This briefing paper asks if it makes sense any more to isolate the far Right from a reconfigured, identitarian and traditionalist hard Right. It attempts to do so by providing a detailed but easily accessible account of how far-right ideas have already passed into the mainstream and what we can do to push back against them.
Five-and-a-half decades ago Enoch Powell MP was dismissed from the Tory shadow cabinet for saying morally, socially and politically unacceptable things about immigration and ‘alien hordes’ ‘taking over’ the country in the most lurid, inciteful language.1 On 3 October 2023 the then home secretary and would-be next Tory leader Suella Braverman was warmly received at Conference for decrying a ‘hurricane of mass immigration’, calling the Human Rights Act the ‘Criminal Rights Act’, and that she stood with ‘the hard-working common sense majority against the few …the privileged woke minority, with their luxury beliefs’, which included saying that a man can be a woman.2
We hope that our briefing paper will contribute to a politics of solidarity that targets disinformation online and in physical spaces and pushes back against the scapegoating of minorities by identifying the real roots of the social and economic problems facing us all.