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.

They splash through puddles on their way into town, but after a while the weather eases. The patrol wears mostly black, and stab-proof vests, though their work has not yet led to violence. Docherty, a joiner by day who founded Scots Active last year, has filled his pockets with the essentials: a yellow tube of naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses; a flashlight; a pack of cigarettes; and a can of 2in1 Self-Defense Spray — a legal alternative to pepper spray that stains an assailant’s clothes.

Scots Active is just one of a number of night patrols that have formed across Glasgow in the past year. Dubbed vigilantes by the media, and disavowed by the police, they insist they are merely concerned citizens. The groups are doing “something the government cannae do”, says Lee, a lumbering young security guard who’s joined us to provide protection.

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Trudging about until the early hours of the morning, the group hands out blankets to the homeless, and checks bridges along the Clyde where people might be considering suicide. Their primary motivation, however, and the reason why they have drawn such controversy, is their belief that the city’s women and girls are under threat from an influx of migrants. Drawn by a generous housing policy, more asylum seekers have ended up in Glasgow than any other local authority in Britain. Under the strain of supporting them all, tensions are beginning to rise.

Docherty’s patrol is the most visible manifestation of the city’s troubles. As we walk for hours, up and down throughout the city center, we see others. A teenager hunched into the corner of a subway stop, a glass pipe pushed up against his mouth. A sweet, childlike man with an Alsatian tied to his waist, who tells us that earlier that week he’d waded into a lake to die until the dog splashed in after him. Homeless men, vibrating in the cold.

Glasgow slumped in the 20th century, depopulating faster than any other British city. Then it began to recover, becoming something of a model for how post-industrial areas might be revived. Now, though, progress seems to be stalling, if not reversing. Youth violence is ticking up, with Will Linden of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit warning of a sharp rise in knife crime. Glasgow still has the most drug deaths in Scotland — and Scotland the most in Europe.

The city’s Victorian architecture is meanwhile crumbling and burning and collapsing. When I arrive, a cube next to the train station remains cut off, weeks after a fire ripped out from a vape shop at the base of a 19th-century building. Peering over the barricades around it, I see black, charred stone.

In a 2023 essay, Rory Olcayto, an architectural writer, provoked debate when he described the city as a shipwreck. “Psychologically Glasgow is paralyzed,” he wrote. “It can’t imagine a future for itself.” The conurbation is too vast and sprawling for Scotland to cope with. It has discarded much of its past, but is unsure of what its future will be, leaving only a trite marketing slogan: People Make Glasgow. “It’s not the same,” bemoaned Ally McCoist of the city earlier this month, introducing a note of despair to TalkSport’s football coverage. “It breaks your heart to walk about Glasgow.”

Now, Reform UK, campaigning on the slogan “Glasgow is broken”, are predicted to break through at the Scottish Parliament election on 7 May. According to an MRP poll published last week, the party should win two seats in the city, pushing Labour into third place both here and across Scotland as a whole. With its growing discontent, anti-migrant neurosis and extrajudicial street politics, the country seems to be swiftly converging with its southern neighbor.

As the patrol tramps through central Glasgow, the crack-smoking teenager seems to appear behind us. He’s a lookout, Docherty claims, keeping an eye on Scots Active for a gang of drug dealers who loiter around the St Enoch subway station. As we pass by them, I see about a dozen of these boys hovering beside its curved glass wall, a puffa-clad mass.

Despite Glasgow’s recent travails, it used to be a far more violent place. While we walk, Docherty tells me about his adolescence on a “scheme”, or estate, in Govanhill, an ethnically diverse neighborhood south of the Clyde. He was raised amid running street street battles with other young “teams”, or gangs, from different areas. His secondary school, he claims, was a “race war” where white children battled Pakistani and black rivals. In one fight, a boy stabbed and stabbed at him, wildly, as he struggled to get away. It was only when Docherty finally broke free that he realized one of his testicles had been severed from his body.

In the press, Scots Active has been labeled far-Right. When I put this to Lisa, she insists that the group doesn’t discriminate and would help anyone in need. Yet discussing the supposed drug dealers, who are mainly non-white, Docherty makes his racialized view of Scottish identity clear. “They might have been born here,” he says. “But no, they’re not from Scotland. They’re not young Scottish boys.” That’s part of a broader trend: Scots Active has tapped into a Scottish ecosystem of anti-migrant politics, protesting alongside groups such as Unite The Clans, which has rallied around the country.

Later, Docherty and I begin talking about the suicidal man walking his Alsatian, and he says he has always struggled with depression himself. Sometimes he blacks out and starts smashing things up: his house, his mum’s house, the building site he works on. The only thing that quiets the negative voices in his head, he tells me, is self-medicating with cannabis.

Audrey Dempsey, too, has witnessed the alienation and violence bred by poverty. When she was hired as an addiction support worker, back in the 2000s, she says things were better than today. Then, Glasgow suffered some of the sharpest budget cuts of any local authority in Britain. The charity Dempsey founded in response — No. 1 Baby and Family Support Service — aims to make up some of the gap by providing second-hand prams, cots, clothes and toys. Visiting her charity’s users, Dempsey finds terrible, debilitating conditions. In one house, she met a mother who was cooking for her children on £1 disposable BBQs, bought after their electricity ran out. Schools approach her asking for nappies because their pupils were never toilet trained. She believes such colossal breakdowns are partly fueled by the state’s perverse system of incentives. “It’s as if,” she says, “they’re trying to create a benefits culture in Scotland.”

In 2022, Dempsey was elected to Glasgow City Council as a Labour representative for Springburn. Having expanded as a center of railway manufacturing, the area collapsed after the Second World War, becoming one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The high rises built here in the late 20th century, to rehouse those moved out of tenements, became hives of social dysfunction. In 2010, a survey found it to be the most-feared neighborhood in Scotland for violent crime.

I meet Dempsey in a café on a retail park amid acres of tarmacked carpark, close to where William Wallace was captured by the English in 1305. She sketches a bleak vision of her city. “What’s been happening for the past 18, 19 years is definitely not progress,” she says. “The place is filthy. It’s run down. Services don’t exist anymore.” Last month, it was reported that health and social care services in Glasgow are facing a funding shortfall of almost £34 million.

Contributing to this budgetary pressure is the asylum system. Since 1999, Glasgow has been part of the national refugee dispersal system, in which the Home Office spreads asylum seekers across the country. Today, over 6,500 such people are currently in, with more than half of those in Glasgow. Once they are given refugee status, however, the migrants become the responsibility of the local authority. And in Scotland, homelessness legislation means that everybody must be housed. As for Glasgow, which declared a “housing emergency” in 2023, this has become a totemic issue.

Like Scots Active, with whom she has been out patrolling, Dempsey now fears ethnic violence. With community halls and public institutions shuttered, she believes it is impossible to properly integrate migrants. The councillor is convinced that race riots such as those that swept England in 2024 — but avoided Scotland — could break out here.

Her shifting views on migration, Dempsey tells me, have been driven by what happened to her daughter. Last year, she says, her 12-year-old girl was attacked by other children. She believes this was racially motivated and so, in its wake, asked at a council meeting about “racist attacks on white children and teachers”. When her comments were made public, the Labour Party suspended her. Now, she is standing for Reform in the Scottish parliamentary elections next week.

Dempsey is hopeful the party might provide the radical change she believes Glasgow needs. When I suggest that Nigel Farage is not known for his focus on child poverty, she agrees. “I have to be quite frank and say when I think of Reform in Scotland, I don’t think of Nigel Farage, ’cause I’ve never met him,” she says. “I think Malcolm Offord. And he gets it. He understands it. Now he does.”

Offord, previously a Conservative member of the House of Lords, was recently unveiled as Reform’s leader in Scotland. Dempsey argues he demonstrated his commitment to change  learning about Glasgow with her by visiting a homeless shelter and walking around with the night patrols. “Are [Reform] gonna be Tory point two?” she asks. “I think there’s enough people in there who are hellbent in making that not the case.”

Dempsey tells me she’s still angry that Sky News misrepresented her views on migration after she spoke to them last year. She is baffled that the journalist who interviewed her had doubted her belief that asylum and immigration were the biggest issues facing Glasgow. “I said to him, ‘have you never walked down Sauchiehall Street and spoke to people?’ You know, you talk to anybody, that’s the type of thing they say to you.”

The next day, I visit Sauchiehall Street myself. The route is Glasgow’s central shopping thoroughfare but, in recent years, it has declined precipitously. I go past vape shops, kebab houses, a half-demolished building, its facade ripped away. Delivery drivers on electric bikes weave past pedestrians at speed. Andrew Neil recently dubbed the area’s condition a “national scandal” but I struggle to see what makes it unique. It looks like every other high street in Britain.

Of the people I speak to, none say that immigration is the biggest issue facing Glasgow. Instead they list the rising cost of food, bills and gas, the closure of centers where the elderly might meet, the pathetic standard of the politicians who govern them. Catherine, a small woman in tortoiseshell glasses, thinks pedophiles could never be rehabilitated. She would like to be the prime minister, she adds sunnily, so that she could kill them herself.

That isn’t to say migration is a non-issue. Brian, sitting alone on a bench, says migration is not a problem at all, before complaining about people coming into the country and being housed immediately. He’s a socialist and voted Labour for decades before flipping to the SNP years ago. Labour had abandoned their principles. Is Glasgow broken? “Most cities are broken,” he says. “Most inner-city areas have their issues.”

Over the past century, Govan became synonymous with such decline. The neighborhood, on the south side of the Clyde, had once been a world-center of shipbuilding, in 1913 producing more vessels than all of Germany combined. But such heights just increased the impact of the eventual crash. After 1945, the residents who could moved out to newly built social housing. Tenements were torn down to leave gaping scars in the streetscape.

On a windy afternoon, I visit a soot-blackened church where a gaggle of children are trying to bodyslam grown men into the ground. This is the Glasgow School of Wrestling, founded by Ravie Davie, a former young team member turned performer. Violence, Davie tells me, appears to be rising again after a period of decline. “A lot more kids are getting murdered or stabbed,” he says. “A lot are being put in prison.” The numbers partly reflect this: though the total number of children accused of violent crime has actually decreased, the level of those guilty of attempted murder has seen a sharp jump.

The trend seems to have an ironic cause. Because of Glasgow’s success in tackling postcode violence over the past decade, children can now travel more freely around the city. And that means they are more able to meet up for fights — and are more valuable employees for organized crime. If Docherty fought for “respect” and due to boredom, teenagers are now sucked into a more nefarious, profit-driven criminal vortex.

Below a monumental pipe organ, I speak to Davie’s cousin, Zander. The pair put a postmodern twist on their area’s reputation for violence, wrestling in character as tracksuited hoodlums named the Govan Team. Now, Zander says, they want to help get local children out of their bedrooms and away from trouble by teaching them this art.

Above Govan’s skyline loom vast sheds. It is along the docks here that Paul Sweeney began working as a shipbuilder as a young man, seduced by the romance of the Clyde’s industrial past. After being tapped by Sarah Brown, Gordon’s wife, he became a Labour MP and now represents Springburn in the Scottish Parliament. I had wanted to talk to him because Glasgow has recently been experiencing something of a shipbuilding revival.

Near where we meet stands the newly erected Janet Harvey Hall — a vast, otherworldly metal structure — where two Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. BAE has invested £300 million in modernizing these facilities, where new capabilities to combat drones and hypersonic missiles are being built. With history restarting amid global conflict, the Clyde may yet find itself central to British security again.

As we talk, Sweeney and I walk through Fairfield Heritage, a museum in the offices of what was once Glasgow’s preeminent shipping firm, now in the shadow of BAE’s sheds. He is wearing a Fairfield Heritage t-shirt and colorful socks with little drawings of trains on them. I ask him about the glut of asylum seekers that some believe is tearing Glasgow apart.

The SNP government in Holyrood had created a powerful incentive for refugees to present themselves in Scottish cities like Glasgow because single men have just as much of a right to be housed as families, Sweeney says, but they had failed to build enough houses to keep up with the ensuing demand. “It feels politically disingenuous to build the ends but not the means. That’s kind of my critique of the SNP is that they’re always about good things, nice things for everyone, but never actually make the difficult trade-off decisions.”

Even so, Sweeney dismisses the idea that migrants are depriving Glaswegians of resources, something he says has been egged on by Reform. Most of the party’s voters he had met were angry, older men who had spent too much time watching GB News. “If anything, one thing Glasgow needs is more people. It’s a city that’s the most depopulated in the UK. If anything, Glasgow needs an orchestrated attempt to reinflate its population.”

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We’d now reached what appeared to be the former Fairfield boardroom. It was all crown molding, thick red carpets and long wooden models of transatlantic ocean liners: an abandoned palace of the Glaswegian bourgeoisie. These men, who had fused Adam Smith’s Enlightenment with engineering genius, transformed the city, turning it into the dockyard of empire, the most easterly American city, the petri dish of industrial modernity. That seemed a long time ago now.

Glasgow had gone through a period of recovery since about 1990, Sweeney says, but then hit a phase of “one step forward, two steps back”. Devolution allowed the SNP to centralize power in Edinburgh, dragging resources eastward. He hopes the city might be granted a directly elected metro mayor, like Liverpool and Manchester, and thinks he would be good at the job.

Though he expresses optimism about Labour’s chances on 7 May, Sweeney also says that Starmer had become a drag on Labour’s chances of taking power in Holyrood, which now look slim to nonexistent. Anas Sarwar calling for the prime minister to resign had been essential, though. “It’s a bit like amputating an arm, you know? You would rather keep it, but if it’s gonna kill you, you might as well lose it.”

Next week, the SNP are expected to win Scotland again. The only remaining question seems to be whether they can claim an outright majority of seats. Neither outcome is likely to save the Glasgow shipwreck.

The night I accompany them, Scots Active’s patrol ends early. It had been a quiet night. They had seen a figure preparing to throw themselves to their death in the river, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a pole. Lisa had approached a lone girl, but she was just waiting for a bus. Some of the men had opened a mysterious, gray door behind which they feared migrants were doing something nefarious, but it only revealed a confused man who told them it was a pool club. Everywhere, phantasmagoric horrors seemed to lie in wait. But none were quite as they seemed.