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To what extent is Reform UK a populist party? - Coggle Diagram

- - - - p.7
        Describes Reform as a version of more mainstream national-populist synergies.
      - p.14
        Does also state that Reform's official communication tends to fit a more traditional nationalism than the explicit civilisationist statements of Robinson or Britiain First.
        However, Farage has adopted a more civilisationist doctrine, through examples such as stating that "what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture" (find this quote)
        
        Guardian
        https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/18/nigel-farage-calls-for-reindustrialisation-of-britain-and-higher-birthrates
        
        Nigel Farage has called for the “reindustrialisation” of Britain and “180-degree shift” to reverse the declining birthrate, as he praised the “Judeo-Christian culture” that he claimed underpinned western civilisation.
        
        E. Courea, 'Nigel Farage calls for reindustrialisation of Britain and higher birthrates', The Guardian, Internet edition. 18 Feb 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/18/nigel-farage-calls-for-reindustrialisation-of-britain-and-higher-birthrates [Accessed 3 Nov 2025].
      - R. Soborski, M. Garapich, A. Jochymek, 'National populists of Christian Europe, unite! Exploring civilizationist alliances in the British far right', Ethnic and Racial Studies, (2025), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2554752
    - - ANTI-EU AND REFORM UK
        p.100
        "There is alsoremarkable continuity between the places that previously backed UKIP and those whichnow back Reform. Even though the salienceof Brexit as an electoral issue has faded, thereis little to indicate that the divides that under-pinned support for leaving the EU have dissi-pated, with immigration once again high onthe political agenda."
        
        p.96
        "The ﬁve seats that Reform won were amongst the most pro-Leave con-stituencies in the 2016 referendum. However,rather than a simple linear relationship, theassociation is curvilinear, indicating thatReform did disproportionately well in themost Leave areas."
      - p.97
        "The ﬁrst thing to notice is that the best pre-dictor of Reform’s performance in 2024 isUKIP’s performance in 2015."
        
        p.97
        "The association between class and supp-ort for Reform is positive, albeit somewhatweaker. This implies that support for Reformin 2024 is slightly higher in working class areas ..."
        p.98
        "... than support for UKIP was in 2015, indicatingthat Reform has deepened its base more inareas of the country that are more working class than places that are more middle class>"
      - DEMOGRAPHICS OF REFORM UK
        p.94
        "Reform voters were slightly lesswhite than UKIP voters (though they arestill overwhelmingly white). Reform voterswere also more educated, slightly more likelyto own their own home and had slightlyhigher incomes. The most important differ-ences between UKIP and Reform voters—and something that explains the very differentimpacts they had on the overall electionresults—is their political history."
      - ELECTION STATS
        p.91
        "THE 2024 UK ELECTION delivered the largestswing against a sitting government everrecorded, seeing the Conservative vote shareplummet by twenty percentage points as theywere swept out of ofﬁce, crashing to just121 seats. However, even more unusually, themain beneﬁciary of the government’s collapsein popularity was not the principal party ofopposition—Labour, whose vote share increasedby just two percentage points—but a challengerparty. Under the banner of Reform UK, NigelFarage’s rebranded outﬁt secured more than4 million votes—14.3 per cent of the total votescast—winning ﬁve seats in the process."
        
        SUCCESSFUL POPULIST PARTY
        "In 2024, Reform performed better than anychallenger party has ever performed. In 2019,the Brexit Party gained just 2 per cent of thevote. Meanwhile, the best general electionperformance for the UK Independence Party(UKIP) came in 2015 when the party ﬁnished inthird place with 3.8 million votes and 12.6 percent of votes cast, winning just one seat. Now,nearly ten years later and following the tumul-tuous impact of the Brexit referendum on theUK party system, there are once again around4 million voters backing Farage."
      - O. Heath, C. Prosser, H. Southall, P. Aucott, 'The 2024 General Election and the Rise of Reform UK', The Political Quarterly, 96, 1 (2025), 91-101. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13484
    - - FAR-RIGHT RALLY
        p.148
        "Just over three weeks after the election, on 27 July, thousands of supporters of far-right activist Tommy Robinson filled Trafalgar Square in central London after a march.4 In 2018, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon had described Robinson as ‘not just a guy but a movement in and of himself [who] represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons. … He is a force of nature … not built to be managed’.5 At the time, Bannon was forming a Europe-wide far-right campaign group – and had been in touch with Boris Johnson.6 Addressing the rally, Robinson claimed it was the ‘biggest patriotic rally’ in the UK. He had organized it as part of his efforts to create a far-right street movement off the back of the large vote for Farage at the General Election. Robinson asked the crowd: ‘How many people here voted for Labour?’ and ‘How many people here voted for the Conservative Party?’, with both questions eliciting boos from the crowd, while a sea of hands and cheers followed the same question for Reform UK.8 He revealed he had asked Farage to speak at the protest, but the Reform UK leader told him he ‘couldn’t make it’."
        
        FAR-RIGHT RIOTS
        p.149
        "Three days after the rally, on 30 July, there began a week of far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots. A message, believed to have originated in Liverpool, told followers: ‘THEY WON’T STOP COMING UNTIL YOU TELL THEM … NO MORE IMMIGRATION. MASK UP. SPREAD THIS AS FAR AND WIDE AS YOU CAN’, along with a dozen fire emojis.10 Between 30 July and 7 August 2024, an estimated 29 anti- immigration demonstrations and riots took place across 27 towns and cities in the UK.11 Many of these were extremely violent, with participants attacking mosques and hotels housing people seeking asylum.12 Flash mobs tried to set buildings alight and cars were stopped to check if the occupants were ‘white and English’ before letting them pass.13 Others were pulled from their cars.14 Viral video footage showed far- right rioters blocking traffic in North Yorkshire.15 The area was described at the time as a ‘no go zone’ for Black and Asian people.16 The Independent has provided horrifying details that include a Black man beaten by a mob, an Asian man stabbed at a train station, mosques under siege and Muslim graves vandalised,17 while footage shared online appeared to show rioters dragging an Asian man, believed to be a taxi driver, out of his car in Hull, while hurling racist abuse by repeatedly yelling ‘P**I’, and damaging the vehicle.18 In Liverpool, Father Peter Morgan, the priest of St Anne’s Church, which hosts an immigration centre that featured on a far-right ‘hitlist’, said that people there who were seeking asylum had been ‘terrified, absolutely terrified’, and his church had to be boarded up, as police on horseback patrolled the nearby streets.19 Morgan described as ‘nonsense’ calls for the country to ‘defend’ its Christian values: ‘It’s actually crazy what they’re saying and here we are having to defend our Christian church. It just doesn’t make sense. All we’re doing is actually helping to feed the hungry.’"
      - FAR-RIGHT FOREIGN INCITEMENT
        p.150
        "When the stabbings happened, the far- right conspiracy theorist Silvano Trotta, who lives in Strasbourg in France, posted false information to the messaging app Telegram that the attack was carried out by an immigrant who had arrived on a small boat and that his name was Ali Al Shakati (a fake name).25 An investigation by Sky News shows that his post was one of the most influential of any of those making similar misleading claims on Telegram. When Tom Cheshire, Data and Forensics Correspondent for Sky, pointed out that this was ‘entirely false’, Trotta responded ‘Who doesn’t make mistakes? But whatever happened, he is still a migrant, even if he was born in Wales’.26 Trotta had been banned from a number of social media sites, including Twitter, but became reinstated when Elon Musk rebranded it as X. Trotta posts mainly about immigration. Working with the organization Prose,27 which monitors more than 10,000 extremist and conspiracist groups on Telegram, every day collecting and archiving everything they post, Sky News found that the people flooding Telegram and other platforms of misinformation were ‘largely based outside the UK’: ‘What it shows is the nature of the new far-right – not a tightly organised hierarchy based in a specific location, but an international network of influencers and followers, working together almost like a swarm to stir up trouble.’"
        
        ORGANISATIONAL MODEL
        p.150
        "Rather than specific organizations, it is a ‘crowd-sourced model’.29 Inciting those on the ground was a specific goal of the online far-right, according to ..."
        p.151
        "... Al Baker, at Prose: ‘These are communities which are expressly specifically and in a very dedicated and organised fashion devoted to exploiting racial divisions internationally.’30 Tellingly, he goes on: Any incident which could plausibly involve an immigrant, a Muslim, someone who isn’t white, regardless of whether in fact they did it or not, these communities are going to kick into action and try and stoke up division and racial hatred … [in this case] to incite a race war on the back of the Southport murders.31 Baker explains that they are ‘fully paid-up neo-Nazis who want to see the extermination of non- white people’."
      - TWO-TIER POLICING
        p.149
        "In the midst of the riots, Farage condemned the violence, at the same time stoking it up by suggesting the escalation in violence came as a result of ‘soft policing’ during ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in the summer of 2020 (see Chapter 4).21 He went on to claim that ever since then, the impression ..."
        p.150
        "... of two-tier policing has become widespread. As always, Farage proceeded to blame immigration for everything: The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal. Yet to attempt to debate this in the public arena leads to immediate howls of condemnation. A population explosion without integration was always going to end badly. I have said this for many years. We must have a more honest debate about these vital issues and give people the confidence that there are political solutions that are relevant to them.22 Farage also stated wrongly, ‘What you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, London or Southport is nothing compared to what could happen over the course of the next few weeks.’23 In May, he had said that Muslims do not share British values."
      - p.152
        JOHN MCDONNEL QUOTE
        "To understand why the riots have taken place and how to respond to them, you have to start by looking at who has been involved. Drawing on other historical examples, it looks like a classic fascist mobilisation. At the top are leading demagogues, the political provocateurs, willing to exploit any issue for their political advantage no matter what the consequences for the people or communities involved. Beneath them are a relatively small phalanx of hardline foot-soldiers, who have been trained and involved in fascist groups like the English Defence League over the years. These are the true-believing fascist muscle behind the riots. Then there is a larger group: the disgruntled, the dispossessed and the disillusioned. This is the combustible material that the fascists target to set alight: people who are so discontented with their lives – with so little hope, with so little understanding of the real forces that drive our society – that they are prey to the simple, beguiling message that someone else is to blame for how they feel."
        
        p.152
        "He goes on, ‘All the leaders have to do is point the finger at whichever group is the scapegoat this time round and wait for a spark, an incident, to set the tinder ..."
        p.153
        "... alight. The truth of any incident doesn’t matter. It’s what they can convince people of.’41 The General Election campaign provided the ideal environment for far-right politicians to bring the anger ‘to boiling-over point’.42 The solutions must be to call and confront the demagogues and those in mainstream politics who are exacerbating the anger, along with those using social and conventional media to make things worse, and crucially to address and solve the issues of the neglected sections of the working class with 14 years of austerity having produced 14 million people living in poverty, including four million children, a housing crisis, collapsed and broken public services, McDonnell goes on, and a ‘grotesque visible level of inequality generating a sense of unfairness overall’.43
      - BADENOCH CIVILISATIONIST
        p.153
        Badenoch has railed against identity politics and ‘wokeism’. A ‘culture wars’ warrior, she has called for a defence of ‘British values’ and a crackdown on immigration. She has also been accused of Islamophobia. In September 2024, she declared that she found the election of five progressive independent MPs in the 4 July General Election more worrying than the rise of Farage’s Reform Party.53 The MPs, four of them Muslims elected for the first time, and the fifth, non-Muslim Jeremy Corbyn, denounced her for ‘an outrageous slur’.54 Badenoch had said: ‘I was far more worried about the five new MPs elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics; alien ideas that have no place here. The sort of politics we need to defeat and defeat quickly.’5
        
        ISLAMIST TERM
        p.154
        "‘Islamist’ is a term for fundamentalist Muslims and is commonly used by Islamophobes, including the far right, to refer to all Muslims. Later in September, Badenoch proclaimed: ‘We cannot be naive and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not.’57 Forced by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to clarify these comments made in the Sunday Telegraph, she said, ‘I actually think it extraordinary to think that’s an unusual or controversial thing to say.’58 After a discussion which focused on Badenoch stating that she was struck by the number of recent immigrants who hate Israel, she was asked by Kuenssberg which cultures she was referring to. Badenoch stated, ‘I know what you’re trying to do, Laura, you want me to say, “Muslims,” but it isn’t all Muslims, so I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to play this game.’"
        
        p.155
        "During the aforementioned Black Lives Matter protests when many politicians were ‘taking the knee’ (see Chapter 4) to show support for the cause, Badenoch had viewed all this as a pernicious ideology that portrays ‘blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression’.60 Later in 2020, she declared war on Critical Race Theory (CRT), claiming in Parliament that the ‘ideology’ informing Black Lives Matter derives from CRT."
      - BADENOCH CONFERENCE
        p.157
        "At a conference organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC, whose backers include Paul Marshall, one of the owners of GB News) in London in February 2025, Badenoch pronounced that ‘ “our country and all of western civilisation will be lost” if efforts to renew the Tory Party and drive forward right wing ideas globally fail’.75 She also likened her own leadership to Trump’s, attacked Keir Starmer for once ‘taking the knee’ in support of ‘Black Lives Matter’, and described ‘pronouns, diversity policies and climate activism’ as a ‘poison’ (cited in Quinn, 2025). Also attending the conference were Nigel Farage and Canadian right- winger, Jordan Peterson (co-founder of ARC and vocal supporter of Tommy Robinson) who has described climate activism as a ‘totalitarian lie’76 and supporters of far-right parties in Germany, Austria, Spain and Hungary, including its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán."
      - M. Cole, 'Postscript: Election 2024 – Labour Wins, Far-Right Riots and the Tories Elect a New Leader', Racism and Austerity (Bristol University Press, 2025), 148-158. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18323811.14
    - - Brexit and Sovereignty
        https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09615768.2016.1250465?needAccess=true
        
        p.344
        "During the referendum campaign there was yet further engagement with the idea ofsovereignty. Afforded ﬂeeting attention was Cameron’s proposed (or at least, announced)‘sovereignty bill’,4 which might presumably have offered some upgrade on a 2011 edition‘sovereignty clause’. Yet the details of this sovereignty bill never emerged—beyond thecounterintuitive suggestion that it would have included provisions to enhance the positionof the domestic judiciary through the creation of a ‘constitutional court’5—and this nowseemingly lies (along with much else) on the political scrapheap. The idea of sovereigntywas not only deployed in these suggestions of the remain-campaigning government thatwe could take further domestic steps towards its better preservation while retaining EUmembership. On the leave side, we saw something tantamount to sovereignty hysteria,reﬂected in that campaign’s catch-all rhetoric of ‘Take Back Control’, and, most ludicrously,in declarations that exiting the EU would amount to an ‘Independence Day’ for the UK"
        
        M. Gordon, 'The UK’s Sovereignty Situation: Brexit, Bewilderment and Beyond', King's Law Journal, 27, 3 (2016), 333-343. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09615768.2016.1250465
  - - - NATIONAL POPULISM DEFINITION
        p.1
        "National populism has emerged as a defining feature of contemporary politics, propelledby narratives of crisis, betrayal and cultural siege. While national populism’s ideologicalcomponents are often loosely, if not contradictorily, arranged, the idea at its core is inbroad terms consistent: national communities, once robust and in charge of their home-lands, are now in decline, betrayed by self-serving elites, destabilized by mass immigra-tion, and eroded by multiculturalism and globalization. This desperate vision underpinsa project of cultural and political renewal framed in oppositional terms and directedtoward reclaiming sovereignty. At the same time, national populism has itself been subject to the transformations it contests and has adapted to changing demographic, geopolitical and technological conditions. One such adaptation consists in a shift awayfrom a strictly national to a civilizational discourse. In other words, national populists increasingly mobilize identity claims not solely on the basis of nationhood, but also interms of broader, ostensibly transhistorical and transnational cultural groupings usually articulated through idioms such as “Christianity”, “the West”, or “Europe.” This “civiliza-tionist” turn (Brubaker 2017) has enabled a selective politics of inclusion, where certain ..."
        
        p.2
        "... migrant or minority groups – for European populists, they are typically white migrantsfrom other European countries – are incorporated into the national-populist imaginaryas culturally proximate allies, while others remain excluded as existential threats. Thisideological maneuver allows for new modes of engagement with some immigrant com-munities, thereby challenging dominant analytical binaries that position national-populistpolitics and migration as intrinsically opposed phenomena."
      - DYNAMIC POPULISM
        p.2
        Core of the analysis is that populism is a dynamic and not a fixed caterogry/ideology. It is dependent on the circumstances locally, nationally and internationally. Currently, the main issue is immigration as its the biggest socio-poliitcal transformation.
        Also criticises if a skeleton structure of 'the people' against a 'corrupt elite' is a platform for an ideology. Then focuses on the binary between left and right populism.
        
        DISTINCTION NEEDED
        "To make sense of it, at the very least a dis-tinction needs to be made between left- and right-wing populisms, where the formerdefine the antagonism between the people and the elite in class terms, while the latterrevolve around nationhood and ethnicity. The right-wing incarnation – national populism– incorporates populist, authoritarian and nativist elements, but the degree to whichthese coalesce into a coherent doctrine varies between specific articulations."
      - p.3
        National populism has adapted away from strictly national discourse to a civilisational discourse. There is now the ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’. The corrupt elite collaborating with hostile others who seek to disrupt the way of life of the pure people.
      - Civilisationist Examples
        
        Framing Islam as an Existential Civilisational Threat
        Examples show of the possibility of Islam taking over
        
        p.11
        "Fransen addresses the Polish community living in Britain,proclaiming: Britain and Poland are under attack. We have a common enemy and thatenemy is Islam. This statement is followed by a series of evocative images suggestingan Islamic threat to the West: a masked individual holding a placard that reads “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD”, large groups of Muslims in prayer and others in militaryuniforms and balaclavas seemingly engaged in combat training. Fransen goes on: Thisbarbaric ideology is tearing across the world causing destruction, terrorism and genocide.And of course, Poland is no stranger to the dangers of Islam"
        
        Asserting and Defending Christian/Western Culture
        Inciting fear of Christianity diminishing and supporting the defence of it
        
        p.10
        "Most of Britain First’s programmatic statements revolve around traditional nationalistthemes as when the party announced that under its rule “British history, traditions, cultureand customs will be promoted and given their rightly place at the centre of nationallife”.12 Declaring itself “a movement of patriotism, nationalism, conservatism and tradi-tionalism”, Britain First promises “a national revolution in priorities, where the state utilises all of its resources for the benefit of the British people only”.13 However, the party’s cam-paign to “defend Christianity” provided discursive opportunities for a more civilizationisttone. One of Britain First’s main programmatic documents asserts: “Britain is a solidlyChristian nation with a long and glorious Christian heritage”.14 Accordingly, resistanceto immigration is framed as part of the fight for the Christian civilization under threat:“Christians will become a minority in Britain on the current demographic trajectory”.15 The argument is then projected onto the West more broadly, beginning with the asser-tion: “Christian traditions, values, morals and ethics have underpinned the development of Western civilisation”."
        
        "In the eyes of Reform’s Polish members, Poles embody Europe, or the West, and are con-trasted with some other minorities living in Britain. Our respondents brought to the forethe civilizationist view of the Western, and especially British, culture as fundamentally open and liberal (Brubaker 2017) and hence superior to others but also uniquely vulner-able – Brits […] are tolerant to the point where they’re going to tolerate themselves out of existence (Jan) – as well as echoes of the “great replacement” conspiracy, as with Jerzy who said he was “very concerned” about
        "the amplification of the number of people that they [Muslims] have on the ground, you know,and they can have four wives and they can bring their wives […] So: “we have enough kids, we vote ourselves into power and then we change everything from within”. So it’s a Trojan horse thing (Jerzy)."
      - R. Soborski, M. Garapich, A. Jochymek, 'National populists of Christian Europe, unite! Exploring civilizationist alliances in the British far right', Ethnic and Racial Studies, (2025), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2554752
    - - POPULISM IDEOLOGY
        p.3
        "The “thin” ideology of populism, which pits a “pure” people against a “corrupt” elite ani-mates many political parties and actors in democracies across the world"
        Focuses on the "Radical right" populist parties tending towards nativism and authoritarianism - they gain "political capital from their ability to mobilize societal discountent over immigration and multiculturalism, their focus on personality, ability to “cut through the noise”, and are adept at positioningthemselves as the opponents of societal elites, who they blame for all of societies’ ills."
        
        FAILURE OF LIBERALISM
        P.3
        "The rise of such parties has benefited from a crisis of “market lib-eralism” from the 1970s onwards, which Hopkin (2020) argues triggered a rise in “anti-system” politics, which acts as a conduit for dissatisfaction with the state of public ser-vices, basic provision of important goods, and the condition of the economy (Hopkin2020). Despite this, they often endorse economically orthodox, or “exclusionary neolib-eral” policies and programmes congruent with those approaches which have fed hostilityto the mainstream parties (Ausserladscheider 2024)"
        
        OPPOSITION TO LIBERALISM
        p.3
        "Populist actors often place themselves in direct opposition to liberalism, and in doingso seek to circumvent democracy – with which they enjoy a “difficult relationship”(Thomas and Jones 2025, 1062). The liberal state consists of (in radical right populists’rhetoric) a vast apparatus designed to maintain the interests of the elites at theexpense of the people (Albertazzi et al. 2025; Mudde and Rovira Kalwasser 2017;Bauer, Peters, and Pierre 2021; Bernhard 2021; Popp-Madsen 2020). Therefore, by dis-mantling the system that upholds the status quo, the people can be liberated from thecontrol of the elite - by a powerful leadership acting on their behalf. As such, populistsand authoritarians, when they attain power, often target, undermine, or ignore therule of law, which represents a key barrier to the achievement of their goals of “liberating”the people such as through placing limitations on the scope of the action of the country’sleadership."
      - p.4
        States that the populist right has been examined primarily in terms of Farage's UKIP and Brexit Party.
      - POPULIST RHETORIC
        p.5
        "Firstly, radical right populist deploy anti-elite rhetoricthat prefigures attacks on democratic institutions (Mudde 2004; Urbinati 2019).Second, populist leaders often use their real or perceived electoral mandate to positionthemselves as the highest legitimate and to justify the departure from liberal norms(Bermeo 2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2017). Third, both phenomena feed off similar con-ditions, high distrust, economic insecurity, and the perception of cultural threat, creatinga climate ripe for democratic erosion (Gidron and Hall 2017; Inglehart and Norris 2016)."
      - S. Kippin, 'Democratic backsliding and public administration: the experience of the UK', Policy Studies, (2025), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2025.2548837
    - - WHITE EXTINCTION
        p.6
        "If the far-right is ideologically diverse, it nevertheless demonstrates consistent overarch-ing themes relevant to its racism and these primarily concern civilization, natalism, and adriving fear of the occultation of whites by others. Thus, anxieties about “white extinction”and the impending collapse of Western civilization constitute key ideological underpin-nings for European and North American far-right racism (Brubaker 2017; Stewart 2020).The reconfiguration by the far right of Western nationalism in terms that can be sim-ultaneously civilizational, ethnic, and racial generates a malleable intellectual space. Theintense focus on migrants, Muslims, and multiculturalism (Mondon and Winter 2020) isvirtually definitive, but it is typically linked to the threat each poses to Western civilization.(The same three targets appear in several non-Western far-right movements, includingHindutva.) The narrative of Western civilizational under siege connects migrant presencewith the degradation of the nation’s life, safety and destiny. Here, ideas of nationalbelonging are not necessarily based on biology but are often informed by a neo-Spengle-rian conception of national culture: organic, spiritual, and civilizational."
        
        p.7
        "Within these, decreasing white birth rates, non-white immigration andracial “mixing” were associated with racial degeneration, national collapse and civiliza-tional decay."
      - SEX AND RACE WAR INCITEMENT
        p.12
        "The theme of sexual violence against young white women and girls is central tothe international popularity of Tommy Robinson and his mobilizations around Pakis-tani Muslim “grooming gangs.” The town of Rotherham in northern England saw thehorrific, massive and organized sexual abuse and exploitation of about 1500 girls overseveral decades starting from the 1990s, with information about the abuse reportedlocally before 2003 and then nationally several times from 2010, most comprehen-sively in 2014. Around eighty per cent of the abusers were men from Pakistani back-grounds. Most girls abused were white and working class, with many of them fromcomplex backgrounds of family abuse, poverty, and drug use (Heal 2003; Jay 2014).While the far-right exploited the abuse using a potent racial politics of gender, the anti-racist response to the Rotherham events was dominated by challenging the narrative of“Muslim grooming gangs” and the racist stereotyping of South Asian men. In August2015, the town saw a brutal racist murder of an elderly man, Muhsin Ahmed. Therehad been over a dozen far right and neo-Nazi mobilizations in Rotherham related tothe sexual abuse in the months preceding the murder."
        
        NON-WHITE PARTICIPATION
        p.13
        "Alongside the ideological diversity described earlier, there has been a “racial” diversifica-tion: virtually all major Western far-right groups and events in recent years have had a sig-nificant presence of non-white figures. Consequently, a critical challenge forcontemporary antiracism is the consolidation of an international “multiracial far right”(HoSang 2024) of a kind that antiracists from the 1970s to the early 2000s did not haveto face in a significant way. Reform UK’s chair is currently Zia Yusuf, a businessperson, a Muslim of Sri Lankanorigin, an ally of Nigel Farage, and the biggest donor to the most electorally successfulfar-right party in the UK for several decades (though Reform UK has strongly contestedthe “far-right” label.) He has been subjected to attacks from different groups of ReformUK supporters, some objecting to his religion, others that he is a “foreigner” (he wasborn in Scotland), others that he is not white (for example, Laurence Fox 2025). Relatedly, Ben Habib of Advance UK favors mass deportations of “illegal” migrantswho he calls “criminals” (GBNews 2025), demonstrating the movement in idiolect from“undocumented” to “illegal” to “criminal.”"
        
        p.13
        "Under the 2025 Trump administration, Vivek Ramaswamy was tasked, alongside ElonMusk, with creating a Department of Government Efficiency. Ramaswamy, an IndianAmerican businessperson and former Republican presidential candidate, represents anauthoritarian politics that is “anti-woke” and driven by conspiracy thinking aboutclimate change, COVID-19, 9/11, and the “Great Replacement” (Corasaniti 2023). His pol-itical views have the shape of those of the far-right, including white supremacists. Ramas-wamy is recognizably a far-right diaspora figure from a “racialized” minority who joinsindividuals like the former Conservative Home Secretary and Attorney General SuellaBraverman, who said that wealthy liberal elites with luxury beliefs were causing massimmigration that was making British culture disappear (Sparrow 2023). If there is littlethat differentiates Braverman’s politics from that of Britain’s white nationalist far-right,it signals how proximity to power “de-racializes” like-minded authoritarians."
      - DRAMATIC IMMIGRATION - RACE WAR
        p.7
        "In this national-civilizational register, threats from migrants are inevitably articulated inoverwrought, apocalyptic, martial terms. As Musk put it after the 2024 far-right instigatedanti-migrant riots in the UK, “Civil war is inevitable” (Elon Musk 2024). Con-temporary racism, whether formally ideological or demotic, is typically catastrophizing,thus generating an affective field of fear and anxiety for its mobilizing power. The apoc-alyptic racial dystopia claimed to exist is expressed in a manner that aims to make it – andlarge-scale civil conflict – real (Harris 2025). The vision of impending civil disorder andsocietal collapse also echoes a persistent far-right theme of “race war.”"
        
        INVASION - LANGUAGE USED
        p.7
        "If Western societies are being “invaded,” then all related political discourse becomesmartial. During a demonstration in Cork in June 2025, a speaker from the far-right NationalParty opposed legitimate non-white migrants and asylum seekers using these words:[Ireland] belongs to the Irish people! It always has and it always will, so long as we are ready tostand up and defend it. So, for those out there who would spit on the sacrifice of our ances-tors, who have betrayed our legacy, let them hear us now. This is our land! This is our home!This is our future, our hopes, our dreams, our ancestors, our legacy! This is our island and italways will be from now until the end of time, so long as the wind blows over our fields andthe rivers flow from our mountaintops, so long as there’s a single blade of fucking grass lefton this island, and a single Irish man only willing to stand up and defend it. (The NationalParty 2025)"
      - C. Bhatt, 'Antiracism and the current moment', Ethnic and Racial Studies, (2025), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2555562
    - - p.539
        "Democracies around the world are facing a rising wave of right-wingpopulism and new nationalism, which often relies on strategic exploita-tion of anti-immigration sentiments. While media have long beenacknowledged as important channels of anti-immigration rhetoric, the evidence of the actual impact of news consumption on attitudes tomigration and support for populist parties is still inconclusive, and largelylimited to pre-digital media ecologies."
      - p.539
        "In many Western countries, the issue of immigration has been one of the most debatedand polarizing topics for several years.1 In Europe, concerns surrounding immigrationbecame particularly prominent after the sharp rise in immigration from war-torn Syria in2015 and remain high to this day (European Union, 2018). Several right-wing populistparties in Europe, from the Alternative for Germany and Marine Le Pen’s National Rallyto Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord, have (re)gained prominence and electoral support on theback of the migration crisis. Strategic exploitation of anti-immigration rhetoric also playeda key role in the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2016 U.S.Presidential election; the “Vote Leave” campaign and Donald Trump’s “Make AmericaGreat Again” campaign both mobilized voters by appealing to anxieties surroundingimmigration (Goodwin & Milazzo, 2017; Hooghe & Dassonneville, 2018)."
      - C. Stětka, S. Mihelj, F. Tóth, 'The Impact of News Consumption on Anti-immigration Attitudes and Populist Party Support in a Changing Media Ecology', Political Communication, 38, 5 (2021), 539-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1820647