These two posts are exactly right imo, except that you need to follow the logic through, which is that these actually aren’t far right parties in the way that that term usually gets used in these conversations, i.e. as the worst kind of bogeyman.
What’s happened is that we’ve had about thirty years of basically continuous economic expansion and infinite credit, which progressives have completely owned because we’ve had social liberals in charge throughout the entire period pushing progressive policies and it’s the expansion which has paid for them – to the extent that in this country it’s become hard to even see the distinction between old style class-based left policies and social liberalism. Everyone just takes it for granted that LGBT or immigration are left causes. But that isn’t true, those things don’t have to go together and the Tories have had no problem pushing either of those throughout their whole term. In fact these are actually different varieties of liberalism, we’re just so used to thinking of them as left issues basically because they worked well for Blair and his paradigm is somehow still the dominant one in Britain.
Brexit and the red wall should’ve been the wake-up call to rethink all of that - the people know very well that e.g. mass immigration is not in their interests, for the reasons Nobby describes. Europe has woken up to this so they’re getting economic left/social right parties taking power, but somehow the UK hasn’t yet, and instead we’re stuck ploughing on and on with the same policies that haven’t been working for years.
It's important to split right-left in terms of economics and 'social/cultural policy'.
My point is that all of the mainstream [nominally] left parties have adopted right-of-centre economic policies to varying degrees (but all a substantial amount). Usually not as far as the mainstream right parties (eg, not eroding the public services function as extremely), and certainly trying to mitigate the inevitable privations that corporate-capitalism imposes on millions, but still broadly right-of-centre (and definitely rejecting the principle of fairer wealth distribution being a core aim)
It's following right-wing economic policy - or, if you prefer, liberal economic policy - that has led us to the constant 'verge of shitstorm' economic territory we've teetered in since 2008.
The prime differences between the mainstream right and mainstream left parties have mostly been on their respective social/cultural policies.
The far-right parties like Le Pen's FN (and worse/more extreme in other countries like Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy and more) distinguish themselves on these social/cultural policies to a greater extent (and are indeed the bad bogeyman in many policy respects)
