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It lacks the elegance of “greed is good”, but as a distillation of the spirit of the age, it’s right up there. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”
So that’s what they meant by “vibe shift”. Though, as the Epstein files reveal daily, the top 0.01% were hardly primly biting their tongues before Trump’s win, at least not in private. Those with telephone-number fortunes and great power felt able to speak, and write, to each other about women in language so vicious, so filled with hate – women discussed as body parts, as “less than human”, in Gordon Brown’s apt phrase – that they didn’t need the encouragement of a “grab ’em by the pussy” president to cast off their inhibitions.
Still, as that unnamed banker made clear to the FT, women are not the only group the powerful and privileged have been itching to disparage. This week it was migrants who were the target, accused by the billionaire Monaco resident Sir Jim Ratcliffe of having “colonised” Britain.
He may have got his stats wrong – he was in quite a muddle about the size of the UK population – but he did usefully debunk one stubbornly persistent assumption. For a while, it was taken as read that anti-immigrant sentiment was a function of economic anxiety: indeed, that was the instant explanation offered for Trump’s victory in 2016. But Ratcliffe, whose fortune is estimated at £17bn, won’t be feeling too much angst in the economic department. That is truer still of Elon Musk, who is simultaneously the backer of anti-immigration parties across Europe and the world’s richest man.
Indeed, the data shows no correlation at all between hostility to immigration and income. In January, Ipsos found that it was the most affluent fifth of voters in Britain who, more than any other group, named immigration as their most pressing concern.
The increasingly uninhibited musings of the super-rich are, alas, just one factor in a shift that is becoming ever more apparent. While of course we must say that Sir Jim’s comments did not specify the racial origins of immigrants, that’s inevitably how they were heard. We are, in the words of Sunder Katwala, who as the director of the British Future thinktank observes these trends more keenly than most, “going backwards on racism”.
The evidence is all around you. It’s there in the 116,000 hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales, but excluding London, for the year to March 2025 – up on the previous year, and a fifth of it involving violence.
It’s there in the “ugly”, 1970s-style racism directed at NHS staff, incidents of verbal and physical abuse based on skin colour so frequent that the health secretary, Wes Streeting, warned last November that it was becoming “socially acceptable to be racist”.
It’s there in a changed public discourse, where the bounds of acceptability have shifted to include notions that most thought had been left behind two generations ago. Suddenly there’s a debate, drawing in mainstream commentators, over whether Rishi Sunak is English. A former cabinet minister, Robert Jenrick, can lament not seeing “another white face” in a Birmingham neighbourhood. A former prime minister, Liz Truss, appears as a guest on an online show where she chats with Connor Tomlinson, who believes, among other things, that British citizens from ethnic minorities should not be allowed to become members of parliament. The Sun’s Harry Cole hosts that same far-right figure on his online show.
It’s there on social media, where it has become routine to hurl the P-word at politicians from the Tories’ Priti Patel to Labour’s Shabana Mahmood, from onetime Corbynite Zarah Sultana to Reform’s Zia Yusuf. And it’s there in the daily, lived experience of Britain’s minorities, measurable in both data and anecdote. Figures released this week, for example, showed yet another rise in antisemitic incidents, including a spike straight after October’s deadly attack on a synagogue in Heaton Park, Manchester, which left two dead on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar – more than half of that spike made up of incidents directly referring to, or celebrating, the killings at Heaton Park. Last autumn, Katwala wrote: “I personally get so much more racist abuse most weeks in 2025 than I ever did in 2005.”
Of course, there will be multiple and varied explanations for all this, but there are a few common threads. When it comes to the discourse, the shaping effect of online influencers is unmistakable. The likes of Tomlinson would once have been handing out badly stencilled leaflets in pub backrooms. Now he can reach millions, with TV production values previously the exclusive preserve of the major broadcasters. But the medium affects the message.
Put simply, the loudmouths of the far right are competing in an attention economy. Saying something shocking wins attention, but to keep it they have to say something more shocking still. There is a ratchet effect, which ensures the conversation becomes ever more extreme. Note the latest effusion from the white supremacist US influencer Nick Fuentes. Holocaust denial worked for him for a while, but his audience demands more. This week, he provided it by directing his fire at women, whom he castigated for encouraging sympathy for the poor and minorities. “The number one political enemy in America is women,” he told his audience on the Rumble platform. And so, “Every woman and girl is sent to the gulags. We will determine who the good ones are after the fact.” But first, to the gulags. “They go to the breeding gulags.”
These figures should be far beyond the fringe, but they keep getting amplified. Tucker Carlson hosted Fuentes on his show; Musk regularly promotes some of Britain’s most extreme voices, including Advance UK, a political party that now includes Tommy Robinson and that vows to ban indefinite leave to remain, ban the foreign-born from becoming British citizens and encourage all settled migrants to leave. Musk seems to think Advance is the real deal, preferable to the “weak sauce” of Nigel Farage. All the while, his X platform barely stirs as users racially abuse others, in the foulest language.
Throw in the brain-boiling effect of the pandemic period, when a small, extremely online minority became radicalised by conspiracy theories of every flavour, with anti-vax talk as the gateway drug, and you have some of the causes of this retrograde shift.
It’s important to hold on to the fact that most people do not think this way, that attitudes of tolerance are now deeply embedded in Britain: the data shows that too. Still, that led too many to become complacent, to assume that this was a problem of our past, one that we’d solved. But racism and prejudice are not like that. The battles against them have to be fought, and re-fought, in every generation. They are light sleepers – and some loud, powerful voices are determined to shake them awake.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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