Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain? Westminster needs some of Donald Trump's optimism

With the accession of Donald Trump, the Labour government, which had settled on a low-octane replica of Bidenism for its governing philosophy, now finds itself diametrically opposed on every aspect of strategy, policy, and ideology to its imperial overlord. There is no equivalent within Whitehall to Trump’s barnstorming inauguration address, in which he declared that “the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons [and] will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”.

Instead, attempting to match the mood of optimism across the Atlantic, the British government points to a call for a judicial review perhaps one day permitting a new reservoir near Abingdon. While British post-liberals have triumphantly claimed the Trump victory one of their own, it must be honestly admitted this is not the case. Instead, vowing “the future is ours and our golden age has just begun”, Trump’s address represents the political ascent of what has been termed Right-wing Progressivism in the world’s most powerful nation.

Were a British leader to make a similar speech, it could be described as Anglofuturism — a hybrid subcategory among the younger, policy-driven Right, which fuses national tradition with a futuristic drive for rapid technological progress. More broadly, Right-wing Progressivism is a strand of thought driven by effective, modernising outcomes rather than outdated dogma, rethinking systems of governance from first principles. As a recent ASI paper observes, this is a movement whose “adherents look to the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew for inspiration, eschewing traditional political idols”. It is a moment crystallised by Syria’s new foreign minister As’aad al-Shaybani’s onstage declaration at Davos that his “Syria First” vision is inspired by Singapore and Saudi Arabia’s Vision2030. This is a glimpse of the ambitious, tech-developmentalist future of governance from which our own ailing dispensation remains firmly isolated.

Just as Trump’s speech declares America’s liberation from a radical and corrupt establishment, Syria’s political transition is literally a regime change: not simply the switching out of personalities on the throne, but a total philosophical and conceptual reordering of governance. What unites both these visions of the near future and British Right-wing Progressivism is a shared sense of loss, a tragic recognition that something has gone deeply wrong with the society in which we live. As N.S. Lyons observes: “the sheer devotion some display in their zeal for this science-fiction future is itself a sign of the depths of their despair in the actual here and now”. In Britain, it is purely tragic that the most inspiring visions of the future, like Concorde, lie in our past. It is tragic that it requires tinkering with AI prompts to give us visions of Britain as a functioning country, just as it is tragic that 2020s Britain is so unremittingly depressing that our brightest and most creative minds fantasise about whimsical tea parties on Mars, like galactic refugees.

Right-wing Progressivism begins, then, with the recognition that Britain’s dominant vision of progress has failed. It has brought only stagnation, even cultural and technological degeneration: so what does the new dispensation offer in response? When Anglofuturists make the case for building on Dogger Bank to evade planning regulations, is it a serious proposal or an absurdist satire on the British state? The reality is that it is both, because it is the British state that has become absurd. What, then, is this current’s relationship to the existing Westminster state? Is it an SW1 reformist movement, a project of national rejuvenation like that of 20th-century China or Meiji Japan? Or is it a nascent replacement for Westminster governance in its current form?

If Singapore is Right-wing Progressivism’s guiding example of a meritocratic, post-imperial state that achieved progress through rejecting Whitehall’s dysfunction, then another useful analogue, perhaps counterintuitively, is early 20th-century Ireland. There are striking parallels between the ferment of ideas on the younger British Right and the classical nationalism of the 19th and early 20th century. Ireland is, after all, the only example of a nationalist movement breaking away from a sclerotic Westminster and reformulating itself according to a vision of modernity drawn from an idealised national past.

The influential Nairn-Anderson thesis that the British state’s dysfunction derives from Westminster’s political development being arrested at the time of the Glorious Revolution is undergoing a revival (including on the younger British Progressive Right). Yet as Nairn underlined in After Britain (2000), Ireland’s historical path diverged from Westminster because “Irish 19th-century and early 20th-century development was so much closer to European and global norms”. Counterintuitively, Ireland was simply “more ‘modern’ than main-island politics”. Uneven development, even the industrial under-development brought by union with Westminster (and here one can see parallels with today’s northern England), fused with the growing popular perception that Westminster’s rule was both illegitimate and disastrous, creating the cultural and ideological ferment that would soon lead to Irish rebellion and independence.

This restive mood was not so different from the mounting perception on the British Right that the Westminster state in its current form is undergoing an existential, and perhaps terminal crisis of legitimacy. Repeatedly failing, through its own ideological obsessions, at the basic function of any state — that is, ensuring the security of the people — Westminster is eroding its popular legitimacy at a frenetic pace. Indeed, given the ongoing and apparently limitless revelations of the British state’s seeming collusion with rape gangs in northern England, and demographic vandalism against the British people through its commitment to mass migration, the Irish nationalist John Mitchel’s 1845 assertion that “The people are beginning to fear that the Irish Government is merely a machinery for their destruction”, would strike a chord in provincial England today. So would Mitchel’s Trumpian observation that the British administration was “altogether powerless; that it is unable, or unwilling to take a single step…for the encouragement of manufactures, or providing fields of industry, and is only active in promoting, by high premiums and bounties, the horrible manufacture of crimes!” The relationship with Irish nationalism is typological, as through its late-stage dysfunction the Westminster state is birthing a classical nationalism of its own against its own rule, dragging the country towards political modernity. In Nairn-Anderson terms, we can say Britain is finally approaching its second bourgeois revolution.

In a similar way, over just a few decades, as the historical sociologist John Hutchinson shows, Ireland’s rising Catholic intelligentsia abandoned the British imperial identity they had been educated to serve in favour of a cultural nationalism which saw Ireland as a nation with a “distinctive evolutionary path, and its special creative contribution to make to human progress”. Blocked from social mobility by dysfunctional Westminster governance, like Britain’s contemporary Right-wing Progressives, Ireland’s cultural nationalists suddenly adopted resentment against the inefficient, traditionalist, “actively malign” state. They saw their project, like today’s middle-class reformers, as one of “catapulting the Irish nation from present decline to a higher stage of social evolution that would embody a higher synthesis of both the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’”.

Just as this characterises Trump’s declaration of American “liberation” from the ruins of an ossified and sclerotic political order, so does it encapsulate the sociological basis of both Anglofuturism and Britain’s Right-wing Progressive strand more generally. Ireland’s cultural nationalists were drawn from “the educated young who had to break with established authority and regenerate the nation from within”, using a mythicised past not as a comfort blanket against modernity but instead to modernise those traditions. This is now the governing ideology of Britain’s imperial patron, and just as every American political trend is soon adopted in our own backwards province, so will its overwhelmingly popular new dispensation come to dominate the thinking of our own political Right.

There is no failure of the collapsed Biden order that Westminster has not in recent years tried to replicate, spreading it like manure on our own intellectually barren polity. The increasingly overt hostility of the Trump administration and its Big Tech oligarchs to Britain’s faltering government presents an opening that both our Right-wing challenger partners will compete to weaponise: this looming dynamic is certain to dominate the politics of our near future. Just as the object of the Online Safety Bill is preserving the safety of the Westminster class from the British people, in trying to turn the Southport atrocity into a narrative about American Big Tech, we see the Starmer government preparing to pull up the drawbridges of our hermit kingdom, insulating a historically unpopular new government from historical forces beyond its control. Yet there are ideological gaps on the Right too.

The conversion of Westminster’s neoliberal think tanks to immigration restrictionist, free-market developmentalism — a kind of institutional Powellism — is one marker of this ideological shift, yet it also highlights a lacuna in the thinking of the British Right and of the Westminster state generally: the post-industrial Northern aspect of British discontent. Just as it was the Red Wall which carried the Brexit vote, defining the nation’s current political course, so were the summer riots — as striking a marker of volatile popular discontent as can be imagined — overwhelmingly a Northern English phenomenon. The anti-riot rallies in the regime heartland of Walthamstow were notably absent in northern England, just as the grooming gang scandal is itself a product of Westminster’s willed neglect of what was once the country’s engine of modernity, now sinking into a level of peripheral torpor and anomie as grim and politically destabilising as early 20th-century Ireland.

Rather than resolving Britain’s national dysfunction, a programme of regeneration that does not place as much emphasis as Trump’s does on rebuilding Rust Belt industrial capacity and prosperity as on tax and planning reforms risks widening regional equalities, dragging the fissiparous pressures already threatening the state within the Celtic periphery into England itself. The North’s decline bears out Nairn’s 1981 prediction that “the metropolitan heartland complex will become ever more of a service-zone to international capital”, while “the industries and populations of the Northern river valleys will eventually be shut down or sold off”: the result, in Anderson’s reckoning, is that “the nexus” — the British state — “is bound to dissolve, in one way or another”.

Rather than conquering Mars, then, the first goal of Right-wing Progressivism is simply dragging Britain to the developmental level of a functioning northwest European country, building and nation-building as if for the first time. Like its etymological derivations from Afrofuturism and Archeofuturism, Anglofuturism’s focus on Lee Kuan Yew is inherently post-imperial, a kind of Third World developmentalism for the only part of the British empire to never win its self-realisation from the ruins of Whitehall misgovernance. In the quest for national progress, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore broke off the shackles of a sclerotic post-imperial state, and prospered. Surely this is the Anglo-ness of Anglofuturism: not a nostalgic imperial Britishness but an inward-looking programme of national regeneration.

It is Anglo not in the sense of a bombastic, Westminster-led imperial identity but as an explicit rejection of that identity and its consequences, in recognition that Britain’s future progress rests entirely on the British nation’s frustrated human and cultural capital. If by its nature it is postcolonial, it can then be seen as a liberation movement to unshackle the British nation from a governing class which still seeks to be world-beating even as it sinks in global esteem, remoulding the nation into a vast budget airport terminal of global transients, without the attendant security such a transformation requires. The logic of Right-wing Progressivism rests on centring the security and prosperity of the British people over any other global aspiration, or any self-imposed moral obligation, the polar opposite worldview to that of our current governing class. It is the quest to remain world-leading that has left Britain in decline; paradoxically it is only in turning inward that Britain can become a great power once again.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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