Net Zero: Unacceptable. Neo-Nazis: Let’s Talk.

Welcome to the completely normal world of British right-wing politics, where ideological purity matters enormously - unless the ideology in question is fucking Nazism.

Content Warning: I swear in this piece. A fair bit. Considering the subject matter and sheer mind-fuckery that’s ongoing in the right of our political ecosystem though, I feel I am justified.

---

I would love to start this week’s post off with a question - and I hope to god that the answer is as obvious to everyone else as it is to me. The question is:

When considering a candidate to stand for public office, be that as a councillor or MP, what, in your view, would be the bigger disqualifying factor:

1. The candidate believes in Net-Zero and is opposed to the United Kingdom leaving the ECHR.

2. The candidate is an actual Neo-Nazi.

This, in my mind, should be an exceptionally easy question to answer, right?

It’s the Neo-Nazi bit. It’s always the Neo-Nazi bit that should instantly disqualify anyone from holding any sort of power.

I should not even need to explain this, but anyone who gets their inspiration from an Austrian dictator that led to the deaths of millions upon millions of people is probably not someone who you want in your political party.

Such is the state of politics in the UK though that this is exactly what we’re dealing with - or rather what Kemi Badenoch is pugnaciously dealing with, while trying to convince the public at large that she is the official leader of the opposition and not, in fact, the most online person ever who accidentally found themselves in public office.

What in the world would be going through your mind to not only refuse to boot a candidate for being, again, an actual Neo-Nazi, and then, once he stood down himself, offer him an advisory role, but to do so on the back of announcing what is basically a cull of all sense and reason, i.e. believing in Net-Zero within your political party?

The cognitive dissonance in holding those two positions should be so severe that it should be bending space-time into bits and pieces.

But this is what the right of UK politics looks like at the moment - a mass of contradictions that all fall flat the moment a sane person looks at it. It’s a raft of policies, movements and pronouncements that seem less focused on actually communicating what plans are, and more to see who can out-batshit each other.

Because Kemi Badenoch is not alone in this - the whole of the right over the past week seems to have lost their collected senses in a way that has outstripped anything we’ve seen before.

It kicked off last week with Rupert Lowe doing an interminably long video addressed to Nigel Farage and Reform asking for an alliance. Very publicly. Suspiciously publicly.

For those not aware, Lowe is a politician best known for mostly existing on Twitter, being best buddies with Elon Musk and occasionally getting confused and calling the police on a bunch of charity rowers because he was convinced that Great Yarmouth was moments away from being invaded by gangs of marauding migrants.

In the video in question, he appealed to Farage’s sense of loyalty to the country, putting his case forward that Reform and Restore should start working together to “unite the right.” Not lead the country, or make meaningful political change - no, no. His intent is to bring all the disparate and increasingly unhinged right-wing actors together into a coalition.

There were, of course, some demands from Lowe’s side, boiling down to five policy points:

• Mass deportation of illegal migrants “including women and children”.

• Tougher rules on legal migration, a ban on halal and kosher slaughter, the burqa, cousin marriage and sharia courts.

• A referendum on the death penalty.

• Welfare cuts to fund “self-sufficiency”.

• The exclusion of former Tory ministers from any future cabinet.

Now, on the last point, I can see some sense - who really wants Cruella Braverman and Robert “Generic” Jenrick anywhere close to power when you consider the panoply of fuck ups that followed those two around while they were in the actual government of the day.

But the previous four? Red meat. Delicious, tasty, juicy red meat, thrown towards both Lowe and Farage’s bases. You can already imagine someone sitting on the fringes of the far-right enthusiastically nodding along to the idea of what largely boils down to brown people being disenfranchised, discriminated against and in general, being painted as the sole reason their life has not worked out the way they wanted.

It was, of course, not a serious proposition - this was all no more than another stage show put on by Lowe, with the intent of putting some more pressure on Farage, and further inflaming tensions not even just generally, but within the right itself. It’s something we’re seeing again and again in politics nowadays - performance. Pantomime really.

Whether it’s Robert Jenrick running through tube stations and pointing at people who are jumping turnstiles, to the weekly Reform UK press conferences that have dominated our screens for the better part of a year and a half¹, to Kemi Badenoch taking every opportunity available to push the Conservative Party so far right that even Enoch Powell would be a bit taken aback.

There is a sense I’m getting that all of their brains have been completely rotted by online culture - that instead of the Woke Mind Virus that we’ve been told we all have for daring to believe in progressive policies, human rights and largely not being a colossal dickhead to anyone who is not a millionaire, they’ve had their cognitive function replaced with what looks suspiciously like the actual Twitter algorithm.

From Richard Tice this week having a full-on barney with the actual Archbishop of Canterbury about the slave trade, to Zia Yusuf taking the first available flight out to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta to attend a crisis that was at that point largely resolved, every action they take seems to be motivated more by driving algorithmic engagement than actual policy that would potentially benefit any single one of their voters or constituents.

Richard Tice MP 🇬🇧@TiceRichard

Did you thank Jesus for giving great courage and vision to the British for abolishing the slave trade, spending vast amounts of money and sacrificing brave Royal Naval sailors in the process? As a Christian, you don’t speak for me, nor millions of other Christians in the UK

Archbishop of Canterbury @ArchbishopSarah

Today I visited Cape Coast Castle. Seeing the horrific conditions that thousands of people were kept in, it is impossible not to feel the weight of the immense evil that drove the transatlantic slave trade. I pray not only in lament for the Church’s involvement in the slave

5:55 PM · Aug 1, 2026 · 300K Views

---

1.1K Replies · 1.25K Reposts · 6.66K Likes

Which brings me back to Kemi Badenoch, staring down the political equivalent of a multiple-choice question where one answer is “believes Britain should reduce carbon emissions” and the other is “fucking Neo-Nazi”, and somehow deciding that the former requires the stronger response.

Because the moment politics becomes entirely about feeding the machine, guess what? Consistency doesn’t matter. Principle doesn’t matter. Sometimes even basic fucking sanity doesn’t apparently matter.

The only thing that matters anymore to these people is producing the next clip, the next outrage, the next thing that will make several thousand people with Union Jacks in their usernames hammer the retweet button before moving on to whatever they’re furious about fifteen minutes later.

That is probably the most depressing thing about the current state of the British right.

When you take away all the press conferences, stunts, trips to Ceuta, Tube station cosplay, the hissy fits at the Archbishop of Canterbury and interminable videos about uniting the right you realise that there is remarkably little underneath it all. It is completely and utterly void, hollow, empty.

We are watching politicians, leaders, increasingly behave like content creators who happen to have parliamentary passes - they are permanently online, permanently performing, permanently searching for an enemy, a crisis or preferably a minority group that can be squeezed into a vertical video with some enormous fucking subtitles and BIG SCARY NUMBERS.

Actual governance has become secondary, real policy is now completely optional - because above all, the prime directive that these people live by is that the algorithm must be fed.

This brings me back to the question I started with - the one failed so spectacularly by Badenoch.

If your political movement has reached the point where believing in Net-Zero is grounds for expulsion but being an actual Neo-Nazi requires a little more careful consideration, perhaps the problem isn’t that you haven’t moved far enough to the right.

Perhaps you’ve spent so long chasing the people screaming loudest on the internet that you’ve completely lost sight of where the fucking road is.

1. Though these have become largely rare these days since journalists started asking actual questions around a certain £5m bung and a very dodgy character within the ranks of Reform itself, but I digress…