One of the essential elements of truth is the use of words according to their accurate definitions. If I think the word red denotes what is classified as green, I cannot accurately identify things that are red. There are layers of meaning to words too. Again, take the word red. It is a colour adjective. But if I say that X turned red, I am saying more than that her cheeks were red. I am now describing her embarrassment or her response to vigorous exercise or that she has a temperature. When a word is used to denote people who cannot be defined in the way that the word normally intends, that is when miscommunication happens, offence can be caused and reputations may be ruined.
This has happened with the label ‘far right’. Conventionally, someone who is far right is one who is a bellicose nationalist, advocates authoritarian government and regards his or her people to be racially superior. Yes, appalling views indeed. Yet, the term is now used by the left to stigmatise people they loathe but who are not ‘far right’.
Take for example the crowd of anti-racists who were marching to Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens to hold a protest. En route, they passed a Wetherspoons pub. They assumed that the men inside the pub had far right sympathies, and so in protest turned to face the pub and drummed vigorously.
As the video recording demonstrates, these patrons of Wetherspoons had not come to Manchester to riot, but merely to support their football team, Port Vale, who were playing Salford City. Their response was not to be intimidated, but to stand outside the pub, wave a Port Vale flag and sing football chants.
The man who spoke at the end of the video made it clear that all he and his fellow fans were doing was having a pre-match beer, and that none of their chants featured racist language. One of the fans present later tweeted that ‘Being called EDL was not on my 2024 bingo card [You] can’t even have a pre-match pint without being called a racist’. The comments that follow reveal how much of an insult it was for these fans to be called racists. So no, these fans are not racists.
There is something disturbingly contradictory about what this anti-racist crowd did. They took one look at a group of white, male football fans sitting in a Wetherspoons and concluded without a sliver of evidence that they were racists. That is the type of prejudiced thinking which the anti-racists say they are protesting, and yet here they manifest it themselves perfectly. Of course, everyone with an ounce of frontal lobe matter knows there are white, racist football fans . Yet to tarnish all white football fans as racist is also racism. The worthy cause of anti-racism has thus turned full circle and ended up being racist itself.
To label football fans as far right is a symptom of the fact that far rightists in Britain are thankfully a negligible political force. The closest Britain ever got to a serious far right movement was Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, which was disbanded after only eight years in 1940. Yet, the left have to have their bogeymen to frighten people into voting for them. Certainly, there were far rightists inciting and leading race riots recently, but they were a minority among the many who wished to protest peacefully about uncontrolled immigration. With few examples of far right extremists to point to, the left must conjure them up by applying the label far right to those who are not. This has led to demonstrations outside the Reform Party’s London HQ at the weekend and the attempt by a Twitter/X mob to smear Douglas Murray as a fascist.
The left’s use of the term far right is therefore an abrogation of democratic values at their deepest level. It strikes at the principle of the presumption of innocence by condemning white men based on their appearance and pastimes, rather than any proven racist intentions and actions. It shuts down free speech over mass immigration and its deleterious effects on British society, because those who oppose mass immigration are vilified as necessarily racist. It also is undermining the success that Britain has had in becoming a nation unmarred by structural racism, as reported by Lord Sewell in his Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report. By diabolising white, working-class football fans as racist, the left has created a ‘structure of discourse’ which is racist. It is in the structures of language that racist conduct has its root, and are arguably more serious therefore than actual institutions being racist. As George Orwell’s novel 1984 warns, political power fundamentally is in the hands of those who control a society’s language, for it is by words that we think.
What is to be done? There is much. To defend free speech, act by joining Toby Young’s Free Speech Union. To oppose the left’s racial divisiveness, consider Don’t Divide Us . You may already be a member of either of these two worthy organisations, but if you are not, please consider them. Words, as the left knows extremely well, create cultures, but to defend British culture, lawful actions are needed too.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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‘What is to be done?’ I suggest turning the spotlight onto the Far Left, (which sometimes seems to be ALL of the left nowadays), and muscularly critiquing their less than perfect characteristics.
Conventionally, someone who is far right is one who is a bellicose nationalist, advocates authoritarian government……
We already have an ‘authoritarian government’ … of the FAR LEFT.
Anyone else sick of this prevalent name calling? All white working/unemployed class are racists. All retired Brexit voters are racists. Anyone who is not left leaning is ‘Far-Right’. Can these goody two shoes types not see that they, by their own use of labels, themselves are significantly outnumbered yet hold sway in Parliament, Local Government, Civil Service, Police, Armed Forces etc. Will the penny ever drop?
Racism has a serious supply and demand problem. Not enough racists to satisfy the need so you have to invent a few. It’s been going on for decades and I’m surprised that the term still has any traction (along with “Nazi”).
I could count on the fingers of one hand how many sensible arguments I’ve had with people who I would descibe as far-ish left – by that I mean beyond old Labour. They tend to be students or older people in the public sector. I don’t bother any more. If someone calls me a racist, I just say “OK, if you say so”. It saves time.
Sunak started the most recent accusation of the rise of the far right when he realised he was going to loose the GE big style. Like a typical fake Tory that he is he even descended into dragging his kids into his narrative. It was pure political theatre of very bad taste. He was attempting to smear ReformUK but it didn’t work, he will go down in history as the fake Tory who led the Tories to the biggest election defeat ever.