Some people say that real socialism has never been tried. Not the Daily Mail. Britain’s most influential tabloid insists that socialism is in full swing — right here, right now under Sir Keir Starmer.
“Starmer’s socialist utopia goes into MELTDOWN!” read one recent front page, pegged on internal splits in the Labour party. When the government revealed plans for digital ID cards, the Mail compared Britain to East Germany: “The economy’s moribund. Socialism rules. Police come knocking if you say or think the wrong thing.” That was at least a geographic variation on a previous splash: “When did Britain become North Korea?”
Certainly, reading these headlines in London can be like reading dispatches about a foreign country. If the socialist revolution has arrived, it feels surprisingly similar to whatever we called life under Boris Johnson. If we really were in East Germany or North Korea, we might be hearing a bit less about immigration.
There is a backdrop to the Mail’s hyperbole. Police estimate that 150,000 protesters turned up at Tommy Robinson’s anti-immigration rally three weeks ago (they had expected 50,000). Once-mainstream rightwing commentators now post extreme comments on X, including about who counts as British.
At this week’s Labour conference, Starmer told the public to choose between “decency or . . . division”. He also branded Nigel Farage’s policy towards legal migrants “racist”. In response, Farage’s allies took a break from defending free speech, and labelled Starmer’s words an “incitement of violence”.
We have the prospect of three or four more years before the next general election during which Labour and Reform attack each other in alarmist terms. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has talked up the threat of the far right to keep together his ragtag coalition of leftists and nationalists. Starmer is committed to something similar. Polarisation is now a strategy.
Is the public as polarised as this politics implies? Is Britain turning . . . American? The answer is not straightforward.
According to new polling from Ipsos, 55 per cent of Britons now believe that “the differences in people’s political views are so divisive it is dangerous for our society”. That’s up from 51 per cent a year ago, and a huge jump from 35 per cent in July 2024, the month that Labour was elected. Conservatives and Labour voters say that things are getting worse.
Of course, disagreement is part of democracy. But only one in six people say that the differences in citizens’ views are healthy for society — less than half as many who said the same in July 2024. The division between Leave and Remain voters — centred around levels of education — faded during the years after the Brexit referendum, but seems to be reasserting itself, says Ben Ansell, a professor of politics at Oxford university.
A key measure of polarisation is how each side views the other. Can we still be civil? Labour conferences were once incomplete without T-shirts and badges with the slogan: “Never Kissed a Tory”. As of last year, one-third of Labour voters said they would be uncomfortable with someone in their family marrying a Tory supporter. On such questions, the UK was not far off similar polling in the US.
The Never Kissed a Tory merch was rather absent at this week’s Labour conference, because these days there are barely any Tories. Labour members are most preoccupied by Reform supporters. They regard them as much worse than unkissable. Most Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters say that Reform voters are generally racist (5 per cent of Reform voters do too, but that’s a different story). Overall Reform seems to be viewed with slightly more disapproval than Farage’s previous vehicle, the UK Independence party, was a decade ago. And it represents a bigger chunk of the population than Ukip did.
Polarisation may be an unhelpful term for what is happening in both US and UK politics. It implies that both sides are becoming equally extreme. Arguably the real dynamic is that elements of the right have hardened, embracing positions that would have been unacceptable a decade ago. By contrast, Labour’s policies are clearly less radical, and less socialist, than those proposed by Jeremy Corbyn, eight or so years ago. (Corbyn’s new venture is yet to demonstrate it’s capable of naming itself.)
Moreover, aside from the fights over immigration, Britons agree on quite a lot. Polling from More in Common, a think-tank that seeks to tackle division, suggests that there is no wave of social conservatism in the UK. The country has long been less religious than the US. There are large majorities, including among Reform voters, in favour of same-sex marriage and current or more liberal abortion law. Most Britons continue to say that diversity policies are a good thing. Although the rightwing media has lionised Lucy Connolly, a woman jailed for inciting violence during August anti-immigrant riots, most of the public don’t think she was treated harshly.
(Another thing that unites the public is disapproval of the current government and of Starmer himself. Policies such as ID cards may become unpopular partly by association.)
The other good news for those wanting to ease tensions is that British politics is hardly at fever pitch. Politics has barely featured on the front page of the Sun newspaper in the past month, pushed aside by celebrity and crime stories. In the US, Trump delegitimises his opponents. In the UK, in the Brexit years, there was regular talk of “traitors” — less so today.
The risk lies in how we manage disagreement. Faith in politics is very low. The ways in which we get information are breaking. For years, the hegemony of the BBC anchored British political debate. Although newspapers such as the Mail have hyped up concerns around migration, they have also set boundaries, for example on racial equality. But with social media, GB News and more, things are less predictable. Britons may agree on a lot — so do Americans — but new media is brilliant at finding the things that divide us.
“The polarisation has escaped the containment zone of traditional media, in a way that may be worse,” says Ansell. It is much harder to track what people are seeing on social media, let alone in their WhatsApp chats.
I listened to a popular rightwing podcast this week, where the opposition to ID cards came close to conspiracy theories: Starmer was lying; Tony Blair, or maybe his son Euan, was running the government; people would be tracked on the basis of their political opinions; and so on.
In this fragmented media world, it becomes ever harder to work out what is really going on, what fellow citizens think, and where compromise might lie. This week Trump described a conversation with the governor of Oregon about anti-immigration-enforcement protests in Portland, where he has been considering deploying the National Guard. The governor reassured Trump that the city was not the war zone that Trump thought.
“Wait a minute; am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?” asked Trump. I’m not sure if the president has ever seen My Fair Lady, but by George, I think he’s got it.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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