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At a policy launch on Monday that would have been considered extreme just a few years ago, Nigel Farage said a Reform UK government would not just abolish indefinite leave to remain for those arriving in the UK, but rescind the status of those who had already been granted it, and force them to apply for new visas. He said the policy was necessary for one reason above all: “to wake everybody up to the Boriswave”.
You might have noticed that term in the past few months: it has been used repeatedly in the mainstream media to describe the sharp increase in inward migration from outside the EU after Brexit, when Boris Johnson was prime minister. But “Boriswave” is not simply a pithy description of a sociological phenomenon but a term coined and popularised among the online far right.
“There is an empirical reality that’s being referred to,” said Dr Robert Topinka, an expert on reactionary digital politics at Birkbeck, University of London. “But whether you’re aware of it or not, it commits you to a far-right framing that makes it very difficult to talk about in any other way.”
Who are the ‘extremely online right’?
You may remember a scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep’s terrifying magazine editor Miranda Priestly tells Anne Hathaway’s clueless assistant that she didn’t really choose her own blue top.
After rehearsing the particular shade’s journey from an Oscar de la Renta collection to the department store, she concludes: “It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”
The originators of the “Boriswave” concept, and many others like it, are basically the Miranda Priestlys of contemporary rightwing politics.
There are various overlapping designations: they were once known as the alt-right in an American context, and are now sometimes called the new right, or the “post-organisational far right”, but Topinka says he tends to refer to “the extremely online right”. They are a hard group to pin down precisely, but the median member of the tribe operates somewhere between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage: less openly hooliganistic than the first, less interested in mainstream approval than the second, and more internet literate than either.
“A lot of it is a game for them,” Topinka added. “They see themselves as seeding mainstream conversation – as advanced players in a game that ‘normies’ don’t even realise they’re playing. And they’re sort of right.”
Where did this phrase start to be used?
In the past, the extremely online right tended to congregate in relatively private spaces such as 4chan, where a term like this might be workshopped away from the eyes of a general audience. That didn’t happen here.
“They used to have to spend a long time cultivating this discourse before it trickled into the mainstream,” Topinka said. “But it’s happening more and more quickly. A massive part of it is that X is now completely different to what it was, and nobody is too far-right to be allowed an account, so it happens there just as much.”
He refers to this as the “ambient extremism” effect: the idea that radical rhetoric now saturates widely used online spaces to the extent that those exposed to it may not even notice.
The earliest extant use of “Boriswave”, or “Boris wave”, came in June last year, when the X user @maxtempers – who attentive subscribers might remember from this piece about the controversy over Motability – described someone as being “so thick he must be from the Boris wave”. (A possible prior use has been deleted.) The phrase caught on, and in September another prominent anonymous X user, @kunley_drupka, published a long post titled “WHAT IS THE ‘BORISWAVE’?”, giving the example of “groups of Africans standing or walking along country lanes in the middle of nowhere”.
Even as the term picked up momentum on X, it was being used on 4chan’s /pol forum, often appearing alongside egregiously racist epithets. “A lot of it is about euphemism,” Topinka said. “It can be a knowing replacement – ‘I saw a Boriswaver the other day’.” But in more visible spaces, that kind of rhetoric was mostly excised.
How did it move into the mainstream?
“Boriswave” first appeared in a national newspaper in the Daily Telegraph last October. A Wikipedia page was set up in December, but was quickly removed: “With all due respect to Max Tempers, you can’t just invent a phrase from whole cloth, make a Wikipedia article for it, and then say ‘OMG this is spreading,’” one editor says.
But it wasn’t long until it really was. The Wikipedia page’s brief existence was reported by Politics UK, an account with more than 370,000 followers that often picks up trending stories from the online right and others. Reform’s Zia Yusuf used it in December; the term also made its way to rightwing online publications including the Critic and the Pimlico Journal.
Thus laundered, and with a huge boost from X’s tendency under Elon Musk to amplify material emanating from the online right, the term appeared with increasing frequency in mainstream outlets: it was in national newspapers six times in January, 15 times in May, and 42 times in the past month. It has even made its way to parliament: two Labour MPs, Tom Hayes and Connor Naismith, have used it to criticise the Conservatives’ record on immigration.
Notably, it has now appeared in the Daily Mail for the first time, in an opinion piece by Farage trailing his speech on Monday – no small concession for a newspaper that counts the former prime minister as a columnist.
What all of this suggests, Topinka said, is that “a lot of politicians and people who write about politics are still seeing X as some kind of proxy for public conversation. That was never fully true, and it’s even less true now.”
What does it tell us about the direction of rightwing politics?
This is a case study, not an anomaly: the same pattern was evident in the discourse, turbocharged by Elon Musk, around online grooming gangs; the phrase “military-age males”, cultivated online, frequently quoted at the Tommy Robinson rally in London earlier this month, and deployed by the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn and others; and the antisemitic “cultural Marxism” trope infamously picked up by the former home secretary Suella Braverman. There are other examples besides. Among the extremely online right, this is often described as the “posting-to-policy pipeline”.
All of this is, of course, catnip to Reform because of the way it suggests that the entire political mainstream, including the Conservative party, is in the same useless place – a feature made particularly clear in this case by the connection to Johnson.
“All of this has reshaped what gets treated as the common-sense framing for mainstream conversation,” Topinka said. “The extremist origins get forgotten, but the narrative remains.”
