As anyone who reads or watches the news known, there has been a rise in right-wing populism in the US, UK and Australia. There have been many reasons put forward for this, ranging from the bleeding obvious to the bizarre. However, it seems to me that this is caused by the Democrats and the Republicans in the US, as well as the Conservatives and Labour in the UK and the Coalition and Labor in Australia having policies that are so similar that there are only small differences between them. That is why they are often pointedly referred to as the ‘uniparty’. All these parties are for freer trade, deregulation, privatisation, financialisation*, central bank independence, and varying degrees of austerity. This has made it clear that elections no longer offered a choice of different economic paths. Indeed, the path of both sides of conventional politics is much the same; it favours corporations and the wealthy1.
This convergence started with the rise of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US and was enthusiastically copied by the Hawke-Keating Labor government in Australia. It has continued subsequently when governments noted that the wealthy could be replied upon to make very generous donations to their respective election campaigns. As a consequence, people’s future depends little on who is elected to govern.
Where has this led? We have suffered deindustrialisation as manufacturing jobs have disappeared overseas, a decrease in union membership and a concomitant decrease in the relative power of employees, a widening regional inequality, a widening overall wealth inequality, and decreasing housing affordability, among other factors. This has caused people to feel helpless and left behind, and has provided fertile ground for the far right to pump up grievances against those who have nothing to do with these problems. These include: immigrants, unionists, the unemployed, gay people, transsexuals, and anyone else they can convince the gullible to hate.
Trump
Perhaps the worst example of this is the Trump takeover of the Republican Party such that they are now complicit in his corruption, bigotry and stupidity, not to mention war crimes. Trump sucked in the gullible by flogging them MAGA caps, and told them ‘I am your voice”, while giving tax cuts to his wealthy donors. Back when I started blogging, during the first months of the idiot Trump’s first term, I knew he was a conman, a liar, and a narcissist and wanted, like most despots, to be president for life. I finished with a short paragraph stating: “All US Senators and Representatives, upon taking office, swear to support and defend the Constitution. Maybe they should read their oath of office again. They seem to have forgotten what it means”2.
What amazes me is that so many Americans are seemingly incapable of spotting such a charlatan despite his constant lying, his pandering to the wealthy, and his clearly evident corruption, as well as his paedophilia. The only conclusion I came to was that Trump gave them the licence to be bigots, thugs and paedophiles (as so many of them seem to be)3, because he hated the same people they hated. These were the people listed above.
To state that he is their voice, while making life more difficult and more expensive for the average punter, beggars belief. And the fact that the red cap wearing denizens of the MAGAsphere believe him is even more astonishing, given that the wealthy have donated over three quarters of a billion dollars to his cause. These donations are often in exchange for lucrative government contracts, and yet these MAGats still believe him. You have to stand in awe at this mind-boggling gullibility.
Farage
In the UK, Farage was one of the leading voices in the Brexit referendum in which his lies about Europe convinced enough of the gullible to vote to leave the European Union. Farage was the long time leader of the UK Independence Party, whose railing against the European Union pressured then PM David Cameron to call the referendum. Farage’s story was all about national sovereignty and the control of immigration. After the Referendum, Farage formed the Brexit Party in 2019 to pressure the government after the withdrawal was delayed. To this end, he led the ‘Leave means Leave’ march. Farage reported that the Brexit Party at that time received about £750,000 over ten days mostly from small donations from people who wanted to see “the rebirth of democracy” in the UK. Again, the gullibility of the average punter is astonishing. The Brexit Party rebranded itself as the Reform Party soon after4.
There was much talk at the time by people who wanted to remain the the EU, that leaving it was all about the wealthy avoiding the tax-avoidance laws for member states, however this does not seem to be the case5.
What I suspect is that the wealthy want to avoid tax by keeping those in power who will decrease their tax burden, and given that the Conservatives seem to be in Johnson mediated downward spiral, then Reform seems to be the place to go for the wealthy6.
This downward spiral is demonstrated by the number of former Conservative politicians, including former ministers, who have defected to Reform. These include Braverman, Caulfield, Holloway, Jenrick, Zahawi, Rosindell, Kruger, Dorries and Anderson7.
One funny thing about this is that Farage has said that he would limit further defections from the Conservatives because Reform is not a “rescue charity” for panicked Conservatives who can see their careers going down the gurgler8. You have to laugh.
Hanson
In 1996, Pauline Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberal Party for her ‘controversial’ (read racist) comments about Aboriginal people. However, because it was only a short time before the 1996 election the ballots could not be changed and she was still identified on the ballot as a Liberal Party candidate. She won that election for the federal seat of Oxley and entered the federal parliament as an independent9. She was laughingly referred to as the ‘Oxley moron’ by some at the time.
In 1997 she joined forces with some experienced political operatives and the One Nation party was born. It is referred to herein as One Notion because that is what it was based on; fear of others. At the 1998 election Hanson lost her seat and the single One Notion candidate who won a seat was found to be ineligible due to holding, ironically, foreign citizenship9.
Hanson was sent to gaol for electoral fraud in late 2003, after much effort by the Howard Government’s minister Tony Abbott. After 11 weeks in the pokey, Hanson’s conviction was overturned and she was released. She ran for parliament unsuccessfully another nine times, but was successful on the tenth effort in 2016. Despite her mantra in the late 90s being ‘we are in danger of being swamped by Asians, her mantra in the second coming is ‘We are in danger of being swamped by Muslims9. As I said, it is one notion.
With the rapid decline of the Liberal Party, which experienced its worst electoral result since the 1940s at the 2025 federal election10,11, after its ham-fisted campaign and its adoption of some Trumpesque idiocy12.
Hanson has received enormous support from billionaire Gina Rinehart to the tune of a light plane, and enormous donations, even to the extent of somehow coercing her ever reliable mouthpiece in the parliament, Barnaby Joyce, to join One Notion. Like the Conservatives in the UK, Joyce realises that the Liberal Party and with it the coalition with the National Party is in a downward spiral which may be existential, so he jumped to the nearest ‘rescue charity’.
Commonality
What do all three of these charlatans have in common?
1. They portray politics as a struggle between decent, hard-working ordinary (white) citizens and a corrupt establishment of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, journalists, judges, or international organisations. This allows them to turn complicated political disagreements into a simple story: “we are the people; they are the corrupt establishment”. However, all of these parties accept enormous amounts of funding from the extremely wealthy and their corporations. In political theory, the ‘elite’ are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege and political power or skill in a society. However one should never suggest that people like Bezos and Zuckerberg (US), Harborne, Hosking, Tice (UK) or Rinehart (Australia), belong to the elite. These parties use the word ‘elite’ to solely to refer to people who are knowledgeable and able and in this they refer to bureaucrats, academics, scientists, journalists, judges, lawyers, and whoever else they disagree with13.
2. They claim that immigration is the cause of innumerable problems such as housing unaffordability, crime, unemployment, cultural change, pressure on public services and loss of national identity.
3. They effectively claim that the nation you knew is disappearing, and outsiders or elites, or both, are responsible.That can be particularly powerful when demographic or cultural change is rapid, which it isn’t; it is just perceived to be. This is perhaps epitomised by Hanson’s shift in demonization from Aboriginals to Asians to Muslims to Transgender people. This is simply a maintenance of the idea that people not like ‘us’ are threatening our nation.
4. Like Trump (make America great again) and Farage (we want our country back), Hanson wants to “take our country back”. They all hark back to a better time when real men wore hats and women knew their place, when the assorted countries supposedly had greater prosperity, security, and social cohesion, and you tipped your lid to the boss. Never do they tell you that during those times the taxes on the wealthy were much higher.
5. They all state that despite many problems of modern nations being complex, they have simple answers, and they state that it all gets down to immigration, the elites and the establishment causing all your problems.
6. They all create a sense of urgency by referring to immigrants or asylum-seekers as being part of an invasion by criminals, terrorists, and those who want to impose sharia law.
7. They all create a sense of distrust in institutions such as universities, mainstream media (despite their supporters owning much of it), the courts, public servants, international organisations and scientists. These are all depicted as members of the elite establishment who don’t understand ordinary people or who are part of the huge conspiracy running the world.
8. ‘Authentic’ idiotic or racist statements by the leader give the racists and the idiots in the general populace permission to be racist and idiotic. In this regard, they look upon ‘political correctness’ as censorship or even oppression, rather than just the system whereby being offensive to particular groups is frowned upon. That is why Hanson has opposed Australia’s racial discrimination laws.
9. Often these parties blame ‘globalists’, and mostly this refers to international organisations such as the UN and the WHO. Hanson has often blamed globalisation for numerous problems in Australia, seemingly not realising that it was the wealthy and their corporations who were in the forefront of globalisation; these are the very people who donate to such political parties.
Trump, Farage and Hanson are part of a peculiar phenomenon in the Anglophone world, where they pretend to be antiestablishment, but are funded by the establishment of billionaires and their corporations to keep the status quo.
*Financialisation: This is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to the present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors. It is tied to the transition from an industrial economy to a service economy in that financial services belong to the tertiary sector of the economy.
Sources
- https://blakandblack.com/2025/04/22/australias-political-uniparty-donor-influence-and-the-threat-to-democracy-and-economy/
- https://blotreport.com/2017/05/11/president-life-trump/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/03/28/paedophile-regime/
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Reform-UK
- https://www.politax.com/post/was-brexit-about-tax-avoidance
- https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/75-of-reform-uks-donations-have-come
- https://bestforbritain.org/reform-uk-defections-resignations-tracker/
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gv9gyxgjjo
- https://stories.theconversation.com/the-making-of-one-nation-pauline-explained/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/05/09/where-to-now-2/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/05/05/they-wont-learn/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/04/30/trumpesque-liberal-party/
- https://blotreport.com/2018/11/10/elites-and-the-gullible/