In this post, I am just noting a developing trend in the way that articles in the non-right-wing (for want of a better way to phrase it) media are reporting social attitudes as ascertained by polling as reflecting social reality or mainstream opinion. The purpose of this is presumably to get their ‘non-right-wing’ readership to change their attitude in line with this ‘new reality’.

For example, according to Sam Taylor Hill, John Denham and Tariq Modood’s article, ‘Beyond Division “Multicultural Nationalism” and the White Working-Class’ in the September 2025 issue of Byline Times (I should note that this article was out-of-step with the generally progressive values of the rest of this issue):

… the disadvantages of economic decline in former industrial and coastal communities, poor social mobility, educational under-achievement, poor health, and the lack of voice and influence found in many white working-class communities sets their lives far apart from politically confident white graduate professionals or the more successful parts of minority communities. This is often felt as a sense of loss of their part in a nation to which they were once central. It can be expressed as resentment if others – minorities or newcomers – are perceived as getting priority, attention, and higher status. These white working-class communities feel excluded from the sense of privilege that being part of the ‘majority community’ was supposed to confer.

Statistics show little real difference between disadvantages in white and ethnic minority working-class communities. Some argue against even talking about the ‘white working-class’, lest it prevent the expression of unified working-class politics. But this misses the point. Right-wing populists can mobilise sections of the white working-class because it does exist as a social reality. It is marked out by demographics, geography, education, history, values, ideas of nationhood and, often, a physical separation from the lives of those who apparently face similar social problems.

I don’t have space to unpick the huge historical claim being made here. My point is that the purpose of this kind of argument is to invalidate critics of the concept of a ‘white working class’ as ‘missing the point’ and not having a grasp of ‘social reality’. I need to trace the logic of this usage of ‘social reality’, which has some grounding in sociology. For example, I’ve seen the term used to argue that certain facets of nation states are in effect social reality that can’t be altered. So, the implicit argument here is something along the lines of claiming that a ‘white working class’ is a core part of the social reality of Britain as a nation state.  

In similar vein, in an opinion column on immigration for the Financial Times on 28 August 2025, Farage is winning the new battle of Brexit, Robert Shrimsley notes

Even so, the impact of his summer campaign has left centrists warning against dancing to Farage’s tune. They argue that talk of an eruption of protests outside asylum hotels has so far turned out to be mostly only a few hundred people. Above all, liberals urge Keir Starmer to fight back against the dehumanising rhetoric of the right.

For those who recoil from the right’s tactics, these are seductive arguments. Scorn is a comforting reflex. But this is where Brexit memories are instructive because we have seen this movie before. The past decade was a masterclass in how to misread a nation.

For when majorities are telling pollsters that the issue is their main concern, the battle has to be fought where it is, not where you wish it to be. Like it or not, the belief that mass immigration has gone too far, that control has been lost and that integration is failing is now a mainstream opinion. 

Shrimsley’s scorn is clearly directed at ‘liberals’ (a pretty meaningless phrase in the context of British politics, but one that has been borrowed from the US) for failing to realise that ‘mainstream opinion’ has shifted. It’s not clear to me why that was already obvious from Brexit given that one of the distinctive features of that experience was how evenly split the electorate was on the issue. The implication here is something along the lines of a claim that Brexit has altered social reality. On one level, this seems to be confusing changes in behaviour of the mainstream political parties with social reality per se.

It has become commonplace in recent months for UK media commentators to argue that ‘recently, the Overton window – the range of ideas and policies considered politically acceptable – has widened on immigration’ – this is George Eaton writing in the New Statesman this summer. Among a list of examples supporting his claim, Eaton cites Farage’s declaration that the UK is facing ‘societal collapse’, which was backed  by the former Tory cabinet minister and current editor of the Spectator, Michael Gove, but also an unnamed Labour MP calling for an ‘“Immigration Sovereignty Act” that unilaterally reforms articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights’. Eaton also reports that many Labour MPs are in contact with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who apparently believes that ‘the country wants someone to take it by the scruff of the neck, lead it and shake things up’. This seems to me to be a fair journalistic account of what has been happening, which is that a hard anti-immigration consensus has been forming across the political establishment.

In this context, the pieces in Byline Times and the FT can be seen as attempts to shift sections of the public who read these kinds of papers behind this new political consensus. In some ways, it might be seen as a form of gaslighting in which ‘liberals’ are told that the world doesn’t work the way that they think it does; ‘racism is all in your mind, social reality has changed now, so you need to get in line with mainstream opinion’. So, it’s basically propaganda. However, the way it’s framed in terms of ‘the nation’ and in defence of British values is telling about the ultimate agenda here, which is a fairly explicit form of British nationalism. Although in practice this is often the external expression of English nationalism (as evidenced by the current profusion of English flags alongside the union flag in anti-asylum seeker protests). Tellingly, another recent article in the New Statesman claimed that ‘Politically, at least, Britain is becoming more, not less, like Clacton’. The slip here is that it’s England (outside London and the other big cities) that is becoming superficially more like Clacton, not Britain as a whole.

While this agenda is not new, the current intensification is reaching new levels. This coordinated embrace of a British nationalism as a new social reality is part of a wider international shift towards authoritarian nationalism. I aim to publish more blogposts on this process over the course of this autumn, as part of wider ongoing research.