TORIES are increasingly adopting far-right rhetoric to win electoral support, campaigners at the Labour conference in Liverpool warned today.

Hope Not Hate director of research Dr Joe Mulhall told a packed fringe room that while there were often policies and individuals within the Conservative Party that have been on the right, the party itself is structurally shifting.

“The party now appears to be willing to increasingly adopt far-right rhetoric, believing it [to be] politically advantageous to themselves,” he said.

“And there is also a bloc within the party that can absolutely be called indistinguishable from the European radical right.”

Dr Mulhall also raised concerns about the broader offence of an attack on multiculturalism and the party’s willingness to use conspiratorial rhetoric.

“This is rhetoric which is utterly indistinguishable from the traditional far right,” he said.

He said that Labour has a “really fundamental role to play,” warning that once far-right policies are normalised, it becomes “extremely difficult to make it abnormal.”

Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, said that the Tories have been “moving to the far-right for some time now and dragging the country with it.”

But she said that one of the things that had accelerated it was the party’s fight for its very survival.

“The purpose of this pivot to far-right populism is to sow division,” Ms Whittome said. “It’s creating an ‘other’ group: a group that is different, that can be portrayed as a threat to deflect from the vandalism that this Conservative government has inflicted on this country for the last 13 years.”

She said that even if the Conservatives face a generational defeat in the next elections, the party could be “dominated by the far right and by a far-right ideological programme for a long time.”

“And even if they’re not in power, that has a huge potential to do a great amount of damage in opposition,” she warned.

Ms Whittome said it is important to call out the language and policies for what they are and “we must not allow it to become normalised.”

“We can make people less susceptible to the far right through providing a real political alternative, an alternative vision of society — one that empowers people, that prioritises everybody’s living standards, that tackles inequality,” she said.

Equity general secretary Paul Fleming spoke about how the vacuum left by austerity had been filled by the far right, citing cuts in arts and entertainment, leaving stories untold, as an example.