Talking the Talk of the Far-Right
Dan Clayton on why the Left adopting the language of the Right never works
There is a concept in linguistics called Communication Accommodation Theory that might be familiar to you. According to Howard Giles, the British-American social psychologist who developed the theory, all users of language tend to shift their linguistic behaviour, converging (towards) or diverging (away) from others, depending on what they want to achieve. Sometimes we might want to distance ourselves from others and show them (and maybe a wider audience) that we are not like them. Perhaps more frequently, and because we are social animals at heart, we might want to signal our solidarity and affiliation by shifting our language style closer to another person. I do it, according to my daughter, when I talk to our regular postman about 1980s post-punk bands on the doorstep most Saturday mornings.
Away from these individual and interpersonal moments, there have been some particularly notable public examples of politicians attempting to converge to what they perceive to be their constituency’s language style and tap into the ‘authenticity’ of the vernacular. What better way to keep it real, than by using the speech style of someone else? When George Osborne was out on the campaign trail in 2013, visiting a Morrisons supermarket warehouse, his glottalised and ‘tapped’ Ts, along with his elided wannas and gonnas raised a few eyebrows and smirks.
But it’s not just Eton-educated Second Lords of the Treasury and heirs to the Osborne baronetcy who feel the need to speak the lingo of their potential electorate: Tony Blair’s vaguely Estuary speech style, mimicking the accent of London and the southeast, was a far cry from his Edinburgh and Durham roots. Even state-educated Ed Miliband went a touch more Cockney when interviewed in 2015 on Russell Brand’s channel in the days when Brand was seen by some as a voice of the left, before he went down the rabbit hole and serious allegations against him came to light.
But it’s a different kind of linguistic accommodation that’s been more noticeable on the political stage in the last decade: one that is less about smaller scale vocabulary and sound choices and more about wider discourses and narrative framings. Instead of adapting to the speech styles of the working-class base that they have been gradually drifting away from politically, many parties that might be broadly described as ‘social democratic’ have been adopting the language of the right and even far-right in an attempt to shore up their falling vote share.
Here’s why that can prove to be a massive mistake.
‘Dancing to the Devil’s Tune’
When talk on the right has turned to ‘stemming the flow’ of migration, ‘clamping down’ on welfare spending or retreating from the ‘green crap’ of climate and net-zero pledges, the centre-left have often tried to prove their electability by converging towards these framings and talking tough.
Back in 2015 we had those notorious ‘Controls on immigration’ mugs produced by the Labour Party and now we get the spectacle of Keir Starmer and other Labour frontbenchers invoking the language of border security when discussing immigration, equating people smugglers with terrorists and vowing to “smash the gangs”.
Presumably (so the thinking must go in the centre-left focus group debriefs), if the left can be seen to talk tough on these issues (and others like welfare policy and the economy), the working-class voters who have deserted them will come flooding back, red wall and all. The trouble is that this is wrong on two counts: politically and linguistically.
It is undeniably true that social democrats have seen their vote share plummet across Europe in the last twenty years but while popular wisdom states that the working class has deserted the centre-left and found a new home on the right or far-right, some studies suggest that it is a more complex picture than that.
The research brief, The Myth of Vote Losses to the Radical Right, published in early January 2024 by the Progressive Politics Research Network, examines patterns of voting data across Europe and finds that “social democrats have lost the largest share of voters among the more educated” adding that “while social democrats have lost many voters to abstention, these voters then do not move on to the radical right”. It concludes by saying that “Our findings also speak against the idea that strategies to win back working-class voters from the radical right by taking more anti-immigrant or other less progressive positions will work for social democratic parties”.
Of course, part of this picture is that the working class has changed: it is more ethnically diverse and the nature of the work that the working class does has altered. The industrial base has largely gone and there is a heightened sense of precarity in an economy of zero-hours contracts and service industries. Many media representations of the working class tend towards what it was, not what it truly is now.
So, does talking the language of the right lead to tacking right in a policy direction, and will that work? According to a 2022 paper by Werner Krause, Denis Cohen and Tarik Abou-Chadi in the journal Political Science Research and Methods, there is “neither general nor conditional support for the claim that accommodative [language] strategies significantly reduce support for the radical right. To the contrary, voters are on average more likely to defect to the radical right when mainstream parties adopt anti-immigration positions” and their findings suggest “that positional accommodation is fruitless in the best case and can be detrimental in the worst case”.
A quick look at recent election results in the Netherlands and Sweden bears this analysis out. When parties around the centre tack right, the real winners are the radical and extreme right – literal fascists and neo-Nazis in many cases. In Sweden, the far-right Sweden Democrats secured more than 20% of the vote and a foot in the door of a right-wing coalition after a campaign full of rhetoric from the centre about cracking down on crime and restricting immigration. In the Netherlands, the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) has been shifting right on immigration since the mid 2010s, but in the most recent General Election it was Geert Wilder’s far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) who reaped the reward, gaining the largest number of seats of all the parties and its biggest vote share in history. As one expert on the far-right, Cas Mudde, noted, if you campaign on the far-right’s issues, the only victor is likely to be the far-right. Dancing to the devil’s tune is hardly going to end well.
So, talking the language of the right is not working politically, and it isn’t working linguistically either. Writing in the Journal of Political Ideologies in July 2021, Katy Brown, Aurelien Mondon & Aaron Winter note that there has been much attention given to the far-right’s attempts to enter the mainstream by detoxifying its language, or as they put it, “discursive ‘softening’ or reconstruction implemented by far-right parties, tapping into new registers and adapting, discarding or concealing old ideological beliefs” but not enough thought on what the ‘mainstream’ actually is or the active role it plays in accommodating to far-right language and ideas.
Brown, Mondon and Winter make the point in their paper that while many political researchers have looked at whether moving right politically is electorally effective against the far-right (spoiler alert: it isn’t), they have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which even moving into their discourse space – talking about race and immigration on the far-right’s terms – is a threat. They argue that “it is crucial to acknowledge that this is not just about electoral competition, as such politics and political shifts have violent and real effects for those at the sharp end of these discourses”. That sharp end, if we need reminding, is violence, intimidation and even mass killings.
None of this is to say that the left shouldn’t talk about these issues, but how do we talk about them, and put forward a convincing counter-narrative, without parroting the right’s language and framing?
Work done by the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) in 2022 on messaging around politics, particularly around issues of racism, migration and xenophobia, suggested that progressives were failing to communicate their ideas and that right-wing narratives were often well understood by the public and often seen as persuasive. “We are losing the debate,” it said bluntly, because “we often legitimise damaging frames, such as echoing the sentiment that Britain is in the midst of a war of cultural values; we mimic our opponents by counterposing race and class and siloing issues”.
The alternative, according to CLASS, is to use a ‘value – problem - solution’ structure and language that acknowledges the diverse nature of the working class, roots it in togetherness and shared values, rather than division, and expresses a vision for the future. It might sound a bit happy-clappy from my account of it, but the detail in CLASS’s UK Race Class Narrative Report is impressive, full of practical examples and has been piloted successfully in focus groups.
When AC Grayling talked in Byline Times of the right-wing being more successful in forming governments “because they are better organised, more focused, clearer and simpler in their aims, and unburdened by too many principles”, he could easily have been talking about their messaging as much as their policies, but that does not mean those opposed to the far-right need to adopt the language of the far-right to win the argument.
Of course politics is more than just language, but so much of politics is done through language that it’s down to progressives to find ways to use it to communicate with its current, former and potential voters, or the future looks very bleak indeed.
Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre in London. He has taught English for more than 20 years and is the author of Attitudes to Language, co-author of Language Diversity and World Englishes and co-editor of Knowing About Language. He runs @EngLangBlog on Twitter and Bluesky and is part of the Lexis podcast team.
A clear and convincing argument which I have long suspected to be the case. Thank you for providing the evidence to support the commentary on this issue.