This text sits in dialogue with Common Cause’s work on strengthening intrinsic values such as care, solidarity, and justice. Efforts to foreground these values unfold within particular social and economic conditions that influence how people encounter one another. In environments marked by distance, distrust, and political abandonment, how might our approach to values require different practices? This piece reflects on how the erosion of shared space shapes the ways we interpret and judge one another.
Read with care: content includes mentions of police and state violence, anti-migrant and racial violence, and anti-trans discourse.
The system makes people.
If you make a cruel system,
you will have cruel people.
– Benjamin Zephaniah
Wave after wave of far-right populism. Our history is saturated with them, each shaped by the crises of its moment. Public discourse tends to fixate on the supply side: security, the establishment, and megalomaniacs and their appetite for power. Viewed at that scale, politics becomes abstract – its systems and zeitgeists unfolding somewhere above everyday life.
The demand side is different – speak into it and someone may speak right back – with all the messy, consequential reverberations we wish to avoid. Real people. Real differences. Real disagreement – in this climate, a terrifying prospect.
As third spaces vanish – community centres, informal clubs, DIY venues, union halls – public life retreats further into digital environments, alongside everything else priced out of the real world. What disappears with them is shared infrastructure: ritual repetition, embodied proximity, informal negotiation, and collective rhythm. These are the conditions in which people learn how to navigate differences without crumbling.
Discourse in the virtual sphere is driven by outrage and spectacle, while oppositional avatars are engineered by oligarchs into something monstrous. Lived realities sit just outside the frame, obscured and deprived of life-giving sustenance. When embodied familiarity declines, imagined versions of one another fill the space.
Abandoned shopping centre, Eastford Square, Collyhurst, Manchester, 2022.
Neoliberal restructuring fractured the shared histories and solidarities that once anchored working-class life. As economic and political systems shifted, identity became reorganised around individual mobility and personal achievement, loosening the collective memory of struggle. Moving across socio-economic worlds brings access and distance in equal measure: it opens doors while quietly separating people from the places, relationships, and contexts that formed them.
What follows is not a single rupture but a slow unmooring from belonging. As collective identities drain, social position is reorganised through competition and status, where worth is unevenly distributed and measured through extrinsic markers of success. In this context, the rise of the far right is rarely experienced as abstract ideology or policy. It emerges instead through regular encounters – in the search for recognition, dignity, and authority over one’s life.
Across the UK and Europe, research links support for far-right movements to cultural displacement and the erosion of local institutions. As familiar structures collapse and welfare systems turn punitive, stability and orientation weaken. Decades of welfare stereotypes and ‘poverty porn’ have normalised contempt for certain communities. Street interviews frame people as foolish and teach audiences who to mock. Bureaucratic humiliation reinforces these attitudes: jobcentre interrogations, inaccessible forms, automated sanctions, institutional suspicion. Political commentary dismisses communities as ‘low-information voters‘, presenting class prejudice as neutral analysis.
144th Durham Miners Gala, 2024
Authoritarian narratives offer coherence by translating diffuse insecurity into visible targets: Anxiety over spiralling rents and displacement are redirected toward ‘asylum hotels’ while economic strain condense into hierarchies of belonging. Debates over pronouns absorb the pace of cultural change, and conflicts about noise in public expand into symbolic struggles over male dominance, power and status.
As more interactions move through screens, the expectation of humiliation also accumulates. We meet stripped of context and propelled by systems calibrated for reaction. Under these conditions, interpretive shortcuts harden quickly: complex pressures collapse into simple explanations, and the ache of misrecognition settles into narratives that feel suddenly clarifying. The psychological appeal lies in the experience of a false epiphany: the intoxicating relief of perceived clarity.
None of this reduces the reality of harm. Migrants live with detention and abuse. Racialised communities endure surveillance and presumed guilt. Queer and trans people face organised campaigns against their existence. Much of this cruelty is enacted not by distant actors but by ordinary people who understand themselves as justified.
People cling to their hates so stubbornly because they sense,
once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain
– The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
At a counter-demonstration against an anti-migrant march, I once heard a speaker shout toward the far-right crowd: You have no culture. You have nothing. The crowd roared and I recoiled. The need to oppose racism was unquestionable, yet the language carried the same grammar of humiliation that had already saturated public life – dignity asserted through the removal of someone else’s.
This moment reveals a deeper problem for the contemporary left. When political conflict is organised primarily through moral denunciation, the terrain of struggle diminishes itself to status and legitimacy rather than shared material conditions. Opposition becomes a contest over who deserves recognition rather than a collective attempt to transform the structures that distribute dignity so unevenly.
LGSM and Welsh miners at London Pride 2015.
As the late Mark Fisher observed, under late capitalism the forms of life that once allowed people to process frustration together have steadily eroded. When institutions capable of absorbing conflict weaken, shame no longer has anywhere to go. It does not dissipate; it accumulates.
In earlier eras discipline was organised through visible authorities – schools, workplaces, the state. Today it operates more diffusely. The competitive logics of the market, amplified through networked communication, distribute surveillance across social life itself. We encounter one another under the assumption of potential judgement, each person both observer and observed.
Without shared practices for metabolising disagreement, conflict increasingly collapses into exposure and punishment. Political speech becomes both therapeutic and disciplinary – identifying the guilty, demanding confession, drawing moral boundaries. The aim shifts from persuasion to disqualification.
Humiliation emerges as a common political currency because it offers quick resolution: someone is identified as the problem, the crowd experiences a momentary restoration of moral order, and the deeper sources of frustration remain untouched. Digital environments intensify the pattern. Encounters unfold between strangers who lack durable relationships with one another, while attention economies reward the sharpest and most cutting responses.
The skills required to hold disagreement without escalation – patience, humour, curiosity, the slow work of recognition – weaken when they are rarely practised. In that vacuum, authoritarian movements are free to gather and use classed, racialised, gendered, cultural, and regional wounds that promise clarity and restoration.
Common Cause’s research on the ‘values perception gap’ shows how frequently people misjudge what others care about. Many assume their neighbours are more motivated by self-interest than they are, even when intrinsic values such as fairness and community remain widely shared. In environments structured by outrage and competition, these misperceptions deepen. We anticipate being misread and begin to misread in return.
The gap widens as the conditions for recognising one another narrow.
Grenfell United, 7th anniversary, silent walk, June 6th,2024.
At the same time, the threat of the far right is real and immediate. Yet many of our political encounters now take place at a distance, far removed from the reality of living, breathing bodies – people with histories, vulnerabilities, and contradictions that cannot be reduced to a position in an argument. Without the ordinary contexts that once helped us interpret one another, encounters arrive stripped of the cues that sustain recognition. Distance shields us from the possibility of harm while quietly magnifying our fear of it.
For those committed to strengthening intrinsic values, this raises a structural question. Care, solidarity, and justice remain widely held commitments across communities. Yet how those values are expressed – and how they are perceived – depends on the conditions in which people encounter one another. Where dignity begins to resemble a hoarded asset rather than a shared condition, and status feels unstable, even shared values can be channelled into defence, suspicion, and exclusion.
The perception gap cannot be addressed simply by presenting evidence of its existence. In environments saturated with information, data travels faster than it can be emotionally processed, and what matters increasingly is not whether something is true but how it makes people feel. Attention must therefore turn to the relational and material infrastructures that allow recognition to occur. Third spaces – the ordinary settings where people meet through shared activity and repetition – help cultivate the competencies that sustain disagreement without dehumanisation.
Anti-racist skin heads – 1970s Derek Ridgers
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
– The danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If humiliation and misrecognition sustain authoritarian appeal, responses that rely primarily on humiliation and moral repudiation risk reinforcing the same emotional economy. Protection against harm remains necessary. Accountability remains necessary. But the wider task involves rebuilding the conditions in which intrinsic values become visible to one another again.
Somewhere along the way, the promise of wider worlds slipped from our hands. We have been trained to expect less – less time, less consideration, less support – until even our relationships begin to mirror the logic of the market: metric-driven, compressed, curated, optimised. The real loss may not be what the internet became, but what it taught us to stop expecting from each other – and how we’ve become accustomed to the growing distance between us.
Rebuilding shared civic space and widening the conditions for encounter is part of the democratic work ahead. The question is not only what values people hold, but how we create the conditions in which those values can become visible to one another again.
Header image: Focus E15 Mothers’ housing campaign, Carpenters Estate, Stratford. 2014