For a while, the international far right appeared to be moving with the confidence of a historical force. Trump was back in the White House. Viktor Orbán still looked like a model of consolidated far-right authoritarianism in Europe. Tommy Robinson had assembled the largest far-right street mobilisation in British history. Across Europe and the United States, the mood was not simply reactionary, but triumphal.

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That moment has not disappeared. It would be foolish to pretend that the far right is in retreat. Reform has strengthened its hand as a major electoral force in British politics through its widespread and crushing victories at the 7 May local elections. Robinson retains a large national audience and the capacity to mobilise street politics at scale. Trump’s administration remains a violent and authoritarian government. Nonetheless, the mood of simple forward motion has been interrupted. The far right is still advancing, but also fragmenting, quarrelling, misfiring and encountering resistance.

Even the juggernaut of Reform is facing problems. Let me be clear—the May elections have set the party on a path to power. Something enormous will need to take place in British politics to stop it forming the next government. However, the Caerphilly by-election in October 2025, when Plaid Cymru beat Reform, and the Gorton and Denton by-election in February 2026, when the Green Party won, show that a new pole of anti-Reform voters can coalesce around forces less contaminated by association with Britain’s exhausted and unpopular political centre. In the short term, this has trapped Labour in a pincer movement, splitting the anti-Reform vote in many places and allowing Reform to stack up huge numbers of council seats. Yet, in the longer-term, it may come to threaten the in-roads the party has made beyond its hardcore base of right-wing retirees and ex-Tories.

This contradictory picture should remind us never to analyse the far right as if it were a single bloc. It is not. Instead, it is a field of organisations, parties, influencers, street movements, local networks, electoral vehicles, media personalities and ideological tendencies. These forces overlap, borrow from one another and feed one another. However, they also compete with one another, fighting over money, audience, legitimacy, tactics, respectability, ideology and leadership. The result is not a smooth march to power, but a fractured process of recomposition.

The current situation in Britain has to be understood in this way. The current configuration of far-right forces—Reform, Robinsonism and Restore Britain—represent distinct but connected attempts to organise the rightward shift in British politics. Reform gives that process its major electoral expression. Robinson gives it a street expression. Restore Britain has emerged as a harder ethno-nationalist pole around Rupert Lowe.

The argument, then, is not that the far right is weak because it is divided. One need only look at the millions of people who have just voted for Reform to see this. Fragmentation is not the same as defeat. Fascist and far-right movements have often passed through fragmented phases before consolidation. They appear as milieus before they appear as parties and as street networks before they become institutions. Today, they may be composed of online audiences before they become disciplined organisations. Fragmentation can be a sign of weakness and rivalry, but it can also be a form of experimentation.

The international right runs into trouble

The first level of analysis has to be international. British far-right politics is not hermetically sealed inside Britain. Robinsonism has been shaped by the US counter-jihad milieu, MAGA politics, pro-Israel Islamophobia, online conspiracy culture and transnational influencer networks. Reform also operates inside a wider right-populist ecology. The ethno-nationalist wing of the British far right is deeply shaped by US white nationalism, antisemitic “America First” politics and the online cultures that link figures such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson as well as their British imitators.

Of course, Britain does not simply import these dynamics wholesale. Britain has its own racial formations, class relations and political traditions. Nonetheless, the international context shapes morale, resources, ideological repertoires and strategic possibilities.

The defeat of Orbán in Hungary is one sign of the difficulties faced by the international far right. Orbán had been treated by much of the global right as proof that nationalist authoritarianism could not only win, but consolidate. His Hungary was an example for Trumpists, European reactionaries and sections of the British right: anti-migrant, anti-liberal, anti-left, nationalist, hostile to NGOs and able to embed itself deeply in the state. Yet, in April 2026, Orbán lost office after 16 years as prime minister, defeated by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party. Magyar is no liberal saviour; he emerged from the world of Fidesz and leads a centre-right, pro-European, anti-corruption formation. Nonetheless, Orbán’s defeat punctures the idea that the authoritarian right, once entrenched, is invincible.

This does not mean Orbánism is finished. Analysts have rightly warned that Fidesz’s influence over Hungarian institutions, the judiciary, media and state structures will not vanish overnight. However, the symbolic blow is significant. A regime that was supposed to represent the future of the global right has been thrown out.

Trumpism is also under pressure, though in a different form. The US far right remains extremely powerful, but its second administration has already generated contradictions. Immigration enforcement remains central to Trump’s project, yet the brutality of ICE has produced opposition and unease. Polling reported in March 2026 found rising support for abolishing ICE, especially among Democrats and independents, with even a minority of Republicans now supporting abolition.

The Epstein files have created a different kind of problem. Trump and his movement spent years mobilising fantasies about paedophile cabals, the “deep state” and liberal corruption. Yet, the politics of conspiracist suspicion is not always easy to control. When the Epstein files became a live issue, Trump’s reversal over their release exposed the difficulty of managing a base trained to distrust hidden power. What I’ve previously termed the far right’s “conspiracy machine” does not only point outward; it can turn back on its own leaders.

The deepest split, however, has opened around Iran, Israel and antisemitism. Trump’s war with Iran has divided parts of the MAGA media world. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and others have attacked the war from an “America First” direction, often through forms of anti-Israel politics that slide easily into antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Of course, the US was not dragged into war by Israel against its own interests. Israel is a junior partner of US foreign policy, not the secret master of Washington. When the US supports Israeli aggression, it does so because that policy fits the strategic interests of the US state. The antisemitic version of “America First” politics displaces responsibility away from US imperialism and onto hidden Jewish or Zionist power.

Nonetheless, the split is politically significant. Trump is so central to MAGA that direct criticism of him remains difficult. The result is a familiar fantasy: the king is good, but his advisers are bad. Trump cannot have betrayed “America First”; he must have been misled by Netanyahu, Zionists, neoconservatives or hidden forces. This is an updated version of a medieval pattern, in which anger at the ruler is redirected onto supposed corrupt intermediaries rather than the structure of rule itself.

The economic context sharpens this. The Trump administration is learning the hard way that war produces costs. Oil prices rise, and food and fuel become more expensive. A movement built around the promise that ordinary Americans would no longer pay for foreign entanglements suddenly finds itself defending another imperial adventure. The ideological crisis therefore has a material base; “America First” promised cheaper lives and fewer wars, but the actual logic of US power has produced the opposite.

The British reflection

These international fractures feed back into Britain because the British far right is itself divided around similar questions: civic nationalism or ethno-nationalism, Islamophobia or biological racism, pro-Israel counter-jihad politics or antisemitic conspiracism, electoral respectability or street mobilisation, Reform or Robinson or Restore.

The split between civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism is central. Robinson’s project has long depended on a form of culturalist racism. The surface claim is that the issue is not race, but religion, culture, values and integration. Robinson presents himself as someone defending women, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, secularism, free speech and “British values” against Islam. This is strategically useful because it allows him to deny that he is racist while mobilising hostility towards Muslims, refugees and migrants in ways that overwhelmingly target racialised populations.

This civic-nationalist surface has always been translucent. Beneath it sits Great Replacement narratives, conspiratorial antisemitism, demographic panic and a politics of national purification that cannot be separated from older forms of racial thinking. Robinson’s movement says it is not about race, but its targets are overwhelmingly racialised. It says the problem is Islam, but refugees and migrants become proxies for black and Asian people more broadly. It says some minorities can belong if they join the anti-Muslim project, but this inclusion is conditional, tactical and always reversible.

This indeterminacy gives the ethno-nationalist wing an opening. Around Patriotic Alternative, the Homeland Party and looser online networks, there is a harder biological racism that rejects Robinson’s civic nationalism as compromise. These forces object not only to Muslim migration, but to non-white migration as such. They define the nation through ancestry, ethnicity, blood and “native” identity. They often combine this with conspiratorial antisemitism.

Their criticism of Robinson is straightforward: he is not serious. He opposes Muslims, but not immigration as such. He has spoken favourably of Iranians, Sikhs, Hindus or other minorities when they are useful to his anti-Muslim politics. He has tied himself to Israel and pro-Israel networks. He uses civic-nationalist language to deny the biological racial politics that the ethno-nationalists want to make explicit.

In one sense, Robinson’s strategy is what has allowed him to build a broad street audience. In another, it leaves him open to attack from his right. The very flexibility that gives Robinson reach also exposes him to accusations of compromise.

Reform and Robinson: separation and division of labour

The primary fragmentation in the British far right is between Reform and Robinson.

Nigel Farage has consistently tried to keep Robinson at arm’s length. Reform’s strategy depends on presenting itself as a respectable electoral force. It wants councillors, MPs, donors, media access and the ability to pose as a government-in-waiting. Robinson is useful to the wider political atmosphere, but toxic to Reform’s official brand.

However, separation does not mean absence of connection. Reform and the Robinson-aligned street movement are distinct expressions of the same wider right-wing recomposition. Reform turns resentment into votes, while Robinson turns it into marches, hotel protests and intimidation. Reform seeks electoral respectability, while Robinson supplies the street pole, the affective charge, the spectacle, the confrontation and the sense that something is moving outside parliament.

This is why the relationship is best understood as a division of labour, but one without stable command. Reform does the electoral work, and Robinson animates the street. Local overlaps are common; Reform activists may attend anti-asylum protests without formally representing the party. Moreover, street agitation can create local crises around hotels, councils and planning conflicts, after which Reform can present itself as the force that will restore order through electoral victories.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not require secret coordination. It is simply a functional relationship inside a broader political field. The same anti-migrant common sense circulates through both, and the same local grievances can be articulated in both electoral and street forms. The same councils can be pressured from outside by protests and from inside by Reform candidates and councillors.

Nonetheless, the relationship is unstable. Reform benefits from the atmosphere created by Robinson, but must avoid being contaminated by him. Robinson benefits from the normalisation of anti-migrant politics by Reform, but must present Reform as cowardly or insufficiently militant in order to convince people that he is necessary. Each needs something the other has, but each can be damaged by too friendly an association with the other.

Rupert Lowe and the crisis of Reform’s right flank

Rupert Lowe’s break with Reform crystallised this tension.

Lowe was suspended by Reform in March 2025 amid allegations that included bullying, harassment and threats against party chair Zia Yusuf; Lowe denied the allegations and framed the move as politically motivated after his criticism of Farage’s leadership. Reporting described Reform’s internal report as finding “credible” evidence of bullying or harassment, while Lowe rejected the claims.

Whatever the formal allegations, the background matters more. Lowe had positioned himself to Farage’s right. He was more willing to use the language of deportation and showed greater sympathy towards Robinson’s supporters. He criticised Reform’s internal structure and Farage’s “messianic” leadership. He became a problem for a party trying to balance right-wing radicalism with electoral respectability.

At first glance, one might have expected Lowe to fuse with Robinson. He had broken with Reform, was rhetorically harder than Farage and appealed to the more militant anti-migrant right. Yet, this is not what happened. Instead, two different vehicles emerged around the right of Reform: Ben Habib’s Advance UK and Lowe’s Restore Britain.

Advance UK was closer to Robinson’s civic-nationalist world. Habib, a former deputy leader of Reform, came to lead the party after his own break with Farage. The party has attracted some activists from the street movement, but its development has been stunted. It has not become the major pole for which sections of the far right hoped.

Part of the problem, from the point of view of the ethno-nationalists, is Habib himself. As a British politician of Pakistani heritage, Habib symbolises the civic-nationalist vision: a far-right British nationalism that can include some non-white figures if they accept its politics. For the ethno-nationalist wing, this is precisely the problem. It violates their basic racial presuppositions.

Restore Britain and the ethno-nationalist pole

Low registered his Restore Britain party in March 2026, positioning it as a vehicle for “taking back control” from a failed political class, but the key political substance is harder anti-migration and deportation politics. At his Great Yarmouth launch, Lowe pledged “mass deportations”, telling supporters that “millions will have to go”.

Restore is far from a mass fascist party. Moreover, it is electorally marginal nationally, though Lowe’s local base is not insignificant. Restore’s local offshoot, Great Yarmouth First, won all ten seats it contested in the May election.

Yet, its significance cannot be measured by votes alone. Restore has become a condensation point for forces that want to outflank Reform and Robinson from the ethno-nationalist right. Neo-Nazi and fascist activists have rallied behind Restore, with former members of Homeland and a number of established fascist activists moving into its orbit.

This gives the ethno-nationalists a significant political vehicle. Restore has a white British leadership figure who is a sitting MP, handing it a parliamentary platform and an emergent network of local branches. It can present itself as more serious than Robinson’s spectacle and more radical than Farage’s electoral moderation. It does not need to make the civic-nationalist compromises that Habib represents.

The result is a new pole in the far-right field. Reform remains the dominant electoral vehicle, and Robinson remains the street leader. However, Restore is trying to become the ethno-nationalist challenger.

Robinson’s strategic problem

This leaves Robinson in a contradictory position.

On one hand, he remains central. His “Unite the Kingdom” rally on 16 May 2026 will be a major far-right mobilisation. The rally follows the September 2025 mobilisation that drew around 110,000 people, which constitutes the biggest fascist-led demonstration in British history. Robinson retains resources that no other British street figure possesses: name recognition, fundraising capacity, international links, a mass online audience and the ability to turn local grievances into national spectacle.

On the other hand, he is vulnerable. Why hold a national march every few months? Is this building durable organisation, or simply producing spectacles around Robinson’s brand? Why is he so often in the US? Is the movement a political project or a fundraising machine? Why has he tied himself so closely to MAGA, to pro-Israel networks and to an US far right that is itself fragmenting?

His relationship to Israel is particularly important. Robinson has been invited to Israel by a government minister, a move condemned by major British Jewish organisations, which said he represented the “very worst of Britain”. For Robinson, pro-Israel politics has long been part of the counter-jihad package. He preaches that Muslims are the enemy, and thus Israel is the frontline of Western civilisation. Jews are to be defended insofar as they can be folded into this anti-Muslim narrative.

Yet, this position now creates problems on his right. Ethno-nationalists and antisemitic “America First” currents can ask why a British nationalist is so aligned with Israel. They can also ask why he appears dependent on American MAGA networks. They can accuse him of serving foreign interests, grifting from overseas audiences or compromising the national cause. The accusation is reactionary and often antisemitic, but it has traction because Robinson’s politics really is transnational despite its nationalist rhetoric.

This is Robinson’s contradiction. His power depends on transnational circuits of money, media, influence and ideology. Meanwhile, his brand depends on national authenticity. The two do not sit easily together.

Fragmentation as field struggle

The British far right should therefore be understood as a strategic field rather than a single organisation. Its actors share broad commitments to racism, nationalism and authoritarianism, but they compete over position.

They compete over legitimacy. Who represents the “real” people? Who is too moderate? Who is too toxic? Who is compromised? Who is a grifter? Who is serious about deportation? Who is too close to Israel, too close to MAGA, too close to the establishment, too civic-nationalist, too reckless or too respectable?

They also compete over audience. Reform wants ex-Tory voters, anti-migrant Labour defectors, pensioners, small-business owners and anyone attracted to an electoral anti-establishment vehicle. Robinson wants the street audience, livestream viewers, hotel protesters, flag raisers and those who want confrontation. Restore wants those who think Reform is weak and Robinson is compromised. Advance UK wants a civic-nationalist space to the right of Reform but without the explicitly white ethno-nationalist baggage of Restore.

They compete over tactics as well. Elections or streets? Councils or protests? Civic nationalism or ethno-nationalism? Culturalist or biological racism? Pro-Israel Islamophobia or antisemitic “America First” politics? Spectacle or organisation? Mass deportation as rhetoric or programme?

Fragmentation flows from the contradictions of the field. Reform cannot fully embrace Robinson without endangering its respectability. Robinson and Advance UK cannot satisfy ethno-nationalists because its leadership embodies civic nationalism. Restore cannot easily become a broad electoral vehicle without exposing its fascist fringe; the ethno-nationalists need a vehicle, but the more explicit they become, the more they risk isolation.

This does not mean the field cannot settle. Reform could absorb parts of fascist right if it continues to succeed electorally, and Restore could grow if Reform appears too moderate and Lowe continues to attract local successes. God forbid, there is the distant but distinct possibility that Robinsonism could become a more explicit physical-force instrument of a future Reform government. Or new crises could produce new alignments.

The key point is that the far right’s current fragmentation is a process of struggle over settlement. The triumphal moment opened the possibility of rapid advance, but the present moment is about who gets to define that advance, who leads it, what ideological form it takes, and how it relates to state power, elections and the street.

The danger of instability

It would be a mistake to treat this fragmentation as good news in any simple sense.

Fragmentation can weaken the far right. It can split votes, waste resources, generate paranoia, expose contradictions and produce tactical confusion. The feud between Advance UK and Restore, the tension between Farage and Lowe, the hostility between Robinson and the ethno-nationalists, and the MAGA split over Iran all create openings. Divided movements can demoralise supporters and stymy consolidation.

However, fragmentation can also radicalise. When actors compete for authenticity, they often move rightwards. Reform is attacked for moderation, so Restore promises mass deportations. Robinson is attacked for civic nationalism, so ethno-nationalists insist on biological race. Trump is difficult to criticise, so antisemitic explanations of Israel and “bad advisers” intensify. Advance fails to satisfy the far right, so Restore becomes the more attractive pole. Each faction tries to prove that it alone is uncompromised.

This is why the present situation is dangerous in uneven ways. The far right may not be marching as a single army, but it is experimenting with forms. Electoral respectability, street mobilisation, ethno-nationalist reorganisation, online media, local hotel protests, flag campaigns, anti-Muslim panic and antisemitic conspiracy are all being tested and recombined.

The British picture is therefore one of recomposition, not simple growth or decline. Reform, Robinson and Restore represent different answers to the same underlying problem: how to organise the reactionary energies released by Tory decline, Labour’s weakness, austerity, racist border politics, imperial crisis and the collapse of older political loyalties.

Their answers conflict, but also reinforce one another. Reform normalises the anti-migrant common sense, and Robinson gives it force in the street. Restore pulls the field towards harder racial politics. Each pole can denounce the others while benefiting from the atmosphere they collectively create.

The far right after the triumphal moment is therefore not simply weaker. It is more exposed, and its contradictions are sharper. Its factions are fighting. Its relationship to Trumpism, Israel, MAGA, Reform, Robinsonism and ethno-nationalism is unstable. Nonetheless, it remains capable of mobilising enormous resentment, producing street intimidation and reshaping electoral politics.

The task is to understand this instability for what it is—one of the forms through which it is currently trying to reorganise itself.

Much commentary on Reform and the far right treats class as a demographic box. Their support is variously described as “working class”, “left behind” or “white van man”. These labels can be useful, but they are blunt. They freeze people in place.

However, there is another route into analysing the appeal of the far right. That is asking not only where people are now, but where they think they are going. What futures do they imagine for themselves? What work do they expect to enter? What status do they feel entitled to? What decline do they fear? And who are they encouraged to blame when those futures are blocked?

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This plane of analysis is important if we are to understand far-right politics. The far right does not simply feed on present suffering, but also on threatened trajectories: the sense that a life people expected, or felt promised, has been taken away.

The future is already in the room

An imagined future is not a private fantasy. It is a socially produced anticipation of the world someone expects to inhabit. Someone may imagine becoming a public-sector professional, a self-employed tradesman, a small business owner, a contractor, a landlord, a care worker or simply a person with a secure job, a home and a stable place in the world. That future has not happened yet, but it already shapes present attitudes.

People discipline themselves for future roles and adopt the values of the worlds they expect to enter. They learn what kind of speech will be acceptable, what kind of authority they will face, what kind of status they can expect, and what kinds of people may appear as competitors, colleagues or threats.

This connects with Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus: the socially formed dispositions through which people come to experience some futures as natural, others as unlikely, and others as not “for people like us”. It also echoes Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the capacity to aspire: the ability to imagine and navigate futures is unevenly distributed, shaped by class, culture and power.

The future, in this sense, is not merely “later”. It becomes active in the present as aspiration, anxiety, resentment and identity. Martin Heidegger expressed this in his enigmatic formulation that human existence is always “ahead-of-itself”: we live not as beings enclosed in the present, but as beings constantly projected toward possibilities that shape what the present means.

Class as relation, not identity

This is a relational way of thinking. Imagined futures are formed through class, labour markets, education, gender, race, state institutions, family expectations and local economies. They are not just “ideas”; they are anticipations rooted in material relations.

That is what makes the concept useful for Marxism. Marxism—or at the very least, good Marxism—does not treat class as an identity badge. Class is defined by relations to others. A worker is not simply someone with a certain income, but someone compelled to sell their capacity to work to a boss. A small business owner occupies a contradictory position between labour and capital. A student is not just a young person in education, but someone being prepared for a future place in the division of labour.

Still, the point is not only Marxist. It overlaps with a wider relational tradition in social theory. There is a rich history of relational sociology that insists individuals are formed within webs of interdependence, not as isolated units.

So imagined futures are not a psychological add-on to class analysis. They help explain how people are already being positioned in relation to future labour, property, authority, competition and the state.

The far right sells stolen futures

The far right does more than organise present grievances; it also organises stolen futures. Its message is not just “you are suffering”, but “you were meant to have more, and someone has taken it from you”.

Migrants, Muslims, refugees, “woke” institutions, public-sector workers, feminists and cosmopolitan elites are all presented as enemies of a promised future. Reform does this electorally through a rhetoric of national restoration, hard borders and anti-establishment resentment. The street far right does it through confrontation, hotel protests and fantasies of defending “our women”, “our streets” and “our country”.

Here there are clear links with Benedict Anderson’s account of the nation as an imagined community. National belonging is not fake because it is imagined; as Karl Marx once said, ideas “become a material force when they grip the masses”. The ideology of nation is powerful because millions of people can be invited to imagine themselves as part of the same threatened collective. The far right turns that imagined community into an imagined loss: the nation that was “ours”, the future that should have been “ours”, the streets that must be “taken back”.

Crucially, that imagined national loss has a resonance in the imagined futures of millions of people. A young man training for a trade, a self-employed builder squeezed by costs, a care worker priced out of housing, a retired homeowner watching a town centre decline or a former Labour voter who feels abandoned may all experience the future as something shrinking. The far right intervenes at precisely this point. It offers an explanation for blocked mobility, insecure work, unaffordable housing, degraded services and social humiliation. However, it does so by converting real losses into racialised theft. The future was not stolen by landlords, bosses, austerity, privatisation, low wages or the organised power of capital. It was supposedly stolen by migrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, benefit claimants, feminists, trans people, “woke” councils and all manner of other enemies. This is the emotional power of the far right’s politics of restoration; it gives people a story in which their own diminished expectations become part of a national betrayal. These are the everyday roots of the slogan ubiquitously chanted during the August 2024 riots: “We want our country back!”

The small proprietor’s dream

This politics lands unevenly across different class fractions. A small contractor, shopkeeper, landlord, tradesman or self-employed worker may imagine a future of independence: one’s own business, one’s own property, one’s own customers, one’s own patch. That future promises autonomy and status, but it is often lived through insecurity: costs rise, larger firms dominate, regulations bite, work is irregular, debt grows and social decline feels close.

Without strong collective organisation, that insecurity can become resentment rather than solidarity. The state appears as regulation. Migrant labour appears as competition. Public-sector workers appear protected. Anti-racist norms appear as moral policing. Trade unions may seem distant or irrelevant. In that world, Reform’s politics can feel like common sense: less regulation, national preference, punishment for outsiders and contempt for liberal elites.

The lower-middle-class element is crucial here, and it is not just a matter of income. It is a structure of aspiration and anxiety: the hope of autonomy, the fear of falling and resentments upwards displaced downwards. Recent arguments about Britain as a society increasingly shaped by home ownership, small landlordism, self-employment and entrepreneurial aspiration are useful here; neoliberalism has not simply polarised society into workers and billionaires, but expanded intermediate layers whose politics often combine insecurity with possessiveness and individualism.

That helps explain why the far right so often speaks the language of the small proprietor: “my business”, “my street”, “my taxes”, “my country”. It’s instructive that the semi-fascist Restore Britain party has launched a series of local organisations with names such as “Great Yarmouth First” and “Barking and Dagenham First”. It turns the desire for control over one’s life into hostility towards those below, beside or outside the nation, rather than those above.

Learning the politics of a future role

Imagined futures also help explain how political common sense is formed before people fully enter the social positions they are moving towards. Education, training and early work do more than simply provide skills; they rehearse future selves.

A person preparing for a regulated public-facing role may begin to internalise the language of professionalism, safeguarding, equality duties and institutional responsibility. Someone moving towards self-employment or small business may be encouraged to see independence, competition, flexibility and personal responsibility as natural. Someone entering precarious work may learn that survival depends on individual hustle rather than collective organisation.

This is a form of anticipatory professionalism: people begin to adopt the norms of the occupational world they expect to enter before they fully enter it. Political outlook is formed not only by background, but by anticipated destination.

The war on “low-value” futures

This is where the right-wing assault on humanities, arts and so-called “low-value” degrees becomes politically significant. Beneath a technocratic argument about graduate earnings lies a struggle over which imagined futures are legitimate.

In 2023, the Conservative government promised a crackdown on “rip-off university degrees”, framing higher education around whether students gain “skills needed to get great jobs” and support economic growth. Proposed restrictions targeted courses where too few graduates entered “professional” jobs, postgraduate study or business formation—a metric widely understood as threatening arts and humanities courses in particular.

More recently, the pressure on humanities has continued through university cuts. Goldsmiths faced major redundancies affecting arts, humanities, culture, society and related departments, with some departments including anthropology, English, history, music and sociology facing losses of up to half their staff. In May 2026, the University of Hertfordshire moved to drop history, English and other humanities courses, citing financial viability and falling recruitment.

The ideological message is clear: education is to be valued only insofar as it trains students for immediately legible labour-market outcomes. Degrees that encourage historical consciousness, interpretation, critique, ambiguity, collective memory, cultural analysis or political imagination are treated as indulgent, wasteful or elitist.

The attack on humanities is an attack on certain kinds of imagined future. It narrows the horizon of what students are allowed to become. The desirable student is recast as employable, flexible, debt-bearing, vocationally disciplined and economically useful. The undesirable student is the one being prepared for a future that is neither clearly managerial, proprietorial nor immediately productive in the narrow sense. They are imagined as drifting towards insecure cultural work, teaching, public service, care, research, criticism or political organisation—in other words, towards a set of imagined futures that would place them in an antagonistic social bloc.

The future is a battlefield

A relational Marxist approach does not deny culture, gender, locality or ideology. It insists these are mediations through which class is lived. People do not derive politics mechanically from income or occupation. They interpret their lives through trajectories, expectations, institutions and political organisation.

That means the future itself becomes a terrain of struggle. Reform’s future is one of borders, resentment and exclusion: a restored nation cleansed of the people blamed for decline. The neoliberal university offers another narrowed future: vocational compliance, entrepreneurial self-management, debt and employability. The two are not identical, but they can reinforce each other. Both shrink the space in which people imagine collective, critical or emancipatory futures.

The far right grows when people experience crisis as abandonment and imagine salvation through exclusion. Its power lies in making reactionary futures feel concrete, emotional and close at hand. Any serious class politics would need to make solidarity feel just as material: not a moral appeal from outside people’s lives, but a plausible route through the crisis they are already living.

The key question is therefore not only what people believe now. It is what futures they are being taught to expect, fear, resent and desire—and who gets to organise those expectations.

Any serious analysis of Britain’s contemporary far-right street movement has to begin with a fundamental question: what kind of thing is fascism? This is no mere philosophical matter. If the object of subject is misrecognised at its most basic level, then even detailed empirical description will create confusion rather than clarity.

Fascism is more than its instantiations as a party, a crowd, an ideology, a leader, an online network or a series of violent demonstrations. It is a social and political process that can move across all these forms. It appears in rumours, hotel protests, flag campaigns, livestreams, local Facebook groups, electoral breakthroughs, town-centre mobilisations and moments of street violence. Its unity does not always lie in formal organisation. Often, it lies in the practical and ideological work through which grievance is racialised and turned towards reactionary mobilisation.

Two errors of interpretation must be avoid. The first can be described as idealism, and the second as crude materialism.

The first error treats fascism as merely ideological: a set of reactionary beliefs, such as racism, nationalism, Islamophobia, misogyny, conspiracism and anti-migrant resentment. Of course, these elements are indispensable to fascism. However, ideology is not some free-floating mist above society. It has to be organised, embodied and operationalised to maintain itself and to have an effect on the world. Fascism is given material form in protests, hotel pickets, social media activity, fundraising and electoral formations.

The second error is to treat fascism as the immediate political expression of social suffering. In this interpretation, poverty, insecurity, decline or humiliation generate reactionary politics more or less directly. This, too, is false. Many poor areas do not produce far-right mobilisation. Many working-class people are actively anti-racist. Many relatively comfortable layers are drawn towards authoritarian nationalism. Deprivation may form part of the terrain on which fascism operates. Nonetheless, it does not determine the political direction of those who experience it.

Fascism is better understood as a real social and political process, rooted in class relations, racialisation, local conditions and the breakdown of previously dominant political institutions, but reducible to none of these taken separately. It is produced through their articulation.

Class as relation

Analysing fascism in this way requires a relational conception of class. Class is not a simple identity category. To say that a person is working class, self-employed, petty bourgeois, lower-middle class, retired, precarious or a small business owner does not yet tell us how they are politically formed. The crucial question is how people are located within relations of labour, ownership, authority, dependence, discipline and social power.

A hospital worker, a self-employed tradesman, a warehouse operative, a taxi driver, a roofer employed by a small boss, a retired homeowner, a café proprietor and a council worker may all encounter crisis. They may all experience pressure, resentment, insecurity or disrespect. Yet, the social relations through which they experience these pressures are often divergent. They are mediated by different institutions, labour processes, forms of authority and political traditions.

Fascist politics does not simply express class anger. Rather, it transforms it and displaces it. It tells people that the cause of their suffering lies not in capital, landlordism, the employer, austerity or the state’s management of crisis, but in migrants, Muslims, asylum seekers, leftists, feminists, trans people, “globalists”, welfare claimants or other supposedly parasitic outsiders.

In this sense, fascism does not abolish class grievance. Instead, it recodes it.

This allows participants in fascist movements to experience themselves as insurgent while directing their anger downwards and sideways. It offers action, agency, comradeship and confrontation, but in defence of hierarchy. It tells people they are rising up, while mobilising them against those more vulnerable than themselves. This is part of fascism’s peculiar power: its capacity to generate a pseudo-revolutionary affect while remaining counter-revolutionary in content.

Therefore, racism, which is so often the binding glue of a fascist movement, must be treated materially. It is more than simply an incorrect idea lodged in individual consciousness. It is reproduced through institutions, state practices, borders, media narratives, housing systems, policing, welfare politics, workplace competition, national myth and local rumour. In the current far-right street movement in Britain, racism is concretised through targets: asylum hotels, mosques, migrant support groups, local councils, refugee accommodation and those accused of betraying the nation.

The hotel, the flag, the racist rumour, the Facebook group and the livestream are not secondary details. They are part of the material existence of the movement.

Fragmented beginnings

The looseness of today’s far right is often treated as something entirely new, produced by new digital practices enabled by social media and livestreaming. Of course, it is certainly truse that modern technologies have transformed the speed and form of mobilisation. Rumours circulate instantly; livestreamers convert confrontation into income and influence; national figures such as Tommy Robinson can intervene in local events without being physically present. These developments all enable a more networked and less centralised form of movement.

Nonetheless, fragmentation is far from new to fascism. The image of fascism that dominates historical memory is usually fascism after consolidation: the Nazi party-state, the Führer, the uniformed mass party, the disciplined apparatus. Yet, this was not the primordial form of German fascism. The Nazi Party emerged after the First World War from a fractured field of radical right organisation: veterans’ leagues, paramilitary bands, antisemitic sects, völkisch circles, counter-revolutionary networks and small political organisations.

Much of the fighting wing of Nazism emerged from the Freikorps: bands of demobbed soldiers who roamed Germany after the First World War in a successful effort to snuff out socialist revolution. The Freikorps were not a single fascist party, but a series of paramilitary formations operating in the shattered terrain of the early Weimar Republic. Nazism crystallised out of this wider reactionary milieu. Its later centralisation was an achievement of political struggle, crisis and organisation, not an original condition.

A similar point can be made about interwar British fascism. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists represented one attempt to create a centralised fascist party before the Second World War. However, its destruction during the war left a vacuum. British fascism passed through decades of fragmentation, with small racial nationalist circles, neo-Nazi groups, street gangs and local organisations attempting to regroup around anti-immigration politics. The National Front, formed in 1967, was itself a consolidation of previously separate organisations.

This history warns against treating formal centralisation as the essence of fascism. Fascist movements often appear as milieus before they appear as parties, as street networks before they become institutions, and as unstable coalitions before they become disciplined formations. The question is not whether a movement already resembles fascism in its most consolidated historical forms, but whether it performs fascist political work: racialising crisis, targeting minorities, building street power, attacking the left, producing fantasies of national betrayal and organising authoritarian energies outside ordinary parliamentary channels.

Epsom and Epping

The contemporary form can be seen clearly in Epsom. In April 2026, rumours circulated after a reported rape in the Surrey town. Protesters gathered amid claims that asylum seekers or immigrants were involved. Surrey Police later said there was no evidence linking asylum seekers or immigrants to the allegation, and no evidence of the offence as reported at that stage of the investigation. Epsom Travelodge was targeted after protesters claimed it housed asylum seekers, a claim police described as “wholly inaccurate information”. The event had been promoted and led by Danny Tommo, a key associate of Tommy Robinson.

Note the sequence: rumour, racialisation, mobilisation, target, confrontation. An alleged crime became a racialised narrative. A hotel became a target. Local resentment was joined by out-of-town fascist activists. Social media accelerated the process. What emerged was not a disciplined fascist party acting through a clear chain of command, but a loose network capable of sudden racist eruption: unstable and uneven, but also dangerous.

The far-right protests in Epping points to a different rhythm. If Epsom showed a sharp and mobile eruption, Epping showed something more sustained. Public protests around the Bell Hotel began in July 2025 after the arrest of an asylum seeker accommodated there on charges of sexual assault and harassment. By early August, the protests had become continuous, with regular violence and arrests. The dispute drew in the council, the courts and national media, becoming a launchpad for nationwide far-right protests outside asylum seeker accommodation.

So, Epsom appeared as a concentrated mobile action, quickly assembled around a false rumour and dissipating once the narrative collapsed. Meanwhile, Epping became a more durable flashpoint, attracting national attention and spurring a broader anti-asylum wave.

What is the difference between Epsom and Epping? The answers are far from immediately clear. The explanation cannot simply be that Epping is poorer or more “left behind”. Epping Forest is a relatively affluent outer-metropolitan district, marked by high home ownership, commuter-belt pressures, proximity to London, Green Belt anxieties and local respectability.

Nonetheless, there are some differences between the two towns worth pausing upon. Epsom’s relatively affluent, professional and commuter-belt class composition sits within a local political terrain where Liberal Democrat authority is strong and where Tory decline has not necessarily opened the same kind of direct street-political opportunity for the far right. Epping, by contrast, combines outer-metropolitan affluence with a stronger small-business, property-owning and Conservative local culture, creating a more favourable terrain for anti-asylum politics to move between respectable local grievance, council pressure and street mobilisation.

This does not prove who organised the protests, who attended them or how local residents, national fascists, Reform supporters, Conservatives and small-business networks related to one another. That would require focused and precise sociological research. However, it suggests a sharper question: why did a racialised rumour in Epsom produce a brief eruption, while Epping became embedded in a wider cycle of local institutional conflict, Tory decomposition, street activity and national far-right agitation?

Layers, firms and local networks

The comparison points to a broader methodological issue. The crowds at the protests in Epping, Epsom and elsewhere do not transparently reveal the class character of a movement. Movements have layers.

The movement is composed of several distinct strata. At the top are figures such as Robinson, along with influencers, livestreamers and those who give the movement its ideological language. Beneath them are the local organisers: people running Facebook pages, coordinating Telegram groups, calling demonstrations and converting rumours into mobilisations. Around these sits a practical layer that supplies the material infrastructure of street politics: vans, ladders, flags, banners, sound equipment, meeting places and physical force. Then there are those who turn up to demonstrations themselves. Beyond all of this is a much wider digital constituency: people who watch, donate, share content and identify with the movement without necessarily appearing on the streets.

These layers need not have the same class composition. To collapse them into a single undifferentiated “base” is to obscure the movement’s real structure. This is why the question “what class are the fascists?” is too crude. The more productive question is, “Through what class relations, institutions and local networks does fascist mobilisation become possible?”

That question directs attention towards occupational cultures, small firms, subcontracting, insecure work, property ownership, local decline, housing pressure, weakened labour organisation, Conservative breakdown and the rise of Reform. It also directs attention to the practical infrastructure of street politics: who owns the vehicles, who has the ladders, who controls the Facebook pages, who has access to friendship networks in local pubs and gyms, who can mobilise a group at short notice, who has links to national far-right figures, who has the capacity to turn diffuse grievance into action?

Fascism as process

Fascism should be understood as a process, not merely as a taxonomic label. It is insufficient to ask whether a given formation possesses the external features of interwar fascism: the party, the uniform, the mass membership, the newspaper, the paramilitary wing and the formal programme. Contemporary fascist politics may operate through livestreams rather than branch meetings, crowdfunding rather than subscriptions, flags and hotel protests rather than formal marches, audiences rather than members.

Nonetheless, its political logic can still be fascistic: racialised mobilisation, street intimidation, fantasies of national betrayal and renewal, attacks on the left, the targeting of minorities, the cult of the strong leader, the production of internal enemies and the transformation of social crisis into authoritarian nationalist action.

We should seek neither to force contemporary reality into inherited categories nor to abandon those categories in the name of novelty. Instead, we should apply our knowledge of the past in a creative and concrete way. Fascism changes its organisational form because capitalism, the state, the media, the labour movement and the right itself have changed. However, adaptation does not mean disappearance. The history of fascism itself shows that fragmentation and centralisation can be phases of the same process.

Britain’s far-right street movement is a real formation produced at the intersection of class, race, place, political degeneration and organisation. It has material roots, but those roots have to be investigated rather than assumed. It is shaped by class relations, but not reducible to class identity. It mobilises grievance, but does not merely reflect it. It grows from local conditions, but through national narratives and digital networks.

The starting point, therefore, must be to ask where this movement is rooted, through whom it is organised, and by what mediations class anger is turned into racist mobilisation.

What kind of thing is fascism? If it is treated only as a moral scandal, analysis remains trapped at the level of outrage and denunciation; if it is treated only as the direct expression of deprivation, it mistakes the terrain for the process that operates upon it. The task, then, is to grasp fascism as a mediated social form: a way in which crisis is interpreted, affect is organised, enemies are produced, and class grievance is displaced into racialised and authoritarian politics. Its growth cannot be explained by poverty, resentment, racism, social media or the charisma of its leadership figures in isolation, but by the concrete articulation of these elements within specific local and national conditions. Analysis must therefore begin not from the question of fascism’s mode of existence: what kind of social object it is, through what relations it coheres, and by what processes it becomes politically real.

One of the questions I keep returning to is whether we can develop a serious class analysis of the far-right street movement that has re-emerged in Britain over the past few years.

It is tempting for Marxists to reach immediately for a familiar answer: fascism mobilises the petty bourgeoisie, the small business owners, the self-employed, the downwardly mobile middle classes, the atomised and embittered layers who experience capitalist crisis as personal humiliation and social displacement.

There is truth in that tradition. The writings of interwar Marxists on fascism remain indispensable precisely because they direct our attention away from fascism as merely a set of reactionary ideas and towards fascism as a social and political process: a form of counter-revolutionary mobilisation rooted in crisis, resentment and the collapse of established forms of rule.

However, if that framework is treated as a ready-made answer rather than a starting point for investigation, it quickly becomes a substitute for analysis. We cannot simply say, “Fascism historically drew on petty-bourgeois layers; Tommy Robinson’s movement is fascist; therefore, the class basis of Robinson’s movement must be petty bourgeois”. That would be a circular argumentation masquerading as Marxist analysis.

The harder task is to ask what class fractions, occupational cultures, workplace relations and local economic structures are actually visible in the current far-right recomposition. That means looking not only at the people who attend demonstrations, but at the networks through which those demonstrations are organised, the local economies in which they take root, the political traditions that have broken down and the forms of grievance that the far right is able to racialise.

This is far from easy. We do not have a reliable sociological survey of people attending far-right demonstrations. Nor are we likely to get one. It is unrealistic to turn up outside an asylum hotel protest and ask participants for a detailed account of their employment history, income, class background, union membership, relationship to small business and voting record. Even if that were possible, the data would be partial, unreliable and politically fraught.

So, the question has to be posed differently. Not: “what class are the fascists?” Rather: what class relations and local social conditions appear to make far-right street mobilisation possible?

Conservative breakdown and right-wing recomposition

The first thing to notice is that the new street movement is developing alongside the decomposition of the authority of the Conservative Party.

For much of modern British history, the Conservative Party has organised and contained a broad range of reactionary social layers: small business owners, sections of the middle classes, wealthier retirees, property owners, nationalist workers without strong links to labour movement traditions, and people whose politics are instinctively anti-left but not necessarily fascist. Importantly, the Tory Party did more than simply represent these layers electorally; it disciplined them, absorbed them and gave them a parliamentary form.

That function has weakened dramatically.

This does not mean that the Conservative Party has disappeared (however fervently some may hope it would), nor that every disillusioned Tory voter is moving towards fascism. Nonetheless, it does mean that the old mechanisms of containment are failing. Forces that were once held inside, or at least around, the Conservative Party are now moving in different directions.

One expression of this is Reform UK: an electoral hard-right formation that channels anti-migrant racism, hostility to liberalism, authoritarian nationalism and resentment towards the political class through the parliamentary road. Reform is not a fascist organisation in the same sense as the Robinson-aligned street movement. Its centre of gravity is electoral, not extra-parliamentary. It seeks votes, candidates, councils, MPs and respectability.

Yet, Reform and the street movement are not unrelated. They are distinct expressions of a broader right-wing recomposition under conditions of Conservative decline. Reform gives that recomposition an electoral form. The street movement gives it an intimidatory, extra-parliamentary form. One turns resentment into votes; the other turns it into flags, hotel protests, street confrontations and mobilisation around Tommy Robinson.

The relationship between the two should not be assumed in advance. It is an empirical question. In some areas, Reform activists may overlap with anti-migrant protest networks. In others, the relationship may be distant, competitive or mediated through a shared audience rather than shared organisation. Yet, both are operating in the space opened by the weakening of the old Tory right.

A useful way to put it is this—the decay of Conservative hegemony over anti-left and nationalist constituencies has not produced a single political outcome, but rather a field of right-wing recomposition. Reform and Robinsonism are different formations within that field.

Fascism without a party

The form taken by Robinson’s movement poses special challenges to researchers. It does not look like the classical fascist party. It does not possess the formal structure of the British Union of Fascists, the National Front or the British National Party. Its organisation is looser, more digital, more episodic and more dependent on spectacle. It operates through livestreams, rumours, Telegram channels, crowdfunding, “citizen journalists”, local Facebook groups and repeated calls to appear on the streets.

This does not place it outside the fascist tradition. If anything, it shows how fascism adapts to new technologies, new social conditions and to resistance from antifascist organisations.

Robinson’s strength has never lain in bureaucratic organisation or ideological discipline. It lies in visibility, confrontation and affective identification. He does not build a party so much as curate an audience. He converts attention into money, grievance and periodic street mobilisation. Leadership is detached from formal membership. Mobilisation is detached from programme. The result is a form of post-organisational fascist politics: decentralised enough to survive repeated setbacks, but coherent enough to generate national moments of mobilisation.

Hence, class analysis cannot simply look for membership lists or party structures. The relevant networks may be informal, occupational, local and digital. They may pass through pubs, gyms, Facebook groups, small businesses, football fan networks and “concerned residents” campaigns. The task is to understand how these networks become politically available to fascist agitation.

The scaffolders question

One of the most striking things I have noticed, especially in parts of London and the South East, is the apparent prominence of scaffolders and related trades in some of these far-right street networks.

Wherever I talk to people who monitor fascist activities in their local areas, especially in South East England, scaffolders are often mentioned as being part of the core group of local organisers.

This needs to be handled carefully. Scaffolders may be more visible than they are numerous. They may stand out because the current repertoire of the movement gives them a distinctive practical role.

The flag-raising activity that has become so central to this phase of far-right mobilisation depends on particular skills and resources: ladders, vans, confidence working at height, small teams, physical bravado and a willingness to perform symbolic territorial acts in public space. Scaffolders are well placed to do this. They are used to climbing. They have the kit. They know how to operate in small gangs. They can turn the slogan of “raising the colours” into a practical operation.

This may give them a prominence inside the movement that is partly conjunctural. The movement’s symbolic repertoire happens to reward their skills.

Still, there may also be something deeper going on.

In several of the local networks I have observed, construction trades, small firms and petty-proprietorial figures seem to recur not just among the crowd, but also within the organising layer. Around the Britannia Hotel protests in Canary Wharf—one of the first significant attempts to spread the 2025 Epping anti-refugee mobilisation into another area—scaffolders appeared especially prominent. A core of people involved in organising and sustaining those protests came from small scaffolding firms operating around Canary Wharf and East London. They were also well placed to participate in the later “raise the flags” activity, where the practical repertoire of the movement—ladders, vans, small teams and working at height—overlapped almost perfectly with the skills and equipment of the trade.

A similar pattern appears, though in a slightly different form, around Epping itself, where identified figures behind the protests and the associated online infrastructure appear to have been small business owners of one kind or another. One prominent far-right livestreamer and auditor central to organising networks of activists across Essex and East London ran a small gardening business. Another figure involved in the Epping Says No Facebook page—an important online organising hub for the demonstrations—owns a vehicle recovery and towing business. He was involved in publicising demonstrations, helping organise them and providing vehicles from which banners could be displayed. All this gives a clue that the small-business layer was not merely present as an audience for anti-migrant politics, but in some cases helped provide the logistical infrastructure through which that politics was made visible.

The same point can be made in relation to South West London. In Sutton and Merton, the local Robinson-aligned milieu appears to be organised through a network of longstanding far-right activists, construction tradesmen and small-business figures. In Sutton, the most prominent organiser is a roofer. In nearby Morden, a longstanding far-right activist with a scaffolding business plays an important role in sustaining the local Robinson-supporting network, including through links with activists around Sutton and figures close to Robinson’s national operation. What is especially suggestive is not simply that this figure is himself a scaffolding boss, but that employees and associates around the yard appear to have been drawn into the same political milieu, including mobilisations for protests.

None of this proves that scaffolders, roofers or small business owners constitute the social base of the movement as a whole. The evidence remains observational, partial and uneven. Yet, it does point towards something worth investigating—the organising and logistical layers of the contemporary far-right street movement may be disproportionately rooted in precisely these kinds of petty-proprietorial and small-firm networks.

Scaffolding sits within a wider construction sector marked by subcontracting, small firms, self-employment, informal authority and direct boss-worker relations. Many workers in such sectors do not experience work through the large collective institutions that once shaped much larger sections of working-class politics: big workplaces, union organisation, shop stewards, collective bargaining and dense labour movement cultures. Instead, work is often mediated through personal loyalty, the authority of the small employer and the constant pressure of insecurity.

That does not make such workers “petty bourgeois” in a strict sense. Many are wage labourers and are “exploited” in the strict Marxist sense. Nonetheless, the political culture of these workplaces can be shaped by petty-bourgeois forms of mediation. The worker may be encouraged to identify not with the collective power of labour, but with the small boss, the “grafter”, the subcontractor, the taxpayer—the person supposedly held back by red tape, migrants, bureaucracy, “woke” councils or a hostile state.

This is where the class question becomes interesting. The issue is not simply whether far-right activists are workers or small business owners. It is how workers are politically formed through particular relations of work.

A worker in a large hospital, warehouse or council depot may experience exploitation through one set of institutions and conflicts. A worker in a small construction gang—dependent on a boss who works beside him, pays him, transports him, recommends him and talks politics all day—may experience it differently. The relation to capital is more immediate, more personalised and more easily misrecognised.

So, the scaffolders point should not be overstated. Yet, their apparent visibility may be a clue. It points towards the kinds of occupational networks through which far-right street activity may currently be organised: small-firm, subcontracted, masculine, informal, insecure and only weakly touched by collective labour organisation.

Small business politics and the influence of the boss

This points to a wider question about the political influence of small business.

In larger workplaces, the power of capital is mediated through managers, HR departments, legal procedures, union reps, formal policies and concentrations of workers who can develop shared grievances. In small workplaces, that mediation is often much thinner. The boss is present. The boss talks politics. The boss decides who gets work. The boss may be a mate, a relative, a drinking partner or the person who gives you the next job.

This creates a particular political environment. Workers can be drawn into the worldview of the small proprietor even when they do not own anything themselves. They may begin to see the world through the antagonisms of the small boss: tax, regulation, migrants, councils, environmental rules, employment law, “benefits” and a supposedly parasitic state. Their anger at exploitation is displaced away from capital and towards racialised enemies, bureaucratic opponents and the left.

This is one of the classic mechanisms through which fascist politics can appeal to sections of the working class without becoming working-class politics. It does not organise workers as workers, but rather as patriots, locals, taxpayers, small traders, grafters, fathers, defenders of women, defenders of children and defenders of the flag. Class antagonism is not disregarded; it is recoded.

That is why a serious class analysis has to move beyond occupational labels. The question is not only “what job does this person do?” It is: what social relations structure their experience of work, authority, dependence and grievance?

Seaside towns and the politics of local decline

The same question can be asked at the level of place.

Take Weymouth, a medium-sized seaside town on the Dorset coast. It sits within a South Dorset constituency where Reform secured nearly a fifth of the vote at the last general election, and it was one of the places drawn into the wider far-right anti-immigration protest wave since August 2024. It is the kind of town that should interest anyone trying to understand the relationship between class structure and far-right politics.

Weymouth contains some of England’s most concentrated deprivation, but it is not simply “poor” in the abstract. Its poverty is bound up with a particular coastal economy: tourism, hospitality, part-time work, low-paid service employment, small businesses, B&Bs, holiday lets and housing pressure. Compared with neighbouring Dorchester, it is less anchored by public-sector employment and county-town administrative functions; compared with Yeovil, just over the border in Somerset, it lacks the same kind of industrial and aerospace base. The point is not that Weymouth has no public-sector or industrial employment, but that its class structure is differently organised.

A deprived seaside town is not the same as a deprived post-industrial town with a history of large factories, union organisation and labour institutions. Nor is it the same as a county town organised around hospitals, local administration and public-sector employment. The form of deprivation matters because it shapes the institutions through which people understand their decline.

In a seaside economy, there may be a dense layer of small proprietors: guesthouse owners, café owners, pub proprietors, taxi operators, small builders, tourist businesses, shopkeepers and landlords. There may also be a large layer of workers moving between seasonal, informal and low-paid jobs. The town may be full of visible inequality: poverty next to tourism, wealthier retirees next to precarious workers, second homes and holiday lets alongside housing insecurity, and nostalgic images of the seaside next to real social decay.

This is fertile ground for reactionary politics, but not automatically. The point is not that seaside towns are destined to vote Reform or produce far-right street movements. Many do not—Hove, Lewes and Aberystwyth all count against such a lazy conclusion. Nonetheless, the point is that many seaside towns may combine several conditions favourable to the far right: visible decline, weak collective labour institutions, small-business resentment, seasonal insecurity, hostility to outsiders and a sense that the town has been abandoned by distant elites.

In such places, Reform can offer an electoral language for resentment, while Robinson-aligned street politics can supply a more visceral vocabulary: flags, hotel protests, betrayal, “locals first” and confrontation.

Again, the relationship has to be investigated rather than assumed. Weymouth is useful to study precisely because it can be compared with other nearby places. Dorchester—with Dorset County Hospital, county-town functions and a stronger public-sector profile—may have a different class structure. Yeovil—with its Leonardo engineering plant and its long-standing aerospace and defence industry—has another. The question is not whether one place is poorer than another, but rather how different local class structures mediate political grievance.

Class composition is not enough

A common mistake in discussions of the far right is to treat class composition as though it automatically explains political direction. It does not.

Knowing that a person is working class does not tell us whether they will move left or right. Knowing that someone is self-employed does not tell us whether they will become a Reform supporter. Knowing that a town is poor does not tell us whether it will produce anti-migrant street protests. Class analysis is not a vending machine into which one inserts measures of deprivation and receives categorisations of political outlook.

The point of class analysis is to understand how social relations make particular political articulations possible.

The far right does not simply reflect class anger. Instead, it works on that anger, and it gives it a story. It tells people that their enemies are migrants, Muslims, asylum seekers, leftists, feminists, trans people and “globalists”. It allows people to experience themselves as insurgents while directing their fury away from capital and towards those below them or beside them.

This is what gives fascism its pseudo-revolutionary affect. It offers action, agency and confrontation. It tells people they are rising up. Yet, the content of that “rising up” is disciplining minorities, attacking the left, reversing social gains and restoring hierarchy in the name of national renewal.

Any class analysis of the contemporary far right has to hold these levels together. It must examine the class conditions that make people available for reactionary mobilisation, while also analysing the ideological and organisational work through which that mobilisation is achieved.

Organisers, participants and audiences

Another reason for caution is that movements have layers.

The class character of a movement cannot be read directly from the crowd. There is a leadership layer, an organising layer, a crowd layer and an online audience. These may have differing compositions.

The leadership layer includes Robinson, influencers, livestreamers and ideological entrepreneurs. Their personal class backgrounds matter less than their political function, though the predominance of small-business owners in this later is notable—Robinson, for example, famously operated a sunbed chain in Luton.

The organising layer includes local Facebook admins, Telegram coordinators, protest organisers, people arranging transport, people liaising with other towns, people producing graphics, people naming targets and people turning rumours into protest events.

The logistical layer includes those who provide vans, ladders, banners, flags, amplification, stewarding, meeting places and muscle.

The crowd layer includes those who turn up, while the online audience includes those who watch, donate, share, comment, join groups and identify with the movement without necessarily appearing on the streets.

The class dynamics may be clearest not in the crowd but in the organising and logistical layers. This is where small-business owners, self-employed tradesmen, construction networks, gyms, pubs, local Facebook groups and far-right activists may intersect. It is also where the line between electoral far-right politics and street mobilisation may become visible.

What would it mean to research this properly?

A serious research project would need to be comparative and restrained.

First, we would need a map of far-right and anti-migrant street events: where they happened, when, around what target, with what slogans, under whose influence, with what online amplification, and with what relationship to known far-right groups or Reform activists.

Second, we would need local socioeconomic profiles of those places: deprivation, employment by sector, self-employment rates, construction employment, hospitality and tourism employment, public-sector employment, age structure, housing tenure, firm size, union presence and recent electoral change.

Third, we would need to examine visible organisers through publicly available information about these political actors: occupations, business ownership, company directorships, candidate profiles, links to local groups, links to Reform and links to other far-right organisations.

Fourth, we would need to map social networks: Facebook groups, Telegram channels, Robinson-linked accounts, livestreamers, local anti-hotel pages, “flagging” groups, Reform pages and local business networks.

Fifth, we would need interviews with people who understand local conditions: anti-fascists, trade unionists, councillors, journalists, migrant-support groups, community organisers and workers in relevant sectors.

Most importantly, we would need comparison. It is not enough to study places where far-right mobilisation occurred. We also need places where it did not: poor towns with little far-right activity, seaside towns that have not produced street mobilisation, areas with asylum accommodation where the far right failed to gain a foothold, and places with strong Reform votes but weak street politics.

What we should not claim

There are several things we should not claim.

We should not claim to know the class composition of the far-right street movement without evidence. We should not claim that small business owners are the core of the movement unless we can show it. We should not reduce racism to class position. We should not infer individual politics from area-level data.

Nonetheless, caution need not mean silence. The absence of perfect data does not mean abandoning class analysis. It means being clear about the level at which claims are being made.

We can say that certain observations are suggestive. We can say that particular occupational networks appear to recur. We can say that far-right mobilisation seems to find favourable terrain in places marked by fragmented work, small-business density, weak labour organisation and Conservative decline.

That is not a retreat from class analysis, but rather the condition for its seriousness and validity.

Towards a better formulation

The strongest version of the argument is not that the new far-right street movement is “made up of” scaffolders, small business owners or seaside reactionaries. That would be too crude.

The stronger argument is that Britain’s far-right street movement is developing within a broader crisis of Conservative authority. As the Tory Party loses its ability to organise reactionary social layers, those layers are being recomposed in different directions. Reform gives this process an electoral expression, while Robinson gives it a street expression. The social basis of that street expression cannot be read directly from the crowd, but it could be approached through the occupational networks, small-firm cultures and local economies through which mobilisation is organised.

That means looking at scaffolders, not because scaffolders are the answer, but because their apparent visibility points to a wider question about subcontracted construction, masculine work cultures, small firms and lower-middle class political mediation.

It means looking at Weymouth, not because Weymouth explains everything, but because seaside economies may reveal how deprivation, seasonal work, tourism, small business and weak collective institutions create openings for far-right politics.

It means looking at Reform, because its rise shows how the old Conservative right is decomposing.

Moreover, it means looking at Robinson, not as an isolated demagogue, but as the figurehead of a post-organisational fascist politics that turns crisis into spectacle, grievance into funding and racism into street mobilisation.

The task is to develop a Marxist class analysis adequate to that reality. This cannot be a ritual invocation of old categories, nor a sociological flattening of fascism into “poor people being angry”, but rather a concrete account of how class relations, political breakdown and racist mobilisation are being recomposed in Britain today.

That analysis has to be sharp enough to name fascism, but disciplined enough not to invent evidence. It has to take anecdotal clues seriously without treating them as proof. It has to understand class not as a static identity, but as a set of relations through which people are formed, organised and misled.

The new far right is not floating above society. It is rooted somewhere. The question is where, through whom, and by what mediations. That is the research task.

A rumour, a mob, a target

On Monday evening, a mob of around 50 people went on the rampage in the leafy Surrey town of Epsom, just outside London. They forced their way into a hotel demanding to know if there were any “foreigners” there, before attacking a property they believed housed migrants, smashing windows, throwing rocks and eggs inside, and chanting “Get them out!” in the street.

The pretext was a false rumour that a woman had been gang raped by refugees in a churchyard. Despite police quickly stating that no migrants or refugees were involved, dozens of fascists travelled into Epsom and rioted on the basis of claims that the authorities were covering up an attack by asylum seekers.

The discourse of today’s British fascism stresses the “two-tier” nature of British state, which supposedly privileges migrants while repressing “patriots”. In fact, the police rolled out the red carpet for the fascists, allowing a small rabble—largely made up of established, out-of-town activists—to grill a senior officer via megaphone before they marched on the hotel to hunt down “foreigners”.

At the centre of events was Daniel Thomas, a prominent bag carrier in Tommy Robinson’s inner circle, who coordinated activity with fascists from London and the South East alongside a handful of local organisers. Robinson himself, currently in the United States raising money from Republican backers, celebrated the violence from afar—tweeting footage of the attack, describing asylum seekers as “invaders” and calling for them to be “removed from our shores”.

Within days, Surrey Police stated that the original allegation had been withdrawn. “No offence had occurred.” They claimed that the woman involved had made a confused report after suffering an accidental head injury. Having helped mobilise a lynch mob, Robinson and his allies quietly dropped the issue and moved on.

This episode tells us something important about the current state of the far right in Britain.

A movement in flux

British fascism stands in an uneven situation at the moment. The enormous demonstration led by Robinson on 13 September last year—110,000 people marching through central London behind banners demanding “remigration”—was a genuine political earthquake. It marked a new peak for the far-right street movement, the largest fascist-led mobilisation in British history.

But the consequences of that moment have been contradictory. Robinson can point to the demonstration as proof of his pulling power, using it to raise money and sustain his profile internationally. Yet, it has not translated into a stable strengthening of the far-right street movement at a local level.

In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. The momentum behind the September mobilisation came out of a wave of racist demonstrations outside asylum seeker accommodation across Britain—protests that spread from town to town, week after week, building confidence and organisation. Since September, that cycle has largely ebbed. Under pressure from the antifascist movement, primarily led by Stand Up To Racism, the fascists have struggled to reproduce that same level of sustained mobilisation.

Nonetheless, significant dangers remain. The underlying forces that produced that wave of protests—racism, political crisis, the mainstreaming of anti-migrant rhetoric—have not gone away. And the layer of activists who look to Robinson are actively searching for ways to reignite momentum.

Epsom is one sign of that.

From mass protest to mobile violence

What we saw there was not a mass mobilisation, but a more concentrated, mobile form of activity: experienced activists travelling in, seizing on a flashpoint and attempting to spark a wider escalation. The speed with which the allegation was weaponised (with the help of a broader far-right infrastructure such as GB News), the coordination between local and national figures, and the rapid amplification through social media all point to a movement that, while currently uneven, retains a dangerous capacity for sudden, violent eruption.

It also reveals something about the political character of Robinson’s project.

This is not simply a matter of prejudice or spontaneous anger. Robinson is attempting to build a street movement capable of acting outside normal political channels—one that can intimidate, attack and assert control over space. The language of “invasion” and “removal” provides the ideological justification for exactly the kind of violence we saw in Epsom.

Deniability and the new organisation of fascism

At the same time, the episode illustrates a key feature of how this movement now operates: deniability. Robinson did not organise the protest in a formal sense. He did not stand at the front of the crowd issuing orders. Instead, he amplifies, legitimises and encourages from a distance, while maintaining enough ambiguity to avoid direct responsibility. When events spiral out of control—or are exposed as based on falsehoods—he simply moves on.

This is a form of organisation shaped by past defeats. Earlier fascist movements in Britain, from the National Front to the British National Party, were built as formal parties with memberships and leadership structures. That made them easier to expose, isolate and defeat. Robinson’s model is looser, more networked, more reliant on media and momentary mobilisation. It is harder to pin down—but also less stable.

An unstable but dangerous conjuncture

That instability is reflected in the current conjuncture. Britain’s fascist street movement has demonstrated an unprecedented capacity to mobilise, but it has not yet consolidated that strength into a rooted and institutionalised movement. Instead, it moves in surges and lulls, searching for opportunities to break through.

Epsom shows both sides of that reality. On the one hand, the ability to mobilise a violent crowd on the basis of a lie within days is deeply alarming. On the other, the scale remained limited, the narrative quickly collapsed, and the mobilisation dissipated just as fast.

The question, then, is not whether the far right is rising or falling in some simple sense. It is how this uneven development plays out—and how it is confronted.

The danger lies precisely in this combination: a movement that is not hegemonic, not stable, but still capable of generating sudden bursts of racist violence and attempting to rebuild momentum through them.

That is what we saw in Epsom. And it is why events like this cannot be dismissed as isolated incidents. They are part of an ongoing process—a movement probing for openings, testing its strength and looking for the next opportunity to escalate.

The task for antifascism is to understand that process clearly—and to be prepared to meet it.

I’ll write more about the demonstration later, but for now, here are some pictures of placards from the event. These are part of a project in which I am involved about antiracist and antifascist placards.