YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Trilling

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-05-17
most recent: 2026-05-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And those failures at the national level of politics I've just been talking about are a symptom of there just not being enough beneath it to sustain people. And although it's not an easy route to something better, I just personally don't see any way out other than pushing to reinvigorate democracy.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are now struggling to kind of build an infrastructure that can actually embed that in the communities they seek to represent. And also reflect that up and down the party hierarchy. These things are just very difficult. But the reason why I in the book kind of stress the sort of, I suppose I'm quite voluntarist in that respect to saying, is this stuff you can do and think about where you live and so on is not just because that's an easy get out from these harder questions about structure and power, but also because I think Britain in particular and England in particular, one of the key problems is not just about economic inequality and geographical and regional sort of imbalances and so on, but it's that local democracy has been really thinned out.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Labour Party, you know, it's old news that the top of the Labour Party have long since been captured by that professionalized political class we've been talking about. You can see Corbyn as the Corbyn movement as an effort to redress the balance by targeting it itself at that level, those kind of top level political class. But I think the big weakness of Corbyn was the movement, you know, it had very shallow roots beyond that. And again, you're seeing a similar kind of thing with the Greens and Polanski for the moment. You know, they have found a way to skillfully play the political game using our current setup of media and technology and people's various frustrations about the country. But I mean, you know, has he even been the Green Party leader for a year yet? Maybe just over a year. They've had this huge influx of tens of thousands of members.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not enough. If you are trying to build a movement that mobilizes what you describe as the empirical community, then it actually has to mobilize and empower people and somehow reflect the collective desires that people have in a much more accurate way than a party-like reform tries to do. I think the reason why the left has been so bad at this recently, even though it's had flashes of success, is for two reasons. One is that I think it's always much harder to rebuild a project when one has been built over generations and then has decayed. So in Britain, you know, this, what we're talking about has been dominated for more than a century by the labour movement whose formal political representative is the Labour Party.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successive governments have failed to reproduce the kind of layer of conservative voters, i.e. affluent homeowners who are likely to hang on to what they have, but also because, you know, it goes back to that kind of old saying that the Church of England is the Conservative Party at prayer. Now, that's not just about values. That was once literally true that, you know, the bedrock of local conservative associations, the way that people socialize and got to know one another was partly through weekly church attendance. And as society has changed and become more individualist, those things have declined. Now, for the right to do without them is possible, I think, because you just need Farage and his gang or rather they, well, they, as they say it, they just need to get into power and make the kind of changes that they want and kind of that's where they want to leave it. For the left.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the left has a harder task, you know, for the right, it's about capturing the commanding heights of politics. On vibes alone, effectively. I mean, ironically, it hasn't always been like that. One of the reasons, you know, we talked a lot about kind of the decay of these older democratic cultures and the way that reform is kind of appealing to a sense that something has been lost. Actually, another big democratic culture that has been lost in the last 40 to 50 years is the conservative party as a membership organization. So there's a sociologist called Philberton Cartridge, who wrote a really good book a couple of years ago about the decline of the Conservative Party as a force in British politics. And he points out that, you know, it's not only because”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just like me, are perfectly capable of looking at the world and making your own conclusions. I'm telling you what I think is right and wrong in this situation. But from that point on, it's for you to take up and do what you want with. So that's my kind of defense of the approach I took in the book.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their due attention when we come to talk about particularly when we talk about the growth of kind of right wing populism, which plays on bits of these things, but I mean strategically excludes a lot of the rest. And so the reason why I wanted to leave that open and just address the reader directly, I suppose was because I wanted to avoid that feeling of being the missionary coming from the center and preaching to the people it's rather a kind of It's my sort of act of faith that people don't need to be told that there are people all around the country who have either spent like the last 10 years have been a pro has been a process of being told you're too elite and urban and woke to have an authentic opinion or you're too provincial and thick and old and whatever to have an opinion and actually”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Residual ideas that are left by precisely the thing that EP Thompson described being formed and being turned into a political project, the idea of kind of solidarity and standing with one another and that there is a working class in Britain and that in some articulations of that that it's diverse and diverse in its strength. And so all of these things that I'm talking about just seem to never really get.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite deep rooted ideas, some of which are to do with these very kind of longer historical ideas about liberty, about Englishness, about your rights as somebody who lives in the country. I would also say, and I've got to credit my wife here because she's just done her PhD on it, there is a long tradition of those rights being defined explicitly in opposition to the rights of migrants and outsiders. So if you want to look up Kathleen Cummins' work on this, feel free. But also it's a mix of things, I think. You know, there is that kind of residual set of ideas. There is also now.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where at most you get about half the voters within a constituency supporting what is seen as the stereotypical red wall set of values. So first of all, that tells you, well, there's another half of the community that think something different and aren't necessarily represented by the way that we in the London media, and I'm including myself here, tend to talk about them. The other reason is for exactly what you were talking about, that there are also these kind of deep-rooted democratic cultures and ideas among people across the country that I think have been really kind of neglected and dismissed in certainly in my lifetime, but that rely on, you know, they draw on various.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think something that has dominated the way politics is discussed, particularly in the kind of Westminster and London-based media, and also among those kind of more educated progressive cultures within the country is that it's a sort of missionary occupation where there's us who know the truth and we've got to go out to these benighted places around the country and convince people, well, in the most patronizing interpretations, and this does happen a lot, not to be so stupid, or even in the more kind of thoughtful and well-intentioned versions to kind of win people over to our side. And I think that's an incredibly reductive way of thinking about the country, which is partly bred by the kind of short-term crude framing that comes with doing electoral politics in a country with a first-past-the-post system. So, you know, the idea there being red wall areas of the country.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just very important, particularly for journalists to just show how that works so that people, anybody can understand what's going on when they see, for example, half an hour of GB News, as we were talking about earlier. The other reason as well is because...”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really good question. And I think you're right that in my book The People As you put it are not very present on the surface. That's partly because I thought the most pressing need at this moment because so much has changed at that top level of representational politics in such a short time was just to explain as clearly as possible what has gone on there how are these different bits fitting together But it's also actually because rather than kind of do an analysis of like who the people are, it's addressed to a general reader and in a way where the people are in that book is it's it's you reading it which at least that's that's my hope and I had a couple of reasons for doing that one is because as you say well all political entrepreneurs are clever with their techniques and they're used to the media and use the power and so on I think it”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reform as a governing project has got to deal with this. It's got to disappoint one of those groups at one time or another. And I think you've already seen that happening with the councils that it's had control of since the local elections in 2025, where it came in promising tax cuts and that it would unleash the sort of economic power of the council by slashing diversity initiatives. And then those same councils very quickly found that this was kind of wishful thinking and they had to essentially had to raise council tax, they had to make the cuts they were had promised not to make to vital social services and so on. And, you know, that's where this kind of mix of ideas that they've assembled really starts to fall apart, I think.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of England, which tend to be people who favour higher state spending on public services, more workers' rights. Essentially, those that are old enough to remember kind of miss British social democracy of the immediate post-war period. And another group of voters who are more likely to be in the southeast of England, who are wealthier, want fewer workers' rights, want a smaller state, less tax, essentially people who did very well out of Thatcherism and the neoliberal boom years and want to see more of that, where they both come together is that they essentially, you know, what they like about reform and kind of agree on is reform's proposal to turn the British immigration system into even more of a miniature authoritarian state than it is already.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The kind of basic elements of neoliberalism as what he's there to push forward. Liz trusses mini-budget in 2022. Farage described as the best conservative budget since the 1980s and then had to swiftly backtrack when it turned out it had some unintended effects. But at the same time, like other similar parties around the world, they are also mobilizing what I think is a kind of desire sort of one that's been quite debased for kind of more community, more solidarity and more of the things that neoliberalism said weren't necessary for society. And, you know, you can see that in a way that their two biggest groups of voters, at least according to a bit of polling done at the end of last year, are, I suppose, what we now come to see as that kind of stereotypical pro-Brexit vote in former industrial areas of the north and east.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that the current sort of received wisdom in that area of politics is that you do that by unleashing the energy of capitalism somehow. So like Javier Millet in Argentina posing on stage with a chainsaw when he was campaigning for election to indicate how he's going to slash away at the state and kind of revive Argentina's economic fortunes is a very good kind of symbol of that. But within that reformer kind of the kind of most extreme end of those free market capitalist policies, you know, if you look at Nigel Farage's background just as an individual, he is someone whose career as a financial trader was made by the Big Bang, the deregulation of the City of London in the mid-1980s, you know, which was a key element of Thatcherism, of the introduction of neoliberal ideology to British politics. He did very well out of that.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story is, you know, the old two party duopoly fragmenting into all these different pieces, one result of which is that it has engaged and energized people. I think people, you know, it's not always a nice feeling, but people feel that there's something at stake at the moment politically that hasn't been for quite a long time. So I think that's what is going on more broadly. I think then you get to the question of, okay, well, so what are the results of that theatre and that contestation? Stick with reform, I think what they're offering, you know, it's okay, I already explained why I think the kind of emotional drive is contradictory, but just ideologically as a party they”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That has grown up, yeah, certainly since the Second World War, but I think that really kind of embedded even more deeply into British culture from the 1980s onwards with the changes that Margaret Thatcher brought in. And the idea that politics is kind of a business done by those people and the rest of us aspectators, except for our allotted time in the ballot booth at elections. And that's breaking down as that political class becomes increasingly unable to offer solutions to problems around us and people get increasingly frustrated with that. I mean, a good indicator of that is just, you know, the recent local elections in the UK. When did you last hear people discussing local elections to that extent? It being such a huge topic, you know, a newsworthy topic. I think turnout went up in most places. And yes, reformer kind of one of the big stories of that election, but the overarching.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditional sort of town hall meeting there is an element of like, you know, you have to get up and perform in front of other people to get your views across. In the time we live in, that is mediated through various forms of technology and, you know, has been for several hundred years. So reform have managed to find a very effective way of doing that in our current moment. But I think also the reason that they have been successful in doing so is linked to the other part of what you just mentioned, which is this idea of a kind of professionalized governing class.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the theatre is really important. First of all, for the reasons we were just discussing because it's where those appeals to the emotions are made, but also because I mean, in a way, politics is theatre. You know, it's a form of collective activity where we have to come together and find ways to represent what we want as individuals or as groups to one another. So even if it's kind of very in your face politics, like, you know, it's kind of...”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right wing party. They're very firmly within that right wing populist wing of the far right that I was talking about before. Even among those parties Tonally, they're more moderate than the AFD in Germany, for instance, or even Donald Trump in the US. But you can see that same kind of oscillation back and forth between kind of moderation and radicalization. If you look at”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This kind of contradictory desire is exactly that, it's contradictory. And when you have politicians and movements who trade in that politically and make that their kind of, you know, their fundamental point of appeal to people, I think it can only really go one of two ways, which is either to kind of fall flat, as it often does, because eventually those politicians will disappoint their supporters because that promised revolution will never arrive. as also can happen as i and as i think you do see happening in different parts of the world at the moment it leads to kind of acceleration of what what those parties are offering are kind of increasing radicalization because one thing is never enough to satisfy that desire and so if we come back just briefly to reform uk who you know in terms of their kind of overall image and their their sort of top line rhetoric you know they're not they're not an”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Underlying quite conflicted emotional drive is there, absolutely. And it's for that reason primarily that I think this is dangerous because I think a desire for some kind of revolution that restores the status quo. And, you know, if you look at GB News, for example, which is a TV channel that airs right-wing populist themes constantly, they're always talking about revolutions and uprisings against the establishment, against the elite and so on. At the same time as they're airing lots of very traditionalist conservative views about gender, national identity, culture and so on and so on. So that contradiction is there. Watch kind of half an hour of GB News and you will see what I'm talking about in terms of the emotions. And the reason I think that's dangerous is because it's something that, you know, it's something that can never be fulfilled.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who, as well as talking about the specific features of fascist movements, talks about them operating on a set of mobilizing passions, as he describes it. And that idea of fascism resting on this very strong appeal to the emotions and appeal to negative emotions is a vein of thought that a lot of other people have worked with in as well. you know, those mobilizing passions, as Patston defines it, are things like an imminent sense of national threat, of humiliation, of a desire for kind of strong authoritative leadership. But I think crucially, this kind of conflicted desire for something radical and revolutionary that at the same time restores an older order, sets things back to how they were. And so that to me, although many of the features of 20th century fascism are not present in, say, a modern right-wing Populist movement.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you reach your decision about what's happening now. To me, that seems to be the wrong way around. And obviously, I come at this as a journalist. So what I'm primarily focused on is sort of what is happening right in front of us and what is new and specific about that. And I think where the comparison is useful for me at least is not so much in looking at kind of the concrete features of particular movements because I think those are always produced by their specific historical conditions. But the kind of emotional drives that seem to overlap. And so for me, that's where I think understanding the events of the 20th century are quite useful for understanding what's going on now. So I'm thinking here particularly about the historian Robert Paxton, who is one of the leading historians of fascism in the 20th century.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, just to talk first of all about that comparison with the 20th century, obviously this is something, again, that we all love to kind of argue about. And I mean, it's important to think about these things. And, you know, for the last decade at least, you know, with a big breakthroughs for right-wing populism in different parts of the world, that question of, well, to some people it reminds them of fascism of the 20th century and then what ensues is a kind of heated debate about, well, is this or isn't this like fascism? And I think that debate often gets stuck in a kind of form of sort of historical box ticking, you know, that the game is to try and tick off as many features that resemble a movement from a century ago or almost a century ago, you know, whether that was in Germany or Italy or elsewhere. And you have to get to as many boxes ticked off as possible.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leaders until he was kicked out at the elections recently, gutted the country's media, gutted the country's judiciary, and so on. And that, I think, is fundamental to that we're doing politics. And it's also why all of these groups belong under that umbrella term far right and should be seen as distinct from what we had been used to seeing in the mainstream of politics over recent decades. Okay, I mean,”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just rhetorically hostile to some of these things, but when they actually have power, they have sought to undermine them. And I think for me, the telling thing there is the idea of free speech. So free speech is a kind of rallying cry of right-wing populism around the world and actually the far right more broadly, even kind of the extreme bits of the far right will often invoke free speech to give their cause legitimacy. But where right-wing populists have had any power, I can't think of a single case in which speech has become more free as a result of what they've done. And in pretty much every case that I can think of, you can point to ways in which it has become less so. So again, Trump, very good example of that. He has tried to intimidate media organizations that publish content he dislikes. Victor Orban in Hungary, you know, one of the longest lasting far-right populist national.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essence of democracy, as Murda puts it. So they have a commitment to the electoral politics, for instance. Most of the time they are committed to abiding by the results of those elections, although not always, as we've seen with Donald Trump in the US. But they are nonetheless hostile to fundamental aspects of liberal democratic systems, which is the kind of system that we in the UK live under, where governments are chosen by voters, but there are various institutions that are supposed to act as checks and balances on the power of the executive to stop democracy becoming a kind of simple, crude tyranny of the majority. So those institutions would be things like independent courts or a free media that is free to scrutinize and criticize people in power. And wherever you see right-wing populists doing well in the world at the moment, the consistent thread, I think, is that they, you know, then...”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He uses far right as an umbrella term to cover this collection of right wing nationalist movements, all of which are more radical or more extreme than what we have come to think of as traditional mainstream center-right politics. But Muda divides the far right into two wings. So one of which is what he calls the extreme right. And those are groups that, as Muda says, are hostile to the essence of democracy. So fascism would sit with him that wing of the far right. You know, fascism essentially seeks to replace democracy with a form of dictatorship. The other wing is what Muda and quite a few other scholars call the radical right, but in everyday terms is kind of usually what we call right-wing populism. So these are the groups that have really got the momentum at the moment politically in not just Britain, but across many liberal democracies. And they accept that.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Britain and movements that sought to revive a version of mid 20th century fascism in their own time. But actually just at that point, I was writing about them. The BMP had started to do something different. They were pioneering a version of what we would now call right-wing populism. You know, they professed a commitment to democracy. They concealed their more extreme views and they engaged in electoral politics. And actually, that doesn't mean they moved away from being far-right completely. It's just that far right actually has always referred to a broader collection of ideas and movements and groups that sit outside the traditional center-right mainstream of politics. And I think for me, the most useful kind of taxonomy of that that I've come across comes from the Dutch political scientist Kasmuda, who is a world-leading expert on far-right politics.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How has the far right been made respectable? Yeah, so to start off with this term far right, that's something that I think gets used in unhelpful ways quite often. You know, it's kind of a vague and fuzzy term. People argue over its meaning quite a lot. And I think in some people's minds, it just automatically means fascist or violent extremist. And it certainly does mean those things in certain contexts. And there was a time, so I started working on this subject back in the late 2000s when that was kind of what sort of dominated the field. So when I started off as a journalist, I was reporting on the BNP, the British National Party, who were founded by neo-Nazis. They came from this tradition of post-war party.”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Classes, as it were, have either not reacted fast enough, been indifferent, or been actively complicit. Packing Subtitle The Far Right and Respectability. Could you tell us a bit about what you think has happened?”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But here today with us to talk about his new book If we tolerate this, how the British establishment made the far right respectable and obviously given recent events here in Britain, the local elections, nothing could be more topical than this subject right now. So, Daniel, a very warm welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm really looking forward to having a discussion with you on your book. Congratulations, by the way, a very, very timely book indeed, raising lots of important questions. So just to start off with, I mean, so what you're sort of saying in this book is that within the period of roughly last decade, 15 years or so, something like that, a new powerful and in your view quite dangerous, political forces sort of entered the arena, a new kind of ideology and the established sort of political”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello, welcome to Intelligence. Today by journalist Daniel Trilling. Including Britain's far right and lights in the distance exile and refuge at the borders of Europe. His work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Political Book”
2026-05-17 · Intelligence Squared · Has Far-Right Politics Entered The Mainstream in the UK? With Daniel Trilling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT