The roar of the dangerous few by Jemma Norman

There was a time when Britain prided itself on quiet decency, on reasoned debate, on tolerance, on that steady, understated confidence that didn’t need to shout. But that time feels like a distant memory now. Today, the air is thick with the thundering voices of the few loud, angry, and relentless drowning out the quiet majority who still believe in fairness, openness, and the rule of law. This minority, emboldened by demagogues like Nigel Farage, has learned that in the age of outrage, volume is power. And Britain, once a nation of thoughtful moderation, now teeters on the cliff’s edge of dark populism.

Farage is not new to the game. He’s been playing it for decades, the performance of the “everyman,” pint in hand, talking about “taking back control” and “the will of the people.” It’s a script written in resentment and applause lines, not in policy or principle. What makes him so dangerous is not his intellect, which is limited but his instinct. He understands fear. He knows how to turn complex realities into simple enemies: migrants, elites, the EU, anyone different or inconvenient. His genius lies not in leadership but in manipulation, in sensing what people are angry about and making that anger his own currency.

And make no mistake this kind of populism is a moral corrosion. It eats away at empathy, civility, and truth itself. It replaces dialogue with slogans, nuance with noise. When Farage or his imitators speak of “freedom,” what they really mean is the freedom to insult, to exclude, to divide. When they invoke “the people,” they mean only a certain kind of people, angry, nostalgic, easily frightened, easily flattered. The rest are dismissed as “traitors,” “globalists,” or “woke elites.” It’s a chillingly effective linguistic trick: strip your opponents of humanity, and you no longer need to listen to them.

Britain has always been a nation of contradictions, empire and emancipation, privilege and protest, conservatism and compassion. But at its best, it found a balance. Today that balance is gone. The shouting has become the soundtrack. The Faragean right thrives on chaos, because chaos creates attention, and attention creates power. They don’t need to win the argument, only to make sure no one else can speak. The strategy is painfully familiar across the world: dominate the narrative, discredit the media, flood the airwaves with outrage.

The tragedy is that it works. Social media amplifies anger like a megaphone in a cave. The more absurd the claim, the more viral it becomes. Farage and his ilk have learned that truth is optional in modern politics; all that matters is emotional resonance. Say it loudly, say it repeatedly, and people will believe it or at least believe that “there must be something to it.” Meanwhile, those who value facts and reason sound boring, academic, elitist. In an age of noise, calmness looks like weakness.

But beneath all the shouting lies something even more dangerous: exhaustion. Millions of Britons are simply tired, tired of division, tired of politics as performance, tired of being told who to hate. And yet their fatigue is the populist’s greatest weapon. When people tune out, the loudest voices are left to rule the room. When moderates retreat, extremists advance. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality; it’s surrender.

Farage thrives on that silence. Every time decent people shrug and say “what’s the point,” he wins a little more ground. Every time lies go unchallenged, the public sphere corrodes a little further. What began as an act, the pub-room patriot railing against elites, has metastasized into a genuine movement that bends national discourse around its anger. The poison has seeped deep. You can see it in the normalization of xenophobia, in the disdain for expertise, in the casual cruelty of online mobs. It’s not that Britain has suddenly become a nation of bigots; it’s that bigotry has found its microphone.

And where is the opposition to this ugliness? Too often, muted, afraid of offending, still believing that reason alone can outlast rage. But you cannot whisper your way through a storm. You have to speak firmly, clearly, without apology. You have to name the danger for what it is: not “populism,” which sounds almost democratic, but a creeping authoritarianism wrapped in the language of patriotism. The populist does not want democracy; he wants domination. He does not want dialogue; he wants obedience.

The Britain that once exported democracy, literature, and law to the world is now flirting with the politics of menace and mockery. And it didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually, with every joke at the expense of “do-gooders,” every headline scapegoating refugees, every politician too cowardly to call out hate for fear of losing votes. The descent into darkness never begins with a march; it begins with a shrug.

Still, not all hope is lost. The strength of Britain has never come from its loudest citizens, but from its quiet ones, those who believe in decency, in fairness, in looking out for one another. They are still here, even if their voices are drowned for now. The challenge is to make them heard again, to remind the country that compassion is not weakness, and that the true measure of patriotism is not who you exclude, but who you protect.

The noise machine will not stop. It will roar and rage and ridicule. But it cannot build; it can only destroy. The task now is for Britain to rediscover its courage not the blustering, flag-waving kind, but the quiet, stubborn kind that built a democracy worth defending.

Because if the country continues to mistake volume for vision, it will wake up one day to find that the shouting has stopped, not because the bullies were defeated, but because there is no one left who dares to speak.

And by then, Britain’s silence will not be peace. It will be the sound of something precious — its moral compass  finally breaking.