Georgios Samaras is an assistant professor of public policy at the School for Government, King’s College London.

I’ve spent more than a year examining the media’s habit of using substitute labels instead of calling the far right what it is — and this practice is now everywhere.

Newsrooms cycle through a growing list of alternative descriptors, usually in search of language that feels safer or less likely to trigger backlash: hard right, alt-right, new right, religious right, national conservative, traditionalist… The list keeps growing.

This would matter less if any of these terms added clarity, but most do not. They’re vague, they aren’t grounded in political science research, and they blur ideology rather than naming it, only to leave readers with softer language that hides what these actors truly stand for. And there are grave consequences to this mainstreaming.

Of course, none of this is new. Scholars of far-right mainstreaming, such as Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon, have shown how buzzwords — especially “populism” — helped produce this kind of journalistic ambiguity. The far right understood this dynamic long ago and has been exploiting it with discipline. Many of these actors now routinely deem being described as “far right” as defamation, treating accurate political description as if it were a form of vilification.

Instead, these parties— from Reform UK and France’s National Rally to Brothers of Italy and Alternative for Germany — are selling a self-proclaimed conservative vision that is wrapped in the language of common sense. Paired with promises of order and national renewal, this is the standard trick for presenting racist politics as natural, and smuggling some of the darkest ideas of the 1930s back into public life under the cover of murky policy language.

Let’s take, for example, the concept of “remigration.” In political science, remigration refers to the forced removal of minorities, especially those of African and South Asian descent, through coercion, exclusion and mass displacement — it’s ethnic cleansing dressed up in bureaucratic language. But today this term is appearing across Western media with far too little scrutiny, often treated as just another hardline immigration policy in the far-right playbook.

We can observe the same pattern being applied to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which which purports that political and cultural elites are deliberately engineering demographic change by encouraging immigration and higher birth rates among non-white, non-Christian populations to displace white Christian Europeans. Claims that whole cities are being “lost” to Islam, “no-go zones” and “two-tier policing” myths; distortions around grooming scandals; and blatant lies about crime statistics are turning the conversation around migration into a permanent moral panic.

While the effects of this are visible all across Europe, Britain’s Reform UK presents one of the clearest cases — not least because the party has been at the front of the line when it comes to legal threats and public pressure against media outlets for using established terms to describe its ideology.

Alas, much of the media has also handed Reform UK an absurd amount of airtime. This party, with just eight members of parliament, is routinely given a platform to push extreme ideas with a free pass, while its figures pose as a government-in-waiting more than three years ahead of the U.K.’s next general election.

This is exactly how someone like Reform UK policy head Zia Yusuf has become such a central figure. Not even an MP, Yusuf has been laying out his far-right vision in plain sight, getting it amplified nonstop. He has threatened mass deportations on a staggering scale — floating figures approaching 300,000 people a day — called for an end to “Indefinite Leave to Remain” when it comes to Brexit, and proposed an enforcement agency akin to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry it out. He has also boasted that Reform UK wouldn’t just leave the European Convention of Human Rights, but “derogate from every international agreement” standing in the way of its deportation agenda.

But while these slogans play well on X and rack up thousands of likes, the second a journalist pushes back and calls this ideology what it is, the whole act falls apart — as when BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire pressed Yusuf to name even one protected characteristic his party wanted to remove from the Equality Act, and he couldn’t name a single one.

This interview showed exactly how little substance sits behind the political performance — and the vital importance of proper scrutiny. The problem is that moments like this are growing increasingly rare.

The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

But this isn’t a one-off example. These aren’t isolated editorial lapses. They reflect a political climate that rewards euphemism and intimidation. And that ecosystem now has a global engine it would be naïve not to name — U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last year I wrote in POLITICO that Trump wants to poison global political culture. What we’ve seen since is an effort to export a style that thrives on bullying journalists and steadily lowering standards, including those of political language.

It’s a lesson that travels fast. His European counterparts are catching up. They now understand that these practices can pressure media organizations into softening their language and normalizing their presence. And with far-right parties topping the polls across so much of Europe, we’ve already passed the mainstreaming stage.

Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.

None of the prime minister’s critics engages with the hard strategic dilemmas arising from Britain’s perilous dependency on US power

It is not easy being a friend of Donald Trump, but it is a lot less dangerous than being his enemy. There isn’t a huge range of options in between. War in the Middle East is exposing how limited the choices are for a British prime minister.

The US president doesn’t see alliances as long-term relationships based on mutual advantage, but as rolling transactions on a mafia model. The boss offers protection in exchange for tribute and loyalty.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, ahead of the May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour is under from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the party. Book tickets here

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” said Charlie Munger. In politics, we can reverse this. We’ve seen the outcome, so what are the incentives?

The outcome, we know, is bad. Recent Prime Ministers have seen near-record levels of unpopularity. And no wonder, because they have failed even on their own terms: Cameron wanted to keep us in the EU but failed; May wanted a Brexit deal but failed; Johnson wanted to remain PM but failed; Truss wanted a tax-cutting Budget but failed; and Sunak wanted to save the Tory party but failed.

Bad outcomes suggest bad incentives. And these are bad for almost all actors in politics.

Let’s start with voters. These have no incentive to learn about politics because of the well=known problem of collective action. For any individual the cost of learning - time that could be spent on other things - is high whilst the benefits of doing so are negligible: the chances that your vote will be decisive are minuscule. This makes voting very different from other areas of life. If I under-estimate the dangers of smoking or the benefits of healthy eating I can ruin my life. But if I misunderstand social facts and so vote the wrong way, I as an individual do not suffer because my vote wasn’t decisive.

The outcome is what you’d expect from this incentive: very many voters are woefully ill-informed, as Ipsos’ polling has shown for years.

Over 20% of them think that either overseas aid, asylum seekers or MPs expenses are among the three things that government spends most on, when in fact these are tiny shares of spending. Only one in six voters were within an order of magnitude of estimating the overall size of public spending. And the median voter overestimates how much is spent on debt interest and under-estimates how much on pensions.

It wouldn’t matter so much if individuals’ errors cancel out. But they don’t. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum Ipsos found that:

We massively overestimate how many EU-born people now live in the UK...we overestimate how much we pay compared with other countries...we massively overestimate the proportion of Child Benefit awards given to families in other European countries...we massively overestimate how much of the EU’s budget is spent on administration.

These systematic errors act as a form of pollution - they impose costs onto others. As Bryan Caplan has written:

If one person pollutes the air, we barely notice; but if millions of people pollute the air, life can be very unpleasant indeed. Similarly, if one person holds irrational views about immigration, we barely notice; but if millions of people share these irrational views, socially harmful policies prevail by popular demand.

Bad incentives don’t just produce ignorant voters but also irrational ones. Jason Brennan writes:

Voters are not merely ignorant or misinformed but also epistemically irrational. The field of political psychology finds that most voters suffer deeply from a wide range of cognitive biases...These biases include motivated reasoning, intergroup bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, among others. In general, voters tend to form political beliefs on the basis of little to no evidence, and then stick to those political beliefs no matter what new evidence they encounter. (When All Else Fails, p165)

I stress here that the problem isn’t that people are simply stupid: countless people who are irrational or ignorant at the polling station are quite clever in other contexts. The problem is that they are incentivized to be stupid. They re rationally ignorant and rationally irrational because the costs to any individual of correcting their errors exceed the benefits.

Nor, of course, does the media have any incentive to help voters correct their errors. Quite the opposite. For newspapers, the incentive is that for any declining industry - to hold onto existing customers. And these are increasingly disproportionately older right-wing people who can afford to live in a bubble of illusion. The upshot is that the papers pander to their prejudices rather than try to correct them. Hence columnists like Allister Heath or Daniel Hannen staying in work despite being consistently demonstrably provably wrong.

Nor is the BBC a counterweight to these, because its incentives are to pander to the right in an attempt to keep it quiet. Lewis Goodall says of it:

The tendency to move right is always stronger than left, because there is terror of the right in a way the BBC does not possess of liberalism or the left.

And so the right sets the BBC’s agenda. It spends more time reporting on migrants arriving in small boats than it does on, say, the wage stagnation of the last 20 years; echoes Tory party tropes; and has for years given Reform and Tufton Street junktanks more airtime than their parliamentary presence or intellectual heft warrants.

Not just that. It fails to provide factual corrections to Reform’s wrong statements about immigration, with the result that impartiality becomes indifference between truth and lies.

What’s more, says Tom Mills the BBC - being incentivized to not antagonize powerful people - “overwhelmingly defers to official politics, taking its cue from Westminster and the broader world of elite policy making, and to a lesser extent business representatives.” That leads to a bias against emergence, and hence against an understanding of society and the economy.

Nor do politicians have incentives to be good at governing. Osborne and Clegg have earned far more since leaving politics than they did in government. The financial incentives, therefore, are not for politicians to govern well: these two men did much to ruin the economy and public services. They are instead for ministers to promote, or at least not threaten, the interests of financiers and techbros.

Osborne and Clegg’s successors are behaving as if they’ve learned this lesson. In chasing non-existent Labour-Reform switchers to the neglect of its actual voters, the Labour right is behaving as if its incentives are not to win the next election but to get cushy jobs outside politics after it.

The MoD’s and NHS’s contracts with Palantir and the NHS’s “digital transformation” programme might well be motivated more by ministers’ wanting corporate handouts and tech jobs after leaving government than by a genuine concern to raise public sector efficiency: Streeting’s majority in Ilford North is a mere 528, so it’s only natural that he should think about his career prospects for his late 40s.

You might object that such contracting out will improve the public services. I’ve no strong view on this: transactions cost economics is all about detail and context. Even if this is true, though, there’s another problem of bad incentives: that good policy is sometimes worse for politicians than bad policy, even in narrow electoral terms.

Farage is an example of this. He remains one of our most influential politicians even though the principal policy he advocated for years has been a proven failure.

Those Brexiters who claimed that Brexit would allow us to better control immigration have also been proven wrong: net immigration rose sharply after leaving the EU. But this actually worked in their favour. It helped keep the immigration issue high on the media agenda, thereby serving right-wing purposes.

Failure works.

The converse is also true: success fails.

Of course, the evidence base for this is small given the paucity of sucessful policies in recent years. But one striking example is that the 1997-2010 Labour government greatly reduced pensioner poverty; the number on incomes less than 60% of the median after housing costs, for example, dropped by a million. Did this success turn pensioners into Labour voters? No, quite the opposite. They now feel no need to vote for parties that will protect the poor.

What’s going on here is partly what happens in any industry. Doing a good job is merely a basis for negotiating a possible reward, not a guarantee of getting one.

Also, these are examples of Gilles Saint-Paul’s theory of political entrenchment. Parties that successfully remove the problems of their client group, he says, also remove the reason for that group to vote for them. And so they have an incentive to not solve the problem. He gives the example of leftist parties failing to greatly raise the incomes of the poor, but I suspect the point broadens.

To see more bad incentives, consider why HS2 proved so expensive. The FT reports that, unlike in Japan where such projects are managed by a public body with technical skills, in the UK they were overseen by “government officials without technical expertise” and that contracts were awarded on a cost-plus basis, giving contractors little incentive to hold down costs.

One problem here is that civil servants are under-incentivized. “Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” Sir Keir Starmer has said. Civil servants don’t suffer much if public projects go way over budget or gain much if they don’t. (One reason we don’t have such high-powered incentives is that if we did the idiot press would scream about “fat cat mandarins” every time something in government went well.)

Another problem is that, despite the slump in newspaper circulation, politicians still feel incentivized to chase good headlines, prioritizing short-term attention over longer-term concrete achievements. In his excellent Failed State, Sam Freedman writes:

Nothing came up more regularly in the interviews for this book than the impossibility of making good policy in a world where media management is the over-riding priority of government (p231.)

He gives the example of penal policy: tougher sentences is a good headline, but building prisons is a long-term slog that gets neglected. The same applies to infrastructure spending. New hospitals or railway lines are headlines, but getting them built on time and budget is a hard grind, and nobody is incentivized to undertake it.

There is an objection to all this. Incentives aren’t everything. People have intrinsic motives too. Politicians’ talk of public service is not always mindless cant. This isn’t a guarantee of sensible or even humane policy: more people have been killed by men who loved their country than by those who wanted to make a few bob. But it is a counterweight to economists’ conceit that incentives are everything.

But is it a strong enough counterweight?

No, and politicians themselves think not. If we could rely 100% on public spiritedness we would not need laws. But politicians make them, and rightly so because not everyone is public-spirited and in a good society incentives reinforce our better natures.

Our problem is that, in politics, incentives do not do this - in fact, quite the opposite.

Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon

Over the past year, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed bans on social media use for vast swathes of their public. These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.

Last year, Australia became the first country to ban anyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. The move emboldened other countries around the world to quickly follow suit. Germany’s ruling party announced it was backing a social media ban. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, called for a ban on social media for under-15s. In the UK, Keir Starmer has sought to enact sweeping social media bans. Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have also pursued similar online identity verification laws.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

BRUSSELS — Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said Monday.

The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.

As companies including OpenAI, Roblox and Discord implement age checks in anticipation of being obliged to, the signatories said it is “dangerous and socially unacceptable to introduce a large-scale access control mechanism without a clear understanding of the implications” for security, privacy and people’s freedom and autonomy.

They are calling instead for a global pause “until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility.” The signatories include Ronald Rivest, winner of the prestigious Turing Award in computing, and Bart Preneel, president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

France is planning to ban kids under 15 from social media as soon as September, while Germany, Denmark and Spain are also accelerating efforts. Australia became the first country in the world to introduce a ban in December 2025. Many leaders have expressed support on the basis it would protect children’s physical and mental health, but countries have yet to decide how bans would be implemented or enforced.

“We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children,” the academics write. But current plans “would require all users — minors and adults — to prove their age to converse with friends and family, read news, or search for information; well beyond what has ever happened in our offline lives.”

A robust age verification system would require checking “government-issued IDs with strong cryptographic protection for every single interaction with the service,” the academics write. Such infrastructure is not only hard to build and maintain on a global scale, but would add friction in services, meaning many providers would refuse to install age checks.

Using technologies like cryptography to solve the problem risks centralizing tools in the hands of the few companies that can deploy them at scale, the experts warn.

They also warn of the risks that governments would ban virtual private networks to stop people from getting around age bans. VPNs are frequently used by people looking to protect their identities from authoritarian regimes.

In Gorton and Denton, I heard again and again that people wanted seismic political change – Labour and the Tories are no longer part of that conversation

In the wake of Labour’s third-place showing at last Thursday’s Gorton and Denton byelection, Keir Starmer could have responded with a mixture of magnanimity, grit, and a clear appreciation of what had just happened.

He might have congratulated the Green party’s new MP Hannah Spencer, and insisted that the themes of inequality and everyday struggle she had so loudly emphasised throughout the campaign were at the top of his government’s priorities. He could also have combined that message with a show of determination to learn from the defeat and win back the voters his party lost, and an acknowledgment that Labour’s recent calamities and internal bickering had sent those people completely the wrong signals.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist