In today’s post-industrial Britain, a strange contradiction has emerged and dominates public life, the people most harmed by capitalist structures have become their fiercest defenders. Working-class communities gutted by deindustrialisation, privatisation, and austerity turn not against capitalism itself, but against migrants, benefit claimants, and “woke” culture. Rather than directing rage upwards, toward the class that owns and governs the economy, resentment is directed sideways or downwards. This is not the result of ignorance in a narrow sense, but the effect of a deep and sustained ideological capture, one engineered through right-wing populism and dog-whistle politics.
The British working class has, for decades, been subjected to a process of political demobilisation, cultural atomisation, and economic abandonment. Right-populism does not fill this vacuum with coherent policy, nor does it offer liberation. It offers identity, grievance, and the illusion of control. In doing so, it has become one of the most effective tools in the maintenance of capitalist hegemony, ensuring that those most oppressed by the system continue to defend it, often with fervour.
This essay examines how right-wing populism in the UK functions as an ideological weapon, distorting class consciousness, obscuring economic structures, and turning social discontent into a reactionary force that defends the very system responsible for widespread immiseration.
I. The Manufacture of Consent in a Post-Thatcherite Britain
The groundwork for contemporary right-populist capture was laid during the Thatcher era, when trade union power was broken, heavy industry was dismantled, and neoliberal ideology was entrenched as common sense. Thatcher famously declared, “There is no such thing as society,” initiating an era in which class solidarity was replaced by individual responsibility, and poverty was framed as moral failure.
What followed was a deep restructuring of the British economy and cultural psyche. Working-class identity was hollowed out, leaving behind a demographic often described in patronising terms, “left behind,” “white working class,” or “red wall voters.” These phrases obscure the material reality, the deliberate destruction of organised labour, the devaluation of social housing and public services, and the disciplining of dissent through unemployment, media propaganda, and surveillance.
Right-populism does not challenge this order. Instead, it rehabilitates it by shifting blame. Economic suffering is no longer the result of capitalism, but of “Brussels bureaucracy,” “political correctness,” or “unchecked immigration.” In this way, the ideology works, the class enemy is rendered invisible, and the political imagination is locked within the very system that produces the crisis.
II. Dog-Whistle Politics and the Architecture of Scapegoating
Dog-whistle politics in the UK operates through coded language that appeals to reactionary sentiments without stating them explicitly. Terms like “British values,” “law and order,” “welfare scroungers,” and “illegal migration” function as ideological triggers. They provide emotional clarity and tribal cohesion while keeping deniability intact.
This is most visible in the discourse around immigration and multiculturalism. For example, rather than discuss the structural causes of housing shortages, such as land banking, right-to-buy policies, and privatised development, the narrative is shifted to “mass immigration putting pressure on services.” In truth, immigration often sustains public services, especially the NHS, but the story told by populists is one of zero-sum scarcity, where “we” must defend our dwindling resources from “them.”
Likewise, when right-populist figures attack “the liberal elite” or “unaccountable bureaucrats,” they are not referring to CEOs, hedge fund managers, or the private financiers who bankroll Westminster politics. Instead, the term is used to describe academics, civil servants, or even BBC presenters, cultural elites rather than economic ones. The real sources of power, ownership, and economic control are obscured. Capital is made invisible, and cultural grievance becomes the battleground.
III. The Role of Ideological Illiteracy and Educational Deprivation
Most people in Britain are not taught how capitalism works. They are not given tools to understand rent-seeking, surplus value, financialisation, or the history of class struggle. Political education is absent from the school curriculum, and economic theory is presented as apolitical. This is not an oversight, it is a design feature of liberal capitalist democracies.
Without a framework to interpret their material reality, people reach for the narratives available to them. These come from tabloids, social media echo chambers, and right-wing punditry. The tabloid press in Britain, especially the Daily Mail, Sun, and Express, has played an enormous role in shaping popular ideology, turning complex economic processes into moral panics and racialised fear.
In the absence of collective class identity, individuals are told to identify with the nation, the flag, the monarchy, or even the billionaire entrepreneur. Thatcher’s “aspirational” working-class dream has metastasised into a culture of upward envy, where working people defend billionaires like Elon Musk or Alan Sugar while condemning benefit claimants as scroungers.
This confusion is not the product of stupidity. It is the result of decades of propaganda, deliberate underinvestment in civic education, and a media system controlled by capital.
IV. Brexit as Right-Wing Populist Masterstroke
The 2016 Brexit referendum represents perhaps the most successful example of right-populist ideological capture in modern British history. Working-class communities, devastated by four decades of neoliberalism, were offered a target for their despair, the European Union. The Leave campaign, dominated by elite interests like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and hedge fund donors, promised to restore sovereignty and “take back control.”
But control over what? British sovereignty had long been undermined not by Brussels, but by the internal logic of global capitalism, outsourced labour, deregulated finance, privatised infrastructure, and weakened unions. Brexit did not reverse these trends. If anything, it intensified them.
Yet the narrative held. Why? Because it spoke to something real, an experience of powerlessness, economic betrayal, and cultural marginalisation. Right-wing populism does not succeed because it is correct, but because it is emotionally resonant. It offers certainty in a world of precarity, and blame in a world where causes are obscured by the abstract violence of markets.
V. The Future of Resistance and the Recovery of Political Imagination
To break the cycle of ideological capture, the left in Britain must do more than expose hypocrisy. It must rebuild the political imagination. That means reconnecting politics to material life, demystifying economic power, and offering a vision of society that is not rooted in nostalgia or scapegoating, but in solidarity, equality, and democratic ownership.
This requires more than electoral politics. It demands grassroots education, the revival of working-class cultural institutions, and the development of alternative media ecosystems. It requires creating spaces where class consciousness can develop outside of the suffocating boundaries of Westminster and Whitehall. The old Labour Party approach, which sought to triangulate right-populist sentiments rather than challenge them, has been decisively defeated. The left cannot win by mimicking its enemies.
Moreover, we must move beyond the language of reaction. The goal is not merely to rebut right-populist claims, but to render them irrelevant by changing the terrain of struggle. This means organising around housing, wages, climate justice, and ownership. It means building forms of dual power, cooperatives, unions, mutual aid networks, that demonstrate a different logic of social life.
The task is enormous. But the stakes are nothing less than whether the working class continues to fight for its own liberation, or defends the forces that destroy it.
Conclusion: Populism as Counter-Revolution
Right-wing populism in the UK is not the voice of the people. It is the echo of power, refracted through the prism of culture war, nationalism, and imperial nostalgia. It is capitalism’s survival instinct, camouflaged as revolt. And unless it is named as such, confronted not just morally but materially, it will continue to seduce, confuse, and capture those whose futures depend on the very system’s overthrow.
To fight right-populism is not merely to oppose bigotry, but to rescue the idea of class struggle from the wreckage of neoliberalism. It is to ask again, whose interests does this system serve, and what kind of world might be built in its place?
No comments:
Post a Comment