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In March 2024, Richard Tice, then leader of Reform UK, complained to the BBC that an article in one of its news reports had referred to his party as "far-right" and that this was "defamatory and libellous".

The BBC immediately apologised and removed the offending sentence. Tice also claimed that his lawyers had warned other media organisations from describing his party in these terms, although this has not deterred independent outlets such as HOPE not Hate and Byline Times from doing so.

Of course, Tice is a presenter on rival channel GB News and regularly rails against the BBC, while Reform itself is committed to abolishing the licence fee, so his complaint was not exactly disinterested. It does, however, furnish a useful opportunity to consider the extent to which populism can be said to have entered the bloodstream of right-wing parties in the UK and the media that vociferously support them.

Mainstreaming the Radical Right

It is now a commonplace that, in both Europe and the US, recent years have seen an influx of radical right-wing ideas into the political mainstream.

Mainstreaming takes place because traditional right-wing parties increasingly address the same issues as radical right-wing ones, and do so in a similar way.

This is particularly the case given the increasing dominance of the political agenda by socio-cultural issues - multiculturalism, identity politics and culture wars. Sentiments that used to be exclusive to radical right parties have increasingly become the "common sense" of the more mainstream right, and the boundaries between the two have become increasingly blurred and porous.

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As Cas Mudde puts it in The Far Right Today (2019), the radical right "does not stand for a fundamentally different world than the political mainstream; rather it takes mainstream ideas and values to an illiberal extreme".

Enter populism

This process is frequently described as a turn towards populism, but before going any further, it's necessary to define the sense in which the term "populism" is being used in this article.

Briefly, populism valorises "the people", which it conceives as a unified and homogenous whole (as in, for instance, the "silent majority"). A good example of this in the UK context would be Nigel Farage crowing on Brexit night that "this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people".

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"The people" are defined in opposition to an out-of-touch, unrepresentative "Establishment", or more commonly in the UK, "liberal elite". This typically includes the mainstream media ("fake news" in Trump-speak, the BBC in the case of those vociferously lobbying against it); elected politicians (in it only for themselves); public functionaries (obstructive and unaccountable bureaucrats); intellectuals (pointy-headed inhabitants of the ivory tower); the legal profession ("lefty lawyers", judges as "enemies of the people"); a...