This is an edited version of an article that appeared in The Yorkshire Post on 13 January 2026 in which Matt Bromley argues that there’s a right-wing bias shaping Britain…
We like to pretend Britain is a country of straight-talking common sense. But for years we’ve been fed a fairy tale: that the real enemies of working people are not the wealthy elite, nor the corporations extracting profit from public life, but the poor immigrant family living next door or the single mother struggling on benefits.
It’s a fiction peddled by those with most to lose from scrutiny. Take our Nigel. Portrayed as an ordinary bloke down the pub, Farage is no everyman. Neither are the millionaires who’ve funded his crusades. Hedge fund donors, offshore investors, media magnates — these are not the underdogs of the story; they are its authors. They are the ones with most to gain if working people blame someone — anyone — other than the rich and powerful for low wages, high rents, crumbling public services.
This is true not only of elected figures but of the agitators who orbit them. Consider Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox — self-styled truth-tellers standing for the disaffected, railing against migrants, Muslims, feminists, trans people… anyone who can be framed as a threat to the ‘real’ Britain they claim to defend. Their narratives are simple because life is complex; they offer villains – such as the asylum seeker in the hotel down the road – instead of solutions. It’s emotional hocus pocus — punching down instead of up.
And this sleight-of-hand is as old as the hills: create a bogeyman – woke students, Brussels bureaucrats, the BBC – so people look the other way, any way, so long as they don’t look behind the curtain.
The truth is far more mundane. Immigrants, on balance, contribute more to the public purse than they take out. They staff our hospitals, our farms, our tech firms. The NHS, social care, and hospitality would grind to a halt without them. Compare that to the billions lost annually through tax avoidance by multinational corporations and the ultra-wealthy.
Part of the problem lies with the press. We have a media ecosystem where most national newspapers lean right, where headlines are written to stir anger rather than tell truths. And now Murdoch’s Fox is in the henhouse in the form of GB News – tin-hat TV.
When Keir Starmer came to office, these media declared Britain ruined before he’d even found Downing Street’s Wi-Fi password. I’d be the first to admit he’s a disappointment. But we are told he is not only ineffectual but dangerous. Compared to what, I ask. Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May, and Cameron? Those 14 years of austerity, immorality, and ineptitude hollowed out councils, police forces, hospitals, and Brexit promises turned to ash in the hands of those who’d sold them.
It is not that Starmer is beyond criticism — he isn’t, and nor should he be — but the idea that he is uniquely disastrous requires a suspension of memory. The bar wasn’t just lowered before he took office; it was mic-dropped amid lockdown cheese-and-wine parties and dodgy PPE contracts for ministers’ mates.
Meanwhile, I hear echoes of America in our discourse: facts treated as optional, conspiracy as currency. Trump built a movement on grievance-fuelled fantasy; now some British commentators mimic his disregard for truth. The theatre is intoxicating, but the consequences are toxic. When Russia seeks to inflame division across Western democracies, we ought to pay attention. Foreign invasions do not always arrive with tanks; sometimes they arrive through algorithms.
Perhaps the greatest con is how normal this now feels. How easily we accept the noise, the blame, the endless culture wars. But we are not fools, or at least we need not be. We can turn our gaze back to the structures that shape our lives: wealth, power, accountability. Then maybe, just maybe, together we can fix what’s really broken.
Read more of Matt’s columns for The Yorkshire Post…
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