Are you a political extremist?

You only need to look at France, Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands and, of course, Germany to see how politicians once considered fringe candidates are growing in influence and, in an increasing number of cases, leading governments.

Here in Britain, there has been a tendency to paint our country as an exception to the rule. On the right, people have claimed that Brexit allowed us to lance that boil. The referendum vote allowed the disaffected forgotten voters to have their rebellion on immigration and take a swipe at the status quo. 

On the left, there has been a tendency to paint Keir Starmer’s election victory as a rejection of right-wing populism, often optimistically framed as Britain turning left as the rest of Europe turns right. 

As is often the case with commentary around complex issues, both of these arguments – while not without merit – are too simplistic. Lots of Britons – including normal people you work with or live next door to – might hold opinions that you find beyond the pale, to the point of being extremist. That could be a belief in mass deportations, corporal punishment, enforcing curfews or locking up climate protesters. 

Whether they picked these opinions up after going down a social media rabbit hole, or if they spend too much time listening to Joe Rogan, we are in an era where a disenfranchised electorate lives alongside an information space without many boundaries. 

“We are at a very dangerous point in British politics,” says John Woodcock, a former Labour MP who serves as the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption. “Substantial parts of the population have had a really rough time economically and seen social change that they are uncomfortable with. If neither of the mainstream parties addresses it,” says Woodcock, “the bar for flipping your political allegiance to something more radical gets lower and lower.”

There are plenty of people across the British political spectrum who are perfectly happy with this. Whether it’s anger at small boat crossings, so-called woke ideologies on gender, or climate change being forced upon them, or simply mass immigration, you don’t even need to look beyond the political mainstream to find people offering simplistic solutions to a receptive audience. 

So, what happens when trust in the mainstream gets so bad that the public looks further to the fringes for answers? What happens when people who have voted for the Tories or Labour all their lives are dismissed as extremists for holding what they believe to be reasonable views? 

The truth might be that mainstream politics has been out of touch with popular opinion for decades – and the digital age of politics has allowed ideas that were once shunned to take centre stage. 

Are Britons extremist?

Brits holding opinions that mainstream politicians would consider extreme is nothing new. The classic example here is the death penalty. Opinions vary depending on how the question is phrased, but there is consistent support from a significant chunk of the public for reintroducing state execution in certain cases. 

While the death penalty is at the most extreme end of public views on law and order, it doesn’t necessarily tell us much more than the public has an extremely hostile view of paedophiles, terrorists and murderers. 

A more useful insight might be public opinion on the severity of punishments handed out to people for lesser criminal activity. 

“There is an underlying authoritarian and disciplinarian streak in many Brits when it comes to handling crime or disruption,” says Joe Twyman, director of Delatpoll. “Back in 2011, during the London riots, I ran a poll asking would people support the use of water cannons to disperse rioters: 90% said yes, 77% supported bringing in the Army. But most shocking to me was 33% who thought the police should be allowed to use live ammunition.” 

While that doesn’t literally mean they wanted the police to shoot rioters dead, Twyman says, it is “an indication of how comfortable Brits are with a more muscular approach to crime. And it hasn’t subsided, 14 years on.” 

The Covid pandemic again revealed this authoritarian streak, as Britons repeatedly supported lockdowns and curfews, in some cases favoring extreme methods to enforce the rules, with 79% saying the police should enforce rules like wearing face masks in shops. 

That pattern of knee-jerk responses to individual events reveals a deep-seated authoritarian streak, and it repeats across other issues. 

“On immigration, you see this complex dynamic of the public being anti-mass migration but favourable towards a range of different groups. However, when you see endless stories of people crossing the Channel in dinghies, you see more radical opinions appearing on how to stop these crossings,” Twyman says.  

Those opinions might range from immediate deportation to allowing people to drown. 

The sudden public obsession with the Rochdale grooming gangs and the Southport stabbings – and the riots that followed – have unsurprisingly, pushed conversations about diversity and the integration of immigrants back to the top of the agenda. 

That isn’t to say that everyone who has a negative opinion of Asian grooming gangs or second-generation migrants stabbing children is an extremist. But in 2025, with a public increasingly distrustful of politicians and more likely to believe something their friends post on social media than reports in newspapers, emotional public debates can easily become hijacked by people who want to push an extremist agenda. 

Where did it all go wrong?

There have been extremists of all flavours in Britain for decades. From the National Front to Jihadist cells, extreme views are nothing new. However, historically, these people were members of fringe groups who would find each other through conventions and organised meetings. 

“Before social media, organised groups like the National Front would sell newspapers outside school gates. There were more barriers to this information getting into people’s hands,” says Paul Jackson, professor in the history of radicalism and extremism at the University of Northampton. “Now they can find each other online very easily and have almost limitless access to extreme material.”

Until even fairly recently, extremist content was quite hard to find online if you didn’t know where to look. Most average internet users wouldn’t visit pages on the dark web or lurk on Subreddits that had been taken over by extremist groups. That meant they were unlikely to stumble across this sort of content. But finding channels on Telegram rammed full of Islamist propaganda or neo-Nazi Twitter accounts now takes a matter of seconds. Indeed, many social media users will have this sort of content reposted into their feeds without their consent or knowledge. Once they have engaged with it, the algorithms of some platforms will keep serving it up. 

The mass exposure to this kind of content, Jackson says, has inured the public to ideas that a decade or so ago would have been considered beyond the pale. It’s this mess of overwhelming information, some true, some deliberately misleading, that appeals to a section of the public that feels politically ignored and economically distressed.

Who is to blame and what can be done?

The people who are most certainly not to blame are the general public, many of whom have very real grievances. Whether it’s broken promises about reducing net migration to the tens of thousands – first pledged by David Cameron in 2010 – or two consecutive generations that have to swallow being poorer than their parents, politics as usual has lost the public’s trust and pushed average people to flirt with radical views. 

It’s perhaps no surprise that a recent report in the Times stated that a majority of Gen Z (people borning 1997-2012) support the idea of authoritarian leaders in Britain. Given what young people today are inheriting, why wouldn’t they look at alternative forms of government – especially when they are being fed content repeatedly telling them “that the West is a falling civilisation, and you need to start looking at other places”, as one respondent told the survey? 

Ashley Frawley, a researcher at the University of Kent, says that the rise of figures like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, the extremist agitator, is in part down to mainstream politicians dismissing legitimate concerns about immigration and multiculturalism as radical. 

“The more you tell normal people they are radical, the bigger the group of radicals becomes. If Labour and the Tories look like they don’t care about your concerns, of course you are going to look elsewhere. And that’s how radical voices slip into the mainstream. In some respect, politicians have ended up with the political rivals they deserve,” she says. 

What were once fringe views now have a solid footing in the British mainstream. There isn’t a quick or easy fix to this. But the main parties may only have a short window to start rebuilding trust in our institutions and political systems. If they don’t, we may soon live in a world where Tommy Robinson is calling the shots on government policy.