Why the new political right is bad news for autism

RFK, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch offer daily blasts of nonsense that amount to a cruel insistence: that neurodiversity must be denied, decried and put back in its box

I’m writing this in Boston, Lincolnshire – the Eastern English town that has long been a byword for immigration from Eastern Europe, Brexit, and the politics embodied by Nigel Farage and his new Reform UK party. There are elections here today (Thursday), for both a directly-elected Lincolnshire Mayor and local councillors - and Reform UK are being tipped as the possible winners. If that happens, they will go from being a force that makes endless mischief to actually running somewhere, and that change may also materialise in other places: see, for example, the Yorkshire city of Doncaster, where I made the Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast on Thursday.

So, this is a good moment to try and articulate a deep fear of Reform UK-type politics, which is surely felt by plenty of people whose lives are (partly) defined by autism and neurodivergence.

Only last week, Farage jumped into the currently inescapable conversation about “overdiagnosis”, with his characteristic mixture of certainty and complete ignorance. He made the grimly familiar mistake – which was presumably not a mistake at all – of conflating issues to do with mental illness and those centred on Special Educational Needs, and claimed that questionable diagnoses were “creating a class of victims”. And then came the clincher: “So many of these diagnoses, for SEND before 18, for disability register [sic] after 18 – so many of these have been conducted on Zoom, with the family GP. I think that is a massive mistake.” Cue exactly what he wanted: a great explosion of outrage, and yet more headlines.

As most people reading this well know, even if some diagnoses happen via video platforms (lots of people have been in touch recently, pointing this out), the basics of what he said were howlingly incorrect. GPs don’t diagnose anything to do with SEND. No-one understood what “disability register” Farage was referring to, and he probably didn’t either. But his words were yet another instalment of a snowballing story about the new political right, here and around the world.

I wrote a piece for The Guardian the other week about Donald Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. and his poisonous belief that autism is a preventable disease, now enshrined in a plan to identify the “toxins” that cause it, and awful proposals for an American national register of autistic people – not to mention his insistence that autistic children will “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.”

Last year, there was a brief flurry of fury about a pamphlet put out as part of Kemi Badenoch’s run for the leadership of the UK Conservative Party, which warned of neurodivergence leading to “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation” instead of “building resilience”. It also claimed – to massed gasps of disbelief - that “being diagnosed as neurodiverse” was an easy route to “economic advantages and protections.”

Self-evidently, neurodiversity is now a central part of the so-called culture wars. The Kennedy position is both grimly modern and pathetically old-fashioned: it draws on the kind of conspiracy-theory nonsense about wholly imaginary causes and cures for autism that runs wild online, and fuses it with the idea that the clock should go back, leaving autism as a matter of shame and pity, and millions of autistic people as social outcasts. Badenoch and Farage, meanwhile, seem to think that (other?) neurodivergent people simply need to get with the “overdiagnosis” theory, and buck up.

What joins the two views together is plain enough. The New Right – and large swathes of the Old Right – loathe any notion of human complexity, and what it entails. That evidently defines its approach to neurodiversity. Across just about every issue, the politicians I’ve mentioned offer their supporters a belligerent kind of nostalgia, and a delusional belief that the past was better, partly because it was simpler. In that context, they think that our ever-more sophisticated understanding of human psychology is an affront to common sense that must be resisted. Handily enough, our over-stretched public services make their arguments financial as well as psychological. And we then end up with daily blasts of nonsense that amount to a cruel insistence: that neurodiversity must be denied, decried and put back in its box.

In Lincolnshire, there is an interesting local story about all this. People here may well wake up on Friday to the news that their new mayor is Andrea Jenkyns, who recently jumped from the Conservatives to Reform UK. In the wake of Farage’s pronouncements about SEND, she said that she and her new party leader "are not always going to agree on everything", and that her rather different opinions were those of someone with a child diagnosed with ADHD, and “somebody who's neurodiverse myself, and as a former MP who saw some of the very sad stories of children, how they've been left behind really.”

She also seems to want to attempt to an Elon Musk-style attack on Lincolnshire’s local public spending, which will be interesting to watch. But fair play to her: here, at least, is one honest difference which sets her apart from a lot of her political comrades. Whether it really counts for anything is another question: the New Right’s toxic view of millions of their fellow human beings feels like its getting grimmer by the day, and their seemingly unstoppable rise to power makes that all the more terrifying. That is not a word I use lightly, but it surely fits.

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