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I have been living in Britain since the late 1970s, but have never witnessed what I am seeing today. Some roundabouts in London have been painted with the red cross of St. George — England’s historic and religious emblem, which also features, alongside the cross of St. Andrew for Scotland and the cross of St. Patrick for Ireland, on the Union Flag — against a white background.

This symbolism emphasizes an English identity over identification with Britain. We should note that, hard-line English isolationists see “Britishness” as a contrived identity born out of the Anglo-Saxon nationalist expansion that subdued, then subsumed, the Celtic minorities — the Scots, Irish, and Welsh — under the imperial crown.

It is true that the evolution of the UK — the official name for Great Britain and Northern Ireland — weakened ethnolinguistic loyalties and nationalisms to a degree, but it has not eliminated them entirely. In many conservative rural regions of England, many continue to see the Labour Party as a representative of minorities and foreigners. This sentiment has long empowered the Conservative Party politically.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the Conservatives — the natural heirs of the old Tory Party — and the Liberals, who inherited the position of the Whigs, were the primary protagonists of British politics.

With the French Revolution having released the ideals of liberalism, these soon spread to Britain’s North American colonies. However, the excesses of France’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror gave rise to a pragmatic, conservative intellectual backlash seeking to curb the excesses of liberalism, restore the authority of state power, and safeguard the cohesion and interests of the British Empire.

Parties once relegated to the margins are now behind the wheel

Eyad Abu Shakra

The conflict between the liberal camp, which advocated emancipation and liberation, and the conservative camp, which championed the empire and stability, soon shaped both domestic and foreign policy. Over the ensuing decades, the Conservatives and Liberals produced some of the most prominent statesmen in Britain’s imperial history.

Things began to shift, however, with the rise of socialist ideas in Europe, and with the emergence of influential socialist thinkers in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere. Without delving too deeply into this intellectual history, several models for a “socialist alternative” took shape across the Continent, creating a spectrum that spanned communism, or “scientific socialism,” to social democracy.

Britain was not insulated from socialist thought, neither intellectually nor in terms of its labor movement. Together, these forces gave rise to a new political force of the left: the Labour Party. Over time, Labour established itself as a central political player, becoming the primary rival of the Conservatives, which represented the institutional and pragmatic right.

The two main parties, Conservatives and Labour, along with the Liberal Party, which became the Liberal Democrats after merging with the breakaway Social Democratic Party (1981–1988), remain fixtures in British politics. Despite their long history, these three parties have faced mounting challenges from two new political models.

The first model includes parties and movements centered on ethnolinguistic identity. Often, these advocated separatism or autonomy: the Scottish National Party, the major parties of Northern Ireland (notably the Catholic Sinn Fein and the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party), and Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru.

The second is radical parties, both on the far right and far left. The leading force of this politics is the Reform Party, an ultra-right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-European movement. A less prominent movement has been formed by the radical left, notably the party being established by Jeremy Corbyn, a former left-wing Labour leader.

Under the leadership of Nigel Farage, the Reform Party currently leads opinion polls, ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. Notably, the more confident the party becomes about its popularity, the more acrid and overtly racist its rhetoric becomes, as we see with calls for sending “illegal immigrants” back to their countries.

The Reform Party is hardly an isolated phenomenon, whether in Britain or Europe more broadly. Britain has known similar figures before: the most notable was Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), the leader of the British Union of Fascists; and Enoch Powell (1912–1998), a hard-line Conservative who later left the party and returned to Parliament representing one of Northern Ireland’s right-wing parties.

Globalization has sharply increased migration to Western countries

Eyad Abu Shakra

Without underestimating the influence of far-right movements in the US under Donald Trump, or in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this right-wing surge can be placed within the context of a broader phenomenon in Europe.

Parties once relegated to the margins are now behind the wheel in countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, and Hungary, and are becoming increasingly powerful in France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

Several factors explain the rise of the radical, racist right and the simultaneous decline of the left. Among the most significant of these factors is globalization; over the past few decades, it has erased political and geographical boundaries between nations and sharply increased migration to Western countries, particularly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

A second factor is the diminishing value of the individual in the face of rapid technological advances, including artificial intelligence, making stable employment seem far-fetched to billions of people. In turn, this precarity undercuts the capacity of labor unions and leftist parties to provide safety nets for their constituencies.

A third factor is the demographic shift underway in “white Christian European societies,” whose population is either growing slowly or stagnant in Europe, North America, and Australia, while the population of “non-Christian, non-white migrant communities” rises at a far faster rate.

I will conclude with an incidental, but telling, observation.

The “Trump phenomenon” in the US emerged only a few years after the country elected its first African American president. Likewise, in Britain, the Conservative Party’s popularity began declining in favor of the extremists of the Reform Party after the Conservatives elected two leaders of immigrant heritage, the first of Indian origin, and the second of African origin.

• Eyad Abu Shakra is managing editor of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was originally published. X: @eyad1949