The British Political-Media Class’ 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

Last year, the BBC received a complaint from Richard Tice, the 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 about describing his party in these terms.

As a presenter on GB News, Tice regularly rails against the BBC, and 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 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 been presented as the ‘common sense’ of the more mainstream right.

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

As the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde puts it in 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”.

Populism

This process is frequently described as a turn towards ‘populism’.

Populism valorises ‘the people’, which it conceives of as a unified and homogeneous whole (the ‘silent majority’). Nigel Farage’s declaration on the night of the EU Referendum result, that “this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people”, is one example of this.

‘The people’ are defined in opposition to an out-of-touch, unrepresentative ‘establishment’ or ‘liberal elite’. This typically includes the mainstream media (‘fake news’ in Trump-speak; and the BBC in the case of those vociferously lobbying against it); elected politicians (‘in it only for themselves’); public functionaries (obstructive and unaccountable bureaucrats); intellectuals (pointy-headed inhabitants of the ivory tower); the legal profession (‘lefty lawyers’ and judges as ‘enemies of the people’); and international organisations such as the UN (interfering busybodies subverting national sovereignty).

Populism almost invariably involves the identification of out-groups: stigmatised ‘others’ which are represented not simply as being not of ‘the people’ but as a distinct threat to them – asylum seekers, migrants, people of colour, travellers, LGBTQIA+ people, the ‘woke’. In other words, those who are not part of ‘us’. Indeed, what constitutes ‘us’ is defined largely in opposition to those who are ‘not us’.

Populism is also embodied in an admiration for charismatic leaders – the increasingly fashionable ‘strongman’ – not bound by democratic niceties.

In its right-wing incarnations, populism may support democracy, at least in principle, but it is fundamentally opposed to the key institutions and values of liberal democracy – on the basis that these have granted too much power to bodies that are neither elected nor controlled by ‘the people’. Such values include respect for minority rights, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Right-wing populism is anti-pluralist – refusing to recognise the existence of legitimate differences among ‘the people’ and hostile to cultural, religious, sexual, and other kinds of diversity.

Although populism is a key characteristic of many of the radical right-wing ideas that have entered the political mainstream in recent times, it is also necessary to note the ongoing presence of two related, but rather more conventional, ingredients of right-wing ideologies: nativism and authoritarianism.

It has never been enough to describe sections of the press as simply Conservative – they are also quite specifically authoritarian-populist. It is thus unsurprising that they, and particularly the Telegraph, should be so obviously drawn to Nigel Farage’s Reform

As Mudde puts it in Populist Radical-Right Parties in Europe, nativism holds that “states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation state”. Authoritarianism, meanwhile, is the belief in a strictly ordered society in which authority must be respected and deviant behaviour stigmatised and punished.

So, if these are the kinds of ideas that have entered mainstream political discourse in the UK – either through new political parties such as Reform; or through infusing sections of existing right-wing parties such as the Conservatives; or via new media outlets such as GB News, the modern Telegraph, and social media platforms such as X, how can they best be defined so as to distinguish them from the more traditional right-wing ideologies that they have supplemented or supplanted?

This is an important question, not simply because of Richard Tice’s legal threats. If the argument is that mainstream right-wing political discourse has shifted to the right, it is important to try to ascertain just how far it has gone.

‘Extreme right’ signifies a political position that is openly hostile to democratic processes – which is the main reason why Nigel Farage has distanced Reform from the far-right convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as ‘Tommy Robinson’), even at the expense of alienating Elon Musk.

‘Far-right’ raises the question of ‘how far?’ It also omits the key populist dimension.

Thus, Mudde’s formulation in The Far-Right Today of a ‘populist radical-right’ is the one that seems most useful.

Denialism

There are many on the right who deny that any shift has taken place.

They appear to believe that sentiments expressed in Parliament and in national newspapers cannot, by definition, be described as anything other than centre-right (an increasingly vacuous catch-all term).

Inevitably, such voices are over-represented in the right-wing media, and are frequently bound up with appeals to British (or, rather, English) exceptionalism and hostility to the EU.

Daniel Hannan, for instance, asked in the Telegraph in September 2018 – in an article headlined “Britain is an island of contentment in an EU driven by Brussels to populist revolt” – “which EU country now has the most positive view of immigration? Which EU country has no populist anti-immigrant party represented in its main legislative chamber? The answer to both questions is the UK”.

Similar sentiments animate numerous articles in the Spectator magazine. Witness the headline “Britain is an anachronism as the world goes right” given to an article by Douglas Murray last June; or a piece by Rod Liddle a week later headlined “why Britain isn’t following Europe rightwards”.

The publication of Sir William Shawcross’ controversial review of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy in 2023 presented another opportunity to deny the shift, this time in policy terms. The review found that, in the case of Islamism, Prevent focused too narrowly on proscribed organisations and ignored the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism. Conversely, when it came to the extreme right-wing, it argued that Prevent cast the net too wide and captured not only “non-violent far-right extremism, but also examples of centre-right debate, populism, and controversial or distasteful forms of right-leaning commentary and intolerance” which have “no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation” and “fall well below the threshold for even non-violent extremism”.

The right-wing press had a field day with this aspect of the report. MailOnline, for example – with the aid of an extremely selective quotation of material from Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) – managed to provoke the then Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg into accusing its officials of being “infected by wokery and metropolitan political correctness” and complaining that it was “farcical to suggest the mainstream Conservative views I espouse, including Brexit, were somehow music to the ears of far-right extremists”. The piece revealed that the review had mentioned a Prevent training course that had included an article by the anti-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate, which mentioned columns by Murray (in the Spectator), Liddle (in The Sunday Times), and Melanie Phillips (in The Times). This provoked Liddle into expostulating that “it’s an absurdity, an absolute absurdity, that people who might read my columns are in danger of being radicalised”; while Murray protested that “the idea that mainstream writers like me would be used for this cynical counterweight exercise is sickening”.

When the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman made a statement to the House of Commons on the delivery of Shawcross’ proposals, she said that the “RICU had failed to draw clear distinctions between mainstream conservative commentary and the extreme right. People like … Douglas Murray express mainstream, insightful, and perfectly decent political views. People may disagree with them, but in no way are they extremists. Prevent must not risk any perception of disparaging them as such again”.

What this episode illustrated was the importance of making the distinction between the different shades of right-wing views clear. The opinions of the likes of Rees-Mogg do not fit into the extremist mode as they are not anti-democratic and, in considering them extremist, Prevent opened itself up to exactly the kind of dismissal and derision to which papers such as the Mail and Telegraph inevitably subjected it.

But just because the views of Murray and co cannot accurately be described as extreme-right, it does not follow that they are “mainstream, insightful, and perfectly decent”. After all, in a 2023 YouTube interview, in which he discussed Muslims and the police, Murray claimed that the latter had “lost control of the streets. Now, is it time to send in the Army at some point? Probably yes. But, if the Army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very, very brutal … I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here”.

‘Britain’s News Channel’

The launch of GB News in 2021 – and broadcast regulator Ofcom’s remarkable latitude in allowing it to run a coach and horses through the ‘due impartiality’ clauses in its Broadcasting Code – has enabled populist radical-right views to be expressed on television in an unfettered way that, up until very recently, would have seemed quite unthinkable.

Given the channel’s relatively small audience compared with the BBC and ITN, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which it has actually served to mainstream such views – either in the sense of making them available to an audience hitherto unaware of them via other media outlets, or of making them more widely acceptable.

But its most striking features are surely the way in which it has allowed populist politicians – such as Tice, Farage, Rees-Mogg, and Lee Anderson – such relatively unmediated access to the airwaves, establishing a bridgehead with the right-wing press by hiring presenters from the Telegraph (formerly Christopher Hope, now Camilla Tominey) and the Mail (Andrew Pierce), as well as providing the right-wing press commentariat with another platform on which to air its views.

It remains to be seen how Ofcom deals with the subject of politician presenters in the wake of GB News’ success in getting some of the regulator’s findings against the channel judicially reviewed.

But what has happened is that the populist right-wing values associated with the Telegraph and Mail – plus The Sun, Express, and parts of The Times – have simply migrated to television courtesy of (UnHerd, Spectator, and GB News owner) Sir Paul Marshall, aided and abetted by Ofcom.

Although the Telegraph has taken a truly vertiginous leap to the populist-right, it is important to bear in mind that Conservative newspapers have always supported the right wing of the party. This is why they were never happier than during the Thatcher era, leading erstwhile Conservative Cabinet member Sir Ian Gilmour to lament in Dancing with Dogma that the press “could not have been more fawning had it been state-controlled”.

It has never been enough to describe sections of the press as simply Conservative – they are also quite specifically authoritarian-populist. It is thus unsurprising that they, and particularly the Telegraph, should be so obviously drawn to Nigel Farage’s Reform – particularly given the increasing possibility of either a pact or merger with the Conservative populist-right.

Of course, far fewer people read such newspapers today. And many of these publications’ values (except on immigration) are more and more out-of-kilter with public opinion, as measured by the British Social Attitudes Survey. But we underestimate the ideological and political power of the right-wing press at our peril.

The Ventriloquists

Despite their falling print circulation, the right-wing papers’ stories are increasingly conceived as clickbait for a raucous, opinion-driven, online world – which is populist discourse’s natural home and the perfect vehicle for it.

The stories the papers lead on daily all too readily tend to set the broadcast news morning agenda, particularly that of the BBC, which also still devotes considerable time to largely uncritical morning press ‘round-ups’.

Populist press pundits are heavily over-represented on BBC panels of one kind or another. This was amply confirmed by recent research by Cardiff University on the composition of Question Time panels from 2014 to 2023, which showed that the journalists who appeared most frequently all inhabited the populist-right media spectrum: Isabel Oakeshott (of the Telegraph and TalkTV); Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRadio), Kate Andrews (the Spectator); Tim Stanley (the Telegraph), Camilla Tominey, (the Telegraph and GB News); Fraser Nelson (formerly of the Spectator and now The Times); Melanie Phillips (The Times); and Peter Hitchens (the Mail on Sunday).

It may be the case that populist radical-right discourse has made its way not only into the political and media mainstream but also into the public domain more generally. But that does not mean that what appears in right-wing papers in the UK, however much they may dominate the national press marketplace, represents ‘public opinion’ in any meaningful sense, or that the papers are merely responding to or reflecting it.

What they are doing is ventriloquising what they claim to be public opinion – as opposed to the views of those who own and run them, and of their dwindling readerships. But as long as governments and oppositions believe in this act, it works politically.

And so the normalisation of populist right-wing discourse will continue apace.

Julian Petley is a Honorary Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London. This is an edited extract from a chapter of Pandering to Populism? Journalism in a Post-Truth Age edited by John Mair, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler, Ray Snoddy and Richard Taitby, to be published by Bite-Sized Books