The rightwing counter-revolution is gaining ground – and Labour’s softly-softly approach won’t stop it | Andy Beckett

Multiculturalism and hard-won equalities are being attacked on all fronts. Labour should look to London’s leaders, past and present, for how to stand against the tide

N ot for the first time, the UK is in the grip of a backlash against equality and diversity. Already disadvantaged parts of the population are having the existence of that disadvantage denied – and the limited legal redress for it, which has been won over decades, such as the 2010 Equality Act, threatened with repeal . Two of the largest political parties, much of the media, street protesters, online activists, opportunistic rioters and organised fascists are all working to erase aspects of British multiculturalism, by lawful means and otherwise. In the decade since the Brexit referendum – which awoke semi-dormant forces of social conservatism and nationalism – this reactionary campaign has gained more and more momentum.

Its targets have widened and solidified: from “wokeness”, multiracial cities, diversity, and equity and inclusion policies to immigrant cultures of all kinds, so-called two-tier policing and the general conduct of local and central government. “Britain is a two-tier state – against white people,” claimed Nigel Farage in a sweeping Reform UK policy statement on Sunday . “Anti-whiteness is institutionalised into every aspect of public life.” His party, still consistently ahead in the polls, promises to work relentlessly against this supposed injustice when it takes office, copying the confrontational and divisive tactics of Donald Trump.

Meanwhile the Conservatives, under the ever more rightwing and Reform-influenced leadership of Kemi Badenoch , pledge to get rid of a key part of the Equality Act, the public sector equality duty. It requires state institutions to “have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment [and] victimisation … advance equality of opportunity … [and] foster good relations” between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged Britons.

Between 2010 and 2024, five successive Tory governments saw no need even to amend this consensual Labour legislation. Yet last week Badenoch said it must be repealed, as “part of our plan to remove identity politics entirely from the public sector”. Switching to the more respectful tone with which she addresses businesses, she continued: “Hopefully the private sector will follow suit, because they have this problem too.”

Only a minority of Britons are actually enthusiasts for this backlash. A survey published this week found that 17% “strongly agree” that “the growth in the Muslim population poses a foundational threat to UK culture” – one of the main preoccupations of campaigners against multiculturalism. “Tracing changes in values across a 30-year period,” wrote the political scientists Laura Serra and Maria Grasso last year, “we find that … [UK] sociocultural values have been consistently shifting towards social liberalism – a change that is driven primarily by generational replacement.” The conservative older Britons upon whom the backlash and its associated political parties and movements still heavily rely, for all the online and street visibility of younger reactionaries, are gradually dying out.

Yet as has been shown regularly since Brexit, angry rightwing minorities, amplified by rightwing papers and digital media, sometimes encouraged and funded by rich allies in America , can easily dominate British political discourse. Meanwhile, the less politicised or more liberal majority either tunes out, pushes back too little, or gives ground.

For much of Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour has surrounded itself with Union flags, produced ever tougher immigration policies and treated many of the grievances driving the backlash as “legitimate” – even those based on fears and ignorance rather than social realities, such as the widespread conviction that immigration is surging, when it has actually fallen fast over the past year . Occasionally, Starmer has spoken up for “our beautiful, tolerant, diverse country”, and against those who “just want to stir the pot of division”, as he put it at Labour’s conference last year. But this strategy of intermittent challenge and more general appeasement has failed: Labour remains loathed by most socially conservative voters and has been abandoned by many liberals, while the backlash parties have radicalised further and the potential victims of their policies have grown more scared.