ENGLISH politics has taken a sharp turn towards racism. Political positions once held by the National Front are now regularly broadcast on national television.

But many of the leading businessmen and politicians pushing the racist and anti-migrant messages only started making these bigoted noises fairly recently, when they were once only concerned with pushing Thatcherite economics. It is easy to believe they are turning up the racism dial to make up for the unpopularity of their core free-market politicians.

GB News is one of the key institutions pushing the new anti-“foreigner” politics, with its presenters resorting to crude stunts like counting “non-British-sounding surnames” among defendants in court.

As well as promoting the new anti-Muslim, anti-migrant politics, GB News also directly funds Nigel Farage, paying him around £300,000 a year as a presenter.

GB News has two principal investors who have funded it since the channel was launched in 2021 — hedge fund boss Paul Marshall and Legatum, the Dubai-based investment fund of New Zealand financier Christopher Chandler.

Before GB News, both Marshall and Legatum’s involvement in politics was basically pushing free-market, Thatcherite ideas.

Marshall was a leading Liberal Democrat who funded the Orange Book movement in the Lib Dems. They were based around a group of essays bound in an orange cover — hence the “Orange Book” — funded and edited by Marshall.

This group of right-wing Lib Dems were fronted by Nick Clegg but it was Marshall’s project. They aimed to defeat the party’s left-leaning “social liberals.”  

Marshall’s Orange Book aimed to shift the Lib Dems away from what it called “soggy socialism and corporatism” towards more neoliberal politics, including arguing the NHS was a “second-rate, centralised, state monopoly service” and calling for more privatisation of hospitals, prisons and Royal Mail.  

The Orange Book Lib Dem MPs were behind the party’s decision to go into coalition with David Cameron’s Tories, so Marshall’s political activity was “Lib Dem” — it wasn’t about anti-migrant rants — but helped create the austerity years.

Legatum meanwhile puts money into politics mostly by funding the Legatum Institute (since renamed the Prosperity Institute).

This had good access to Tory ministers which it used to push a “hard Brexit” position. However, Legatum promoted Brexit as a “free-trade” issue as part of its general push for deregulation in international markets, rather than the “culture war” and anti-immigration themes of GB News.

The businessmen behind the culture war seem to have realised that, especially after the financial crisis, their preferred pro-City free-market politics were unpopular and put on a cloak of racism to disguise their unloved ideas in a new, dynamic bigotry.

This is also true of some leading politicians pumping out the new racism: Robert Jenrick was once such a bland Cameroon centrist Tory he was nicknamed “Robert Generic.”

But he has reinvented himself as a crusader against “alien cultures” attacking white people. Even Richard Tice was once a mainstream Tory donor whose main political interest was in making state education more “free market” by breaking up the teaching unions’ influence on pay so “academy schools” could have a freer hand in wages.

So the turn to anti-migrant, racist themes looks like a simple attempt to give their Thatcherite politics a “culture war” paint job to sneak them past disapproving voters.

Except the conversion often looks pretty heartfelt. Hope Not Hate found an anonymous Twitter/X account run by Marshall called “Areopagus123.”  Using this private account, Marshall was very active promoting “Great Replacement”-style views about the need for “mass expulsions” to defend “”European civilisation” from “Islamic conquest” and “fake refugee invaders.”

This anonymous account looks like a window into his private views, his anti-migrant subconscious bubbling up. Similarly, when Robert Jenrick complained that “I didn’t see another white face” in the “slum” of Handsworth, Birmingham, this was in a semi-private moment, at a Conservative Association dinner. Jenrick didn’t know he was being recorded, so this felt like his personal feelings being exposed.

So while the new right politicians are clearly trying to create a popular bigotry to cover their unpopular “free-marketeer” politics, this isn’t just them wearing a mask. It seems genuine and personal. I think it is more likely they always held somewhat racist views. Many rich right-wing people believe that they and their children or parents are a “better class of person” and “deserve” their success, so there has always been a bit of a personal belief in genetic or “civilisational” personal superiority. Letting this flow into full personal racism is not such a big step, once unleashed.

However, under the Tories or Lib Dems, they suppressed these feelings because at this strength they were not publicly acceptable in Conservative circles. But now they are letting their inner racists run free. It is a political tactic, but also one they are enjoying.

There was a small confirmation of this pattern recently when Robbie Lammas, a Conservative councillor who had defected to Reform, switched back to the Tories. Lammas said that he was shocked at how many of the Reform “inner sanctum” believed they were on a “Christian crusade,” with many councillors being “secretly big supporters of Tommy Robinson.”

Lammas said he did “encounter racism” in Reform. He admitted “I did encounter racism in the Conservatives in the past too” – the difference was in the Conservatives, officials did their best to have open racists “removed” from the party.

Now these well-heeled funders of the new hard right are letting their inner racists frolic free, what do we do?

Obviously there is a basic response, that we stand in the way of bigoted scapegoating of minorities. But it is also worth focusing on the Thatcherite economics that clearly came first for these men.

They want to use the “culture war” themes to push through neoliberal economics, and we should draw attention to that. It seems they think that their economic mission is unpopular, so we need to highlight that.

If they want to encourage racism to break up working people’s solidarity, so they can fleece them more easily, we need to oppose them with more solidarity.

Opposing bigotry isn’t just morally right, it is also essential to stopping us all being exploited.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.