In Britain, the Far Right Is Moving to the Mainstream

Mobs of masked men tore through parts of Belfast, Northern Ireland, last week, setting fire to cars and homes. Their primary targets were people of color, and the prompt was a knife attack for which the authorities charged a Sudanese refugee. Graphic video of the attack was shared on social media.

About a week earlier, riots had followed the release of body camera footage of the December murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student in Southampton, a city in southern England. The video showed that the police handcuffed Mr. Nowak as he lay dying after being stabbed by a British-born Sikh who lied to officers at the scene, falsely claiming that Mr. Nowak had carried out a racially motivated attack.

These events had echoes of previous summers. In 2025 mobs targeted homes of immigrants and a recreation center that was being used as an emergency shelter in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, after two teenagers were accused of attempted rape; the teenagers denied the charges and spoke through a Romanian interpreter. The charges were later dropped. In 2024, a horrific knife attack at a dance class for children in Southport was quickly framed as a consequence of Britain’s openness to asylum seekers, even though the assailant was born in Wales.

Episodes like these punctuate the British calendar with grim familiarity, following a template that is troubling for the direction of British democracy. First, rumors, allegations and fabrications circulate on social media — particularly on X, whose owner, Elon Musk, seems peculiarly dedicated to aggravating ethnic conflict in Britain. A narrative quickly coalesces around the perpetrator and the wider political causes: the excesses of immigration and liberalism, and a state and a police force that are sympathetic to everyone except white Britons. Violence follows.

And, as the far right becomes a fixture of British politics, prominent voices are willing to abstain from condemning the violence, excuse it or even appear to encourage it.

The anti-immigrant, nationalist Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, has been steadily moving from the fringes to the mainstream. With eight lawmakers in Parliament, it consistently tops polls and is increasingly talked about as capable of winning the next general election. Mr. Farage described the reaction of “our leaders” to Mr. Nowak’s death as proof of “a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities,” and urged Britons to respond with “pure, cold rage.”

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