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Earlier this week, a Sudanese man who was seeking asylum in the U.K. was arrested in Belfast for attempted murder, after allegedly stabbing someone in the street. Following this attack, violence broke out across the Northern Irish city, with cars being lit on fire and immigrants being chased from homes that had been set ablaze. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, has called for calm, but several far-right personalities in Great Britain and the United States—including Elon Musk—have used the attack to foment hatred against immigrants.
I recently spoke by phone with Daniel Trilling, the author of the new book “If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Acceptable,” to talk about the rise of far-right and anti-immigrant politics in the U.K. and around the world. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the United Kingdom has become a symbol of global reactionary politics, why some British élites have stopped pushing back against far-right narratives about multi-ethnic societies, and whether the media in the U.K. is stoking hatred or merely responding to it.
When you look at the recent riots in Belfast, do you consider them as something specific to the United Kingdom, or are they part of a larger anti-immigration trend we are seeing internationally?
I think very often that the specific incidents themselves are local, and related to a national issue, or even something to do with the city or the region that they take place in. What’s changed over the last five to ten years is that the international dimension has become much more significant. Particularly when there is video footage, an event in one country will be taken up by international far-right influencers and networks. And then that feeds far-right narratives and ideas in other countries, but also feeds back into the country where the narrative originated. Certainly that’s the case for the U.K.
You have to see this rioting as the latest in a string of similar events that have been happening in the U.K., especially in the past two years, and there’s a kind of momentum to them. What happened this week is obviously off the back of there being disturbances in other parts of the U.K. after footage of the murder of Henry Nowak was made public. Nowak was an eighteen-year-old man who was stabbed to death in Southampton, toward the end of last year. And his murderer lied to police who arrived on the scene, and claimed that he, the murderer, had been the victim of a racist attack. So the police initially handcuffed Henry Nowak as he lay dying, and were slow to recognize that he had actually been stabbed. Nowak was white, and his killer was of a Sikh, South Asian background. So that prompted protests and disturbances in Southampton, and a huge, angry reaction from the far right, both within Britain and internationally.
We also had a large far-right march in central London, the so-called Unite the Kingdom Rally, which happened in May. And shortly before that, local elections in which the far-right party Reform U.K. did very well. So there’s this constant drumbeat of events allowing right-wing forces in the U.K. to gain momentum, and feeding the appetites of the far right internationally. And the U.K. seems to play this quite symbolic role, particularly for far-right actors in the U.S. Their main trick is to link any unwelcome incident or social development to mass migration, and they like to hold Britain up as a kind of cautionary tale.
Do you have a theory for why that is? I’ve noticed that, too. It’s funny, because the nonwhite population in the United States is more than twice as large as it is in the U.K., in percentage terms.
Yes, and despite current events, Britain is a pretty successful multi-ethnic democracy. But I think the reasons are, one, that English is the main language here, so Americans have easier access to news reports, and, two, Britain, being in Western Europe, has a lot of overlap with the U.S. in terms of when people are on the internet, and then there’s a bit of an overlap with India as well. But, mainly, it is just easy for far-right actors in the U.S. to project these things onto a country that your main audience is not as familiar with, because you can massively distort things.
Do you think even liberal élites in the U.K. have, in many cases, stopped celebrating what you describe as a successful multi-ethnic democracy?
Yeah, I think that is fair. In terms of the traditional governing élites, there’s still a lot of support for ethnic and social diversity, and a rhetorical commitment to anti-racism when those things are easy to defend. As soon as they’ve come under pressure, the élites have kind of just backed away from it as much as possible. I think it’s partly fear-based. Labour, since they took power in 2024, have oscillated between panicked immigration-policy proposals in response to the uptick in support for Reform U.K., or just this kind of rabbit-in-the-headlights paralysis. But I think it’s also due to some longer-term factors. There has been, really since the two-thousands, from the traditional right-wing press and other sources, a persistent attack on “multiculturalism.” Stephen Lawrence was a black teen-ager who was murdered by a gang of white racists in 1993. His death was not properly investigated by the police at the time. And some years later, in 1999, an official inquiry produced a report in which it said that institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police was partly responsible for his killers not being brought to justice. And that prompted a kind of reckoning within the British state about policing and racial discrimination and so on. But there was also a backlash from the right, which began almost immediately, and was based on this idea that if you apply anti-racist measures to state functions like policing, you will paralyze them, because police officers will be scared to be called racist, and they won’t enforce the law properly, and so on. And that’s something that the right-wing press has kind of banged on about for years and years. And for a long time the political center largely ignored it, but as politics has become more unstable, and with the rise of right-wing populism here, that narrative has really taken hold, to the extent that I think the people at the top of the Labour Party, and people running our large political and cultural institutions are now scared to push back against it, because either they’re worried about the backlash, or they feel like they’ve lost the argument.
The United States is now living through the second term of an anti-immigrant, far-right leader. The United Kingdom has not had that happen. Nigel Farage, if he wins in the next election, will probably pursue similar immigration policies to Trump. But what Trump has done, in addition to his horrific policies, is create space in the culture for people to push back, and for people to say this has gone too far. You’ve seen in both Trump terms that the public’s support for immigration has actually gone up in opinion polls. In the U.K., you haven’t had this backlash to the backlash yet.
I would say there has been a lot of pushback, but it hasn’t come from the top. That’s the key thing. After murders in Southport, in 2024, by a Black British citizen, there was a wave of racist rioting. And there was a real lack of leadership from the government. This was not long after Labour had been elected, and they displayed exactly that kind of rabbit-in-the-headlights paralysis that I mentioned earlier.
But what actually happened was that much larger numbers of people came out en masse to demonstrate and show their opposition to the racist rioting and the targeting of refugees and asylum seekers and mosques, and so on. I think this is a common pattern where people in power underestimate the people they’re there to represent. The most striking detail out of that period was that, the day after very, very large protests in London and elsewhere against the racist violence, the Daily Mail, Britain’s leading right-wing newspaper, had a huge picture of the demonstrations on its front page, and a very, very laudatory headline around it. And what struck me was that many of the people in that photo would have been the kind of people the Mail, in other contexts, would have condemned as urban élites. And just within twenty-four hours, there was this turnaround when suddenly bits of the establishment were forced into celebrating this grassroots anti-racism. Britain’s political and media class have frequently underestimated the extent to which people oppose far-right politics in this country and overplayed the size and influence of those who do—either because they are scared or because it suits their political agenda.
Is it fair to say that you view much of the far-right backlash against multiculturalism as élite-driven? Your book definitely argues that to a degree.
It’s both. I would say that a minority of noisy bullies have been allowed to intimidate other people into silence, and what’s allowed them to do that is the failure of élites to challenge it, and to back up the rest of us who are trying to challenge it. So, let’s take the strongest part of this, since you mentioned Nigel Farage. I’m not denying that Reform U.K. has got significant popular support at the moment. They are leading the polls. But that’s in a political landscape where our traditional two-party system that we’ve been used to having for decades has fragmented into five or six parties, depending on where you are in the country. In the local elections in May, Reform received around twenty-seven per cent of the vote. So they’re not commanding anywhere near a majority of support, and even when it’s a plurality, it’s a pretty small one. But I think large parts of our political class, and large parts of the media, have responded to their growth as if they are the new voice of the people, and we have to listen to what they say, and accept it.
In some cases, parts of the media actually prepare the ground for the far right. The stigmatization of asylum seekers in the U.K. has been primarily carried out by the right-wing press, going back a very long time. So, entrepreneurial, far-right politicians who arrive on the scene—what they’re able to do is to take what is already there in the minds of the public, and then present a more radical version of that, or propose more radical responses to the problems the press has already created. So it is a symbiosis. There’ll be bits of the media, the right-wing press, for instance, who will have already put in some hard work stigmatizing asylum seekers or other groups of immigrants. You then get a surge of far-right activity, and then that same right-wing press that helped get us there will say, “Look, we don’t want to let these people in, so you really must listen to us and do what we say on this issue.”
Meaning, what?
For a long time, the argument you would get from the mainstream right was that we need tougher policies applied to asylum seekers and refugees, otherwise the far right will come in with much worse solutions, and none of us want that, do we? One of the most controversial issues around immigration in the last few years, and one that’s become a big campaign issue for the far right, and one that a lot of mainstream politics has also been exercised about, is the use of hotels to house people seeking asylum. Often, they are there for long periods and are essentially idle. Then, if somebody living in a hotel commits a crime, that kicks off big disturbances and reactions, and so on.
Well, one of the reasons why asylum seekers are stuck in this state of limbo for so long is because they’re banned from taking up work while they’re waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. And the decision to ban them from taking up work was made by the government of Tony Blair, in response to a moral panic about asylum seekers taking people’s jobs which had been whipped up by the Daily Mail and other newspapers.
Enoch Powell, the far-right British politician, gave his notorious, racist “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. It was enormously popular, and polls showed that, perhaps, he could have been Prime Minister, but he was punished for it by his colleagues in the Conservative Party. And then, with Brexit, the vast majority of élites were against it. But Brexit was voted on, and got fifty-two per cent in a referendum. So, I hear everything you’re saying, but I also think that, while it is easy to blame élites, these views are held by lots of people, and even if they are obviously not innate, they can be hard for people to shake.
I think that’s broadly correct. It is a sort of push-and-pull situation, you know. There is a chunk of the British population who’ve got fairly socially conservative attitudes on a range of things, including immigration. That’s not new. What changes, though, is its salience, politically, and the kind of political project that is formed out of those attitudes. And what we’ve really seen in Britain, precipitated by both the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, and the particularly severe form of austerity that was applied in Britain by the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and then followed by the institutional paralysis and polarization that followed Brexit, is the fragmentation of the political system, and a sort of institutional meltdown right at the top, which has opened the space for new political entrepreneurs to arrive on the scene and start building new things out of people’s views and attitudes and hopes and fears, and so on.
Enoch Powell was expelled from the Conservative Party Shadow Cabinet after making his “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. But what followed was a decade of a rising far-right movement outside of the mainstream in the form of the National Front, and quite a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment and racism, both on the grassroots and institutional level. The ultimate outcome, then, was that, by the end of the seventies, Margaret Thatcher had been able to bring the various discontents mixed up in that into a kind of big-tent project within a mainstream center-right party.
At other points in our history, the Labour Party has managed to do similar. The Labour Party, historically, was able to appeal to both relatively socially conservative voters and socially liberal voters, and yet offer something that they could both buy into. What’s really changed in the last decade is the ability of these traditional big-tent political structures to keep it all on board, and so that means that parts of what would have been a traditional coalition of voters are spinning off and are being taken up by other political actors elsewhere. You know, that’s not all going to the right. We’ve had the rise of the Green Party as what its recently elected leader, Zack Polanski, describes as an eco-populist party. The Financial Times political columnist Stephen Bush described it quite well. If you look at who’s voting for Reform and who’s voting for the Greens at the moment, they tend to be people who are suffering most from, or most discontented with, inflation, poor economic prospects, frustration with their wages, their job conditions, and so on, whereas better-off people have tended to stick with Labour and the Conservatives. And the way Stephen Bush put it was that it starts with frustration at the cost of living, and then it’s your other values that determine whether you go to the left or the right.
In terms of the distinction between political élites and the people at large, I think you have to see that neither side is inert. They shape each other. Political movements don’t just grow out of the ground. They need to be brought together, and certain ideas need to be vocalized and put together in a narrative. And that comes from leaders and prominent figures, politically, but the people who do that are also responding to what they think people might want, or shifts in society that they can observe, and so on. So it’s neither one nor the other, and for me, what’s important is to recognize how those bits fit together and relate. ♦
