How a ‘Populist’ Media Has Mainstreamed the Far Right

In March 2024, Richard Tice, then leader of Reform UK, complained to the BBC that an article in one of its news reports had referred to his party as “far-right” and that this was “defamatory and libellous”.

The BBC 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, although this has not deterred independent outlets such as HOPE not Hate and Byline Times from doing so.

Of course, Tice is a presenter on rival channel GB News and regularly rails against the BBC, while Reform itself is committed to abolishing the licence fee, so his complaint was not exactly disinterested. It does, however, furnish a useful opportunity to consider the extent to which populism can be said to have entered the bloodstream of right-wing parties in the UK and the media that vociferously support them.  

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Mainstreaming the Radical Right

It is now a commonplace that, in both Europe and the US, recent years have seen an influx of radical right-wing ideas into the political mainstream.

Mainstreaming takes place because 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 of the political agenda by socio-cultural issues — multiculturalism, identity politics and culture wars. Sentiments that used to be exclusive to radical right parties have increasingly become the “common sense” of the more mainstream right, and the boundaries between the two have become increasingly blurred and porous.

As Cas Mudde puts it in The Far Right Today (2019), 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”. 

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Enter populism

This process is frequently described as a turn towards populism, but before going any further, it’s necessary to define the sense in which the term “populism” is being used in this article. 

Briefly, populism valorises “the people”, which it conceives as a unified and homogenous whole (as in, for instance, the “silent majority”). A good example of this in the UK context would be Nigel Farage crowing on Brexit night that “this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people”. 

“The people” are defined in opposition to an out-of-touch, unrepresentative “Establishment”, or more commonly in the UK, “liberal elite”. This typically includes the mainstream media (“fake news” in Trump-speak, 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”, 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 who are represented not simply as being not of “the people” but as a distinct threat to them — for example asylum seekers, migrants, people of colour, travellers, LGBTQIA+ people, the “woke”, and so on and on. 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”.

 Finally there is an admiration for charismatic leaders and the increasingly fashionable “strong man” not bound by democratic niceties. In its right-wing incarnations, which are certainly the dominant ones in the UK, populism may support democracy, at least in principle, but it is fundamentally opposed to the key institutions and values of liberal democracy, because these have granted too much power to institutions which are neither elected nor controlled by “the people”.

Such values include respect for minority rights, the rule of law and the separation of powers, whereas 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.

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

As Mudde puts it in Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (2007), 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.

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Matters of Definition   

So, if these are the kinds of ideas that have entered mainstream political discourse in the UK, either through newly created parties (Reform), or through infusing sections of existing right-wing parties (the Conservatives), or via media such as GB News, the New Model Telegraph and 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 indeed supplanted?

This is an important question, not simply because of Tice and his expensive lawyers, but because if the argument is that mainstream right-wing political discourse has shifted to the right, it’s important to try to ascertain just how far it’s gone.     

“Extreme right” won’t do, because it signifies a political position that is openly hostile to democratic processes — which is the main reason why Nigel Farage is desperate to distance Reform from English Defence League co-founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, even at the expense of alienating Elon Musk.

“Far-right” raises the question of “how far?” and also omits the key populist dimension. Thus Mudde’s formulation in ‘The Far Right Today’ of “populist radical right” is the one that has been adopted here, even if some on the left disapprove of right-wing parties and ideas being described as radical. 

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Denialism

These considerations are particularly important in the light of the fact that there are many on the right who take every opportunity to deny that any shift at all has taken place. Indeed, they appear to believe that sentiments expressed in Parliament and in national newspapers cannot, by definition, be described as anything other than centre right (which is thus becoming 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. And equally inevitably we turn to Daniel Hannan who, in the Telegraph, 9 September 2018, in an article headlined ‘Britain is an island of contentment in an EU driven by Brussels to populist revolt’, asks: “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, witness the headline ‘Britain is an anachronism as the world goes right’ over an article by Douglas Murray on 8 June 2024, or a piece by Rod Liddle a week later headlined: “Why Britain isn’t following Europe rightwards”. That such parties have traditionally found it hard to make headway in the UK because of first-past-the-post and both Labour and the Conservatives doing  their utmost to outflank them on the right, particularly on immigration policy, is of course conveniently ignored.

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‘Mainstream, Insightful and Perfectly Decent Political Views‘

Another opportunity to deny that any kind of ideological shift has taken place on the right was provided by the publication in February 2023 of the controversial review by Sir William Shawcross of the Prevent strategy.

This complained that in the case of Islamism, Prevent focussed 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”. 

Thanks to judicious leaks, the right-wing press had an absolute field day with this aspect of the report. For example, MailOnline, 11 February, with the aid of extremely selective quotation of material from Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU), managed to provoke 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”. 

Similarly, the article  revealed that the report had mentioned a Prevent training course that had included an article by HOPE not hate which mentioned columns by Murray (Spectator), Liddle (Sunday Times) and Melanie Phillips (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”. 

Then, when home secretary Suella Braverman made a statement to the House of Commons on 7 September updating on the delivery of Shawcross’s proposals she complained that:

“RICU had failed to draw clear distinctions between mainstream conservative commentary and the extreme right. People like my Rt Hon Friend the Member for North East Somerset [Rees-Mogg] and 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 illustrates, among other things, is precisely the importance of making the distinctions between the different shades of right-wing views discussed earlier on. Clearly those of Rees-Mogg et al. do not fit into the extremist mode, as they are not anti-democratic, and in considering them as 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, pace Shawcross, this could actually suggest that Prevent should cast its net wider than the extreme right and consider the possible radicalising consequences of exposure to populist radical right ideologies as well. (Cue howls of rage from the Conservatives and Reform and their media allies, and hasty distancing by Labour). 

Furthermore, just because the views of Murray and co cannot accurately be described as extreme right, it by no means follows that they’re “mainstream, insightful and perfectly decent” either. After all, in a YouTube interview in November 2023, in which he discussed Muslims and the police, Murray stated that the latter have clearly “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”.

And just for good measure he added: “I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here”. [I could give many more examples of his views].

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The Ubiquitous Populist

Discussion of these press pundits leads us, finally, to considering in more detail the role of the media in the mainstreaming of populist radical right ideologies.

Obviously the arrival of GB News in June 2021 and 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 to the BBC and ITN it would be 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, 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 and established a bridgehead with the right-wing press by hiring presenters from the Telegraph (formerly Christopher Hope, now Camilla Tominey) and Mail (Andrew Pierce), as well as providing the right-wing press commentariat as a whole with yet another platform on which to air its views. (It remains to be seen how Ofcom deals with the issue of politician presenters in the wake of GB News’s success in getting some of Ofcom’s findings against the channel judicially reviewed).

What in fact has happened here is that the populist right-wing values associated with these papers, plus the Sun, Express and parts of The Times, have simply migrated to television courtesy of Sir Paul Marshall, aided and abetted by Ofcom.

Although the Telegraph has taken a truly vertiginous leap to the populist right, it’s 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 (1993) that the press “could not have been more fawning had it been state controlled”.

And as I pointed out in my contribution to the edited collection Populism, the Pandemic and the Media (2021), it’s never been enough to describe sections of the press as simply Conservative — they are also quite specifically authoritarian populist. It is thus entirely unsurprising that they, and particularly the Telegraph, should be so obviously drawn to Reform, particularly given the increasing likelihood of either a pact or merger with the Conservative populist right.

Of course, far fewer people read such papers today. Moreover, many of their values (except on immigration) are increasingly out of kilter with public opinion, as reliably measured by the British Social Attitudes Survey. 

However, we underestimate the ideological and political power of the right-wing press at our peril, for at least three reasons.

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The Power of the Populist Press

Firstly, its 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. 

Second, the stories with which it leads daily all too readily tend to set the broadcast news morning agenda, particularly that of the BBC, which also devotes considerable time to largely uncritical morning press round-ups.

Third, populist press pundits are heavily over-represented on BBC panels of one kind or another. This was amply confirmed by recent research from 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 (but mainly press) spectrum, namely Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph and TalkTV), Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRadio), Kate Andrews (Spectator), Tim Stanley, also a regular on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day (Telegraph), Tominey, (Telegraph and GB News), Fraser Nelson (Spectator), Melanie Philips (The Times) and Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday).  

But the final point is this. It may indeed be the case that, as a result of all the factors considered in this article, populist radical right discourse has made its way into not only the political and media mainstream but also into the public domain more generally.

But that most emphatically does not mean that what appears in right-wing daily papers in the UK, however much they may dominate the national press marketplace, represents “public opinion” in any meaningful sense, nor that the papers are merely responding to or reflecting it.

What in fact 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 ventriloquism act, it works politically, and so the process of normalising populist right-wing discourse continues apace.         

• This will shortly be published in the collection, Pandering to Populism? Journalism in a Post- truth Age, edited by John Mair, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler, Ray Snoddy and Richard Tait, published by Bite Sized Books.