- Is this really the "rise of the extremes"?
Posted by Keith-264
on July 19, 2025, 4:41 pm
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https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/is-this-really-the-rise-of-the-extremes Labour and the Tories are both cratering in popularity, with Reform and the new left party looking to fill the void. Is this really the "rise of the extremes" media hacks are going to portray it as? Another Angry Voice Jul 19, 2025 Reform have been leading most of the polls for months, and a recent poll put the new Jeremy Corbyn/Zarah Sultana left party level-pegging with Labour despite the fact they’ve not even been officially founded or named yet! if the seemingly inexorable decline of the Tories and Starmer’s bastardised version of the Labour Party continues - with Reform and the new left party filling the void - the narrative that Britain’s horrible professional media class are going to adopt seems obvious. They’re going to paint it as the "rise of the extremes" as if the extreme-right and the extreme-left are taking over British politics, with a big serving of "boo hoo, what happened to the moderate centre?" on top. The so-called "centre" To answer what happened to the so-called "moderate centre" first, there are a couple of things to consider. Boris Johnson’s unprecedented ideological purge of the liberal-conservative faction of the Tory party in 2019 ended any possibility of the Tory party seeing sense, or having any claim to occupy moderate centre-right territory. It turns out that the bonkers radical-right fringe of the Tory party is far less popular than they thought they’d be. Keir Starmer’s takeover of the Labour Party has seen it transformed into a Thatcherite operation that’s miles to the right of the ground Tony Blair occupied. There’s nothing "sensible" or "centrist" about continuing Tory austerity ruination; siding with the filthy private water profiteers against the British people; economic punishment beatings for pensioners and the disabled; spreading the right-wing lie of "trickle-down" economics; arming and supporting a genocide; or introducing draconian new laws to revoke free speech and right to non-violent protest from those who oppose the genocide Starmer chooses to support and enable. If the so-called "moderate centre" ever really existed, it certainly doesn’t now. People who reject the Tories and Labour aren’t doing it because they’re rejecting "centrist" politics. They’re doing it because they can see that neither of these parties seem remotely interested in serving the interests of ordinary people. Reform Are Reform an extreme-right operation? There are different ways of looking at this. The first is that they’re miles to the economic right of any UK government since universal suffrage; their anti-migrant rhetoric is straight out of the National Front playbook; their ranks are stuffed with bigots and ideological extremists; they’re endlessly going on about imitating Elon Musk’s doge cuts; they’re mindlessly obsessed with flags and ultranationalism; and Farage has repeatedly spoken about his adoration of Margaret Thatcher and his desire to scrap universal health care in the NHS to replace it with a US-style private health insurance system. On the other hand, they’re just offering the logical conclusion to Thatcherism, where they privatise and destroy everything that hasn’t already been ruined and flogged off on the cheap by generation after generation of Thatcherite politicians already. If the hard-right Thatcherite orthodoxy of the last four and a half decades is the "centrism" that capitalist media hacks always try to portray it as, then Reform is surely just the "extreme-centre" by their definition, right? The new left party Given that the new party hasn’t even been founded yet; stood a candidate in an election; or announced policies and manifesto commitments, it’s not entirely clear what they stand for. If the political track record of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are anything to go by, there are certain positions that the new party will adopt: • Investment economics instead of austerity cuts • Public ownership of vital infrastructure and services (health, education, water, energy, transport …) • Improved workers’ rights • Investment in social and affordable housing, to make home ownership viable again • Repairing Britain’s terribly vandalised social safety net • Clamping down on the tax-dodging of corporations and the mega-rich • Humanitarian foreign policy instead of genocide complicity None of this stuff is particularly new or unprecedented, in fact most of it would represent a return to the post-war consensus that delivered the longest sustained period of economic stability and rising living standards in British history; a consensus that both Labour and the Tories adhered to until Thatcher and her ideological extremists smashed it up from 1979 onwards. False equivalence and the media If things go as they seem destined to, much of the professional media narrative is obviously going to go down the "extreme-left vs extreme-right" path, but it’s clearly a false equivalence between a left party that wants to break away from the disastrous Thatcherite consensus to rebalance the economy in favour of ordinary people, and Farage’s mob who want to see Thatcherite economic extremism followed through to its horrible final conclusion. Given the choice between breaking with the Thatcherite orthodoxy to go back to a more balanced mixed economy that benefits ordinary people as well as the rich, or intensifying Thatcherism to the extreme, it’s inevitable which side most of Britain’s wealthy media class are going to cheerlead for, isn’t it? It’s not just that most of their pay packets are dependent on following the right-wing economic agenda of the billionaire media barons who own most of the British press, it’s that even the ones who think of themselves as "sensible", "liberal", and "centrist" inevitably end up siding with the extreme-right over a bit of democratic socialism, because in the choice between socialism or barbarism, they imagine barbarism is better for their beloved capitalism. Conclusion The Tories lost literally half of their voters between 2019 and 2024, and they’ve been on a downwards trajectory ever since under Kemi Badenoch’s clueless leadership. Labour just suffered the worst local election results of any new government ever, and Starmer has dragged Labour’s approval ratings down even further since then with his calculated cruelty against disabled people. Reform are already filling the Tory void, and it seems inevitable that a new left party is going to absorb millions of the traditional Labour voters that Starmer told to 'leave if you don’t like it', especially if they form a broad-left alliance with the Greens. The media are going to try to portray this as a clash of extremes, but people just need to ask themselves what is really more extreme? Further intensifying the hard-right Thatcherite agenda that’s been so bad for ordinary people over the last four and a half decades, or attempting to finally move away from it and repair some of the damage? |
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