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date: 30 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines the evolution of the extreme and radical right in the United Kingdom, providing an overview of its historical, organizational, and electoral development. In contrast to the experience of several other Western democracies, the repeated failures of extreme and radical right parties in Britain led academics to point to “British exceptionalism,” or to portray this case as the “ugly duckling” in the wider family of Europe’s extreme right. However, between 2010 and 2016, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) scored a string of impressive successes, finishing ahead of the mainstream parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections, then winning nearly 13 percent of the popular vote in the 2015 general election. The final section considers the role of UKIP in the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership and what the future is likely to hold for the radical right in Britain.

Keywords: radical right, right-wing movements, UK Independence Party, EU membership, Brexit

Matthew J. Goodwin

Matthew J. Goodwin, University of Kent and Senior Visiting Fellow at Chatham House, is author of the books New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party (Routledge), Revolt on the Right: Explaining Public Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Routledge), UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw British Politics (Oxford University Press), and Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge University Press).

James Dennison

James Dennison is a Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Re-thinking Turnout: Explaining Within-Individual Variation in Electoral Participation” at the European University Institute. While writing his dissertation, he published articles on migration attitudes, electoral choice, political participation, the Italian constitutional referendum, the United Kingdom’s European Union referendum, and European politics. He has previously held positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Sheffield, where he taught quantitative methods. He is also the author of The Greens in British Politics: Protest, Anti-Austerity and the Divided Left.

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