Black All Year - Decoding the Rise of the Right

What if the recent UK general election was more than just a competition between Labour and Conservative parties? Join me, Steph Edusei, as I try to make meaning of the election results and what they reveal about the state of British opinion. Using insights from renowned thinkers like Robert O. Paxton, Erich Fromm, and Noam Chomsky, I try to decode the rise of the Reform UK Party Limited and its 4% vote share. I also spotlight the gains made by the Liberal Democrats and Green Party in this shifting political landscape.

Beyond election mechanics, in this episode I attempt to give some answers to address the move towards radical views, stressing the crucial role of critical thinking and media literacy in combating misleading narratives. I discuss how we need to build inclusive communities grounded in mutual understanding and cooperation along with critical economic reforms aimed at tackling inequality are highlighted. I make a case for the importance of political engagement and supporting marginalised groups amid rising far-right rhetoric. Finally, I call on you to get involved, share your thoughts, and work collectively towards a more just society. 

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Original music by Wayne C McDonald, #ActorSlashDJ
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Chapters

• 0:09 Analysis of Recent UK General Election
• 4:30 Analysing the Rise of the Right
• 12:43 Combating Radicalisation
• 19:31 A Call to Action

Transcript

[Steph Edusei]

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Black All Year. I am Steph Edusei and I am the host and creator of the Black All Year podcast. Now today I want to kind of delve a bit into the recent general election and in particular into the performance of the Reform UK Party Limited.

And hopefully we'll be able to look at what the numbers say about the political landscape of the UK and really reflect on what the implications might be for different communities across the country. So actually, let's start just by thinking about the voting numbers. Turnout we know was quite low.

We can hypothesise about what the reasons for that were and hopefully somebody will actually do some market research and find out what the reasons were. But the turnout was actually pretty low and what's really interesting is that the percentage share of the vote was pretty evenly split between Labour and Conservative. But because of the way that the voting system works in the UK with constituencies and it's the party with the most constituencies that actually ends up being in government, Labour got a huge number of seats compared to any of the competitors and therefore we now have a Labour government.

So, vote share not particularly massive, around a third of the vote but as I say we have a huge Labour majority government. Liberal Democrats actually didn't do too badly. They did better than they've done for quite a long time and again were kind of I think around about 70 seats.

Green Party got close to a million votes so not bad at all but they have four seats which is the most they have ever had in the UK Parliament and then we have Reform UK Party Limited and I will keep calling them Party Limited because how they differ from the other political parties that I've mentioned, Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Green Party and pretty much every other political party in the UK is that Reform UK are a company and not a party. So, the people in charge are the shareholders and they are the ones that will make the decisions about who leads the party etc but that's possibly a whole other show and maybe a whole other podcast. So those numbers kind of give us a snapshot of where the political feelings of the electorate may lie and I say may because it's fairly likely that there was quite a lot of voting going on that was really quite thought through.

So, I may not support the Lib Dems for example but actually if they were the most likely to beat a party that I didn't want to win then I might vote for them in that tactical voting. So, Labour and the Conservative parties are still by far the dominant forces in UK politics. They've both got over 10 million votes.

They say Lib Dem got a decent number of votes there and then the smaller numbers with the other parties that I mentioned and when we look at that percentage share just over a third for Labour and Conservative, Lib Dems were about 12%, the Greens got about 2.8% of the vote and Reform UK Party Ltd got 4% roughly and those numbers show a rather divided electorate. There is growing fragmentation as smaller parties like Reform gain some traction and it may be because people are dissatisfied with traditional parties and looking for alternatives. Reform in particular, their 4% might seem quite small but actually that's quite a lot of people who didn't feel that they could vote for what would probably normally be their alignment which would be the Conservative party and that might suggest some disillusionment with the status quo.

Historically we know that economic hardship, social change and a sense of disenfranchisement can really drive voters towards more radical options. When people feel that they can't achieve a basic standard of living they often look for someone to blame and there's evidence for this. This is not a new phenomenon at all.

So, Robert O Paxton in his book The Anatomy of Fascism explains how economic instability and social upheaval have really historically paved the way for the rise of the far-right movements. In Escape for Freedom From talked about how individuals who are feeling powerless and insecure again might gravitate towards authoritarian figures who promise more order and stability and you can kind of see that we perhaps have a sector of society who are not happy with their lot. They're working or they're struggling to find work, they see people around them and particularly on TV and in the media who have more, who seem to be doing better than they are and yet from their perspective they're working hard, they're trying hard and things over the last five to ten years have got harder and particularly if these people were Brexit voters they believed that Brexit was going to make their lives better and actually things have got worse.

So, this idea of well things have got worse, why? What we then find is that far-right, more radical movements and organisations have a ready answer for that. It's to blame them, not the far-right movements but the other people and in the UK the narrative's often been that immigrants or people receiving welfare are the cause of economic woes but remember that some of these people who are feeling those woes at the moment are welfare recipients and it can't be them. I'm not the the master of my own destiny, it has to be someone else so who is it? It's the immigrants and particularly the illegal immigrants.

It's not just them of course, it's all of your LGBTQIA people and it's that narrative that's put out there, it's the people who are woke, who are creating this for you because they are taking what is rightfully yours, they are taking your world, they are taking everything that you have known and they are making it different and they are making it worse for you. It's a classic scapegoating tactic. Noam Chomsky pointed out in Manufacturing Consent that those in power can manipulate the media and public discourse to really divert attention from the stuff that's really going on, the systemic issues and the easy thing to do is to place the blame on vulnerable groups.

So, it's not your fault Mr White Working Class Man, of course it's not your fault and it's not my fault because I'm a righteous upstanding person in power and I have money so how can it be my fault? actually, fault of the people who if we were honest are actually more vulnerable than you are and we really have to recognise the fears, the genuine fears of this white working class population. A whole load of people feel left behind by globalisation, by the loss of industries. I live in the North-East of England and it was a really proud industrial area where employment was high, people had money in their pockets, it was dirty, difficult, dangerous work but they did it and they had pride in it.

That has gone and there are huge technological changes which just move faster than we know what's going on. Communities are changing rapidly and any cultural identity that they had they feel is under threat and whether we agree with those fears they are real fears that have and to an extent we should greet them perhaps with empathy and understanding. It's really easy for us to get into conflict about this but until we understand what's really lying at the root of those fears, because it's not the fact that I have brown skin, that's not really the fear, the fear is far more than that, it's what this brown skin signifies for them and until we get to the root of that we don't stand a chance in changing it.

But, and this is really important, I am not excusing or diminishing what's going on for minoritised populations because the rise of the far right is terrifying for minoritised populations. It signifies that increase in xenophobia, in racism and unfortunately in violence. The rhetoric of the far right will dehumanise immigrants, people with brown and Black skin, people from the LGBT community, even people with disabilities, making them the target for discrimination and making them the target for hate crimes because it's them that is doing it to you.

There might be some other reasons as well why Reform UK Party Limited has risen over the last few years, beyond that economic hardship and discontent. The party really capitalises on real nationalist sentiments, that whole thing of we'll take back control and protect British values and it's that hark back to nostalgia and a time, a bygone age that never really existed but that it's easy to say oh things were so much better then because we do tend to look back with those rose-tinted spectacles and that whole message of we'll take you back to that golden age that never existed really appeals to those who feel really disoriented by rapid social change and social media has a huge role to play in this as well. Researchers have shown that online echo chambers just reinforce extreme views.

I know for myself when the UK voted to leave the European Union I was really shocked because that wasn't what I was hearing and that was when I realised I was in an echo chamber. I was surrounded by people who thought and spoke like me and on my social media I was exposed to people who thought like me so then all of a sudden that Brexit vote exposed this whole other way of thinking and beliefs out there but because of the algorithms of social media what you react with is what you see and we also are aware of the fact that there will be other things that are fed into your stream that just take you further and further and further down that route. So, if you're in this echo chamber you are far more susceptible to far-right ideologies because it's reinforcing your beliefs, it's showing you more and more of what you believe is happening anyway and then it takes it bigger and bigger and bigger.

So, we're in this situation now where we have a rise of the far-right and what can we do to counter that while still protecting those of us who come from minoritised communities? There is a degree of education and awareness raising that is needed. One of the things that we don't have enough of these days is critical thinking. It's that ability to stop and to look at something and to go okay so is this correct? What else might be going on? I'll give you a really good example of this.

AI imagery is more and more common. Somebody shared a picture of a baby peacock. This thing was the cutest little thing I have ever seen.

Huge eyes, beautiful plumage but it just looked too wrong to me. It looked too perfect to be an actual picture of an actual living creature. It took me seconds to google baby peacock and look at a picture of baby peacock and whilst baby peacocks are probably cute to adult peacocks, they look nothing like this picture or the little brown thing, little brown birds.

But that kind of ability to stop and to question and to do a little bit of digging is sorely lacking within the population and that degree of media literacy that will help people to recognise and resist really manipulative narratives is not there. So, we need an education programme. We need education and awareness so that people become more aware of what is going on and have the ability, the literacy to recognise and resist those narratives.

We need to start creating inclusive communities where people from different backgrounds can come together, can share their stories and build mutual understanding because actually we are all humans and we all care about very, very similar things. We care about do we have shelter? Do we have food? Do we feel safe? Do we love? Do the people that we love and love us, are they safe? Do they have opportunities? We all have those common things and the more we can build that mutual consensus of we all want the best and we all want the best for the people that we love and for ourselves and it's not about me taking from you and you taking from me but actually it's about us coming together to build that collectively. The more we can do that, the more we're likely to get communities that understand and cooperate and share instead of being combative.

I genuinely believe that until something happens with our economy that addresses economic inequality and really provides for support for those who have been left behind by economic changes, we're going to see this going on. We're seeing people working and struggling and people with good jobs working and struggling and it's no surprise that they're looking for people to blame for that. They're probably blaming the wrong people because that's what's being fed to them so we really need a reform to policies, we need a real change so that we can get rid of some of that inequality because addressing the inequality actually makes things better for everyone.

It's that rising tide lifts all boats. It really does make things better for everyone. Our politics has to change.

People are fed up. We've got to do stuff that really encourages voter participation and support for parties that makes people understand that the more they engage the more parties represent their views because parties will listen to people they think are going to vote and if they don't think you're going to vote then they can listen to you and they could even develop policies for you but it's not going to benefit them at the ballot box. So we need to find a way to get parties to really engage and to promote and to just to connect with people but for people and I think this probably needs to be more of a ground-up movement for people to encourage others to vote and to show how they can use their vote to vote for people who are promoting inclusive and equitable policies not just the person with the rosette of the colour that I've always voted for or that my parents voted for.

And the last thing I think that we need to think about is how do we support in the meantime all of those who are being targeted by far-right rhetoric. At the forefront of that is members of the global majority, Black and brown people. We are a very visible manifestation of what the far-right is battling. We are well our difference is literally written on our faces we cannot hide we can't pretend that we are not the colour that we are so we get the brunt of it. And this is not new we have had this for generations, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

When it is on your doorstep it is terrifying when I think that four percent of the population either really wanted what Reform UK Party Ltd were saying or were willing to disregard the distasteful parts because they liked other parts, that terrifies me. So we need support we need strong networks of support but it's not just Black and brown people, it's women, it's people who are LGBT+, it is anybody who is different who is different from what is still, despite what the far-right will tell you, what is still the majority in the UK. And that support needs to be practical assistance and it needs to be allyship and solidarity. 

So, there's a few things that we can do to combat this rise of the far-right but as I wrap up today's episode. I really want to leave you with a message of hope. Change is possible and we all have a role to play in creating a more just and inclusive society. And that equity is not just about racial equity, it's not just about gender equity, it's about economic and social equity too. Let's continue to engage in these conversations. Let's continue to support one another and let's continue to work towards a better future for us all.

I'd really love your thoughts on today's topic you can reach out to me on social media you can email me on blackallyearuk@outlook.com or you can interact with the podcast send me a message through the website which is www.blackallyear.co.uk

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