Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain

"For me, there are two reasons why this is a really good book for a general audience. First, it’s an excellent summary of the key insights of 25 years of social science research on the radical right. They pull everything together just perfectly. It’s also a great example of a solid academic study that draws on both theory and data and addresses a highly topical issue in a very accessible way. It sold more than virtually any political science book—I heard around 8,000 copies, which is massive for political science—and I think it did so because it’s very well written. It’s not dumbed down, it’s still solid, but it’s understandable. The book puts the rise of a party, UKIP, into the much broader context of what they call a ‘revolt’ on the right. As a consequence, the book goes beyond UKIP and also provides a good insight into why Brexit could happen, because it’s part of that same thing. The revolt has consequences like UKIP, but it also pushes the Tories to the right and creates someone like Boris Johnson. So that, I think, is the strength of the book. It shows this societal change of which UKIP is more a consequence than a cause. It’s a broader revolt than that and is also about populism . There’s dissatisfaction with both political parties, of not taking care of key issues, of looking the same. Labour had become New Labour. Both parties had converged on the centre and certain issues were no longer really divisive. Both parties agreed on European integration, for example. Both parties agreed on immigration, to a certain extent. It’s a type of politics that clearly favours one type of Britain, which is to a large extent London. It’s an integrated city—in terms of ethnicity, in terms of Europe and also economically. The authors describe a large group of people who feel abandoned, who feel what they call ‘left behind.’ Now, I have a bit of a problem with that specific term. It’s a longstanding argument about what we refer to in the literature as the so-called ‘losers of modernization/globalization.’ It’s the idea that there’s a process of globalization that has created winners and losers. That is in itself true, however, it’s not an objective category. Whether you’re a winner or a loser is partly how you self-define. There are actually a lot of people who have objectively won from modernization, but who feel that they have lost. The state has invested a lot in them or in their towns, but they feel they’ve been left behind. So it is somewhat true that people who feel that they are losers of globalization will support the radical right more than others, but it’s a very vague category. “There’s a lot of money in the far right. Some in this subculture are believers, others are just people who want to make money out of it.” The other problem I have with the term is that it creates this idea that there are two groups, the winners and the losers who have been left behind. But actually there’s a third group, which has always been left behind. The current left behind are the white working class, the people who under industrialization were doing well. Now everyone else has gone further and they have stagnated. But under them is a third category, which is predominantly non-white, that no one ever cared about. They’re left out of that book. When ‘left behind’ becomes a normative category—as in the discourse of David Goodhart , for example, with his ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’—then the poorest people are not even mentioned. That’s how poor they are. They are often immigrants who never had a steady position with protection."