Common Sense and the Common People:A Queer Typology of Radical Right Populism in the UK

Populist discourses and politics, especially from the radical right, are becoming increasingly prominent in numerous national contexts across the world. This article examines the UK as a particularly relevant case for scholars of this wider trend, focusing on the 2023 Conservative Party Conference as a pivotal moment in the mainstreaming of radical right populist rhetoric. At this conference, key actors portrayed multiple groups – including trans people, migrants, and striking health workers – as threats to the nation, displacing blame for neoliberalism’s unequal distributive effects onto those already marginalised. Engaging queer, feminist, postcolonial, and other critical scholarship on radical right populism, this article offers an original framework for analysing the role of “common sense” in constructing the “common people”. Specifically, we develop and operationalise a queer typology of common-sense populist discourses as anti-elitism, moralism, economism, anti-collectivism, and futurism. In so doing, we shed new light on the gendered, racialised, sexualised, and classed logics at work in radical right populism, and illuminate the discursive mechanisms by which consent for neoliberal governance is secured through the targeting of the very groups most impacted by it.