The British Political-Media Class’s Mainstreaming of the Populist Radical-Right

Julian Petley explores how hard-right views have increasingly been normalised as the ‘common sense’ of the more mainstream right

Photo: Alamy

Last year, the BBC received a complaint from Richard Tice, then Leader of Reform UK, that an article in one of its news reports had referred to his party as “far-right”, which he argued was “defamatory and libellous”. The corporation immediately apologised and removed the offending sentence. Tice also claimed that his lawyers had warned other media organisations from describing his party in these terms.

As a presenter on GB News, Tice regularly rails against the BBC, while the Reform Party is committed to abolishing the licence fee, so his complaint could not be described as exactly disinterested. It did, however, provide a useful opportunity to consider the extent to which right-wing populism can be said to have entered the bloodstream of right-wing parties in the UK, and the media outlets that vociferously support them.

In both Europe and the United States, there has been an influx of radical right-wing ideas into the political mainstream in recent years. ‘Mainstreaming’ takes place when traditional right-wing parties increasingly address the same issues as radical right-wing ones, and do so in a similar way. This is particularly the case given the increasing dominance in the political agenda of socio-cultural issues such as multiculturalism, identity politics, and ‘culture wars’. Sentiments that used to be exclusive to radical-right parties have increasingly become to be presented as the ‘common sense’ of the more mainstream right.

In this way, the boundaries between the two have become blurred and porous.

As the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde puts it in his book The Far-Right Today, the radical-right “does not stand for a fundamentally different world than the political mainstream; rather it takes mainstream ideas and values to an illiberal extreme”.

If you are not a subscriber to Byline Supplement, but have subscribed to Byline Times’ monthly print edition, you can read the rest of this article by logging on here:

Byline Supplement subscribers, please read on…