Across Western democracies, the same pattern of grievance politics is emerging. From the streets of southern England to the ballot boxes of Germany, France, and the United States, support for far-right and populist movements is growing. Yet, mainstream commentary remains largely stuck in surface-level explanations.
Journalists and pundits wring their hands over balaclava-clad activists, the electoral gains of Reform UK, the success of Alternative for Germany, the persistence of Marine Le Pen’s appeal in France, and the disruptive force of Donald Trump. They catalogue the symptoms while struggling to diagnose the disease.
The underlying cause is not mysterious. We live in a tiered society structured by deliberate scarcity. The individualised lifestyle we receive through media today encourages a sort of siloing of information. Our feeds are not full of those suffering under austerity. The people left without resources – the “dogs” who do not get bones – remain invisible. No media platform champions them.
The bones in this metaphor stand for the basics of a dignified life: adequately paid and meaningful work, secure housing, functioning community networks, accessible healthcare, industrial capacity, reliable energy, and decent transport.
For decades, the dominant economic model has ensured that these goods are systematically under-supplied for large sections of the population.
The dogs and bones of manufactured scarcity
The neoliberal framework adopted by most Western governments contains built-in mechanisms that produce shortage across everyday life.
Consider employment. For roughly forty years, successive British governments – and many of their counterparts elsewhere – have treated a certain level of unemployment as natural and even necessary, reasoning that a buffer stock of jobless people restrains inflation by keeping wage demands in check.
The empirical link is open to serious challenge, but the practical consequence is clear: when workers push too hard for better pay or conditions, a ready supply of replacements exists. Take as an example P&O Ferries Ltd, when in March 2022 they made 786 staff redundant without prior consultation and then brought in agency staff to fill the positions. The dogs and bones analogy works like this: picture one hundred dogs released into a field containing only seventy bones. Once the bones are claimed, thirty dogs are left empty-handed despite their efforts. The policy response favoured by governments today is to gather some of those unsuccessful dogs and put them through training courses designed to improve bone-finding technique. When the exercise is repeated, a new group of thirty dogs ends up without bones. The training providers congratulate themselves, secure their budgets, and proudly display their laminated lanyards.
The structural shortage of bones is never addressed, and the right-wing parties rub their hands with glee. You see, the same logic applies far beyond the labour market. Housing shortages, underfunded health services, decaying infrastructure, and energy insecurity are treated as technical or individual failings rather than the predictable results of an economic order that prioritises certain forms of efficiency over sufficiency.
Far-right parties such as Reform UK deliberately redirect the anger of those left without bones toward migrants. Rather than confronting the systemic scarcity of secure jobs, housing and services, they portray newcomers as the cause of shortage and competition. By framing immigration as the primary threat to the discarded, these parties convert legitimate economic grievance into cultural resentment. The strategy is electorally effective: it offers a simple external enemy while leaving the underlying shortage of opportunities untouched, allowing the same structural failures to persist.
The arbitrary lottery of exclusion
Under this system, success or failure often has little to do with individual merit, intelligence, or effort. The allocation of opportunity functions more like a lottery. Those who draw the short straw are effectively discarded. Governments proclaim a commitment to growth while leaving willing workers idle and paying them welfare. The resulting waste of human potential is profound, yet it is rarely acknowledged as a design feature rather than an unfortunate side-effect.
Once people are cast aside, the machinery of the welfare state frequently compounds the injury. Complex bureaucracy, conditionality, and low levels of support grind down morale. Individuals experience the institutions that are supposed to assist them as hostile or indifferent. Hopelessness and resentment take root.
When far-right parties and movements accurately mirror these feelings of rejection and anti-establishment anger, and when they present themselves as champions of the discarded, their growing support should not surprise anyone. The rise in polling and voting for such parties is not evidence of an innate underclass of “deplorables.” It is the foreseeable political consequence of a system that ignores surplus workers and then treats their despair as a personal failing.
The limits of the rules-based order
No major mainstream party has been willing to look beyond what former Bank of England governor Mark Carney once called the “rules-based international order” – a polite description of the neoliberal settlement that has dominated policy since the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that “there is no alternative” has been thoroughly internalised.
Politicians of both centre-left and centre-right parties continue to operate within parameters that treat systemic scarcity as natural or inevitable. This reluctance to confront the model’s core errors is a failure to target the system’s greatest vulnerability. The same framework that generates permanent unemployment and housing shortages has also produced institutional blindness to the climate crisis, the healthcare crisis, and the slow erosion of industrial capacity. The power to mitigate any threat to society through government is diminished each time a politician asks “how are we going to pay for it?” The government has unlimited access to the national currency for public good, however, the scarcity narrative is played here too.
Left unchecked, these compounding failures threaten the stability of Western societies themselves.
A practical path beyond extremism
The situation is not irreversible, and it does not require embracing authoritarian or fascistic solutions. What is needed is a deliberate reset of economic and political priorities.
Local and regional authorities are well placed to begin the work. They can identify the potential in their communities – people currently sidelined by unemployment or underemployment – and invest in training and upskilling aimed at meeting real social needs.
Instead of endless courses that merely redistribute the same limited set of jobs, programmes can focus on building the missing infrastructure: homes, energy systems, transport links, care capacity, and community facilities. As these individuals move into productive roles that address genuine deficits, living standards rise for everyone. Over time, communities can climb out of stagnation and move toward greater sufficiency and wellbeing.
From a foundation of greater security, health, and educational opportunity, it becomes possible to project a different kind of politics outward. Societies that have reduced internal scarcity and restored dignity are better equipped to engage constructively with other nations. The goal is not utopian perfection but a workable alternative to both the current order and the reactionary forces it has helped create.
The practical steps are comparatively straightforward; the harder task is overcoming four decades of conditioned assumptions, learned helplessness, and entrenched misinformation.
The dogs-and-bones problem is not an accident of history or a failure of individual character. It is the product of policy choices that have prioritised neoliberal economic doctrines over the broad distribution of life’s essentials. Recognising this systemic character is the first step toward changing it.
Only by expanding the supply of bones – meaningful work, secure housing, functioning public services, and shared prosperity – can societies reduce the grievances that extremists so readily exploit. The alternative is continued polarisation, further erosion of democratic norms, and the progressive unravelling of the very society that claims to value advancement and fairness.
