Victim politics — that supposedly left-wing habit of organising identity around injury — is now thriving rather more vigorously on the Right than anywhere else...
Consider the case of Zia Yusuf, Reform UK's home affairs spokesman, who recently described former defence secretary Ben Wallace as "a traitor to Britain" after Wallace picked holes in Reform's scheme to rent prison capacity in El Salvador. Wallace served in the Scots Guards during the Troubles and ran the Ministry of Defence for four years. Yusuf also ran a poll asking whether he should be prosecuted for treason. Nigel Farage announced he would administer a ticking off; the tweet stayed up.
Here we have a supposed wronged in-group, a great replacement or betrayal narrative, and a category of enemy — the "betrayer" — which is reserved not for the opposition but for one's own side. Kemi Badenoch calling out the "woke Right" fits the same pattern from the other direction. Everyone is a victim of somebody nominally on their team.
Such victimhood claims are not a left invention. They are what happens whenever a political system rewards demonstrable harm with attention and resources. Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning described this years ago as a shift from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood — one in which moral status accrues to whoever can most credibly present themselves as damaged. That dynamic doesn't care about your politics; it cares about whether the incentive exists. I
The other thing worth saying is that some of the grievance is real. Voters are repelled by abuse and sanctimony even when they sympathise with the underlying complaint. Two decades of flat real wages, a housing market that functions as an inheritance lottery and public services that visibly do not work are not hallucinated. The grievance entrepreneurs of the Right did not invent the wound. They simply got there first with a story about who caused it.
The genuinely depressing bit is what victim politics does to the possibility of argument. If your opponent is wrong, you can debate them. If your opponent is a traitor, you can only defeat or expel them. That move has been made on the Left and it is now being made, with real enthusiasm, on the Right.
