I Used to Laugh At Britain’s Right-Wing Bigots. I’m Not Laughing Anymore 🇬🇧
Marketing Unfiltered #82 → HOW FRESH MARKETING & NEW MEDIA EFFORTS HELPED TO RESHAPE BRITISH POLITICS
Good Morning readers,
Today’s newsletter from Harry isn’t just about Britain’s drift to the Right – it’s another demonstration in how marketing through modern media, precise messaging and working with platform algorithms are influencing many at scale.
If you missed recent MU’s definitely read you cannot bury your head in the sand anymore and the 2027 CMO nightmare and what to do about it.
Thanks for reading today and enjoy your long weekends,
Danny Denhard & Harry Lang
I Used to Laugh At Britain’s Right-Wing Bigots.
I’m Not Laughing Anymore.
Britain’s migration towards the Right isn’t a fringe movement. The channels and methods that have accelerated it (and how others responded) just takes us there faster, so perhaps understanding is more useful than apathy.
Earlier this week, I made a comment under a post on LinkedIn, as I tend to do when I’m up early and my interest nodules are tickled. The post itself was about the disaffected political middle of the UK, and despite not being connected to the original poster, I felt obliged to chuck my two Cents in.
Yes, the post was quite a few postcodes away from my usual content habitat, so I can only assume LinkedIn served it to me so I could spread my intellectual wings in new and interesting directions…
A senior media figure had posted about the recent ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, framing the attendees not as extremists, but as ordinary, fearful British people.
I replied that my concern wasn’t with the ‘fearful middle’. It was that their visible, legitimising presence at a right-wing rally gave permission to more nefarious, racially motivated behaviours on the periphery. Give it a year of such advocacy, I said, and the fringe might start to look less abhorrent.
Give it two, and it might sound normal.
The first reply I received was short and to the point (even if the point was blunt and had absolutely nothing to do with what I’d said): -
“Of course. Like attacking our police force with sledgehammers1 type of distasteful. We want to do anything possible to prevent that type of behaviour, don’t we? The courts think not.”
And there it was - the pivot from polite social interaction to divisive land grabbing in a few short keystrokes.
I’ve been thinking about this brief exchange ever since, because it feels like a snapshot of what’s happening to political discourse – and the state of our country – on the UK’s digital, social and traditional media platforms every day.
Yep, I Got It Wrong
For the past couple of years, I’ve treated the proliferation of Nationalism in Britain with the same casual disdain that I viewed my daughter’s Labubu collection or any Kardashian. I occasionally marvelled at the stupidity of it all from the comfortable distance of my intellectually smug, progressively liberal bubble.
Yes, I’m aware I can be a dick. Sue me.
What I completely miscalculated was that apathetic ridicule doesn’t shrink movements, nor does it recognise the underlying issues that amplify socio-political division.
In a nutshell, every condescending sneer from a self-regarding liberal like me is a recruitment poster for Reform and their ilk.
Every sneering op-ed about ‘disaffected’ voters trying to have their voices heard and written by someone who lives in the cream end of Britain’s curdling milk bottle can be used as ammunition.
I didn’t take them (or the changing winds of our country) seriously, and in doing so, I dismissed the most powerful political narrative in the land: -
That the establishment was perceived to be mocking ordinary people.
The Economics of Anger (Which Are Actually Quite Simple)
What us professional liberals find so uncomfortable is that the economic anxiety and anti-immigration sentiment in the UK might actually be legitimate.
Wages in Britain have been stagnant (effectively net reducing) for over fifteen years. House prices have become so obscene that an entire generation has stopped considering homebuying entirely. The Cost-of-Living Crisis is a dictionary definition, and SME owners are drowning in compliance costs, energy bills, salaries, tax and shrinking margins. Public services are visibly falling apart, and farmers are looking at 2027 and 2028 as loss making years already.
For many British people, things are a bit shit.
Meanwhile, the politicians who promised to fix these issues (during government stints branded in both colours) have done the exact opposite with all their intellectually stunted and selfishly ego-driven might.
When people are scared or feel ignored, they get small, they look for explanations and eventually, when they’re cornered, they fight back. In my race to be apathetic, I forgot to ask one simple question:
‘Why?’
For the last decade or so, people in the socio-economic middle of the UK have been panic searching for answers and meaning – anything or anyone who could make it all make sense. So into this void of uncertainty marched the jack-booted mouth breathers new breed of politicians in the shape of Reform, Restore Britain, Advance UK and their ideological cousins who provided the nipple of an answer on which the masses could suckle: -
Immigration.
It’s not an accurate reason to ascribe to Britain’s problems in any meaningful sense, but immigration was a simple, visible and PR-able patsy. It’s even easier to hurl blame bombs towards ‘those not from round these parts’ when you’re standing in an A&E queue with your child for six hours or struggling to pay the bills every month.
Understanding why people believe something is not the same as agreeing with it, but I, for one, have been far too busy pretending that the shift rightwards was a bit of an absurdist joke, like the Daily Mail comments section or a Farage promise. I recognise and regret this mistake now.
The Pipeline Nobody Wants to Talk About
Social media didn’t invent the ‘new right’ of British politics, but it definitely helped build its credibility by dripping misinformation honey into the earholes of disaffected voters who were searching for answers.
The big social platforms have weaponised radicalisation, placing right wing party leaders behind iron clad, defendable defences while their minions and followers acted with impunity, scattering mortars of scurrilous untruths and Claymores of divisive suggestion across battlefield Britain.
This polished the somewhat unpolishable turds at the helm with a veneer of respectability, thus making the whole sordid operation functionally invisible to the people it was designed to influence.
Angsty knicker wrangling about ‘algorithms’ and blaming Big Social is how we avoid confronting what’s actually happening here: -
The modern hard-right operation is not a bunch of angry white men in gentlemen’s clubs sipping Scotch while discussing ‘New England’ (well, not just that) but rather a sophisticated, multi-channel communications powerhouse with talent, money, impunity and bravery.
Yes, bravery. They’re changing the narrative and, like their mentor Trump, they don’t let such fripperies like ‘the truth’ stand in the way of a good story. Whether you like the characters or not, that takes some doing.
The New Marketing Approach
Some of their video output may look hokey and transparent to us marketing professionals, sure, but to an older, tech-allergic middle Englander, it reads as authentic and relatable.
To them, it’s a breath of fresh, honest, pragmatic air.
Just imagine what Reform’s comms monkeys will be able to achieve when they really understand the nefarious capabilities of Digital Twins and Deepfakes…
But I need to go back, eventually, to my newfound measured positioning. I must applaud some of the tactics from a professional viewpoint. The language deployed has been tactically massaged with real precision: -
‘Illegal immigrants’ replaced ‘asylum seekers’ - not by design, not by accident, but because one phrase invokes sympathy whilst the other demands punishment.
‘Two-tier policing’ became a rallying cry overnight, seeded through social and trad media and amplified through the mainstream press until it felt like accepted wisdom.
‘Free speech’ was rebranded as a right-wing cause, so any attempt to moderate hate speech (no matter how backhandedly delivered) could be painted as censorship.
This is all textbook power comms, in which those who control the story control the debate – and the outcome.
Then there’s the high volume/ low quality (sorry ‘authentic’) video content machine the Far Right deploys with aplomb.
Short, emotionally charged video clip such as: -
A confrontation on a high street, a court ruling, a crime involving a person of colour - allstripped of context and distributed across X, TikTok, Telegram, Truth Social and FB simultaneously with a legion of loyalists and bot farmers ready and waiting to pour meths of outrage on the ensuing flames.
The influencer layer is where it gets really interesting. A new generation of political commentators, some unashamedly partisan, building audiences of Millions on socials and a new crop of pseudo political, socially sympathetic podcasts.
These commentators act as a highly functional bridge between the aggressive fringe and the more acceptable middle. Someone who would never watch a ‘Britain First’ snippet will happily listen to an hour-long pod debate that claims to independently interrogate the immigration issue from both sides.
Giving credit where it’s due, they’re extremely good at this bit, and it’s scarily effective.
Marketing Effectively On All Fronts
Of course, social algorithms don’t care either way. They care about your eyeballs, attention and wallets. Anger, outrage, confrontation and disgust are some of the most attention-amplifying emotions going.
The mainstream media needs to be credited, too. Front pages of all colours have treated small boat crossings as an existential threat to British civilisation, like they’re an Armada threatening to eviscerate our national plums and surgically orphan us from everything we hold dear.
Like the drip drip drip of soft social news feeding, newspapers serve as a daily conditioner that makes the language and logic of the hard Right feel less like hate induced nonsense, and more like a brand of common sense shared by everyone except you.
As with the social algos, outrage sells papers, and papers sell ads, whilst FOMO and fear retain subscribers. The economics of attention and the economics of radicalisation are as interconnected as twins in the womb.
Now Just Add A Pinch Of AI to That…
Political parties theoretically operate under a set of quite stringent rules around what they can say and how they can say it, guided by spending caps, advertising standards and Electoral Commission oversight.
The Parties themselves are, supposedly, accountable while their social media output can be traced, challenged and reported on. ‘Follow the rules or be damned’ is the message, which has been heard and ignored by pretty much every party across the British political spectrum. The Right is just better at this ignorance.
AI has driven into this lazy domain like a Deliveroo driver at a Weightwatchers party, causing unstoppable and immeasurable havoc. Deepfake videos of politicians saying things they never said, AI-generated voters posting believable but bullshit testimony about made up data linking immigration to crime and fabricated local news site networks optimised for AI SEO reporting on communities that don’t have a functioning local paper anymore.
They all push a consistent and effective ideological line while looking indistinguishable from legitimate journalism.
Thanks to AI, all of this is cheap to produce and immediate to distribute, meaning the first snippet of a story many will hear (and the key sentiment they’ll trust) will be owned by the originator.
Beyond the Right-Wing minions, influencers, Podcasters and comms professionals, the political parties themselves are learning too, using AI to micro-target and A/B test political messaging at scale.
They can identify the emotional triggers of specific voter segments at a postcode level of granularity in near real time and serve them content calibrated to move them into favourable directions, both emotionally and politically.
Welcome to Digital Marcoms – The Dystopian Version.
The real skill in is how effortless it all looks and feels to us liberal cynics and the middle ground target audiences alike.
We feel safe in our mockery bubbles, whilst the moderate voters feel like they’re being listened to, for once, rather than coerced or worse - ignored.
Instead, they feel like they’re being educated – let in on some secret knowledge vault, the combination being their own research, asking the right questions and discovering the truths that mainstream media can’t or won’t give them.
This is what I meant in my LinkedIn comment, and what the reply illustrated so succinctly: -
“The pivot away from my reply to a single inflammatory point used to shut down the conversation irrevocably is a proven tactic in the genre.”
It’s The Hope That Destroys You
Ten years ago, Nigel Farage was nothing more than a pinstripe-wearing pub bore - a pint swilling, chain smoking, grandstanding fartbox spewing Capitalist idealism and sniggering racist suggestion and dressing it up like the acceptable Pret sandwich of politics.
People like me dismissed him as a joke – another nail in the Right side of the coffin.
People like the everyman voter felt the winds were changing and, in secret, they finally had an oracle - a Pied Piper of Pragmatism who honed his craft (i.e. not letting the truth get in the way of a powerful message) from the king of the method, Donald Trump.
I was wrong – and they were right.
Today, Farage leads a British political party which supersedes the Conservatives and is causing Labour serious headaches. Meanwhile, parties to his right act as his political pathfinders, shielding by his public persona whilst gaining real traction through more underground means.
How did these outliers get their social and political profile? Casual racism is a content genre with millions of followers, whilst misogyny, rebranded as ‘masculinity’, is being force-fed to teenage boys via Manosphere accounts on YouTube and TikTok like a daily intravenous Red Bull shot of hope.
Give it two more years on the current trajectory, and what looks like edgy and unpleasant ‘fringe’ behaviour today will feel like the warm cozy glow of the centre tomorrow.
Trust me – this is how it works, and why they’re doing it.
So What the Hell Do We Do?
See, here’s the problem – my problem. I’m doing it again. I’m sliding into a one-sided litany, looking down from my high horse, sneering at the behaviours and beliefs of others and the motives behind them. I can’t fix the problem because…
I AM THE PROBLEM.
…or at least part of it. It’s a me problem before it’s a they problem. And that, in itself, is a problem.
They don’t think what I think. But what they believe and what I believe is a totally different - and much more salient - question.
I need to understand what the moderate middle believes before they stroll towards the warmer, more accepting voting booth of the Right and, crucially, I need to understand why they believe it.
Maybe, with patience, understanding and a significant ego extraction on my part, the divide that I (and others like me) have manifested will pull together towards a more pragmatic and functional distance.
Get closer, and there’s a chance we may engage in a more progressive and positive discussion that could (and those italics are doing some serious heavy lifting here) improve the direction Great Britain is moving in.
Genuinely. Not as an exercise in tolerance or intellectual hubris, but as a necessity for our country.
Our friends.
Our neighbours.
Our children.
Us.
That challenge starts with me.
Harry is a veteran marketing professional and author.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn and X Twitter
→ If you enjoyed today’s newsletter please help us to grow by hitting the ❤️ or sharing www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/82 in your favourite Marketing Group
*23.04.2026 – ‘A Palestine Action activist had hit a police officer with a sledgehammer, fracturing her back’. The BBC April 2026