This is the state of play in Britain at the close of 2025. The Prime Minister communicates daily on a website whose owner promotes race war on the streets of the country he governs. Mainstream newspapers spent the summer salivating with excitement at the prospect of anti-refugee riots. Frontbenchers in Parliament express their horror when they don’t see “another white face” in a town. Commentators debate whether brown people can be English. Former PMs trade in crazed online conspiracy theories. Broadsheet columnists demand that we expel all Muslims from Britain.

We are the frog in the boiling water. On a day to day basis, the change seems hard to accept. If you say that Britain is becoming a far-right country, it seems hysterical, even mad. But if you were to take any one of these developments and communicate them to someone just a few years ago, it’s you they would have thought mad. That’ll never happen, they’d have said. Not in Britain.

In fact, three separate but related developments have taken place which served to bring far-right ideas into the British mainstream. They are the result of three men, with very similar beliefs, operating at different levels of the populist project: Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.

The first and most important development was the purchase of Twitter, now X, by Musk in 2022. Musk’s political views can no longer be a matter of debate. He offers the Nazi salute, he appears as a guest at Tommy Robinson protests, he co-ordinates with the far right worldwide. Surely we can now conclude that he is on the far right.

Nor is there any remaining debate over how he uses the site to achieve political aims. Verified pro-Nazi accounts flourish. Robinson had his account reinstated, allowing him to co-ordinate violent protests across the UK. The site’s algorithm was then changed to downgrade progressive........

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