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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses how liberal institutions manage far-right racism through media portrayals that frame prejudice as ignorance to be corrected by institutional models of truth. It argues this audit-style governance misrecognises racism’s relational, historical, and socio-economic roots.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how liberal institutions attempt to manage and neutralise far-right racism through what can be understood as a form of political audit culture. Drawing on British media interventions such as Channel 4’s 100% English (2006) and the BBC’s invitation of Tommy Robinson onto “free speech” programming in the early 2010s, the paper analyses a recurring liberal strategy: placing racist subjects into ostensibly neutral, experimental settings designed to correct their beliefs through exposure to scientific truth.

I argue that these interventions function as political technologies disguised as education. Racism is framed as an epistemic error; an outcome of ignorance, misinformation, or irrational belief rather than as a relational, historical, and socio-economic phenomenon rooted in deindustrialisation, class dislocation, political abandonment, and affective grievance. The racist subject is positioned as an object of audit: scrutinised but not reciprocally addressed, governed through external judgement and expected to internalise expert knowledge in order to reform themselves. Scientific presenters, geneticists, sociologists, and media producers emerge as auditors who classify deviance, design corrective interventions, and offer redemption through self-improvement.

Situating this logic within a longer intellectual history, the paper traces how Kantian assumptions about a rational, unified subject underpin liberal models of political management. The paper concludes by suggesting that far-right persistence should be understood not as a failure of education, but as a failure of liberal governance to engage the relational conditions through which political identities are formed.