The Gorton and Denton by-election gives a taste of the “vicious future that awaits England”, says Nick Cohen in The Spectator. To win the Muslim vote, Green leader Zack Polanski gave an interview to 5Pillars, an Islamist outfit that has been reprimanded by the press regulator for encouraging “hatred and abuse” toward Jewish and LGBT people. (Polanski is Jewish and gay, “but you don’t get the sectarian vote by opposing racism and homophobia”.) He also put out an ad in Urdu linking Labour with India’s Hindu PM Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, overtly stoking religious tensions – in Manchester no less, where Jews were murdered in October “just for being Jews”. And don’t look to Reform UK for help: Nigel Farage is pursuing a mirror-image of Green sectarian politics from the right – or, to be plain, the far right.

We are facing nothing less than the “collapse of our democratic norms,” says Jake Wallis Simons in The Daily Telegraph. Sectarianism is “poised to become the new lever of British politics”. For years there was talk of a “red-green alliance” between the hard left and Islamists. Those old fears now seem “pitifully naïve”. What did our elites expect after decades of importing whole communities from non-democratic cultures and “neglecting their assimilation”? Today, a not insignificant chunk of voters is so consumed with hatred of Israel that it is the dominant issue for them, even during a cost-of-living crisis. This foreign priority highlights the “ghettoisation of modern Britain” and suggests that communities increasingly “define themselves by their religious affiliation”. I fear we’re heading for a future of more bigotry, more fury, more extremism and less democracy. “Britain is fighting for its life and frankly, the odds aren’t good.”

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Looking back, says former Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland in The New York Times, 2025 will be remembered as the year of the “great capitulation”. It was the year liberal democracy lost its nerve as law firms, universities, media organisations, corporations and countries bent over backwards to appease an increasingly illiberal US government in an “unseemly and miscalculated” scramble to protect their interests. Suddenly, liberals everywhere began declaring that all the uplifting stuff about the arc of history was no more than “sentimental claptrap” and that “the age of monsters” had begun. This is nonsense. The only real danger to liberal democracy in 2025 was liberals themselves throwing in the towel with this highly contagious defeatism.

Donald Trump’s narrow victory over the hopeless Kamala Harris was not a “global shift toward the extreme right”. It was part of a worldwide bonfire of post-Covid incumbents who were blamed for inflation. Some places – Germany, Poland, Argentina – followed the US in replacing a left-wing government with a right-wing one. Just as many others – Britain, South Korea, Lithuania – went the other way. In other words, the elections of 2024 and 2025 weren’t a “tectonic social and cultural shift” or a repudiation of the Enlightenment. “They were a complaint about the cost of ground beef.” There were plenty of cases in which the populist right was explicitly rejected by voters. New York and Seattle elected socialist mayors; in India, Narendra Modi’s nationalist party lost its parliamentary majority; in Canada and Australia, strongly Trump-aligned candidates were mullered at the ballot box. Traditional conservatives – “perhaps the most bereft political tribe” at present – have a golden opportunity to reject the bizarre fantasies of the extreme right and the wet fatalism of the left and lead the great 2026 renaissance.

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t know fire is hot.”
George Orwell

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