Some time ago, I read The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase.
Published in 1938, the book explored the relationship between language, thought and the world that language claims to describe. The challenge I retained from it was deceptively simple:
What do you mean?
Not what emotional response does the word produce?
Not which political side normally uses it?
What does the word actually refer to?
I have found myself returning to that question whenever I hear the term far right.
There is no single uncontested definition of far right, but the term is not meaningless.
Political scientists commonly distinguish between two related traditions: the radical right and the extreme right.
Both are often associated with nativism—the belief that the state should belong primarily to a native group and that outsiders threaten its identity or cohesion—and with authoritarian ideas about order, hierarchy and punishment.
The important distinction concerns democracy.
The radical right may participate in elections and accept popular sovereignty while opposing important parts of liberal democracy, including pluralism, minority rights and constraints upon majority power.
The extreme right rejects democracy itself and may accept intimidation or violence as legitimate political tools.
The boundaries are disputed, movements change and individual supporters do not always hold every element of an ideology consistently. But this still gives us something more useful than a general expression of disapproval.
It identifies beliefs about belonging, authority and democracy that can be examined against what people actually say and do.
Concern about immigration may form part of a far-right politics. So may attachment to national identity or distrust of institutions. None of those things, by itself, completes the definition.
The political structure built around the concern matters.
So does the object being classified. A party, an organised movement, a loose online network and an individual voter are not the same thing. A party may have a recognisable ideology even when many of its voters support only part of it. A crowd may contain committed extremists, angry residents, opportunists and people who arrived for reasons that do not fit one explanation.
A useful label should help us distinguish those things rather than collapse them.
Chase was writing while fascist and authoritarian governments were expanding across Europe.
Nazi propaganda did not merely criticise particular people or ideas. It helped define varied groups as collective enemies and outsiders. Repetition made the categories feel natural. The label began to determine what people believed about somebody before their conduct or character had been examined.
It would be lazy to suggest that every modern political disagreement repeats the 1930s.
Britain today is not Nazi Germany. Calling every objectionable political development fascism would itself demonstrate the problem Chase was examining.
The historical connection is more modest.
Chase was writing about unstable meaning while the world around him showed that political language could do more than describe reality. It could classify people, narrow sympathy and make exclusion appear reasonable.
The lesson is not that we should avoid naming dangerous ideologies. Fascism was real. Racial persecution was real. Political violence was real.
The lesson is that powerful words must remain attached to identifiable beliefs, behaviour and consequences.
I returned to these questions after the murders in Southport and the disorder that followed.
There was genuine violence. Police officers and mosques were attacked. Racist rhetoric and Nazi salutes were visible. On 1 August 2024, the Prime Minister described the immediate challenge as being driven by “far-right hatred”.
I understood what he was condemning.
I condemned it too.
Violence directed at communities because of race or religion, Nazi symbolism and organised attacks upon the police fit comfortably within any serious account of the far right.
My concern was what happened to the term once it moved into the wider political conversation.
It seemed to travel beyond those throwing bricks, setting fires or targeting communities. It began appearing around people concerned about immigration, people who distrusted government, people displaying national flags, people questioning institutional failure and people expressing unfashionable opinions in language that would never survive a professional communications review.
Some of those people may hold extreme views.
Some may be racist.
Some may use an ordinary concern as respectable cover for something uglier.
But are all of them members of the same political tradition?
If the term applies equally to racial nationalists, authoritarian movements, dissatisfied voters and somebody who thinks immigration is too high, what information does it still provide?
It may tell us that the speaker disapproves.
It tells us less clearly what is actually there.
Part of my concern comes from knowing people who could now find themselves placed beneath this label.
I went to the local comprehensive school. My friends include people from different backgrounds, faiths, classes and political traditions. My maternal family includes migrants. I have also spent most of my working life in public service, where I have seen both the seriousness of government responsibility and the subtle ways a boundary forms around what is considered acceptable opinion.
None of this makes me immune from prejudice or uniquely qualified to interpret society.
It does make the questions personal.
My own position is fairly straightforward.
I couldn’t give a toss where somebody comes from, what colour their skin is, what they believe or who they sleep with. If they live peacefully and do not wish harm on or inflict harm upon others, then I’m good.
I think that is true of most people I know.
They are not uniformly wise or tolerant. Neither am I.
A person can be kind in ordinary life and still hold a harmful political belief. They can repeat claims without checking them or express a legitimate concern in a careless or offensive way. Knowing somebody does not make every opinion they hold harmless.
But people are also inconsistent.
They can be anxious without being hateful. They can identify a real problem and misunderstand its cause. They can distrust an institution for poor reasons—or because that institution has genuinely failed them.
Knowing the person makes it harder to accept that one concern, one vote or one badly chosen sentence necessarily reveals an entire ideology.
A label may conceal all of that.
Political labels offer efficiency.
Once somebody has been called far right, the difficult work can appear complete.
We no longer need to ask what they believe about equal citizenship, democracy, political violence or the rights of minorities. We do not need to distinguish between legal migration, irregular migration, asylum, integration, population growth or pressure on services.
The category has already supplied the explanation.
It can become both accusation and evidence.
The person is far right because they hold an unacceptable opinion. The opinion is unacceptable because it belongs to somebody described as far right.
The reasoning closes in upon itself.
Even asking for a definition can then become suspicious.
Why are you so concerned about defending the far right?
But asking what a word means is not necessarily a defence of everybody to whom it is applied.
It may be an attempt to preserve the word’s ability to identify something important.
Extremist movements do attach themselves to legitimate grievances and familiar symbols. A concern can be exploited. A peaceful crowd can contain people with more sinister intentions. Someone may begin with distrust and move towards an ideology offering simple enemies and absolute explanations.
Connection is not equivalence.
Concern about immigration is not automatically belief in racial hierarchy.
Distrust of government is not necessarily a desire to abolish democracy.
Patriotism is not fascism.
Clumsy language is not proof of hatred.
Those distinctions do not excuse extremism. They are part of locating it.
The far right is not imaginary. There are movements that define citizenship through ethnicity, treat minorities as threats, reject equal rights, seek authoritarian rule or regard intimidation and violence as legitimate political tools.
We need language capable of identifying them.
That is precisely why the language should not be allowed to expand without limit.
Precision is not only a courtesy to somebody who may be labelled unfairly. It matters to those who are genuinely threatened. Communities facing racist intimidation need public language that identifies the source of the danger rather than dissolving it into a category so broad that it becomes routine political vocabulary.
Extremists may operate within a larger population carrying more ordinary concerns. Radical-right ideas may also become normalised without arriving in uniforms or announcing an intention to abolish democracy.
Those possibilities make careful distinctions more important, not less.
When language for genuine extremism becomes a general description of political disagreement, people may be condemned inaccurately. Actual extremists may also gain room to hide within the much larger population carrying the same label.
We often say that we should learn from history.
Usually, we mean remembering the outcomes: wars, dictatorships, persecution and the moments when political violence became impossible to deny.
We are perhaps less successful at recognising the habits of thought that precede them.
The simplification of complicated populations.
The use of a category as though it explains every individual within it.
The repetition of words whose emotional force has become stronger than their definition.
The assumption that questioning the label means sympathising with the worst people placed beneath it.
History does not have to repeat precisely for those warnings to remain useful.
The challenge I retained from Stuart Chase was not a demand for neutrality.
It was a demand for clarity.
When the term far right is used, we should be able to ask which beliefs, actions and political aims justify it.
Does the person or movement believe citizenship properly belongs to one ethnic or native group?
Do they reject pluralism or equal rights?
Do they want authority freed from democratic constraint?
Do they accept intimidation or violence as political methods?
Or are several substantially different positions being gathered beneath one emotionally powerful word?
The label may prove accurate.
But it should be the result of looking, not a substitute for it.