In modern Ireland, as the writer Alexander Poots notes, what is most remarkable to English eyes is “chiefly the matter-of-fact way in which the supernatural is discussed”, a diminution of the spectral realm to that of minor inconvenience. At one family party, for example, I was told the story of an otherwise no-nonsense in-law bothered by a ghost that kept pulling the bedcovers off in the early hours of the morning. His eventual response, shouting out “Will ye piss away off ye wee ghostie, I’m trying to get some sleep here”, was apparently successful in quietening the unquiet dead. What made the story worth sharing was the Ulster-Scots-tinged homeliness of his Antrim dialect, amusing to Belfast ears: the role of the ghost itself was assumed as an unexceptional domestic irritant. 

But do I believe in ghosts? It would be difficult to maintain the pose of a dispassionate and level-headed observer of human foibles and say yes. But even still, I have my own story I can and do bring out when the wind and rain lashes against the windows in the dark winter, and the conversation around the fireside turns, as it inevitably does, to such unknowable matters. 

A few years ago, through a combination of impulses both romantic about a simpler way of life and pessimistic about the future course of world events, I removed my family from the coastal Kent townhouse where they were happy to an isolated farm in deep rural Ulster, where they were less so. The farm itself, all 80 acres of bog and woodland and mountain, was surprisingly large for the listing price. The farmhouse, too, though it had been derelict for some decades, was unusually spacious for such poor and marginal land. It had been built, records showed, by a prosperous Protestant tenant farmer in the early 1800s. The stone barns clustered around had been mean cottages once, as part of an older clachan — a communal living and farming arrangement for closely interrelated families that survived from at least medieval Gaelic society until the rationalization and consolidation of unproductive smallholdings into larger parcels, held by tenants who could pay more rent. 

Such was the case, I assumed, with my own holding: within the surrounding boggy meadowland was another, ruined clachan, from whose limestone rubble gnarled hawthorn trees grew and a gushing spring ran forth. The very ground beneath our feet was uncertain. You quickly learned to memorize paths across the fields that would not leave you stuck up to your calves and sinking deeper. Seemingly deep and dark pools of water would suddenly appear in the meadows, and then vanish when you next looked for them. 

Archaeological evidence indicates the ancient Celts felt obliged to sacrifice their wealth in watery places and turbid pools, for mysterious reasons of their own: friends and family warned I had fallen victim to a similar compulsion. In the wettest county of a country not celebrated for its clement weather, when it rained, which was often, both the farm and the house seemed more composed of water than land. At the foot of a steep and rocky escarpment, constantly shrouded in mist, and much of which belonged to me, the setting was beautiful, if you happen to like bleak and inhospitable isolation. Unfortunately, not everyone does. Tradesmen, displaying the practical unsentimentality of rural Ulster, uniformly advised me to tear it down and start again. The only note of appreciation came from the local removals man who delivered my furniture from storage, whistling expressively before saying “there’ll be rare ghosts in here”. 

There is a danger, when writing as an outsider about rural Ireland, of exoticizing or fetishizing the local ways, in a manner that rolls the eyes of the sophisticates of Belfast or Dublin. It was the 2020s after all, in what is at least tenuously part of the UK, with all its retail parks and chain stores and gastropubs and garden centers. But it is the simple truth nevertheless, and a valuable cultural resource of the farm’s immediate area, that folk customs still survive locally from, no doubt, very ancient sources. Even in the county town, a handsome Plantation settlement laid out like an English market town deposited on alien soil, the local Facebook buy-and-sell group is filled with requests for “cures” — either folk remedies, or the services of an otherwise ordinary man or woman, gifted since birth with the magical ability to cure a specific ailment. 

The nearest churchyard to our farm contained the grave of a parish priest, venerated locally for his saintliness in life, from which a teaspoon of his grave soil, it is widely believed, will cure most ills. Rationalists will be reassured to learn that, according to medical science, this may well be true. Either way, so widespread is this belief still that a laminated notice next to the grave provides clear instructions in warning capitals: “ONLY A SPOONFUL OF SOIL SHOULD BE REMOVED AND MUST BE RETURNED TO FR MCGIRR’S GRAVE ON THE FOURTH DAY”, with dire if unspecified consequences for those who fail to heed the stern advice. 

The farmhouse itself had been empty for decades, having been abandoned at the death of the elderly bachelor farmer who had owned it. Yellowed newspapers, agricultural calendars and farm subsidy paperwork lay scattered around, along with stacks of turf for fuel in an outhouse, and a broken Child of Prague statuette to summon forth good weather for haymaking. So much soil had been washed down, over the years, from the hill behind us that the back of the house seemed half-underground, the windows opening directly onto a disconcertingly vertical wall of grass. The great stone slabs that made up the floor had been laid directly on the soil, and a musty, earthy smell rose up from them. So did, at times, a sudden strong whiff of pipe smoke, a sharp and fresh vestigial memory of earlier occupants dislodged, no doubt, from deep within the house’s fabric by my DIY renovations. 

The house had been built according to the ancient, formalized pattern of Irish cottages, with rambling outbuildings and three large rooms on the ground floor, extended upwards by an extra floor at some point in the 20th century. The central downstairs room was dominated by the giant stone hearth, blackened with two centuries of turf smoke, around which, traditionally, the family would have lived and worked and cooked and slept. The room to the east became my office. I chose the “West Room” — the traditional formal room, warmed by the hearth wall, and preserved for honored guests, or in older times, family elders approaching death — for the kitchen. As a reserved, formal space, filled with furniture not to be touched, and crockery not to be used, the idea of the West Room still, just, lives on among older Irish people as the “good room”. But as the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg observed, well into the 20th century the traditional cottage west room “had still another association, of a supernatural cast”, being a room treated “with respect and perhaps a little fear”, for “traditionally the west is the land of the dead”. 

As a kitchen, certainly, my wife found it both wanting in domestic comforts and an unpleasant space in which to spend time. But for me, the entire package was perfect: it was exactly the kind of place my grandparents had fled at the first opportunity. Moving in before the rest of my family, to make it habitable, I had the electricity reconnected for the first time in decades, and running water installed for the first time ever. Until then, I collected and filtered drinking water from the spring, precariously hauled back over the quivering bog in steel buckets. I used my outhouse composting toilet with smug satisfaction and washed myself with ice cold water in a ewer and bowl: here, I told myself, I would find the peace and isolation to write my Great Book.

The concept of the book — I still regret that it will never now appear — was that through the history of the land I now owned, its tenants and landlords, I would be able to tell the history of the county, Ulster’s wildest and least populated, and the only part of Northern Ireland that could reasonably claim to be part of Ireland’s remote and underdeveloped West. The overarching theme was that the English conquest of this part of Ulster, where isolated colonial settlements hacked out farmland from the wilderness, fearful of raids from the deep, surrounding forest, and the tribal warriors lurking in it, both presaged and explained the course of colonialism in America, where many of the first settlers promptly moved on to more forgiving land. 

There was no shortage of local color for the book, regarding either rural drama or the patterns of agrarian resistance and rebellion that so excited my imagination. An early 20th-century predecessor, a widow, had been poisoned by her nephew, I was informed by a farmer neighbor, who grazed his cows on my pastures according to the age-old conacre letting arrangement, still legally beginning on Bealtaine and ending the first morning after Samhain, or Halloween. “I never thought we’d see another family in here,” he added. A nearby cavern — the limestone crags around, including what was then my own sliver of mountain, are pitted with the deepest cave shafts in these isles — is known as Noone’s Hole, commemorating an informer against the Ribbonmen, the secret society of Catholic agrarian rebels, who was waylaid from a cottage dance and thrown into the abyss. There is a 19th-century novel on the murder, drawing on local traditions, and written by the “Bard of Knockmore”, Peter Magennis, teacher at the old National School directly opposite my farmhouse. In the novel, the peasant wedding party from which he was abducted took place in a cottage directly opposite the National School. There being no other houses for some distance, the coincidence certainly piqued my interest. 

May and June saw a rare heatwave, family barbecues and frenetic renovation. That July — the wettest ever recorded in Northern Ireland — we learned that we were unexpectedly expecting our third child. The prospect of giving birth or caring for a newborn in a house slowly being dragged into the 20th century did not appeal to my wife, a more sensible character than me. The house’s isolation, though romantic enough, admittedly lacked certain practicalities. The only phone signal — which came with a WELCOME TO IRELAND text, so close was the house to the border — could be attained at the foot of our boreen, a long walk in the rain that swiftly palled when authenticating bank transactions or making work calls. If you left the place for a week or two, you would come back to find the wooden furniture, and books and leather items covered in a thin film of bright green mold. 

The pregnancy was not an easy one for my wife, who suffered terribly from hyperemesis. When not in hospital, she was confined to her bed by nausea, watching the lashing rain against the window and the fire in the grate, far from friends and family and with sufficient time to reflect on the drawbacks of a rural isolation she had not been enthusiastic about in the first place. Over the early course of the pregnancy, she became convinced that the house was imbued with the presence of a woman, who had suffered great sadness, and that this presence had now become intolerable. Certainly, when you were alone in the house, you never actually felt alone. The instinctive sense the consciousness has that another person is present, waiting in the room next door, or sometimes moving between rooms, could not be shifted. Sometimes, you would find yourself looking up sharply towards the door to greet an arrival who was not there. 

But there were of course rational explanations, as I repeatedly suggested. My wife was gravely ill, the change of lifestyle was dramatic and abrupt, and the living conditions represented a sharp downgrade in comfort and familiarity. Of course, I suggested, she was projecting unhappiness with her circumstances onto the fabric of the house itself. This was perfectly natural and understandable, and would resolve itself once the baby had been born and the house was finished and the weather improved. Perhaps, as science suggested, it was the presence of mold in a damp and until recently derelict house causing us to imagine things that were simply not there. Maybe, as a rather dubious theory claims, the stone walls were themselves imprinted with some kind of emotional memory, palpable but neither sentient nor supernatural. No doubt the freakishly horrible weather was instilling some form of cabin fever in us. These discussions, when the children were asleep, went back and forth. When one morning our elder son asked who the woman who sat in his room at night was, that was the end of the debate. My family removed themselves to sunny and ghostless Greece while I was instructed to prepare the farm, rather unwillingly, for sale.

At least, writing my essays, staging the property for any similarly romantic or reckless buyers, I didn’t feel alone in the house. If there were a presence there, a question on which I still have no firm answer, I did not find it objectionable. Indeed, perhaps over-confident of my personal charm, I sometimes told myself I would win it over. “Oh, it’s you,” I would say to myself as I got a sudden whiff of pipe smoke, looking up briefly from whatever essay I was engaged in. When, the morning after my only Halloween in the house, I woke up to find the front door I was certain I had locked wide open, the only possible response was “Sure, why not?”. I was ambivalent then, as I am now, about the existence or otherwise of ghosts, though insofar as I could blame them for giving up my beloved farm, they had become more than a minor inconvenience. There is only one single occurrence that, whenever I am asked if I have experienced a ghost, causes me to pause for a second, weighing up how my interlocutor will receive the answer, and reply “Maybe”.

Alone in the house one wet November night, the wind howling off the mountain, I was drifting off to sleep, wrapped up in bed in front of a coal fire, when I heard a woman weeping in the bedroom across the landing. In my half-sleep I assumed it was my wife, suffering the turbulent emotions of a difficult pregnancy, and got out of bed to comfort her. But why is she in this room, I wondered to myself as I approached the door, before remembering that she was not, and that she was in Greece. I stood at the threshold, not opening the door, and the weeping continued. I went back to my bed, and the weeping still continued, for some, rather unsettling time. All the rational explanations I gave my wife apply to me too, of course: it was a strange and emotionally draining time, in an unfamiliar and seemingly luckless environment: whatever pride I may feel in my cold rationality, my sense of perception is not infallible. 

Eventually, I sold the house and farm at auction, and when the movers returned, on the long drive together to our new house in Belfast, they asked, after a polite period of discretion, why our sojourn there had been so short. I made an offhanded laugh and said my wife thought it was haunted. “Oh, she’s right there,” they said. They had hated the job, they told me, and hated being in the kitchen most of all. “It’s quare haunted, that place,” the burlier of the two men told me, the both of them saying that as soon as they left the grounds, both the first time and then, they felt they had been freed from a dark and oppressive presence. “Even just now, I couldn’t wait to get out, sure it would make your blood run cold staying in that house.” 

The two of them regaled me, laughing at the memories, with tales of other haunted houses in the locality they had worked in, of which there were apparently many. The driver’s assistant, a large and otherwise phlegmatic working-class Protestant, told me that he rented a house in a nearby village, built on a Famine mass grave, whose spectral residents kept turning on his Sky TV and toaster whenever his girlfriend came round, to the point she now refused to stay over. The stories themselves were less remarkable than the matter-of-fact way in which they told them. My wife’s course of action was sensible, they agreed, my own pose of indifference unnatural and rather irresponsible. We’d bought a house that turned out to be haunted, it’s annoying, but sure it could it happen to anyone, and often does, they reasoned, before asking me which football team I supported. 

So do I believe in ghosts? No, I’d say. Well, perhaps. The house was a strange place, certainly, but then it was a strange time. There are rational explanations for everything recounted above, no doubt more plausible than the spectral presence of unhappy women, or long-dead farmers, or renegade Ribbonmen. Blaming my failure on ghosts is, perhaps, an easier answer for all involved than the alternatives. Years on, far away from it all, in a fully-equipped and comfortably ghost-free house in a leafy part of Belfast, an unsettling year in the countryside has faded into a strange anecdote, one not unusual in itself in a society that takes pleasure in retelling such stories with a display of matter-of-fact indifference, real or performed. 

If Ireland has a gothic sensibility at the best of times, that of Ulster is even more so — a notable strength of modern Northern Irish writing. As Reggie Chamberlain-King, editor of Black Dreams, a collection of “Strange Stories from Northern Ireland”, observes, “if the weird intrudes on the post-conflict writing of Anna Burns or Jan Carson, that is because the weird was there at the time of writing.”

The Donegal historian Breandán Mac Suibhne suggests the purported 19th-century haunting of a farmhouse in windswept, isolated Fanad is attributable to the shifting political balance of the era, the ghostly presence being an outward projection of Protestant fears. As he writes, “while the story of the ghost, in its first telling, can be read as concerning the overcoming of a colonial past and embracing of a republican future”, it is also “a parable about the need for vigilance given an omnipresent threat to the status quo”. Change, particularly unwanted change to a previously secure and comfortable existence, is by its nature unsettling, and can manifest itself in strange psychological projections. Britain’s uneasy politics, haunted by an ancient past, real or imagined, and an uncertain and threatening future, is surely proof of that. If there is any meaning to any of it, perhaps the acceptance of uncertainty, and of the shifting ground threatening suddenly to open up deep beneath your feet, is the very point. 

But at Halloween — the one festival of the Gaelic calendar, and of the ancient beliefs behind it, to have imposed itself on the English cultural consciousness — it is customary, when the nights draw in, and the wind rises, and the veil between the seasons reaches its thinnest point, to share such stories, and to shiver at the difference between the chill outside and the warmth within, and at the risk of the firewall between them being, if only for one night, removed. Did it happen, and to me? Maybe. But then, sure, couldn’t it happen to anyone? 

Since May, Tirana’s central boulevard had been the scene of the peaceful, and joyful “Flamingo Revolution” protests, named after the animals supposedly threatened by the Kushner-led coastal development project in the southern village of Zvërnec. But if the “Flamingo Boulevard” of the summer was a protest movement that styled itself as a revolution, what is happening now is an attempted revolution that styles itself as a student movement. The demonstrators are attempting to overthrow Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, elected for a fourth consecutive term only last year, with the aim of installing a caretaker technocratic government before new elections. On Saturday, it looked for a dramatic few hours like they might succeed. Thousands of protesters had filled Tirana’s main boulevard, pressing right up to the Prime Minister’s Office, Albania’s seat of government. Masked and black-clad youths kept pushing forward with howls of joy and rage against the water cannon and shield walls of riot police, cheers going up as petrol bombs exploded in flames against the armored trucks, forcing them to retreat. If the underlying causes — an end to political corruption, greater social spending, an entirely new political system — are the same as before, the mood among the protesters has become newly fierce. Gone is the summer’s disaffection with Edi Rama, replaced by a burning, visceral hatred.

More from this author

Inside the Albanian revolution

By Aris Roussinos

Whenever the rioters wavered, chants of “Down with the dictator, Down with the communists” rang out, motivating them to push forward once again into the thick clouds of tear gas, hurling back the CS canisters, and aiming fireworks at the police ranks. Hijacking a parked car, the protesters rolled it towards the police lines and set it aflame, forcing the police to retreat. Young women in gym wear and Covid masks, and young men in black tracksuits and ski masks ran as close to the police as they could to hurl their missiles, jeering and cursing at them, the men often thrusting their groins at their opponents to indicate, in a manner it does not take a fluent command of Albanian to understand, what they wished to do to the officers. Dozens of times that Saturday night, I had to escape from the choking tear gas; every time, within seconds, a volunteer ran up to squirt distilled water in my eyes, an indication of the impressive and seemingly organic level of student organization behind the protests. Tea, a 21 year old math student, asked me where I was from as she squirted water into my eyes. England, I spluttered. “Then you don’t know us Albanians, we are crazy as fuck,” she laughed. “He is going, and we are going to make him go, as quickly we can.”

At a pavement cafe near the protests, I met Genc Pollo, a prominent conservative intellectual and politician, and a strong critic of Rama’s government. An urbane figure, it was a surprise to see him with swimming goggles perched on top of his head, an attempt to keep out the tear gas from the protests he now observes nightly. If the Flamingo protests had been listened to by the government, he told me, all this violence could have been avoided. “But the answer from the government was mostly derision, mockery, calling them foreign spies, calling them algorithmic manipulators, and the usual stuff.” Instead of concessions, “immediately, with the police, replying with tear gas and batons, and now rubber bullets, it turned into a violent confrontation. That is “a very logical evolution of the situation. Should the frustration, and the discontent, and the legitimate grievances have been really dealt with, not with decoys, not with propaganda, and on the top of that, derision for the protesters, it could have been channeled into peaceful ways, peaceful solutions, and arrangements.” Was there a solution that ends with Rama still in power? “I don’t think that’s possible,” Pollo told me. “Since it has become tense and also violent, I don’t think it will last as long as the Flamingos. By the nature of it, I mean if it’s either way, it will be decided in a shorter time frame.”

Back on the boulevard, beneath the din of the tear-gas grenades, I asked Jurgen, a  20-year-old law student, why he was here. “Because of the corrupt government and everything that has been happening in the past 13 years,” he told me “The PM will resign, hopefully this weekend, because of the mass protests, he should reflect on that. We gave him 140 days of just asking nicely, he didn’t listen, so now things took a turn. This is the result of not listening to the people of Albania. I cannot name a single thing he’s done that has benefited me as a student or as an Albanian.” Behind him, a group of older women, one in a hijab, were busy tearing up the cobbled pavement and filling a wheeled shopping trolley with rocks to be trundled towards the young men at the front. Indeed, for a Gen-Z protest, there were a surprising number of men with gray hair at the forefront of the clashes, hurling rocks and metal poles at the police lines.

While the violence is led by students and schoolchildren, the polite middle-class protestors of the summer have been joined by older toughs, with indications that ultras from Tirana’s football firms have set aside their rivalries to unseat their embattled Prime Minister. To the chants of “Rama resign” and “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail” from the peaceful summer protests have been added a new one: the slogan of the Balli Kombëtar, the Right-wing Second World War resistance movement: “Albania for Albanians, Death to Traitors.”

For many protesters, however, it is contemporary geopolitics that most concerns them. “Rama will go,” one man in his 30s told me, “but he will only go when other nations, America and Europe force him to go, because he has a bad personality, he is difficult, and also because he is implicated with criminal gangs, and with Israel.” If the Kushner-led Zvërnec project was the spark for the summer Flamingo protests, a broader sense that the Rama government is too close to Israel has led to widespread conspiracy theories that Tel Aviv has sent reinforcements and crowd control equipment to the Albanian police, and that Rama has sold the country out to Israeli interests. Among the many demands for revolution scrawled along the walls of the boulevard was the terse spray-painted message: “Fuck the Jew Rama.” In a country that is fiercely nationalistic even by Balkan standards, multiple shades of political opinion, both Left and Right, have now converged on a joint struggle to overthrow the government. I asked Eldison, a 20-year-old software engineering student, if the Flamingo protests had become a revolution. “It was always a revolution, because we are fighting for our future, our rights, our country,” he said. “Rama won’t resign, but he will kill himself.” Why, I asked. “It’s kind of Jewish stuff,” he shrugged.

The Albanian government did not grant a request for an interview, instead offering to respond to a set of written questions. When I sent a detailed list, it didn’t answer them, instead forwarding me a transcript of Edi Rama’s television address in which he blamed antifa, “neo-Communists”, “neo-Ballists”, the political opposition and Iran for the disturbances. At a café in a shopping mall, I met a prominent Socialist Party insider who granted me an interview on the condition of anonymity. “What is new now is that there was this very sudden explosion in terms of attacking public institutions, destroying public offices,” the insider told me. “But I guess there’s also the element of the police doctrine linked to it, in the sense that there was an effort in the very early days, at least, to sort of let them let steam off.” The explosive rhetoric, meanwhile, which the insider blamed on “bots,” was also apparently new. “What do the bots say? You have sold this country to Israel. You are all thieves, that’s the second element. And we are gonna kill you and burn you. So these are the three overarching themes.”

The rhetoric was becoming increasingly dark, my interviewee told me. “The last time Albanians have called other Albanians traitors, it was in 1943, 1945, 1944. And it’s so out of context now, but again, this is a generation that does not understand the specificity of that word in Albanian history. And for me, it’s very dangerous.” Indeed, “there are three things I fear in terms of keeping me up at night,” the insider told me. The first was rising inflation of essential goods, carried over from Albania’s main trading partners Italy and Greece. The second was that the heightened rhetoric might cause a death, after which things could spiral out of control. The third, they said, was an unwillingness to explore constitutional means of resolving the impasse, in favor of absolute victory. “That’s why I’m a bit bemused by them saying, like, ‘We need a political answer to this crisis’, I mean, if you go to the government and say, ‘Look, before we talk, you should step down’, it’s a diktat. It’s not a political solution, right? It can be a political outcome, but it’s not a political beginning of the sentence.” Will Rama step down? “No, but there are discussions in terms of what’s the method forward.” The interview over, our smalltalk was abruptly ended by their driver coming up to warn them that protestors had reached the area, and that they should leave. This protest, like almost all the protestors’ gatherings now, was quickly dispersed by the police’s liberal deployment of tear gas and water cannon.

At the headquarters of Albania’s conservative opposition Democratic Party, I met Belind Këlliçi, the party’s young and American-educated vice-chairman. In his office, with signed photographs of Donald Trump and JD Vance framed on the wall behind him, a jumble of gas masks and plastic body armor sat on the floor. The night before, police had fired volleys of tear gas into the compound, in what Këlliçi told me was part of a plot to have agents provocateurs burn it down and blame it on rioters. I asked Këlliçi what he meant by his tweet the day earlier, which said that: “This monster who demands blood at any cost deserves the fate of every dictator who has been dragged away by his own people.” “[Rama] is a dictator, and he’s the head of the first narco-state in Europe,” he answered. “I say that the Socialist Party is not my enemy. It’s my political opponent, but for what Edi Rama has done to the Socialist Party, and if you can check the records in the last decade, you have dozens of ministers, mayors, members of parliament, and high-ranking officials that are in jail for either corruption, drug dealing, stealing money, money laundering, and other affairs.”

I asked Këlliçi what will happen next for Rama’s government. “I cannot tell you within this month or within this calendar year, but I’m very positive that within a very short period of time, in the next few weeks or months, it will be forced to leave,” he said. “There is no way that people can go on with this. There is no way that we will go in parliament and pretend it’s business as usual. We will not do it. We will stand by the students. We will stand by the protesters. We will do everything in our capabilities to support and protect them.” In terms of the coming days, Këlliçi claimed, “We have received a tip from his closest team within the Prime Minister’s office that he’s trying to have a fatality in the protest. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the students or from the police forces. He’s trying to use it as a justification to stop immediately the protest and to find a way to come to an agreement with the students and to say that this is enough, you cannot take it anymore, one fatality is enough, and we have to find a political solution.” But, Këlliçi added, “I don’t see the students stopping. I don’t see the civilians, the people of Tirana and other cities stopping.”

Certainly, the street violence, which now comes in waves of lulls and escalations, has not ended, and neither have the mass rallies, which have now been joined by striking university lecturers and teachers. On Friday, I’d joined the protesters outside the Ministry of Education on Durrës Street, which has become the hub for morning protests, before a far larger crowd gathers later in the day along the government boulevard. The police assumed a defensive posture, huddled around a water cannon whose nozzle twitched and dripped in anticipation of the violence to come. A line of schoolgirls linked arms and pushed to the forefront, daring the police to blast them away, which, after male protesters ran from behind them and began to throw stones, they did, first with blasts from the water cannon, and then with volleys of tear gas. I asked one of the girls for an interview. “My parents would not be happy,” she said, lowering her Covid mask. It would be anonymous, I said. “Oh, OK,” she replied, “We are here to bring down the dictator Edi Rama,” smiling happily before running away at the next round of gas.

Women were as prominent at the forefront of the fighting as men, one woman in her 30s wearing pink angel wings running right up to the police to hurl a rock into their faces, another young hijabi in modest clothes smashing a cobblestone against the curb then throwing it at the police, skittering away laughing. Later that evening, as the crowd of protesters outside government buildings on the boulevard morphed into a riot, I watched as a few hundred protesters began ripping up the cobbled pavements and hurling the stones at police. Some climbed onto the parliament building and smashed the windows with steel bicycle racks, trying to batter down its thick wooden doors before being dispersed with volley after volley of tear gas in fighting that went on through the night. In the first days of the riots, the government tried to project an air of normality, sending in overnight teams to clear away the wreckage and paint over the slogans on the walls, no doubt hoping that the protests would fizzle out naturally. Yet at the very least, large crowds smashing the windows and doors of parliament and the Prime Minister’s palace to burn them down is surely a distraction from normal parliamentary procedure. For over a week, Parliament was suspended as the riots overtook the capital’s daily life.

Each side, government and protesters, blames each other for the violence. On Friday and Saturday, it appeared from the scene that the police used force only defensively, after coming under sustained assault, or in an attempt to prevent the storming or destruction of government buildings. But in an attempt to prevent an Albanian Maidan in the capital’s seat of power, the police have evolved new tactics of dispersing attempted concentrations of protesters with water cannon and baton charges, rubber buckshot fired from shotguns, and constant volleys of tear gas, which hangs around the city center like a thick Dickensian fog. Potential rioters are pre-emptively arrested by police snatch squads, sometimes seemingly at random. At night, operators from the elite police special forces unit RENEA surround the Prime Minister’s office, where they make their disinclination to be photographed assertively clear. But if the police’s new tactics have eased the threat to government buildings, the result, so far, has been to push the violence into surrounding streets, as knots of rioters fight evening running battles in the main shopping boulevards and narrow alleyways in between, smashing up banks and CCTV cameras and erecting impromptu barricades of burning bins and street furniture to slow down the police vans chasing them, and throwing firecrackers and pyrotechnics into government buildings along the way in an attempt to burn them down.

The protests, and riots, have swiftly evolved from a shock event into part of the fabric of Tirana’s daily life, a new normality for Albanians to navigate, with all its inconveniences and strange advantages. The kiosk where I was accustomed to buying my preferred local cigarettes has been burned down, like many others in the city center. On the other hand, crossing the road, a hazardous enterprise in ordinary times, has been made easier by the destruction of all the center’s traffic lights, forcing drivers to begrudgingly stop for pedestrians. The television news channels are now devoted to rolling coverage of street battles, filmed by gas-mask wearing cameramen perched atop vans. Pavement diners in restaurants and cafés watch the disorder like football fans, restaurant owners hand out bottles of water to passing rioters to shouts of “bravo”, and confused tourists choke at the tear gas as they leave their hotels, trying to make their way between the clashing lines of demonstrators and police.

Along Mine Peza Street, one of Tirana’s main thoroughfares, almost all the shops are shut, with A4 signs proclaiming “We are with you! Please don’t destroy our business!” taped to the metal shutters. At the landmark Taiwan cafe, in a park beside the main boulevard, I watched burly security guards order away riot policemen attempting to enter to arrest protesters. When the police gave up and trooped away, the park erupted in cheers and clapping. With both sides digging in for the long haul, the battle to come is for the patience and goodwill of Tirana’s wider population. In one busy shopping street, I saw passersby remonstrating with rioters attempting to burn down a bank, gesturing angrily at the occupied apartments above. “I’m disgusted at this,” a café owner told me, “Burn down all the ministries, sure, good, but leave private property and small businesses alone. Rama will never leave. I’m 40 years old, and I know Albania will never change.”

Outside the Ministry of Education, I met the 25-year old MP Marjana Koçeku, elected to parliament for Rama’s Socialist Party only last year, and who resigned when the Flamingo protests began. As we spoke, over the loud explosions of tear gas grenades, our conversation was twice interrupted by older women coming up to kiss her, thanking her for her support. “Being part of this group [the Socialist Party] I understood that just by being part and having my vote on their support, I am contributing to the destruction of my country,” she told me. “I think it’s very important to have a deep reformation of the system of the political elite that we have right now, because they are strongly rooted in a mentality of corruption, in a systematic violence of making politics and [its approach] to the citizens. So if this is a safe and healthy solution for our country, I fully support it.” Indeed, she added, “I believe that this protest will not end soon,” she told me. “I expect it to last for some time, and I definitely believe in good and positive results of this protest, and of this movement. The only and the most necessary reflection into political actions that should be coming now from the government part, is the resigning of the Prime Minister, from his government, and from politics at all, because he had enough time to witness what our nation is really looking for, and enough time to understand that he cannot be the right image of leading Albania toward the European Union, especially with all the scandals that have popped up.” I asked Koçeku if the Flamingo Protests had now become a revolution. “Revolutions are beautiful,” she smiled, “I’m looking forward to seeing one in my country.”

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France has not fallen

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In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protesters to gather or hold their ground. The protesters’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy. With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.

Whether or not the protesters evolve new and more effective tactics, as the government has, remains to be seen. The country’s religious leaders — Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic, —have made joint appeals for calm and dialog, hinting at a political transition. But even if the government wished to negotiate with the protesters, it is unclear who they could negotiate with. Over lunch, an exasperated Western diplomat, who had attempted to reach out to the demonstrators, told me that they still don’t know who is leading the movement, or indeed if anyone actually is. The government’s hope, then, must now be that the attempted revolution turns back into a protest movement, with which it can choose to negotiate or else continue to ignore. Winter rains will soon be coming, perhaps diminishing the will of protesters to gather in large numbers, but also limiting the effectiveness of tear gas, upon which Rama’s authority increasingly rests. Another possibility is that the protests will evolve into an electoral movement beyond the control of either main party, as in Serbia, where the two-year student-protest movement looks this weekend to be on the cusp of power. The one thing that could tip the balance, almost everyone I spoke to told me, would be a death resulting from the riots, at which point, I was told over and over again, “anything could happen.”

But for now, two immovable objects, Edi Rama and the protesters, are locked in a battle of wills with no plausible means of de-escalation other than the total defeat of their foe. On Monday, on the boulevard, eerily quiet after the police’s overwhelming use of force the day earlier, I bumped into Bora again. “I don’t like it,” she said, gesturing at the small knot of placard-holders outside the Prime Minister’s office. “If this protest turns back to peaceful, we’ve lost.” She need not have worried: the clashes have since resumed. Overshadowed by turmoil elsewhere in Europe, Albania’s most serious political crisis in years still has a long way yet to go. Perhaps, rather than appealing to EU institutions for mediation, the greater impact will be a disenchantment with a European core not so very different in its essence to Albania after all.

But neither does Kemi Badenoch, whose most striking conference speech contributions lay in casting Reform as a party of dangerous ethnonationalists, and observing, correctly enough, that “there are separatists running not just Scotland, but Wales and Northern Ireland”. That both Burnham and Badenoch feel it necessary to cast themselves as the most fervent defenders of the Union does not bode well for its future.

Indeed, Badenoch’s claim that “our Prime Minister clumsily opened the door to a second Scottish referendum, while his leader in Scotland actively supports one” glosses over the broader likelihood that the transformation of British politics into a multiparty contest — especially when coupled with Burnham’s promise, or threat, of electoral reform — will force a reliance on such unstable and unwieldy coalitions. If Britain’s malaise is unique in its specifics, it is also merely our version of similar dynamics across the Western world. British politics is now increasingly European in its composition, even if its electoral system is not geared to recognizing this fact. Rather than producing strong executive governments, the effects of first-past-the-post voting in a country with multiparty politics have been to consolidate permanent political crisis, further destabilizing the Westminster system, and weakening the central state. Looking at our closest comparable European neighbors, France, Germany and Spain, we are offered a selection of possible British political futures, none of them particularly appetizing.

In France, the ongoing riots seem certain to strengthen the National Rally’s chances of victory in next year’s election. Yet they are also merely an amuse bouche before the rioting and mass protests that an NR victory would bring. The cordon sanitaire of the center parties has now apparently shifted from blocking cooperation with RN to isolating the Left-populist La France Insoumise, a rather more full-throated version of the brand of politics driving Polanski’s version of the Green Party, from power. The political center is perhaps stronger in Britain than in France: as it stands, there seems little likelihood of Reform winning an outright electoral victory on the scale the polls predict for Le Pen’s party.

In Germany, meanwhile, the center-right CDU’s historic electoral collapse at the hands of the AfD has found the party reaching a historical nadir of around 20% national support: a figure comparable to that which the Conservatives currently achieve as part of what her outriders insist on calling, with little supporting evidence, the “Kemi bounce”. In Germany, the objective electoral logic is for a consolidated Right-wing coalition government. But given the taboos around the radical Right most fervently held by Germany’s political class — and gifted, by Germany’s historical experience, to the rest of the Western world — the more likely outcome is either the CDU’s total collapse or the absorption of its surviving rump into yet another unwieldy and unstable coalition, there merely to keep the AfD from power. It is not fanciful to see such an ungainly political chimera assembling itself in Westminster, too, in a Great British Brandmauer against Reform which may well block the party from power for another electoral cycle, but will accelerate the cynicism and disaffection increasingly felt by Britain’s voters for their political system.

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Nothing can stop the break-up of Britain

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But perhaps the closest near-future analogy is to be found with Spain, where the governing Left party, propped up by peripheral separatists, has been forced to call an early election following its loss of support over widespread corruption and a willful mismanagement of migration represented as a principled moral stance. If the Ceuta incursion showed how impatient other European leaders now are with Madrid’s attitude to migration, it is the Spanish electorate who are set to deliver the final blow.

Judging by the polls, the most likely outcome is some form of coalition government between the center-right Partido Popular (PP) and the radical-Right Vox: a nationwide extension of the ruling coalition in devolved Andalucia, once a stronghold of Left-wing political organization, but whose governance has been carved up between Vox and the PP since 2018. As it stands, Britain’s party of government commands a similar level of popular support as Spain’s governing PSOE, though neither party of the Right approaches that of the PP. No party in Britain approaches the popularity of either the National Rally or the AfD. The CDU’s polling nadir, a historic disaster for them, is vaunted as a triumph of Badenoch’s leadership by her lobby outriders, when the same level of support is achieved by the Conservative Party. The options available to the European center-right thus vary according to circumstances: in France, where it is subordinate to the National Rally, some form of tacit coalition; in Spain, where the PP is dominant but not strong enough for majority government, an overt coalition with Vox; and in Germany, where both continuing the firewall against the AfD and coalition with it invites electoral disaster, merely further collapse.

Let us apply the lessons of European multiparty politics to Britain’s new multi-party system. If the most obvious barrier to a Reform government is a coalition of Labour and the broader liberal and Leftist center, then the most obvious prospect of a Right-wing government lies in an electoral coalition between Reform and the Conservatives. That this does not seem possible seems to derive more from the personal antipathies between the rather histrionic personalities involved (as shown by Badenoch’s conference speech contempt for the “drama queens” who abandoned her party for Reform) than it does from any real questions of political principle. In terms of immigration and border security — the central issue destabilizing British politics, and indeed the rest of Europe — there is very little to distinguish between the policies of the two major parties of the Right. Zia Yusuf’s rhetoric may be more intemperate, but both Reform and the Tories now stand on the principle that the asylum system, in its current iteration as a costly and wildly unpopular form of welfarism for the entire world, is dead. Unpalatable though it may be to either party, or to either party’s voter base, the electoral mathematics of turning this from rhetoric into law currently lies in coalition. It is odd, then, that Badenoch devoted such energy in her speech, so rapturously received by her loyal commentariat, to erecting a new moral firewall against cooperation with Reform on the basis of the contentious and seemingly willfully misunderstood topic of ethnicity — which has now become, to no-one’s benefit, a staple topic of British political discourse.

Unlike Question Time panellists or lobby journalists who performatively claim not to understand the meaning of ethnicity, we at least know that Badenoch does, because she has made explicit reference to her own Yoruba ethnicity, and its distinction from her (as of last year renounced) Nigerian national identity. “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian,” she explained to The Spectator. “I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people.” The Hausa and Fulani of northern Nigeria may well be Badenoch’s “ethnic enemies” simply because she has inherited an ethnic identity, which she asserts has given her a “very strong identity about who you are, where you come from, traditions and so on”, and from which she derives both moral and political meaning. The national identity she inherited — Nigerian — was essentially an artificial construct of the British state, and being less meaningful, has since been abandoned. The principles at operation here are the same, in essence, as those in the ongoing debate over Englishness, and perhaps listening to her explain them so frankly might clarify more immediate questions for her fanbase in the lobby.

Indeed, the principles in operation are the same as in her conference-speech claim that the Green Party, by declaring that “Zionism is Racism”, is “seeking to erase Jewish identity”. Evidently Badenoch subscribes to the basic principles of Zionism, which are that the Jewish people are a people distinct from others in the world by virtue of ancestry; that they deserve their own state as a result; and that that home should be in their ancestral land of Israel. Is this racism in the Israeli case? Clearly, Badenoch does not believe so. Would, then, the same principles apply in the British or English case? Here, the answer is less clear. It is notable that, after rebuking Suella Braverman for waving away any claims to ethnic Englishness, Badenoch does not claim herself to be English, instead declaring herself proud to be black and British. Yet Badenoch’s British nationality, through being born in England, was via an avenue shut off by Thatcher’s British Nationality Act in 1981, the very year after her birth. Explaining her motivation, Thatcher told ITV’s World in Action in 1978 that “by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here”, which “is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. Indeed, in such a situation, Thatcher claimed, “people are going to react and be rather hostile to people coming in”. Obviously Thatcher did not foresee that four million people would enter Britain just within the term of the last Conservative government, a turn of events characterized by Badenoch as a regrettable but understandable oversight, and whose unrepentant architects remain in frontline Tory politics.

Even given Thatcher’s own opinions, reading the Hansard debate on the 1981 bill, one is still struck by the forthright language on the matter: the past, even the near past, really was another country. The Right-wing Conservative MP John Stokes remarked, in terms Reform would shy from today, that “where immigration has occurred, the immigrant penetration is against the clear wishes of the indigenous population. The ordinary Englishman still clings obstinately to his Englishness and to the old, known ways. He knows only too well that if immigration continues at the present rate the indigenous population will in time be supplanted by aliens and British people will gradually disappear from these islands. It has already started to happen in certain areas.” Given the Conservative party’s present day Cargo Cult devotion to the Iron Lady —  evident even down to the Thatcher-themed trinkets and gewgaws offered for sale at Conference — it is worth asking if Badenoch would consider her political role model, and the government she led, racist? Was Thatcher more or less racist than Braverman or Zia Yusuf? Was she, indeed, an ethnonationalist?

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The English Question

By Aris Roussinos

Thatcher did, after all, note that the recapture of the Falkland Islands was undertaken partly because the Islanders are “British in stock and tradition”, as well as owing allegiance to the Crown. This is a direct appeal to ethnic kinship, but is it now beyond the pale for Thatcher’s most slavish modern devotees? These are interesting questions, to which we should not expect any answers from the Westminster commentariat: expediency, as always in British politics, takes precedence over any coherent intellectual principle. Perhaps the more relevant observation is that, proud of their Britishness while seeking to close off such status to current arrivals, there is really little difference between Badenoch or Braverman or even Yusuf in terms of policy: they are all rather more liberal on the questions of race and identity than the governing Conservative Party of the Eighties. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if a more strident British Unionism might not become the default stance of non-white minorities discomfited by the increasingly purist definitions of Englishness rising on the Right. This would, by definition, place the separatist parties of the Celtic Fringe, whose political success forces the English Question into sharper relief, as their political foes. In any case, the current intemperate rhetoric, politically tempting for both parties of the Right, shuts off the avenues for cooperation the electoral logic currently demands. The result is that rather than stable governance of any kind, Britain seems doomed to descend further into political turbulence and the erosion of state legitimacy.

Even the richest, most stable and well-governed country, luxuriating in a climate of benign international security, can ill afford its politics to be subsumed into such anxious, and increasingly poisonous questions of identity. For modern Britain, which can claim none of the above, the risks are markedly greater. On the Garvaghy Road and Drumcree in Portadown the other week, I was struck by how many riot police I spoke to had “mainland” accents: the erosion of the PSNI’s capacity to manage large-scale disorder, apparent in the race riots of past summers, has led to an increasing reliance on support from British police forces, even at a time that Britain itself faces, for the first time, the endemic risk of widespread disorder, as new groups of ski-masked men daily announce their paramilitary cosplay. England’s South Coast, perhaps not territory for which Burnham has an instinctive understanding, threatens to become his own Southport: but even his home territory of Manchester is now seeing the widespread vandalizing of migrant HMOs, while Glasgow, scene of increasing anti-migrant mobilization with apparent links to Ulster Loyalists, looks like an explosion waiting to happen. Can the British state manage simultaneous summer disorder in, say, Belfast, Glasgow and Gosport? It would seem doubtful in the extreme. Perhaps the best that can be said for the United Kingdom’s unity is that widespread political disaffection and the looming threat of violent disorder has now become a truly national concern.

That all of this is taking place in a climate of extreme international turbulence, with our political leaders urging the electorate to prepare itself for war while themselves doing nothing that would enable Britain to win one; where state capacity is weaker than it has ever been, the fruit of decades of misgovernance by both parties; and where the economy is so palpably weak — none of this restores faith in Westminster’s capacity to pull Britain out of this dangerous spiral. Britain’s already-existing multiparty politics, the unintended consequence of voter disaffection, has not been met among party leaders by the tolerance for coalition government necessary in such a system. Instead, they all chase the fleeting high of a majority government, which has swiftly turned to ashes for every one of our many prime ministers over the past decade.

But if their solutions are unconvincing, at least the somber national mood was apparent in both Burnham and Badenoch’s speeches. It is, after all, the kind of political scenario a country would wish on its bitterest geopolitical enemy. Dwindling state capacity, eroding state legitimacy, rising ethnonationalism among the state’s core population and ascendant nationalist separatism on the peripheries: such is the shared diagnosis of the Prime Minister and his notional counterpart in opposition. Each party leader presents themself as the only solution to a period of long-term political instability: but the structural forces seem to suggest only further rancor and destabilization. Conference season may have provided the Westminster lobby with its customary annual thrill, but for the country’s far less enthusiastic voters, it gave just another glimpse of late-Soviet Britain.

In a famous 1922 speech, Winston Churchill lamented “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”, a literary device for the intercommunal conflict in Ulster which, even as great empires collapsed and new nations were born across Europe, continued with a grim and relentless dedication not far short of romantic obsession. As he remarked, “The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.”

Churchill would not have been surprised to find the steeple of County Armagh’s Drumcree Parish Church as dreary as ever on a wet Sunday afternoon in 2026. In the parish hall, a few dozen Orangemen sat waiting on folding chairs for approval from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to march down a country lane a mile or so towards the Garvaghy Road, a Catholic and strongly Nationalist and Republican suburb of largely Protestant Portadown.

The parade, banned by Northern Ireland’s Parades Commission since 1998, as a result of the drastic uptick in lethal violence its previous iterations caused across the province, had been allowed to take place this year, after the PSNI declared there was little risk of disorder occurring. The PSNI, clearly, was wrong. Thousands of Nationalists and Republicans, from across the whole of Ireland, had gathered since Saturday to join the Garvaghy Road residents who were blocking the route. An attempted start to the march, at its allotted 8am time, had been swiftly abandoned. The Orangemen now sat gloweringly waiting for the nod to go ahead. When I introduced myself as a journalist, one leapt from his chair at the other end of the room to briskly, if politely, frogmarch me from the building.

Outside the church, Nigel Dawson, the Grand Master of the Portadown Loyal Orange Lodge, was more accommodating. “All that’s happening is that we’ve been to church and we’re walking home, and they,” he added, pointing down the hill at the Garvaghy Road, “will have to move, and if they won’t, the police will have to move them.” But on the Garvaghy Road, where loudspeakers blasted Oasis and Kneecap tracks at the line where protestors confronted the PSNI, this did not look like an imminent event. The mood throughout was cheerful: rather than a riot, the intent was to dare the PSNI to use force first, which it did not. Elderly volunteers weaved through the crowd collecting litter.

When messages sporadically boomed out of the armored Landrovers warning the protestors that this was an illegal demonstration, and that they would soon be dispersed, the crowd responded with jeers, mocking laughter, or chants of “SS RUC”. Police negotiators were rebuffed: there would simply be no negotiations. “They can’t arrest us all,” Mary, an elderly local woman told me, “There’s nowhere to put us. Sure they’re already letting out all the rapists.” Mary asked me if “Halloween Face”, by which she meant the DUP politician Carla Lockhart, was still up at Drumcree. When I said she had left, she said “She’ll have turned up for the cameras and then gone on home for her dinner, that’s all they’re good for.”

Certainly, Unionist politicians were, with the brief exception of Lockhart and her DUP colleague Jonathan Buckley, notable for their absence from Drumcree. Politically divided at the best of times, Unionist politicians and commentators were debating on social media whether they had won a great moral victory or achieved a total disaster. For all the detailed local history lessons I was given by representatives of both sides, the simple binary of Northern Irish life is that the march taking place would be seen by both sides as a victory for Unionism and Loyalism over Nationalism; the march being prevented would be seen as victory of Nationalism over Unionism. If the mood was somber and numbers sparse at Drumcree, on the Garvaghy Road, the mood of impending victory had already brought forth a hundred fathers. Politicians from across the whole spectrum of Irish Nationalism and Republicanism were keen to show themselves and be seen, associating themselves and their parties with what had rapidly turned into another historic event, for a movement that lives off the compounding symbolism of historic events.

“The mood was increasingly frustrated as the Orangemen, who had formed up on the road to Portadown, were prevented from moving by riot police.”

The broader Nationalist community, politically dominated by Sinn Féin, contains a bewildering collection of micro-factions of differing shades of political opinion. All had now entirely united at a protest directed and organized by the residents of Garvaghy Road. It was an extraordinary display of cross-class and cross-border political mobilization brought about to quash what seemed to be a sudden, legally-sanctioned reversal of Loyalism’s symbolic fortunes. So total was the sudden display of unity that a number of protestors declared their anger to me that the Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin was not there alongside them, “instead of standing idly by, like his predecessor Jack Lynch did”, one added. Perhaps this displays a certain Northern detachment from Southern political currents — confronting armored police Landrovers at an illegal demonstration would not be a very Micheál Martin thing to do — but it certainly showed the mood of the moment.

Leading the blockade was local man Breandán Mac Cionnaith, formerly of the IRA and currently of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition. A softly-spoken man, Mac Cionnaith was once described by Tony Blair as the most intransigent person with whom he was ever forced to negotiate. He is due to meet with the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Bryant, tomorrow. “The police will not move too many people here,” Mac Cionnaith told me. “And there’s a big difference between today and 28 years ago, when the police wouldn’t even have tolerated this, a majority Unionist, Loyalist police force… in 1985, 1996, 1997, there was no mercy shown here. It took 2,000 troops, and police, to invade this area and put us under martial law in order for an Orange march to go down that road. It’ll never be allowed to happen again.” Instead, he suggested, the standoff threatened the ability of the Orange Order to hold its marches elsewhere in Northern Ireland, as  “it’s actually putting those less contentious marches at risk, because, you know, there’s a lot of support from our communities, Nationalist communities right across the North…. So should we not send a message, well, if you’re going to mess about with the Garvaghy Road, you’re messing about with all your marches everywhere else.”

When rumors reached the crowd that the Orangemen were preparing to move, Sinn Féin MLAs linked arms at the front of the protest, as if daring to be arrested. Sinn Féin’s support has wavered in recent years, increasingly challenged by a resurgent SDLP in Northern Ireland, and hemorrhaging voters in the Republic, most particularly over the topic of immigration. Given the marked increase in immigration to Northern Ireland, even on the Garvaghy Road where a third of residents now have no identification with either Irish or British nationality, it had been theorized, particularly on the Irish anti-immigration Right, that the old loyalties would have little sway with the new residents: they would neither support nor be offended by Orangemen marching down their road for surely incomprehensible local reasons.

Interestingly, this did not appear to be the case. There were a number of African residents blockading the road alongside their ethnic Irish neighbors, and one East Timorese family traipsed along the road cheerily distributing bottles of water and packets of Tayto crisps to protesters. I asked the teenage son, who was the only one to speak English with any confidence, what he thought about the march. “We don’t need it here, this is a Nationalist community,” he told me, nodding vigorously when I asked him if he was himself an Irish Nationalist. Perhaps this dynamic is a result of the association with Loyalism with summer race riots over the past few years, or perhaps the power of Ulster’s traditional ethnic conflict is simply such that incomers happily assimilate into it.

In any case, the “new Northern Ireland”, that hopeful mantra of the country’s politicians and commentators, looked rather more like the familiar old Northern Ireland, revolving around its long-suppressed folkways, than it has in many years. On both sides, the participants dutifully fulfilled the roles allotted to them by Ireland’s history. “Fuck the sash”, “Orange scum”, and “Brits Out” graffiti marked the somber stone walls of the march route — sentiments visually at odds with the new development of handsome detached houses dividing the Orangemen from their unwilling mooted audience. Aside from a large handmade banner proclaiming “From Gaza to Garvaghy Road: Resist Occupation and Fascism”, there was little sign of the Palestine flag so central to recent Irish Republican mobilization: instead it was the Starry Plough of Irish Republican Socialism that fluttered from every lamppost alongside the Irish tricolor.

I asked Gerry Carroll, a popular West Belfast MLA for the socialist all-island People Before Profit party, if he was concerned at the prospect of arrest. “I’m not really bothered about that, to be perfectly honest, you know?” he replied. As for the collection of politicians to be seen, it was, he added, a broad front on display today. “It’s a broad swathe of Republican opinion here, obviously we’re a socialist organization, we are here. Other Left people, independents, people kind of came together. There’s obviously disagreements on many issues, but I think people are united in the fact that if this goes ahead, then there’s this open season for hardline, right-wing Loyalism, and that would be pretty devastating for Garvaghy Road, but also people right across the North…there’s a bigger battle here today.”

At the Drumcree Community Trust community center, a hub for local Nationalists, protesters from across Ireland charged their phones, chatted, dozed on playmats repurposed as mattresses, and drank vast quantities of hot tea. Volunteers produced tray after tray of sandwiches in apparently endless succession. “I have a 25 year old son myself,” Róisín, who had driven up from rural Leitrim across the border, told me. “I called him yesterday morning, and I told him, I’m sorry I wasn’t going to be able to go to Dublin to visit him. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, I’m going to the Garvaghy Road. He said, ‘Where is the Garvaghy Road?’ He’d never heard of the Garvaghy Road. Now, I’m not saying it’s not a beautiful place and a great community, but thank God. My 25 year old, my son, had never heard of it because there hasn’t been trouble in 28 years. And the Orange Order decided they wanted to walk over people in this community and bring back the Troubles again. And to me, it breaks my heart that there’s youngsters out there, the same age as my son, that never saw trouble in this country, and now they’ve been brought back into it again.”

That the march was proposed at all, Paul Doherty, formerly Deputy Mayor of Belfast for the constitutional nationalist SDLP, and now a popular local independent councilor and community activist in West Belfast, told me, was really a story about divisions within Unionism and Loyalism, particularly in the wake of the DUP’s macabre recent legal travails. “We’ve an election next year as well, and I believe the DUP are electioneering, and they’re ramping up tensions in the North of Ireland, here, for political gain. And I think that is quite shocking, and I think they’re dragging people in, who are unelected, people like [Loyalist activist] Jamie Bryson, who are ramping up tensions. I mean, when tensions are ramped up here, when rhetoric is ramped up, we know what the consequences are.” But it had been, he mused, a failure of governance more generally. “I think people need to sit down and reflect upon what has happened here today and the poor decision-making that has come from the top and the impact that it’s had, and the impact that potentially can have on stability here, and for peace in the North.”

Back at Drumcree, the mood was increasingly frustrated as the Orangemen, who had formed up on the road to Portadown, were prevented from moving by riot police, who had now completely withdrawn from the Garvaghy Road, and re-established themselves in a long armored convoy outside the church. “They’re asking me what my plan is and I intend to stay here,” Dawson told me, as his fellow Orangemen stood in ranks behind him. “And I said, listen, that’s the wrong question. You need to answer my question that I’ve asked now five times today. What time are you coming to bring us home? And we haven’t got a response to that yet.” Instead, the police were now informing them that the march could not go ahead for the marchers’ own safety. “We have given a clear commitment,” he told me, “even though we’re not happy with the policing, but we’ve also gave a clear commitment, that we will abide by the direction of the police. That’s who we are and we’re not going to step outside that.”

I asked Dawson, given all the trouble it was causing, to explain to readers outside Northern Ireland why it was so important to march down the Garvaghy Road in the first place, and not choose another route. “So you’ve got to know who we are, first of all,” he replied. “The Orange Institution. So we’re a massive organization, but Portadown District, who I represent, it was the first district ever formed in their history. We were in place before the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was ever constituted, and we came to church in Drumcree in 1807, and have done so on Sundays, once a year, ever since. So this is our tradition, and we are a traditional organization. It’s part of our history, part of our culture, part of our heritage, part of who we are. And that’s why it’s important to us. So that’s why we can’t walk a different route. Because our forefathers walked this in 1807.”

Wearing a Rangers gilet, the Loyalist activist and legal advisor to the Portadown Lodge, Jamie Bryson — a prominent and influential figure in Northern Irish politics — told a crowd of Loyalists who had gathered in support that the PSNI were now asking the Lodge to stand down, “to give them a way out for their appalling policing all day”. But, he added, to cheers and claps, “We will not give them a way out. The PSNI have caused this, they have failed in their legal obligations,” and had a legal duty still to to allow the march to take place. “The only option open to them if they can’t is go to the Secretary of State, cap in hand, and ask him to revoke the determination of the Parades Commission, which he said he had full confidence in. So, it’s a big problem between the PSNI and the Secretary of State, but as far as I’m concerned the Unionist and Loyalist community shouldn’t be solving that for them.”

I asked Bryson, given the PSNI’s seeming incapacity to allow the parade to take place, what this meant for the writ of the state in Northern Ireland. “The law has been completely undermined,” he told me. “We have the First Minister engaged in an illegal protest, on the Garvaghy Road, we have a mob now, the Republican mob, and the PSNI have shown themselves incapable of dealing with this mob. So that’s the present situation.” Asked if he thought, realistically, he would march down the Garvaghy Road that day, he replied “I think that the law has to be upheld. And I think that if it’s not, that the consequences for the political stability of Northern Ireland is going to be absolutely profound.”

While I was up the hill at Drumcree, Sinn Féin party leader Mary Lou McDonald and First Minister Michelle O’Neill were down on the Garvaghy Road urging protesters to stay out “until at least midnight”, when the permission for the march would expire. I asked Bryson if the day’s events would have ramifications for Northern Ireland’s devolved Stormont executive, where Sinn Féin politicians blockading the road share power with DUP politicians accusing their colleagues in government of “participating in an unlawful protest” and “giving two fingers to the police, the courts, and the rule of law”. His answer was instantaneous. “The DUP should collapse the executive in the morning, in my view,” he told me. “I’m not a member of the DUP. I don’t speak for the DUP, but I mean, it’s an intolerable suggestion that the DUP would remain in Stormont.”

Certainly, for Chris Bryant, the risk is growing that his role will suddenly become more hands-on than any sensible Westminster politician would wish. Adding to the many unwanted headaches direct rule will bring to the Burnham government is Reform’s sudden and unexpected interest in Northern Irish politics, shown by Danny Kruger’s speech at the DUP conference last week in which he praised their “Ulster granite” and proposed vague but significant new restrictions on the Common Travel Area. In a Sunday night tweet, Kruger observed that “The First Minister of Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein‘s Michelle O’Neill, has joined an illegal protest blocking a march that is allowed by law. The lawful management of parades was a key article of the peace process and for Sinn Fein to be joining illegal street action is a terrible step backwards.”

While it is common enough for Northern Irish politicians to complain of Westminster’s neglect, they may yet find it preferable to a sudden burst of interest from their British counterparts, in a situation where devolved governance is no longer tenable. One possible next party of British government is, after all, increasingly flirting with Ulster Loyalism, rather than the respectable and ineffective middle-class Unionism with which the Conservative Party is most comfortable. In such a scenario, the logic for Sinn Féin to push for a border poll, already a longstanding demand, becomes almost inescapable.

For the mostly middle-class Orange Order, and the broader swath of working-class Loyalist opinion sympathetic to it, it will not go unnoticed that attempts to follow the letter of the law, and utilize the legally mandated dispute managing mechanisms of the Northern Irish state, entirely failed. The newly traditional summer race riots, on the other hand, both win London and the world’s horrified attention, and swiftly achieve their intended results. In a country where the state’s coercive power is strikingly weak, a march that never took place, of 35 men down a few hundred meters of contested road, may have political consequences far beyond a rainy Sunday in a small Ulster town.

This late-flowering, politicized ethnogenesis among the English people is obviously the direct product of mass immigration, which has had the effect of rapidly diminishing the English population share within their own titular country. It was also obvious, and long-predicted, that the parallel growth and confidence of Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalism would, in turn, midwife an English equivalent. When we add to this volatile mix the obsession, in recent decades, of Britain’s political and cultural class with aping essentialist American rhetoric on racial and ethnic difference, valorizing minority identities while actively seeking to suppress and undermine (or “dismantle” and “de-center”, if you prefer) majority ones, then we see the perfect Molotov cocktail our elites have managed to assemble for us in the coming decades.

Is Rishi Sunak English? The question is so poisonous because it elides multiple distinct but partly overlapping concepts — ethnicity, culture, political identity — and is further obscured by late 20th-century British taboos and anxieties over race. One can be culturally English (as, for good or ill, I am) without belonging to the English ethnic group (to which I do not, being of mixed Greek and Irish origin). Like my suburban Northwest London contemporary Suella Braverman, I have my own ethnic identities, which I have inherited and been socialized in, and do not wish to give up, instead passing them on to my children. This is not a question of race — both Greek and Irish are European ethnic groups — but of ethnicity. I do not feel aggrieved or despondent that I am not a member of the English ethnic group, just as I do not pine to be Japanese or Basque or Hutu. But framing the question, as parochial commentators seem compelled to, as “can non-white people be English?” has, whether through well-meaning ignorance or willful obtuseness, led to the absurd situation where the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, as well as a cultural identity, is either denied or actively suppressed as a barrier to racial harmony. Indeed, for New Labour apparatchik John McTernan — proud possessor of Irish identity and citizenship through descent — “the concept of ethnic English is truly evil”.

At the same time, elements of the online Right are indeed objectively racist, denying English ethnicity to people of part-English origin by virtue of their mixed race. One of their victims, the MP Ben Obese-Jecty, who is half-English and half-Ghanaian, is clearly more English than me, ethnically, because I am not at all English. Given that a significant proportion of the new ethnonationalist Right often do not have to look back far to find non-English ancestors, then a preference for people of European but non-English heritage over non-white people with some English descent clearly shows a focus on racial identity over ethnicity or ancestry — another conceptual matter entirely. If some level of physical descent from ancestors from England were the central factor, then the vast majority of the Caribbean, or even African-Americans, would have a greater claim on Englishness or Britishness than the non-ethnically English descendants of European immigrants, though I have never seen today’s genetic purists make this claim. The racial aspect, on both sides of this debate, then, overwhelmingly obscures the matter supposedly at hand, that of Englishness as an ethnic identity, which is to say the existence of the English as a people, distinct from the Welsh, or the Tibetans, or the Iroquois, or any other of the world’s ethnic groups which are universally agreed to exist.

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Piddington’s very English revolution

By Aris Roussinos

Perhaps the online debate revolves around whether prominent non-white personalities can be definitively called English precisely because the question feels more loaded, and thus more dangerous to comfortably discuss. The existence, or otherwise, of the English as an ethnic group has become, politically, a sub-problem of the continued viability of a tolerant multiracial society within the context of vastly expanded mass Third World immigration. Without the policy choices creating this situation, this entire conversation would not be happening, and these neurotic, increasingly casuistical debates would simply not be taking place. The progressive claim that the English, alone among human societies, do not exist as an ethnic group is so absurd as to be unworthy of discussion: it is simply a means of evading the question of what political importance should be attached to being of English ancestry in the very land named after their ethnic group. If the reasoning is that the path to racial harmony lies in removing the English, alone, from the long list of the world’s ethnic groups, against the will of those who both are and believe themselves to be such, then permit me the adopted English understatement of saying that the outcome will not be positive.

To disentangle, as our purposefully obtuse commentators choose not to, the distinct issues of race and ethnicity, it is more useful here not to ask whether Rishi Sunak is English, but whether Andy Burnham is. Proud of his Irish descent (on his father’s side Irish Protestant from Drogheda, so we must assume of English settler origin), Burnham has made it explicitly clear that of the various regional and national — even pan-continental — identities he holds, Englishness comes last. As Tom McTague observed in his profile interview with the Prime Minister, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity”, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”, an identity which “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth”. With his Derbyshire surname, vanishingly rare in Ireland, no one can reasonably doubt that should he have wished, Andy Burnham could have chosen to assimilate into an English political, cultural, or even ethnic identity. For the most part, it seems he has chosen not to. Politically, he is British (and incidentally is strikingly more Unionist in dealing with Sinn Féin than his recent predecessors). Culturally, his Englishness is regional, urban and Northwestern rather than national: it is perhaps more difficult to imagine him bedecking No. 10 North with England flags in support of the national team than Starmer chose for the British state’s previous London regional office. Ethnically, should he even think in these terms, we must assume it is his “Irish roots” that dominate.

Indeed, when hosting Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin at Makerfield’s Brian Boru club last week, Burnham observed that “I certainly am proud of the Irish heritage that I have in my family. And I was with the Prime Minister of Canada at the new Everton stadium this week… Another Irishman, it wasn’t unnoticed, a Mayo man, I think.” Carney certainly is, or was — he relinquished the Irish citizenship he held from the 1980s on becoming Canada’s Prime Minister — “another Irishman” and “a Mayo man”. On the official Irish Department of Foreign Affairs website, one can find the lovingly-produced document “Aughagower to Canada: A commemorative history of the Carney and Moran families”, a masterpiece of sentimental old country soft power, tracing Carney’s forebears back to their peasant smallholdings, published “on the auspicious occasion of your visit to your ancestral home”. Carney acquired his third, British citizenship through necessity, as is mandatory on becoming Governor of the Bank of England (there is of course no English citizenship to acquire for what is, despite its name, a British role). What makes Carney “another” Irishman to Burnham? Is it citizenship? He is no longer an Irish citizen. Culture? Perhaps, though it is difficult to see exactly how this manifests.

More obviously, the answer is in descent, and the very idea of having “an ancestral home” in the first place. Such descent is a category recognized by the Irish state, like the majority of European states, for citizenship purposes, in a way the British state does not recognize its own British, or even English diaspora, in America, Canada, Australia, or other distant outcrops of the great historic wave of British transcontinental migration. But there is, still, an element of personal choice here: though less Irish, by ancestry, than either Burnham or Carney, that descendant of stout Hampshire yeomen, Joe Biden, chose to identify as Irish, in a distinctively bombastic Irish-American way.

Comparing Irishness to Englishness, then, we see that ancestry is a factor in the Irish case; citizenship another factor (though neither Biden nor Burnham are or ever were Irish citizens); and choice — the subjective matter of personal identity construction, itself a product of socialization from within and without the cultural in-group — the third. It is not any one of these things in isolation, but an interplay of all of them. If British progressives, trying to suppress a politically toxic, and, it is not difficult to foresee, potentially tragic outcome that they have themselves created, now find themselves denying the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, it must be said that much of the newly ethnonationalist Right exists in a similar state of confusion about the subjective element of choice in ethnic affiliation. If ancestry alone were the operative factor, that son of a Birmingham stonemason, Patrick Pearse (who incidentally blamed his “cold nature” and social awkwardness on his “English blood”), would be only partly acceptable as Irish, yet you cannot find even the most extreme neo-Gaelic nationalist online claiming so. When the London-born Englishman John Stephens changed his name to Seán Mac Stíofáin and led the Provisional IRA at the start of the Troubles, it was surely a triumph of will over ancestry, and yet he was nevertheless accepted as Irish by the most zealous Irish nationalists then available. Admittedly, spearheading armed rebellions may be a stiff benchmark for successful assimilation, but the Irish case — so geographically close and culturally similar to England, compared with the vastness of the surrounding world, yet so utterly dissimilar nevertheless — remains, as always, a useful foil to English certainties.

No one, at least until Irish progressives belatedly acquired once-fashionable Anglo-American opinions, doubted the existence of the Irish as a people distinct from others in the world, or that the Irish people, as such, are distinct from the English. Even the latter claim is, at least, still vestigially held by the Irish progressive class as the last remnant of Irish nationalism. Indeed, hapless Ed Sheeran has recently, by virtue of his disinclination to publicly condemn Israel, been stripped of his inherited Irishness by prominent Irish progressives, and presumably condemned to mere Englishness for his sins. This element of politicized cultural negotiation, from within and without the in-group, is neither an English nor a Right-wing peculiarity but an inherent feature of ambiguous cases in what is, by its nature, a socially constructed category. Ancestry, ethnicity, political identity: these are partially overlapping but distinct concepts, for Englishness as well as Irishness.

Yet the fact that many Irish people can claim English ancestry, like Gerry Adams, or Scottish, like Mary Lou McDonald or Conor McGregor, does not negate the existence of an Irish ethnic group, which both partially overlaps with British populations in terms of descent, but is also held in jealous contradistinction as a matter of identity formation. Indeed it is in Northern Ireland, where Irish and British ancestry is most closely intertwined in most families, that the cultural boundaries between them are most rigidly enforced. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth observed in his influential book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, it is the very existence of cultural boundaries themselves rather than the “cultural stuff” they are commonly held to contain, that makes the distinction between ethnic groups. The ability of individuals, in very particular and mutually negotiated ways, to slip between them, rather than deconstructing ethnic groups, reifies them as culturally meaningful categories. Ancestry, real or fictive, is an element, even a large element, in the existence of ethnic groups, but the two terms do not overlap entirely. Both sides in this interminable debate are conflating related but distinct concepts, and poisoning a debate that will result in serious real-world consequences for millions of people.

So when Jacob Rees-Mogg can claim, to online outrage, that the English are a “mongrel people”, then this is something that can be said of every ethnic group on earth outside uncontacted Amazon tribes or Andaman Islanders, it is not particularly meaningful. Even Winston Churchill, in his popular work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, took great pleasure in ascribing different temperamental characteristics of the English “race”, the common late-Victorian usage for what we would today term “ethnicity”, to the various ancestral strains in its makeup. Churchill, who was half-American of English descent, certainly did not intend to deny the existence of an English ethnic group: indeed, his work was intended to explain what he predicted as its domination of the earth, or at least justify the handover of power he oversaw from its mother country to its New World successor empire. It is sadly ironic that the man who sacrificed the British empire to defeat Hitler spent a large part of his life writing a multi-volume epic glorifying his own ethnic group, from its island birthplace to its vast new lands across the globe, that would now itself be considered tantamount to Nazi race science by the standards of British politicians in 2026. What a muddle these people have found themselves in, and what a sad and needless predicament for the English themselves. These are nuanced and complex terms, hedged with ambiguities at the edges, but at the same time, you should not need a DPhil in Anthropology to know whether you exist.

Where does all of this leave us? The observable fact that membership of one ethnic group or another, is in certain circumstances, and within certain cultural contact zones, mutable or negotiable, is less politically relevant than the fact that for the majority population of England, such circumstances have not existed since the early Middle Ages. The English were, until relatively recently, disinclined to center themselves as an ethnic group at home precisely because they were one of the very first in the world to form a nation-state, in which this identity was unchallenged. Later, when other European societies were undergoing the wave of explicit identity-formation that led to modern nation-states, the English had happily subsumed themselves into an imperial British identity, which no longer exists — except perhaps vestigially in Whitehall. But, just as the modern experience of mass immigration leads to complex and ambiguous identities in the descendants of immigrants, whether inherited or consciously maintained like Burnham or Carney’s layers of Irishness, at its current scale, it has now caused the English to adopt the same introspective anxieties and acts of conscious identity formation.

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Nothing can stop the break-up of Britain

By Aris Roussinos

We may say that the creation of hyphenated English identities have suddenly transmuted unhyphenated Englishness from an assumed cultural norm into a politicized identity. English demographic decline in England itself, with all the rapidly eroding taboos around its open discussion, is the central fact driving all of this discourse, around which everything else is displacement activity. It is the direct result of mass immigration since the Nineties that these questions of identity and ancestry and meaning, the stereotypical immigrant neuroses, have now come to overshadow the English themselves, who in their homeland have no other identities to play with, or assume, or explore.

Like any child of immigrants, I have made choices, rational or romantic or some combination of the above, and for good or ill others have been made for me, or inherited. Like Mark Carney, I have “an ancestral home” in Ireland, and have chosen to “return” to it. If Jacob Rees-Mogg thrusts Englishness upon me, I must therefore politely decline. Yet for those whose ancestral home is England, there is no escaping the problem. Some have chosen self-assertion; others have chosen self-negation: but there can be no real imminent resolution when what was once unspoken and merely assumed has, for the first time in many centuries, become a matter of political dispute and negotiation. Yet it is doubtful that either current position, maximalist or minimalist, on who gets to call themselves English has yet reached its final form, but should instead be seen like the first haggling at a bazaar. There is, presumably, a middle-ground between claiming that the entire world is composed of temporarily embarrassed Englishmen, and determining belonging solely by 23andme results.

In Greece, which went through this process in the 19th century, despite the strong ideology of shared ethnic identity and physical descent from the ancient Greeks driving the modern state, some groups, like Romanian-speaking Vlachs or Albanian-speaking Orthodox Arvanites, were adopted as fictive Hellenes, while others found less happy outcomes. In Ireland, the descendants of English settlers were twice absorbed into the Irish ethnic group, as Catholics in the 17th century, and as Southern Protestants only definitively after independence (the assimilation of Ulster Protestants into Irishness is, we may say, a distinctly unfinished project). But modern English political ethnogenesis is only beginning, and it is impossible to predict its final form, should there ever be one. It is very plausible that an accepted compromise will retain more of imperial Britishness than the current discourse would imply. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness is also politically unstable, and one possible route out, or deferral, of English angst over identity could be a revivified unionism, which indeed appears to be Burnham’s response. But the stakes, for those of ambiguous Englishness, are increasingly high, as the once uncomplicated English begin to argue among themselves. We may as well get used to these endless and increasingly sterile online debates, and the shadow they threaten to cast over our offline lives. All of us, English or not, are now stuck with the English Question.

This, then, is what a parish council meeting in prosperous Oxfordshire looks like in 2026. A Westminster state that has lost its heartland of Southern England is simply living on borrowed time: and that’s exactly what I’d come to Piddington to see. It is not, now, a daring observation to remark that many of the institutions of the British state — the police, Westminster, democracy itself — have sacrificed their basic legitimacy on the inability of successive governments to visibly control migration, protect the populace from its harmful effects, or square their legal obligations on asylum with the increasingly hostile demands of their people. When even South Coast harbourmasters refuse berths to RNLI boats escorting unwanted migrants, or the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner can angrily claim that the Government has lost control of its borders, we see the mood of revolt has spread deeply into Britain’s otherwise unflappably centrist middle classes. It is now the Times, and not the avowedly Right-wing press, that forensically dissects the state’s failures on asylum, exposing its practices to public horror and ridicule. The asylum system is already politically dead in this country, just as it is in the rest of Europe. What is now at stake is how much more damage this government is willing to take to itself, to public order, and to the entire legitimacy of the political system, before it signs off power to a new regime willing to publicly recognize this fact.

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By Wessie du Toit

With its almost parodically bucolic name, Piddington, a quiet village of 360 people, where the cooing of doves in the leafy lanes is disturbed only by the trundle of Ocado vans, has now attracted coverage from across the world for its planned independence referendum, a project set in train by the Government’s plan to house 1,250 single male asylum seekers in a disused MoD facility on its boundary. In his kitchen, on the other edge of the village, I asked McNally, the brains behind Piddington’s unlikely independence bid, whether locals would accept smaller numbers. “If you want to have a house or [HMO] in here, we’d tolerate it, we’d manage it,” he told me. “But when you’ve got 1,250, we’re going to have to assimilate into their society. And that’s not on and that’s not what we’re going to do.” In fact, subsequent reporting has alleged, the site may house up to 3,500 asylum seekers, outnumbering the villagers 10 to one.

The people of Piddington are right to say that this is an unreasonable demand to make of them. Yet the Government’s logic is, in its own way, hard to fault. The policy of housing boat migrants in hotels has proved wildly unpopular, and has led to mass protests across the country, typically in the wake of sex crimes or other atrocities. Yet the response of dispersing migrants into social housing, typically in poorer areas of the country, has precipitated rioting, as in Belfast or Middlesbrough, as well as a bad-tempered popular mobilization, as in Glasgow, that looks set to fruit into open disorder in the near future. All Whitehall has left, trapped by its legal obligations to asylum seekers, is to corral the constantly accumulating new arrivals into government-owned facilities, ideally near as few voters as possible, and hope for the best. The people of Piddington, and places like it, may not be happy, but they are at least unlikely to riot. For a Labour government in 2026, that’s about the best outcome that can be hoped for.

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves here of the road not taken. In 2015, at a point when the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders was merely a moral panic for Middle East correspondents rather than the death-knell for the Continent’s postwar order, David Cameron proposed a reasonable and practical solution that would have offered a route to defanging the current crisis before it fully developed. Britain would take in 20,000 Syrian refugees over the course of the Parliament, carefully selecting and vetting deserving families from refugee camps in countries neighboring Syria. That way, the United Kingdom would take responsibility for a modest refugee flow it could reasonably expect to integrate, dispersing them across the country. It would focus its attention on Syrians — whose plight gave the demands to throw open Europe’s borders much of their moral force, even though they transpired to be a minority of those who actually arrived — and evade as far as possible the obvious security risks associated with what was effectively an open European border with the Islamic State. Even more importantly, Cameron’s plan, and its associated proposal of using European coast guards to turn back migrant boats in the Mediterranean, far from British shores, would have sidestepped the destabilization of domestic politics that would result from voters, to say nothing of aspiring migrants, rightly concluding that European leaders had entirely lost control of their countries’ borders.

But in the real world, the open-border activists won out, for too long, over cautious conservatism, and the results were precisely what any reasonable observer could have predicted. As the European architect of all the subsequent disorder (Turkey’s President Erdogan has still largely escaped the popular blame he deserves for overseeing the 2015 flow), Angela Merkel’s reputation has, in the decade since, sunk to its deserved level, for this and her many other sins against our Continent’s security and prosperity. The AfD, in 2015 a minor libertarian party, is yet to find its ceiling. While it is now a given that there is no longer an appetite for open borders, among all but the most marginal zealots, the full effects of the center’s experimentation with their demands have yet to reveal themselves, on either side of the Channel.

In polite and prosperous Piddington, the local reaction to the village’s proposed secession has been a media blitz. But in Dover and Portsmouth, last week saw the first stirrings of a new working-class form of direct action, blockading ports while eschewing uncontrolled violence. It is significant, for adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British politics, that the organizer of the coastal protests, Tommy Robinson collaborator Danny Tommo, hit upon the idea for his new Patriot Platform movement after travelling to Belfast during this summer’s riots. Returning home enthused at the concept of black-clad Loyalists working in a disciplined manner to achieve concrete goals, the new approach has taken the place of the mass flag-waving jamborees previously characterizing the English anti-immigration right. But it is also worth noting that the muscle of his new group derives from the already-existing and organically formed local “patriot” anti-immigration groups of southern and eastern England. A militant, working-class mobilization against mass immigration is now a factor in British politics, whether or not Tommo can consolidate his attempt to direct it.

But back in Piddington, villagers expressed open distaste for such forms of street action and open manifestations of anti-migrant politics, indicating divisions of class and political temperament the Government’s electoral rivals may struggle to navigate. “That would perhaps be more of a Bicester thing,” one resident told me, expressing a world of class feeling in terse English cultural shorthand. Middle-class villagers, expressing their fears, spoke in semi-veiled terms, women saying they worry about walking their dogs alone, fathers about letting their children roam free. These stronger statements against immigration itself, rather than the specific site on their doorstep, were uniformly delivered in Oxfordshire accents, though even still, elderly residents with thick burrs worried about skinheads coming down “from Birmingham” to wreak havoc.

For the anti-immigration parties competing to dominate the British Right, consolidating these different class mores into an electoral coalition will therefore prove difficult. To win the country, Reform will have to win over leafy shire heartlands like Piddington, whose voters, like Farage himself, are uncomfortable at the sight of men in black balaclavas taking to the streets. But faced with a gadfly challenger on his Right, in the shape of Rupert Lowe’s Restore, openly supportive of Tommo’s activism, Farage needs to keep an increasingly assertive and rebellious working-class street within his coalition too. The linchpin in holding the two groups together seems to be Zia Yusuf, recently deployed to both Piddington and Portsmouth to express his support for the two opposing forms of rebellion. Perhaps, indeed, Yusuf is more personally comfortable with the more kinetic forms of revolt than his boss: his rhetoric suggests that his role is to say, and do, what Farage does not himself feel comfortable publicly aligning himself with.

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The Piddington independence movement is careful to maintain a public stance of political neutrality, though its adherents, perhaps stung by the schadenfreude their plight has earned from the online Right, were keen to assure me they were not Liberal Democrats. We can assume they will not be voting for Burnham either, or the Greens. The remaining realistic options are then Reform and the Conservatives, and in this Piddington represents a microcosm of the southern English middle classes: unhappy with a dysfunctional immigration system, particularly when its consequences land upon their doorstep, but also uncomfortable with open or overly assertive displays of anti-migration politics.

Rather than the once seeming-inevitability of a Reform government, the impression left by Piddington was that the growing shift against asylum dysfunction in middle-class England may instead revive the fortunes of the Conservatives, increasingly strident against the ECHR, but instinctively closer to the class mores of the centrist political establishment. Reform may have won over the younger online Right, but it may struggle to persuade their true-blue parents. Rather than fomenting anti-immigration feeling, as its opponents imagine, Reform’s success has been in riding a wave of organic dissatisfaction that has, as shown in Portsmouth and Dover, often outpaced Farage’s personal appetite for rebellion.

If Burnham has shown a realistic understanding of class politics in shifting the consequences of asylum dysfunction onto middle-class rural constituencies which will never vote for him, to win back working-class constituencies which still plausibly might, the opening this leaves for the broader British Right in winning over the shires presents more of a challenge than an opportunity for Reform. Piddington offers a glimpse of a country exhausted by Britain’s dysfunctional asylum system, but also of a Right divided on how far it is willing to go to overturn it, a division more expressive of political temperaments, or class tensions, than of desired political ends.

Reform’s analysis of the solutions required, demanding a cultural revolution within the British state as a whole, is deeper and broader than that of the Conservatives, content merely to leave the ECHR they, rightly or not, see as the root of the problem. But Reform has to win over the suspicious middle classes as well as maintaining its shaky hold on the working class; whereas all the Tories are required to do is present a harder edge on immigration while maintaining a public commitment to law-and-order conservatism — a stance made easier for them by Restore forcing Farage to more activist positions than he feels comfortable with, and which are unpopular in the shires. After all, a Cameron government, left in power, might have mitigated the problem before we ever reached this stage of political fragmentation and disorder, in what is surely the least discussed “what might have been” of modern British politics. On paper, the growing mood of middle-class revolt should be a comfort for Reform: in practice, it is likely to be the Conservatives who will use it to win back Middle England. If Burnham is gambling that no single challenger can win both Piddington and Portsmouth, he may yet prove entirely correct.

It is perhaps instructive in the wake of the Arday affair, in which both progressive commentators and sociology departments have found themselves in want of “common sense” as most of us instinctively perceive it, to further examine common sense as a concept within anthropology, sociology’s academic daughter and rival. For the influential cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, making explicit a long-implicit concern of the discipline, common sense is a “cultural system” which “can vary dramatically from one people to the next”, and “rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity”. For the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, suggesting the idea first as a “mischievous” provocation and then entirely seriously, “Social and cultural anthropology is simply ‘the study of common sense’” which is itself “the socially acceptable rendition of culture, and is thus as variable as are both cultural forms and social rules”.

As Herzfeld remarks, “common sense — the everyday understanding of how the world works — turns out to be extraordinarily diverse, maddeningly inconsistent, and highly resistant to skepticism of any kind”. It is, indeed, precisely the cultural misunderstandings between the anthropologist conducting his fieldwork and the people who he lives among that reveal “the mutual incommensurability of different notions of common sense — our object of study”. What is anthropologically significant about common sense is not that it is sensible but that it is held in common. It is common sense for the Azande tribesman, stubbing a toe or breaking a pot, to ascribe his misfortunes to witchcraft, where the Western observer would point to what are for us more pertinent causes: the two common senses differ wildly, demarcating two different cultural worldviews.

We may never fully understand what attracts such journalistic and legal luminaries as Carole Cadwalladr and Jolyon Maugham to the cause of the late fabulist and self-promoter Jason Arday. Certainly the many fantastic and self-contradictory claims Arday made over the course of his first stratospheric and then tragic career are an affront to the common sense of the cultural community as a whole. Perhaps, we wonder, trying to make sense of their worldview through our own cultural priors, they have simply gone too far and staked too much of their reputations to accede defeat now, despite the nonsensical nature of the claims they still defend. Could it be pure cynicism, we wonder, defending positions they surely now know not to be true to establish their positions within a political community? But instead, borrowing a way of interpreting the world from anthropology, perhaps it is more fruitful to focus not on the sensibility of their claims but their commonality. For while it is common sense to us that they have settled on an absurd and intellectually indefensible position, it is clearly self-evident common sense to them that they are correct. Beliefs that seem bizarre and outlandish to us provide them with social meaning, reinforcing the boundaries and worldview of their culture and allowing them to make sense of a confusing world.

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The common sense of our own culture would, for example, make even an ambivalent observer of the Arday affair think twice before claiming that the forensic Guardian investigation, by a black journalist, of Arday’s fabulism was an example of racist “lynching” by the “right-wing press”. But to this strange and nascent culture within our midst such truths are self-evident. Perhaps “racism”, or its presumed progenitor “whiteness”, those invisible but omnipresent forces whose malignant presence they discern throughout our society, function for them as witchcraft does for the Azande. As Geertz observes, “It is when ordinary expectations fail to hold, when the Zande man-in-the-field is confronted with anomalies or contradictions, that the cry of witchcraft goes up. It is, in this respect at least, a kind of dummy variable in the system of commonsense thought. Rather than transcending that thought, it reinforces it by adding to it an all-purpose idea which acts to reassure the Zande that their fund of commonplaces is, momentary appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, dependable and adequate.”

Indeed, Geertz continues, “the cry of witchcraft functions for the Azande as the cry of Insha’Allah functions for some Muslims or crossing oneself functions for some Christians, less to lead into more troubling questions– religious, philosophical, scientific, moral– about how the world is put together and what life comes to, than to block such questions from view; to seal up the commonsense view of the world… against the doubts its inevitable insufficiencies inevitably stimulate.” Rather than unsettling their worldview, as our common sense would expect, the effect of the Arday affair upon the progressive tribe has been to reinforce it, allowing them to double down on their beliefs and further elaborating their all-encompassing moral cosmology. Absurd to us, the entire worldview makes sense to them, and clearly serves a social function. One need not agree with their precepts, as Evans-Pritchard did not agree with Zande cosmology, to recognize their importance as social facts, and value as an object of study.

Gently placing the Arday affair to one side, we can apply such methods to the Right as well. It is, after all, a political tribe just as much as the progressives, and one which places greater emphasis on its worldview aligning with the common sense of the wider national community. The recent proposal to ban first-cousin marriage, for instance, aligns with British “common sense” — we know, without needing to be told, that we do not do such things here. Such marriage patterns are anomalous and alien to the cultural community. And yet, as the anthropologist Adam Kuper makes clear in his 2009 work Incest and Influence, first-cousin marriage was the preferential choice of the rising bourgeois class of early 19th-century England, giving rise to such powerful “clans” as the Darwin-Wedgwoods, and the Macaulay-Trevelyans, which would dominate English cultural life, through their descendant spinoffs like the Bloomsbury Group, into the mid-20th century.

Like the Mirpuri clans of Northern England who are the object of the current proposed legislation, such preferential marriage arrangements were undertaken to maximize the economic resources of what became corporate kinship groups, outcompeting rivals and creating mutually reinforcing networks of patronage and influence. This pattern was broken up by economic liberalization, reducing the material necessity for such arrangements, and by the outsized impact of fatalities in the First World War on the upper-middle class, forcing eligible women to widen their pool of marriage partners.

That the first-cousin marriage taboo, like the racism taboo, may be relatively new does not make it less widely held or natural-seeming — even “common sense” — today. Like the progressive appeal to racism as a causative factor operating within our society, the present-day political currency of that anthropological staple of differing “common sense”, the kin marriage taboo serves a social function: to distinguish between “us” and “them”, by demarcating the differing values of two distinct societies. The logical solutions for the Mirpuris addressed by the proposed legislation are thus binary: to jettison first-cousin marriage, and become “like us”, or maintain it and become legally as well as culturally outside the boundaries of the national community.

Britain’s dissident Right is increasingly adopting quasi-anthropological frameworks to make sense of the modern UK. The fact that the values of the liberal, upper-middle-class Victorian “130+ IQ Anglos” they laud did not, historically, differ all too greatly in this instance from the immigrant populations with which they are contrasted does not detract too much from the inner logic of their project, any more than the aberrant relationship between objective fact and their worldview does from the progressive one. Much of the newly-anthropological outlook of the British Right has much to recommend it: what is “the blob” if not a governing caste, a cultural superstructure which uses bureaucratic and legal power, shared social norms, rituals and beliefs to advance its collective interests? These norms are enforced with powerful taboos, and fearsome tests of ritual purity which the Arday fall-out has greatly accelerated, to the discomfort of cautiously skeptical progressives like Novara Media’s commentators, compelled to submit their errant cosmologies to the judgment of the tribe. Rather than gaining new adherents, this caste seems to prioritize thinning its own ranks through ever-stricter enforcement of its social norms. Theirs is a political project, or a culture, which sets itself apart from the interests of the political community or wider culture from which it is sprung, and that sees its purpose as either dismantling or overturning it.

Whether we should view modern progressives as a culture, or as a politically-oriented social structure, reflects older fissures within anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology was historically divided between British Social Anthropology, derived from Durkheimian sociology, and with a politically-minded focus on the notionally empirical social structures of “societies”, and American Cultural Anthropology, derived, via Franz Boas, from contemporary German notions of discrete and holistic “cultures”, which make meaningful sense of the world in their own interpretive ways. What they share, and what sociology now apparently appears to lack, is the emphasis on cultural interpretation through fieldwork, the seeing the world “from the native’s point of view”, as Bronisław Malinowski famously summarized the discipline’s craft, which provides a constant check to the cultural assumptions of the anthropologist himself. An “insider-outsider” in an alien society, the anthropologist is forced, through encounter with its differing notions of common sense, to reflect on the partiality of his own. It is an in-built check to cultural solipsism that sociology, the study of advanced Western societies by members of those same societies, inherently lacks. The practice of autoethnography as practiced by Arday and his Cambridge patron Hilary Cremin shows nominal social scientists conducting a form of anthropological technique briefly fashionable in the first flush of the discipline’s engagement with critical theory, but which was always predicted by serious anthropological theorists, as it has since proved, to become a solipsistic intellectual dead-end.

But this is not merely a matter of abstruse social-scientific debates. When Arday could blame “whiteness” for questions being raised about his credentials and competence by his academic peers as well as his students (as in this paradigmatic work of autoethnographic solipsism), while valorizing, as his posthumous defenders do, his own blackness as a defense of his probity and moral worth, we have moved beyond an anthropological understanding of “culture” into the world of power politics and hierarchy: the meat and drink of social anthropology. Who is subaltern and who is dominant when Arday could set the police on the Times Educational Supplement, summon the legal power of London’s most intimidating law firm on skeptics of his manifold claimed achievements, and weaponize accusations of racism against his academic critics, just as his defenders today invoke this most powerful taboo to muzzle the press in advance of their own political power? These are political matters, relating to the fundamental distribution and exercise of power within our society, and are thus legitimate areas for intellectual inquiry and debate.

As the anthropologist Terence Turner cautioned in 1993, progressive “multiculturalists use the term culture in different ways, and for different purposes, than anthropologists”, as a political tool “of the cultural nationalists and fetishists of difference, for whom culture reduces to a tag for ethnic identity and a license for political and intellectual separatism”. Sniffily disregarding its intellectual output, Turner observes that “to the extent that it has developed a theoretical analysis, it is primarily a conceptual framework for challenging the cultural hegemony of the dominant ethnic group”, so that “Culture, as such, becomes a source of values that can be converted into political assets, both internally as bases of group solidarity and mobilization, and externally as claims on the support of other social groups, governments, and public opinion all over the globe”. For Turner, prefiguring today’s febrile discourse, at its worst all this is merely “an intellectual pseudopolitics that implicitly empowers the theorist while explicitly disempowering real cultural subjects”.

Yet in doing so, he notes, the essentialist claims on identity — on race, gender, religious belief — made by progressive multiculturalists for political ends mirror and thus reify those of the presumed dominant culture. Just as Kuper observes, multiculturalism preserves “insidious assumptions” on the organic wholeness of cultures long jettisoned by anthropology itself, which are put to fundamentally Romantic and reactionary ends, and are “distantly related to certain Counter-Enlightenment discourses about ethnic identity”. As Kuper notes, “how can one know whether a person’s cultural identity is authentic? Only if it is further assumed that identity is fixed by descent.” Arday’s Labour Party defender Dawn Butler, for example, is, by virtue of her apparently self-penned poem on the spiritual, physical and moral superiority afforded to her by her skin color, in common sense terms clearly a racist. Yet her racism is surely an inversion of what she perceives as white racism, similar to the way medieval black magic was merely an oppositional inversion of Christianity rather than a coherent belief system in itself. If whiteness and blackness are parallel constructs of the colonial encounter then why should the modern progressive not deconstruct blackness, and drive it out of the academy?

These are questions, provocations that anthropology can pose but which it is not its role to answer: the mere destabilizing of the culturally-specific assumptions behind them, the grappling with their own partiality and cultural boundedness is enough. Can sociology in its current parlous and solipsistic state pose these questions? One does not imagine that career advancement in today’s Cambridge Department of Education would result. This is where anthropology, with its broader and more quizzical perspective, comes in, for, as Turner claims, “much as St. Paul revealed to the Athenians the identity of the unknown god they had been worshipping, anthropologists might play a useful role in helping multiculturalists realize the revolutionary implications of the course upon which they have embarked”.

For just as academic sociology, taken as a culture, is marked by an aversion to “common sense”, which it broadly views as something to be overturned rather than a spur to deeper analysis (as it is for anthropologists), progressives have seemingly settled on a social system or political project — it is not entirely clear which of the two is preferred — set on the destabilization, dismantling or total destruction of the “common sense” norms of the wider national culture.

As an object of anthropological inquiry, such a development is fascinating and worthy of study. As a political project within democratic conditions, it is obviously disastrous for its adherents, as our last prime minister found. The sheer hatred Keir Starmer inspired among ordinary voters goes beyond rational analysis of his strengths and weaknesses: he ruled according to the common sense of his own social and cultural tribe, and against that of the wider society. Laws, intended to produce positive outcomes, were followed zealously because they were laws, whether their outcomes were positive or not. Such a course of affairs was deemed so unnatural, such an affront to our common sense that Starmer became a folk devil quite out of proportion to his bumbling and incompetent nature.

It is in this literal culture war — a term, as Kulturkampf, incidentally coined by the German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow — that our new prime minister finds himself. Much of Andy Burnham’s recent messaging — on North Sea oil, or the Net Zero push — seems intended to position him as aligned with the common sense of the wider political or cultural community and against that of his progressive caste. The relentless northwestern messaging of the Burnham government is not because he is a provincial bore, though he may be, but because it correlates to widely-held stereotypes within the British cultural zone — commonsensical beliefs — about the no-nonsense pragmatism of Northern English culture. He is invoking, and appealing to, a different type of commonsensical worldview than Farage, who addresses himself primarily to the tradesmen of southeastern England. On some matters, the two groups may hold a shared common sense — and indeed the next election will be decided on this question.

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What Burnham appears to understand is that, however intellectually interesting the cultural worldview British progressives have now settled on may be to observe from without, does not present a viable path towards political success. Insofar as, viewed from outside, their beliefs take a coherent form, it appears to be one of direct opposition to common sense, in which the most outlandish and bizarre claims are made precisely to alienate as many potential adherents as possible, and reinforce the purity of the in-group. When they have lost the Guardian and Private Eye, we can deduce, they have lost even the establishment center-left, still tentative adherents to our society’s common frame of understanding the world. For the progressive part, even the Guardian and Novara are now “polluted”, in the anthropological sense, by their perceived contact with “the Right-wing”, the theodicy against which their moral world is constructed.

When we say that policies or outcomes are wrong or unfair, what we mean is that they violate our understanding of how things ought to be; they simply go against our common sense. The fundamental issue highlighted not so much by Arday’s various fables as by the political furor following his death is that the way in which our society is run in large part goes against the dominant cultural understanding of how our society should be run, to what ends and with what guiding beliefs. The belief systems professed by some within the highest ranks of the British establishment are, to most of us, as self-contained, unfalsifiable, and as alien as if they belong to an entirely different culture, a distant society we can only puzzle at from outside. It is common sense to them, but not to most of us. This creates a cultural disturbance inviting in, though not limited to, extreme political turbulence. The electoral collapse of the Left results not from the fact that progressives do not agree with us, but like du Boulay in her Greek mountain village, that they do not know: they are outside the bounds of the wider society.

But Burnham is not a social scientist: what is of meaningful interest to him is not what hidden patterns the opposing worldviews unlock about their respective cultures, but which sense is more common, and thus commands more votes. His future therefore rests upon whether or not he can re-align the Labour Party with common sense — in both the detached anthropological and our instinctive folk usages of the term.

Aris Roussinos visited the fraught country at the height of what is now being called the Flamingo Revolution, speaking to activists, opposition leaders, and even the country’s embattled PM himself — who believes that his people have never had it so good. 

* * * * *

“Why am I living in England?” Avni, an Albanian in his 40s working in London as a builder, asked me angrily, as we walked to the lines of riot police separating Albania’s Flamingo Revolution protesters from the country’s parliament. “Albania is a very good country, there is no war here. We shouldn’t be immigrants. We should come back home,” he added, telling me that his home village in northern Albania was now entirely depopulated, as everyone who could had already decamped to Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe.

“Because the government [in Albania] is very corrupted, people doesn’t get no rights, but if you know anybody from government, you’ll be a millionaire in two days. All the MPs from Albania, they become billionaires, they’ve got massive houses, massive cash, hidden everywhere. All their cousins, they got massive, massive cash. It’s a really, really corrupted government, and we’ve had enough of this. They push us all [to] Europe, but we need to come back.”

It was the 54th and most violent day so far of the street protests that have overshadowed Albania’s summer, to the chagrin of Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, which has run the country for 13 consecutive years. “Everyone thinks that this is a democratic state,” Bora Mitrovica, an Albanian-Canadian activist, told me at the police barriers where I had found her, shouting “Down with communism!” and cursing the police with elaborate Balkan oaths. “It is not. Edi Rama is a dictator. This is a dictatorship.” Bora had just been pepper-sprayed by police, after attempting to push through the barriers towards Albania’s parliament. Protestors had hurled eggs and water bottles at police lines, and at the cars of politicians making their way to the voting chamber. When the police pushed them back with tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray, the protestors howled in fury, some breaking aloe leaves from the decorative street planting and squeezing the soothing juice into their eyes. “Dictatorship does not end with a chant, You need to fight. We need our Albanian men to stand up and not just say ‘fuck you’, because that’s not how you change the country,” Bora told me. “I advise all tourists to get the fuck out as soon as they can, because they’re not going to be able to handle what we can handle as Albanians.”

The protests had begun in the southern seaside village of Zvërnec back in May. Villagers had discovered access to their fishing boats and coastal olive groves suddenly closed off by security fencing, and construction vehicles apparently starting work on a luxury resort project backed by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and strongly supported by Rama’s government. In violent scenes, security guards and villagers clashed, before local protesters broke down the fencing and reclaimed possession of what they say is their land. Who the land in question actually belongs to remains a matter of dispute. Because of the many land reforms and disbursements marking the country’s shifts from Ottoman rule to independence and Italian occupation, and then from Enver Hoxha’s isolationist regime to the chaotic transition to democracy, claims in Albania often overlap. Frequently, more than one party can claim legal title to any given plot.

The ostensible owner of the Zvërnec coastline at the center of the Kushner project, a Miami-based businessman called Artur Shehu, has been accused by lawyers working for local villagers of forging Ottoman title deeds to seize control of their valuable property. In June, he was also announced to be under investigation by SPAK, an anti-corruption body set up by Rama’s government, for money laundering and international cocaine trafficking. Shehu, for his part, denies any wrongdoing, insisting he is a legitimate businessman who inherited the land from his medieval forebears. Complicating the story are hints, in SPAK proceedings, of government officials’ attendance at meetings with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers. And SPAK files leaked to international journalists suggest that Belgian investigators noted that “these meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds, with the support of political authorities”.
At the same time, SPAK stresses that “at this stage no evidence is presented that identifies the officials involved or proves their participation in illegal activities”. The gap between these two claims is now, in Albania, filled with feverish and dramatic political speculation, used by the opposition Democratic Party to claim high-level political corruption.

* * * * *

Because the salt lagoon at Zvërnec is a rare European breeding ground for flamingos, the initial protests in Tirana were environmental ones, with festive protesters carrying giant styrofoam flamingos as their emblem. But over the course of the following weeks, the protests escalated from halting construction on the project and reinstating Albania’s recently quashed environmental protection laws, to demanding what is in effect a full revolution against the entire political system. The protesters now insist that Rama must resign and face trial for corruption, along with the leader of the opposition, Sali Berisha, while Albania must install a 12-month technocratic government before new elections. Naturally, Rama is not inclined to agree, hence the current standoff.

Though the nightly protests along Tirana’s leafy boulevards are good-natured family affairs, those in the morning are rowdier, bringing along a more committed core of activists who declare themselves to be revolutionaries. While there are young masked men to be seen throwing missiles, and older working-class men wearing the traditional Albanian felt cap or waving the flag of Greater Albania, the majority are from the young, highly-educated and socially liberal Tirana bourgeoisie, as well as the diaspora — ordinarily a reliable vote bank for Rama’s reformist and pro-EU government. Conservative young women in hijabs stand alongside heavily-tattooed hipsters, chanting “Rama, hand in your resignation,” in Albanian at the police lines, to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, or “Rama, Rama, Fuck You,” to the tune of “We Will Rock You”.

Over the days and nights of protests I attended, long and passionate speeches condemned the government as terrorists, as a dictatorship, and bemoaned the claimed sell-out of Albanian land to Israeli interests. The latter, rather conspiratorial, claim transpired to be a regular theme when talking to Albanians. Even stickers observed on lampposts in central Tirana depicted Rama as a stooge of George Soros or as a Hasidic Jew. Xhoana, a fashionably dressed marketing executive, told me: “Our government is selling our land to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the oligarchs in our place. They don’t work for the people. We want a revolution because everything is a mess.”

“Albania right now doesn’t need a revolution,” said a government spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, drawing on a cigarette at a pavement cafe. “People have been saying for 50 days we need a revolution, but they have no plan for what comes next. A revolution at this stage, when we are so close to going into the EU, is a dangerous thing.” Rama’s Socialist Party government has pledged EU entry for Albania by 2030, but negotiations have dragged on since 2009, delayed by rule of law concerns, the country’s relative poverty, and worries over organized crime — particularly the domination of international cocaine trafficking by Albanian clans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reignited the accession process, as EU officials felt compelled to exert the bloc’s agency in the new age of geopolitical competition. But the window for accession may be narrow and short-lived. For both the ruling Socialist Party and the EU, this summer’s mass protests are an unwanted complication.

“Europe, chiefly the European Commission, they wanted to see all progress,” Genc Pollo, a prominent Albanian conservative intellectual and former Deputy Prime Minister told me. “They didn’t want to see the democratic backslide, and in their annual reports, they omitted all the problems, for whatever reasons.” A skeptic of Albania’s progress under Rama’s government, which he termed a “narco-state,” ruled by a “klepto-regime”, Pollo told me that “Rama has allowed for the Albanian rings, which bring coke from Latin America to central and northern Europe, to launder their proceeds in construction. And then, I mean, when elections come, they, with their money and their muscle, they help him get the vote.” But, in his telling, European diplomats are deaf to the opposition’s concerns. “Edi Rama is a master in staging things, and organizing, in having summits in Tirana, and having the leaders in some restaurant presenting a pizza, with his face on the pizza box, and then you have the President of the European Commission, saying ‘Oh, this is wonderful, this is wonderful, oh, dear Edi’.”

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On the face of it, though, the protests, supported by every single Albanian I spoke to who wasn’t a member of the government, seem strangely timed. Under Rama’s rule, Albania’s GDP has almost tripled in a decade, a growth rate Western Europeans can only envy. New tower blocks, exuberantly designed in the flush of new wealth, loom over Tirana’s handsome Mussolini-era civic architecture and the few surviving Ottoman mosques and coaching inns. Until recently seen as rather outré destinations, both Tirana and the country’s many fast-developing beach resorts are now filled with tourists, both northern Europeans seeking summer sun and Turks and Gulf Arabs escaping it. The bustling cafes, bars and restaurants are as stylish and comfortable as anything elsewhere in the Mediterranean, if no longer significantly cheaper. Albanian wages have not kept up with the rapid inflation of prices, particularly of food and property, introduced by the influx of money, legitimate or otherwise. In some ways, Edi Rama appears a victim of his own success.

The protesters are “an urban group of people, predominantly highly educated”, says Pirro Vengu, a Socialist Party MP for Vlorë, including Zvërnec, over coffee at one of those stylish restaurants. “The paradox is that this is the youth that has come to age during this government. So, apparently we’ve done something right, right?” Young, smartly suited and charismatic, Vengo is a rising star in Albanian politics, who even government critics in Zvërnec ruefully admitted liking. “It’s also totally legitimate that Albanians are not comparing the country now to its tragic past of the Nineties. We’re not the poorest country in Europe anymore. We’re comparing ourselves to Western Europe, where all Albanians have traveled several times.”

For all the country’s economic success, Albanian political discourse is riven by eyebrow-raising claims of impropriety, emanating most strongly from the opposition. In his office in Democratic Party headquarters, Sali Berisha, the 81-year old leader of the conservative opposition, came out from behind a desk piled high with papers to shake my hand. Behind him, on the cluttered bookshelves, a MAGA baseball cap and framed photograph of Mother Theresa vied for space. Albania’s first democratically elected leader, and the architect of the country’s Western orientation, Berisha is as central a figure in shaping the country’s modern course as his arch-rival, Edi Rama. Just a few weeks earlier, the Trump administration, citing national security grounds, had lifted the Biden-era entry sanctions placed against Berisha for corruption in office, which he denies. British sanctions remain in place — unjustly, Berisha told me, handing me a printout of an FCO document relating to his case, and accusing the previous British ambassador of being “corrupted” by Edi Rama. The influx of money from criminal proceeds, Berisha told me, had distorted the country’s economy, wrecking Albanian exports to Europe while being laundered in high-value construction projects. “If you look to this country,” Berisha asked me rhetorically, “What you will find? You’ll find an extraordinary power in the hands of Edi Rama and his government, which is the power of drugs. The power of drugs is many, many billions of euros. The power of drugs, of Albanian drug cartels, controls everything in this country.”

Recently returned to frontline politics after defeating internal rivals within the Democratic Party, Berisha eyes the protests as a route back to office, or at very least as weakening his bitter rival Rama’s grip on power. He concedes that “maybe 20%” of the slogans demanded his jailing, but assures me that these demands were made only by “Left-wing extremist groups”. For the most part, he said, the protesters were against the government, “and their cause is just. [It] is our cause. That’s why we fully support it. We fully respect it, we do not try to take the leadership of it.” As for his rival himself, “Edi Rama treats Albania like his personal fiefdom, in which he could do everything,” Berisha told me. “Like being a sultan, in a sultanate of centuries ago, where the air, the land, and the water, are considered property of the sultan.”

* * * * *

The Prime Minister’s Office is in a handsome Rationalist building opened in 1941, designed to house the Italian colonial governor. Attendants there ushered me through long corridors, lined with classical Greek and Ottoman ceramics and into Edi Rama’s office, where he pointedly ignored me for some time, busy scrolling on his mobile phone. Rama had been an artist and writer before entering politics as the reformist Mayor of Tirana, whose policy of beautifying the capital had turned it into an Instagrammable tourist destination, and himself into Albania’s second longest-serving ruler since independence in 1912, surpassed only by the communist dictatorship. A big and powerful-looking man, today dressed all in loose, black clothing, apart from spotless white trainers, the fiercely intelligent Rama is as charismatic as he is intimidating. But recent international interviews had been fraught, making the mood in the office tense. When Rama finally sat down beside me, leaning into his chair, I asked him his opinion of the protests.

“The protests today are not the protests of June, so the people who spoke today are different. They are engaged in political parties. They are engaged in opposition parties, small parties of opposition, Leftists from the extreme and Rightists from the extreme,” he claimed, “While the June protests were different, were bigger, a lot of people that voted for us were there.” In any case, “I am very, very proud that we have had such a big protest for days in a most peaceful manner, and that nobody was hurt, nobody was stopped to do what he or she wanted,” he added, “The bottom line is that this protest shows a country that is like a normal European country where you have protests.” Repeating his government’s claim that the protests were being stoked by foreign actors, he suggested that “the algorithm did a lot to bring them to bring them in the boulevard, you know? Listen, I’m telling you, one of the things that we have seen from the back of the mirror, the social media, is that a very high percentage of the content is produced outside the building. It’s not Albanian.” Indeed, Rama added, “If this would not have been about Jared Kushner and Trump and Ivanka and all type of fantasies, this would not have been so good for the algorithm,” but the Kushner link “brought all the anti-Trump people on steroids.” When I demurred, he added, “You are an exception in this if you are not looking for an angle to say how terrible Trump is and how he’s killed flamingos in Albania.”

* * * * *

But neither Trump nor flamingos seem the prime source of discontent down in Zvërnec. “Albania is not a democracy,” an older man told me in the village’s heavily-accented Greek. “They are thieves, all of them, Edi Rama and Sali Berisha are the same,” he said, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis. “We have had no water here for two months. I have to use my little well, but then they take everything we own here for themselves.” A local woman agreed. “They have taken my elderly father’s olive groves. We have had these plots from generation to generation but they won’t give us the papers saying they belong to us, not even for the house we live in.”

For the birthplace of Albania’s political crisis, Zvërnec is a sleepy place, a village of a few hundred people, mostly ethnic Greeks or Hellenized Vlach pastoralists. Close to the southern city of Vlorë, whose thudding beach bars stretch along the sandy shoreline to the village boundaries, Zvërnec reflects an older, unspoiled Mediterranean, increasingly a nostalgic memory even in Albania. Wading birds hoot and croak in the coastal marshes of the Vjosa delta, cicadas rasp in the olive groves, shaded from the ferocious summer sun: it is all reminiscent of the Greece of maybe 30 or 40 years ago. “We want investment, but not this investment,” one woman told me. “This is our land, and we have never got our family land back since 1991. We also don’t want Israelites here — this is Albanian land, and if they come here we will kill them.”

On Zvërnec’s wild sandy beach of Portonovo, empty save for a handful of local families, happily ignoring the notices forbidding them to swim, I met Kosta Xhaho, the local project coordinator for PPNEA, Albania’s largest environmental NGO. This is, he told me, one of the most important, turtle nesting areas, and Ground Zero for the protests that had long migrated to central Tirana. “We started to protest here. Then we started to fight with those bulldozers that started to construct a road and the trucks in the protected area. And then we started to fight with the security that they put on the fences, and now we are fighting with the government to change the law, so this area is to stay protected forever.”

PPNEA’s wish is for the beach and the rest of the coastline to remain public land, as was all the way back to King Zog’s Kingdom of Albania. But it is a highly marketable commodity, just as much for those who have farmed it for generations as for the Kushners. And it is not clear that the villagers themselves wish the site to remain undeveloped, rather than profiting from the tourism boom they believe Shehu has stolen from them. In nearby Vlorë, local opinion is distinctly more in favor of the Kushner project. “These people [in Zvërnec] are stupid,” a Vlorë taxi driver told me. “They don’t want to go forward, but it’s one of the biggest investments in Europe. It’ll be so good for our city. I just hope it’s like they say it is, and Israel doesn’t build a base there,” he added. Even so, he told me that he supports the Tirana protests “because they’re about high prices. Albania is a very poor country still, and very corrupt.” I asked him who he voted for. “Rama, of course,” he said, looking at me as if I’d asked a stupid question, “Every time Edi Rama.”

For Rama himself, re-elected just over a year ago for a fourth term, the protests have come as a jolt of shock. In the recently released “Besa” strategic document, whose name alludes to the unbreakable oath-making central to traditional Albanian culture, Rama’s government declared that “the flamingo boulevard” presented “a mirror that society held up before us”, and proof that “ever more Albanians, including older ones, no longer compare the Albania we have with the one we had in 2013, but only with the one they themselves believe Albania can and must be”. Much of the Besa document seems to draw from de Tocqueville’s observation that the most dangerous moment for any regime is when the rising expectations derived from reforms already undertaken make any residual injustices seem intolerable. “The citizen who has more than yesterday,” the strategy’s authors write, “is a more dissatisfied citizen. Precisely because they live better today than yesterday, they likewise believe that their country is capable of doing far more than it does today.” In a recent open letter, the former Socialist Party insider and Rama loyalist Elisa Spiropali, recently removed from her role as Europe Minister, declared that the protests represent a “political and social mobilization, especially among the younger generation, that cannot be ignored without consequences.” In what can only be read as a critique of Rama’s governance style, Spiropali asserted that Albania requires “not more personalization of power, but institutions stronger than individuals”, “more humility, less arrogance”, “more representation and less concentration of decision-making”, to build “a state where the law stands above power and where power is not identified with any one person”.

When I asked Edi Rama whether Spiropali’s open letter highlighted inner disputes within the Socialist Party, he shut down the question. “This is a very internal, domestic thing,” he said. “And we have to keep it for our own because I don’t think we have to export our internal things outside for the audience, because then it becomes like feeding with curiosity, feeding with curious things, an audience that is not at all inside the story, not informed or nothing.” But the opposition had no such qualms, I replied, adding that Berisha had made very specific allegations that political figures within Rama’s inner circle had attended the Aruba meeting with the alleged drug trafficker Artur Shehu, and that the government had uncomfortable links with organized crime bosses. “Where is it? Who, where? Where is the picture? Where is the document? Where are the tickets? Where, where?” he responded. “So how would you answer,” he added, pointing at me, “for example, an allegation that you were yesterday with some drug dealers in the hotel where you are sleeping. How do you answer that?”

He went on, “Yeah, the opposition figures may tell you many things, but it’s not for me to say to you, if we are linked or not, it’s for them to prove that we are linked or not, because I’m really disgusted from years now that in this country… that the burden of proof has passed to them who were accused.” Asked about the opposition’s characterization of Albania as a narco-state, Rama dismissed the idea entirely. “You can say whatever you want. But ‘narco-state’, a narco-state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU? It doesn’t match in any shape or form. If Albania has problems with corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years. If Albania has problems with crime, Albania has never fought crime like these years. And when it comes to crime, I’m telling you, we pay a big price in the Balkans, to the fact that people from the Balkans are very active in organized crime. Outside. But the industry of the crime is not here. It’s there.”

Referring to my being a journalist, he added, “You know narco-states, I guess, how they feel like, you know corrupt poor countries, how they feel like, you know middle-income countries, how they feel like. I don’t think you need me or whomever else to tell you in which type of country you are, with all the goods and the downsides… It doesn’t feel unsafe, it doesn’t feel like a poor country, you don’t feel all these things.”

I asked Rama if, having secured his place as one of the most significant figures in Albania’s history, he worried that an escalation of the protests might harm his legacy. “No, how protests can threaten the legacy?” he said, “I like the pressure.” He had ridden out two previous waves of protests, he told me, maybe bigger than today’s, in 2013, just after entering power, and also in 2018. “When it came to the first one, I pulled back because they were right. They had a very strong point. I said, you are right, we’ll stop. And it ended, they got what they wanted. Second time, I didn’t pull back. But I started a conversation with them and we did good things. This time, I learned things, so we are not going to pull back from the [Zvërnec] project, for sure. But we’re gonna make a [consultation] process.” In the end, he added, “I strongly believe the project will close this chapter completely because it will be beautiful.”

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Many Albanians I spoke to, including those otherwise supportive of Rama, likened his current situation to that of Serbia’s strongman Aleksandar Vučić — not, in Albania, a flattering comparison — who has also won the EU’s favor while facing down months-long street protests. While it is unlikely that the protests alone will unseat Rama, they clearly highlight a growing disaffection with the two-party system, and the current politics of patronage. Mostly young, liberal and highly-educated, the protestors are, to a large degree, Edi Rama’s children. For nearly a generation, Rama’s brand of developmentalist, benevolent paternalism has transformed the country into a genuinely dynamic boom economy, at a dizzying pace. But like the villagers in Zvërnec, Tirana’s middle classes feel poorer, not richer, for the visible growth and wealth sprouting around them. For Western observers, now accustomed to stagnant wages and the limitations of two-party systems, Albania’s political crisis shows, ironically, how European the country has become, even while stuck in the EU’s Balkan waiting-room.

With the protests continuing, contrary to early expectations, through August, the likelihood of their escalation in the cooler weather of autumn, when holidaymakers have returned home and students have returned to classes, appears to be growing. But juggling his attempts to secure the simultaneous approval of EU observers, of the mercurial and acquisitive Trump administration, of the party shaped in his own image and of his increasingly restive voters, Rama projected only calmness. Leaning back into his armchair at the end of our meeting, he told me, “Listen, I am 13 years here now. So I have three more years. I have nothing to prove to myself. Because in the beginning, you know, there are many things to prove to yourself. As you said, I have my place in the history of this country, then, in which light this will be decided by the people.”

But navigating the vagaries of the second Trump administration has increased the pressure on Edi Rama, whose attempts to court favor with the American president, whether by signing up Albania to Trump’s dubious Board of Peace scheme or by pushing through the Kushner family’s contentious real estate project, has revealed previously hidden fractures within his own voter base. Rama’s only reward, so far, has been Washington’s sudden rehabilitation of his bitterest political rival, Sali Berisha, in what can only be read as a means to exert American pressure. What happens over autumn will now decide everything, Sali Berisha told me. “Very much will depend on September. Will they re-energize, remobilize? Will opposition parties succeed to get united in a large front? To persist for a caretaker government for new elections, or not, I could not predict. It’s difficult, but I think it’s vital.” But the Democratic Party’s chances of riding popular dissatisfaction to power seems doubtful, given the broad, anti-systemic nature of the protests. In the street directly outside Berisha’s office, pausing to check my phone, I noticed a slogan prominently scrawled on a large metal bin. “Revolucion, Rama Burg, Berisha Burg,” it said, Rama to jail, Berisha to jail. It is, by far, the most popular slogan shouted on Tirana’s streets.

Based on Bernard Cornwell’s novel series, a commercial assembly line with no relation to literature, as the author happily admits, the Nineties cycle of feature-length dramas equally cannot be termed cinema. But if Sergei Bondarchuk’s great Soviet war epics War and Peace and Waterloo, in all the grand and inhumane scale of their production, reveal something intrinsic to the nature of Mother Russia, could something similar not be said of their homelier and more ramshackle British analog? With performances that seem to embrace their pantomime quality, and risible pitched battles between armies of a few dozen men apiece, the series — the most expensive drama terrestrial TV budgets could then sustain — have a charmingly amateurish air. Later British stars — Liz Hurley, Daniel Craig — and character actors such as Pete Postlethwaite and Julian Fellowes, crop up expectedly, hamming it up with glee. Never shy of veering into camp absurdity, low comedy, or of sending itself up, even as it aspires to epic grandeur, the series is stamped with a very particular type of Britishness, earnest and self-mocking in equal measure. No wonder, 30 years on, Sharpe retains its appeal.

Just as Nolan’s casting choices diverge, no doubt, from the archaic Greek imagination, so did the television hero take on a life apart from that intended by the author. Cornwell’s Sharpe, a black-haired Cockney, has now been fully subsumed by Bean’s portrayal as a gruff and hawk-like Yorkshireman — a last-minute casting decision made, at ruinous expense, due to the actor Paul McGann’s injury on set in Ukraine. But Bean became Sharpe, just as Troy’s Odysseus later bore his stamp. As Cornwell would write, Bean “really did take over Sharpe. I hear Sean’s voice when I write Sharpe,” with the author eventually tacking a Yorkshire backstory onto his Londoner hero to flatter his audience’s desires. Such is the craft of the bard who spins his tales for fame and gold. Before his first writing attempt, Cornwell stripped apart CS Forester’s Hornblower novels for the basic building blocks of plot, creating a formula that could be reliably leaned upon with the minimum of artistic exertion. Like more celebrated epic cycles, then, ITV’s Sharpe is the work of multiple authors, working within a common register. So dependable, and elastic, had the formula become that the TV series could soon diverge from the books almost entirely, as its scriptwriters appealed to their own personal muses.

For primetime TV entertainment on a low-rent commercial channel, a surprising amount of tonal experimentation could ensue from this production-line dynamic. So, the screenwriter Nigel Kneale, of Quatermass fame, would thrust Sharpe into the strange and unsuccessful horror-Western of Sharpe’s Gold, in which the hero fends off an Aztec sacrificial cult in conquistador armor; or the writer Patrick Harbinson would invent, from thin air, the Loachian social drama of Sharpe’s Justice, with its flinty Yorkshire mill-owners repressing their striking workers with foppish and callous local yeomanry. Perhaps the most artistically satisfying of the entire series, 1996’s Sharpe’s Regiment, scripted by the playwright Charles Wood, possesses an uncanny, dreamlike quality, enhanced by the flat Essex marshland landscapes that owe so much to David Lean’s Great Expectations. Its performances are so outlandishly strange, its portrayal of the harshness and class-based humiliations of the redcoat’s life so bleak, that the episode feels less like a primetime TV drama than a Sixties absurdist satire: and indeed, it comes as no surprise to learn that Wood had scripted both the 1968 anti-war satire The Charge of the Light Brigade and the BBC’s acclaimed and grueling Falklands drama Tumbledown. If the pre-Blair Nineties were, as I often think, the last gasp of postwar British society before its great transformation into today’s UK, then in Sharpe we see that lost civilization working out its concerns, almost unconsciously, through a determinedly populist medium.

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Surprisingly under-remarked by Sharpe enthusiasts is the series’ obsessive working-out of Britain’s pained relationship with Ireland, a theme returned to again and again like a tongue probing a rotting tooth. This political subplot makes sense given the unusual backstories of both Cornwell himself and the writer of the majority of its episodes, Eoghan Harris. Sharpe was born “one wet winter’s day in Belfast”, remembers Cornwell, who at the height of the Troubles “gloried in the grand title of Head of Current Affairs Television for the BBC in Northern Ireland”. It is not hard to discern the imprint of time and place on the author, birthing his hero at his desk “as the rain fell steadily beyond the window and the grey clouds hung low over that strangely beguiling city”.

It is no coincidence, surely, that the villainous Colonel Girdwood of Sharpe’s Regiment, traumatized by his experience of being “ambushed by Black Irish as a young officer” and neurotically obsessed with the “Irish filth, Irish scum” inhabiting “that cess-bog”, shares his uncommon name with the main British Army barracks in North Belfast — a location with which the younger Cornwell would have been depressingly familiar. But then, 30 years ago, Irish concerns intruded more forcefully on England than today. It comes as a shock, such is the English capacity for historical amnesia, to remember that the series’ Nineties run spanned the IRA’s renewed mainland bombing campaign from Warrington and Bishopsgate, through the Manchester and Docklands bombings, to the Good Friday Agreement that froze the conflict. Sharpe is, in its own superficially trivial way, as much a cultural artifact of that carefully forgotten era as the Cranberries’ song “Zombie”.

After all, the series takes pains to put forward a particular political conception of the relationship between the two islands. While Wellington’s army in Spain was indeed heavily composed of Irishmen, the sympathetic Irish characters who populate the series — exiled priests, Wild Geese in Spanish service, or Anglo-Irish aristocrats with dubious lilting brogues — are writerly moral choices. Anti-Irish sentiment expressed by a character is a sure sign of a ne’er-do-well; the relationship between Sharpe and his loyal Irish sidekick Sergeant Patrick Harper (played by Daragh O’Malley) is, on the other hand, the emotional core of the series. Taken together, the repeated Hibernian allusions ultimately coalesce into a particular political plea for amicable coexistence.

Harper’s name is directly lifted from a Republican friend of Cornwell’s in Belfast, whose family, the author writes, “was not fond of the British, nor did they have cause to be”. Irish rebellion is understandable, the writerly logic runs, the product of English neglect and misgovernance: nevertheless, Bean’s gruff Yorkshireman and O’Malley’s bellicose, sentimental Celt can still come together in pursuit of a common, greater good. Or, as the exiled Irish priest in Sharpe’s Sword puts it, as he reluctantly deploys his wits towards Wellington’s service, and humbles a caddish English traitor: “I’m Irish. John Bull’s a bad neighbor. But Bonaparte’s a bully and so are you.” It is a curiously 19th-century vision of Irishness, of sentimental patriotism and rebellious grumblings nevertheless tempered, in the end, by British military service and loyalty to the Crown. Such Redmondism endures today, not least in people like Andy Burnham.

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As for Sharpe, all this surely owes as much to the quixotic politics of the screenwriter Harris as to Cornwell himself. When not writing martial TV entertainments for British mass audiences, Harris was an influential and controversial staple of Irish political commentary; an activist for Sinn Féin before the 1970 split within the party, and in the IRA between its Provisional and Official/Workers Party factions. Indeed, Harris says he was once asked to join the IRA by the Republican icon Seamus Costello (who later founded the INLA), an appointment blocked by the IRA’s chief of staff Cathal Goulding. “Forget that,” Goulding apparently said. “Your job is to write pamphlets and work out the ideologue side.” While working for Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE, it has been claimed that Harris smuggled pro-Workers Party and anti-Provisionals sentiment into programming at the same time Cornwell was toiling away for the BBC across the northern border. With the violent self-certainty that characterized his turbulent career, Harris rejected Irish Republicanism’s tradition of violence as a form of “fascism” likely to precipitate Yugoslavia-like ethnic cleansing in Northern Ireland, taking up the cause of Ulster Unionists and in the process becoming “the ultimate Republican apostate”.

Writing the Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech the year after the Sharpe series ended, Harris’ popular screenwriting and his concurrent anti-Republican activism reflected two aspects of his own ideological whole. Not for him the squeamishness against military glory that characterized British liberal mores of the time. As he declared in the official ITV companion to the series, “Left liberalism was all over the British film industry at that time… Having somebody stand in front of the Union Jack and shout “‘Stand! Stand!, Stand!” would make most English-born writers deeply uneasy. I was the perfect man for the job because I have no such hang-ups. Being Irish I could wave the Union Jack and be proud of honor and courage, without feeling I had to defend myself at a Hampstead dinner party.” If Sharpe represents a certain kind of Britishness, it is one filtered through a very quixotic Irish perspective, that of the anti-Republican, patriotic Home Ruler, a stance still observable, as a current, among a very specific sub-type of Irish conservative. It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to view Sharpe as one of the final, popular works of the Anglo-Irish canon.

But, Irish ambiguities and Harris’ tangled politics aside, as ITV’s manly and populist answer to the BBC’s contemporaneous and genteel Regency costume dramas, Sharpe more overtly speaks to British audiences. Sharpe is, canonically, a working-class hero, made doubly so by his Northern accent: indeed, you do not need to be Andy Burnham to suspect that the nation would not have taken quite so readily to his intended Cockney incarnation. He is not especially patriotic, and like his literary creator has taken up his calling for purely mercenary and self-improving ends. His antagonists are more often craven and incompetent toffs than Frenchmen, who are, with the exception of the pantomime villain Ducos, almost always fundamentally decent. Indeed, having declared “I’ve done without Yorkshire more than 20 years and I don’t want it now”, Sharpe — like his creator — eventually abandons Britain for good to live abroad with his foreign wife. Much of the hero’s resentment towards authority, and to the petty meanness and restrictions of his own country, can be derived from Cornwell’s own experiences. The illegitimate child of a Canadian airman, Cornwell was adopted by an Essex family adhering to the puritanical Peculiar People sect, and escaped his childhood unhappiness in historical and martial fantasies of his own dreaming.

Here, it is not hard to discern the influence of the Commando, Victor, and Warlord comics of postwar British boyhood in Sharpe’s DNA. Pitched battles are few, fortunately for the directors’ budgets. Instead, Sharpe is sent out on missions of his own, always pulling off victories against overwhelming odds, and defeating enemies who are cads and rotters as well as strategic adversaries. Ducos, the French spymaster, endlessly polishing his spectacles while devising cruel fates for our hero, is simply the cold and sneering German commandant of British boyhood fare. Just as Orwell observed that the Edwardian Boys Own comics of imperial derring-do, which made up his own childhood reading, strove to impart Victorian public school moral codes to a less privileged readership, so do we see their last vestigial survival in Sharpe, who inhabits the moral world of The Four Feathers rather than Flashman. “While other boys were reading Wizard and Rover, I was engrossed in huge leather-bound volumes of the Boy’s Own Paper, 1890 to 1900,” Harris has remarked. “Mentally, I spent my childhood on the North West Frontier.” If, as Orwell stated, “boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910,” then Sharpe represents the last, unbroken and unapologetic strand of the genre, a golden Edwardian summer never to meet its 1914 (or in Harris’s case, 1916).

Just as folk art, and the bardic register preserves, in fossilized form, the styles and mores of earlier times, so did Sharpe’s unashamed quest for mass popularity preserve the essence of this lost Britain. For all the class grievances that run through the series, Sharpe is a fundamentally conservative corpus of work. The great failing of his superiors, in military rank as well as social class, is not that they possess stern and self-denying moral codes: but that they fail to live up to them. Even a foppish traitor, like James Purefoy’s character in Sharpe’s Sword, can at least redeem himself with a final act of suicidal heroism. Sexual politics, too, are more conservative than the hero’s many dalliances would initially suggest. Bodices are ripped only by villains; Sharpe himself is strangely cold-blooded, the often-awkward and hesitant object of female wiles rather than a Regency rake. Betrayed by his silly and faithless wife, Sharpe’s only enduring and fully requited love throughout the series is his platonic relationship with Sergeant Harper. “As a writer, I’m much more interested in relationships between men than between men and women,” Harris would later declare. “His emotional life is with the regiment, not with the women, and he’s committing adultery every time he turns to them. This is the classical view of what a man’s role is… It’s not a fashionable view, and I make no apologies for that.”

Patrick Harper is, then, Sharpe’s Patroclus, the emotional and battlefield companion of Sean Bean’s moody warrior, sulking in his tent before the walls of Badajoz. Cornwell later reworks this martial pairing of Saxon and Gael in his Last Kingdom series, a set of novels explicitly focused on England’s state formation and the relationships between the constituent peoples of these islands, his purposeful addition to our insular civilization’s founding myths. If Nolan’s Odyssey is overshadowed by the contemporary culture war surrounding it, then Sharpe’s edges are perhaps smoothed over by relegating it to the TV nostalgia of less complicated times. Nolan reworks ancient archetypes to serve today’s American concerns, just as Sharpe, with tighter budgets for Britain’s straitened circumstances, did three decades ago for us. As formulaic as a bard’s stock phrases, conceived as popular entertainment rather than high art, there is a certain political as well as aesthetic value, beyond mere guilty pleasure, in rewatching Sharpe as the mythic hero of that lost and irrecoverable land: John Major’s Britain. The past is a foreign country, we realize, contrasting today’s ITV dross with the first wailing electric guitar notes of Sharpe’s theme tune, as boyishly stirring now as it ever was. They do things differently there.

The conclusions drawn from that conflict, based on the controversial counterinsurgency doctrine of General Frank Kitson, then overseeing military intelligence operations in Northern Ireland, were clearly directly intended to apply to the British mainland. As Kitson predicted in his 1971 book on counterinsurgency, Low Intensity Operations, the spread of communications technology, particularly the “small cheap wireless sets” the man of the near-future would be glued to, meant that in the decades to come, “social discontent and racial ferment will be more important, and disturbances arising out of dissatisfaction with society, often allied with racial problems which have not yet been mastered”, would present a threat to the stability of societies even as cozy and placid as provincial England. “It is difficult for the British with their traditions of stability to imagine disorders arising beyond the powers of the police to handle,” Kitson warns, “but already there are indications that such a situation could arise, and this at a time of apparently unrivaled affluence.”

We are not there yet, though the murder of Reform’s justice spokeswoman, Ann Widdecombe, appears, if no more plausible motivation arises, to be the country’s third assassination of a prominent politician in just over a decade — a tally comparable with that of the Northern Ireland conflict. Writing in 1991, for the reissue of his book, Kitson remarked that the controversy it aroused among the Labour opposition at the time — the party’s defense spokesman, Roy Hattersley, asked angry questions of it in Parliament — was the product of its turbulent era, aswirl with fears of revolution, civil disorder and rumors of deep state interference in electoral politics. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the heat generated at the time would be incomprehensible in today’s climate of opinion, but is of interest as an indication of the very different situation that existed in the early 1970s.” 

We may observe that the current state of British politics is more heated still. Reform’s spokesman for home affairs, Zia Yusuf, who last year declared that “the Prime Minister and his Cabinet are engaging in stochastic terrorism” by inciting violence against Nigel Farage, this week laid the blame for Widdecombe’s murder on Labour politicians whose alarmist rhetoric may have inspired the killer “to eliminate that supposed threat through lethal violence”. We may ask what happened to the broadly pacific, affluent and content mainland Britain of the Nineties, but no answer that does not include the consequences of Labour rule can suffice. We live in the country Blair dreamed up, which the Tories reified. A heatwave is now as regular a summer occurrence in Britain as a communal riot, and the conjunction of the two presents a predictable strategic risk to a Westminster government. If the incoming prime minister can get through August without a mainland repeat of last month’s Belfast disturbances, he can count himself lucky — or luckier than Starmer, at any rate. 

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Whether it is all doom and gloom is a matter of perception. There is, unlike the early Seventies, no fear of destabilizing industrial action, because there is now little British industry to speak of: in establishing the conditions for today’s faltering economic settlement, Thatcher’s cure has proved worse than the disease. Yet the result of her handiwork is that both the aggrieved proletariat of the Sandhurst scenario, and the disgruntled petit-bourgeoisie huddled around its firebrand Right-wing MP, can now be comfortably chalked up as Reform voters. Not too far from Ogbourne St George’s fictional disturbances, the equally bucolic-sounding Oxfordshire village of Piddington, a Liberal Democrat stronghold, voted last week for a symbolic referendum on secession from the United Kingdom, angered by the presence of a migrant facility in its disused military camp. It is, as Reform’s dubious signing Nadhim Zahawi declared, “the beginning of civil disobedience & rightly so”. The British electorate has become too political for its politicians’ comfort. “The system will break. The UK is broken,” Zahawi warns, as if he had no previous hand in the matter. And so, to stave off whatever Reform represents, Burnham must be foisted upon us. 

Having cycled through a decade of occasional murders, hurried elections, plots and coups to oust calamitous leaders and install new ones, and a referendum so destabilizingly democratic to Westminster’s functioning that it is unlikely to ever be repeated, we are treated on Monday to an unimpeded coronation, as an ailing political system attempts to save itself from its voters. Like Phoenix Nights and ITV1, Burnham’s popular appeal may be more narrowly regional than his courtiers hope. Yet for all his claimed antipathy to Westminster, and even as he threatens to strip it of its dominance, it is the capital that will prove most quiescent to his project of taming provincial Britain. The Burnham project, like all enthusiasms of the current Westminster state, is fundamentally a conservative one. It aims to shore up the Fabian experiments of its predecessors, like a bucket-hatted covers band recapturing the magic of Labour’s greatest Nineties hits, and add some extra of its own — though the restive audience seems unlikely to welcome his new material. Government by Radio 6 dad is as doubtfully appealing a project as rule by Matrix Chambers: the people are already moving elsewhere.

But rule by wonks may at least be better than rule by activist lawyers. In neutering an insurgency, Kitson observes that, practically speaking, “there are two possible alternatives, the first one being that the Law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public”, a tactic that requires that “the member of the government responsible for law, either sits on the supreme council or takes his orders from the head of the administration”. The other, preferable option for Kitson “is that the Law should remain impartial and administer the laws of the country without any direction from the government”. One man’s rioting, or unwisely worded tweet, in this approach, would not be treated more harshly or leniently than that of his political rivals, for it is the role of the police and judiciary — of the state as a whole — to act as an impartial arbiter of justice between the opposing sides. “As a rule,” he notes, “the second alternative is not only morally right but also expedient, because it is more compatible with the government’s aim of maintaining the allegiance of the population.” To do otherwise would be to invite a situation in which an aggrieved section of the population, having lost faith in the state’s neutral benevolence, would come to distrust the police, the judiciary, the entire political system, and wish to see it all razed to the ground.

It is a clearly apparent fact that for Reform, its supporters, and the Conservative media sphere which is increasingly coalescing around the party, the first of Kitson’s two options is the state in which we now live. The indignant accusations of two-tier justice, and of Lord Hermer as a particularly vengeful and politicized Inquisitor-General, are now axiomatic for Reform. Farage himself, justifying the quixotic drama of his resignation and re-election campaign, declares that “the Establishment have now decided that they can’t beat us fairly, so they’ve chosen to use foul means”. Indeed, “perhaps Dominic Cummings was right,” Farage continues, “when he said Whitehall will break the law to stop Reform winning power. We’ve been subject, in the last few months, to the use of illegally obtained information. Firm evidence of computer hacking. And now leaks from government agencies.” Whatever the truth of the matter, Farage’s allegations of dirty tricks and hidden agendas, and of nefarious collusion by the security state, are a new development in Westminster politics, if not in Kitson’s old stomping-ground.

Kitson’s dire reputation among Northern Ireland’s Nationalists rests upon both the above accusations, and the perception that he treated the community like the troublesome inhabitants of more distant colonial outposts. The latter is a complaint increasingly heard in mainland Britain, a country of mutually suspicious tribes in which an anthropology degree now appears a better grounding for governance than one in PPE. In a realm where policing matters are increasingly devolved, for the sake of dampening threatened disturbances, to “community leaders”, it is striking the degree to which Farage has recently chosen to sound like one himself. “The British state is no longer working for everyone in this country,” he tells us, “White Brits will become a minority in this country before the end of the century. Without a voice to speak up for them, the future will be manifestly unjust.”

Railing against the police, the press, the judiciary, and the Westminster system in its entirety, the party is edging into the “conditional loyalty”, in the historian David W. Miller’s phrasing, of Ulster Loyalists, whose wish for continued incorporation within the British state does not often translate into affection for, or acquiescence to most aspects of, its real-world existence. The state, in this view, is of value only so far as it does not threaten the continued existence of the people. For all that Reform is called Powellite by English observers, the constitutional romantic Enoch Powell himself was shocked by his adopted Irish faction’s notion that “Parliament’s authority might be resisted… if it were ‘traitorous to a section of its population.’” It is a mark of mainland Britain’s political descent, since the Seventies, that this Ulster peculiarity is an increasingly commonplace tone of discourse among English voters. When Farage warns that without “urgent action taken to remove discriminatory and dangerous anti-White policies, we will see another Belfast”, it is not Northern Ireland he is speaking of.

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If Burnham recognizes the threat, he does not show it. The Starmer government’s commitment to clamping down on internet anonymity, which is to say Right-wing political discourse, echoes Kitson’s advice on the necessity of “locating illegal enemy broadcasting stations and… jamming them”, updated for the social media age. But so too did his government’s rhetoric on the Conservative Party’s disastrous Boriswave, and tentative support for ILR reform. Coming immediately after the riots, and bracketed by threats of robust police and judicial crackdowns on rioters, Starmer’s approach was analogous with Kitson’s advice on “the judicious promise of concessions, at the same time imposing a period of calm by the use of government forces backed up by statements to the effect that most of the concessions can only be implemented once the life of the country returns to normal”.

In just such a way, the most recent Belfast riots — overseen by the local version of “community leaders” of whom the British state is fearful — led to an immediate immigration crackdown in Northern Ireland, to such an extent that asylum claims in the neighboring Republic have halved in a month. The principle is well-established, even if its historical application has often been found wanting: a soldier writing bluntly for soldiers, Kitson nevertheless saw counterinsurgency as a primarily political process. But instead, as his elevation of Hope Not Hate advisors shows, Burnham appears fated to view his political survival as a form of bloodless counterinsurgency, monitoring and punishing subversives and removing them from the body politic, while reneging on promised concessions — not, in Kitson’s book, a recipe for success. 

So, the stage is already set for a heightening of Reform’s rhetoric of political persecution at the hands of state and shadowy, quasi-state actors. The scope of the party’s grievances against the British state in its current form have widened to such an expansive degree that anything short of its total reform will count as failure. Rather than merely installing Farage in No. 10 — we can assume only the original London branch — the driving thrust of British politics has moved inexorably to the stage Kitson posits as preceding insurgency, that of subversion, where “those involved… envisage replacing the authorities ultimately, and ruling in their stead.” The party’s explicit pitch is, as Farage puts it, “a political revolution” to upend “the entire establishment”. 

While we can reasonably doubt the party’s capacity to do so, the crucial issue in British politics seems strangely underanalyzed. The very idea that the state, as a thing distinct from its ruling party, is a neutral, or indeed fully legitimate political actor, has been consigned to history by the British Right. But if the odds against Burnham’s success are daunting, so are those facing Reform. Both Burnham and Farage represent, to their respective supporters, last-ditch gambles before the abyss. Mainland Britain is already a more turbulent country than that of the early Seventies: it is difficult to see any plausible route for Burnham to make it less so in the years, or months, between his coronation and the next election. Long hot summers stretch on endlessly between now and then: what was once an exotic novelty now appears the combustible norm.

And so, yet another failed leader has been sacrificed as an offering to the British public, as Labour carries out an internal coup to stave off an electoral revolution. But even as the Lancastrian usurper secures his hold on Westminster, disbursing sinecures to his faithful retainers, there is no particular reason to believe he will be any more successful in office than Starmer. After all, many of those today celebrating his successful coup were just as feverishly exultant, two years ago, over the coming Starmerite golden age. If they were better judges of the country’s mood, we would not be here today.

Like an incoming headmaster turning around a failing school, Burnham told us Westminster is “broken” in his landmark devolution speech, using language apparently no longer the preserve of Right-wing populists. But will future historians characterize him as a continuity figure, carrying out necessary reforms to save a failing system from itself, or as an agent of total change? His manifesto-by-proxy, The Productive State, which aims to flesh out his much-invoked but nebulous Manchesterism as a program for governance, claims him for the latter role. As it states, the public “ask now for only what is obvious: major, even fundamental changes in British society” to cast off “the meanness and frustration of long years of stagnation and decline”, unabashedly adopting a “declinist” framework still mocked as a Right-wing fantasy by backwards-looking elements of the Labour Left. Indeed, the paper notes, “Labour have hitherto not delivered on that demand. If that feeling does not change, the electoral consequences will be severe and lasting.” That much is true. Yet what is perhaps more interesting than the structural economic reforms the paper suggests, is that its writers frame their socialist ends in postliberal terms, quoting Polanyi and appealing to national sovereignty and state resilience to make arguments postliberals were condemned for a decade ago.

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How to save postliberalism

By David Goodhart

As the foreign policy writer Lily Lynch recently observed, “Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus.” The same may be said of the domestic political and economic order so drastically reshaped to fit the vanished dreamworld of globalized liberal capitalism. And so, The Productive State observes, “in an era of weaponized interdependence — where access to energy, critical minerals, and essential supply chains has become a tool of geopolitical pressure”, the question of ownership of vital infrastructure “is a strategic one, which cuts to the heart of live debates about sovereignty in an increasingly geopolitically unstable world”. National sovereignty, state capacity and resilience in a world of global competition rather than co-operation, in which Westminster failure “wears down the basic democratic expectation that public institutions can identify the needs of the public they govern and act to meet them”, eroding the state’s legitimacy: these are Lexiteer arguments of a decade ago, now championed, perhaps too late, by those who would in 2016 have scorned them.

For in economic terms, there is very little, in The Productive State’s condemnation of neoliberalism as the agent of national decline, that could not be said, or has not already been, by Reform’s planner-in-chief and prominent postliberal intellectual, Danny Kruger. That there is such an overlap between The Productive State and postliberal arguments is hardly surprising, given British postliberalism’s intellectual descent from socialism. Even still, it is of note that Burnham’s only open challenger, so far, is the Blue Labour-endorsed candidate Al Carns, standing on a platform of industrial renewal through sensible energy policy in the service of national security. Even if Farage has shied away, recently, from his tentative support of nationalization for key infrastructure, postliberalism already appears to dominate the economic argument, ahead of the next election.

But the arguments for national sovereignty, domestic reindustrialization, energy security and a strengthened state have been won by the deteriorating security environment rather than the esoteric pronouncements of post-liberal commentators: both the former Thatcherite Farage and the Labour soft-left now converge on them for the credibility to advance their own projects. Reform’s Zia Yusuf publicly threatens the prime beneficiary of actually existing British neoliberalism, the outsourcing giant SERCO, for its insufficient zeal in carrying out future mass deportations. The postliberal Labour MP Jonathan Hinder declares, “Put cheap energy before clean energy. Drill for our own oil and gas in the North Sea. Back British industry, by scrapping self-harming Net Zero policies. Seriously start to rebalance our economy away from London. Stop the boats.” The next election will be fought on firmly postliberal territory, quite divorced from the ineffective theorizing of the movement’s intellectuals.

For we live, now, in the unmanaged postliberal order brought about by liberal hubris. A decade ago, Brexit offered Westminster the breathing space to break with liberal nostrums in a controlled and sober way, listening and acceding to the democratically-expressed demands of the electorate. Instead, the Brexit vote was treated as the mindless revolt of unlettered proles, manipulated by social media algorithms and a malign network of populist demagogues. Back in the heady days of Brexit discourse — and I have cause to remember this well — to argue that liberal fantasies of enlightened cosmopolitan governance had seen the capacity and legitimacy of individual states dangerously weakened, threatening the basic political order itself, was reviled as something akin to fascism by those who have only latterly awakened to reality.

Again too late, the very same commentators who, only a year ago, mocked the inter-ethnic violence predicted to result from mass immigration as the product of rightwing fever dreams, introducing the “nightmare” prospect of “hardened borders,” now panickingly declare that “we cannot simply dismiss the violence as just another outburst of a hardened racist few… because to do so would seem to leave us destined to regular summer bouts of pogromist violence”. This crisis is apparently no longer a hard-Right fantasy: through gritted teeth, the writer comes to the conclusion, presented as novel, that “the sight of unvetted young men landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a glaring signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it”. A year is, evidently, a long time in British political commentary. We cannot, perhaps, ever expect Britain’s liberal Left commentariat to admit that they were wrong, even as they belatedly adopt positions their social standing once rested upon condemning. But Burnham’s ideological malleability — delicately phrased — is such that he can easily adopt much of Reform’s message of a broken, dysfunctional Britain in renewing an establishment consensus he affects to despise.

One obvious danger for Reform is that Burnham, not shy of exaggerated displays of cultural Northernness, will cast them as the party of arrogant, spoiled Southeast England. Early trial versions of this approach, such as moving part of his Prime Ministerial court to Manchester, seem designed more to inspire a kneejerk reaction from his foes than to tangibly improve British governance. But it is difficult to extrapolate too much from his Makerfield win: Burnham is genuinely popular in the Northwest, and simply presented the fastest route to ousting Starmer. Hanging a general halfway through a war is rarely a sign of impending victory; even still, for Reform, the path ahead is uncertain. Running a prominent national-populist intellectual failed in Gorton and Denton; but so did running a no-nonsense local plumber in Makerfield, where a strategic section of the Red Wall has been found electorally wanting. Should Reform now lean into its end-of-pier, ITV1 Red Wall aesthetic, or attempt to woo the middle classes, among whom it has rapidly become the default party of the Right?

It is perhaps in pursuit of a newly radicalized middle-class audience that Farage has begun to write on Substack, focusing on territory simply untouchable to Labour. The Burnhamite manifesto declares that “Reactionary politics… is fundamentally a politics of shrinkage and exclusion: drawing the circle of belonging tighter, withdrawing provision from those deemed undeserving, turning scarcity into a weapon that disciplines and divides,” positing instead a program of mass abundance rolled out by a revitalized British state. Farage’s message is simpler and clearer. As he asserts, the effect of current social housing policy “has been to redistribute the nation’s stock of social housing away from the White British populations who originally inhabited these areas”. Indeed, as he writes, extending Reform’s critique of mass immigration further back in time than has lately been deemed acceptable, “When Labour and Conservative politicians opened Britain’s borders after the war, it would have been simple to maintain a basic principle: the British people paid for these homes, should be housed in them, and newcomers will have to be patient as they earn their way in.” Perhaps addressed at a downwardly mobile, younger middle class, the dangled prospect of redistributing prime urban real estate may yet outweigh fashionable moral poses.

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Here, on the once-perilous ground of immigration, is the obvious dividing line at the next election, between parties with otherwise converging economic worldviews. As Burnham’s first headache, the spat between his future ministers over Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) reforms, shows, immigration is a source of internal conflict within Labour, caught between an awareness of the public will and its own internal morality, while it is Reform’s very reason for being. To win over his party, Burnham may, as he has hinted, be inclined to abandon Starmer and Mahmood’s ILR reforms, intended to quietly disperse what even the BBC now calls the Boriswave. Yet as clear-eyed, Blue Labour-adjacent commentators like the Labour Realists observe, “the Labour Party cannot transfer the costs of a Conservative mistake on immigration policy onto the British people and win the next election”. It is, simply, in Reform’s greatest interest for the Boriswave to become, as soon as possible in the public’s eyes, the Burnhamwave. Reform’s pitch on the Boriswave, already the Party’s prime line of attack against Burnham, is clear, as Zia Yusuf writes: “If Burnham tries to make the Boriswave permanent, we will reverse it: abolishing ILR, rescinding residence rights of those dependent on the state, and reforming the immigration system so that no Government can ever behave so recklessly again.”

The logic for Reform in the coming election — which we may now expect at any date from Burnham’s formal coronation — is therefore to go further, and harder, on immigration than would have been imaginable even two years ago. There is little ground on which Burnham can fight — on housing, on the NHS, on crime — in which his party’s near-religious sympathy for mass immigration has not poisoned the well. Every new social housing development Burnham promises can, and will, be presented as a source of local danger. The future of British politics, long-delayed, is finally upon us.

For Labour, there will never be a better time for an election than now — but for Reform the attractions are less clear. The Party’s declarations of the urgency of new elections do not fully convince, given its recent electoral setbacks and still nebulous program for government. Yet for both the calculation will be the same: the longer the country has to experience the operation of a Labour government, the more attractive a Faragian reformation will seem. With both parties deploring the dysfunctional brokenness of Westminster politics, victory will come to whoever can more convincingly capture the revolutionary mood. Burnham wants a decade to complete his project: but so did Starmer. Like the violent storms attending Starmer’s downfall, Britain’s decade-long, suffocating political climate now seems ready for dramatic resolution, clearing the air for years to come. The heavens are opening up over Westminster: even in his Manchester fiefdom, Burnham is unlikely to escape the flood.

A good portion of their narrow terraced street, which had, until that evening, housed non-European migrants, had been burned out. The migrants had been escorted away in armored Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Landrovers earlier; the houses, and cars outside, were now blackened shells. Taking a photo of the devastation, eerily lit by the blue lights of the emergency services, I tried to persuade a local woman, on promise of anonymity, to grant me an interview. Two burly men, overhearing me, ushered me into a dark corner where they demanded to search my phone’s camera roll, to ensure I had not captured any local faces. Once they were satisfied, the larger of the two men warned me, “with no animosity, like, don’t be asking any more questions. We don’t want any journalists down here.” I understand, I said, but it’s my job. “In this country?” replied his more excitable colleague, “Are you fucking daft? Fuck away off and get on home before you get kneecapped.”

There was, perhaps, no arguing the point. Hostility to journalists was ubiquitous, at least on the Loyalist side. Over the course of the day, in which protests had been announced on social media in a bewildering variety of locations across Northern Ireland, a constant theme had been that no cameras, and no phones, were to be allowed. Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes. Coming home to Belfast from London that afternoon, I had returned to a place of ghostly quietness, where confused tourists wandered past the shuttered shops and bars of the deserted city center. The horrifying attempted beheading of a North Belfast man by a Sudanese migrant, captured on video, would have been incendiary enough in a mainland Britain increasingly host to such horrors; in hitherto untouched Belfast, the assumption was that tonight’s response would be a historic event.

What gave the atrocity its added political piquancy was that it took place in a firmly Catholic, Nationalist area. The symbolism of the attacker being beaten off with a hurling stick, a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism — by a local man named Maitiu Mág Tighearnán — was quickly taken up by new Irish Republican factions firmly set against mass migration. Until now, the governing rule of thumb was that anti-migrant riots are, in Northern Ireland, a purely Loyalist affair, which Catholic Nationalists regard with detached dismissal. But it is increasingly common to hear grumblings against mass migration from working-class Catholics, grumblings entirely absent from their community’s social media and journalistic commentators. Indeed, the locally influential Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), which claims not to be the political wing of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), has recently begun to make its veiled criticisms of mass migration explicit, seeking to capture the turning mood and turn it against their politically dominant rivals Sinn Féin. In its statement delivered on the night of the attack, the IRSP declared its support for a residents’ group protesting the siting of a migrant hostel in West Belfast’s Republican Glen Road, and warned against the silencing of “legitimate working class concerns about immigration” within “communities, who, with zero consultation, have never seen such demographic shifts in their lifetime”.

Northern Irish Republicanism has, until now, been insulated by the country’s post-peace process political system — guaranteeing an increasingly socially liberal Sinn Féin a role in government — from the anti-migration disturbances that have roiled the Irish Republic in recent years. The long-expected moment when that would change appears to be slowly dawning, accelerated by the violent horror of this attack, deep within the Republican inner sanctum. “You wouldn’t expect this happening here, not since the days of the Troubles,” one Catholic woman, smoking a cigarette on the doorstep of her neatly-presented terraced house, told me of the attack sparking the night’s events. “As a mother of young boys you worry what might happen to them, it’s shocking, just shocking is what it is.”

Yet in North Belfast, a patchwork of jealously guarded sectarian enclaves and exclaves, which makes a map of the Holy Roman Empire look manageable, the traditional ethnic conflict is of far greater relevance than whatever new politics is being formed by the decisions of Whitehall officials, who have rapidly turned Belfast into one of the United Kingdom’s prime destinations for asylum resettlement. On North Queen Street, one of North Belfast’s many euphemistically termed “interface areas”, where the two communities abut each other, Catholic Nationalists cheerily watched masked Protestant youths, masked and dressed in black, set barriers alight and fill petrol bombs, the two sides observing each other from a healthy distance. On the Catholic side, commanding-looking men in expensive black SUVs sat overseeing the events, occasionally nodding at messages whispered to them through their car windows.

On the Protestant side, where older women held up placards saying “Women and Children Not Safe In This Area” behind a screen of intimidating masked teenagers, a woman laughed at a police patrol car making a rapid about-turn from the area. “Look at them doughnuts he’s doing,” she said to her friend, “He’s from Divis [a notorious West Belfast Catholic housing estate] flying about like that.” One older man, who appeared to be drunk, angrily tried to pull the bemused driver of a rental lorry, with Southern plates, from his cab, following his awkward and failed attempt to negotiate the unexpected and blazing barricade. No doubt in the new spirit of cross-community co-operation, other Protestants intervened, leading their errant colleague away and giving the driver alternative directions to his destination with a kind of exaggerated politeness rare to Belfast. Unlike previous anti-immigration riots, where the PSNI came under furious and sustained assault, this time round the police were markedly absent, occasionally sending officers in patrol cars to pull burning bins away from traffic intersections, and instead leaving the two hostile communities they are normally at such costly pains to separate to explore each others’ unmediated proximity.

“It’s an excuse for them [Loyalists] to come out, build their numbers and then they’ll attack our community, it happens all the time,” one Catholic man from the fiercely Republican New Lodge told me, while grinding weed for a joint. “We’re all just standing here so, you can see, and they’re all covered up, covered up to their teeth, all black as your boot. Don’t you be going down that side,” he warned me, “they’re a lot more aggressive down there, even though their side supports Britain, you know.” Even still, he added, tonight was something new. “It’s about both sides, you know, the Green and the Orange coming together.” An older Catholic man from the New Lodge, watching the Protestant rioters with his Southern-accented female companion, agreed. “They [migrants] shouldn’t be allowed in this country,” he told me. “We’re keeping our distance there at the minute,” he added, nodding at the rioting Protestants, “but by right we should all be coming together here. They shouldn’t be in this country.” His grey-haired male friend, shaking his head angrily, walked away saying “I don’t agree with you there, mate.” I asked the first man what he thought of his Sinn Féin elected representatives. “Arseholes,” he replied.

Walking down, past burning barricades on the Clifton Circus roundabout overseen by a thin garrison of teenage sentries, I went to a different burning barricade on the staunchly Loyalist Shankill Road, where I met Amanda, a 60-year old woman shouting “Leftie scum!” at an ITV news crew. Though telling me that I “looked like a Leftie”, she agreed to talk to me. “We’re feeling very, very angry, we’re just tired,” she told me. “It just goes from one thing to the next thing, and they’re just all horrible situations. We’ve just come out of the horrible situation of Henry Nowak, and now, this week, we’ll have the young man almost decapitated up on the Antrim Road.” Smoke rose from a new development of executive apartments under construction over the road, which were locally controversial. Indians were buying up all the new flats on the Shankill, which locals can’t afford, she told me, and turning them into Airbnbs. “We don’t want them here,” she added, telling me of her appreciation for Rupert Lowe — an extremely rare cut-through of English politics in Northern Ireland’s insular political universe — and distrust of the insufficiently staunch Nigel Farage. As for the Catholics, she told me, “You know, we fought each other, ever since I was so high,” indicating a point a little off the sidewalk with her hand, “but we’ve had to come together because there’s a new threat from outside the country. When you start bringing in another threat from outside, well, the people are obviously going to have to unite, because we’re being invaded by illegal migrants and immigrants on this side of the community, and they’re being equally affected with the same situation. So, what else are we going to do?”

The idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is, overwhelmingly, one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists, with the former observing both the rabid hostility displayed by Loyalist activists to expressions of cultural identity like the Irish language, and the frequent violent intimidation of Catholics living in working-class Protestant areas as far more of an immediate and existential threat. Indeed, even Nationalists hostile to mass immigration view any coordination with Loyalists as a strategic catastrophe, gifting ammunition to their pro-immigration enemies within Irish Republicanism. But in the aftermath of the North Belfast atrocity, there has for the very first time begun, though certainly not an alliance, then the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement. The nightmare scenario for Sinn Féin would have been Catholics rioting against immigrants. That did not happen: instead, working-class Catholics merely turned out to watch their Protestant neighbors riot with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of open contempt. I have never until now heard working-class Catholics, from devoutly Republican areas, talking about the coming together of the “Orange and the Green” with anything other than derision. At Ardoyne Roundabout, one of North Belfast’s most volatile sectarian interface areas, protestors from both communities shook hands and declared amity in scenes that were genuinely startling.

But this is, ultimately, Northern Ireland, where the age-old ethnic conflict is as perennial and inescapable as the soaking rain that drew the night’s events to a close. It is, probably, doubtful that anything will come of the cautious street flirtation, and as July’s marching and bonfire season draws close, we can no doubt expect a reversion to the old ways rather than the ungainly new dalliances of 2026. But, nonetheless, there was something novel and unexpected about the occasion: the working-class communities of both sides, accustomed to hating each other, and increasingly estranged from their political leaders in Stormont, for the first time eyeing each other up, from a distance, like awkward teenagers at a disco. Northern Ireland is an extremely dysfunctional country, though very charming and livable for it: it is entirely unique for both communities to find common cause in blaming Westminster for introducing an unexpected source of random, violent dysfunction to unsettle their old and comforting, formalized one.

While the Home Secretary defers judgment to the results of yet another inquiry, the Right’s political narrative, convincingly supported by the released footage, is that the racialized obsessions of progressivism have claimed another innocent life: falsely accused of racism, the victim was treated as the suspect, and died for it. For all the shocked protestations made against Reform by those culpable for this state of affairs, this is not an argument limited to Farage. The Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, condemned in Parliament “the dangerous ideology of so-called anti-racism”, which “enshrined” in the Police’s own strategic guidance differential treatment of suspects according to their race. As Philp states, in what is an expression of mainstream conservative opinion rather than dangerous rabble-rousing, “extreme activists have hijacked the policymaking process, and this is where it has led”.

Philp is correct, as is Farage. This is the true state religion that governs our society, with its own Test Acts, ritual phrases, taboos and zealous enforcers. For its hold on public life to endure, for the faith of its adherents to not be shaken, it has turned the British people into its unwilling victims. To cleave to the privileging of racial difference over competence, fairness or the basic functioning of a society is now the marker of career advancement in every limb of the British state. Nowak was murdered not just by the dagger the state allowed his killer to carry in the street, but by the chaotic jumble of powerpoint presentations, HR decisions and fears of offending the wrong people which informed the officers attending his miserable death.

Nowak’s murder was not, in itself, an event of historic national importance, in a country where the consequences of sudden, violent ends have become a regular feature of political turmoil. What made it historic is Nigel Farage’s unexpectedly strong response, unimaginable only a few months ago. In his address this morning, backdropped by green Kentish downland and the chirp of morning birdsong, the Reform leader sought to capture a national mood, using this “moment to take a long hard at ourselves as a country, and what we’ve become”. Nowak’s callous treatment by the police was “proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country”, Farage claimed, “where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. In managing the unnecessary tensions caused by unwanted mass migration, he observed, “to stop any criticism of this, we’ve brought in hate speech laws, we’ve brought in a DEI agenda, we’ve brought in what is called ‘positive discrimination’ in favor of ethnic minorities, over those of white people whose families have lived in Britain, in many cases, for centuries. That is the mess we’ve got into.”

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By Aris Roussinos

It must be noted that both the victim and the perpetrator of this crime, one of Polish descent and one of Punjabi, were the result of migration to this country. Yet for those who might query Farage’s invocation of Nowak’s race, it was the British state itself that made race the operative factor in his death. Once the magic charm of racism had been uttered by the murderer and his family members covering for him, Nowak became a white perpetrator, automatically suspect to the officers presiding over his final moments, reading his rights to him as he bled out, the British state’s perversion of the Last Rites. Praising the dignity of Nowak’s family, which like Calocane’s victim Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s family has chosen to confront the state’s failings rather than accept the loss of a child for a greater social good, Farage suggested that instead “the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage”.

This is a tone we have not heard in British politics before, though its arrival has been long expected. It was not hard, even during the hysteria surrounding the death of the man who Farage pointedly called “the career criminal George Floyd”, to divine the beginnings of a popular reaction; a time coming when the politics of racial self-interest and group grievance would be turned against a political and cultural establishment wielding such a dangerous weapon with such recklessness. Farage declared that, for the police, “the fear of being called racist was greater than dealing with Henry Nowak’s murder”: but it is also apparent that the fear of being called racist is now less of a concern for Farage himself than channeling public anger towards Reform’s capture and overhaul of the state. Perhaps it is Restore’s threat, to his Right, that has brought about this startling language; more likely, it is the shift in public attitudes both Restore and Reform compete to represent.

Yet if Farage’s striking language, declaring “Enough of anti-white prejudice” and “a promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives” marks a new waypoint in Britain’s political settlement, what is perhaps most remarkable is that the ends to which it is being put are objectively liberal ones, of “a country that treats everybody equally and fairly before the law”, rhetoric language echoed, indeed, by Shabana Mahmood. Who could argue, in good faith, against such an obviously desirable outcome? Only those who, for their own private advantage, or their witless attempts to do good or merely to be seen to do good have brought us to where we are today. The Britain of recent decades is a failing, actually-existing post-liberal regime, governed by racial hierarchies and unequal laws, overseen by an increasingly oppressive and authoritarian state unable to govern the society it has created.

The ends of a Reform government, at least judging by today’s rhetoric, and the hopes of its voters, are a return to Britain’s governance of the Nineties, by contrast with today a stable, prosperous, well-governed and fundamentally happy country. While Reform forthrightly condemns “antiwhite racism”, addressing itself directly to the dwindling majority in what was hitherto only tacit signaling, the Conservatives invert the rhetoric, focusing on the excessive emphasis on race over fair policing. Yet for all that Kemi Badenoch condemns Farage’s language, her chosen policy outcomes, of a return to equal policing under the law, are the same. There is little distance to be found between the two conservative parties: each of them, rhetoric aside, can be viewed as the last defenders of a race-blind, liberal conservative settlement already shown to be superior, in managing a diverse country, to everything that has followed.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the competence of a future Reform government, or its ability to bend Britain’s state towards a belated reflection of the electorate’s will. But what can no longer be argued against is the necessity of trying to do so, before the state loses the last vestiges of its legitimacy. The progressive obsessions of our masters have dramatically worsened Britain’s cultural and racial politics, to the extent that it is reasonable to fear where it will end; to fear that unreformed, the state will lose what little popular acceptance it still possesses, and that the reaction will sweep us into a dangerous new world, unwanted by all but the most committed extremists.

Farage’s apocalyptic language, presenting Reform as the only political choice “if our society is not to be ripped apart, where communities start to distrust each other and deeply distrust the police and all the other institutions of this country”, where “I fear for where our society will be in a few short years if we don’t grip this and do it very, very quickly”, is now no longer beyond the bounds of political speech. Indeed, many of the comments underneath his address, shared on social media, are from voters declaring he does not go far enough.

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That Reform has positioned itself as the only party both willing and capable of saving the British state from itself is precisely why it is the likely next party of government. That neither the Conservative nor Labour architects of our racialized regime can be trusted to salvage what they have wrought is their epitaph. While Westminster awaits the results of the Makerfield by-election, and its probable elevation of the next interim prime minister, uncharacteristically silent on the news of the moment, it is both the Southampton murder and Farage’s unapologetic response that now crystallize the national mood. It is not in the interests of Britain’s ethnic minorities for those claiming to represent them to have brought us so close to the precipice. Conversely, it may only be through Reform being seen to defend the interests of Britain’s majority population, in rhetoric delivered through its multiracial shadow cabinet, that much of the liberal settlement of previous decades can be preserved.

Like Lampedusa’s Tancredi, a natural conservative forced by events to adopt revolutionary airs in order to preserve what was good about the society crumbling around him, it seems that for Farage, for things to stay as they were, everything must change. It is not hard to foresee, once Reform’s likely victory becomes a certainty, the functionaries of the state who so eagerly bent their knees to the enforced religion declaring their earnest allegiance to the new settlement. Britain is, after all, a country of few natural zealots, but many amoral and shallow-witted careerists.

Indeed, a key element in Reform’s victory, now, will be encouraging elite defection towards the new regime, among civil servants and others who will be encouraged to weigh the benefits of cooperation against the looming costs of defiance. Just as Hungary’s election has brought about a total clearing-out of the old order and its political appointees, so will Reform’s success or failure be determined by the party’s ability to reshape the state according to its vision of the common good. The alternative is no longer a return to the failed nostrums of the past, as our antiquated Blarite media class still believes, but the British state as we once knew it becoming its own final victim.

Yet in this battle between the two visions of the nation, it’s ironic that Burnham himself holds the rare distinction of having been directly scolded by his musical hero. The would-be prime minister, who once rather Pooterishly wrote that while “not in tune with his views now, I can’t deny how important Morrissey was to me”,  faced the singer’s wrath for imprecisely characterizing the 2017 Manchester bomber as merely “an extremist”.

The Manchester Arena bomb, for Morrissey “England’s 9/11”, and the subject of his unreleased song “Bonfire of Teenagers” — in which “the silly people sing: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’… I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die” — came only two weeks into Burnham’s tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, in what already feels like a different country. Were it to happen today, it is hard to imagine a restive public responding as warmly as it then did to the comforting platitudes of swaying “togetherness” rolled out by Burnham. In his 2024 political manifesto of no-nonsense Northernness, Head North, co-written with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham (whose own daughter was at the concert), Burnham discusses the atrocity more or less like an unfathomable act of God. Particular censure is reserved for the slow response of the emergency services, presented as yet another failure of Westminster state capacity.

That the bomber’s very presence in this country — as a member of a family granted asylum precisely due to their involvement in jihadist opposition to Gaddafi; who was himself returned to Britain from Libya by the Royal Navy while an object of interest to MI5 for his jihadist activity; and who paid for his bomb’s components with taxpayer-funded benefits doled out to his mother — of course represents an infinitely greater state failure. None of this figures in Burnham’s manifesto. Yet it is precisely this grievance — against the strange and cruel punishments that the British state, through a perverted sense of benevolence, wreaks against its own people — that has underwritten Reform’s rise and Labour’s catastrophic fall. Only in his 2025 postscript does Burnham note that, “One of the features of the age in which we live is its extreme volatility… The appalling murder of three young girls in Southport was sickeningly exploited and, for several days after, Britain felt like a country we have not known before… it feels as though we are approaching a political reckoning.” If the numbers are right, Burnham will soon find himself ruling this strange and unknown country. Yet uneasy lies the head that wears the Northern crown: according to the polls, if he enters power at all, it will only be because the threat from Reform, in this once dependable Labour heartland, has been dissipated by the electorate’s unexpectedly strong interest in the more radical Restore party.

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Burnham himself warns of the “risk” that “a progressive government could serve only one term and be replaced in 2029 by the most right-wing one Britain has ever seen”, presenting his Northern manifesto as “the Left’s only viable answer to the radical Right.” Is Burnham’s localized success replicable nationwide? As others have noted in their dissections of Burnham’s self-proclaimed “Manchesterism”, presiding over a booming and dynamic citystate is not quite the same as being the cause of its success. That the Northwest, with its Irish links so lauded by Burnham, has become the epicenter of violent revolt against the asylum system and its unintended consequences, first in Knowsley in 2023 and then after the Southport murders, suggests other narratives are possible.

Yet Burnham’s contributions to Head North are more interesting than the Westminster discourse, focused on the economics of Burnhamism, would so far imply. Buried in the text is a one-line summation of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, in which the root of British decline, and latterly its political dysfunction, is traced to the Westminster state’s anomalous failure, when compared with peer nations, to have undergone a successful bourgeois revolution.

“Britain,” Burnham declares, “unlike other countries, has never had a moment of modern nation-building. Our system of governance has slowly evolved from the feudal state, the remnants of which are still clearly visible in Parliament today.” The result, Burnham writes, is that “Britain is one of the most politically centralized and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world.” Rather over-egging Manchester’s distance from the capital — we are led to imagine him like Robert Bruce sheltering from the rain in his cave, ruminating on London’s iniquities — Burnham declares that only in his Northern exile did he reach the conclusion that “the Westminster system was our problem and, in its current form, could never be our solution”.

While Farage and his Right-wing challenger Rupert Lowe echo, in southern English accents and perhaps unconsciously, the discourse of Britain’s peripheral nationalists, Burnham’s critique of the failing Westminster state is more startlingly explicit. The Celtic comparisons are fully intended: his “experiences outside of Westminster”, he tells us, have inspired “a much better understanding of the feeling long building in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland”. He rails against an “establishment prepared to play public opinion against parts of the North of England, Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland whenever it has suited them”. He claims that “they do it because they fear nothing more than the regions and nations uniting in common cause against a system that doesn’t have their interests at heart”. The Hillsborough disaster is repeatedly likened, rather dubiously, to Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland “has big similarities to the North West of England,” Burnham asserts, without informing the curious reader what these similarities might be.

Yet Burnhamism, in its constitutional sense, represents something that does not meaningfully exist in Northern Ireland: he is an Irish Catholic Unionist, a Home Ruler through and through. This Redmondite quality comes through most clearly in his 2025 interview with Tom McTague. Proud of his great-grandfather’s self-sacrifice in the First World War, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity,” we are told, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”. Bearer of an identity more commonly found among non-white minorities and Ulster Protestants than Labour’s defected voter base, now merrily flagging their neighborhoods with St George’s Crosses, “Being British rather than English”, Burnham tells McTague, “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth.” Or English last, Morrissey might archly note.

For having outlined the similarities between the North — and for Northern England, Burnham only ever really means the urban Northwest — and the Celtic nations, Burnham suddenly tacks in a different direction: insisting that “unlike some in those places, we would never advocate for the break-up of the UK”. He thus utilizes the Nairn-Anderson thesis for novel Unionist purposes, using it to save what its originators believed could not be saved. The answer to Britain’s many problems, he argues, is a further round of devolution, breaking up England into powerful city-regions with their own hinterlands, each comparable in size to the Celtic nations. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in turn, are to be encouraged to devolve more power away from their parliaments towards their towns and cities, which, “collaborating” across the UK’s internal borders in a hazy fashion, would weaken the “inevitably tense and political” relationships between their national governments and Westminster. For all that Tony Blair’s latest intervention in national politics is read as an assault on Burnhamism, Burnham’s own constitutional experimentation is a turbo-charged Blairism, both completing New Labour’s unfinished revolution and, Burnham believes, ameliorating the centrifugal pressures it introduced.

But it is here that we see Burnham’s characteristically Labourite weak point, his absence of national feeling except towards the very Westminster state he claims to oppose. Burnham’s assertion on the outdatedness of nationalism is not borne out by political events, as the May elections showed. The very building block of electorally ascendant Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism is their sense of national sentiment and the sense of political destiny it leads towards, a destiny its adherents believe to be frustrated by Westminster rule. Rather than cooperating with a Burnham government, won over by his misty-eyed Celtic reveries and performative distaste for the capital from which he must rule, Burnham’s proposed strengthening of Unionism through devolution would present peripheral nationalists with a mortal threat. Why would they give up their hard-won power to serve explicitly Unionist ends? Why would they abandon their political projects at the behest of Westminster’s latest (and surely short-lived) ruler, thrust to power only as a result of crisis and desperation in the political center?

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And what is true of the Celtic nations is also true of England. Burnham’s analysis of the urban Northwest as the artificially suppressed engine of British modernity, laid low by the rentier capitalism of Southeast England and a creaking and antiquated Westminster state, equally overlaps with that of Tom Hazeldine in his excellent 2020 book The Northern Question. Its history punctuated by occasional rebellions, its dialects divergent from the state’s prestige form, its governance marginal to distant London, Northern England in many ways presents an analog to the Celtic nations. Yet it never developed its own comparable nationalism. The reason, Hazeldine never quite clarifies, is surely that the inhabitants of Northern England are, politically, English before they are Northern. As such, Northern English dissatisfaction has always expressed itself in trying to reform Westminster rather than seceding from it: and for all that he claims to be Northern first and English second, this is also Burnham’s chosen path.

Yet to save the United Kingdom, Burnham must carve up England, an instinctively conservative country, into a collection of urban metropoles whose cosmopolitan voters will outweigh their suburban and rural hinterlands in the exercise of power. Why would Reform, with its keen if unspoken appreciation of the demographic limits of its appeal, agree to such gerrymandering? Perhaps the march of history compels us, Burnham muses: “If the nineteenth century was the century of empire, and the twentieth was the century of the nation state, the new thinking was that the twenty-first would be led by a network of cities around the world,” he declares, revealing himself as less a daring avatar of national rebirth than as a provincial Sadiq Khan.

We can, no doubt, expect all manner of constitutional novelties from a future Burnham premiership. In its terminal throes, Labour is making the explicit choice to replace a leader who believes the Westminster state still fundamentally functions with one who demands “nothing less than a complete rewiring of Britain”: even Labour now accepts that Britain needs reform. Yet beyond England — for Burnham merely an unappealing menu option between dynamic city-states, the wider Union and an even greater European union still — none of the dominant peripheral nationalist parties have anything to gain from Burnham’s vision of “the regions and nations uniting in common cause”: unless it is to accrue more power, to be utilized in the service of secession. A Westminster creature through and through, to save the Labour project it is England Burnham must dismantle, whose own brewing bourgeois revolution he feels history commands him to suppress. If Northern England is now the engine of the nation’s politics, its voters’ ever more determinedly-expressed wishes present far more of a threat to Burnhamism than an endorsement.

Nevertheless, there is something, and potentially something of great power, to be found in appealing to shared conceptions of British identity beyond the reach or confines of the Westminster system. Yet attempting to do so from Whitehall, exerting power through the same system he condemns, will prove as challenging for Burnham as it later will for Farage. Once ensconced in Downing Street, he will no longer be the King in the North, but just another Labour prime minister, trying and failing to manipulate the broken levers of the state. More likely, the English revolt will soon do for Burnham as it already has for Starmer. Even so, Burnham is significant as a waypoint on the road we are condemned to travel: it is a marker of our political moment that to rule from Westminster, our next prime minister must claim to despise it.

One need not share the apocalyptic visions of Britain’s near future animating much of the Right to see a similar, dreamlike paralysis in the face of our own national disintegration. The facts, when outlined, are bleak. Elected on a mandate of renewing Britain, Keir Starmer is now the least popular prime minister in British history, whose party’s landslide victory may yet prove terminal. If we assume that Starmer’s time in office is now drawing to a close, then it is his fate for his premiership to have been bookended by being heckled by angry crowds at the scene of two stabbings: the first in Southport, the second in Golders Green. That footage from North London revealed the Union Flag fluttering from lampposts, a now England-wide dynamic which only took effect after Southport and the ethnic riots which followed, shows how quickly we have stumbled into creating a simulacrum of the Shankill Road even among loyal and placid suburban British Jews. Neither of these two attacks were Starmer’s specific fault; his fate is just to embody the modern Westminster state, loathed by its people.

Seemingly cursed from the start, it is hard not to feel some grudging sympathy for Two-Year Kier. True, he is unsuited both ideologically and temperamentally to keeping a fractious country together. But who else could do any better? Every news story, every headline, looks like an extract from some future documentary recounting the disintegration of a state. Just weeks before the elections, Starmer’s St George’s Day video message once again possessed all the attributes of a late-stage imperial bureaucrat trying to dampen an ethnic revolt outside the capital. And rightly so: the political salience of St George’s Day, which is entirely new, is the symbolic rupture between the English people and their form of government that Westminster represents.

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That rupture, indeed, is closer to the resurgent Celtic nationalisms than it is their antithesis, and is best understood as part of the same process that has led the governments of all three devolved nations to be led by parties eager to terminate the Union. On the other pole of national politics, the Greens, by virtue of their support for Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism, are functionally Westminster’s only political faction committed to the logic of an independent English state: in technical terms they are therefore more of an English nationalist party than Reform, the ambivalent flagbearers of Unionism, whose support base nevertheless rests upon English dissatisfaction with Westminster. The logic of party political fragmentation is also one of national dissolution, consciously intended or otherwise.

The two legacy parties of British mass democracy, meanwhile, have shrunk to regional London parties of the Westminster statelet. Losing their leafy shires to the Liberal Democrats, and the suburbs to Reform, the Conservatives are now the party of Metroland Hindus, socially conservative West Africans and Clapham Yimbys. No longer a national mass party, Labour has become a London-based workers union for those who actually run the Westminster state — the civil servants, lawyers and thinktankers who now make up Labour’s voting base — and the social housing tenants to whom they distribute their patronage, or at least those who have not yet been seduced by their own ethnic parties, whether openly, as in Tower Hamlets, or under the Green mantle, as in Waltham Forest. Politically, it is the British state’s seat of government that has now become the periphery, buffeted by events it can no longer control.

And in turn, further than London than they have seemed for centuries, it is on the peripheries that the twilight of Westminsterism is now most highly evolved, and the country’s future determined. Northern Ireland, waiting for its devolved elections next year, remains, as it has been since its abortive birth, a thing apart, incomprehensible to British observers, and viewed with a mix of horror and disdain by political elites in the Republic. Indeed, the anxiety within Ireland’s coalition government that Farage will “bounce Ireland into a referendum it is not ready for” reads more like fear of a border poll succeeding than of it failing. Yet the exultant glee expressed by Sinn Féin at the election results in Scotland and Wales, which show, as my own abstentionist MP claims, that “people are looking beyond Westminster towards a brighter, more positive future, free from the shackles of the British government”, is difficult to dispute.

The SNP’s victory in Scotland, despite all its internal feuding and record of incompetent governance, once again demonstrates the existence of a hardcore voting bloc for independence above all other factors, even if it is outweighed by a slim unionist majority, divided, as in Northern Ireland, between opposing factions. In Wales, initially ambivalent about devolution, Plaid Cymru, seeking independence, is now the party of government, yet with only a slim lead over Reform, which has now taken on the responsibility of defending the Union.

Yet the headline take — that both countries now share pro-independence administrations — obscures the more meaningful political reality that, just like Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are now more or less evenly divided between those wanting to preserve our shared state and those wishing to dismantle it. With no immediate route to independence for either, the likelier outcome than near-term secession for is therefore a repeat of the dysfunctional deadlock of Stormont, with the concrete work of governance taking a backseat to the symbolic politics of national identity. Political paralysis, and the radicalization of the voter base into two binary and directly opposing conceptions of national identity, now appears unavoidable. The hopes of Celtic nationalists rest on framing a now probable Reform government as an English nationalist party, the Westminster state assuming its final, most reductive, and cartoonish form.

Yet Reform’s hopes, in both Scotland and Wales, must be that the accelerating immigration into both Wales and Scotland — immigration supported by Plaid and the SNP respectively — eventually inspire defections among Celtic nationalists of the ethnic rather than civic variety, with the novel and rapid peripheral adoption of England’s demographic churn eventually producing an equivalent political response. Indeed, 12% of Reform’s vote share in Scotland is now assessed to have come from defecting SNP voters. Yet the tussle between Unionism and nationalism works in precisely the opposite way in Northern Ireland, where the mass immigration lauded by Sinn Féin has the effect of strengthening the Unionist vote, by importing people with no particular emotional bond to Irish nationalism, who are in many cases wards of the Westminster state, dispatched to Ulster by the spreadsheets of Whitehall bureaucrats rather than any personal choice. The same two poles — the traditional nationalisms of the British state and the new ones created by mass immigration — are in interplay across the Kingdom, with long term effects difficult to predict: other than bitter and dysfunctional polarization and the counterintuitive ambiguities inherent to nationalism, far beyond the apparent synchrony of yesterday’s results.

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With Reform, a personalist movement led by a figure ambivalent about the Union, now adopting the mantle of Unionism in Wales and Scotland, it is ironic that its own pitch to English voters is not so different to that pronounced by Sinn Féin’s South Down MP Chris Hazzard: that “Westminster does not serve our people.” Rare is the English voter who would now disagree. The zeal with which Reform’s new English voter base has taken to flagging its own ethnic enclaves is an outward manifestation of the collapse of post-industrial England’s Labour coalition into opposing ethnic blocs. As the pollster Luke Tryl observes: “We are seeing some of the most fragmented results in councils that combine a white working class vote with a large ethnic minority population.” The political polarization reshaping British politics is simply the reflection of an already-existing social polarization decades of willed Westminster blindness failed to prevent and which it is now too late to undo.

In England, Reform’s success in Bradford, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, just as much as the rise of the South Asian Muslim identitarian candidates — or where electoral demography requires it, the Greens as a temporary substitute — reflects this binary process of self-sorting into ethnic factions. The belated protestations of horror from liberal pundits amazed at the inevitable consequences of their worldview have come too late to arrest this dynamic. The Greens, for now, may be a beneficiary, though the party’s coalition of radicalized young women; geriatric millennials seeking yet another lifeboat from the wreckage of the Corbyn project; and Muslim identitarians is hardly more stable than the Labour bricolage whose rubble it picks over.

Yet something similar could be said of Reform, whose working-class and petit bourgeois coalition is deeply divided on economic questions, papered over by a shared, and newly assertive identity. There is no logical reason, other than the total unqualified success of a future Reform government, for the same structural forces demolishing the 20th-century parties not to do the same to Reform in turn. England’s genuine ethnonationalist contingent, currently celebrating as online outriders Rupert Lowe’s success in his Great Yarmouth fiefdom, is more likely to find the failure of a Farage government a profitable hunting ground than any immediate attempt to supplant Reform as the dominant party of the Right. Whether there will be a Britain left for them to restore is quite another question.

For there is, in all that Reform’s path to government seems inevitable, no real certainty in Britain’s future politics other than extreme volatility. Reform’s vote share has decreased from its greatest highs: unless the party fully cannibalizes the Conservatives, or enters coalition with them, it is not on course for a stable majority. There is just as much a likelihood of a coalition of England’s Left parties, propped up by peripheral nationalists, as there is of Farage entering Downing Street, in doing so accelerating the dynamics of disintegration and dysfunction on which Reform relies. Should Reform achieve power, it is highly likely to find its program frustrated by the functionaries of the Westminster state, heightening the already mutinous mood of provincial England. The dysfunction of the Westminster state accelerates its disintegration into identitarian voting blocs, and the state’s disintegration in turn accelerates its political dysfunction: and all the while, the country gets poorer, angrier and worse governed. There is more to Ulsterization than just flags on lampposts.

Let us look at the problem objectively, from first principles. In every country in the United Kingdom, the winning message from last week’s elections has been that Westminster, as it currently exists, simply does not work. In the peripheral nations, the electorally dominant solution is to break away and start again. In England, it is to gamble on Reform as the last chance of resolving this mess. The world that Starmer entered power to preserve, of optimistic, 1990s cosmopolitan liberalism, is already gone forever: his political failure, rather than deriving from his personal flaws, was to attempt to rule a country that no longer exists. Yet in attempting to mend and preserve a Westminster state whose very failure is propelling him to power, it is hard for even the most sympathetic observer to see Farage — a far more polarizing figure than Starmer — working the same raw material into something more stable.

The state may not break apart, then, but it will continue to hollow out, as its constituent peoples old and new continue to sort themselves into smaller political units, focused on ever-narrower and more bitterly opposing ends. The process now underway, which Starmer’s doomed two years in government has radically accelerated, is still very far from assuming its final form. Indeed, Farage is just as likely to prove a catalyst of disintegration as a nation-builder. Some unhappy marriages fall apart; others stagger on, in hope that things might change, or fear of the alternative. The difference between the two outcomes is as often a matter of chance, and circumstance, as willed choice. Westminster is no more in control of how things end than any individual voter. Like the cartoon Yugoslav, all we can do is continue, motionless, to watch the headlines scroll, and wait for events to unfold as they will.

I asked her what it was about the Fidesz system she disliked. “It’s about the corruption,” she said, “and selling our country and our nation to the Russians, and stealing our money, and EU taxpayers’ money, and this sort of feudalism that he built.” Beatrix, her niece, nodded along emotionally. “I want to get married and have children,” she said. “We all have good jobs but we don’t earn EU wages. My boyfriend lives in London, and if we lose now I’ll move there and leave Hungary forever. I see this as an election for the EU and against Russia — I’m a European and I don’t want to belong to the East.”

But as polls closed, and the crowds gathered in front of the giant screens showing the televised results coming in, the outcome still seemed to hang in the balance. Government-aligned commentators had made much of what they claimed were strong showings across the country; earlier in the day, turnout had looked strongest in rural areas long seen as Fidesz strongholds, with liberal Budapest only rousing itself to vote in significant numbers in the afternoon. It had been assumed that the initial results would show a strong showing for Fidesz and Orbán, with the true dynamics only revealing themselves late into the night — or even, in case of a close-fought battle, later in the week, once the results from the sizable Hungarian diaspora had been counted. But whatever inner trepidation the crowd felt was not to last long. As each new tranche of results came in, the crowd roared in joy at the victory suddenly unfolding before them, chanting “Dirty Fidesz” and “The Tisza is Flowing”, the motto of their party, named after Hungary’s second-largest river. Fidesz’s vote share in the provinces had collapsed, a source at the government’s rival election night party told me, and the mood there was grim. A Trumpian election night party, Patriots of Europe, was abruptly canceled.

Perhaps this wasn’t the shock it seemed. The evening before, I had attended Péter Magyar’s final campaign event in Debrecen, Hungary’s second city, close to the eastern borders with Romania and Ukraine. Long a Fidesz stronghold, Debrecen was now contested territory. Orbán had pulled large crowds into the city center a few days earlier, but the crowd for Magyar, gathered in the University Square, was larger still. The sight of tens of thousands of Tisza voters, young and old, bearing flaming torches in the lowering night sky and chanting for Magyar’s victory was impressive enough from the middle of the crowd. Seen on television, the sea of fire filmed from above by a drone, it was overwhelming. The speech from Magyar, a fluent and charismatic speaker, was good enough, but the sheer size of the crowd was the real message being sent to the wavering voters watching at home. Provincial Hungary was now in play, Gabor, a 22-year-old trainee teacher from a nearby village told me. “The majority are still Fidesz voters, unfortunately,” he said, “but we are trying to convince our parents and grandparents, and things are definitely changing.” Daniel, a 19-year-old student, agreed. “Hungary’s history has always been pretty bad, to be honest. And now we feel that things are finally beginning to change.”

Back in Batthyány Square, the whole crowd pulsed with a mass intake of breath and then let out a vast roar of victory as the ticker ran across the screen announcing that Orbán had congratulated Magyar on his win, long before anyone expected — such was the scale of Tisza’s victory. Magyar had won a countrywide landslide, and the generation-long political experiment of Orbánism was over, at least for now. Breathless and alarmist commentary, from Hungarian opposition activist-journalists and their aligned thinktankers and commentators in the West, had warned that Orbán would, in the face of defeat, try to hold onto power through some malign dodge or other, whether dragging the election through the courts or staging some kind of provocation to annul the results. But in truth, this was never Orbán’s style: illiberal he may have been, but he was never a dictator, however his opponents framed him. In the end, the genuine popularity that kept him in power for a generation meant too much to him, and when he lost, in a free and fair election, he relinquished power gracefully. 

Even so, it was a historic moment for those gathered in the square, debating what should be done with the man who had shaped Hungary in his image for so long: I hope he goes to Russia, one said; no, I hope he goes to prison, her friend said; no, said an older woman, shaking her head slowly as if asserting the wisdom of age, I hope he stays in Parliament, and is made to answer for everything he did. “We feel the breath of ‘89,” Hanna, an 18-year-old goth, told me. “All our lives, we lived through the Fidesz system, it’s kind of a new breath to see this change. Fidesz never cared about us, until we make children.” Her companion, Milos, agreed. “Thank God, Thank God,” he said, casting his eyes upward. “I really hope we get closer to the European Union, and we can distance ourselves from Russia.” 

This election, cast externally as a battle between liberal Europeanism and something approaching Asiatic despotism, was perhaps swung by hard-nosed domestic rather than broader philosophical concerns, centering on the struggling economy, on corruption that was “simply indefensible”, as one Fidesz insider had previously put it to me, and on the parlous state of public healthcare and social infrastructure. Yet it must be said that the liberal, middle-class inhabitants of urbane Budapest, gathered in the square, some of them waving EU flags as well as the far more numerous Hungarian ones, certainly fit the image of Tisza positively projected by its supporters outside Hungary, and negatively by Fidesz loyalists domestically and abroad. Budapest, which still looks and feels like the polyglot imperial capital it once was, is a liberal city in a conservative country: but the final electoral map made the country as a whole look far more like Budapest than anyone had expected.

Yet Tisza’s leader, a Right-wing nationalist with a far more restrictive stance on legal immigration than Orbán, is hardly the radical liberal Fidesz and its army of MAGA influencers made him out to be. The crowd’s most animated and vehement chant was “Russians Go Home”, a relic of the 1956 revolution latterly applied to Fidesz, but Magyar has already signaled he won’t be unplugging the country from Russia’s cheap and plentiful energy bounty any time soon. Hungary has moved from one version of personalist conservative rule to another, this time round led by a former Fidesz insider with a European focus, ready to unlock Brussels’ long-withheld and sorely missed financial bounty. Magyar’s victory seems less a defeat for the European Right than a generational evolution of it, which — at least in Hungary’s unique circumstances — has brought liberals and Leftists, both political nullities in this country, under its conquering wing. Perhaps that’s why Phil, a 26-year-old voter for the far-Right Mi Hazank party, was calmly philosophical about the new regime, as he watched the crowds of ecstatic zoomers beeping horns and waving flags as if Hungary had just won the World Cup, pulsing Eurodance blaring from car windows. “Orbán was just too close to America, and Hungary is a European country,” he shrugged. “At least Tisza is Right Wing.”

Presenting itself as less a liberal opposition to Fidesz than a reformist movement from within it, the Tisza party, built around the charismatic authority of its leader, the former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar, has developed a commanding lead in most polls. Magyar’s adoption of nationalist imagery and eschewing of support for progressive social causes has won inroads into Hungary’s electorate far outstripping the previously lackluster opposition. His party sells itself, one government sympathizer told me, as “Fidesz without the corruption”. His entry into opposition politics came after a very public breach with his ex-wife, former Justice Minister and Fidesz high-flyer Judit Varga, who resigned from public life following revelations she had pardoned a well-connected paedophile. Fidesz loyalists, describing Magyar as a “third-tier apparatchik” gone rogue, are happy to gossip darkly about the alleged character flaws displayed by their former colleague. (Tisza, pursuing a tightly-controlled media strategy which may hint at a successful Magyar’s governing style, did not agree to an interview for this piece.) But in liberal Budapest at least, almost anyone you speak to who is not connected to the government transpires to be a Tisza voter. 

On a riverboat in the Danube converted into a restaurant, I met Balázs Sarkadi, bassist and vocalist in the punk band Bankrupt. I had met young Bankrupt fans protesting at Orbán’s national day rally a few days earlier, one of whom was dressed as a zebra in an ironic nod to opposition claims that the prime minister keeps the exotic animals at his family’s country estate. Bankrupt’s songs, with titles like “Viktorland” and “Illiberal Holiday”, channel the frustration of a younger generation who have never known a different government. “It is definitely a generation gap between Fidesz supporters, who tend to be like old people or uneducated people, but all the young people are against them. They all want this Tisza party to win,” Sarkadi told me. After years of opposition failure, “This guy appeared, and he was competent. People were like, yeah, he came from Fidesz, but if he’s the one who can defeat Orbán, then let him beat them, because he came from Fidesz, he knows how they work, so he has the knowhow to compete against them.” 

Yet a Tisza victory is far from certain. Pollsters close to the opposition present Tisza with a commanding popular lead; pollsters close to the government show Fidesz winning most electoral districts. In a country whose journalism is largely inextricable from political activism, whether for or against the government, the results of the election are genuinely difficult to predict. In Hungary’s last election, the polls seemed to predict a slender opposition victory: the result was a Fidesz landslide. “It’s going to be tight,” Pál Daniél Rényi, an investigative journalist with the opposition-leaning 444.hu website, told me. “But I can’t even say that, because the system favors the winner so much that you can win and you win easily. But it’s difficult to see Orbán winning so clearly as he has been doing for the last four times.”

Still, figures close to Fidesz point out that even after all this time, Orbán can boast personal approval ratings greatly ahead of any Western leader. In liberal Budapest, it is easy to get the impression that everyone supports Tisza, but Orbán can depend on a bedrock of loyal support, particularly in the countryside and among the Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries, that may yet be enough to swing the election. “Budapest is 70, 80% for Magyar,” András, the softly-spoken middle-aged owner of a cafe in the gentrifying VIII district, told me, “but outside in the villages, I don’t know, Orbán pays poor people for votes. I hope it will be Magyar — I don’t like Orbán, I don’t like Putin, I don’t like Trump, I don’t like populism and corruption. But it is very difficult. I hope it is Magyar.” 

At the national day march, loyal supporters carried banners and placards bearing the names of their towns and villages — Nagycenk, Fertőd, Törökszentmiklós — Hungary’s conservative countryside gathered in the heart of opposition Budapest. One pensioner I spoke to, in traditional folk dress, was an ethnic Szekler from neighboring Romania’s Hungarian minority, among whom, he told me, “90 or 95% of Transylvanians support Orbán”. In its split between liberal cities and conservative provinces, Hungary replicates the familiar pattern seen across much of Europe, only more so. “In most countries, the capital rules the countryside,” one member of the foreign post-liberal diaspora in Budapest told me. “But in Hungary the countryside rules the capital.”

After Orbán’s big speech, I chatted with Buda, a 22-year-old Fidesz-supporting law student in a quarter zip. “I believe Hungary is the last bastion of the old Europe, and that has to be preserved,” he told me. “If you look at the West, with all the crime and sexual assaults that come from migration, you see the EU leadership have an idealized ideology of how things should be that just doesn’t work in real life.” Many, perhaps most, voters in Western Europe would agree, a fact not lost on Fidesz in its long-running war against Brussels. For many Western conservatives, Hungary presents an attractive vision of post-liberal governance, not only in its strict border management but in its extensive support to young families, pro-natalist subsidies and vision of a rightly-ordered conservative society. On immigration, the source of Orbán’s original rupture with Brussels, Hungary has won the argument; the EU may yet, in the aftermath of the Iran war, come around to an energy rapprochement with Russia, too. It is certainly striking that the Tisza opposition is not offering any dramatic ruptures on the questions dividing Budapest from other European capitals. But perhaps, given the dire relationship with Brussels the past decade’s battles have wrought, Fidesz can no longer extract political capital from having been right too early.

“My feeling is that all the big, important decisions which we made after rational calculations based on the national interest, it turned out that these were good decisions,” Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor Balázs Orbán (no relation to the Prime Minister) told me. We were meeting in his office in the Karmelita, a converted 18th-century monastery that is now Hungary’s seat of government, overlooking the city high up in Buda’s castle district, from where he was running a Fidesz election campaign for the first time. “And probably that’s the reason why we are still the most popular governing party in Europe. If you look at the polls, there is no other governing party which has this popularity rate and this chance to win the election.”

Yet outside the gleaming, expensively restored streets of central Budapest, where MAGA influencers are wont to take nocturnal selfies by the Danube marveling at how safe they feel, the capital sometimes doesn’t feel that different to Western Europe at all. In the VIII District, an inner suburb of grand 18th- and 19th-century palaces and apartment blocks, once notorious for crime and prostitution but now heavily if unevenly gentrified — and visibly reshaped by mass migration — the expensive cafes and bakeries patronized by middle-class, opposition-supporting young families are punctuated by the same halal takeaways, African hair salons, phone repair shops and Middle Eastern barbers as London. Returning to Budapest for the first time since the 2022 election, I find it striking how many more rough sleepers there now are, and how numerous and visible street drinkers and beggars have become. It is often pointed out by the government’s post-liberal advocates that Budapest is a liberal bubble in a conservative country: it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the post-liberal utopia is also something of a bubble of its own.

“The economy is not good now,” Gábor Győri, a political analyst with the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, told me, as we chatted at a pavement cafe. “And you have what is catching up to the government, is that for many public services, they haven’t done anything in 16 years, or whatever they have done has made it worse. So, the Hungarian public, and we have done surveys about this, has a very devastating opinion of public services in Hungary, and when it comes to healthcare, for instance, even a significant minority of Fidesz [supporters] agree that it’s not good.” 

While Fidesz presided over an economic boom in the earlier part of its reign, the Hungarian economy has suffered in recent years, particularly since the outbreak of the Ukraine War, with growth trailing that of the country’s Central European neighbors. Since 2021, research reveals, the Hungarian upper middle class has almost halved in number, while the poorest class in society has grown from 31% to 43% of the country’s population. Prices, in shops and cafes and restaurants, are now not markedly lower than in Britain, but wages have not risen accordingly. Government officials stress that the Ukraine War is an external shock beyond their control, and that without the continued access to cheap Russian energy maintained by Orbán, the cost of living for Hungarian voters would be even more crushing. 

Yet with the dire state of the country’s hospitals a recurrent theme among the opposition, even Fidesz loyalists privately concede that more should have been spent on healthcare over their generation in office, on raising ordinary state employees’ salaries and on spreading wealth beyond the party’s innermost circle. While the government campaigns on foreign policy, centering the Ukraine war and Orbán’s close relationship with the Trump administration in its messaging, Tisza is running on bread-and-butter domestic issues: in many ways, it is now Magyar running a populist campaign against what he pits as an out-of-touch establishment. 

“The difficulty in terms of running this campaign,” Balász Hidvéghi, State Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, told me, “is that there is a foreign affairs, um, dominance in our message, you know? Whereas we’ve done a lot in Hungary that we can be proud of. We have a lot of results, economic results. We’ve increased wages, we’ve given a lot of tax cuts and other advantages to families, to young mothers, to young people. So there are lots to talk about, as positive… But of course, even I feel, when I finish a speech or an exchange with voters, that perhaps I talk too much about the international order, you know, the war, the strategy, and not enough about what we’ve done here in Hungary and what would be good for the community.” 

Rényi, a long-term observer of Fidesz’s inner workings, believes that this time round, Orbán is losing his once-sure touch for the public mood. “He has a very close circle, and he started to make mistakes,” he told me. “That’s the feeling. You know, they just try to create content and dominate the daily discussions on politics, and it’s just not really working, to be honest.” The old style of Fidesz campaigning, pitting the country as fighting a valiant, lonely battle against internal and external enemies, is losing its appeal, he believes. “I think there’s some sort of an exhaustion in the system,” Rényi told me, “the whole way of doing politics, actually playing on people’s existential fear. I think this is something that just people got somehow fed up with. People are exhausted being all afraid all the time.”

In his office in a Baroque building in Buda’s castle district, a Make Europe Great Again baseball cap prominent on his desk, I met Zoltán Kovács, Hungary’s Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. An often combative presence on social media, he was relaxed and affable in the flesh, leaning back into his armchair as he defended the government’s record in office. “Most of those criticisms can simply be refuted by the facts,” he told me. Over the past 10 years, the government had spent more on healthcare than ever before, he added, and wages were rising, even in an era of pan-European stagnation. “So as a matter of fact, [how] people feel about the economy is completely different to how people in reality are having that opportunity to actually consume, how their wages are changing. So that’s the reality on the ground.” As for the state of the healthcare system, “We can have an argument about it, but there comes the fact that actually the European resources that could be used for renovation are being withheld for political reasons.” With just a few more days of campaigning before the election, Kovács exuded confidence in the final result. “I believe there’s a huge surprise going to come on Sunday, especially for the international press. And I’m going to tell you that all the push polls you see, especially for the past couple of days, are completely nonsense.”

At least publicly, both sides are going into the election expressing certainty in their victory. Speaking on background, it is more common to hear doubt and uncertainty creep in. Independent observers, too, stress the unpredictability of the final result. “I think that maybe the odds are in favor of Tisza,” Győri told me, “because the polls, the independent polls, [show] such a strong lead.” Yet even still, the polls have been wrong before, understating the extent of Fidesz’s shy voters, and the party’s ability to turn out the wavering and undecided at the last moment. “So, if it weren’t for that,” he adds, “then I would say yes, Tisza are certainly going to win, because all the independent polls would give them a healthy margin. But still, I don’t know.” 

Whoever wins the election will inherit a polarized country, and perhaps a pyrrhic victory. In its creation of a post-liberal counter-elite, Fidesz has enmeshed itself within the inner workings of the state. Without winning a supermajority, an unlikely outcome, Tisza will find its ability to govern effectively hemmed in by a state bureaucracy reshaped in Orbán’s image. Even in opposition, Fidesz will remain a tried and tested political machine, while Tisza — derided as a “virtual party” by Kovács — may struggle to hold together a disparate electoral coalition formed solely to unseat Orbán. On the other hand, a slender political victory for Fidesz, and perhaps even a coalition government, should the electoral arithmetic require it, with the radical Right-wing Mi Hazánk party, whose policy positions are far to the right of Fidesz, and who express quixotic foreign policy stances at which Orbán’s Trumpist allies would look askance, would also hamper Orbán’s ability to govern effectively for the first time in many years. The government’s hope, and a dominating theme in its campaigning, is that the uncertainty inherent in a new government formed by an untested party will, in the end, be too much of a gamble for Hungary’s voters. “They know him,” Balázs Orbán insisted of the Prime Minister, “They understand who he is, they understand where he is coming from, they know the bad and the good things. And in these times of uncertainty, you do not choose any risky candidate, and the guy itself [Magyar] is a risky candidate.”

One “interesting scenario”, cautions Győri, would be Tisza winning the popular vote but not, due to the intricacies of Hungary’s electoral system, winning a parliamentary majority. “That would be, technically speaking, a legitimate victory,” he notes, “but it would dispute the legitimacy of the election, because it would show that more people would have preferred Tisza.” In such a scenario, protests are not out of the question, notes Rényi, given the high expectations held by opposition voters. “They believe that this is the moment and that the regime is going to be over. So I think this is the first time when I had this feeling that when the opposition would lose, they would be less willing to accept it than the government. I mean, if the opposition loses, Budapest is going to be, I don’t know, something’s going to happen.” According to one recent poll, 71% of Tisza voters would not now accept a Fidesz victory as legitimate. 

Whoever wins the election will require a commanding majority not just to govern effectively, but, perhaps, merely to convincingly take power. In an election that has seen previously unimaginable foreign interference, both for and against the government, and with such a polarized political and media landscape, a slim or even contested victory for either side would present great challenges for political stability over the next few years, and make the country a target for even more overt external meddling. Yet for all the foreign interventions so far, and the projected hopes and fears of foreign liberals and post-liberals alike, Hungarians seem set to go to the polls tomorrow centering domestic Hungarian concerns. The central Fidesz pitch, that after a generation’s rule, Orbán represents tried and tested leadership in an uncertain world, is the precise inversion of Tisza’s message that Fidesz has ruled for too long, and the country desperately needs change. In weighing up the merits of these opposing arguments on Sunday, in an election perhaps more finely balanced than domestic and foreign coverage would make it seem, it is in the country’s interest that whatever Hungary’s voters decide, they are seen to do so decisively.  

In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

In this, as in so much else, the Senior Common Room revolutionary was entirely wrong. But not, the far less influential Walker Connor. The American political scientist had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of resurgent nationalism in his 1984 book The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Indeed, Connor observed, rather than leading societies away from the backwardness of tribalism toward the promised land, in reality state socialism relied upon the strength of national feeling for the implementation and survival of its project, to the extent that the Soviet Union was forced to create the very structures, the semi-autonomous republics, which would end up consuming it.

Time would prove Connor correct, and the post-national fantasies of Hobsbawm disastrously wrong. Yet while any PPE graduate has at least a cursory familiarity with Hobsbawm’s writing on nationalism, the only recent Westminster allusion to Connor’s writing appears to be an AI hallucination. At our own time of epochal political change and ideological ferment, perhaps analogous to the collapse of Soviet communism, it may therefore be worth reassessing Connor’s central contribution to political science, now that it too has entered the Westminster lexicon: that of ethnonationalism.

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Benedict Anderson: humane nationalist

By Aris Roussinos

There is surely very little that can unite Reformers and Starmerites at the podium in shared expressions of pained distaste, other than the concept of ethnonationalism. Even the populist Right, at least in interminable online debates, is torn between rival concepts of civic and ethnic nationalism, in which the latter is seen as a dangerous and novel radicalization of the former. Alluding to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, Farage recently declared that, “Unless we are able to provide a proper democratic antidote” to anxieties over mass immigration, “then I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism”. The Home Secretary, for her part, has warned that British “patriotism is turning into something smaller, something like ethnonationalism,” a term Labour MPs nevertheless struggle to define. The Left-wing IPPR thinktank similarly warns that “large parts of the political right are increasingly, often explicitly, ethnonationalist”, including, it claims, 71% of Reform supporters. Reform’s Zia Yusuf, meanwhile, rather improbably accuses Rachel Reeves of being an ethnonationalist. Without being clear precisely what it means, Westminster has awoken to the existence of ethnonationalism, as a political force and as a threat to its current order.

But what is ethnonationalism, other than, as the above Westminster voices, claim, patriotism’s evil twin? In his 1994 book Ethnonationalism: the Quest for Understanding, a collection of essays spanning 30 years of careful deliberation, Connor coined the term to dispel what he termed the “terminological chaos” of writing on the subject. For Connor, all nationalism was at heart ethnonationalism, deriving from essentially emotional loyalties to the nation, itself a fundamentally ethnic category. As he puts it, “nation connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Nationalism connotes identification with and loyalty to one’s nation as just defined. It does not refer to loyalty to one’s country.”

Most of the world, Connor asserts, “is subdivided into a series of perceived homelands to which, in each case, the indigenous ethno-national group is convinced it has a profound and exclusive proprietary claim.” For as he asks, “Who but the Scots could have plenary claim to residence within Scotland, who but Germans to Deutschland, Kurds to Kurdistan (literally “Land of the Kurds”), or Nagas to Nagaland?” This is, for Connor, simply a historical and social fact: it does not mean that members of other groups can or should not reside among them, or even be absorbed by them; but it does mean that the dominant ethnic group will always see its own group interests as paramount in its own titular homeland, and that this belief will almost always, eventually, come to shape that country’s politics, particularly if the self-assurance of continued ownership comes to be challenged.

The problem, Connor perceived, was that this basic, observable reality had become confused by the popular and lazy academic use of “nationalism” to describe the transference of such emotions, for which “poets are far better guides for penetrating… than are social scientists” to the state, a self-identification he preferred to describe as “patriotism”. Nationalism and ethnonationalism are, to Connor, exactly the same thing, with ethnonationalism his preferred term to underline this relationship; patriotism, in contrast, is limited to loyalty towards the state, which may or may not be founded on ethnic lines. Where multinational states, like Britain, have survived into the age of nationalism, they find themselves increasingly threatened from below, as with Scottish and Welsh nationalism: and in a no-longer hypothetical tussle between British patriotism and Scottish nationalism, Connor places his historical chips on the latter’s eventual victory. Rather than a benign alternative to ethnonationalism, the Westminster-approved concept of “civic nationalism” is, according to this interpretation, something between a misnomer and a category error, an attempt to harness the power of nationalism in the service of state patriotism, just as was tried and failed by the Soviet Union.

Connor’s aim was descriptive, rather than normative. “He has been relatively silent on whether constitutional engineering or astute statecraft can ever successfully manage nationalism,”  his intellectual disciple, the Irish political scientist Brendan O’Leary observes. “He has ‘quested’ for understanding, not sought to put the world to right.” Connor did not intend to advocate for ethnic nationalism as a mode of politics, merely to accurately portray the world around him. In this, he expressed frustration at the errors of academics and policymakers who, through a “tendency to perceive trends deemed desirable as actually occurring”, relegated to an atavistic past a phenomenon he believed was only growing in power.

For in his own way, Connor was just as much a modernist as Hobsbawm or Gellner. The antiquity or otherwise of nations was of no interest to him: he understood that the perception of ethnic kinship is a social fact rather than a biological one, in which “the myth of a common and exclusive descent can overcome a battery of contrary fact”. His argument was that the age of nationalism, which dawned with modernity, was a historical watershed setting us apart from all that came before. Before modernity, nations could die or meld into each other or assume new identities: after the age of nationalism, the tendency is for nations to be set into permanent, immovable forms, and for sub-state groups which had not acquired national identities to adopt them, inspired by the contact with other peoples brought about by modernity, increased mobility and the reaction to centralizing state power.

Rather than at its tail-end then, we are only part way through the age of nationalism. Yet through wish-fulfillment rather than a descriptive approach to objective reality, Connor observed, the Second World War’s “immediate afterglow lulled scholars into believing that Europeans had left nationalism behind”, while specious comparisons with the United States created the illusion of a parallel European melting pot, an analogy that nevertheless still trickles down from academia, through thinktanks and journalists directly to policymakers. Muddled thinking thus creates bad policy, leaving the powderkeg dysfunction of modern British politics as the result.

To show the speciousness of the analogy with America, Connor approaches the problem from multiple angles. First, America’s immigrant, assimilationist society is built upon the extirpation of its native inhabitants, as “the American policy of conquest eliminated the indigenous people as cultural competitors”. Few analogies exist in Europe, and where they do they are rarely lauded, especially by the natives themselves. Secondly, he notes, the United States was, historically, explicitly understood as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic polity, in appeals to blood descent, and the bonds deriving, as striking as anything from 19th-century European Romantic nationalism. The descendants of African slaves, Connor emphasizes, though their ancestors had been brought against their will into America from its very beginning, had no say in the formation of this political identity, into which they were only lately, and partly assimilated once it had already crystallized. For those who actively forged this new world political identity, Connor reminds us: “Paeans to the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon strain said to be inherited by the true Americans were plentiful well into the twentieth century”.

Finally, Connor observes, “the pattern of early settlement created a dominant, almost exclusive Anglo-Saxon culture; upon this firmly entrenched cultural base, representatives of other cultures, on their own, were periodically added in relatively small numbers. As a result, ethnic problems in the United States have not been primarily characterized by minorities resisting assimilation, but rather by the unwillingness of the dominant group to permit assimilation at the tempo desired by the minorities.” The American model of assimilation then was, until very recently, one in which immigrants were essentially compelled to adopt a fictive Anglo-Saxon political identity, that of the staatsvolk or dominant, leading ethnic group to whom the state belonged. A modern-day example can be seen in the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, of pure Italian descent, declaring his total self-identification with this legal and political tradition such that when he first visited England, he “felt at home”. Yet by the Nineties, Connor observed, Americans who had previously toned down their Old World ethnic identities began to reassert them, with Connor suggesting that the upsurge in ethnic self-identification, along with what he termed “black nationalism”, “a nationalism in the most correct sense of the word”, might come to challenge the American model. Even in the United States, the ideal form of the immigrant state, the melting pot may not be the final outcome.

That the belated introduction of the term “ethnonationalism” in Westminster discourse derives from the growth of anti-immigration sentiment is hardly surprising. The IPPR paper on ethnonationalism begins with what it calls “the alarming turn on the right towards policies of mass deportation”, an object of genuine surprise to its authors. They would have done well to reflect on the observation made in Walker’s little-read 1986 essay, The Impacts of Homelands on Diasporas, that “history is liberally sprinkled with cases in which diasporas have appeared relatively secure only to be faced with an unexpected outbreak of xenophobia and nativism”.

In this essay, Connor expands on the distinction between America’s unique case and that of the rest of the world, divided up into ethnic homelands. A homeland need not be an ancient state, but can be created, as in the case of Quebec, wherever new settlement is geographically concentrated: we may, here, think of European parallels in the process of becoming. The United States could only become an immigrant society because its prior native peoples were removed from the equation: in Africa, Asia, and Europe, this was not the case, with the result that the threat of expulsion always hangs over incoming peoples, however long-settled they may be, or secure they may feel.

“In such an environment, diasporas are viewed at best as outsiders, strangers within the gates,” Connor observes. “They may be tolerated, even treated most equitably, and individual members of the diaspora may achieve highest office. Their stay may be multigenerational, but they remain outsiders in the eyes of the indigenes, who reserve the inalienable right to assert their primary and exclusive proprietary claim to the homeland, should they so desire.”

Citing the example of the East African Asians, ejected after the end of British rule, Connor notes that the “benign tolerance toward the Asian migrant community did not long survive the British withdrawal from East Africa. The tolerance shown by the colonial authorities does not require explanation, since their homeland was not involved” — but as soon as the homeland peoples of the region obtained the opportunity, their long-suppressed resentments were translated into political reality. Such, Connor suggests, is the nature of human societies, however much we might wish it were otherwise.

That Westminster figures can use Connor’s terminology without engaging with his work should not, perhaps, surprise us. Writing in a 2003 festschrift for Connor, his student and colleague, the Italian sociologist Daniele Conversi, observes that British academics were uniquely blinded, through their intellectual and moral biases and aspirations, from describing objective reality. As he remarks, “A cavalier tradition of superciliousness has percolated through most post-war studies of nationalism in Western, particularly British, academia.,” partly a reaction to the horrors of  the Second World War, but “often derived from several overlapping traditions: part of mainstream Liberal thought… or of the competing Marxist viewpoint, as in the case of Eric Hobsbawm”.

The result, it is implied, is that the top-down assimilatory state-building projects suggested by thinktanks like the IPPR are as doomed to failure as those of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia. By failing to take ethnonationalism seriously, by misapprehending its meaning, and by relegating it to a distant, shameful past, they have created a political project in direct opposition to the most powerful political force in modern history, one that brought down each of the great European empires in turn. It is remarkable that the British state can have unlearned this clearly apparent truth, for as Connor observes of Britain’s imperial collapse, “the basic cause of the disintegration of empire was the refusal of people to accept political rule by those deemed aliens.”

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But there is another characteristically Connorian observation that British policymakers may be wise to dwell on: on the legitimacy of the state. “The literature has assumed that legitimacy is necessary for a modern state to function,” Connor remarks. Where the state is reduced to coercion to survive, it is generally held, then it has proved its illegitimacy in the eyes of its people: where it is not compelled to rely on coercion, it can be assumed to be considered legitimate. Instead, Connor observes, all the state requires to survive is passivity, in which a “mélange of fear, habit, inertia, apoliticalness, political and cultural isolation, disorganization” staves off immediate collapse, without inspiring loyalty or affection. “Only passivity, not legitimacy, is essential to the everyday, humdrum functioning of a society,” he notes. “But if the state requires more than passivity, if it hopes to invoke the symbols of the state as a means of gaining positive cooperation and sacrifice, legitimacy will be sorely missed.” Beneath its unruffled surface, the Soviet empire was, Connor perceived, fatally wounded by a widespread, popular withdrawal of consent: all it took was an unexpected crisis to elicit collapse.

To stave off this outcome, O’Leary, developing Connor’s thought towards the policymaking ends his teacher spurned, proposes that “a stable democratic majoritarian federation… must have a Staatsvolk, a national or ethnic people, who are demographically and electorally dominant — though not necessarily an absolute majority of the population — and who must be the co-founders of the federation”. Such is the largely unspoken settlement that assures ethnic Russian loyalty to their multi-ethnic state, that of the Han to China or the Fars to Iran: without this predominance, they are likely to withdraw their consent from the state, and bring the whole thing crashing down around them. As Connor warns, “We know from the comparative study of nationalism that when the two loyalties are perceived as being in irreconcilable conflict — that is to say, when people feel they must choose between them — nationalism customarily proves the more potent.”

Such a rebalancing is, more or less, what Katie Lam suggested in advocating the termination of Boriswave visas for the purpose of “cultural coherence”,  a policy and phrasing directly quoted, with horror, by the IPPR. This backlash is hardly surprising: such a policy may well be successful, as O’Leary shows, in staving off political instability, but it is also “inconsistent with liberal cosmopolitan and radical multiculturalists’ hopes”. Like those before them, who believed the Soviet Union had resolved the national question, perhaps our own ideologues would rather be swept away by historical forces than give up their cherished illusions.

For all the genuine and awe-inspiring might of America’s war machine, geography has given Iran an advantage in the Strait of Hormuz to which there is no obvious military solution. It is difficult to imagine what the Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently steaming toward the Gulf from the Pacific where it had been deployed to deter China, can do to unblock the Strait. Even if the 2,500 deployable Marines seize Qeshm island, on the Iranian side of the strait, they and the shipping they are being sent to guard will still be within range of weapons systems located within the mainland city of Bandar Abbas — and among its half-million population — and in the craggy and desolate mountain ranges behind. Senator Lindsay Graham’s proposal of seizing Kharg island, more than 300 miles away at the other end of the Persian Gulf, would still require the taskforce to sail through the very same strait from which, fearful of losses, the US Navy chooses to steer well clear.

It is all very well for Trump to demand that European, or even Chinese, warships escort oil tankers through the narrow waterway, but there is a reason that the US Navy has refused the same task. What America cannot do without bearing politically unsustainable risk, and very little prospect of success, Britain certainly cannot, and it is petulant and ultimately risible of Trump to demand we try. As Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius rightly observed this week, “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American Navy cannot manage alone?”

In these inauspicious circumstances, the idea that Britain should be doing more to help does not seem compelling, whatever confused and rambling outbursts emanate from the imperial center. The single drone that hit the American hangar in RAF Akrotiri may have been an embarrassment for Whitehall, but it was hardly a catastrophe. The seeming absence of a ground-based air defense system may be a mysterious oversight, but as Israel and the Gulf kingdoms show, even the most modern and extensive GBAD installation does not provide total defense. The carrier that many Fleet Street hawks demanded should immediately sail for Cyprus is already busy in the High North. Indeed, its current deployment, announced last month, came after Trump’s own declarations that Europeans were paying such insufficient attention to Arctic security that America has the right to seize Greenland, and perhaps Canada too. It is not Britain’s responsibility to chase after every military whim, reasonable or otherwise, of our imperial patron. In any case, the whole purpose of Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas is to act as our unsinkable carrier in the Levant: in Cyprus, and in the skies over Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states, the RAF is already active shooting down missile threats to regional allies, and there is no obvious logic in seeking to do more.

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Macron’s European flotilla, led by France, and assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean, displays more than a touch of overkill: for the level of threat it faces, Cyprus must now be the best-defended country in the world. It is certainly an impressive sight, and a galling one for British observers of our own naval decline — yet competing with France is not in itself a vital national interest. Rather than being driven by strict military necessity, this is an act of political theater in which European leaders can signal both their capacity to act decisively in concert when one of their number is threatened, and their willingness to maintain a certain distance from the United States in doing so. Dismissively quashing Trumpian suggestions that it might sail eastwards to the arena of America’s muddled war, Macron’s government clearly sees the deployment, coming so soon after the announcement that France will expand the defensive umbrella of its independent nuclear deterrent across vast swathes of Europe, as tangible proof of the latent power that a French-led Europe, independent of Nato, can muster in defense of its own interests. We are less weak than we tell ourselves, the flotilla says, and our erratic overlord less strong.

Politically, the implications of all this for Britain are unclear. Starmer’s government has, correctly, chosen not to commit itself to this war, which is unfortunately not quite the same thing as remaining entirely detached from it. There is not, after all, much difference between Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus, unwillingly hosted by Cypriots for use in wars of no interest to them, and the notional RAF bases here in Britain from which American long-range bombers set off to and return from their missions over Iran. For the Greens and Scottish Nationalists to condemn the use of these bases is entirely expected. Yet when we see the keen populist bellwether of liberal centrist opinion Ed Davey demand a fully independent British nuclear deterrent, something has surely changed. It is hard, now, not to palpably feel the tide of empire retreating, though this time round with us as the natives observing, with mixed feelings, the crumbling power of their imperial master. Living through a time of historic changes is a more disorienting and ambiguous experience than the confident hindsight of historians later pretends: we can expect our politicians to struggle with the new realities struggling to be born.

It is reassuring then, at a moment in which Britain’s Right-wing parties have not covered themselves in glory, that Reform’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm for America and Israel’s war was so swiftly backtracked by Robert Jenrick, a long-standing skeptic of foreign entanglements. If his colleague Andrea Jenkyns remains keen to commit British boots on the ground, this is at least beyond the power of the Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire to effect. Yet the spectacle of Reform’s headlong advance to war, and the party’s hurried retreat when faced with polling data, has perhaps obscured the Conservative Party’s own, and perhaps worse, stance on Iran, a position seemingly derived equally from recklessness and a shaky grasp of detail.

Badenoch’s insistence, perhaps extrapolating from her experience of World of Warcraft, that Britain should  “stop the archer” by joining in strikes on Iranian underground missile bases, rather than merely “catching the arrows”, would seem an odd and escalatory response to a UAV launched from Lebanon. Bombing an entirely different weapon system in an entirely different country would not prevent any recurrence of such attacks, presumably undertaken by Hezbollah, unless Badenoch also intends to bomb Lebanon. Yet doing so would require deconflicting and therefore coordinating with the Israelis in a bombing campaign that even the United States is steering clear of, against UAVs launched from mobile and most likely civilian vehicles, in the wooded and heavily-populated landscape of southern Lebanon. The moral, legal, and political risks of accidentally killing civilians, in an aerial campaign that has already killed hundreds, would be unacceptably high for little obvious gain, the product of a soundbite in search of a strategy.

In its latest and even more confusing iteration, published in the Daily Mail, Badenoch’s stance on the American-Israeli campaign is that she is “clear that Britain shouldn’t have joined in – I remain concerned that there isn’t a clear plan behind the strikes – but Britain should also not be neutral” and should “strike the missile and drone sites at source”. The Conservative Party’s apparent position on this urgent question of national security is that Britain should conduct its own entirely independent retaliatory bombing campaign, in the same airspace as American and Israeli jets and against much the same targets. Given the American aircraft losses already to friendly fire, we must presume that Badenoch intends the RAF to coordinate and deconflict with its American and Israeli counterparts, as well as, given Britain’s military shortcomings, leaning upon their support for surveillance and targeting data. How this is considered “not joining in” is hard to discern: the advantage for the nation, even harder.

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It seems unnervingly clear that, rather than starting “from first principles,” according to her characteristically high estimation of her own intellectual rigor,  Badenoch had settled on a political strategy of marketing herself as stronger on defense than Starmer, in which the outbreak of war initially seemed a useful backdrop. That the war she initially chose to back proved both chaotically mismanaged and domestically unpopular has now led her to defend, alone, this tenuous and isolated political outpost. On a matter of the utmost gravity, the only principles apparent seem to be feeding the needs of the Westminster media grid, and a desire to cosplay the Iron Lady for her dwindling audience.

If we are to truly start from first principles, they must be that Britain has its own interests, distinct from those of our allies in Europe and the United States, and it is only to those interests British leaders should attend. If the Iran War is an American party to which we have been invited but do not wish to attend, so is it the case that the European effort is something Starmer may wish to join, but to which we have not been invited. Greece did not send its jets and frigates to Cyprus to defend Britain’s SBAs, as British commentators affected to believe, but to reassure and protect its ethnic kin, maximizing the country’s political influence. In the same way, the broader, European effort has its own French political rationale, of advancing a Macronian vision of strategic autonomy, in which Britain serves little if any role. Rather than joining the war at arm’s length, as Badenoch may wish, our current refusal to take part is itself carried out with a certain insular detachment.

Yet the European consensus on this war’s regretful pointlessness, now uniting even the most Trumpian of continental governments, like those of Italy and Hungary, with the liberal center, provides Starmer with the political cover to stay out. At the beginning of this conflict, it was a contrarian position in the British press to unequivocally state that joining the fight is not in our interests: now it is, correctly, the mainstream political opinion in Westminster as across Europe as a whole. What a few weeks ago appeared an unusually bold stance from Starmer now seems boringly, obviously sensible: Trump’s increasingly erratic jibes to the contrary now inspire pity rather than deference. There may well be a case, when the shooting stops, for taking part in convoy escort and minesweeping duties in the Strait of Hormuz, but we and other Europeans should demand a reasonable price from this most transactional of American administrations. Above all, surely, we should require that Trump firmly and publicly commit himself to the territorial integrity and self-determination of both Greenland and Canada, the New World extensions of our European civilization: he may be a boomer, but Trump has no right to consume our rightful patrimony.

At this moment of historic American weakness, so swiftly following Trump’s intimidation of our home continent, we Europeans must be a little more ambitious in renegotiating the terms of our relationship. Yet instead, the Conservative and Reform politicians who would have blindly leapt into war now tie themselves in knots justifying arcane and incoherent positions, isolating themselves from both domestic opinion and the broader European Right. That they find themselves in this position seems almost more pathetic than lamentable, so devoid is it of any political or strategic sense. Like parents, all empires age, wither and then eventually die. Filial loyalty does not generally extend to jumping into the grave alongside them.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

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For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “​​unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalizing on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefing the attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme  — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

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The dangerous martyrdom of Khamenei

By Arta Moeini

It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s former brain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defense axis initially trialed with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice.

In the same way, the emerging narrative that the Green Party’s Gorton and Denton by-election victory marks the emergence of a new, “sectarian” Britain does not seem quite correct. The existence of South Asian Muslim voting blocs is not a new development. Rather, the novelty is their accelerating abandonment of the Labour Party which once took their votes for granted — corralled through the clan and family patronage systems co-opted by Labour’s Northern England machine politics. But the political contest in Gorton and Denton, a matter of simple demographic arithmetic, was fundamentally one tipped by ethnic rather than religious mobilization: it was no more sectarian than, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin are devout Catholics, or the Shankill Protestant Boys Flute Band are devoted practitioners of quiet Bible study.

Indeed, there is little in the Gorton and Denton result to dissuade adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British political development from the theory. As the Manchester Evening News observes, the constituency is a highly segregated one, with 96% of residents in Denton East and Denton West self-describing in the 2021 Census as “White” — an awkward category, in this instance largely coterminous with ethnic British and Irish ethnic identity — declining to a low of 85% in Denton North. In the western half of the constituency, on the other hand, only 6% of residents in Victoria are white, and only 8% in Levenshulme North: a lower percentage, it may be noted, than of Catholics in Belfast’s proverbially Ulster Loyalist Shankill Road ward. At least in Northern Ireland the fact that elections are won in the census rather than the voting booth is open and taken for granted: in Britain, cultural taboos forbid such accurate depiction of reality. The Gorton and Denton by-election, given the polarized electoral map of its constituents, may just as accurately be termed the Gorton versus Denton by-election, in which Gorton proved the victor.

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The Ulsterisation of English politics

By Aris Roussinos

Zack Polanski’s pre-election claim that “the public have moved on” from immigration was therefore disingenuous: his Green victory was built on the foundation of historic South Asian immigration in a constituency highly segregated along ethnic lines, in an election novel only for the increasingly overt nature of the ethnic mobilization and counter-mobilization now becoming the stuff of modern British politics. As Abubakr Nanabawa, the organizer of the Muslim Vote pressure group — which in this election backed the Greens “to block Reform, and to end Labour’s assumption that our communities can be ignored, disrespected, and still counted as automatic” — observed, this was to be an election decided by demographic heft, in a “constituency, with 76,000 potential voters, approximately 26% of whom are Muslims… split demographically into the Gorton side, which is more ethnically diverse, and Denton, which is more white working class,” in the latter of which the “the Right-wing Reform party has made inroads”. As Nanabawa pointed out back in 2024, “political parties and candidates ignore the concerns and priorities of Muslim voters at their peril, for their sway will only continue to grow, shaping the trajectory of British democracy” — a prediction also made, openly or implicitly, by Reform, as a threat rather than a promise, and as a means to mobilize the dwindling ethnic majority.

Ascribing the process to Muslim sectarianism thus obscures the nature of the ethnic mobilization now in play among Reform just as much as the Greens: as pre-election Opinium polling revealed, among white voters, Reform dominated the contest, with a vote share approximating that of the Greens and Labour combined. Indeed, at 57% of the population, the proportion of white voters in Gorton and Denton exactly matches that projected for the UK as whole by 2050. If the political maps of Britain are increasingly ethnic ones, then we can expect future elections to proceed accordingly, if in less binary form than Northern England. The rise of the Greens and Reform each now accelerate that of the other. The speed and extent of demographic change means that the collapse of the former mass parties of 20th-century Britain now appears baked in, even if neither the Greens nor Reform is likely to remain the ultimate protagonists of British political contest.

Against this argument, the writer John Merrick, one of the more astute Leftist  critics of the Right’s increasingly ethnic framing of British politics, dismisses the observation that the Palestine flag has become a marker of South Asian Muslim ethnic mobilization by remarking that objecting to Israel’s war on Gaza is not solely a Muslim concern. Indeed, he accuses those who have made this observation, particularly me, of attempting to “to lay the blame on specific ethnic groups” for what he terms the “widespread sense of alienation among often young British Muslims”. In that revulsion to the Gaza war is not solely a matter for South Asian Muslims, he is correct. Yet if Green strategy were merely a matter of principled internationalist politics, rather than of appealing to narrow ethnic loyalties, one struggles to imagine why the party should also wave the Pakistani flag in its campaigning, or release Urdu-language videos linking Starmer to India’s President Modi. Both are simply overt examples of ethnic Pakistani political mobilization, which, partly through willed ideological blindness and partly through mercenary electoral calculations, the Left chooses not to examine too closely. It is permissible, indeed electorally necessary, for progressives to engage in such open ethnic organizing: yet it remains taboo for them to remark upon it.

Free from such squeamishness, the Green Party’s Deputy Leader, Mothin Ali, is closer to the mark in noting that Matt Goodwin’s campaigning materials made repeated references to the defense of “Christian” identity, in what Ali termed “something that is quite sectarian that is harking back to those troubles [sic] in Ireland”. This is simply the Ulsterization thesis correctly observed, and applied for political gain, by the Green Party. Gorton and Denton was historic in that it was one of the first mainland British elections to be fought along near-overtly ethnic lines. Like Labour, the Greens mobilized white progressives and South Asian Muslims together against what they portrayed as Reform’s dangerous identitarian politics. As a national spectacle rather than a local campaign, specific political goals took a backseat to “keeping out Reform”, a party whose perception as one focused on narrow ethnic British interests is the unspoken context of all the Labour and Green rhetoric of “hope against hate” and “unity against division”. This is simply ethnic politics for a political system unwilling to name what it has become. Having lost both British Muslims and the white working class, Labour is at least now free to condemn their respective political manifestations.

Certainly, ecological issues no longer seem matters of particular interest to the Green Party, a development that appears to have passed Labour by. The pivot of the election was better understood by Jeremy Corbyn, announcing the need to vote Green to “defeat Reform, defeat the fascists and the racists”, which, translated out of Leftspeak, means parties addressing ethnic British voters and their collective interests as openly as the Greens so effectively did for their own new voters. In this, given the legal restrictions and political taboos against overt ethnic mobilization of the British electoral majority, progressives currently possess the upper hand, permitted to engage in open ethnic pandering while condemning the same approach for their Right-wing rivals. How long either of these political norms, a relic of Britain’s stable Nineties demographics, can last will determine the politics of the coming years. The radicalizing effect of the “Boriswave” and of the dispersal of boat migrants among parts of Britain previously unaffected by mass migration, causing race riots in Middlesbrough and protest marches in deep Middle England, lay in disrupting the unspoken, indeed accelerating ethnic segregation of provincial British life. What was hitherto politely implicit is increasingly becoming the central matter of Westminster politics.

For now, in any case, the Green coalition has proved a winning one. Yet, as Your Party has found in its struggle balancing narrow ideological zealots on the one hand, and British Muslims on the other, the alliance of young white progressives and South Asian Muslims is an inherently unstable one on matters other than defeating the Right in elections. It is, simply, a marriage of polling convenience rather than a political philosophy. All the internal contradictions displayed by Labour’s marriage of soft-Left social progressives attempting to represent religious social conservatives is true of both Your Party and the Greens, with each now possessing a far narrower electoral base than Labour at its height, given the near-wholesale defection of the white working class to Reform. Cannibalizing the Labour vote in urban districts containing a specific demographic cocktail of white progressives and South Asian Muslims is a strategy with a ceiling: one that can certainly topple Labour as the dominant party of the Left, but is unlikely to deliver the country.

Yet Reform, too, suffer from their own unstable electoral coalition, of white working-class Labour defectors, married to interventionist economic policies, and its largely Thatcherite lower-middle and middle-class voter base stretching inland from the party’s Eastern England Saxon Shore. If they are to sweep the country, in a political context increasingly shaped by ethnic mobilization, then it is ethnic British voters as a whole, including Liberal Democrats in their tacitly homogenous enclaves, to whom they will have to appeal. Doing so may be a harder task than winning the Red Wall, though further Green success, now that the collapse of the two mass parties of a vanished Britain appears certain, may yet work in Reform’s favor: it is risky to assume that in a direct contest between the two, the wavering British center will ultimately choose the Greens.

Certainly, the “sectarianism” discourse now apparent from political commentators who would shudder to be associated with Reform hints at a growing disquiet with the Greens’ open courting of ethnic bloc votes. Yet it is really no different, in its essential form, to the same process that once worked for Labour, to the absurd ethnic pandering of Tory politicians like Bob Blackman to the Hindu nationalist vote, or indeed to the claim by Zack Polanski, in his previous Liberal Democrat incarnation, that a vote for the Lib Dems is “a vote for Israel and a vote for Judaism”. The Greens have not advanced any particularly religious policies, and are unlikely to do so, given the fragile nature of their electoral coalition. If the issue is that British Muslim voters, of mostly South Asian origin, are an increasingly important electoral bloc, then the issue with which centrist commentators are increasingly perturbed is one of demographic change itself, rather than its second-order religious accretions. In just the same way, Reform’s recent pledge to forbid the conversion of disused churches into mosques is not a matter of bringing them back into Christian usage but of preventing their passing into the hands of the demographic “Other”: the issue is an ethnic rather than religious one, with religion functioning as a barely euphemistic marker. The charge of “sectarianism”, Greens are correct to observe, is here merely a dog-whistle for British politics increasingly centering around the questions posed by demographic changes which centrists are unwilling to otherwise notice, let alone navigate.

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The Green victory changes everything

By Jonny Ball

The reshaping of Westminster politics into a battleground between the party of limitless open borders on the one hand, and of mass deportations on the other, will make overt what British political taboos still barely manage to keep implicit. If Reform are the Conservative Party’s DUP, a populist party cannibalizing the mainstream conservative vote on ethnic lines, then, even in the months since I first wrote about mainland Britain’s Ulsterization, Reform have already found in Restore its TUV, an even more Rightward challenger which may, as demographic anxieties proceed, eventually come to cannibalize its vote. The Green victory in Gorton and Denton accelerates Labour’s demise, but Reform’s strong second showing — and the demographic patterns underlying it — should be of at least equal note to Westminster commentators, who would be better examining the country like anthropologists than psephologists.

Rather than civil war, as darkly hinted at by Danny Kruger should Reform fail to win office, the more likely outcome is simply the formalization of voting along ethnic lines in highly segregated communities, and the consequent foregrounding of symbolic politics — of flags and monuments and the jealous rivalry over communal space — in areas where the two politically opposing voting blocs about each other. Gorton and Denton, a demographic bellwether for all Britain, acts as a crystal ball in which our near future can be divined. Both the Greens and Reform are able, for now, to ride the polarization of their supporters into Westminster. But for both the risk, as these dynamics accelerate, is that each of their new voter bases may soon enough outgrow them. It may not be the form of politics the parties of the Westminster center would wish for, but it is the one they have gifted us, before they finally shuffle off the stage.

As the architect of New Labour’s campaigning focus on Tory sleaze, warned his readers: the British voter’s faith in politics is squandered “when those who are elected to serve the public interest see nothing wrong in helping themselves to their own share of the consequent commercial rewards in directorships and consultancies. The idea that there is nothing objectionable about a public figure pursuing a dubious private commercial interest as long as it is declared is one of the most corrupting principles in public life today. As far as the electorate is concerned, many think we have a government that consists of business back-scratchers and a Parliament made up of politicians on the make.”

That two years later Mandelson was forced to resign for an undeclared loan from a parliamentary colleague, whose entanglement with the late press baron Robert Maxwell’s estate it was Mandelson’s remit, as trade and industry minister, to investigate, is more than just a piquant historical irony. After all, to have been once forced from office for perceived corruption and undue coziness with the interests of the super-rich may just be bad luck. By the third instance, the blame surely falls to the employer: the character of the person involved is all too well-known, and the pattern long-entrenched. As Le Monde, freed from English niceties, characterizes New Labour’s Third Man, he is “the evil genius of the British Labour Party”, a “tactician fascinated by fame and money” who “showed contempt for morality and common social rules.” The scorpion stings because that is its nature; the blinking protestations of the frog, clinging to the wreckage of his premiership, that such an outcome could not be anticipated are too absurd to be entertained.

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Jeffrey Epstein's corrupt overclass

By Mary Harrington

Instead, the greatest, most ironic contrast that strikes today’s reader is not that between the younger Mandelson’s reformist, moralizing tone and the well-established tenor of his political career, but rather the yawning gulf between his domestic reputation and the raw facts of wealth and power unveiled by the ongoing Epstein revelations. The notorious “Prince of Darkness”, the fearsome and powerful intriguer at the heart of British governance, stands revealed in his email correspondence as more Widmerpool than Machiavelli. Westminster’s ruthless operator, the terror of lobby journalism, comes across as a needy, social climbing arriviste, a grasping provincial striver dazzled by the opulent consumption of his rich friends and desperate to grab a slice for himself. So desperate, indeed, that his mentor Epstein even once rebukes him for his constant demands for favors. His New Labour memoir, The Third Man, sent to Epstein for writing advice, is, the two friends discuss, merely a CV for a role at Deutsche Bank. Epstein dangles other glittering prizes before his friend. Would Mandelson like to sell an Israeli oil field for Ehud Barak, Epstein enquires. Why not? Would Mandelson like to involve himself in post-Tahrir Square Egypt, Epstein wonders? Why not? The affairs of nations, once the engine of history, had at the End of History become mere business opportunities: it must have seemed, back in the 2000s, as if the party would never end.

The glittering, amoral world of Epstein and his associates, of the Russian oligarchs and Arab potentates and financiers who flit across the correspondence, is simply the end product of the world of globalization, and of America’s unipolar imperial moment, without which the New Labour project is incomprehensible. When we read Epstein and Ehud Barak venomously gossiping over the extravagant income Tony Blair has amassed as the consigliere of Central Asian dictators, we are granted a glimpse of the true architecture of the world New Labour sold us as unstoppable progress. “We live in the new global economy, and that there is no alternative to that,” the Mandelson of 1996 advised his readers, and this is the result. Just like Blair, whose planned post-premiership career of resolving the Palestine conflict while accumulating wealth was rather more successful at the latter than the former, it was fortunate for him that this brave new world would transpire to be so personally rewarding. Epstein was nothing more or less than a vampiric aristocrat of American empire, extracting whatever he desired from its outer reaches. Mandelson his eager courtier, risen from that same empire’s provincial backwaters. How meager and parochial British politics must seem from this exalted vantage point: it must have been hard to remember that the needs and desires of British voters ever mattered at all.

The age when a former prime minister could retire to obscurity in a quiet cathedral close ended with New Labour. Today, their second acts revolve around the imperial center. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in How Will Capitalism End?, corruption, broadly defined, is simply a symptom of financialized capitalism in a globalized world, and the decaying social fabric of its host countries the result of a world in which “the rich may rightly consider their fate and that of their families to have become independent from the fates of the societies from which they extract their wealth.” If British industry did not notably prosper from Mandelson’s time overseeing it, smoothing its wholesale transfer into the portfolios of the globalized oligarchy, so be it. If the MP for Hartlepool more rapidly and dramatically prospered from New Labour’s time in office than did the people of Hartlepool, that is the nature of things. For all that Mandelson can proclaim that the business dealings with Epstein, for which the police are currently investigating him, were in “the national interest”, the governance of Britain does not figure in this worldview as anything other than a career first act, the highest offices of the British state merely a provincial dry run for advancement in the higher world, among the richer people, who actually matter. When even the former Prince Andrew inserts himself in Epstein’s court, seeking rest and relaxation from the onerous privileges of his sinecure, we see, if not the secret harmonies of the world, then its true architecture, beneath the Westminster state’s ornately crumbling facade.

As for the little people, the truculent and aggrieved British voters whose anger was to be assuaged by the scraps from the big table, redistributed as a consolation prize for the loss of their industries and the wholesale recomposition of their cozily insular society, if their time has not yet come, Mandelson’s third downfall is the harbinger of when it will. It is ironic to recall, now that the near-revolutionary tumult of British politics is waved away by the Government’s dwindling band of supporters as a false consciousness imparted by hostile Right-wing agitators, that the younger Mandelson once spun visions of Britain’s near future as dark as anything now found on Twitter.

Imagining the future world of 2005, in which the public had failed to vote a reforming Labour government into office, Mandelson in The Blair Revolution conjured dark prophecies of the forthcoming “millennium riots”, in which “the army had been brought in” and his fictional upwardly mobile family had witnessed “their neighbors running screaming along the road”, their Georgian townhouses set ablaze. As a result, “there had been a middle-class exodus from London to the Home Counties, into hastily built private estates with perimeter fences and private security.” In the real world of 1996, the “breakdown of society in Britain”, typified by “a crime wave [that] was dismissed as exaggerated tabloid scare-mongering”, derived from the simple fact that “the nation has been in relative decline for a century”, and was baldly “a declining, post-imperial, economically second-rank nation, which is also increasingly divided and unequal”.

In his introduction to the 2004 reissue of The Blair Revolution, Mandelson lamented Britain’s “bleak ghettos depressing the spirits of all who live in them, dominated by the fear of crime and racial tension, too often becoming centers of danger and desperation”, language now anathema to his ideological heirs. The British public had begun to despise its political class, he warned: “New Labour’s task now is to ensure that public opinion does not slip back into this sullen mood — or, at least, not permanently — and that a deeper, lasting connection is made between government and governed.” Does Mandelson feel New Labour achieved this, we wonder? Does he believe his wavering place at globalization’s most-luxurious table is justified by the transformations his faction wrought? Mandelson termed his mission a “permanent revolution,” creating “a long-term transformation of Britain” in which New Labour’s ideology “embeds itself in the fabric and social architecture” so that “our changes can be entrenched”. Indeed, he notes, “We want to create institutions across British society that people can point to in twenty and thirty years’ time and recognize as distinctly New Labour landmarks.”

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Why Farage is a Burkean

By Aris Roussinos

Indeed we can: New Labour’s monuments are all around us. The tragedy of modern Britain is that Mandelson and his clique succeeded. The wreckage of our society is a testament to the success of their project, a series of time bombs buried within Britain’s social and economic architecture. The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism. The current prime minister’s project of governing Britain as if it were still 1997, taking off where his ideological forebears were so rudely interrupted by the British voter, was doomed from the start, because Starmer is fated to rule the volatile and rebellious country that New Labour created. The least popular prime minister since polling began is now condemned to eke out his mandate without power, at the helm of a fractious and moribund party that despises him, lurching from crisis to crisis, until the electorate’s final sentence of execution rescues him from his purgatorial reign.

A badly run country has become an ungovernable one, ill at ease with itself and looking inward for enemies. Lord Mandelson’s one, unintentional gift to Britain is in hastening the collapse of the rotten and crumbling superstructure of the politics he helped construct. The reams of internal correspondence soon to be released will provide Reform, the de facto party of opposition, with ammunition in its mission to undo the Blair Revolution Mandelson once flaunted. As the director of Labour Growth, Mark McVitie, rightly observes, the scandal is “the latest and most grotesque signifier of a political culture that cannot carry on in its current form”, and “what is undoubtedly worth saving in the liberal democratic settlement will not be saved by the people who have presided over its decay”. But the domestic tragedy of British dysfunction is inseparable from the country’s willed transformation into the fawning servitor of a corrupt transnational order. That it takes an American scandal to demolish the Government’s last lingering traces of legitimacy, our peripheral backwater administration haunted by the nefarious pleasures of its metropole, is only fitting. In his career’s final act Mandelson has become, just as Le Carré perceived, the squalid archetype for the British state itself.

Whether noble or naive, this project now looks doomed as AANES’s great power backers turn their fickle attentions to Damascus, and the Damascus government has in turn successfully reasserted its control through military coercion. Within a matter of days, as its Sunni Arab levies turned their affections to their ethnic kin in Damascus and their guns on their former allies, Northeast Syria switched from a bold experiment in multi-ethnic governance to a desperate, rearguard battle for Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. The war, at its presumed end, reverted to the dynamics of its earliest days, when Ahmed al-Sharaa, then leader of the Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, had attempted, along with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and tribes of changeable loyalties, to seize control of the oil-rich, and newly Kurdish-run region, Syria’s breadbasket.

Simultaneously rich in resources yet neglected by its central government, and host to the country’s richest mix of ethnic and religious minorities, alternately the tools and the victims of the central state, the Syrian Jazira had always run according to its own dynamics. Both colonial French and independent Syrian administrations in distant, Levantine Damascus expended significant, if sporadic, effort in absorbing this neglected region of Mesopotamia within the modern state system, privileging one ethnic group against another for reasons of statecraft, and building model towns and vast dams, as evocative in their current dilapidation of failed modernities as the ancient tells dotting the landscape, now repurposed as gun emplacements, are of earlier lost civilizations.

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Benedict Anderson: humane nationalist

By Aris Roussinos

Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list. Birthed from the fusion of Kurdish nationalism and Marxist-Leninist thought that initially drove the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) independence movement, the AANES, a project of the PKK’s Syrian sister organization, the Democratic Union Party ‎(PYD), performed an attempted shift to anarchist political theory. The thought of the American writer Murray Bookchin, as reworked by the PKK’s occluded godhead figure Abdullah Öcalan from his Turkish jail cell, was its most notable innovation. Echoing Öcalan’s rejection of the PKK’s previous project of independence for the Kurdish nation, the AANES presented itself as an explicitly multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian state in which the greatest possible autonomy was devolved to religious and ethnic communities, beneath the benign framework of Jazira’s de facto autonomy from Damascus. In practice, the quasi-anarchist devolution of power resulted in the proliferation of bureaucratic structures. Local empowerment, similarly, meant the elevation of new elites loyal to the project, and the freezing out of dissidents, particularly rival Kurdish factions. Imperfect though it may have been, compared to the overt totalitarianism of the Baathist state, the anarchic infighting of the FSA rebels, and the gothic cruelties of ISIS, history is likely to remember it more favorably than today’s discourse would suggest.

Barely populated until the French Mandate period, except during the annual circulation of nomadic Bedouin shepherds, the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates underwent during the early 20th century a transformative period of internal and external immigration and development analogous, in a modest way, to that of California or Australia. Ethnic Kurds fleeing the collapse of proto-nationalist rebellions in Ataturk’s Turkey, along with Syriac Christians fleeing the Seifo genocide and many uprooted Armenians streamed south across the culverts and rusting tracks of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line, which still marks the modern border, joining their ethnic kin residing there from the beginning of recorded history. Ethnic Assyrians from British-Mandate northern Iraq similarly sought French protection from the predation of the Iraqi state and its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen auxiliaries, establishing a string of fiercely Christian villages along the Khabur river. Northeast Syria was shaped by the cultural memory of ethnic conflict; its past decade of governance was an attempt to evade the return of its attendant cruelties.

As such, the AANES project was always as much one of necessity as Leftist idealism. The Kurdish regions of northern Syria, stretching West of the Euphrates into Aleppo, were separated from each other by clusters of Arab and Turkmen towns and villages, in large part the result of the Baathist state’s settlement of Arabs from Syria’s desert hinterland to hinder any Kurdish attempts at secession. While the early successes of the Syrian Kurds under the PYD, following a negotiated handover of control by Assad’s overstretched government, resulted in what was essentially the occupation by its YPG military forces of Arab settlements, loyal to one or other rebel or jihadist faction, America’s decisive intervention in the war against ISIS resulted in both sudden and unexpected great power backing for Northeast Syria and an evolution of Kurdish political attitudes towards local Arabs.

Partly at America’s behest, in a failed attempt to assuage the Syrian rebels’ combative Western think-tank diaspora, and partly a genuine attempt to impose progressive governance among a population Kurds frequently portray as stunted by its own reactionary obscurantism and crude ethnic chauvinism, Northeast Syria’s autonomous quasi-government undertook a project of delegating political and military authority to Arab regions won back from ISIS. It was an ambitious goal which seemed, for a decade, to have won majority acquiescence, if not affection. It became the boast of the regional administration that its armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was now predominantly composed of Arabs, a feat of enlightened governance that rapidly proved hollow, over the past two weeks, when the majority of these Arab fighters effortlessly switched sides. Having lost almost all its Arab accretions, the SDF was once again, in practice, the Kurdish YPG, an ethnic militia fighting for purely Kurdish goals. Now that, under the threat of military defeat, a shrunken version of these forces will be subsumed under the Damascus government’s control, their future role — on paper, and in reality — remains to be seen.

The integration terms finally accepted, at gunpoint, by the autonomous administration last weekend, though better than those of a fortnight ago are worse than those of the unimplemented March agreement. Consequently, much has been made in recent days of the AANES’s failures to come to terms with al-Sharaa’s shock capture of the Syrian state just over a year ago, and negotiate a settlement with the new reality. Certainly, the region’s political focus had, since the seeming cornering of the Sunni Arab rebellion into its Idlib Bantustan, centered on negotiating re-integration into Assad’s Baathist state in a manner that preserved some means of political and military autonomy. Yet Assad, over-confident of his own position as victor of the long and bloody war, refused to offer more than integration into the central state on terms that amounted to surrender. The new regime in Damascus now offers little different: what has changed is its greater power of coercion, and international backing, compared to its previous Baathist iteration.

Putin, once an occasional, tacit partner of the Kurds west of the Euphrates, has fully backed the new Damascus government, another instance where Russia, once America’s rival in Syria, shares increasingly aligned interests with the Trump White House. Calls for the protection of Kurdish cultural rights and social norms by European states are outweighed by their overriding political interest in the accelerated removal of their more than one million mostly Sunni Arab refugees. Regionally, the success or otherwise of the Northeast’s reintegration will determine Israel’s ability to justify its military protection of Druze autonomists in the southern province of Sweida. Relations with mostly Shia Iraq, which has its own reasons to look askance at Sunni jihadist governance and is currently making a show of reinforcing its border with Syria, will be fraught at best. Given the sheer improbability of fate’s wheel suddenly projecting al-Sharaa into Assad’s Damascus palace, it would be foolhardy to offer any firm predictions, rather than vague anxieties, for the country’s future.

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The West has abandoned the Kurds

By Matt Broomfield

For the Kurds themselves, the experiment in enlightened multi-ethnic governance proved, at the crucial moment, a dramatic and costly Achilles heel. The result, over time, will likely be the weakening of PKK ideology in favor of some form of pan-Kurdish ethnic nationalism, whose early stirrings are apparent in the flow of volunteers from northern Iraq to defend their ethnic kin, the sudden revival of the Kurdish flag, Ala Rengin, in Northeast Syria, and in the readoption of the ethnic term Rojava, or West Kurdistan, in place of its previously bland geographic descriptor. When even Abdullah Öcalan’s nephew Ömer, an MP in Turkey’s parliament for the movement-aligned DEM party, feels compelled to proclaim “Long live the Kurds and Kurdistan”, and “the Kurdish nation will not forgive the enmity committed against it”, we sense the tectonic plates of Kurdish politics shifting away from Leftist post-national idealism towards an embryonic ethnic nationalism. The decade-long experience of Kurdish self-governance, military success and international diplomacy will shape whatever follows the likely collapse of the AANES statelet, whether what replaces it will coalesce in the mountainous redoubts of eastern Turkey, Western Iran and northern Iraq, or in the grey cities of the European diaspora. So, too, will bitter analysis of the project’s failings.

Yet it would be unfair for harsh self-criticism to so soon follow hindsight. For all its faults, the Kurdish project of autonomy from the Syrian central state evolved, through managing the dynamics of their multi-ethnic region, into one that ironically and idealistically attempted to make the very idea of equable Syrian co-existence a political possibility. Inversely, the current Damascus project of re-centralization has, in western Syria, been accompanied by sectarian massacres and other abuses, which have increased the antipathy of peripheral minority populations towards the central state. Sunni Arab supporters of the al-Sharaa government, whose decade-long displeasure at having their ethnic kin ruled by minorities is accompanied by certainty of their own natural right to rule those same minorities, have made much of Kurdish intransigence while minimizing or even justifying the starkest governance failures of their own new regime. Yet the past year’s massacres of Alawites and Druze, punctuating the failed integration talks with the AANES, only heightened the Kurdish disinclination to disarm and dissolve its forces and place the fates of its people in the benevolence of the central state.

Syria’s post-independence oscillation between peripheral revolts and centralized coercion, the very cycle that produced both Assad and his own overthrow, is simply the remorseless logic of a country, like neighboring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics. Whether or not the new Syria can break this cycle is an open question. It will take great feats of governance, and of control over his own disparate armed forces, by al-Sharaa to avoid the logic of Syria’s demographic confusion weakening his own state-building project just as, suddenly and catastrophically, it did for the Kurds. Syria’s ethnic and religious complexity makes it a hard country to rule, historically veering, as a result, between instability and oppression. The Kurdish attempt to find another, progressive path ultimately failed, for the same reasons. The lessons, it ought not to need underlining, reach far beyond Syria’s borders.

It is hard not to empathize with Macron — longstanding and much-mocked critic of Europe’s dependence on the United States; prophet of our mother continent’s strategic autonomy — as he was forced to watch the former handmaiden of transnational globalization, Mark Carney, win plaudits for his speech declaring that the rules-led global order was always a fiction, and that economic interdependence has become “the source of your subordination”.

Carney’s speech, excellent though it was, and destined for the reading lists of IR undergraduates yet to be born, nevertheless performs the function of permitting centrist liberals, far too late, to adopt the positions they until yesterday feared and vilified. Inevitably, we must endure the podcast from the Iraq War propagandist and the failed occupation governor earnestly informing us that the liberal order is fake and America’s empire is harmful. Yet it is fruitless now to complain that our leaders are weak, slow-witted, and negligent: had they been otherwise, they would not have been elevated to their role in Washington’s imperial system.

A clearer assessment of our place in the world was given, if unintentionally, by the European leaders at Davos, when Belgium’s Prime Minister sadly declared that “being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, as if this were a meaningful distinction. Like Orwell’s analysis of Dickens’s politics, observing that the novelist’s lament was not the fact of exploitation in itself but that the factory owner was insufficiently benevolent to his proles, America’s regional branch managers in Europe chafe not at the fact of their servitude, but at its worsening terms. When Nato chief Mark Rutte’s obsequious text message to Trump was leaked by his graceless master, we understood that their current shame is that they are now being made to kneel in public, and not grovel, as before, in private comfort.

Carney’s speech explicitly likened the non-American West’s position today to that of the subjects of a Soviet satellite state before 1989, an analogy that would once have been mocked as provocative contrarianism by those who today applaud him. It is like watching the functionaries of an Eastern European politburo declare themselves market liberals when the winds whipping about them became too bitter to ignore.

It is worth considering, then, whether Keir Starmer, or whoever replaces him, can be considered a more functionally independent ruler than a figure such as Aleksandr Lukashenko. In preserving his personal fiefdom, Lukashenko has, after all, managed to evade his country’s active involvement in Russia’s imperial wars — a feat beyond the abilities of our own rulers. Whatever his personal inclinations, or the desires of his supporters, there is little prospect of Starmer joining any meaningful or concerted European pushback against Washington’s coercion of Denmark to cede its sovereign territory. Over decades, Britain’s security elites have sought to make themselves indispensable to America — in reality settling on a form of commensalism, like the fish that live inside sharks’ mouths feeding on the detritus of their host’s meals, peering out at the world with the optical illusion that they are themselves the fearsome arbiter of the deep. This superficially advantageous viewpoint has fostered a dangerous British appetite for risk. Like Poland and the Baltics — which at least have history and geography to justify their unwelcome dilemma — Britain’s resultant, excessive exposure to the Ukraine War has deepened its already worrying and sovereignty-eroding dependency on America’s security umbrella.

Like Europe as a whole, only dangerously far more so, Britain’s Ukraine strategy was of cajoling America into a far more assertive posture against Russia than anyone in Washington, of either party, desired, occasionally leading the way to show that the path is firm. Yet the coalition of the willing has proved, unfortunately, far more willing than it is able. As long as that remains the case, Europe and particularly Britain find themselves, through fear of Russia’s vengeance, more tightly bound within America’s own imperial designs. The proposed British deployment to guard the territorial integrity of a post-armistice Ukraine is essentially a weak and overstretched tripwire force dependent on the hope that, should Russia attack or confront it, the US will immediately come thundering to its rescue. Given that, in the actual real world in which we live, European nations are deploying troops to guard European sovereign territory from American annexation, this is not a robust planning assumption. Without the certainty of American support, the mooted deployment does not help Ukraine, endangers Britain and deepens our dependency on Washington’s capricious favor. The errors of over-confidence, old and new, have not only left us dangerously exposed to an escalation we cannot match but entirely at America’s mercy.

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The options facing Britain now are few and unpalatable. Even if desirable, placating the US is impossible when its orders are self-contradictory and incoherent. Trump’s last set of demands, for increased European defense spending, were interpreted, perhaps accurately, as a shakedown for increased purchasing of American materiel. Yet, as the Danes are surely learning, logistical and technical dependence on Washington is of little value when Washington is itself the aggressor. Theoretically, Britain could hedge against American domination through deepened collaboration with a more sovereign Europe, yet the EU’s current structure of diffuse sovereignty, a recognition that it is a body composed of multiple countries with divergent interests, explicitly designed to smooth and regulate a world of trade dependent on American hegemony, leaves the continent a sleeping giant without a brain.

In its current form, the EU cannot long sustain a coherent course of action, and lurches from crisis to crisis, both self-made and imposed. One path for European middle powers is the essentially amoral balancing act shown by Hungary, juggling great power sponsors and foregoing an outward-facing foreign policy. Another is shown by Turkey, pursuing a similar balancing act at the interstices of imperial rivalries, but in pursuit of an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy. Both methods have proved successful, in their own ways, not least in prolonging the rule of their leaders: over time, rather than anomalies, such paths of naked self-interest are likely to become the European norm. As another European strongman playing-off empires against each other, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic soberly cautioned at Davos of the Greenland crisis: “This will happen again, but it will be deeper and more problematic, and everyone will have to take care of their own interests.” Even now, as the United States pursues its own diplomacy with Russia over Europe’s head, Poland and the Baltic states are too invested in the Atlantic alliance — for reasons as much sentimental as rational — to confront their sponsor in the shared interests of Europe as a whole. As Poland re-arms, it will in time assume the ability to pursue a more sovereign foreign policy, but it will also struggle to persuade Madrid or Rome into a posture of eternal confrontation with Moscow.

The current logic of the EU then, just as predicted by Sumantra Maitra’s prescient and influential “dormant NATO” paper, is for subsidiary, tactical and perhaps ephemeral alliances among regional nation-states to pursue their divergent interests. One glimpse of what this might look like can be seen in Greece’s pursuit of a deepened defense relationship with Israel, hedging against the increasingly revisionist and aggressive Turkey which Nato collapse will embolden through allying with non-Nato partners. It was, after all, Greece and Turkey’s brush with war in 2020 that first elicited Macron’s assertion that Nato was “brain dead”, a statement of fact derided at the time by those who would then confidently assert that the Ukraine war had revitalized the alliance. Rather than with the EU as a whole, one feasible route for Britain is therefore pursuing bilateral or “mini-entente” alliances with select European partners. In this context, Britain’s refusal to join France and Italy in negotiating directly with Russia looks untenable. An act of superficial British resolve, its real-world consequences of leaving British and European interests in Washington’s fickle and increasingly malicious hands is not a productive path forward.

The hard truth is that decades of past errors have limited Britain’s choices, leaving dwindling room for independent maneuver. Yet our current errors of timidity and path dependency, particularly the default strategy of waiting for a more benevolent American master, are set to compound these mistakes, checkmating our future as a sovereign state. To claw back some vestige of sovereignty, Britain first of all requires a drastic rethink of its Ukraine strategy, a risky course embarked upon years ago in a very different world. Much of the previous Ukraine discourse, such as holding out for Nato membership or firm American security guarantees for Ukraine, has already been rendered obsolete by the dwindling value of either, as Sweden and Finland are rapidly learning.

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'Excalibur' is English fantasia

By Aris Roussinos

A Trump administration, happy to use Europe’s fear of defending itself against a revanchist Russia to extract territorial and other concessions from its subordinate clients, has no real urgency to conclude the war. Yet until the Ukraine issue is resolved, Britain has no realistic option to carve an independent path or hedge against America’s increasingly onerous demands. It is difficult, without washing our hands of the matter entirely and retreating to quiet isolation, to think of a satisfactory route out of this dilemma. At the very least, home defense should become a far greater priority to British planners than any lingering dreams of defending America’s Pacific empire: basking in the reflected glory of world hegemony has already proved harmful enough.

Rather than enhancing British power, as decades of policymakers assumed, Britain’s slow descent within Nato from a partner to a client state has served to constrain our actual sovereignty. If Denmark is “irrelevant” to deciding the future of its own territory, as the US Treasury Secretary declares, or Canada exists at America’s mercy, as Trump menacingly asserted at Davos, then what does the future hold for Britain? As the current crisis proves, Britain will not defend Denmark nor, when the time comes, Canada, against American coercion because it cannot, and so is functionally less independent than either.

Everything desperately said of Greenland to stave off annexation — that America is already sovereign de facto, and can expand its bases, and pour in troops unhindered — is just as true of Europe, and Britain as a whole. Trump’s repeated declaration that it is not worth America defending territory it does not fully possess implies, as the least alarming interpretation, that Nato’s Article 5 mutual defense clause is already defunct. Yet, showing their customary foresight, European security wonks are celebrating as a victory for European resolve the precedent apparently now being set that US bases on European soil can overnight become American sovereign territory, while European leaders squirm at their helplessness being exposed to world derision. Yet Trump has burdened them with no new chains they have not previously competed for as honors. Europe’s subordination is the fruit of all the glittering prizes and titles, thinktank fellowships and security conferences that Washington offered them. Men will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon, Napoleon remarked. America’s innovation was realizing that a continent can be bought with lanyards.

Instead, as Hutchinson declares, it is precisely in mythmaking that nationalism draws its power, as disaffected intellectuals, and particularly artists, find themselves “generating at times of crises novel myths based on romantic acts of sacrifice by heroic elites that legitimize new national projects”.

Such was the director John Boorman’s explicit task with his 1981 epic Excalibur. It is “The Dark Ages”, the title sequence flashes portentously over Wagner, when “The Land Was Divided And Without A King”. As academics have noted, Boorman’s masterwork was released “shortly after Britain’s winter of discontent”, and “can be seen as a reaction to the economic and political crises of the 1970s, meditating on a Britain in decay, presided over by the female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher”. Yet if Excalibur is a critique of Thatcher’s Britain, it is not obviously one made from the political Left. The film’s driving fixation with will, heroic destiny, and the mystical unity of land and leader is strikingly transgressive to postwar liberalism. “I believe that the popular, lasting stories are really about great deep psychic events in human his­tory that have bitten themselves into the racial memory and which we remember in our unconscious,” Boorman would later write. “The retelling of these stories is like the rediscovery of them — it ‘catharizes’ and then gives solace.”

In Boorman’s intention to reattach Britain to its mythical roots, and so restore the nation’s mystic and psychic unity — the director is a convinced Jungian — Excalibur is overtly a work of cultural nationalism. Indeed, it is arguably the most deeply British, or at least consciously British film ever made: even more so for the fact that the names “Britain” or “England” are never once uttered. The ultimate, sacred source of yearning and duty is always “the Land”, tapping into and devoting itself to something far older than the modern British state, now palpably withering around us.

Excalibur’s immediate genesis was in Boorman’s failed attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings, whose “great brew of Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth”, the director declared, was “the Unterwelt of my own mind”. Yet unlike Tolkien, who viewed Ireland “as a country naturally evil”, haunted by a deep and ancient malignance emanating from its very bogs, trees and mountains, and only “held in check by the great devotion of the southern Irish to their religion”, Boorman found in the dramatic mountain landscape that had become his home a source of great and regenerative artistic power. “The valley in the Wicklow hills where my house sits is as close to Middle Earth as you can get in this depleted world,” Boorman would write, “The soft, feminine folds of the hills, the bleak bogs, the ancient oak woods, the black lakes, the urgent streams somehow corresponded to an inner landscape… It felt like a setting for the Arthurian legend.”

And, indeed, the Arthurian epic Boorman would create is dependent, for its visual appeal, on the Irish landscape surrounding his home: “with a few exceptions, all the scenes in Excalibur were shot within a couple of miles of my house.” In Ireland, the director had found an aesthetic hyper-Britain where the hills were steeper, the forests gloomy and primeval wildwood, and, most importantly, water was ever-present. Excalibur is surely the dampest film ever made on land: battles are fought in ice-cold moats, knights clash in front of plunging waterfalls and babbling streams or, drowning, find psychic truths in the weedy beds of lakes. His characters crawl and die in mud, their glittering armor sinking into the land itself. The woods themselves, wet with dew or shrouded in lake-mist, their moss and lichen-covered trunks and boulders lit a lurid green to heighten the raw, natural power emanating from them, are palpably rank with leaf-mold and mildew: it is the only film ever to capture the uncanny magic of our native Atlantic rainforests.

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Even the air, and light itself, is heavy with water, for “the Irish climate is heartbreaking to a filmmaker — unpredictable, constantly changing, but mostly raining”. It rained steadily for almost every day of the five-month production, Boorman said later, with the rare bursts of sunlight breaking through capturing a luminosity more intense for its doomed struggle against the Irish rain. Yet unlike Kubrick, Boorman would later praise the “wonderful light in Ireland, because it’s moist, because there’s so much moisture in the air even when it’s not raining that you get this refraction, this light, so you get a kind of softness”. That, he suggested, lent the film a hazy dreamlike radiance that “felt like a myth rather than reality.” In just this way, Boorman’s understanding of his native England was refracted through Ireland’s clarifying light.

Even still, only England could have made him. In Boorman’s personal mythology, both woods and water are central, fitting for the director of both the riparian horror of Deliverance and the pre-lapsarian fantasia of The Emerald Forest. Growing up in wartime London — his film memoir of the time, Hope and Glory, opens with the future director playing with a toy knight and wizard in the suburban rockery that served as mountain forest to the child’s imagination — Boorman was formed, he tells it, in a once-enchanted land that had only just lost its magic. As he writes in his autobiography, Suburban Boy, the “Tudor gables, leaded panes, bow windows” of suburbia — “eclectic fragments from pre-Industrial Revolution England” — masked the hard truth that “This was a new land and the England of old was gone for ever. Oh, what the English inflicted on the English: misery, deprivation and bondage on a scale quite equal to that visited upon their colonial vassals.”

Mocking the attachment of his father, George, to the Union Jack-and-Royal Family patriotism of the Westminster state, the young Boorman nevertheless remarks with wonder that, in his youth as a soldier in the Great War, like a warrior saint, the “young George, who lived to see a man walking on the moon, rode into battle against the Turks with a drawn sword on an Arab mare”. Though of London’s low church lower-middle class, Boorman’s parents would send him, for unromantic and practical reasons, to a cost-effective Catholic private school that was “my first contact with Irishness in all its glory and grim horror”, so seizing his imagination that “Ireland was to have an insidious influence on my life and work, drawing me and keeping me there for thirty years almost against my will”.

“During my Catholic schoolboy experience,” Boorman observes in his second memoir, Conclusions, “I used to study the holy water in those little enameled troughs that hung on the wall of the chapel. You dipped your finger in and crossed yourself. Here was a magical mystery: a priest could pray over ordinary water and invest it with spiritual power.” For Boorman, inverting Tolkien’s moral view of Ireland, “I felt Catholicism was only skin deep, that underneath it was a pagan place.” It could just as easily be said that Boorman’s English paganism had developed a markedly Irish Catholic flavor. Either way, the war would soon give Boorman his own watery baptism into the old ways.

Released from suburban boredom by the German bomb that destroyed his unloved house, the young director and his family moved to his grandfather’s wooden bungalow along the wooded stretch of the Thames at Shepperton. Skipping school, playing in and along the river, once he fell into the rushing waters of an open lock: “I opened my eyes to a turbulent green world… I exhaled and sucked water in again. No longer struggling, I felt a perfect ease as I breathed my beloved river. I was the river.” Rescued by his brother, “I resented the violent intrusion into my communion with water.” We see this scene recast in Excalibur, made mythic, in the drowning vision of Sir Percival, shedding his armor in the weeds, which permits him to find the secret of the Grail, that “You and the Land are one.”

Once, idly shooting a kingfisher with boyish callousness along the Thames’ wooded banks, Boorman “was consumed with shame and remorse. I had killed the spirit of the river, god’s messenger: the kingfisher. Something broke in me. I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored,” a quest he would seek in filmmaking. For all Ireland’s influence, then, Excalibur is the product of his deeply English imagination: “my childhood in river and oak forest had been steeped in the legend.” Even so, like many others before and after him, from Edmund Spenser to Paul Kingsnorth, Boorman’s Irish exile crystallized his English romanticism into something harder, and sharper.

“When I came to this simple Georgian house in the Wicklow Hills of Ireland some thirty-four years ago, the ancient oaks I inherited cast their spell on me. They rooted me to the place,” Boorman writes. In his extraordinary film autobiography, I Dreamt I Woke Up, the director pens a dreamlike ode to the Church of Ireland rectory and 100 acres of forest he called home, set above the wooded, holy fjord of Glendalough. We see him planting trees, conversing with bog bodies and roguish peasants, setting up carved standing stones and swimming with a friendly priest in his own private stretch of the river Avonmore. The enclave, a wild and haunted place, was sacred to the Irish mystic and hermit Saint Kevin, revered for his attachment to nature, and long before him, at least in Boorman’s personal mythos, it had been a site of great power in native Irish belief. Even in Boorman’s own time, he writes, the local Church of Ireland vicar reverted to Druidism under Glendalough’s spell, now blessing births and weddings with oak fronds in the flowing waters. “The druids, the Dark Ages, the monks in the monastery up the way; the cruelty of man and nature,” all here came together in Glendalough’s primeval oak forest, for Boorman “the atavistic homeland, the repository of fairy tales and myth”.

Conveniently close to Dublin society, Boorman’s bohemian village of Annamoe was also once a favored spot for Anglo-Irish literary artistic converts to Irish cultural and political nationalism. The Gaelic Revivalist playwright J.M. Synge, whose brother was once Annamoe’s Protestant rector, “wrote in this room where I now write”, Boorman is pleased to relate. Iseult Gonne, Yeats’ muse, had lived there in “the smallest castle in all of Ireland, a castellated doll’s house”, with her husband, the writer Francis Stuart, who would spend the war making propaganda broadcasts on Nazi Germany’s Redaktion Irland radio service (while Iseult, from whom he was separated, would harbor a German spy in her faux-medieval folly). The Edwardian British imperialist and thriller-writer Erskine Childers was a scion of Glendalough’s landowning family, and following his conversion to Irish revolutionary nationalism, was hunted down by the forces of the Free State in his own family’s Big House: before being executed as the military commander of the anti-treaty IRA. What made these children of Ireland’s Protestant ruling caste, so dependent on British rule, in Glendalough nevertheless throw in their lot with a highly-mythicized and Irish nationalism? Whether quirks of personal temperament, the grand and impersonal logic of social forces, or simply of the spirit of place, the same strange magic also cast its spell on Boorman.

And so, in Excalibur, we see Boorman create in Ireland his highly aestheticized hyperreal Britain, in which he restores his rejected, blighted native land to the world of myth. The film, which asserts itself to be an adaptation of Mallory, in fact plays with the entire Arthurian corpus: Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” are in there, along with T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Tolkien’s syncretic national dreamtime, and even Monty Python’s then-recent satirical effort. Boorman is not retelling the myth, but playing with the building blocks of myth itself. Setting the film at a moment when, as Merlin puts it, “The one God comes to drive out the many gods, the spirits of wood and stream go silent,” Boorman nevertheless spurns the Romano-British historicizing of Rosemary Sutcliff for a dream of the High Middle Ages. “We were taking it out of time, out of period, into the world of myth,” Boorman would later remember. “It’s a great mistake trying to make it real [because] the myth is much stronger than the reality.”

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As Hutchinson, undercutting the attempted debunking of nationalism’s demonstrable power by advocates of the modernist thesis like Hobsbawm and Gellner, observes, “many theorists have regarded nationalists as inventors of tradition and their claims to continuities with the past as either self-delusion or a form of deceit”. Yet this is simply a category error. Instead, we should see nationalism’s conscious appeal to myth as something akin to Boorman’s creative process, “a quest for an alternative world which is more satisfactory than the one we live in”, as the director states, “hopefully a bit better, braver, more beautiful than it was”. In the 21st century just as much as the 19th, a shimmering dream of the past stands as both a rebuke to the dysfunctions and humiliations of the present, and as a vision of the future to come. Rather than a retreat to past glories, real or imagined, as its detractors assume, nationalism’s appeal to myth is a modernizing, futurist mission, which recreates the present as an anomalous Dark Age to be overcome. Just as Hutchinson observes, against the dead hand of tradition, at moments of national crisis, historically  “national revivalists argued that it was a misunderstanding to conceive of tradition as a passive repetition of custom. Traditionalists must recognize that tradition had continually to be renewed.” We see just this process in Boorman, beating together the varied ancient and modern components of the Arthur myth, to forge something new in service of his own spiritual and opaquely political purpose of personal and national regeneration. Or as he pithily declared, “Realism is limited and boring — and fundamentally dishonest. It doesn’t tell the truth.”

And so, light gleams from his heroes’ burnished Gothic armor, beaten from polished aluminum for added brilliance, as if glowing from within. Boorman would later write that the 19th-century fantasia of Neuschwanstein, a classic product of German romantic nationalism, is far superior to any medieval relic. His is an extraordinarily Victorian dream of the Middle Ages, drawing from the same cultural wellsprings as the Gothic Revival, of Young England, whose romantic Tory peers would joust in armor to banish industrialism and its democratic excesses, as the pre-Raphaelites whose visual imagery Boorman would freely plunder, and indeed from the Wagnerian epics whose most bombastic sequences punctuate the film’s soundtrack.

Writing and filming his epic in an Irish setting that inspired the romantic nationalism of disaffected intellectuals, Boorman thus draws directly from the same Romantic aesthetics and impulses as England’s abortive and Germany’s ominous classical nationalism, essentially leaning on them for his film’s mythic power. He even openly reworked the aesthetics of fascism in his bricolage, as just another source of primal, irrational power, to some disquiet from critics. Knights kneel, as lightning strikes, before a blood-red solar cross; the inlaid marble knotwork patterning of the Round Table owes more, visually, to Wewelsburg, favored castle of the SS, than it does to Tintagel. Indeed, the film was particularly poorly received in West Germany, where its imagery of torchlit ceremonies, and of glittering knights riding forth under red pennants to battle for their sacred leader, all set to the most stirring excerpts of Wagner and Carl Orff, did not chime with the mood of the moment. What is the meaning of Percival’s Grail revelation that “you and the land are one”, after all, but nationalism’s great mystery of faith for which men sacrifice themselves? Boorman draws on the headiest strain of politics for his art, plundering nationalism for effect, as a dark and double-edged magic of fearsome power.

And like nationalism, when viewed from those outside its spell, the film is utterly ridiculous. It possesses, throughout, a definite end-of-pier quality. The performances are strange and stilted, Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is oddly camp and slapstick, and the whole thing is in the worst possible taste, a monument to excess as absurd as anything by Ken Russell. As a narrative, it barely hangs together; yet it is driven forward by imagery of strange and compelling power. Battles in bluebell woods, dead knights hanging from Mordred’s thorn tree, food for crows; the glittering, barely Christian wedding sequence, as if overseen by Glendalough’s renegade vicar; the apple orchards blossoming back into life as, restored by the Grail, Arthur leads his knights towards their final battle: and everywhere the presence of gushing, living water. We begin to believe, despite ourselves, that Boorman has indeed tapped into some Jungian essence, something that could only spring from the deep memory of these islands.

“When you’re in that state of grace where you’re wholly concentrated on making the film, you can draw on unconscious forces to help you,” Boorman writes, with absolute sincerity. “For a century now, we’ve been rushing headlong into the future; we’ve made a cult out of progress and we’ve forgotten our former selves, our former patterns of behavior, whose origins can be traced to the Middle Ages. We no longer have roots,” he mourned, and so, purely for our own survival, there is now “a pressing need to investigate the Matter of Britain”.

And it is only because of Boorman’s sincerity that any of it works. The vision of the just and rightly ordered state, of the Grail, and the restorative power to be found, if only searched for, in the land itself: he means all of it, with religious fervor, and it is enough to carry us along with him. A London mystic like Blake, he had found in Ireland not his Jerusalem but a dream of Camelot, sleeping dormant in the native woods and waters of these ancient, sacred isles. In Excalibur, more than any other modern adaptation, the great tradition has been worked on, made anew and handed on, glittering, to us. “I felt great satisfaction in having made it against all the odds,” Boorman writes, “It was a lifelong quest: I had found the Grail.” Like any national revivalist of the 19th century, or Anglofuturist of today, he perceived that the only way to cut our way out of the wreckage of modernity lay in reshaping the myths of a golden past to arm us for the great struggles ahead.

***

In his 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain, the socialist and Scottish nationalist writer Tom Nairn titled his chapter on the United Kingdom’s then-most restive province “Northern Ireland: Relic or Portent?” On this, as with so much else, Nairn may have been prescient. A year ago, it was natural to speculate on whether anti-migrant disturbances would become a feature of the English summer, as those deriving from the province’s traditional, and now largely ceremonial, ethnic conflict are in Northern Ireland. Today, it appears that “rioting season” has become England’s new routine. Rather than a freak occurrence, to be dealt with by harsh sentencing, the mixed protests and clashes in Epping, like the demonstrations in Diss and now Canary Wharf, still seem like only tremors before a greater earthquake. When Nigel Farage warned this week that “nobody in London understands how close we are to civil disobedience”, the response from Left-liberals, confused and frightened by a predictable course of events nevertheless incomprehensible to their worldview, was to cast him as a sort of English Ian Paisley, threatening violence at a safe remove for political gain.

A more apposite analogy, perhaps, would be with the last-ditch attempt, in 1968, to wrest the province from societal breakdown delivered by Northern Irish Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill in his famous “Ulster stands at the Crossroads” broadcast. “What kind of Ulster do you want?” O’Neill asked, “A happy and respected province… or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations?” O’Neill, a brave, perceptive and forward-thinking reformer, proved unequal to the task before him. It must be said that neither Keir Starmer nor Nigel Farage approach his caliber.

Is it going too far to declare a creeping Ulsterization of English politics? In a response to their demographic decline, currently mostly focusing on the British state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders, one would have expected the English to adopt a similar siege mentality to that of Ulster’s Protestants, whose “conditional loyalty” to the British state has always been dependent on the sense that it was safeguarding their ethnic interests. It now appears that they have. Like the PSNI, the English police is being criticized for its handling of disorder by a mobilizing ethnic community, with the latter enjoying the tentative support of two political parties. One of those, Reform, increasingly appears to be poised to swap roles with what was famously dubbed, until Cameron, “Britain’s natural party of government”. As with the SDLP and UUP in Northern Ireland, respectively replaced by the more radical Sinn Fein and the DUP through a process of what analysts of such conflicts call “ethnic outbidding”, the dynamics in mainland Britain are adopting uncanny echoes of Ulster’s once-unique dysfunction. The DUP is now being threatened from its Right by an even more explicitly ethnic party, Traditional Unionist Voice, though this has not happened in Britain or England. The dynamics of the next decade — what remains of Labour’s capacity to govern the country, and the unknowable, but not immediately reassuring possibilities, of a Farage-led Britain — will surely determine this question.

As in most ethnically divided polities, Northern Irish politics is a dispiriting gridlock of low-quality politicians uneasily managing the ethnic rivalries of their voter bases, placating them with symbolic treats while building nothing of value, all while failing to reform an economic basket case. Yet it also differs from England. Sharing an island, Northern Ireland’s Loyalist anti-migrant riots now overlap ambiguously with the Irish Republic’s protests, riots and sporadic arson attacks against mooted mass-migration housing. Ulster Loyalists have attempted cooperation across the border with Southern anti-migration activists, and have been rebuffed, with the Southern protest organizers adopting an increasingly Republican, and partially Gaelic nationalist flavor. Yet the cross-border dynamics also extend to the forces of order, with London and Dublin joining together to suppress anti-migration disorder. Fearing a recurrence of the Dublin riots — the modern precedent, I believe, for all such occasions on both islands since — the Irish state borrowed water cannon from Northern Ireland’s PSNI. Similarly, the current murder trial of a Northern Irish citizen in Belfast, allegedly by an asylum seeker, is, highly unusually, being held in Dublin, presumably in an attempt to ward off disturbances north of the border. Westminster and Dublin may not have agreed on much when it came to Brexit, but they happily cooperate on this more existential matter.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Do the “Epping Says No” placards derive from Ballymena, or from Coolock? The slogan-coiner is from the Homeland Party, an identitarian Right-wing group strongly analogous to Ireland’s National Party, right down to the visual branding and internal feuding. Indeed, Homeland’s recent attempt to expand to Northern Ireland was quickly demolished by National Party-sympathetic Gaelic nationalists on both sides of the border. On anti-immigration activism, it is possible to discern the cultural and political dynamics in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and Great Britain influencing, accelerating but also rivaling each other in a cycle of cultural exchange, just as they have done throughout the history of our archipelago.

In the summer of 1914, mainland Britain was only spared a civil war spreading from Ulster by the outbreak of the First World War, just as 1640s Protestant settler refugees from Ulster fleeing to London helped spark the conditions for England’s only civil war the state chooses to refer to as such. The Glorious Revolution, still referred to as such for its foundational role in the wavering modern liberal-democratic order, is still celebrated for its climactic Boyne victory every summer by Ulster Loyalists, albeit for their own Irish reasons. Unlike a growing number on the Right, or even in ordinary life, I believe the modern British state is very far from outright conflict. Yet disturbances of a lesser kind, for being less grave in their consequences, are surely more likely to spread, and to become our new, so easily avoidable, normal.

Many of last year’s English rioters, given the epicenter of the disturbances in northwest England, were of Irish descent and may, like that other child of the Irish diaspora, Tommy Robinson, have kept up with events across the water. Even the English movement’s two political martyrs, Lucy Connolly and Peter Lynch, bear good Gaelic surnames, just like Reform’s Epping candidate and female organizer, as well as many of the Homeland Party’s public faces. Whether this signifies successful Irish diaspora assimilation into Britishness is perhaps a deeper question than you might initially think. Similarly, the “No Surrender” slogan on the English flag borne by masked Canary Wharf protestors nods to the interest in Ulster Loyalism apparent in some London football firms, something also true of the British radical Right in the Seventies and Eighties.

The Euro ‘96 effect, beloved of Fabian commentators still trapped in that halcyon age, appears under pressure. In England, flags are re-adopting a territorial nationalist or communitarian quality, just as they always have in Northern Ireland and as is increasingly the case with the Palestine flag in South Asian Muslim areas of Britain. Yet the similar ambiguities over the politics of the flag, sometimes civic and sometimes ethnic nationalist, is also true in the case of Scotland and Wales, if there deriving from Britain’s foundational ethnic conflicts. How the new politics of mass migration will interact with the Westminster state’s already fraught management of three existing ethnic separatist movements is so far an unknown quantity. Through its own ineptitude, Britain’s political class has created a situation of almost unimaginable complexity, whose outcome is impossible to predict.

While there are many similarities between the current wave of English protests and Ireland’s longer-running ones, the existence in England of two political parties more than tacitly backing mass mobilization is a major difference, let alone the fact that one of these parties is currently topping the polls. The current asylum hotel protests have seen Reform tack back away from the center and towards chasing the angry public mood, here defined as the increasingly radicalized Facebook comment sections of provincial news websites. Yet if England’s provinces are adopting the aggrieved, conditionally loyal attitudes of Ulster Loyalists, Reform increasingly appears as the equivalent of the mainstream Unionist parties, uneasily representing their volatile support base while disavowing its methods. Labour, on paper, possesses four more years to dampen the angry public mood: but given the extent of radicalization over the party’s first year in power, it is difficult to imagine what British politics will look like by 2029.

Where the Republic of Ireland differs is that the “mammy-at-the-forefront” legal protests against planned asylum centers coexist with the social pressures of public shaming and intimidation, and the sporadic, and mostly nocturnal arson, of migration infrastructure. I’ve often toyed with writing about the historic line from the Land Wars, and Ireland’s earlier rural outrages and peasant mobilization, to Ireland’s current popular insurgency. Now I find it hard to believe that England is many years away from such direct activism. If anything, the attempted burning of occupied migrant housing in last year’s English riots went far beyond the Irish arson wave on unoccupied centers. Yet while the Republic of Ireland is a few stages ahead of Britain — in terms of the focused application of violence against the infrastructure of mass migration — it is certainly not approaching the civil war scenario which Britain’s mainstream Right is now rhetorically toying with, and nor, I would say, are we. At least, not yet.

But if English rioters have drawn a lesson from Ballymena, it is that, judiciously applied, violence works: far more quickly and decisively than voting anyway. Five years ago, the British state bent its knee to a wave of protests and rioting over explicitly racialized solidarity with a different ethnic group thousands of miles away. Why would it not buckle further before the previously dormant, and now increasingly volatile, majority ethnic population? Even in Northern Ireland, as the Guardian recently observed, the Ballymena riots were successful on their own terms: “of the approximate pre-riot [Roma] population of 1,200, two-thirds are gone — or, to use a loaded term, ethnically cleansed.” For the residents of Epping, similar methods have proved equally effective. This is not a lesson a serious state should be imparting to its populace, but it is the situation the British state has now created for itself.

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The populist revolt isn’t over

By Aris Roussinos

Unlike Northern Ireland, where rioting is traditionally confined to “interface areas” where working-class sections of the two dominant ethnic groups abut each other, in England this summer any migrant facility could be the spark of protest, and any protest could become a riot. Most will be peaceful, will fizzle out, or just won’t draw numbers. But planning and preparing for the rare occasions where violence does occur will strain Westminster’s capacity to respond. The policy of dispersing migrant housing across the country has only dispersed the opportunities for protest. Last year, it was the North; this year, so far, Eastern England. Angela Rayner’s solution is apparently to replace the hotels with private rented accommodation in residential areas. But Ballymena shows the risks with this approach. For a state whose every budgetary decision is now being associated with mass migration and its consequences, then whatever it says about the future path of the Westminster system, the policing costs of this apparent new reality will be enormous.

As in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, the police itself — its ethos, its tactical decisions and its demographic make-up — will become a source of political contention. As for adventures abroad, or the approaching world war the Westminster state continually warns us of, I do not see the young men of Epping or Diss eagerly answering Whitehall’s future call to star in a drone snuff video. Just like Ireland in the First World War, and Northern Ireland in the Second, even conscription now looks untenable within the British state’s former English heartland. Given the international commitments it has adopted towards other countries’ borders, this presents a major problem. A government excessively enamored with the opinion of global elites, even by the standards of the Westminster establishment, will now find that political paralysis at home through recurrent ethnic rioting is also Not A Good Look.

The Westminster state has spun itself into a web of legal, moral and essentially aesthetic obligations which it cannot easily escape, in its current form anyway. How can Starmer smash the gangs when the biggest smuggling gang of all — in its lavish inducements to game the asylum process, and its fawning attitude to the rent-seeking and gray economies propped up by mass migration — is the British state itself? The gangs to be smashed all sit in Whitehall offices: yet neither Starmer, nor maybe even Farage, are temperamentally inclined to the task ahead. Perhaps this, more than the external displays of flags or rioting, marks the real Ulsterization underway this summer. Holding or ceding Northern Ireland is a manageable headache for Westminster, which correctly treats the statelet like its own self-contained universe. But losing legitimacy in England is an existential problem for the British state. However this ends — and there are many potential outcomes, a few of them positive — whoever succeeds Starmer will face a daunting, and perhaps impossible task. As for the current government, the danger is that for its opponents on the street, England’s Ulsterization increasingly appears less a threat than an exciting new opportunity.

The European reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has overwhelmingly been one of horror: at being cast out, weak and under-equipped, into a grown-up world full of terrors. Yet the framing that the NSS represents America’s “divorce” from European concerns seems precisely wrong. Instead, it marks the opposite. Walking back its Pacific commitments in the interests of a stable equilibrium with China; its “spreading [of] liberal ideology” in Africa; and its “misguided experiment” in urging Middle Eastern regimes into “abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government”, Washington’s new strategic doctrine is explicit in retreating to core interests. In its declaration of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, Washington reasserts its traditional right to dominance over the Western Hemisphere. When it comes to our own continent, it makes clear that rather than casting us adrift, Europe is to be drawn closer into America’s now openly civilizational empire.

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With Washington confronted by two overt civilizational states — China and Russia — the NSS makes clear a division between the world without, in its declaration to maintain “good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours”, and its new assertiveness in dominating the world within — the sphere that was, until recently, unabashedly called “Western civilization”. So, the NSS declares, Washington will “push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms” in a process of cultural retrenchment limited to the “countries that share, or say they share, these principles” of Enlightenment liberty, drawn from Europe’s unique civilizational path. The NSS cannot be clearer that this is Washington’s aim: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Again and again, the document emphasizes its civilizational focus: Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”, it declares. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence”, because “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.”

Yet rather than a civilizational state, Europe’s current form of governance looks more like a civilizational suicide note to the Trump administration. Like a stern parent gathering its wayward charge back into the family fold, the United States now limits its interest in the domestic politics of foreign nations to that of its European kin. As the Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared after leaving Brussels: “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”

How much more explicit could Washington be over its determinedly civilizational ethos? Perhaps it is because such a worldview is now so alien to Europe’s rulers that this clearly and repeatedly expressed focus has been glossed over in European commentary so far. Or perhaps it is because they fear, while “perched in unstable minority governments” as the NSS cruelly if accurately observes, that it may strike a chord among the European peoples they so waveringly rule. Though expressed snarkily, The Economist’s defense editor Shashank Joshi is perhaps closer to the mark than most in tweeting “Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.” Likewise the comment by the EU’s former high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, that Trump “wants a white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands and voting preferences”. What both Joshi and Borrell frame pejoratively as a “white” Europe is, of course, the until-very-recently uncontroversial belief that individual European countries should remain the homeland states of their titular peoples: that Finland should be predominantly composed of Finns, for example, and Italy of Italians. This is, after all, the organizing principle by which almost every European state was founded, and over which many bloody wars have been fought.

As the NSS declares, in a frank manner that would invite censure if not police attention in Europe itself: “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” A Trump administration that has rejected any interest in the internal affairs of Asia, Africa and the Middle East has no desire to manage the tumultuous affairs of their diasporas in Europe itself. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, for America in the total “Birminghamization” of Britain, or the replacement of Europe’s wider population by non-Europeans, especially after the failure of America’s experience of world hegemony, in which advocates of distant peoples were permitted to “suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own”.

Such a worldview is of a piece with Trump’s recent declaration that he will ban Third World migration to the United States, coupled with his preference for European immigration, and preferential asylum for white South Africans. Even within the Western Hemisphere, it is Canada that the Trump administration expresses the desire to annex, and not Latin America, where, the NSS declares, America’s interest lies in ensuring the region “remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. The Trump administration is increasingly strident in its declarations that the Hart-Celler Act, which opened the United States to non-European migration, was disastrous. In the President’s overt support of “remigration” — seen in its current, explicitly hostile focus on America’s Somali minority — the terminology of Europe’s Nouvelle Droite has entered the Oval Office, just as the Department of Homeland Security now spends its time tweeting openly Dissident Right memes. The borderless Utopianism of the 2000s, and the radical, racialized discourse and policymaking of 2010s liberals have brought about precisely the nativist reaction they were always warned against. Just a decade ago, all of this seemed unthinkable: now the rhetoric and policy goals of a few dozen Austrian, French and German Identitarian students are returning to Europe via the White House. For European Rightists, this may prove a mixed blessing.

The NSS declares that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”, and that “our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory”. An unpublished version of the document seen by the Defense One website adds that “we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life… while remaining pro-American”, and focus on specific countries such as Poland, Austria, Hungary and Italy “with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union]”. The document’s assertions that Europe’s elites survive through “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” — and “subversion of democratic processes” which “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” — imply that Washington will not look kindly on quasi-constitutional attempts to prevent Right-wing parties from gaining power: such as the forthcoming state elections in eastern Germany. Rather than actively helping Right-wing governments into power, then, it is more probable that the Trump administration will prevent faltering liberal administrations from clinging onto by dubiously undemocratic means.

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Britain can't escape its imperial master

By Aris Roussinos

Yet while it is difficult to imagine the Brussels clerisy, already faltering against a populist upsurge driven by unwanted mass migration, rallying angry European voters against Trump on this exact matter, there are nonetheless risks for Europe’s Right-wing parties. Deepened integration — or rather subjugation — within America’s imperial realm would pose fewer immediate risks if a Republican victory, and a Vance administration, after Trump were a more certain prospect. But a win for a Democratic Party that is now increasingly Third Worldist in both composition and aspiration would surely mean that Washington’s might and influence would be deployed against the European Right just as nakedly and unsparingly. In any case, the gulf between rhetoric and action within the Trump administration has often been a wide one. Europe’s current elites can perhaps be forgiven for their “wait and see” approach: perhaps the Republicans will lose the midterms, and with them the opportunity to reset the empire according to their vision.

Yet the looming and unsatisfactory conclusion to the Ukraine War adds extra time pressure to Europe’s leaders, a sense of jeopardy which works in Washington’s favor. The war initially seemed, in a strange way, a blessing to Europe’s leadership: a chance to preserve their legitimacy, in demonstrating the strength, will, and autonomy of a united Europe and so stave off their reckoning at the hands of their voters. Instead, due to their incompetence, it has accelerated their downfall. Europe is simply not ready to confront Russia alone, and so must cling tighter to Washington’s skirts even as Trump mocks and reviles its leadership. A Europe that can defend itself against external threats — as the Trump administration claims to want — will, eventually, summon up the hard power to become an autonomous actor in a world of predatory empires. Some measure of independence may yet be found, in decades to come, from this terminal point of Europe’s century of humiliation.

It would, though, have been better to have asserted our autonomy before this moment of existential crisis, as France has long urged. Yet the Atlanticist elites too long insisted otherwise, and now bewail, with genuine bewilderment, the kicking they receive from the boot they were installed to lick. Now, faced with aggression from the East, they must subject themselves to humiliation from the West. Like the Byzantine officials who, at the Eastern Roman Empire’s lowest ebb, declared the Ottoman turban to be a better fate than the Papal tiara, the choice at this perilous moment is which subordination will prove less painful. The price of American protection, the NSS makes clear, is ideological conformity: it is not Europe being discarded by its imperial master, but its current leadership. For us Europeans, whom they have dragged to this civilizational nadir, their removal will at least be some small consolation.

While Putin has not yet achieved the fast-moving operational breakthrough that has eluded him since the war’s first hours, the acceleration of Ukraine’s territorial losses on the eastern and southern sectors of its frontline paint a grim picture of the coming months. Now the situation is such that, as America’s army secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly told his Ukrainian counterparts last week, Kyiv’s military position can only worsen, and Moscow’s can only improve. America’s skepticism of Ukraine’s chances is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: in these circumstances, it is hard to argue against Driscoll’s reported warning to Kyiv that “you are losing… and you need to accept the deal”.

The war’s outcome will now be decided by Russia and the United States, over the heads of both Ukraine and Europe. If this is a defeat for the European Atlanticists who are most determinedly hawkish against Moscow, it is also the end result of the worldview they embody. So enmeshed are European nations within America’s defense structures, that it is impossible for Europe to sustain a major war without US support: and which only a fool could now believe is guaranteed. The Ukraine war was an opportunity for Europe’s leaders to radically transform our continent’s security framework towards a vision of strategic autonomy — in which, by taking responsibility for our own defense, we Europeans could assert our own interests and shape our own futures. Yet as the Russia analyst Jade McGlynn, a Ukraine hawk, observes: Europe “has chosen paralysis while others determine the fate of our continent” — a fate which is “the product of decisions not taken, responsibilities avoided, and illusions clung to for too long”, not least the “bizarre teleological liberalism that sees liberal democracy as somehow feted to win out according to the laws of history”.

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Putin is facing his Waterloo

By Aris Roussinos

As the war’s early days revealed, Putin is no strategic genius. But with Europe’s current leadership, he does not need to be. If it is Emmanuel Macron’s tragedy to be a great man of history, trapped in the role of a 21st-century European leader, it is our far greater misfortune to be ruled by his peers. Europe failed at the historic task with which it was presented, settling back into its comfort zone of demanding a satisfactory outcome to the war it is not in a position to impose. Veering between a hawkishness that it cannot sustain — see Kaja Kallas this week demanding Russia’s demilitarization — and humiliating tributary missions to our Washington overlord which reflect our true situation, Europe’s bellicose rhetoric on the Ukraine war has become increasingly detached from reality.

The simple facts of the matter are that the United States, on whom Europe’s defense depends, is keener to end the war than Russia, which scents total military victory. Ukraine’s overriding interest, in preserving the Kyiv government’s independence from Moscow, increasingly diverges from Europe’s, which is for the Ukrainian armed forces to distract and degrade Russia’s military power long enough for Europe to effectively re-arm, or for some, so far unknown, deus ex machina appear to resolve the situation in a satisfactory manner. From its earlier heady expectations of total victory, and resultant disastrous overreach, Kyiv must now find a path to negotiating the least painful defeat the circumstances offer: Europe’s political discourse is yet to catch up with this harsh reality.

Yet even still, for Britain, losing a proxy war is a better outcome than losing a war in which we are ourselves engaged. Due to the Army’s prolonged mismanagement, Britain cannot field artillery or air defense to speak of. Nor can it cobble together the armored brigade that is its Nato responsibility, nor sustain the munitions expenditure of a high-intensity war for more than a few days. The next prime minister will find themself at the helm of a country that has simultaneously enmeshed itself to an alarming degree in a losing war while bulldozing, through sheer incompetence, its own ability to field an army. Having entirely failed to rebuild its deterrent power in the nearly four years since the beginning of the greatest land war in Europe since 1945, it would take great optimism in Whitehall’s wisdom and ability to assume that matters would suddenly improve if Britain were itself forced to fight. This is not a reassuring position to be in, and Washington enforcing a peace settlement that extracts us from this worrying bind should be accepted, even if its terms are no cause for celebration.

Yet dragging Britain’s political class to hard reality is not an easy task. Though no doubt well-meaning, the pundit hawkishness that undermined previous attempts at peace negotiations has not served Ukraine well. It would have been better for Ukraine, and Europe, to have negotiated peace from a position of relative advantage, as the country possessed in 2022 or 2023. Yet those chances were squandered, with those urging negotiations condemned as Putinist appeasers by a commentariat which apparently believed that Ukraine was destined to liberate Crimea, topple Putin, and carve Russia into a constellation of weak ethnic statelets. Discounting the possibility of Zack Polanski hypnotizing Putin into shrinking his munitions stockpiles, we are perhaps fortunate that the likeliest next prime minister will be either Nigel Farage, leading a Reform government with a mandate for total change, or an intervening Labour reformer. Shabana Mahmood has already set out her stall as a purveyor of uncomfortable truths and hard-nosed realism, while another likely contender for a Labour coup, the defence secretary John Healey, possesses the credibility to recalibrate Britain’s rhetoric to its diminished capability.

Britain’s next leader will be forced by events to construct a new and cautious vision for British security managing four separate poles: the United States, whose will and ability to defend Europe is clearly waning; Europe itself, which has proved itself disunited and incapable of sustained and concerted action; Russia, whose assertive foreign policy will have been bloodily vindicated by the war’s conclusion; and the greatest industrial power in world history, China.

In our current circumstances of military and economic weakness, and near-revolutionary domestic political discontent, a continuation of Britain’s hawkish stance on world affairs is simply not viable. Even if an interventionist foreign policy were wise — which it is not — or electorally popular — which it is not — it is simply now beyond our ability. It is unfortunate, then, that in his choice of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society’s Alan Mendoza as foreign policy adviser, Farage has settled on an advocate of total, ideological war against rivals great and small at which even Washington balks. It is, indeed, worryingly plausible that the domestic demands of neutering claims that he is a Russian asset, a Brexit-era liberal fantasy entirely downstream of the Clinton campaign’s Russiagate conspiracy theory, will force Farage into reckless hawkishness to win the approval of the commentariat which will never come.

If Ukraine manages to retain its functional independence from Russia, obtain meaningful security guarantees from the United States, and join the European Union, then the cession of territory it currently does not hold and will not soon recapture is hardly the worst outcome. Certainly, it is a better than the looming loss of territory currently in its possession, and an even worse peace deal in the future. The Trump administration, proposing lucrative joint economic projects with Moscow, openly covets a stable future diplomatic relationship with Russia. Whether this is feasible may be doubtful, but so is Europe’s current stance of simultaneous subordination to the former and hostility just short of open war with the latter.

Like Ukraine, Europe and Britain are forced by military and political disadvantage to take their orders from their imperial patron: America has decided that the war must end, and is now persuading Russia to agree. If this damages European pride, then it should: the continent will now pay the price for the weakness our leaders chose for us. Absorbing a bruised and shell-shocked postwar Ukraine, whose economy has been wrecked, a quarter of whose population has already fled to the EU into European political structures will be a generational challenge in itself. So, too, will be stemming the illicit westward flow of weapons, once the shooting stops.

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Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for a peace deal has already passed. If the war is over by Christmas, it will be a miracle. Yet its likely unsatisfactory conclusion, and the narrow escape it may grant us from a far worse outcome, require a measure of sober reflection alien to Westminster’s political culture. The Ukrainians, rightly, now place little faith in Europe’s empty assurances. As Zelensky this week warned his nation, “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter.” If only our own leaders were so frank with us. Britain’s rivals are growing in power, and our allies are demonstrably unreliable: yet as the Commons Defense Select Committee warned this week, Britain’s ability to defend even the homeland itself is doubtful in the extreme. Farage is perhaps fortunate that the burden of defeat will fall on a Labour prime minister, and that Reform’s foreign policy is so far little more than an empty page on a website: with his current foreign policy adviser, it is better that this is remains so. Losing a war is, historically, one of the greatest spurs to serious projects of national reform. In preparing for government, Farage must make use of what may only be a lull in hostilities to chart a swift and viable path towards guaranteeing the nation’s basic security, and ensuring that Britain is never again left so dangerously exposed between its commitments and its capabilities.

Swift was, no doubt, inspired by his native Ireland, until now the historical benchmark for poor British governance mismanaging a nation under its purview, and inspiring spasms of inchoate anger among its benighted people that led eventually to revolution. Yet the portrait of a distant governing class obsessed with extracting solar energy from cucumbers as the cities they rule fall into squalid ruination, trying and failing to make reality conform to their ideal theories, is an uncomfortably apposite one for the British mainland today. British politics now looks less like the collapse of a party than of an entire regime.

If Keir Starmer did not exist, the governing caste he represents would have had to invent him. Indeed, so rigid and robotic are Starmer’s certainties, so unwilling to face reality and so strangely devoid of interior life is he, that we half-suspect they did: the Prime Minister seems less a person than a tulpa collectively dreamed up by this class at its moment of terminal trial. An idealist of a failed Utopia, a technocrat who cannot govern, a manager who cannot control the underlings who despise him, his failings are those of his caste as a whole; he is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime. Over just the past couple of years, the British electorate has eviscerated both parties of its two-party democracy: historic landslides have immediately crumbled into electoral extinction, rendering power illusory and the country ungovernable. Five prime ministers in a decade have tried and failed to impose some order to the chaos. And what is surely now the most revolutionary electorate in the Western world is drumming yet another leader to the scaffold.

It is useless, in these circumstances, for Starmer to remind his rebellious party that he won power barely a year ago with a landslide mandate; that he is, as his allies desperately brief the press, just one of two living persons to have ever won an election for Labour. Starmer’s devious and sharp-elbowed internal climb to power, then, reveals him as probably the most competent and successful politician that the modern Labour movement can produce. That he is already so weak, so luckless and so widely despised highlights the essential problem neither he nor any Labour successor can overcome: he is the incarnation not so much of a party as of an entire cohort about to be swept from the stage.

In a democracy — we are told often enough, anyway — governments win and hold power by giving voters what they want. Yet British democracy works in quite other ways: those who hold power are fearful of what the voters want, repelled by it on moral grounds, and instead see their role, like a stern Victorian nanny, as forcing down the bitter and improving medicine it is their duty to administer to its ungrateful charge. That the voters may grumble, sulk and spit it out is all, for them, an expected part of the process. The very existence of British democracy is, we may say, a testable proposition: in its greatest test so far, the Brexit referendum, our governing caste entirely failed. Viewing the result as a tantrum to be ridden out, rather than a demand for total reform, every element of our governing caste congealed together in a single mass to frustrate and subvert the vote. Brexit’s winning voters were, they told themselves, merely deluded and misinformed.

There is a pleasing synchrony, then, in the collapse of the Starmer project, and of the BBC’s latest and perhaps last great scandal: they are both, after all, the death pangs of an elite that has lost its legitimacy. When we see the BBC’s defenders mobilizing, like worker ants scurrying to defend their threatened queen, we see revealed an entire class struggling to maintain its grasp on power. The narrow sweep of those who, in declaring the BBC’s non-partisan nature, reveal how precisely partisan the organization has become, underlines the scale of the problem. From the Sixties onwards, through to winning power in the Nineties, a set of ideological assumptions became dominant within the Westminster State and its class allies in what we euphemistically term “the professions”. The BBC transmits the worldview of this class, whether those who pay for it wish to watch it or not. Gleefully adopting a role as combaters of “disinformation” — that is to say, opinions conflicting with this worldview — the Corporation has veered ever more tightly to its own narrowing set of approved beliefs.

As its latest scandal shows, what is objectively true is now of less importance to the BBC’s tastemakers than what ought to be true, or simply feels true to them. From history documentaries to morning pabulum to the tired, court satire of Have I Got News For You, whose doddering panelists still trot out flaccid jibes at their caste enemies, it is now impossible to watch the BBC’s content without wading through its intrusive ideology at every step. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”, Keats wrote: yet having long foregone any pretensions to artistry, all that is left of the BBC’s output is the designs its makers wish to impose on those who fund them. Like the rest of their caste, in Westminster or in Whitehall, within the BBC’s management there is not the slightest hint of self-doubt or wavering, even out of self-preservation, in the face of the nation’s growing contempt.

More from this author

How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

This caste, when expressing the righteousness of its beliefs, likes to think of itself as the Sensible Ones, setting itself against the base enthusiasms of the British public. We may instead call them, as the ancient Greeks euphemistically did the Furies, the Kindly Ones. For the early results of their imposed ideological project are in, and their punishing regime of self-regarding kindliness has brought both daily horrors and petty humiliations into the routine of British life. Indeed, the collapse in wealth, liberty, public safety and basic capacity to govern that has so rapidly ensued is so dramatic that Britain has become, to America’s reigning Right, the whipping boy for an entire failed ideology — the cautionary Ruritanian end state, as Hungary once was to its liberals, of the opposing domestic faction’s worldview. From the American government’s perspective, a narrow ideological and cultural class has seized control of the entire British state, and the mismanagement that has ensued may yet be fatal. With all the unsentimental precision of an imperial bureaucrat taking stock of a failing colony, it is a more accurate assessment than anything in lobby commentary.

That Reform will come to power now seems increasingly certain. That the party is capable of governing Britain now — or that anyone can — is doubtful in the extreme. For Reform to win power, it must transition into a middle-class as well as working-class party, a process that is already well under way. After all, the Epping homeowners protesting migrant accommodation beneath their sea of flags are surely a more affluent demographic than the average Leftist wavering between the Greens and Your Party. Yet as Starmer’s fate reveals, winning power is not the same thing, in modern Britain, as wielding it. Reform’s ability to actually govern rests on either inspiring mass defections among the current professional class, or in the total personnel renewal of the entire British state. The BBC’s fate, under the incoming regime, will serve as a useful benchmark for their progress: does Reform intend to disestablish the Corporation, and all the other lavishly funded, senile and corrupted monasteries of the British state, or does it wish to reshape it in its own image? Will the crisis of the British state be resolved by the renewal of its failing institutions, or in starting afresh?

Yet unseating, or replacing, an entrenched and unelected shadow state, firmly convinced of its moral right to eternal rule, is not a simple task. Let us imagine that, in assuming power, Reform were to embark upon a great rolling series of referendums on the questions dividing the nation from its rulers: on immigration, on crime and punishment, on the headlong rush to Net Zero. Would the governing class, spread across all its perches in the British state, accept the likely results, or would it seek to frustrate and undermine them? Would the democratically expressed will of the British people be respected, whatever the nation decides, or would it be delegitimized as the populism of the base urges, with the establishment’s role being to protect the British people from their own desires? We already know the answer.

British politics now resembles, rather than a crown in the gutter, an ancient sword of great power asking to be drawn from its calcified and rusting matrix, with the current establishment preferring instability and collapse than deigning to touch it. As long as their grasp on power lies beyond the reach of British democracy, the worst is yet to come. Just like Swift’s Laputans, “instead of being discouraged” by their failure, those who rule us “are Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”. The nation has not yet escaped Laputa’s burdensome shadow. If the failure of the Starmer project was an inevitability, the failure of Farage’s last-ditch attempt at reform presents a far more worrying prospect.