How everything became 'far right'

Reform UK is the latest group to be slapped with this increasingly meaningless label

One of the features of our crackbrained society is the growing phenomenon of linguistic inflation – the process by which the overuse and misuse of certain words result in those words losing their true meaning and their impact being thus diminished.

For example, we will often hear the terms ‘amazing’, ‘awesome’, ‘genius’, ‘iconic’ and ‘incredible’ used to describe something or someone quite unworthy of such superlatives. And as the comedian – I can’t remember who – once said, ‘“Legend” once meant pulling a sword from a stone. Now it means returning from the bar with crisps.’

Usually, this type of thing is pretty harmless, and most of us are sharp enough to recognise a bit of rhetorical exaggeration when we hear it. But sometimes the hyperbole can have serious consequences and deserves to be called out.

I think particularly of the tendency of some politicians, commentators and activists to reach for certain controversial and highly-charged words in an effort to denigrate and smear opponents. Terms that once had distinct and widely-understood meanings, and which everyone knew should be deployed in political discourse only when the situation genuinely merited it, are now tossed around so liberally that the real meaning of these terms has been seriously eroded.

‘Hate’, ‘racist’, and ‘bigot’ stand as examples of this. As does (usually) any word carrying the suffix ‘-phobia’ or ‘-phobic’ (the correct meaning of ‘phobia’ being an extreme or irrational fear of something). More often than not, the charge of being a ‘phobic’ of some sort is wholly misplaced. Are those who, for instance, object to biological men identifying as women having the right to enter women’s single-sex spaces ‘transphobic’ – in other words, driven by an extreme or irrational fear of those individuals – or are they simply motivated by concerns over women’s safety, security and dignity? Are those who believe immigration is too high driven by an extreme or irrational fear or immigrants, or are they merely motivated by concerns over a lack of border control and the ability of the country to cope with such unprecedented numbers?  

Perhaps the most egregious example of linguistic inflation is the debasement of the terms ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’. Once upon a time, people knew exactly what these terms meant. They meant skinheads wearing bomber jackets and Doc Martens banging on about ‘Rights for Whites’ and marching through towns with large immigrant populations. They meant Combat 18 and the National Front, conspiracies about Jewish control, Holocaust denial, sympathy for the Nazis, and hostility to pluralism and democracy.

But in recent years, the terms ‘far right’ and ‘fascist’ have, through wilful misuse, been utterly devalued. They have come to mean anything from support for capital punishment to opposition to open borders, from embracing the national flag to disapproval of abortion or same-sex marriage, from gender-critical feminists to critics of radical Islam, from support for Donald Trump to hostility to woke ideology or Net Zero.

We saw a striking example of this at the weekend when the BBC published an online article that described Reform UK as ‘far-right’. Now, Reform UK may be many things – and in a recent discussion with its deputy leader, Ben Habib, I explained why I felt it was not the answer for working-class voters – but to brand it as ‘far-right’ was simply ludicrous. It is essentially a Thatcherite party in favour of low taxation, privatisation, deregulation and generally rolling back the frontiers of the state.

After the party’s leader, Richard Tice, threatened legal action, the BBC removed the reference from the article and apologised for its ‘error’. But the fact that its editors were seemingly content to allow the description to slip through in the first place probably tells us that they hadn’t initially thought it wrong or inappropriate.  

The incident is very much consistent with how institutions stuffed with high-minded progressives treat anyone or anything outside their own narrow worldview. In my book, Despised, I wrote of how I had been in attendance at the Labour party conference in 2019 when a delegate came to the rostrum and, to loud cheers and applause, described Brexit as a ‘far-right project’. It was an absurd statement, and one that no-one with any sense of political or historical perspective could credibly have made. But the conference lapped it up.  

I also wrote of how, later that year, shadow cabinet member Dawn Butler tweeted, ‘The general election has just been called. This isn’t a normal election. It is the fight of our lives to save our country from the far right.’

In her use of ‘far right’, Butler was referring, of course, to the Conservative government – a government that contained figures such as Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, had presided over an explosion in immigration numbers during the previous nine years, and was in every sense about as socially liberally as any party of the Left. But, for Dawn Bulter and her fellow progressive partisans, these realities were obscured by the fact that some senior ministers supported Brexit and occasionally spoke of the need to better protect the country’s borders – or something like that.

After the election, the general secretary of my own union wrote an article that included the warning, ‘We are facing a far-right anti-union Tory majority government,’ (he eventually amended ‘far-right’ to ‘Right-wing’ after I pointed out the ahistoricity of the statement).    

Ironically, Despised itself became a target for militant progressives determined to depict it as a far-right tract – no matter that the book had been written from my own perspective as a long-time trade unionist and Labour party member who had seen his movement abandon working-class voters and desperately wanted it to win them back.

I happened to share the same publisher with one such critic – a commentator on political extremism in the Western world. So uneasy was this person about belonging to the same stable as me that, after Despised’s publication, he publicly threatened to sever all links with the publisher. In publishing my book, the company was, according to him, guilty of ‘mainstreaming and normalising far-right ideas’.

It seems not to occur to these people that attempts to broaden the meaning of accusatory and contentious terms, and to target them at everyday people and opinions, ultimately have the effect of normalising those terms to such a degree that they are rendered meaningless whenever they crop up in debate. This in turn runs the risk of allowing genuine extremists and hardliners to become part of the mainstream. After all, if a large chunk of the population can be labelled as ‘fascists’ or ‘bigots’, or whatever, how do we identity the real ones? And the obvious response of any person so accused would simply be to point out that the accusation is essentially worthless because, hey, doesn’t everyone get called those things nowadays?

Some are determined to play this irresponsible game regardless of the potential consequences. They mustn’t be allowed to do so without challenge. On this occasion, history is not on their side. Quite literally.

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