And, as the far right becomes a fixture of British politics, prominent voices are willing to abstain from condemning the violence, excuse it, or even appear to encourage it.
The anti-immigrant, nationalist Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, has been steadily moving from the fringes to the mainstream. With eight lawmakers in Parliament, it consistently tops polls and is increasingly talked about as capable of winning the next general election. Mr. Farage described the reaction of “our leaders” to Mr. Nowak’s death as proof of “a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities,” and urged Britons to respond with “pure, cold rage.”
A more explicitly far-right party, Restore Britain — formed by the lawmaker Rupert Lowe, a breakaway from Reform, and endorsed by Mr. Musk — responded to Mr. Nowak’s murder in a long post on X that said, “Enough is enough,” and that keeping alive the “savage” who killed him served nobody.
As Britain’s traditional two-party democracy disintegrates, and voters splinter in five or six directions (Reform may lead the polls, but gets only around 25 percent support), the boundaries that once distinguished the center-right from the far right have collapsed. As the writer Daniel Trilling describes in his book, “If We Tolerate This,” flagrantly racist ideas and claims that would have been utterly beyond the pale just over a decade ago now circulate among conservative newspapers and politicians as they struggle to keep up with the rage bait of far-right influencers. Last year, for example, an up-and-coming Conservative lawmaker named Katie Lam told The Times of London that legal residents needed to “go home,” leaving Britain more “culturally coherent.”
There is a troubling sense in Britain that only the right seems to possess the momentum and theatricality that succeeds in this new quick-fire videographic era of politics. Be it in Westminster or on the street, the right — including the far right — takes the initiative and sets the agenda, leaving those in the liberal mainstream to denounce sporadic outbursts of violence without confronting the wider political and ideological climate that encourages and condones it. Few seem willing to, for example, defend the progress made in the effort to make the police force less racist over the last 30 years — an effort the right holds responsible for Mr. Nowak’s death.
