This is the state of play in Britain at the close of 2025. The Prime Minister communicates daily on a website whose owner promotes race war on the streets of the country he governs. Mainstream newspapers spent the summer salivating with excitement at the prospect of anti-refugee riots. Frontbenchers in Parliament express their horror when they don’t see “another white face” in a town. Commentators debate whether brown people can be English. Former PMs trade in crazed online conspiracy theories. Broadsheet columnists demand that we expel all Muslims from Britain.
We are the frog in the boiling water. On a day to day basis, the change seems hard to accept. If you say that Britain is becoming a far-right country, it seems hysterical, even mad. But if you were to take any one of these developments and communicate them to someone just a few years ago, it’s you they would have thought mad. That’ll never happen, they’d have said. Not in Britain.
In fact, three separate but related developments have taken place which served to bring far-right ideas into the British mainstream. They are the result of three men, with very similar beliefs, operating at different levels of the populist project: Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
The first and most important development was the purchase of Twitter, now X, by Musk in 2022. Musk’s political views can no longer be a matter of debate. He offers the Nazi salute, he appears as a guest at Tommy Robinson protests, he co-ordinates with the far right worldwide. Surely we can now conclude that he is on the far right.
Nor is there any remaining debate over how he uses the site to achieve political aims. Verified pro-Nazi accounts flourish. Robinson had his account reinstated, allowing him to co-ordinate violent protests across the UK. The site’s algorithm was then changed to downgrade progressive content and promote extreme far-right content.
Since then, liberal and left-wing voices have left the website in droves. They simply could not accept the moral indignity of helping an openly far-right businessman make money. But even if they had stayed, Musk’s algorithm buried their content, making the decision functionally irrelevant.
That exodus was not followed by the mainstream. Politicians from the three major parties stayed. Keir Starmer remained on the site, as did Kemi Badenoch, and even Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who has accused Musk of “inciting violence”. The Government only recently began a review of using X for communication purposes, despite firm evidence showing it to be a networking and co-ordination mechanism during the far-right riots of 2024.
Ministers and MPs took their cue from party leaders and stayed on the site. Most journalists did the same. This includes print reporters, broadcasters and columnists. But perhaps more importantly, it also included editors, producers and bookers on radio and TV current affairs shows. These are the unsung figures who set the news agenda. They decide what gets debated on morning TV and local radio phone-ins. They decide what people will hear as they drive to work or try to get their kids ready for school. Most of them spend their days trawling through social media looking for topics to cover on the programme. And now that decision was based on the conversation on a site dedicated to spreading far-right messaging.
This process took on a new urgency when Trump became president. His victory corresponded perfectly to the narrative on X. It seemed to suggest that right-wing populism was the true and authentic voice of the people. It presumed that even where populism had been beaten into retreat, its return was inevitable. Most importantly, it meant the most powerful political position in the world was now occupied by a figure of the far right. He would use it to cajole and humiliate other leaders unless they followed his agenda.
Trump launched an extreme political agenda, the likes of which we have simply never seen in American democracy. He had already tried to undermine an election result and launch a coup. Now he has ignored court orders, launched a mass deportation programme, cut a swathe through the state bureaucracy, attempted to replace independent figures in civic society with loyalists, and attacked freedom of speech on television and on campus.
In the main, these effects were felt in the US. But each one of them had the secondary effect of shifting the boundaries of political debate in Britain.
This is how the Trump effect has always functioned. If a British pundit had gone on BBC News and argued for a ban against Muslims in 2015 they would have been considered a bigot and never invited back. But in 2016, Trump’s promotion of precisely that policy meant BBC News would actively look for people who believed such a thing, or were at least prepared to publicly defend it, so that they could debate it. Before you knew it, such ideas became part of respectable discourse. Trump’s re-election this year put that process on rocket boosters.
This shift in the parameters of debate benefited no one as much as Nigel Farage. The timing was perfect. Reform had just done surprisingly well at the 2024 election. The party gained traction from people’s anger at the Conservatives’ record in government and their disappointment at Labour’s performance. It was ideally suited to pick up disillusioned voters’ anger at the system.
The extent to which Reform has polled well has been somewhat overstated. YouGov has the party hovering around the 25 to 29 per cent mark over the course of the year. This is a solid performance – possibly enough to win power – but not exactly an indication that Reform has won the hearts of the country. The fact Farage enjoys a strong lead on these sorts of numbers is symptomatic of a shattering of national support into five parties rather than the usual three.
Reform’s leader then became the local broadcasting unit of the populist worldview. Over and over, he would dictate the behaviour of the leadership in the mainstream parties. It was Farage who whipped up public concern over small boats. Tories and Labour now fall over themselves to provide ever more hard-hearted solutions. It was Farage who first tried to extend the conversation to indefinite leave to remain. Now all the parties want to tighten the system, making it even harder for people to integrate into the UK. British politics has become a reflection of our most reactionary political leader.
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With X defining the national conversation from San Francisco, Trump making daily global news from Washington and Farage promoting the same narrative in the UK, a right-wing conveyor belt has developed. Socially liberal ideas are barely ever expressed. They have become unsayable, a symptom of an unfashionable “woke” worldview. But regressive ideas are widely promoted and subject to ever more extreme expression.
This is the core story of 2025: the far-right takeover of British political discourse. On a day-to-day basis we barely notice it. But when you step back, and see the extent to which our national conversation has degraded, it becomes shocking how quickly a country can lose sight of its better nature.
This new political culture is making us vicious, irrational and unkind. It is turning us into a small, narrow-minded, cold-hearted country; 2026 can be a better year – but only if we demand that those in the political and media mainstream reject these websites, this language and these ideas.
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