the heart of mainstream discourse. Consider the new home secretary, Priti Patel, who casually caricatured the politicians opposed to her as the “north London metropolitan liberal elite” in a conference speech that drew outrage from some quarters and passionate defence – or rushed excuses – from others. Her choice of words, as many pointed out, echoed a classic antisemitic trope: “north London” is often a shorthand for Jews; “metropolitan liberal elite” isn’t far off from “rootless cosmopolitans”.

The destination is a revived hard-right populism, narrow in focus, pumped-up, aggressive

But there is more to what the Tories are doing than offensive language – and the road map to it can be found in Patel’s cartoonishly hardline performance. The destination is a revived hard-right populism, narrow in focus, pumped-up, aggressive, that will define the Conservatives long after Brexit.

Those whose “will” the Tories intend to enact are “hardworking, honest, law-abiding people whose needs are humble, whose expectations are modest and whose demands of their government are simple”. Patel’s policy proposals, such as they were, consist largely of signalling. It’s not clear how an “Australian points-based immigration system” differs from the UK’s current points-based immigration system – but it’s a good shorthand for immigration controls that police incomers by wealth and ethnicity and mete out savage treatment to unwanted refugees.

County lines drug dealing, singled out for a crackdown, involves horrific exploitation and abuse but also – conveniently for rightwing press and politicians – fits a racialised image of crime-ridden inner cities infecting more respectable areas. Promises of tougher sentences, combined with more powers and weapons for police, add to the mood music.

Play Video Priti Patel says she will end free movement of people – video

The message is clear: the Conservatives will protect the people – from the criminals and immigrants who would do them harm, and the elite liberals who would enable it.

At a moment of crisis and with an election looming, the Tories are pinning their hopes on a replay of the populist authoritarianism that won Margaret Thatcher the 1979 election. Patel’s declaration that the Tories are “the party of law and order again” suggests that their campaigning on domestic policy will be simple and brutal: tougher criminal sentences and tougher borders; measures to keep ordinary British citizens safe that the unpatriotic Labour leadership is unwilling to take.

In fact Patel directly invoked Thatcher, who “knew that if you made the British people your compass, if you took time to understand their lives and priorities, then your direction would always be true”. In admiring tones, Patel described Thatcher’s understanding of ordinary common sense: “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, live within your means, pay your bills on time, and support the police”.

The Conservatives may wish to emulate past glories, but they face radically different circumstances. The political theorist Stuart Hall was one of the few analysts on the left to recognise from the outset that Thatcherism represented a profound shift in the terms on which British politics were conducted. For Hall, it was a new form of rightwing populism that drew on familiar themes – law and order, race and immigration, discipline in schools – but assembled them in a new way that spoke directly to what millions of people experienced in their daily lives.

In the 1970s, according to Hall, what people were frustrated by was a postwar social democracy that had run into serious economic trouble, a Labour party caught between representing working-class interests and policing workers on behalf of capital. It was easy to turn people against “socialism” and promise a restoration of order at a time when socialism, for many people, was synonymous with stagnation and an overbearing state bureaucracy.

But 2019 is not 1979. The Conservatives want to tap into voters’ fears and frustrations once again, but now they cannot name the real causes – because they are the cause.

Unlike the 1970s, we are not nearing the end of 30 years of relatively prosperous social democracy. Instead, we are finishing a decade in which Conservative-led governments have destroyed public services in order to preserve an economic ideology that was revealed to be bankrupt by the crash of 2008.

People’s lived experience of Britain today is of a country that is physically and socially fraying at the seams: one of budget cuts, youth centre closures, hospital waiting lists, food banks, soaring homelessness, holes in the road. Councils – Tory-run councils – have gone bankrupt. In so many walks of life, people right now are likely to be feeling that the safety net in which they once trusted has been ripped away.

A journey in search of the north London metropolitan elite Read more

But for the Conservatives to acknowledge this would mean acknowledging their own responsibility. So instead blame must be directed elsewhere: criminals, immigrants, anyone standing in the way of “getting Brexit done”. The Conservatives have no option but to engage in this pantomime authoritarianism, because they simply don’t have anything else to offer. For a party gearing up to fight a general election in the next few months, it was striking that they had almost no policies to announce at their party conference last week.

This may be a pale imitation of Thatcherism’s authoritarian turn, but it has the potential to be even more vicious. Populism doesn’t just need a “people” to speak for, it needs an enemy – and Patel and her party are happy to name it, however reckless their language.

While commentators debate their intentions – do they mean to invoke these poisonous tropes? – the real question is not about their choice of words. All this talk is in the service of something more forceful than language: it constructs a shifting and shapeless category of people who stand accused of working against the interests and security of the nation. That is violent imagery, and the Conservatives seem at the very least indifferent to the kind of emotions it will stir up, or the people who might be willing to act on them. Its effects will likely be longer-lasting and harder to remove than the current government.

• Daniel Trilling is editor of New Humanist and author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe