But what had Kruger actually said that was so offensive? That Zoomer women’s wombs were factories for future taxpayers? That a Reform government would go full-Hungary, scrapping income tax for mothers of three or more? That they’d ban abortion? 

Wrong! Kruger said: “I’m not interested in your love life… But I am interested in the framework in which you make your decisions, and I’d like the framework to be more pro-social.” There were no plans to touch no-fault divorces, no handmaidens, no mothers’ medals after all. The biggest thing these anti-woman fascists wanted to do seemed to be to introduce household taxation… are you getting all this, Atwood? Labour’s faux-outrage, an opportunity for a tidy bit of political point-scoring, seemed for naught.

For Kruger is perfectly correct in his suggestion that young women’s choices, especially around fertility, are influenced by society’s messaging around motherhood. Research that may surprise those readers sold on the idea of Gen Z as cat ladies-in-waiting reveals that about 92% of young women want children one day. Whether they’ll have them is a different matter entirely.

Why? The assumption, particularly among trad types online, is that old chestnut: women, the gatekeepers of fertility, are selfish and misled. We are said to desire only career advancement for its own sake, or meaningless casual sex, or to spend any disposable income on baby-replacements in the form of houseplants, toys and small dogs. A straw poll of Zoomer life goals over the next few years would admittedly bear this out: the women I know would tell you they want to travel, to meet someone, to get a dog or a better job. Wiping dribble off a baby’s chin hardly gets a look-in — but all but one of my friends ultimately desires motherhood. But will they have children? What is it about our current sexual culture — or the “sexual economy”, as Kruger called it — that might prevent them? 

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The Center for Social Justice, in a determined attempt to crack the case of tottering birth rates, recently identified 600,000 “missing mothers” — that is, women in the UK who want children one day but are probably going to miss out because of insecure housing, extortionate childcare costs and even environmental doomerism. But buried amid female economic woes was a purported solution: a call to arms for the other party in the business of babymaking. The father. 

For once, it was not just the cosmo-swigging career girls being scolded for not having babies; this time, actual researchers had spent more than 10 seconds thinking about the sexual marketplace and discovered that the Zoomer men expected to sire the next generation were not exactly up to snuff. (Of course, they might have realized this with a five-minute scroll through Hinge… but they got there in the end). Yes, the study found, our future baby daddies were both desperately unprepared and desperately unprepossessing as potential mates. This delayed maturation of today’s men means that their adolescence now extends well into their twenties. “The average age of leaving home for a young man sits at 25, three years older than for young women.” 

Of course, women often also find themselves in a state of suspended adolescence, reliant on parental funds and living in godforsaken houseshares with collections of cuddly toys — but the report found that male “readiness” for children was a critical factor for those women who were ready themselves. Its suggestions make perfect sense: “Start adulthood earlier — especially for men.” Reduce the school leaving age and the number of young people in higher education; get them, and especially the blokes — who are increasingly festering into a cohort of NEETs — into the workforce. Parental dependence is emasculating, off-putting and disastrous for self-esteem; politicians who are quick to point the finger at feminism for driving women to look for baby substitutes at cat shelters should only be taken seriously when they consider the problem of male listlessness. Much effort has been expended on the project of “changing women’s minds” about having babies — but when we already know we want them, it’s time to start considering what, or who, is getting in the way.

For Zoomettes, the banquet of potential partners cheffed up by the NEET pandemic is unappetizing indeed. Directionless dolts clog up dating apps, offering non-committal porn-infected sex interrupted by the periodic flushing of the loo by one of ten thousand housemates in his Flatbush flatshare. If you were us, would you have his child? My suspicion is that many more women would be more receptive to the delights of family life if the pick of husbands weren’t limply balding their way through their thirties until their bands “really take off”. The thought often occurs to me when I run into other women picking up their contraceptives from the pharmacy. Who’d do otherwise? After all, if you’re dating a man whose lifestyle is essentially unchanged since their teens, his suggestion that you have a baby is like a 10-year-old telling you they really really really want a puppy. Who’s gonna be doing all the work?

We are all to blame for tanking birth rates — and we will all suffer the consequences. But the tradition of giving women a kicking as the perpetrators is looking shabbier by the day. The reasoning that women are cold and selfish victors in a post-feminist world has never been borne out, not since Theodore Roosevelt was describing “the woman who deliberately avoids motherhood” as “in effect a criminal against the race”, nor even when JD Vance bemoaned that his country was run by a league of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”. 

It’s not that young women today don’t want children — ask them, as Vance probably never has, and you’ll realize they do. It’s that they would be foolish to center their lives around wanting them when the pool of potential partners is so desperately dank. Any government serious about helping those women who do want to become mothers must give up their “this-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like” act and stop being squeamish about pro-maternal policy. There is nothing anti-feminist about bringing about conditions in which women who want children end up having them; the radical solution is to stop yelling at we twentysomethings and lick the leagues of would-be fathers into shape first. Would Daniella Kruger want Mr Neet McNojob sulking around her house amid a rising pile of nappies? Me neither.

These always include Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V, in recognition of the foiled 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Fawkes and Paul V are joined every year by “Enemies of Bonfire”, usually topical figures from contemporary politics. Or, more precisely, from a roster of those perceived as villains by one particular “side” of contemporary politics.

Lewes is a prosperous, low-crime, not particularly diverse market town in the South-East, recently voted “one of the happiest” in Britain. It is commuting distance from both Brighton and London. Its residents skew older, and voted Liberal Democrat at the last election. So it’s perhaps to be expected that the “Enemies of Bonfire” often look like a Who’s Who of Guardian hate-figures: recent years have included Nigel Farage, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. But if there’s a distinctive political flavor to Lewes’ “Enemies of Bonfire”, perhaps this fits with what the festival always marked: a temporary victory for one side in a bitter culture war where — for a long time — compromise was simply impossible.

If we’ve since largely forgotten the details, this is for the happy reason that eventually the politics became (for the most part) less bitter. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so complacent. Many of the underlying drivers of 17th-century England’s political turbulence have echoes in the world around us today. Then, as now, the atmosphere was febrile. An information revolution was transforming the country’s economy, culture and ideology. Some were looking toward opportunities in the New World, while others argued over how close England’s bonds to the Continent ought to be.

Back then, all these disparate issues snowballed into two increasingly irreconcilable ideological poles — and, eventually, into the open conflict of the Civil War — before one side eventually emerged victorious. And today, as I consider the angry, fractious place my country has become, I can’t help wondering: how much longer will the attempted murder of an entire government go on feeling sufficiently remote, as a prospect, to make a safe, fun theme for an autumn party?

It might be tempting, at this juncture, to make a facile point about bombs and Islam. But while Islamist attacks pose a genuine threat today, comprising the lion’s share of contemporary counterterrorism work in the UK, it would be anachronistic to call the Gunpowder Plot terrorism in this sense. As Jean Baudrillard has argued, modern terrorism is as much a phenomenon of mass media as of violence: its impact lies not just in the violence, but also in its media reproduction as spectacle. Guy Fawkes had a much blunter and more straightforward aim, which was to assassinate James I and his entire government, before (as most believe) replacing James, a Protestant, with his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, so as to use her as a puppet to restore Catholic rule to England.

As for today, I don’t think anyone is literally plotting to blow up Britain’s government. But I do think it’s telling that a poll conducted last year revealed Reform voters are more sympathetic than any other group to Guy Fawkes. Among this group, 55% were favorable to Fawkes and only 22% unfavorable, while supporters of other parties were much more evenly divided. And if we take “blowing up Parliament” figuratively, rather than literally, this makes perfect sense.

It’s hardly original to note that British politics has been in a state of increasingly bitter deadlock for at least a decade, as trench warfare grinds on between those who believe nations should be sovereign and democratically self-governing, and those who believe in a post-political, post-national “rule of law”. And there’s a precedent: if Brexit brought this wrangling into the open in 2016, the polarization that impelled Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot in 1605 also began with a Brexit of sorts, when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.

At the time, the Reformation was spreading across Europe, and technological and economic changes were beginning to cascade. All was enabled, and intensified, by an information revolution: the printing press. But it wasn’t that Henry VIII was a religious radical. He never stopped viewing himself as Catholic, and these moves were more about political expediency than conviction. But others felt more strongly. Religious and political tensions soon became difficult to disentangle, especially when amplified by the politics of national interest.

By the time Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I died in 1603, bringing James I to the throne, printed maps had revolutionized international exploration, and the European scramble for empires was well under way. During Elizabeth’s reign, imperial rivalry between England and Catholic Spain was fierce. For many, Catholics looked perilously like foreign fifth columnists; meanwhile, among more ordinary English folk, spreading literacy meant intensifying religious sectarianism. Taken all together, set against new demands for political power from an expanding mercantile elite, these pressures contributed to an intensifying sense of crisis in the model of governance itself, that we could perhaps summarize with two questions: who rules, and on whose moral authority?

For Henry VIII, the answer to those questions had been “Me, and mine”. But by Guy Fawkes’ era, the answer was increasingly contested. Seen in this context, his plot seems less revolutionary than mournfully reactionary. He wanted to return, perhaps even retvrn, to a Catholic monarchy: in effect, to reset England to the religious and political order that preceded Henry VIII’s religious and constitutional upheavals.

We can perhaps understand Reform’s recent restorationist policy proposals as a similar (in this case, we must hope, only figuratively incendiary) attempt at reset. For if there is something familiar about the early 17th-century landscape of information revolution, competing elite factions, ideological polarization, and metapolitical wrangling, that’s because we’re there again. Just this time, the information revolution is digital. And if 55% of Reform supporters approve of Guy Fawkes, and perhaps dream of (metaphorically) blowing up Parliament, this expresses a now explosively pent-up public frustration resulting from the first modern attempt to respond to this new revolution: Tony Blair’s constitutional changes.

New Labour was nothing if not prescient. As early as 1998, Peter Mandelson was predicting the end of “pure representative democracy” in favor of new, perhaps digitally-mediated forms of political participation. So even if Blair’s constitutional fiddling is viewed today as a factor in our current political paralysis, perhaps the most charitable read of its intent is as a sincere if wrong-headed effort to “modernize” an order Blair accurately assessed as hopelessly ill-equipped for the information age. The problem, as it turned out, was that his solution made everything worse, replacing a sclerotic and unresponsive democracy with even more sclerotic and unresponsive managerialism.

In response, Farage promises we can retvrn. Back in August, for example, he announced a range of measures to tackle illegal immigration into Britain, so many of which are impossible under the Blairite regime that even attempting them presupposes retooling the engine of government. Accordingly, Reform recently followed up with a still more comprehensive program for doing so: Danny Kruger MP laid out plans for reforming Whitehall and restoring parliamentary sovereignty: in effect, a controlled demolition of the Blairite revolution.

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Will it work? If we take the Guy Fawkes analogy literally, the signs are not good. Those who celebrate tonight with bonfires and fireworks do so, after all, because Fawkes failed. On the evening of 4 November, based on an anonymous tip-off, officials searched the vaults under Parliament, and discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes and his co-conspirators were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

But that was far from an end to the era’s upheavals. In fact, it was more like the beginning. Over the reigns of James and then his son Charles, the question of who rules, and on whose authority, grew so conflicted that by 1642 the country dissolved into chaotic civil conflict. This was followed by a decade of military dictatorship, and finally the restoration of Charles II — but even then it wasn’t over. There were further plots and upheavals, including at one point an attempt by a faction in Parliament to legislate the Catholic heir apparent out of the line of succession.

All was only settled when the Jacobite line was deposed, in favor of William of Orange. As well as being a Protestant, William was also happy to enjoy a regency that was largely defanged and symbolic rather than absolute. And with this, the question “who rules, and on whose authority?” was resolved as, respectively, “the House of Commons” and “a constitutional monarch who is Supreme Governor of the Church”. England, and later the United Kingdom, and thereafter the British Empire, thrived under some version or other of this settlement from 1688 until the 20th century.

If things feel grim and chaotic today, it’s because that settlement is now exhausted and ineffective — surely, in part, as Mandelson anticipated, thanks to the digital revolution. New Labour tried to get ahead of this by “modernizing” us into a post-democratic managerial age governed by human rights, judicial reviews, and all the extra-democratic rest of it. In other words, to answer those two questions respectively as “technocrats” and “universal human rights”. And it worked well enough, for some, for a while. Its beneficiaries cluster, for example, in prosperous towns such as Lewes, where they can symbolically burn the enemies of managerialism undisturbed by dissenting perspectives.

But while I commend Reform’s impulse to end our managerial paralysis, it’s an open question whether Parliamentary sovereignty will be the hoped-for solution. Even among those who hate the Blairite order, who still believes the old one can save us? Who can look at Charles III, let alone his crapulent younger brother, and see a flourishing constitutional monarchy? As TikTok nibbles at our attention spans and capacity to read, and MPs are accused of getting ChatGPT to write their speeches, who can believe unquestioningly that restoring Parliamentary sovereignty will on its own deliver improved public trust, or indeed functioning governance?

If the 17th century is any guide, we’ll just have to keep grinding through the options until we find a resolution everyone can live with. I hope this time it doesn’t take a whole century, or produce (as some pessimistically predict) civil war. For what it’s worth, my hunch is that resetting the Blairite revolution will ultimately fail, just as the Catholic restorationists failed. But also that, when the dust finally settles, we will find, as we did previously, that a revolution has in fact occurred. I think it at least possible that the resulting order will more closely resemble the England that ended in 1688 than the “Modern Britain” bestowed upon us by Tony Blair.

The period between 1688 and the 1740s was roiled by culture wars and economic change as dramatic as our own. Long before today’s keyboard warriors stereotyped their enemies online — either as skinhead flag-shagging gammons or spittle-flecked blue-haired harpies — Grub Street partisans were doing much the same. Instead of mocking lager louts in England shirts, Whig propagandists attacked a target that was, in many ways, the 18th-century equivalent: the ruddy-cheeked fox-hunting squire who made up the backbone of the Tory Party.

Urbane Whig essayist Joseph Addison depicted the average Tory backwoodsman as being a savage boor with a passion chiefly for dogs, inebriation and xenophobia. He was depicted as a bluff, insular patriot hostile to travel (good only to teach a man how to “jabber French”) and foreigners, whom, he splutters, “will never be loved in England”. With Addison presenting the squire as a half-educated gout-ridden oaf, it’s not far off those online progressives sneering at the “Raise the Flag” movement today.

Such political caricatures, then as now, were rooted in the passionate hatreds inspired by both cultural divides and clashes of economic interests in a time of disorientating change.

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The Tories had, in the period following the Glorious Revolution, become classic provincial “populists”. Their base — the staunchly Anglican landed gentry and their rural dependents — not only despised the Whigs for being the defenders of their religious enemies, the more radical Protestant Dissenters outside the Church of England, but also for material reasons. The Whigs, partisans of the new Dutch King William III, supported their new master’s expensive wars with France, wars which gave rise to higher taxes, rising state debt, and a new web of corrupt state clients in the form of government contractors, “stock-jobbers” and army officers. The cost of all this fell disproportionately on the Tory squires while a new financial elite prospered.

As a result, in the 1690s there was a dramatic political realignment as the old party of state authority and monarchy — the Tories — became the “country” party, hostile to the depredations of the central state. All the while, the old libertarianism of the Whigs faded as they became the party of a new, courtly “progressive establishment”.

The parallel with now is obvious. Just as the triumph of post-revolutionary Whiggery created fresh culturally inflected classes of economic winners (financiers, speculators) and losers (the rural gentry and their tenants), globalization over the past 30 years has created urban-progressive economic beneficiaries and provincial small “c” conservative economic casualties. Back then, Tories and Whigs clashed on the status of the Church of England and religious toleration, whereas now we debate trans rights and Net Zero. But if these debates are separated by hundreds of years, both nonetheless pitted “rooted” cultural conservatism versus the radicalism of a new “Anywhere” class. Then as now, meanwhile, such bitter divisions also reflect the material resentment that economically “left-behind” groups — the Red Wall and angry farmers now, the gentry interest then — have for their urban, “sophisticated” rivals who benefit from both economic openness and state patronage.

Both periods saw a new division — put crudely, nation and tradition versus international economic entanglements and cosmopolitan openness — replace the old political binary. What matters now as then is a dichotomy between those championing national cohesion, rooted in the ways of the provinces, versus those championing new paths of global dynamism rooted in innovation and “progress”. It’s Tory versus Whig all the way down.

There is, however, one major contrast between the two eras. As the Whigs went from being libertarian opponents of state overreach to defenders of a new economic status quo, one dominated by financial interests, so Labour has gone from being the champions of the provincial working classes to the party of socially liberal cosmopolitan graduates. That political realignment has its limitations for Labour, given urban progressives are always in a minority. But the modern Conservative Party has an even bigger problem: they have not made the “populist” transition that their ancestors did. Married to a world of globalization and neoliberalism, thanks to their donor class and backbench Thatcherites, they missed their chance to exploit realignment under Boris Johnson.

This mantle has instead been grasped by Reform. Farage’s revolt against the Blairite state resembles the populist Tory rebellion against the post-Glorious Revolution Whig settlement. Starmer, for his part, looks like a Whig desperate to hold back the tide against the dangers of an insular reactionary neo-Tory backlash. These parallels, in their complexities, hold lessons for both Reform and Labour.

The strength of the appeal of the “country” Tories of the early 18th century was that they combined all the energies of a provincial populist insurgency with a deep sense of tradition. They wanted to dismantle what they saw as illegitimate and alien innovations that were distorting the traditional constitution and endangering liberty — the power of a new breed of financiers and a new class of parasitic state toadies that leeched off the bloated post-revolutionary state — without mostly abandoning the essentials of the post-1688 constitutional settlement. They were genuinely skeptical about the destabilizing implications of incipient financial capitalism, and prepared to countenance major “radical” reforms to ward off its ill effects, while still remaining the party of the church, constitution and squire. In other words, then, the Tories were both profoundly radical and profoundly conservative.

The contrast with Reform seems glaring. Firstly, there is every risk that Reform will be nobbled by the same donor class that rendered the Tories irrelevant, with the power of capital transforming Reform into another appendage of the uniparty. Secondly, elements within Reform appear to be ultra-liberals, albeit of a Right-leaning kind, who want to sweep away the Lords (or perhaps appoint their own cronies to it, Farage isn’t clear) and allow non-parliamentarians to sit in a US-style “cabinet”. They give the impression of skepticism towards a “woke” monarchy and of holding a desire to trash many of our institutions. Either or both of these tendencies may prove far from popular with precisely the marginalized provincial voters Reform is banking on, especially if they win power and the white-hot resentment of voters against the old two established parties fades with time.

This is why the defection of Danny Kruger seems surprising, but perhaps also hopeful. He is, after all, a Tory of the old school: a communitarian Christian and no “Right-Jacobin”. Given all this, he seems well-placed to help Reform negotiate these contradictions and channel the strengths of 18th-century Tory “country” radicalism. That there might also be more than an element of political calculation in the move as Kruger seeks to save his seat is probably true. Principle and pragmatism are, of course, not necessarily enemies, although he might find it a struggle to overcome the very different instincts of men like Richard Tice. We shall see how such a tension plays out.

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Meanwhile, Keir Starmer (or whoever succeeds him) will not avoid being swept away by a provincial populist backlash in the way that the original Whigs did: by the accession of George I, a king more than prepared to rig the political game in the Whigs’ favor. Nonetheless, Starmer might learn a lot from the man who helped secure Whig hegemony back in the early 18th century: Robert Walpole. Walpole wanted the Whig settlement to be truly secure, and he knew that the best way of doing that was to dampen down the deep economic and religious divisions that, when provoked, tended to work against the Whigs and in favor of the Tories.

So Walpole managed his new Whig economic and religious settlement very carefully. He gave the Tories much of what they wanted: he scrupulously avoided foreign wars and entanglements, kept taxes low and left the Church of England mostly alone. He reined in radical elements on his own side — defying his supporters from the ranks of Protestant Dissent who wished to curtail the privileges of the Church of England further — and compromised. In short, the economic and cultural wounds of the preceding generation were given time to heal. Political partisanship certainly didn’t disappear. But the temperature dropped, and Walpole remained in power for 20 relatively stable years.

The same principle could work today. There is no majority in the country for neo-Whig policies of open borders and neoliberal globalization. But Labour could — in theory — do what Walpole did and make his peace with the provincial patriots who otherwise look likely to power Reform to victory. He could give them what they want on immigration, just as Walpole gave the gentry what they wanted on peace. Starmer could also take real steps to assuage the economic pain of the hundreds of small cities and towns decimated by globalization, as Walpole reduced the land tax and bolstered domestic manufacturing. Starmer and Reeves could actually pull some of the economic levers available to the government: an industrial strategy with teeth and resources behind it, capitalizing regional investment banks, and a return to protective tariffs for key industries.

Alas, one fears that Reform will end up as a debased version of the current Tory Party and Labour will be unable to respond in any convincing way to the electoral tsunami that threatens to engulf them. The result could be a never-ending spiral of voter discontent and rising provincial fury. Let’s hope that Starmer and Kruger get mugging up on their 18th-century history, and soon.