Resisting Racist Language, Resisting Fascist Politics
“You don’t fight fascism because you’re going to win, you fight fascism because it is fascism.”
– Jean Paul Sartre
The slide towards authoritarian rule in Britain and the US, and the prospects of a Trump third-term and a Farage government in the UK, has to be resisted. At the heart of this is the degradation of language and the normalisation of scapegoat politics and racism. Time and time again, daily, over years, there’s a new transgression, a new acceptance of actions or language that would have previously have been considered outrageous, vile or unacceptable by understood norms or values.
As Daniel Trilling noted in the London Review of Books last year (This Times its Worse):
“Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment has been a staple of Britain’s right-wing press for decades, but we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform. The damage done on this front by the Johnson-Truss-Sunak government needs to be recognised. At each inflection point since 2019, the Conservatives and their media cheerleaders chose to double down on the populist rhetoric, painting their opponents as enemies who threatened the integrity of the nation. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were treated as signs of an ‘alien’ culture that had taken over Britain’s cities. Demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were smeared as ‘hate marches’ by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary.”
These ‘inflection points’ are everywhere in our daily lives. But, as the saying goes, the body rots from the head down. There was one when Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, falsely claimed that Britain was “sleepwalking into a ghettoised society”, and that “Islamists … are in charge now”, she was allowed by Rishi Sunak to stay on the party benches. There was one when in 2024 the BBC described far-right rioters as “a pro-British march”. There was one when the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, was revealed to have said that he “didn’t see another white face” in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. Katie Lam, a so-called “rising star” of the Conservative party, last week called for legally settled families to be deported to make the UK “culturally coherent”.
And here we are with another with Reform MP Sarah Pochin talking about how mad it makes her that tv adverts are “full of black people, full of Asian people”.
Slip of the tongue?
She’s a racist, in a racist party run by racists. https://t.co/zAs3oYj7TI pic.twitter.com/JCgIruyvLt— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 3.5% 🇪🇺🐟🇬🇧🏴☠️🦠💙 (@g_gosden) October 28, 2025
Very little of overt racism has any consequence for anyone now that it has become completely normalised. Still, some of Pochin’s colleagues felt the need for some half-hearted retraction.
Here, Reform’s Danny Kruger attempts to wash it away calling it a ‘slip of the tongue’ while also (hilariously) re-positioning the whole thing as an injustice not to POC but to Reform! (“it will confirm that prejudice that people have against us”):
‘I regret this massive slip of the tongue that Sarah made.’
Reform’s @danny__kruger tells @NickFerrariLBC that his fellow MP’s comments will ‘be deeply offensive to many people, and it will confirm that prejudice they have against us’. pic.twitter.com/TwEUkZr6VU
— LBC (@LBC) October 28, 2025
The fact is that British racism is institutional . There’s nowhere better to see this than in the Mother of All Parliaments where the MP Dawn Butler got shut down, not for doing the right thing and calling out Sarah Pochin’s behaviour and language, but for having the tenerity to speak the truth. Watch this:
*The most pathetic thing I’ve seen in parliament, ever*
Dawn Butler MP says Sarah Pochin MP’s iss racist
Deputy Speaker tells her off and tells her to withdraw the remark
Butler repeats, Pochin is racist
Deputy Speaker tells her off again for calling another MP a racist… pic.twitter.com/SY0WEuhLYv
— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) October 27, 2025
You can hear in the Deputy Speakers trembling voice that she knows that what she is doing and saying is wrong and absurd.
This level of toxicity and absurdity doesn’t come naturally, its carefully nurtured and curated for political advantage. Today Iain Macwhirter, who left The Herald after describing the UK Cabinet, which included several ethnic minority MPs, as a “coconut cabinet”, posted on his Substack about the Pochin affair:
“It is the complaint heard in every provincial Witherspoons. “Why are there so many bloody black people suddenly on the telly? This isn’t Nigeria. It’s bleedin’ Folkestone”.
Is it Iain?
He writes: Whether it is actually racist depends on your point of view and on whether you think it is legitimate to question the proportion of racial minority groups on TV.”
and: “…attempts to promote minorities on TV has caused regulatory blow back. Well meaning promotion of Black people, especially after Black Lives Matters, has helped fuel right wing conspiracy theories.”
Macwhirter’s comments are, frankly disgraceful, but not surprising. It used to be though that the curation of racist language and narratives was the domain of the tabloids [Hostile Media? – Bella Caledonia], and its true they have weaponised and monetised race-hate for decades.
But there is historically a particular role for Britain’s top-tier of racist columnists. Remember Douglas Murray not so long ago writing in The Spectator with reference to British Muslims involved in protests in London against Israeli atrocities in Gaza [Hate Sells: ‘The Spectator Cannot Defend Douglas Murray But It Won’t Sack Him’ – Byline Times]:
“If the Army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very, very brutal.”
This degradation of our public lives needs to be resisted, both in our own lives and language and in resisting the political-media class’s descent into the open sewer of racism.
The description of the pursuit of the Ethiopian asylum seeker as a ‘man hunt’ is another example of racist framing. Even though the whole incident was revealed to be a mistake in the part of inadequate authorities the impression of a convicted sex offender escaping and being sought seemed to me to be redolent of the Deep South of the US. I learned of his being taken into custody with a certain amount of relief – that he hadn’t experienced more violence at the hands of racists. Something is deeply wrong when a society turns almost as one on a person like that.
Reform are a racist fascist party. But it has been seen before. Oswald Mosley in the Thirties. Even good old Winston Churchill with his view of India and Indians, a beastly country with Beastly people. Racism lies dormant then rises when stresses are felt. Mrs Thatcher started the rot by selling council houses – the impact is now keenly felt by those who struggle to be housed – but of course it is the fault of the immigrants. There are just so many other examples. We need compassion, an acknowledgement that we may have differences with other people, but they too are human and should be treated with dignity and care. I do not care for Reform nor the Tories and struggle to be kind about them – I shall not vote for them and shall campaign against them at the next election using sound economic and rational arguments.
Bill
“Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform. The damage done on this front by the Johnson-Truss-Sunak government”
it goes back to 2010 and Cam-moron and Gidiot. The tories were & still are not just racist scum – but hate poor people – hence austerity which killed (murdered?) 130,000 of them. Right whinge populism & racisim and hatred of non-white people has been core to the Tory identiy for ever – except now its shifted to Fart-rage and Deform – different faces – same tory scum. Nye was right – they are & always will be just vermin – regardless of the label on the party.
Reminds me of a passage in Robert Jay Lifton’s brilliant book about the Nazi doctors: fist they pretend to objectively and reasonably identify a social problem (“Jews, immigrants”), thus opening up a discursive space in which certain ways of speaking about the problem are normalized (“Entfernung,” “removal”). Etc.
The fascists are also able to exploit a steady stream of online content such as YouTube videos depicting bleak high streets of vape shops, takeaways and, of course, immigrants.
Some of these are more overtly racist than others, but they help to set the mood- the comments below are the inevitably dominated by nudge nudge wink wink talk of “we all know the problem here” or references to “fighting age males”.
Impressionable young men are sitting in comfortable suburban houses , convinced that their country is a hellhole of mobile phone thefts and marauding brown skinned grooming gangs.
I don’t detect enthusiasm for Reform among this group- mere despair at the establishment ranging from the SNP to the Tories.
Particular disdain is expressed for Sadiq Khan and our very own Humza Yousaf.
Avoiding a Reform government is clearly an imperative here- but the spread of these ideas won’t be halted without action to increase the accountability of the tech giants.
One gets the sense that so-called “ordinary” Germans were not proactively antisemitic until after they’d been exposed to massive uninterrumpted streams of caricatures and distorted representations of Jews.
Steve – where is your evidence for this?
Are people in Scotland getting worked up about Sadiq Khan – I honestly doubt it?
Lastly advertisers try to reach as many people as possible so this means including as many minorities as possible. It will be a thought out strategy that they consider will attract as many people as possible to buy their products. The fact this upsets some politicians tells you everything you need to know about them.
Been saying this for quite a while. On BBC new the other day, almost the whole news was taken up by three different stories all depicting foreigners as “The Enemy”. Unfortunately there are some murders and sexual offences carried out in UK every day. How many are reported where the offender is of UK origin; the offence has to be pretty terrible for that to make the news. Our “newspapers” and TV are now only cheerleaders for Nigel Farage and the racists behind him.
I’m no fan of Jeremy Corbyn but the tone was set when a left leaning politician was driven out by trumped up accusations of antisemitism led by our Fascist media. I have written several times recently that we are now where Germany was in the 1930s; instead of the Jews our media target is MIGRANTS and any other FOREIGNER. We are on the path to Kristallnacht in UK unless we can somehow turn the tide.
But the reason why incitement to racism falls on such fertile soil must be interrogated (and comprehensively it is not, in the corporate media). The one simple and obvious comparison is between what the British did (does) as migrants to other countries. There are plenty of sources. I haven’t finished Elizabeth Kolsky’s Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, for example, but it deals directly with topic. Kolsky also directly addresses the lack of public attention to the issue.
p2 “Although the archive is replete with incidents of Britons murdering, maiming, and assaulting Indians — and getting away with it — white violence remains one of the empire’s most closely guarded secrets.”
However, British imperialists and fascists likely know and *celebrate* these kinds of migrant violence and atrocities (which still continue to day, the Empire hasn’t magically dissipated, merely adapted to serve the USAmerican one these days). They just fear the wheel turning (despite a colossal empirical difference).
#karmaphobia
You can see the colonial attitudes persist in documentaries like the BBC’s Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise, if you must. So, I suggest bringing up exactly those counterpoints so that the secrets Kolsky mentioned are brought to light.
The Advertising law of Nigeria since 2022 requires use of Nigerian citizens in advertising and voice-overs, whilst citizenship is mostly a matter of birth and descent, with naturalisation a difficult process. I’ve yet to hear much in the way of criticism of it.
Stephen – Sarah Pochin’s comments were directed on skin colour of people appearing in advertisements not their citizenship. That is why her comments were racist.
I struggle to see the relevance of Nigerian advertising policy about citizenship to this debate? The fact that few people have commented on Nigerian policy. Is probably related to the fact that few people are aware of it (certainly outside Nigeria).
Dear Mike Small, thanks for your fine articles, which certainly add to our food for thought. However, regarding “Britain was ‘sleepwalking into a ghettoised society'”, etc. The British Bull’s Crap corporation is of NO consequence to most people living north of the border. Their so-called ‘UK’ consists of more than ONE country, while the BBC Licence fees are charged everywhere in their beloved Britain… Eventually, this IS bound to END.
Yep Mike the UK’s Overton window has shifted to the far-right, but I don’t agree with Sartre on this one. We have to strategise to win.
With the collapse of the political centre the left needs to be articulating its own criticisms, not defending the policies of the last decades just because they’re being attacked by the right. I’ve said this too many times, but developing a competing narrative is necessary rather than criticising our opponents’ one (e.g. calling it out as racist).
We need to be discussing the abject failure of Thatchernomics, the poison that social media is for society (making us lonely, angry and stupid) and what the phenomenon of mass immigration really is: IMO a result of decades of coercing developing countries to put the interests of foreign companies above those of their citizens, as well as a policy seen as a shortcut to quick GDP growth. This is in no way an admission that immigrants are an aggravating factor in the UK’s omnicrisis, nor an argument that people should not be able to move around freely as they always have. However, were a dignified life possible in their home countries, I imagine many immigrants in the UK would prefer to have stayed there. Especially in these times.
I agree 100% Duncan
So would Sartre (agree). He had nothing but contempt for those who refused to “engage,” no matter the risks of success or failure; he called such people “salauds,” bastards.
George Orwell, who had credibility on the topic of fighting fascism, wrote in 1945, that the word had become meaningless; a way of demonstrating disapproval of your enemies and opponents.
As I have written before, there are – to all intents and purposes – no fascists in Scotland.
There are racists but far fewer than a generation ago.
Opposition to high levels of immigration has emerged as a major political issue across Europe, most recently in Scotland and Ireland. This applies from Spain to Poland; from Finland to Greece. The left, often a prisoner of identity politics, has chosen to ignore this opposition. (Denmark is an interesting exception.)The beneficiary of the left’s foolishness has been the populist right.
In Scotland, at the most recent Holyrood by election, the left – represented by the Scottish Socialist Party – got 1% of votes. The populist right -represented by Reform UK (essentially an English nationalist party) – got 26%.
For the Scottish left this was a rare excursion into electoral politics. For most of the past decade, it has given elections, and thus the voters, a miss. Instead, it has bet the farm on campaigning on social media. The verdict is now in. It lost.
Your argument seems to be – consistently – that a person or political project should abandon their values – in this case ‘racism is wrong’ – if its politically expedient to do so.
The Left specifically should just embrace racist polices to get elected. Its woeful, bizarre and opportunist.
The question is not, ‘Is racism wrong ?’. The question is, ‘How important a political issue is racism in Scotland ?’
Most Scots do not see it as a high political priority. Added to the obvious reasons, which have made it a non issue for decades, is a new one.
Scots see tens of thousands of people – mostly people of colour – spend huge sums of money and risk their life to reach the UK. They are mostly leaving the EU to get here. This is not indicative of a racist country; neither England – where nearly all want to stay – nor Scotland.
Most of the Scottish left has tied itself so securely to identity politics that it is very difficult to see any route back to a politics which resonates with voters, particularly working class voters. The most crippling thing about silo politics is the enormous difficulty is getting out of the silos, once you realize it is a dead end.
@florian albert, how do you know “there are – to all intents and purposes – no fascists in Scotland”? Your methodology? Trouble recruiting? Your ‘White Dragon’ clubhouse a bit empty these days?
Police Scotland publish their own records regarding Prevent references, of which far-right (or ‘extreme right wing’) groups make up a sizeable chunk. Officers are supposedly trained in detecting this, although possibly would find some within their own ranks.
I assume that the sun has not yet set on Scottish Dawn, while there are media reports of groups like the Neo-Nazi Highland Division and various youth groups. Some fascist activity, possibly the most part, will be clandestine and/or online, and some will not adhere to traditional tropes and ideologies. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Freedom News correspondents, but here’s a recent piece:
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/09/23/antifascists-outnumber-glasgow-far-right-unity-rally/
I knew some Scottish fascists, although some may have died or gone abroad or recanted since. Senility may see a resurgence.
So why make a ridiculous claim? Whether George Orwell was an authority about the use of the term ‘fascism’ in some circles in 1945, it does not make him an authority on uses of the term ‘fascism’ in Scotland in 2025. Orwell was happy to offer his own definitions of fascism, and describe its popularity among ‘rich men’ and white supremacists (The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941), and addressed the question ‘What is fascism?’ in a 1944 article which distinguishes how the word is loosely used from the useful concept (“Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning.”). Clearly it was counterproductive to openly support fascism in Britain in 1945, the most ludicrous year in which to compare to ours. Orwell writes that while ‘fascist’ is currently (in 1944) a slur applied to many different groups and viewpoints, fascist regimes have family resemblances but are difficult to tie to one definitive pattern, there are key political and economic signatures, and looks forward to the time when the term ‘fascism’ will be reclaimed from a swearword into a ‘generally accepted definition’. Perhaps like Umberto Eco’s. Or Wikipedia’s. Or Paradox Interactive’s.
FA – population in Scotland has barely increased over recent years in contrast to England where it has increased by a much larger amount. There are no small boats with asylum seekers washing up on Scotland’s shores unsurprisingly due to geography.
Immigration was polling at 6th most important issue for electorate in UK until Tory government started ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign which raised profile in media when it started climbing in electorate priority. The electorate in Scotland gets its news primarily via UK media therefore immigration has become a bigger concern on the back of this. Scotland is taking its fair share (possibly more) of asylum seekers arriving on English shores as immigration is not devolved and Scottish authorities wish to help out.’( I personalty think that Holyrood should refuse to accept any further asylum seekers arriving in England until Westminster devolves immigration to Holyrood). In the medium term due to our elderly population and low birth rate Scotland will require more immigrants to meet the workforce and taxation shortfall. I think vast majority of Scots aren’t unhappy welcoming immigrants if they arrive legally or are in genuine need.
There are right wing extremists/ fascists in Scotland trying to whip up discontent and racism but they don’t have much popular support in Scotland. The majority of support for Reform in Scotland comes from older, socially conservative people and disaffected voters who primarily wish to express their displeasure with all the main parties in Scotland.
Lastly much as I enjoy and respect George Orwell’s writing he was a writer of the first part of 20th century and was without criticism (witness his controversial comments on Scotland). He appears to have been elevated to such a level of reverence that his name is now frequently used/abused by a variety of people across the political spectrum.
McWhirter is hardly relevant to Scotland, few take him seriously. He’s an example of what you could describe as the tartan Overton window. One of the McMosleys.