Two men at the Lesbian and Gay Freedom Festival in 1995 (Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
“All of my friends are dead.” It was said in his customary matter-of-fact tone, without the slightest hint of self-pity. This was Robin, my supervisor at university, who would often discuss his pre-academic life and what it was like to be a gay man during the worst of the Aids crisis. That he had survived at all struck him as incredible.
In those early days, the sense of an angel of death targeting a particular community seemed like the realisation of a nightmare. When it first emerged in the US it was known as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). An article appeared in the New York Times on 3 July 1981 with the ominous headline: “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” Some called it the “gay plague”.
Confusion turned into widespread panic, not limited to the gay community. The first time I heard of the disease was during a PE lesson at primary school. Such was the general ignorance that our teacher warned us not to borrow each other’s plimsolls or we’d catch Aids. Some time later I saw the government’s public health advert on the television; I remember little about it except the large tombstone with the dreaded four-letter acronym as an epitaph.
In the 40 years since the virus was identified, there has been a sea-change in attitudes. Whereas the government’s campaign set out to frighten people with the message “it’s a deadly disease and there’s no known cure”, a recent advert by the Terrence Higgins Trust reminds people that those diagnosed with HIV “can live a healthy, happy life just like anyone else”. Much of the stigma has dissipated.
The same is true of homosexuality itself. One could say that the while the Aids crisis exacerbated the hatred and mistrust against an already beleaguered community, it also spurred activists onto the pathway to normalisation. Whereas the pursuit of a gay lifestyle was romanticised — or demonised — as a dance of Eros and Thanatos, a way to ensure that one remained beyond the scope of civilised society, today the very notion of being orientated towards one’s own sex is largely perceived as unremarkable. Those who bleat about their oppression as gay people in a climate of widespread tolerance are luxuriating in a kind of perverse nostalgia for a reality they could never comprehend.
For those who lived through it, the Aids crisis was a moment when the concept of a “gay community” actually meant something. Lesbians were instrumental in providing support for their gay brothers, and amid the loss there was a sense of greater solidarity. I remember seeing a production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in New York in 2004. The audience mostly comprised of older gay men, and Kramer was among them. Afterwards, people were visibly shaken from watching the worst of their past so unflinchingly dramatised. One man approached Kramer and, through his sobs, I heard him simply say: “thank you”.
Kramer has been credited as a kind of Cassandra figure, one who had warned that the hedonism of gay life in the late Seventies would lead to trouble. His novel Faggots (1978) was loathed by conservatives for its graphic depiction of the sexual free-for-alls of New York’s bathhouse culture, but it was also mistrusted by the gay community for its moralising implications. Its lead character is on an impossible quest to find meaningful love in a world of fleeting sexual encounters. Kramer was criticising what he saw as a sybaritic and morally vacuous culture, and the sense of an impending reckoning has led to the novel being interpreted as predicting the outbreak of Aids.
When the crisis exploded, Kramer was one of those calling on gay men to exercise sexual temperance, and to shut the bathhouses until the virus could be contained. For this he was accused of being a puritan and a traitor to the gay lifestyle. His play The Normal Heart is set around this time, and in one furious monologue a character rails against a Kramer-type figure for trying to make gay men feel ashamed of their own liberation.
For the ultra-religious, Aids was seen as a righteous punishment from God. Many had been appalled at the promiscuity that inevitably arises when women are no longer in the equation. Male sexuality has always been contained to a degree by the institution of marriage, but gay men had been forced to exist on the periphery. There was no need to abide by sexual mores, because the rules had clearly not been written with them in mind. In other words, sex became an integral aspect of their own defiance against the society that had shunned them.
It always seemed a catch-22. Gay men were loathed for their sexual licentiousness, and at the same time excluded from the very ethical framework that would, to a degree, offer some kind of incentive against it. In his 1982 lecture, “Rediscovering gay history”, the historian John Boswell addressed this fundamental contradiction and argued for the need for a gay archetype or moral aspiration. He pointed out that when a straight man cheated on his wife, he at least knew that he was falling short of society’s expectations. But the same could not be said for gay men:
“I think that part of the reason for the ambivalence of the intellectual establishment in the United States is that they can’t tell when they read a book like Edmund White’s States of Desire, whether the life of casual promiscuity it depicts represents a homosexual ideal or the failure of an ideal. Are they reading about what gay people should do, what they do, or both, or neither? So they don’t know how to fit it into their usual critical apparatus. They don’t understand what would be a departure from homosexual ethics because they don’t know what homosexual ethics would be. And neither do we.”
Boswell was right that this ambivalence existed within and without the gay community. When William Friedkin’s film Cruising was released in 1980, the most vehement opposition came from gay campaigners who feared that it would depict them as being inherently deviant. And yet the movie had been shot in the leather bars of New York City, and the real-life sex acts that were filmed were hardly atypical. This subculture may not have been reflective of gay society as a whole, but it certainly existed.
Perhaps it could be said that the activists who sought to ban Cruising won out in the end. Their implicit goal was that gay people could be brought under the aegis of heterosexual respectability — that they could, in other words, live as conventionally as everybody else. It didn’t surprise me at all, therefore, that it was a conservative government in the UK that eventually legalised same-sex marriage. It would appear that we have seen the cultivation in the Western world of the kind of shared ethical ideals that Boswell seemed to crave. Gay monogamy is no longer seen as an oxymoron.
Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. To them, it was a way to control gay people, to bring them within the same heteronormative yoke that dominated the rest of society. This debate echoed those of The Normal Heart, where there was a fear of an attempt to “civilise” those who had found freedom in occupying a realm outside of social convention. To be gay was to be different, and for many this was a source of pride. An older gay man once told me that sex was far more exhilarating when it was illegal. It meant that even the most casual sexual encounter was a little act of rebellion.
But even as tolerance has increased, anti-gay feeling has not gone away. The Aids crisis galvanised such prejudices, and of course religious fundamentalists have always opposed those who they deem to be acting against the wishes of their various gods. Today, these prejudices are resurfacing through the obsession with gender identity, an ideology that shames gay people for not being attracted to members of the opposite sex and has been responsible for the government-funded medicalisation of gay youth. In many ways, this is a “progressive” rehash of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, with its prohibition in schools against the “promotion” or “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.
The instinctive disgust that many people feel towards those who do not share their own sexual inclinations is seemingly hard-wired, and so what we call “homophobia” will always emerge in one way or another in a majority heterosexual culture. But at least to be gay is no longer defined solely by the sexual act, and that for one man to fall in love with another is widely considered to be an unexceptional fact of life. The gay rights activists of yesteryear weren’t necessarily calling for universal indifference, but perhaps we’ll get there in the end.
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SubscribeDo you see any hope? Reform is the last throw of the dice, but I don’t see any miracles happening. Britain decided to throw open the doors to the Third World for reasons I don’t understand and the final act is inevitable.
As an American, I just don’t understand how this slow kiss of death was given to such a once great country like the UK. What is it about the native collective psyche that allowed this to happen, to keep electing feckless fools when it’s been clear for years, even from our shores, that your country is not, nor could or should be, a melting pot for the world’s ethnicities? Is there not a sizable enough demographic to just absolutely not play ball? Can England not get angry?
The UK’s fate is sad beyond words, and confounding. Not that we don’t have our own absurdities in the USA. But at least there’s a strong vein of ‘screw it, not taking this ** anymore’ and then doing something about it.
When all parties in the Uniparty and their cheer leaders throughout the media continually ram home the elite message that unlimited immigration is a good thing it is easier to see why any other political view is hard to get across. Any criticism of the elite view has been denigrated for decades especially the state sponsored BBC which dominates broadcast media here.
We saw during the lockdowns how people can easily be persuaded by state propaganda to follow the elites’ line. They even have specific departments to carry out the propaganda. This was first openly acknowledged by Cameron-Clegg who boasted about what they tweely called The Nudge Unit. These programmes are now bigger and laws have been passed to limit the range of opinions which may be discussed.
JD Vance was right but maybe he under estimated the degree we have lost free speech.
What is emerging unnoticed (in particular by those that do not wish to notice )
There is now a whole generation of young voters who are part of the “multicultural experiment” from school age and beyond .
They no longer pay attention to the slogans but rely upon their own experiences.
The ‘liberal’ establishment that has sold the country down the river is now terrified both about what they’ve done and that people have noticed.
As someone once said: wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolts happen when you work it out for yourself.
Yes. The liberal establishment is like those parents of ‘trans’ children, who affirmed and encouraged their child, and cajoled and bullied all those about them to accept what they had helped create.
The awful reality that they have mutilated something beautiful is too horrifying to bear, so they persist aggressively with the lie. They will never give it up.
The Conservative Party is moribund and the Labour Party is heading that way. The Lib Dems are only attractive at a local level. Which party can represent the Liberal Establishment?
I expect we will need a (genteel) Trumpian reduction in state run organisations before the authority of the Liberal Establishment is cut down to size. It won’t be pretty.
The Lib-Dems are clowns.
Indeed. It won’t be pretty because state run organizations never respond to “genteel” reform efforts.
There is no such thing as ‘genteel’ reforms any more. The rot will have to be ripped out of Westminster, it won’t be pretty but it is glaringly needed and soon.
There is something creepy and sinister about how our country is being taken over. It smells rotten of underground slime. Devious and malign. I would rather the Germans had won in open air combat than this slow strangulation, revealing cowardice and corruption by our “leader”.
“‘Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage’ boasts the construction site billboard.”
Reads like a Red Guard poster in Beijing circa 1966.
There is a shocking neglect of attention to the Greater South East outside London (and whilst Dagenham is in London it is really the border area with the Greater South East like many London Boroughs where there was a big vote for out in the EU referendum). Very little social science done on these areas – almost no real ethnography – and not much decent journalism. This piece is good but there is a need to look further. I suggest attention to Bedford, just one of the towns now a commuter zone for London. The Greater SE is the largest region by population in the UK when you include Hertfordshire, Essex and Bedfordshire which were put into the Eastern Region to even up numbers. This is where UK elections will be decided and deindustrialization is the major cultural driver of voting.
Labour is caught between two stools. Does it seek to recapture the disillusioned white, working class of the Red Wall, or seek to hang on to the Muslim vote that is leaking away to Corbyn’s Independents? It can’t do both.
It’s certainly ground as fertile for radical Right as there is going to be. It shows the direction we are heading, and have been for some time but with an acceleration driven by Austerity and the Pandemic, is increasing starkly obvious – growing inequality of opportunity and thus outcomes. The juxtaposition of private affluence, public squalor as documented 70 years ago in another Country, pulling apart that which bonds us.
The question for Reform is what solution do they offer other than the red meat on migration? (Let’s assume for the moment we all want massive reduction in illegal migration and less legal because we’ve invested more in training/developing our own etc). What is the coherent Reform offering? I read the Policy section of their website – it, to be fair like most Parties, ducks how it’s really going to pay for changes or whether it’s at all interested in addressing growing inequality. It needs revising in light of Trump’s approach too.
The Farage/Lowe fight is more personal and ego driven but there are elements that relate to major Policy tension. Is this a Party that really rejects neo-liberalism and thus would, ironically, share some of the Corbyn/McDonald economic view (which wasn’t unpopular with red wall Voters), or a Party that just uses migration concerns to gain power for the same old elite benefit that the Tories did? For now that tension may not prevent it winning protest Votes, but anyone truly interested in solutions to our many problems, rather than just a nihilistic attitude, needs Reform and others to properly grapple with the choices we face. Desires and slogans are not Policies that then really deliver the outcome wanted.
The question for Reform is what solution do they offer other than the red meat on migration?
Electoral reform?
Ask yourself: why is a Labour government piling ever more taxes onto working people, small businesses and farmers and taking benefits from disabled people whilst you and everyone you know are still collecting £tens or £hundreds of thousands every year in artificial property price inflation, unfunded pensions and all the rest of it? Because Labour need your vote more than they need those of the people they are taxing into oblivion and whose lives they are destroying with mass illegal immigration and all the other globalist scams designed to enrich the suburban middle class at everyone else’s expense. A de-centralised electoral system along Swiss lines could fix that.
That said, I have as little confidence that Reform is the answer as you do.
THERE SHOULD BE NO electoral reform. FPTP is what we need. Look to Germany and the EU for the impossibility of clearing out the Augean Stables with PR. Germany’s population is increasingly moving to the right, BUT PR elections mean the Government is moving to the left. It forms a coalition with the far left & Greens in order to keep the popular vote suppressed,. FPTP would ensure these parties DO NOT GET IN. Reform are insane IF they scrap FPTP they have now hit the watershed, and they will only achieve what they want via FPTP because that ensure the demise of the Uniparty. Go for PR and Reform will be in opposition watching the Uniparty Coalition destroy the country.
You might be right. What we really need is decentralisation.
“Right-wing populism”
Disappointing.
I would have hoped for a more nuanced and intellihent anlysis at UnHerd. Not more of the same .
Stopping and then reversing the spiral of decline will not be easy. In fact it will be damned hard. Dropping the lunatic deindustrialising policy called Net Zero will
help but beyond that we have to start repaying our ever increasing national debt which must involve attracting private investment to stimulate sustainable growth and curbing the Welfare State. That means lower taxes and lower benefits – both of which can be divisive. It will take exceptional political leadership to deliver this.
The quickest way to recovery is to scrap vast swathes of European Napoleonic style legislation, and the Public sector and QUANGOS and the mindset you can ONLY do what is allowed. Revert to the English Common Law and the attitude UNLESS it is banned, you can do it. For example. the insanity of rules re energy when selling houses. The law re contracts and honesty plus Caveat Emptor should be the aim. Free the people to achieve what no Government can, to revive economies.
AND stop the vast waste of tax-payers money. We could save a fortune IF we stopped funding arts – Why fund them? Did the Beatles need funding? No, in fact they even wrote a song about the taxman and his 90% demands Does Banksy get funded? Tho it wouldn’t surprise me to find he did.
IF Reform are brave enough the UK could be turned around FAR faster than the pessimists on here think.
The liberal establishment and their lapdog media have several years to destroy Reform. Their agents will be joining, ready to be activated.
I am afraid Britain cannot no longer be saved via the ballot box.
That is possible,m BUT Net Zero is going to destroy any party that backed it AND possibly the very country itself as NO modern society can survive without a reliable grid, AND windmills and solar will NOT provide that. In fact I believe even National Grid is now aware of how close failure could be. Last week they actually sent me an email asking if I was prepared for Power Cuts!
Sad consequence of our political class caring more about virtue signalling than dealing UK voters’ needs and aspirations.
Mass migration and the loss of well-paid jobs in manufacturing is a lethal combination. Add to that a political establishment that seems to be complacent and not listening, and people become desperate enough to vote for anything.
So what happens when people work out that their new Reform councillors are as hamstrung and ‘useless’ as the Tory and Labour councillor they replaced? What then?
“Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons ! “ etc, etc.
i believe, as Charles Stanhope infers, we are beyond the point of “voting for anything”. Violence seems a possibility based on the febrile nature of the country as it descends into the third world. The article, with its uncompleted multi-vignette approach captures the identity-covulsing experience of Britain 2025. Pop collapsing public services, sustained real-term economic per capita decine, and the loss of any hope of a life that just one generation ago was a Briton’s expectation, and you have the ingredients for major conflagration. Since a new settlement is required between state and citizen (rather than resident) and that path cannot be negotiated – as evidenced by refusals to implement and attempts to overturn the will of the people – the ballot box appears to have been exhausted. I doubt that Reform can represent “containment” at this stage.
“…refusals to implement and attempts to overturn the will of the people…”
This, Remoaners and Establishment Blob, is what you’ve brought us to, laid bare in this and other articles setting out the reality of life for the majority of the indigenous population, which includes 3rd/4th/5th generations of settled immigrants from the mid-20th century. They too, have major qualms about the more recent opening of the floodgates since it threatens their feeling of being settled in their country of birth.
It can’t continue. Those who wilfully ignore the populace at large will have their day of reckoning.
Keep in mind that only the state is armed. The folly of bringing knives and clubs to a gunfight is clearly known at this stage of history.
Twas always thus. Certainly since medieval times. But Civil War, “Glorious’ Revolution, French and Russian Revolutions still happened. The circumstances need to be extreme I grant you, but given that, even some lower level – but nevertheless armed – agents of the State might be driven to don the Phrygian cap.
Depends on who the electorate believe are most likely to cut the legal, political and bureaucratic gordian knot that is preventing positive change.
Hint – no-one believes it will be Labour or the Tories
Reform is not the answer with a Muslim as its Chairman and with Farage deliberately avoiding the elephant in the room.
But the Reform Grass roots can sort that ONCE Reform are in power. We have too many dangers threatening UK society to waste time and give the MSM an opportunity to atack to bother with sorting the leadership now. Get into power, start scrapping all Blair’s reforms, Net Zero etc and then we can sort out our leadership.
Net Zero alone is capable of destroying the very state itself. The Grid WILL fail if Miliband keeps up his insane drive for windmills and solar panels AND if the Grid fails for any length of time, what’s left of the economy will AND JIT food supermarkets will run short of food for long periods.
You also wouldn’t want to be in many modern UK Hospitals where vast areas have NO natural light and where modern medicine rests on electric and electronics. We have had THREE warnings of what power failure for only a few hours means for chaos. Manchester and Heathrow AIrports and
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-46371271
National Grid now advertise on the bcak of buses where I live AND possibly because I’m a shareholder, they emailed me last week with the SAME message “Are you prepared for Power Cuts”
Their website has this,
https://powercuts.nationalgrid.co.uk/power-cut-advice
and ironically on the very day the Tories called the last GE, ths Government webpage went up.
https://prepare.campaign.gov.uk/get-prepared-for-emergencies/
It isn’t just immigration threatening the fabric of the UK Society. Lets get Reform in first, then sort out the leadership. What could the leaders do IF 300 MPS all changed party IF it gets that bad? It is not impossible it will, so plan to change from a position of power not as wannabbees
Yes I probably agree with this, Bill. I don’t agree with a lot of what Farage has been saying recently, but I can hope he’s smart enough to be focused first on winning, and then starting to pull us back from the abyss.
The WEF loving globalist government must do an about-face, fast. You need oil, gas & coal. Net Zero is, and always has been, a scam.
Look to Africa and Syria. Southport, Manchester Arena, the so far non-existent inquiry into Islamic rape gangs are a sign of what is to come. Even if the English don’t start a revolution, Militant Islam will. Christians are massacred in Africa daily, Syria and parts of the Middle East too, BUT no one in the MSM (or even Unherd as far as I can see) ever likes to mention it. The fact that the UK is far from Christian makes no difference. Hindu, Buddhist none will be acceptable to Militant Islam.
Our Prisons are more often than not being run by Islamists AND that in some cases IS reported in the MSM. Ironically Tommy Robinson in jail and isolation for his own protection has highlighted it in the MSM. Perhaps Pakistan is the State we should look to to get a glimpse of the future England, and perhaps the whole of the UK. Israel may end up the only safe place from Militant Islam.
“neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas)”
The idiocy – it burns!
How can anyone argue, with a straight face, that British patriotism requires us to get involved in a conflict between pro-Russian and pro-Western elements in the Donbas?
Putin is an unpleasant authoritarian; so is Starmer. Putin is content to throw thousands of young men into the meat grinder; Starmer also has no qualms about it.
One of these two villains is intent on demographic change for Britain that is unlikely to be reversible without violence.
Against whom should British patriots direct their ire?
I’m definitely no fan of Starmer… but to lump him together with Putin?!? That’s absurd.
Opponents of Starmer do not have a nasty habit of falling out of high windows. Nor do we have a secret police force to keep people in order (although our police officers do have tendencies in that direction). Nor do we have a policy of assassinating dissidents in other countries.
Opponents of Starmer do have a nasty habit of being sent to prison on trumped up charges, or having the cops break down their door for having the wrong opinions.
Putin is right however. Check out how many Ukrainian brigades, NOT just those labelled Azov, are basically Nazi and only accept like minded Bandera recruits. Putin steps in to protect ethnic Russians, he didn’t take over ALL Georgia or anywhere else, he effectively gave protection to ethnic Russians caught on the wrong side of Soviet drawn borders. Now in Ukraine he may take more than those areas, a land-bridge to Transnistria, everything East of the Dnieper perhaps NATO cause this and now reap what it sowed.
It is also worth noting how Ukraine basically removed the self-determination aspect of the Crimean Republic, so to claim it is Ukrainian is equally historically incorrect. NATO was warned for decades to abide by the promises not to expand East or risk War. The 2014 US coup started this war. Putin is likely to finish it. As Hungary’s Orban pointed out months ago. Ukraine is a failed state only surviving on Western handouts. We in the UK should have nothing to do with that war.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html
Ukraine has many faults and is bedevilled by corruption. As indeed is ALL the ex Soviet Union, Russia included.
But Putin invaded ALL Ukraine with the aim to change the regime into a puppet state and annex the entire country. Only Ukrainian citizens willing to fight and Western military aid stopped that happening.
I am not from the London area but when you consider that in 1961 London (and I guess that part of Essex now in Greater London) was 97% white British but by 2021 that percentage had fallen to 37% the rise of the Reform party should not surprise anyone. Even if Reform were to form a government in 2029 (by which time a further 1,5 million may well have joined our shores) I doubt whether the party would be able to do much about it. Even in its darkest days of 1983 and 2019 the Labour Party still had 200 or so Members of the House of Commons. In any event the parties which are either left or left leaning i.e. the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Nationalists and the Greens will do anything to prevent a Nigel Farage premiership possibly by encouraging tactical voting in a multitude of constituencies. The eminent historian Dr. David Starkey believes that the only way forward is to introduce what he calls ‘The Great Repeal Bill’ removing all of what is deemed contentious legislation i.e. the Human Rights Act, remaining in ECHR etc. which has been enacted since 1997 and which would be a mammoth task given all the obstacles. The question is then : If the Reform Party had a comfortable majority would they have the stomach for such a fight?
Many overlook how demographic shifts can intensify over time. Ethnic minorities tend to have higher birth rates and often bring extended family members with them. As certain areas become more diverse, some white residents may choose to emigrate, possible to leave the UK.
I know this might come across as harsh or prejudiced, but it’s the reality I see unfolding.
Tactical voting would NOT work IF ALL BREXIT voters voted for Reform. Farage proved that in the THREE effectively Brexit votes we’ve had. 410 constituencies out of 600 had a Brexit majority. No tactical vote could have beaten them. Farage won a referendum, a European election , then let Boris borrow (then betray) the Brexiteer vote in a General Election. 3 votes, under 3 different voting systems, straight majority, D’Hondt (European Elections) and FPTP for Boris. AND Brexiteers won every one. The ONLY thing that can stop Reform is the Tory voters who think the Tory part is conservative and so vote for them.
Quite frankly, there were more Just Men in Sodom and Gomorrah than there are conservatives in the Tory party (or perhaps in Reform’s leadership, but we can deal with them ONCE in power, NOT before.
Sorry but I don’t accept your argument. It is a fact that since the Referendum in 2016 a fair number of those who voted for Brexit have passed on and I doubt whether they would have been replaced in sufficient numbers. In 2019 yes the Brexit party gained the most seats in the European election but only polled 33% of the vote. And if I remember correctly Nigel Farage disappeared for two years immediately after the referendum. Using phrases ‘such as we can deal with them ONCE in power, NOT before ‘ is simply bully boy tactics more likely to repel any waverers rather than attract them. Like it or not Reform is going to need former Conservative voters if it is to get into power so a period of reflection on your part might be advisable.
A sad but accurate indictment of the Dagenham and Barking that gave us among others, the legends of Greaves, Venables, Brooking and Moore….and the Cortina.
Nigel and his Asian friend look set to make Reform another branch of the post-Partition British uniparty.
Then the party members should plan to stop it. BUT not until they get into power. Reform getting in may also end up producing a REAL conservative party , patriotic enough to attract the White Working class AND Reform voters, The White Working Class who by the way appear to refusing to join the military. Tommy Atkins 2025?
Veni vidi vicit
What benefit to the UK was there in letting the rubbish of the world into England? It was either incompetence or intentional. Both are unacceptable. Only a radical solution can possibly save the country from further decline and stem the decline of the natives
History repeats itself, first as Griffin then as Farage. The ugly soulless urban sprawl and the associated existential vacuity has long been with us. I would be more interested in hearing about the new immigrant economy thriving outside the mainstream which the writer alludes to and then ignores.