How to Defeat the Far Right and Fascism in Scotland, the UK and West
Sunday National, 28 September 2025
Gerry Hassan
The myth of British exceptionalism has collapsed in relation to the far right and fascism. There has been for too long a belief that Britain was somehow exempt from such politics and that its institutions and culture was immune.
The Scottish version of this – a smug, self-congratulatory story – has stressed that our civic, inclusive culture makes us less susceptible to racism, racists and bigotry. This view was always deluded, especially given our history of anti-Irish racism. But now in Scotland and rest of the UK it is time to wake-up.
Across the Western world the populist right is on the electoral rise, and the far right and fascists are now making their presence felt on the streets from London to Glasgow, from Washington to Budapest.
How did we get here? What does it mean? And how can democrats respond in Scotland, the UK and wider world? Cas Mudde, academic and expert on populism and the far right, differentiates between the two terms – the far right and fascism – seeing the former as shaped by populist stances on immigration, while the latter unapologetically embraces nativism believing that Western civilisation is under threat from immigration and Islam.
Some see “a decade of revolt on the right” and “a rising tide of discontent since the banking crash”, but to others the origins of this current resurgence go back further. The modern populist and far right can be traced back to the post-1945 world after the defeat of Nazism and Italian fascism and the electoral success of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) from the late 1940s on. There then followed in the 1950s and early 1960s French Poujadism radicalised by the Algerian war of independence, and from the early 1980s the Front National in France and Austrian Freedom Party began to have a political impact in their respective countries.
The march of the far right since 9/11
This is small pickings compared to the world since 9/11 and what Mudde calls “the fourth wave of the far right”. This was the age of hyper-globalisation led by Blair and Bill Clinton with all its hubris, arrogance and over-reach which, in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, led to the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the never-ending wars of the West and amplification of Islamophobia.
In the UK now many thousands of people feel disillusioned and distrustful of politicians – betrayed and let down, ignored and disrespected. This comes from a host of factors: flatlining living standards since the banking crash, the cost of living crisis, stretched and crumbling public services, a housing crisis locking out younger generations, and the feeling in some places that “immigration has got out of control” which has been weaponised by the right.
Across the West are similar public moods with a febrile mixture of bitterness, anger and rage at the status quo and mainstream politicians. Right-wing populism and national conservatism, in the words of Paul Mason author of How to Stop Fascism, has embraced “the tropes of fascism.”
Mix this with what Mason calls “the crisis of the neoliberal self”: the notion of the over-financialised, atomised, individualised consumer noting: “We’ve been brought up to believe the market solves all problems, and that politics is just basically economic”. He concludes: “Once the market system failed in 2008, there was an ideological vacuum and because the left failed to fill it, fascist ideology emerged as one of the only coherent frames.”
To add fuel to the fire, with the retreat of traditional print and broadcast media with all its own biases and the increasing distrust of media, authority and experts, there has emerged an alt ecology of information with little relationship to facts – what Mason describes as “viral, networked disinformation.”
Symbols and Flags Matter
Symbolism and spectacle have a key role in what we are currently witnessing, hence the importance of flags and their increasing profile in public places and at recent far right marches. Singer-songwriter Billy Bragg who has written on England, patriotism and nationalism, told me: “The sudden appearance of St George’s flags undoubtedly has an air of menace about it, a notion underscored by the numbers willing to march behind the racist Tommy Robinson. At heart this flag phenomenon is an attempt by elements of the white working class to make themselves visible – to each other, to society at large and most importantly to Westminster.”
The London march led by Tommy Robinson was a far right march, but that does not mean everyone shared the same views. “The answer depends partly on which way one was looking. If you were looking at the stage [it was] a global parade of bigots”, commentator Kenan Malik notes: “Yet if we were to turn around and look not at the stage but across the marchers, that label might seem ill-fitting.” There were racists, haters and bigots, but there were also people filled with despair and a “sense of voicelessness” whose most common phrase is “No one listens to us.”
This watershed moment is sadly not completely in isolation but part of the long normalisation of far right ideas, and in reality just one more episode in an alarming process developing for decades in the UK and the West. Central to this is how mainstream parties have adopted the language, postures and policies of the far right; think of the Tories and Labour on multiculturalism, Islam, mass deportations, third country detention and the European Convention on Human Rights.
Would any Tory leader dare to do what Ted Heath did in 1968 when he fired Enoch Powell after his “rivers of blood” speech? We sadly know the answer when Keir Starmer recently cited the UK as becoming an “island of strangers” echoing Powell’s language. Just as damning Tory leader Kemi Badenoch refused to condemn Elon Musk’s incitement to violence, civil war and overthrowing the UK government: part of the craven appeasement of the far right and language of violence. Where this race to the gutter and embracing of the far right goes is alarming and can only be stopped by a courageous, principled politics opposing, rather than feeding, its hatred.
The left cannot defend the status quo – that is the road to disaster
What is an appropriate response? First, there needs to be an understanding as Cas Mudde points out that “the far right is the symptom, not the cause, of the decline of liberal democracy.” Do we in these hard times try to patch up liberal values and institutions? Defend what remains of the liberal establishment – the BBC, civil service, judicial system, universities – against the barbarians at the gates?
This is one approach but what it invites is that the left positions itself with and is seen as synonymous with the establishment, while the right embrace being both the insurgents and anti-establishment – a trick that Farage and Trump have been able to pull off despite everything. Being labelled as the forces and allies of the establishment is the road to disaster having already aided Brexit, Trump and more.
A multi-layered approach is required that recognises the threat of this gathering storm. The rule of law needs defending. But beyond today’s timid, corroded democracy, Paul Mason believes there is a need to champion “militant democracy” alongside the broadest electoral coalition.
It is worth remembering that the great anti-fascist antecedents included some principled Tories such as Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath and Scotland’s “Red Duchess”, Katherine Atholl, the latter the subject of a new biography by Amy Gray. Atholl, Tory MP for Kinross and West Perthshire 1923-38, raised funds for the Republican government of Spain against Franco and personally translated Mein Kampf into English to counter the official sanitised German edition. For standing up for democracy and against fascism she was deselected by her local Tory Association!
Much more is needed. There must be an acceptance that powerful forces have aided the rise of the far right and fascism. Across the West, liberal democracy and mainstream and progressive politics have failed millions including those who most need support and sustenance. Not only that millions feel disrespected by mainstream politics and believe that only the radical right see them and give them have voice and agency.
None of this can be defeated by polite soundbites from Keir Starmer or John Swinney. One way not to respond is the Morgan McSweeney approach of trying to appease Farage and Reform, or that of Maurice Glasman and Blue Labour trying to import Trumpian authoritarianism into UK politics and Labour. Nor is the approach of John Swinney calling anti-populist summits of the great and good with echoes of 1980s “civic Scotland”.
Mainstream politics have failed. Not only do they not deliver in policies; they do not represent the interests of most people, instead slavishly serving the rich and powerful. They do not connect with everyday concerns and instead offer across the political spectrum identikit politicians talking a discombobulated, cliché-laden language of technocratic solutions and thinking.
George Orwell, the St George’s Cross and the Saltire
Westminster is a broken institution, but the Scottish Parliament really isn’t that much better. When did you last hear a Westminster or Scottish Parliament politician say something with cut-through? You would be struggling. Politicians like Farage and Trump understand the need to say things they are not meant to which breakthrough the attention-deficit economy and make people take notice. They are transgressors, showmen and entertainers – and this is something which fascism in the 1920s and 1930s knew to be fundamental to doing politics and animating power.
George Orwell fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and believed that the left did not understand the appeal of Nazism and fascism when it stressed how policies could defeat them. What this missed he said was the allure of “drums, flags and loyalty-parades”: the sense of belonging and community, noting that: “However they may be as economic theories, fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”
Popular culture has a role in this. In the 1970s the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism mobilised young people and black and ethnic minorities, politicised a generation, and contributed to defeating the National Front. Popular music and culture then had an alternative community which is not true today, with music being more commodified and safe, without a cutting edge and political literacy.
Some degree of political mobilisation and imagination is urgently required beyond liberal homilies. This must go beyond the usual platitudes from the voices of “the Baby Boomer generation” such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones and the generation below such as U2. It has to come from across the generations but needs younger cultural voices to have an impact.
Paul Mason believes there needs to be “big, cultural festivals of resistance in every town and city, using public money to press home the message: we are a proudly multicultural, multi-religious and multinational state.”
The power of flags and symbols is important. Billy Bragg observes that: “England and Scotland share a common history after 1707 and as such the Cross of St Andrew carries as much imperial baggage as that of St George.” From this he notes: “The Scots have begun to forge a post-imperial identity to the extent that their flag doesn’t come with that aforementioned menace” which many associate with the English flag.
Finally, we need a politics of substance – using language, popular culture and symbols – which deals with the concerns of working people. This may sound obvious but our current politics in Scotland, the UK and West, do not. Ask yourself whose interests do Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, Reform and SNP serve? And who in recent years has bankrolled their operations and had access and influence at the highest levels? Politics today serves the corporate class, money and vested interests.
The dynamics of centre-left parties – Labour, the SNP, Greens in Scotland and England and Wales, the US Democrats and others – are about the interests of the professional middle classes and what is in their best interests. No wonder for two decades the right has had such an easy task posing as the insurgents.
If we as citizens do not get our act together the appeal of the populist right, far right and fascism will only grow. How many wake-up calls do we need? We are as we speak in the second Trump term, nearly ten years after Brexit, sleepwalking towards disaster.
The current configurations of mainstream and progressive politics are not fit to take on fascism. Rather they have been enablers of the foot soldiers of fascism. We need to get out and educate, agitate and organise not just a politics of anti-fascism, but on democracy, symbols, class and power.
