Briefing: The Link Between Inequality and the Far Right
The racist riots that spread through British cities in the last week of July were shocking, but not particularly surprising. Violent racism has been simmering for decades now, stoked to a boil by a media and political system that has upheld inequality by scapegoating migrants, Muslims, and Black and Brown people. Leaders within the British far right have been openly calling for riots for years.
Why? Why have we been trapped on a steady path towards far-right violence? And why have those in power chosen to keep us on this road?
Inequality’s role in driving the far right
The far right has always been part of politics. The current global wave of far-right populist political movements began in the late 1970s, grew in the 1990s, and accelerated dramatically in the late 2000s. It has mirrored a sharp increase in inequality across developed economies, the globalisation of neoliberal economics, and the creation of an international super-rich.
In the Spirit Level at 15, Professors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, along with our research lead Aini Gauhar, articulated many of the ways in which inequality leads to a stronger far right. Economic inequality creates a deeply unequal distribution of political power. In the UK, this can be seen in the growing influence of major donors over political parties and in the ways that political decisions favour the wealthy and highly-educated; a trend that has become more entrenched over the 20th and 21st centuries. As Dr Parth Patel from the IPPR demonstrated on our webinar recently, the public are aware of this fact and disengage from the political system, forming a vicious cycle.
This inequality rapidly causes a breakdown in trust: of politicians, of the media covering politics, and of the mechanisms of democracy itself. High income disparities also collapse trust across other areas of society by fostering an ‘othering’ mentality, which is why unequal countries have lower levels of trust than more equal ones. These trends, combined with the actions of the wealthy and powerful to defend their privileged positions in society, result in countries with higher levels of income inequality having lower levels of democratic governance.
These mechanisms appear to be some of the key ways in which support for the far right grows. Several studies across the last 20 years have found that a long-term increase in income inequality increases support for parties on the far right. A 2021 study in particular found similarly to Pickett and Wilkinson: their models found each one-point increase in the Gini income inequality measure increased support for far-right parties by one percentage point, with people more likely to support the far right if they have “economic insecurities, distrust elites, are socially disintegrated, and hold national identities. Income inequality further affects distrust in political elites, economic insecurities, and national identity, making them potential explanations for the positive effect of inequality. “ This fertile ground for far-right support exists worldwide.
If a political movement is growing in reaction to inequality, you might assume that the movement would aim to reduce the inequality that created it. Certainly the hostility towards establishments and elites that have arisen under neoliberal economic systems in far-right rhetoric indicates that inequality of power concerns far-right supporters, and wealth is often singled out as a factor in that unearned power. For example, the far-right attacks on the Hungarian billionaire George Soros or on American corporations perceived to be supporting social liberalism.
But these movements don’t tend to talk about the systems that encourage inequality of wealth and power in the first place. Instead, they often favour further dismantling of the social safety nets many of their supporters rely on, deregulation of the economy that would increase the vulnerability of their supporters to economic shocks or harmful products like air pollution, and extensive tax breaks for the richest. This would seem to be a fatal contradiction at the heart of the movement; so what’s going on there?
The far right reacts to inequality, then creates more
The current wave of far-right growth in Europe began in the late 1990s and 2000s in opposition to the way countries were being reorganised around the European Union in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR and were turbocharged by the 2008 financial crisis. Many studies have found a strong link between financial crises in general with support for the far right and the 2008 crash in particular with the current far-right wave. This produced two of the earliest far-right governments in Poland and Hungary: Fidesz won Hungary’s 2010 election and Law and Justice (PiS) won Poland’s 2015 election.
In both cases, the groundwork for the far right had been laid by massively successful, and internationally praised, liberalisation programmes that dismantled regulations, sold off state assets, and ended welfare schemes. These programmes were led and continued by all mainstream political parties, including the ones that claimed to be socialist or centre left. This is a clue to one of the reasons the far right has been successful in several governments despite the contradictions of their position: they chose to mobilise the resources of the state in a way that other political parties refused to do.
In Hungary, Fidesz has moved to take state control over the economy, nationalising some sectors that had been mostly foreign owned while also installing party supporters at the head of nominally independent institutions or companies. Both Poland and Hungary significantly increased their minimum wages, and in Poland an extremely popular social welfare scheme provides an unconditional monthly payment to families with children.
These have given Fidesz and PiS genuine support, but the economic systems in both countries are intentionally rigged towards the richest. Hungary’s new labour law cracked down on the right to strike and removed many worker protections. Unemployment benefits remain very low, with harsh sanctions and an extensive workfare programme. State control over independent institutions has taken some power away from international economic elites, but handed much more power to national elites, along with significant concessions to international corporations who are willing to tolerate an authoritarian regime.
A study from a Cambridge University academic characterised the entire Fidesz regime in Hungary as one designed to introduce authoritarianism in order to prop up the accumulation of extreme wealth. Despite Poland’s stronger focus on chauvinist welfare schemes and economic development, the PiS government similarly focused on replacing the international economic elite with an expanded Polish one, and the development focus has only occurred because it’s the decision of that Polish elite.
Unsurprisingly, inequality in Poland and Hungary has continued to increase.
This pattern is common across hard-right and far-right governments, from Trump in the US and Erdogan in Turkey to Meloni in Italy and Mitsotakis in Greece. According to Thomas Piketty, India, after 10 years of rule by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, is now more unequal than it was under British colonial rule; a system explicitly designed to extract wealth through violence.
Establishment elites fund the far right to entrench their control
This is what the far right movement, in practice, is really about: the wealthy and powerful in one country trying to push out international competition and threats to their influence over wealth and power.
The links between the British far right and the ultra-wealthy are well established. Farage and Tice are multimillionaires, as are several of their candidates. Donations come from a similar class, including “aristocrats like Robin Birley, who owns a private club in Mayfair, to financiers like David Lilley, who runs the investment fund Drakewood Capital. The party’s biggest backer in the mainstream media, GB News, is owned by billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Marshall.” Tommy Robinson in 2024 made profits of £1.6m while not paying any tax, and Hope Not Hate believes he may have stashed over £3m to avoid HMRC.
Although it’s difficult to track money donated to political parties, studies of the last European election indicate that one quarter of all donated money went to far-right parties. Similarly, it’s difficult to quantify the influence of big donations on the far right, but a recent study found “robust evidence of a negative relationship between politically-connected wealth inequality and democracy across the globe using all of the measures from the V-Dem project as well as the Continuous Machine Learning index.” The primary beneficiary of this trend towards undermining democracies has been politically-connected wealth, and that in turn has benefited the hard right and far right.
This indicates another key part of the link between the far right and inequality: the richest are intensely relaxed about the consequences of far-right governments on rights, democracy, and the safety of minority communities. Democratic backsliding in the world’s largest economies has gone hand-in-hand with record corporate profits, and far-right persecution of minorities has not hindered rapidly growing billionaire classes.
Resistance to the far right is led by communities
Despite far-right claims to represent the “silent majority” of a country, the most successful resistance to the far right has always been led by communities and organised workers.
The initial rise of British far-right groups in the mid-to-late 1970s was immediately met by resistance from trade unions. Many began programmes to combat the National Front’s appeal to workers in their unions, and it was unions who contributed many of the members of the Anti-Nazi League, who met the National Front in physical confrontations.
This doesn’t mean the official trade union movement was a bastion of anti-racism; the organised unions were often hostile to Black or Asian workers and chose not to represent them. But this was a failure of the unions as institutions, not of the tactics they employed. Grassroots organisation among Asian workers in Leicester led to wildcat strikes at Imperial Typewriters in the early 1970s, for example, which rapidly became a broader movement against the National Front, supported by community organisations from different backgrounds. It built a massive network of solidarity and support across races, religions, and regions of the UK by organising democratically and against the far right.
It was this community-led, bottom-up approach to organising that forced the official trade union movement to start changing their narrow view of what workers looked like, with a long struggle eventually forcing them to take leading roles in the anti-racist movement.
The same thing happened in the riots in late July. After the initial outbreak of far-right violence, locals in Bristol and Plymouth rushed to defend their neighbours. They assembled outside mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers to prevent the far right entering: something that turned out to be crucial, as far-right rioters in Rotherham blocked exits to a hotel also housing asylum seekers before setting it on fire. Other community efforts to heal as much of the hurt as possible have been highly successful. People in Sunderland organised themselves to clear up debris while fundraisers in Belfast have raised over £100,000 to support businesses targeted by the far right.
But community resistance to the far right must not be conflated with a wholesale rejection of the far right. In the days after the riots, newspapers in the UK led with front pages that celebrated massive turnouts at counter protests to the far right, despite using the exact rhetoric and demanding the same things as the UK’s far-right movements. Politicians celebrated the community spirit of places with counter protests while failing to attend themselves, with the ruling Labour Party instructing elected representatives to not attend any of them.
This moment of establishment solidarity with the Black, Muslim, migrant and other minority people targeted by the far-right in the riots will not last long. As with far-right movements around the globe, the wealthy and powerful in the UK stand to benefit too much from a growing far-right movement to allow the unpopularity of these riots to cause serious action to stop future ones.
Up until now, anti-far right movements have universally struggled to stop the growing crisis. Dealing with the inequality that is at the root of much of this is essential, and it requires both a community-led, grassroots movement to demand equality and international action to curb the power and wealth of the super rich.
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