Explained: The Rise of the far Right

This is not happening in a vacuum. It is a predictable response to deepening hardship. When societies are stripped of security, certainty, and hope, the search for scapegoats becomes a politically profitable endeavour. And Britain’s political class has learned to weaponise that instinct with clinical precision.

The Economy: The Fuel Behind Britain’s New Right

The far right does not grow in times of prosperity it grows in hunger.
It grows when people feel abandoned, unheard, and economically suffocated.
And in Britain today, that soil is rich.

Rising bills, unaffordable housing, collapsing infrastructure, and record levels of personal debt have created a population that is anxious and angry. Instead of addressing the structural causes of corporate profiteering, financial deregulation, and failing public investment, politicians have chosen the easier path: redirect that anger downward.

Migrants become the problem. Muslims become the threat. Minorities become an obstruction.

It is an old playbook, but in times like these, it works with frightening ease.

For Politicians, This Is Not a Crisis, It’s an Election Strategy

Britain’s political class has discovered that fear is an election winner.

Talking about economic reform risks upsetting donors, corporations, and party financiers.
Talking about “culture”, “border control”, or “taking our streets back” costs nothing and delivers votes.

For decades, Britain had a political spectrum: left, centre, and right.
In 2025, that spectrum has long gone.

There is no serious “left” permitted in mainstream discourse, no centre with influence, and barely any space for material conversations about inequality. What remains is a competition between parties to see who can speak the harshest about immigration, Muslims, and multiculturalism. The Overton window is not shifting; it has shifted.

The Far Right Doesn’t Create the Narrative, Parliament Does

The public face of extremism may look like street thugs and football hooligans, but the narrative they carry isn’t theirs. They aren’t clever enough, organised enough, or ideological enough to craft it. They are repeating what has already been said in Parliament and printed in the most-read newspapers in the country.

When a former minister like Robert Jenrick declares there are “no white faces” in Birmingham, it gives the far right oxygen.
When politicians talk about “migrant invasions”, “cultural threats”, or “taking the country back”, they hand the far right a ready-made manifesto.

Extremism on the streets does not begin with extremism in pubs, it begins with extremism in politics.

The Muslim Community: The Battle Is Not on the Pavement

The scenes in Whitechapel and other cities show young Muslims reacting emotionally to provocation. But this is not where the real battle lies.

The challenge before the Muslim community is not to meet thuggery with energy, or to mimic the theatrics of the far right with balaclavas and bravado. That only strengthens the very forces seeking to trap them.

The challenge is to expose how the system is failing everyone: white working-class families, Black communities, migrants, and Muslims alike.

The system is not collapsing because of minorities; it is collapsing because it was designed to concentrate wealth upward.

And who benefits from keeping it that way?

The ultra-wealthy tiny elite who gain the most when society is divided and distracted. According to the Resolution Foundation, once hidden assets and offshore wealth are properly accounted for, the richest 1% in Britain control around 23% of the nation’s entire wealth , far more than official statistics show. Oxfam adds that the top 1% now own more wealth than 70% of the population combined, while ordinary families face the harshest fall in living standards since records began. Meanwhile, a Public Accounts Committee investigation found that billions in unpaid taxes from high-net-worth individuals remain uncollected, even as everyday people are squeezed harder each year. This is the real architecture of inequality: the powerful hoard resources, escape accountability, and rely on mass distraction. The far-right narrative doesn’t just emerge naturally, it is politically useful. It keeps the public busy fighting each other instead of recognising the system that is draining them.

Mosques Must Step Into the Void

Mosques must become spaces where this truth is discussed openly, courageously, and with political maturity. For too long, Friday sermons have been reduced to moral reminders, personal purification, and individual piety, all important in their own place, but entirely insufficient for a community living through a political, economic and social earthquake.

The elephant in the room is not “community cohesion”, “radicalisation”, or other buzzwords invented by think tanks. It is a failed economic model that pits human against human, neighbour against neighbour, and majority against minority, all fighting for a shrinking slice of dignity.

Mosques must rediscover their original function: not as quietist spiritual stations, but as centres of public consciousness, justice, and societal guidance. In the earliest generations, khutbahs addressed prices, governance, corruption, and the economic direction of society.

When Umar ibn al-Khattab stood on the minbar, he spoke about rising prices, unfair wealth, governance, and public accountability issues that shaped people’s lives. When the Umayyads or Abbasids drifted into corruption, scholars used the pulpit to challenge tyranny, not to avoid it. The khutbah was where economic justice was debated, where rulers were scrutinised, and where the ummah was reminded that dignity is a collective right, not a private luxury.

Today, our mosques speak about purifying the soul but remain silent about the system that crushes the soul. They warn about personal sins but avoid discussing the structural sins of poverty, creation, exploitative labour, corporate greed, and the manufactured scarcity that fuels division on Britain’s streets.

The Muslim community does not need more lectures on how to perfect wudu while the country burns. It needs khutbahs that explain why families can’t afford food, why homelessness is soaring, why the far right is growing, and how Islam’s economic vision, built on zakat, fair distribution, the prohibition of exploitation, and the dignity of labour, offers an alternative to the financial order collapsing around us.

Until our pulpits stop avoiding the real issues and return to the prophetic tradition of confronting injustice, Muslim youth will continue to mistake reaction for resistance, and noise for strategy.

A Message to the Youth: Don’t Become the Brown Tommy Robinson

The far right has succeeded by presenting a simple and wrong argument:

If one piece of bread must be shared between twenty people, life improves when nineteen disappear.

But the real question, the only question that matters, is:

Why is there only one piece of bread in the first place?
Who decided that?
And who benefits from keeping it that way?

Young Muslims must rise above the street-level theatre. This moment demands substance, not reaction; clarity, not mimicry. Becoming the “brown Tommy Robinson” is not a strength; it is surrendering to the same shallow politics that strengthen the far right.

The Trajectory: It Will Get Worse Before It Gets Worse

The far right is not peaking; it is accelerating.

With every new budget that cuts deeper into working families, more people will be pushed into desperation. And as the economic pain widens, so too will the appeal of blame politics.

The political elite will never become the target, because they control the narrative.
The poor will blame the poor.
The struggling will blame the struggling.
The angry will blame the visible, not the powerful.

And minorities, especially Muslims, will be cast as the eternal problem.

Britain’s darkest times are not ahead.
They have begun.
And the darker it gets, the more this country will try to find someone to blame.