The rise of the far right is an awful but inescapable fact of modern politics. Across the world, in supposedly stable and moderate democracies as well as volatile ones, in mainstream and fringe parties, new and old media, and the minds of many voters who don’t consider themselves extremists, far-right ideas are circulating and growing.
Immigration is ruining society. Net zero is a conspiracy against the people. Promoting diversity is a perversion of the natural order. Traditional patriotism is the only real patriotism. Liberals should be purged from the state bureaucracy – otherwise, national decline is inevitable.
Prominent conservatives often co-opt these bleak arguments, which are frequently only more alarmist versions of their own. From Margaret Thatcher to Kemi Badenoch, Tory leaders have echoed the far right because they’ve seen it as an electoral threat, basically agreed with it on an issue, or both. In Britain and beyond, the line between the right and far right has for decades been much more blurred than believers in conservatism’s civilised qualities like to suppose.
For the centre left, and especially centre-left governments, the far right presents a more fundamental problem. Centrists are meant to be against extremism, especially the kind of confrontational, simplistic and often impractical politics in which the far right specialises. Many people vote for centre-left governments because they believe they will provide calm, consensual leadership in turbulent times.
Yet centrism is also about compromise with forces that centrists believe can’t be beaten. During Tony Blair’s government, that meant free-market capitalism. During Keir Starmer’s, that means the anti-EU, often inward-looking and illiberal strand of English nationalism, which includes the “millions of people concerned about immigration” whom he highlighted in his Labour conference speech this year, and whose preoccupations he carefully described as “legitimate”.
Not all these voters – regarded as crucial by Labour, the Tories and Reform UK alike – are far right in their entire political outlook. But consciously or not, these voters have absorbed the far right’s favourite, highly questionable argument that immigration is central to this country’s problems – as opposed to, say, inadequate public spending or an ever-more unequal economy.
Despite the frightening quality of this often xenophobic politics for many of the minorities Labour traditionally represents, so far the Starmer government has rarely challenged this narrative. Only when people involved with or influenced by the far right have broken the law, as in the summer’s race riots, has the government been assertive. And even then, rather than accompany the arrests with a proper, sustained condemnation of rightwing extremism and the myths it propagates, Starmer offered only a few terse, formulaic-sounding words, attacking “far-right thuggery”. The much broader problem of anti-immigrant prejudice went unaddressed.
Instead, last month Labour accused the Conservatives of conducting an “open borders experiment” when they were in office – echoing an argument long made by Reform UK. In the short term, Labour’s decision to attack the Tories from the right on immigration is clever politics, highlighting the hypocrisy and incompetence behind recent Tory governments’ tough talk. But in the longer term, Labour risks putting itself in a morally compromised, politically awkward and quite possibly unsustainable position: deferring to the far right and many of its concerns, to the dismay of many core Labour voters, while remaining distrusted by some reactionary Britons as a latecomer to the borders issue, and loathed by others as irredeemably liberal, whatever Starmer says or does.
Similar dangers come with the government’s approach to Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni and the growing number of far-right-influenced leaders and leaders-elect around the world. After last month’s US election, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, tried to dismiss his past description of Trump as a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”, from when Lammy was a backbencher, as “old news”. Instead, he said the Trump and Starmer administrations would be able to find “common ground”.
Foreign relations are rarely wholly ethical, especially for newly isolated and vulnerable countries such as post-EU Britain. But always trying to appease what is likely to be a bullying and erratic Trump regime, rather than sometimes standing up to it, could be disastrous for Labour and Britain. The credibility of Blair’s premiership, and much else, was destroyed when he did not distance himself from George W Bush’s grandiose and reckless hard-right presidency. Trump’s second term may be similar, but worse.
Is there a better way for Labour to avoid being overwhelmed by the far right and its ideas and offshoots, at home and abroad? Starmer and key allies such as his strategist Morgan McSweeney argue that “delivery” – a typically dry Starmerite term – of improvements to the everyday lives of Britons will undermine the appeal of rightwing populism, which offers unworkable “easy answers” to the country’s problems.
As an assessment of the far right’s governing abilities, this seems shrewd enough. From Brazil to the US, the world is littered with the failed promises of rightwing populist governments, such as Trump’s unfinished and ineffective Mexican border wall.
Yet given the far right’s increasing media influence, with once tweedy establishment papers such as the Telegraph now ultra-partisan and apocalyptic in tone, the bettering of millions of lives by the Starmer administration – if it happens – may be underreported and insufficiently noticed by voters, however much Labour tries to highlight it by the “measurable milestones” he announced last week. To acknowledge that a dour centre-left government has actually produced some successful policies, and deserves re-election, would be unusual in our era of anti-incumbency, impatience and addiction to political drama.
Relying on “delivery” to defeat the far right is also another way for Labour to avoid condemning it as malign in itself. The lack of electoral damage to Trump from Democrats calling him a fascist suggests, depressingly, that many voters who weren’t alive during fascism’s 20th-century heyday don’t take warnings of its recurrence seriously.
But if Starmer doesn’t define his premiership against the far right, at least to some extent, then his government – already a vague and ethically compromised project in the eyes of many – will continue to confuse, underwhelm, and shed leftwing and liberal support. And the far right will continue to strengthen and demand more. Bullies can always sense weakness.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
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