Calling Out Racist and Jingoistic Rhetoric

“…examines the rise of nationalist and exclusionary rhetoric in British political discourse, calling out the quiet normalisation of racism and jingoism at the highest levels of government. Drawing on recent political statements, Dorling argues for the urgent need to challenge these narratives and defend a more inclusive, honest understanding of national identity.”

On May 21st, 2025, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was questioned about the Labour Government’s possible winter fuel allowance U-turn by the Sky News journalist Sophy Ridge. That day, the current Prime Minister had indicated that he was minded to re-look at the decision to scrap the payments for pensioners who were not the poorest of all pensioners. [1]

Brown appeared to choose his words carefully. By omission, they could be interpreted as implying that he believed that people should be allowed to fall into poverty if they had not “served the country well.” But why promote a policy that appeared to differentiate between an undeserving-poor and the apparently deserving-poor? And why make some kind of measure of national service or patriotism the loadstone of determination? Here is what he said exactly: “To me the issue is, nobody should be pushed into poverty if they’re doing the right thing. Nobody who’s working hard, or nobody who’s served their country well over their lifetime, should be pushed into poverty, if we can avoid it.”

You might read those words another way. You might not worry about the phrase ‘the right thing’ or ‘their country’. You might not note, perhaps with surprise, the emphasis on hard work as what is required not to be pushed into poverty (‘working hard’). You might, or might not, be concerned that ‘served their country’ is mentioned with all its military overtones. You might not have noticed the caveat at the end about this all only being conditional: ‘if we can avoid it’.

You might think I am being pedantic, splitting hairs, pointing out small issues and giving them undue importance. That might be the case, if it were only one aged former Prime Minister saying such things. But Brown’s comments appeared as part of a pattern of talking up the rights of some people of this country, especially those who had ‘served well’, and by omission talking down others not mentioned. Note also that this older population mentioned here are largely white. However, it was not just older people who had served that were being highlighted by former and current government ministers and Prime Ministers in the springtime. White children were also being singled out.

Just over a week after Brown spoke, the Labour Government’s Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, launched what was termed: ‘an independent inquiry into white working-class children’s progress at school’. The Times newspaper reported this announcement under the headline ‘White working-class children “betrayed by politicians”’, and quoted Phillipson as saying: “The data shows a clear picture. Across attendance, attainment and life chances, white working-class children and those with special educational needs and disabilities do exceptionally poorly. Put simply, these children have been betrayed — left behind in society’s rear-view mirror. They are children whose interests too many politicians have simply discarded.” [2]

Anyone who speaks in public chooses which statistics to highlight and how to interpret them, what to put emphasis on, and what to ignore. Data never shows a clear picture. It is just numbers. The description of data reveals the picture that the person interpreting it chooses to paint, and how they choose to present it. This does not mean that anything goes. A lie is clearly a lie, a fact is clearly a fact, but data doesn’t contain words like ‘betrayal’, or show that it is because some children are both white and working class that they do badly. What it does show is that children in London do especially well, and that is not, of course, because of the often-darker colour of their skin. It is because they live in London; it is their geography, not their class or ethnicity, that matters most here.

The advisers to ministers will know this. Over four years ago they will have read newspaper stories of academic reports, and studies from the Office for Students with titles such as: ‘Geography, not race, explains the disparity in England’s educational outcomes’. These studies explained that “white students who receive free school meals in London have pulled away from those in other parts of the country with their rate of HE participation 8% higher than any other region, at 44.7%.”[3] – in other words, being white and probably working class, and definitely poor, was far less of a problem if you had many potential black and brown school friends living in your neighbourhoods.

So why do Labour Ministers and Prime Ministers say such unhelpful things about some groups explicitly being more apparently deserving, or losing out, than others? Why pontificate over who has served the ‘country’ of the UK well? Why concentrate on this apparent white working-class construct both existing (as a useful thing to talk about) and having been apparently neglected?

One reason why is who advises the government now. What happens in the public sector, and why you are reading the magazine this article appears in, is due to the beliefs of government advisers as well as politicians. They determine policy. The coterie of current influential government advisers includes people who say of the Labour party: “It doesn’t know how to deal with race, except to be anti-racist or to go along with DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion]…” [4] — which reads like a complaint about being anti-racist. The same key government adviser goes on to claim: “The problem is that the left has convinced itself that we’re an immigrant nation, and we’re not. We’re just not…”

This should raise more questions. Why do some of those who currently have the ear of power think that the UK is a single nation? We have not referred to Scotland as Northern Britain since Victorian times. Where on earth do they think most of these islands’ inhabitants or their recent ancestors came from? Most people living in Britain at some point in their personal family history, if they go back far enough, have at least some relatives that were from abroad. So many of us even have surnames that mean our father’s father’s fathers were living abroad, not too many generations ago. [5]

If you do not believe me, try to imagine what the decennial British censuses have revealed ever since country of birth was first asked, in 1841. Censuses can be used to see what the origins of us were, back to our parents, through to our great-great-great-great-grandparents. Almost unique among states, the British state has one of the longest records of ‘who do you think you are’, and that is before you even consider that almost all the subjects of the empire were at one point or another legally British. It was the ‘British empire’.

It is perhaps worth noting that these advisers go on to claim that: “Manly virtues of the past that were seen as good things about men – to have courage, integrity – are dismissed now. Boys are supposed to be in touch with their feelings. Well, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be, but there’s more to it than that.” It is certainly worth having feelings, and even more worthwhile being in touch with them. But it is much more valuable to use those feelings to help you always have the courage and integrity to call out racism and jingoism when and where you see it. That is the only thing that quells the rise of these two evils. Both men and women can do that. One tell-tale sign of politics shifting to the right is hearing more talk of what men and women might do separately. The political right is most interested in giving men power and putting women down.

The advisers who talk of ‘manly virtues’ and Britain being some kind of inherent white nation may see their views as reasonable because they are to the left of what a few academics or former academics are now saying much more frequently in public. We now more often hear words which were not put together in these ways so frequently only a few years ago. If you want to know why you are hearing more of what follows, I suspect you need to follow the money and ask who funds these people and the outlets they now publish in.

Here are two recent examples, simply illustrated through two final quotations of this short article. In the first, the writer suggests that the current Labour Prime Minister should begin to more closely ape Nigel Farage. She says: “The left, including Labour, overplayed its hand when it spent years describing Farage and his supporters as ‘far right’ and ‘racist’. To the working-class people across the country who I speak to as a researcher, Labour is no longer listened to. In contrast, Farage, who recently said that family, community and country ‘are the three things that matter above everything else’, seems relevant. That is because the people of the UK want a welfare state and a society that are there to help them, and they don’t care who delivers that, even if it’s Farage. Starmer is now in a very difficult position. Wiley Farage and his army of supposedly thick gammon are outfoxing the human-rights lawyer and the civil-service wonks in Whitehall. Will Starmer continue to ape Farage and Reform’s policies? Who knows. But if he does, it would take Labour far closer to its working-class roots than the party is right now.” [6]

The second example is taken from a diatribe against immigration by another academic/former academic who describes himself similarly as coming from and representing the working class. He says: “Skilled migrant workers are not making significantly larger contributions to the UK economy than their British counterparts, while the much larger number of migrant workers who are flooding this country, and who are not mentioned at all in that clip, are very clearly taking more out of the national economy than they are putting in.” [7]

Almost anyone with a grasp of statistics could explain why migrants into a country do not make that country poorer. It is areas from which people leave and to which people do not come that become poorer. Almost anyone who has a basic understanding of politics or sociology or human geography, or current affairs, or social policy, or history could explain why Nigel Farage is far-right, and why so much of what his messages rely upon is racism or jingoism for their attraction. I don’t need to explain this to you, as you almost certainly understand. If you do not, you are unlikely to have read this far or to read this magazine.

What I am trying to do here is explain how the words of a former Prime Minister and current minister, the quotations I began this article with, are likely to have been influenced by what current advisers close to the heart of government themselves now so often say, which their counterparts would have been ashamed to have said out loud before and usually did not even believe. What I think emboldens today’s government advisers is that they in turn might not view what they say as extreme, harmful or uninformed. They may seem mild when compared to what a few very vocal commentators now shout out so loudly. Those who call the British Labour government to act more like Reform. Ministers speak in a country where others now much more often decry any net value in immigration. Given this background noise, the advisers’ and politicians’ words can appear almost reasonable. What those trying to confront the new British racism and jingoism are really fighting against are the funded, the largely invisible people who ensure that the words quoted above are widely read. There are always people with a great deal of money, often living abroad, who like to play games with a little of their wealth, who like to buy influence. [8]

The answer – the only brave answer, the only answer that has any integrity – is to call all this out. It is to remember the 1960s and the racist slogan ‘no blacks, no Irish and no dogs’; it is to remember the 1970s and the National Front and the calls to ‘send them home’; it is to remember the steel toe caps of the boots of the nastiest 1980s fascist skinheads if you (like me) were a school child then; it is to remember how Stephen Lawrence and so many others died in the 1990s; it is to remember that in the 2000s the word ‘swamped’ was still frequently used in public discourse; it is to remember that we made progress against so much of this; but it is to know now that some people forgot, or never really knew, and will not do the right thing. Call them out. Don’t be polite. I have heard these stories all my life. They come from the few, they come with a hate that is always lurking not far beneath the surface. These stories should not be allowed to pass, not be seen as normal, not in our new dangerous times. We live in a dangerous world, and the greatest danger is the so-called patriots and actual racists – the enemy within.

References

[1] ‘Former prime minister Gordon Brown questioned on winter fuel allowance U-turn by Sky’s Sophy Ridge’, Sky News, 5.21pm Wednesday 21 May 2025, https://news.sky.com/video/former-prime-minister-gordon-brown-questioned-on-winter-fuel-allowance-u-turn-by-skys-sophy-ridge-13372252

[2] Georgia Lambert, ‘White working-class children “betrayed by politicians”’, The Times, on-line at 8.30pm on Sunday June 01 2025, , The Times, https://www.thetimes.com/article/66026d5a-c595-46b2-904d-600d4e9778aa

[3] Sasha Mistlin, ‘Geography, not race, explains the disparity in England’s educational outcomes’, The Guardian, 4 February, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/04/geography-not-race-explains-the-disparity-in-englands-educational-outcomes

[4] Sienna Rodgers, ‘Can Blue Labour help Keir Starmer’s government develop a clear direction and sense of purpose? Sienna Rodgers talks to Jonathan Rutherford, a political thinker with the ear of No 10’, Politics Home, 2 May 2025, https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/blue-labour-jonathan-rutherford-keir-starmer-no-10-morgan-mcsweeney

[5] The comic Stewart Lee, in December 2013, produced the best eight minute answer to this ignorance. Worth watching if uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cgeXd5kRDg

[6] Lisa McKenzie, ‘Can Reform become the party of the working class?’, Spiked Magazine, 1 June 2025, https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/01/can-reform-become-the-party-of-the-working-class/

[7] Matt Goodwin, ‘How the elite class mislead you –Part 1 of a three part series on how the people who rule over us try and hide the truth from you’, Substack and Goodwin’s website, 19 May 2025, https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/how-the-elite-class-mislead-you-part?

[8] See the film ‘Undercover: Exposing the Far Right’ shown on Channel Four in 2024, and relatively easily found on-line: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34192088/

For a PDF of this article and where it was first published click here.