While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

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Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

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More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

Alas, he did not fool anyone. Yuan’s bid to become Emperor was met with widespread revolt, and only hastened China’s descent into political chaos. The ancient rites could no longer be performed except as a modern charade; the giveaway was that Yuan had cameras present to record what none had previously been allowed to witness. There comes a point where the changes a nation undergoes are too large to be quietly folded back into a story of deep continuity.

Perhaps this tale can help us to parse the uncertainty which hangs over the ceremonial heart of British government, the Palace of Westminster. Last week, a joint commission of the Lords and Commons published costed proposals for “restoration and renewal” of the building. The plans are so expensive, extensive and disruptive that the task of refurbishing Britain’s Parliament, which has already loomed for years, looks set to drag on much longer still. So now is the time, before this magisterial building is dismembered in the name of modernization, to ask whether its own magic has not already turned to empty gesture.

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The Palace of Westminster embodies a constitution that was also fabled for its continuity, its traditional framework evolving by peacefully incorporating change. Parliamentary government emerged without discarding the monarchy, which aged into a symbol of national unity transcending politics. Through the House of Commons, democracy was progressively extended to encompass more of the population, even as the aristocracy retained its influence in the Lords. New classes of wealthy businessmen were brought into the establishment through the lower house, and then the upper one, a path later followed by the Labour Movement. For generations, a widespread Whiggish view held that this gradual process of change, perhaps reflecting the hand of divine Providence, protected Britain from the revolutions and dictatorships that rocked the European continent.

The current Parliament building entered this story halfway through, but tellingly, it was designed to invoke a much deeper past. The Commission which selected it during the 1830s had asked for proposals only in the Gothic and Elizabethan styles (although the contract had originally been awarded without competition, leading to a procurement scandal; some things really are continuous in British history). The winning submission, by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, combined classical stability in its structure with delirious masses of Neo-Gothic ornament, the latter signaling Pugin’s preference for an idealized medieval social order over what he regarded as a squalid modern world. It was a bold decision by a political class which was, in the same decade, undertaking the contentious process of expanding democracy through the Great Reform Act. In the ensuing decades and centuries, Barry and Pugin’s masterpiece provided a symbolic anchor against countless further storms. This is where the great rituals of democracy are performed, investing the country’s leaders with authority: the debates and votes, the spoken formulas, the waving of order papers and confrontations at the dispatch box.

But the new proposals to renovate Parliament are an omen, if one was needed, that this Westminster world cannot continue forever. It is a baffling report, symptomatic of deep problems with how the British state tries, and fails, to manage its projects. Parliament needs upgrades to its fire safety and services such as sewerage and heating systems, along with asbestos removal and conservation of the building’s fabric. Somehow this refurbishment has spiraled into a proposal of eye-watering cost and duration. One option, costing up to £11.5 billion, would see the works going on for 24 years, during which the Commons would leave the building for up to a decade, and the Lords for up to 15 years. Should the Commons prefer to remain in place, and Lords to decamp for a mere eight years, the works will take up to 60 years, at a cost of up to £20 billion in today’s money. Worst of all, the revamp will insert various new spaces into the building, including a visitor area and education center, in the most horrifically dull style imaginable.

Part of the problem, as so often with state procurement today, is that a practical task has been swamped with nice-to-have social schemes. The renewal program “will seek to create opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises”, with partners given “contractual obligations to achieve the widest practical geographic spread of the supply chain”. As Nicholas Boys Smith points out, the goal of reducing the building’s energy consumption by 40% comes at a price that could produce far greater environmental dividends if spent elsewhere, and step-free access is demanded for parts of the building where few people go even on foot. The Commission has gone for the second most expensive of six initial options, partly because it will allow still more tampering in the future. Even if this renovation avoids the budget overruns and delays we see in so many other projects, it will become a potent symbol of governmental dysfunction and waste, adding another layer of ridicule and scorn to the word “Westminster”.

Unless, that is, Parliament takes an option not mentioned in the report, and moves out of the Palace for good. This would surely be the best way to honor the historic beauty of the building itself, by saving it from further misguided renovations and allowing it to become a heritage site. More importantly, though, it would free Britain’s lawmakers from the weight of a civilization which has already, for the most part, passed into history, and whose rituals they struggle to perform with conviction or plausibility.

The Palace of Westminster was built in a society in the midst of an Industrial Revolution, moving towards mass democracy, at the heart of an expanding global empire and undergoing a boom in Evangelical Christian faith. It served the country through enormous convulsions, including two world wars, the loss of its empire and a transformation in social attitudes. But whatever authority was once bestowed by images of green benches, state openings and robed peers is now largely gone. As Parliament’s own website reports, between 2014-24, “the proportion of people with low to no trust in MPs rose from 54% to 76%”. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, just one-in-five respondents think that Britain’s system of government — the one embodied by Parliament — needs little or no improvement, whereas half did in 1999.

At what point does change become too great to bury behind the façade of continuity? This question is impossible to answer with certainty, but it feels as though the line was crossed at some point in the past few decades. There is nothing wrong with anachronistic customs; they are, in fact, important for nourishing the emotional dimension of politics. The problem arises when the figures performing those customs evidently no longer belong to the world they invoke, creating an impression of self-importance which makes those concerned appear like pigmies parading in boots several sizes too big.

Consider, then, that Britain’s constitution is increasingly remote from the one which the Palace of Westminster once represented. The upper house, whose grandeur Pugin sought to recognize with ornament far more lavish than that of the Commons, has only a dwindling rump of hereditary peers left, which the current Labour government has tried to remove. The Lords is now a constitutional appendage, hosting a combination of diligent legislators and political cronies, its ranks swollen by wave after wave of appointments and its future an elaborately dressed question mark. Meanwhile, some MPs are apparently unaware that the separation of powers, an American concept, doesn’t apply in Britain, which may be the result of confusing innovations like a US-style Supreme Court. The fundamental principle of Britain’s constitution, parliamentary sovereignty, has been undermined by Blairite reforms, dispersing authority to devolved governments, international courts and a vast web of unelected bodies.

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No less striking are the changes in the nation that Parliament is meant to govern. Most obviously, London’s transformation into a city of immigrants means that fewer than half of its residents come from families that lived in Britain at the time of the Second World War, a single lifetime ago. Taking the British population in general, around a quarter have no familial presence in the country before 1945. British people no longer attend the churches, read the newspapers, work in the industries or hold the class loyalties that they used to, nor do they have the same understanding of themselves as a nation. These shifts are undermining the political foundations on which Parliament was built. The adversarial system of governing party versus opposition which always underpinned the House of Commons is falling apart, as Britain becomes effectively a multi-party system trapped in a two-party constitution. Last year, for the first time, a majority of Brits surveyed claimed to prefer coalition over single-party government.

It seems that no one currently benefits from British politics playing out against the traditional backdrop of Westminster. For voters of a conservative bent, that hallowed setting can only be a reminder of the history the country has abandoned; for those of a progressive or radical one, the survival of such a hidebound institution implies that history has not been abandoned enough. Politicians shout endlessly about “change”, about the broken system that needs fixing and the establishment that needs to be overturned. As long as they do so from what is itself the unchanging home of a broken establishment, they will struggle to be heard.

Providing a connection to the past, even an imagined one, is a valuable function for a public edifice. Indeed, historicist monuments like the Palace of Westminster, which inspired parliaments in a number of other countries, represent one of the great innovations of modernity, helping to steady a society in the face of disorienting change. But there are other roles which such buildings can perform. Britain does not have a great record of constitutional reform in recent decades, yet its leaders cannot just look on as the country’s governance becomes increasingly unfit for purpose and the public’s anger increasingly implacable. Commissioning a new Parliament building could be an opportunity to properly think through the roles of the two chambers, and possibly a spur to a wider reorganization, or in some cases restoration, of the British system. It seems sacrilegious to move government away from Westminster, where it has existed for the best part of 1,000 years, but the alternative is a forlorn hope that the authority of the old rituals will return.

It would also be helpful to have a tangible representation of the British state as it exists today, rather than in its 19th-century pomp, for us all to see and judge accordingly. At present, Britain’s lawmakers are hiding in the remnants of a vanished country, cloaked in a borrowed dignity which is wearing thin. Is it not time to see, in the cold light of day, how the living center of the constitution would choose to present itself? To judge by the recent renovation proposals, not to mention Scotland’s modern parliament building at Holyrood, the successor to the Palace of Westminster could be very uninspiring. But why the state manifests itself in such ugliness is not a question we can shy away from forever, and need not be the end of the conversation. Seeing its parliamentarians encased in soulless fiberglass, like glorified office workers, might be just the reality check the country needs.

From Downton to Bridgerton to Saltburn, aristos continue to hog our screens, big and small. But as a class they have been in visible decline. The Whigs — those original wokes — delivered the early blows, repealing the Corn Laws and widening the franchise. Then came the fin-de-siècle pounding: Harcourt’s death duties of 1894, which were the first serious taxes on the rich; by 1946, they had reached a respectable 75%

The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed à la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks.

By the Seventies, their kind were truly on the back foot. The V&A’s doleful 1974 exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House”, invited the public to mourn the plight of the poor aristos. It opened in December, just two months after miners had kicked out Edward Heath, the only instance in postwar European history where working-class muscle toppled a ruling party.

To be sure, there were holdouts. American nouveaux riches came galloping to the rescue of cash-strapped British anciens pauvres through canny marriages. The aristocracy itself was padded out with parvenus: the infamous “beerage” of nouveau peers who had merely brewed enough pints or befriended the PM to warrant their elevation.

Some piles these days host festivals. Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, for instance, was until recently the unlikely home of the psychedelic trance festival Noisily. Then we have the aristocratic rhotacists who stwuggle with their Rs flogging themselves on YouTube, the likes of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who scrape a living from posting lifestyle videos for the gawping pleasure of the lower orders.

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The contemporary trend is less marriage than outright sale. Highland acres have been snapped up wholesale by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish fashion billionaire who is now Scotland’s largest landowner. Meanwhile a great many native landlords, far from being wellie-wearing custodians of tradition, have abandoned their home. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, sniggered at English girls as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne” before decamping to France for a dissipated life. Many of his peers now live off private wealth management funds on the Riviera.

But for most aristos, the decline has been grim. Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, a modern history of the aristocracy, is a surprisingly candid and stylish peek into that well-heeled world; surprising because her acknowledgements brim with such reassuringly posh names as Lady Celestria Hales, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Thomas van Straubenzee, not to mention her throwaway reassurance that she has one foot firmly anchored in the clubs of St James’s. Still, she lapses into a certain breathlessness at times, succumbing to titular gewgaws: “Though we are friends on Facebook, I cannot help but always call him Lord Derby.” But then, this is the sort of book where Stuart Hall denotes not the founder of the New Left Review but a country pile of that name in County Tyrone.

Doughty parades before us the symptoms of decline: braces of yachts sold, Van Dyck rooms denuded of Van Dycks, visiting grandees of yore replaced by wide-eyed day-trippers with lanyards. One architectural historian noted a Lazarus-like lady of the house who, unable to afford maids, “exuded a sour smell of unwashed clothes” — a mephitic reversal of the old order, where aristocrats wrinkled their noses at the poor.

Worse than the stench, it seems, is their boorishness. Freed from pecuniary cares, one might have expected these families to take up learning or cultivate a little sprezzatura. Instead, they plodded into finance, ignorant of their own collections. Henry Somerset, showing guests his Canalettos, could only remark they were “very like the house”. The decimation of foxes was the only pursuit that quickened his pulse.

The decline in servants worsened things. The half century on either side of the First World War coincided with rising wages. Thousands of footmen and scullery maids took city jobs, leaving aristocrats to fend for themselves. Suddenly Job was less the Old Testament character than a métier one might be forced into. The Earl of Arundel became an insurance salesman after a stint as a Formula 3 driver, Baron Milne a chair-caner, Baron Kenilworth a horticulturist, and the son of the second Viscount Monckton — what else? — a monk. Baron Teviot found a job behind the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s before becoming a bus driver. Baron Feversham, for his sins, made porn flicks.

Contact with commoners no doubt proved salutary for these men. For, by and large, the non-working aristocracy has remained insulated from shifts in social attitudes. Indeed, they have effectively sat out the 20th century as if in a time-warp, clinging to arch-conservatism even as the lower orders have embraced progressive ideas. It is no accident, then, that the Lords has always lagged a generation behind the Commons. Women peers only arrived in 1958, amid spluttering opposition from the 28-year-old Earl Ferrers, who moaned: “Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to ‘the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor?’ I find that a horrifying thought.”

On divorce, too, they trailed behind popular sentiment, sneering long after the rest of the country had stopped caring. There were, it is true, emancipated outliers. Mollie Buccleuch, known as “Midnight Moll”, maintained a sprightly reputation for seduction well into senescence. The 7th Marquess of Bath lived as a polyamorist with 74 “wifelets” while remaining married. But such figures were the exception, not the rule.

Throughout the 20th century, many made a show of ordinariness — roast beef on Sundays, cottage pie on Mondays — in stabs of working-class cosplay that conveniently ignored their own preference for endogamy. Eton in the Seventies could still field classes with two earls and a viscount; another student recalled classmates named Guinness, Charrington, Whitbread, and Worthington: “it made me drunk just to look at them.”

To be fair, there were aristos like Tony Benn, who disclaimed his title, and the red toff Wogan Philipps, the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to sit in the Lords. But such class traitors were rare. The majority clung to their exclusivity. At their most accommodating, the Bolshie levellers among them go no further than insisting their tenants address them by their Christian names.

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Aristocratic decline has been good for us proles. Many of its ranks happily disposed of their white elephants to the National Trust, which has done noble work rescuing crumbling porticos and pergolas — though its deferential tone still grates on the average republican who visits such establishments for reasons of architectural interest rather than to admire aristocratic twee. Much of the art was absorbed by our national collections, with Kenneth Clark, the soi-disant socialist director of the National Gallery, astutely scooping up treasures for the people. Back in 1873, a land survey revealed that 710 people owned 80% of this isle. This vampiric monopoly, the statesman John Bright complained in 1871, had “divorced the English from the soil”. It is no bad thing that the monopoly was smashed, clearing space for hoi polloi. Home ownership increased from 10 to 70% in the 20th century.

And yet, for all the decline, the aristocracy persists. Doughty reminds us there are still 796 families with hereditary titles. They hold some 3.2 million acres — three-quarters the size of Wales — and remain, as the great political theorist Tom Nairn insisted, not so much a quaint relic as an active abetter of our “national backwardness”, impeding our progress toward a truly classless society. Even Ken Livingstone, that tribune of municipal socialism, Nairn lamented, was prone to going moist-eyed before the queen in his lime-green hat sporting wobbling baubles — making him resemble “some form of royal bird-scarer”, as The Times conjectured.

Pace Bagehot, Nairn argued, Britain is not a “disguised republic” with its real rulers the modernizing commoners and the ancient nobodies merely for show. Republics are built upon equality among the orders. This has never been the case in Britain. As Nairn puts it: “No amount of fulmination about the immorality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: the aristocracy is an expression of mass conservatism… People enjoy the monarchical twaddle, and show very little sign of being robotized or brainwashed.” The upshot is continued deference to nobs. The sort of people who fly into a rage when a lumpenproletarian type jumps a Tube turnstile will in the same breath wax rhapsodic about Elizabeth Windsor: yes ma’am; thank you for your service; three bags full, ma’am.

This rings true. The British working classes have never despised the aristocrats as their continental counterparts did. Here, as in sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent, deference to bigwigs remains the default mode. Britain’s peculiar solidarity is inverted: high and low are united in despising the middle — with its associations of thrift and moderation, education and culture, museums and literature, its self-preening moral seriousness and pseudo-high-mindedness, dedication to an assortment of causes, disdain for such vices as whoring and heroin. As the working-class comedian Billy Connolly put it: “The serious upper class, the proper bigshots, they’re all nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts as well and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.”

It’s fun to épater la bourgeoisie, no doubt, but the worldview has consequences. Britain today suffers the highest homelessness rates in the Western world, the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and a public realm in visible decrepitude — drafty homes, leaky plumbing, collapsing trains, a health service on life support. We tolerate this partly because our culture still whispers that some are born to better things. The cult of the aristocracy, and its royal apex, supplies the nation with a pensée unique: a defense of hierarchy, inequality, and indeed decline.

With our love of twee, pomp, and ceremony, we are an anachronistic society, much like the fictional Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As Nairn puts it, we live in Ukania — a broken, fractured society held together only by the weak glue of monarchic attachment. Britain’s regions and nations are bound with a royal tint of Ruritanian nostalgia, its protocols and etiquette: misty-eyed guff about past glory, Second World War memorabilia, and endless “yes, ma’ams”. Nations are usually built on a sense of comradeship. Not so in Britain, where a surrogate nationalism has formed around the enchantments of the aristocracy and the Crown — around the “glamour of backwardness”. The Windsor-worshipping queues during Truss’s brief tenure made this plain. It is hard to escape the conclusion that our fascination with the aristocracy has reduced us to a nation of groveling gimps.

Liverpool’s problems in the later 20th century derived from its hugely profitable bet on oceanic trade. When the city opened its first wet dock, in 1715, it was a modestly sized town, but it soon benefited greatly from the trade in enslaved people between West Africa and Britain’s Caribbean plantations. After the 1807 abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, Liverpool’s merchants developed a booming trade in goods and emigrants with the United States. In the late 19th century, they unveiled a statue in Sefton Park to Christopher Columbus, the “discoverer of America and the founder of Liverpool’s fortunes”. Former slavers built up a lucrative trade in West African palm oil. Liverpool’s people were not just enterprising: to the disgust of early Labour activists, they were also Tories who believed fervently in the monarchical empire within which they thrived. By 1900, almost three quarter of a million people lived in the shadow of the Royal Liver Buildings, the grandiose monument to Liverpool’s shipping fortunes whose Edwardian Baroque cupolas and heraldic birds still define it today. 

Eventually, though, Liverpool went the way of Nineveh and Tyre. The Great Depression wrecked global shipping and threw many dockers out of work. After the Second World War, meanwhile, the inexorable decline of empire whittled away trading ties with British colonies. Liverpool’s commercial downfall was sealed by the rebalancing of Britain’s trade from the Atlantic to Western Europe, which its 1973 entry into the European Community rendered official. The last passenger liner from Liverpool to Montreal had sailed two years earlier. Southern and eastern ports, notably Felixstowe, now thrived at Liverpool’s expense. The last blow was technological: containerization dramatically boosted the efficiency of shipping but decimated the workforce of ports around the world. While Liverpool’s new container terminal at Seaforth kept busy, its docks rotted. The result was what the historian Sam Wetherell has called “obsolescence” and on a huge scale. Liverpool became the Mersey’s Detroit. Among the shuttered infrastructure was the Stanley Dock, which is still the biggest brick building in the world.

The inevitability of these shocks became local wisdom. During the early Nineties, my fervently Tory grandfather would drive up the empty Dock Road, pointing out the route of the demolished Overhead Railway and telling me that “Liverpool was in the wrong place”. But could not local or national government have done more to compensate for this shift, which was as much geopolitical as economic? In 1981, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe’s memorandum on the city argued that attempting to revive Liverpool’s economy was like “trying to make water flow uphill”. Howe’s words are sometimes taken as an expression of monetarist contempt for the northwest. Yet as Wetherell shows in his fine recent book on the subject, they were apt commentary on decades of efforts by local and national government alike — which together had been futile if not counterproductive. 

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The interwar downturn of the docks had prompted the council to build up industrial enterprises on the city’s outskirts. They combined this with slum clearance, moving thousands of people from over-crowded terraces to brand new housing. The purchase of the quaint Speke estate, which had once belonged to a slave trader, was a mark of its forward thinking: fields gave way to semis, factories and an art deco airport. After the Second World War, Attlee’s government concentrated on bringing the casual labor of dockers under the control of a National Board — a noble but futile undertaking, given the contraction of the port’s trade. Yet the council pressed on with creating new estates and towns in Kirkby and Huyton. These salubrious but dull suburbs depended on single employers, many of which had been pressured into locating factories there to start with. Former dockers brought into their factories the go-slow practices customary at the quayside, which hardly improved their competitiveness.

As late as the Sixties, planners still hoped that Liverpool might defy economic gravity. New car-making plants thrived. Graeme Shankland, the director of planning, sought to make the city into a regional center for consumption and entertainment: St John’s Precinct, the lumpen complex that is still the first thing you see on exiting Lime Street Station, is his monument. Among other things, Shankland tried to accommodate the mounting number of private cars. In 1974, the Queen opened the city’s flagship (and overbudget) project: a new road tunnel under the Mersey. The Cavern Club that gave the Beatles their start was casually wrecked for a tunnel vent. The building tourists flock to now is just a replica. 

Far from reviving Liverpool’s economy, though, Shankland’s plans were stymied, as the city continued to shed jobs and people. The factories opened under the Wilson government did not even make up for work lost elsewhere. The next bout of intervention — following the Toxteth riots of 1981 — didn’t achieve much either. Michael Heseltine certainly became famous for his distinctive brand of Scouse boosterism. In practice, however, Westminster’s solutions ranged from managerialism (a Merseyside Development Corporation to prep the docklands for outside investors) to magical thinking (the rushed organization of the 1984 Garden Festival on the polluted remains of the Herculaneum Dock).

It is easy to write off Heseltine as a posh Tarzan whose wild swings did the city little permanent good. Though millions attended his Garden Festival, it left few tangible traces. I enjoyed its model of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a child, but makers Cammell Laird found it a poor substitute for dwindling orders of ocean liners. Yet the experience of other deindustrializing cities shows that such initiatives can be successful. Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada where I now live, was a faltering port city when in 1986 it hosted an international exhibition. That kickstarted a boom and brought in Asian investors to tidy up its derelict industrial zone and fund parks and housing.

The local Left got no closer to solving Liverpool’s problems than the self-appointed “minister for Merseyside” — though, again, not necessarily in the way received wisdom tells it. Though Derek Hatton’s Militant faction has since become a byword for radical excess, it actually criticized the voguish preoccupation of the metropolitan “Looney Left” with race and gender. As for Hatton himself, he was an unlikely devotee of Thatcher’s housing guru Alice Coleman, who argued that the best way to eradicate crime and build community was to tear down tower blocks and move people to small houses of their own with fenced gardens.

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This anti-urban sensibility spawned the cul-de-sacs of Barratt homes that cluster around the disused canals and docks of inner Liverpool, giving them a strangely suburban feel. Indeed, the straight edge ethos of Militant members made them uncomprehending of the new social problems that were the fruit of obsolescence. The hostility of the Liverpool underworld to illegal drugs, which they saw as an ethnic vice, had at first kept them out of the city. Yet when addiction to heroin took hold here, as in many other depressed towns and cities, Militant opposed the pioneering work of clean needle exchanges, which sought to prevent the spread of HIV. The city’s AIDS activists faced the same kind of disdainful obstruction.

Outsiders have often invoked the popular culture of Liverpool to explain what went wrong with the city. But it would perhaps be truer to say that it was a response to than a cause of economic downturn. The journalist David Swift points out in his spiky recent history of the city that deprivation prompted people to carve out a strong and idiosyncratic identity against a supposedly uncaring country. The Scouse accent thickened and its sweary vocabulary became increasingly creative and impenetrable. Football became a religion. Scousers imagined that they were not really English, playing up their Celtic roots even though Irish immigration to Liverpool had peaked in the later 19th century and had anyway been no higher than in London or Birmingham. 

This defensive turn allowed media outsiders to parade their hostile knowledge of Liverpool as a city in thrall to its bad impulses. This was especially true of initial commentary following the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. Wrongly blaming fans for the catastrophe — in fact down to stadium flaws and mistakes by the emergency services — journalists accused them of behaving “like animals”. Even those who rightly refused to blame the disaster on supporters could not resist policing the city’s emotional response. “It would be Liverpool,” sighed Alan Bennett, “that sentimental, self-dramatising place.”

There clearly is, or was, such a thing as anti-Scouse prejudice, but much of it is out of date. Despite the jokes that I grew up with (“What do you call a Scouser in a house?”; “A burglar”), the city now has lower crime rates than its peers. That’s shadowed by the partial recovery of Liverpool’s economic vim — with year-on-year growth of 15%, it’s one of the most dynamic cities in Britain. In the end, this revival owes little to the well-meaning interventions from Whitehall, and much more to a pursuit of the commercial impulses with which the city’s rise began. 

The Liverpool One shopping center, which has remade and reinvigorated 42 acres of the town’s center, has had many local detractors. As Wetherell points out, one objection is that it is not a truly public space: the capital to build its bland chain stores came from the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estates. For their part, efforts to drive international tourism have a stereotyped and nostalgic focus aptly symbolized by the execrable statue of the Fab Four on the Pier Head and the transfer of the Yellow Submarine to John Lennon airport (motto: “Only the Sky Above Us”). The museums and aspirational eateries crammed into the city’s renovated Albert Dock do nothing to lift the everyday lives of the many people who still live tough lives in the city’s many deprived suburbs. 

But to say that Liverpool’s revival is a little crass is not to say that it’s failed. Shopping and eating certainly make for a tawdrier civic religion than the strenuous moralism of the Victorian bourgeoisie, which covered the city with churches and museums. Many of the monuments to that creed are moldering away unlamented. On a recent visit, I passed the thunderously Gothic premises of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Saplings were sprouting from its roof turrets, while its ground floor was occupied by a Detroit-style pizza bar called Holy Garage. What would William Ewart Gladstone, who was born on Rodney Street, have said? But at least consumerism is ecumenical: in the city center lately, I saw Scouse glamazons happily mingling with head-scarved shoppers in the sort of quiet coexistence that we are often told is less and less viable in Britain. 

In welcoming Liverpool’s slow return to prosperity, we need not believe all of its publicity. Its past has not made it uniquely progressive, a “Scouse republic” at proud remove from a parochial and deferential England. The city’s cosmopolitan branding has not insulated it from the uptick in angry unease at immigration. There was an ugly riot at the Pier Head after Axel Rudakubana killed children at a daycare in nearby Southport. The far-flung nature of Liverpool’s trade never made its people especially ethnically diverse either. In the decades after the First World War, authorities thinned out Chinatown with covert deportations, corralling West African sailors into a decaying quarter and labeling their children with local women “half castes”. Its football fans were vicious racists, with Everton supporters pelting John Barnes with bananas. 

As for the future, the bright lights of Pier Head belie an uncertain future, not least when it comes to politics. In recent years, after all, there were as many Liverpudlians in Tory Cabinets as Old Etonians: Nadine Dorries may now be more representative of the city than Derek Hatton. Liverpool still has the three safest Labour seats in the country, but all three voted for Brexit. In the 2024 General Election, Reform polled second in most of its seats. But this is just another way of saying that Liverpool has now become surprisingly normal: facing tensions and problems that are never insurmountable, however forbidding they might seem. 

Spengler argued that the dominant civilization in the West was on the inexorable downward part of its cycle, and heading for dissolution. I doubt he would have thanked me for punning so egregiously on his magnum opus — and yet, this week, I found myself remembering that work in the context of the contemporary decline, of a different West: Kanye.

West, whose recent torrent of barely-coherent livestream and interview rants attests to an increasingly erratic public persona and possible mental health issues, prompted shock and disgust when he released a new song titled “Heil Hitler”. Launched to coincide with VE Day, it was promptly denounced across the political spectrum as “classic 1930s style antisemitism”, “fascist art”, and “a crude, adolescent chant of racial slurs and fascist glorification masquerading as music”.

So what would Spengler make of this musical work? Would he be Heil Hitlering with Kanye? Some historians draw a line from Romanticism, through Spengler, to the Nazis, notably via the idea that ethnocultural groups share the kind of mystical national consciousness George Mosse called “Völkish moods”. And it’s true that Spengler has since reappeared at intervals, as a touchstone for the Right.

But despite his Romantic literary roots, Spengler himself thought Hitler was “an idiot”, and called the Nazis an “organization of the unemployed by the workshy”. So I doubt he would have seen much of moral or political worth in a hip-hop tune with the chorus line “Nigga, heil Hitler”. And yet his analysis is useful when considering Kanye — offering both short-term reassurance as to what it represents, and also, as you might expect, a longer-term prognosis that is far from happy.

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Spengler died in 1936, but much of his contemporary success and subsequent influence rested on predicting the decline into “Caesarism” that, he thought, would accompany this end-stage “Winter” phase he believed Western civilization to have entered. When the publication of Decline was followed, in short order, by the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, Spengler was hailed as a prophet — only to fall out of fashion again as the 20th century wore on and the forces of liberal democracy re-asserted themselves.

Interest in his work tends to revive in periods of turmoil and economic downturn, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the end of the End of History has been accompanied by something of a Spengler revival. But if there’s a sense in which Spengler helps us understand Kanye’s musical development, it’s less in diagnosing his latest single as ominous harbinger of incipient fascism in America. He did predict that “Caesarism” would come in waves, and would doubtless have expected the authoritarians of the early twentieth century to be only the first of these. But even so, Spengler helps us here mainly by revealing that “Heil Hitler” doesn’t have much directly to do with authoritarianism at all. Rather, it sets Kanye’s work in the context of two cultural currents, in both of which Spengler is implicated: first, a Romantic tradition of anti-modernist, usually masculine-coded rebellion; and second the endemic path towards general brutalization that Spengler saw as inherent in end-stage civilization: a brutalization he thought would, in time, give way to a “new primitivism”.

Modernity, in his view, was not the perfection of Western civilization, but the beginning of its “Winter” and herald of its inexorable collapse. The Romantic tradition from which he wrote has been with us more or less since the beginning of this era, in reaction to its character. It’s less a coherent programme than a sensibility: a revolt against everything cold, clean, procedural, and rationalistic that comes with the secular, technological, disenchanting modern worldview.

At its core, though, Romanticism always seeks what is deeper, higher, and more soulful, emphasizing the role of feeling. Goethe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early instance of such intense emotionality; on publication the book triggered copycat suicides. Half a century later, the same reckless and sometimes self-destructive intensity made Romantic poet Lord Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and — another century on — prompted Julius Evola, a Romantic contemporary of Spengler’s and father of the modern esoteric far Right, to call for “revolt against the modern world”.

Today this kind of revolt has, itself, become commodified by the modern world against which it rebelled — and nowhere is this more apparent than in the music industry. Most forms of transgression are mere grist to its mill of transgression-as-product: audiences seem only mildly titillated by (for example) Satanic metal bands or drill artists who boast in music of murders, drug deals and other criminal activities.

In this jaded environment, it’s remarkable in a narrow sense that West has managed to find a way to be genuinely shocking. Jewish groups and allies are rightly furious and distressed. And yet the song itself is more driven by inchoate fury than Nazism as such. West says so in the song: “I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out”. This is, he says, the fault of a vague “they”, who have taken his kids off him and closed his bank account: “With all of the money and fame I still don’t get to see my children”.

So now he wants people to understand his depth of emotion: “Niggas see my Twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling.” And the only way to express his fury is through the only remaining taboo with real shock power. “I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain.” In context, then, “Heil Hitler” is less coherent ideology than ultimate swear-word: the adult equivalent of a pre-schooler saying “pee pee poo poo”, to get a reaction from his mum.

In other words, the song is pure, distilled essence of male rebellion, in direct continuity with a centuries-old Romantic tradition but today most palpably felt in the noisome underbelly of the internet. Here, especially since GamerGate, a “dissident Right” subculture (aided by a side order of Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler among others) helped propel Donald Trump into power. “Heil Hitler” is this subculture in musical form, voicing a masculinist backlash whose ripples spread well beyond West’s individual circumstances.

And there’s also a second sense in which the song invites a Spenglerian reading. Writing a century ago, Spengler forecast a future of drab, universal uniformity, in which national differences are largely abolished and life concentrated into “megalopolis” world-cities. In this brutalizing environment, competing peoples would spend their days in repetitive tasks, assuaged by vulgar diversions — until a new primitivism emerged that would eventually drive the collapse of this dying civilization. In Spengler’s vivid formulation: “Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.”

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Spengler envisaged an end-point where, “The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will”. It’s reasonable to surmise that those cheering on the Trumpian backlash from the depths of the “dissident” internet would understand themselves as aligned with the re-assertion of a martial over a managerial spirit. But what if the internet Nazism as an expression of rage does not, in fact, signal the return of martial spirit? What if it’s just another spasm of brutalization and dissolution, en route to the bottom of the cycle?

If this were so, it would be reasonable to expect any political victory applauded by a dissident caucus not to be followed by much in the way of substantial policy change. And indeed, since Trump’s victory, the so-called “dissident Right” has grown increasingly marginal within the emerging government coalition. The anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo explained why, distinguishing between those effective as critics and gadflies, and those with the temperament for building and cooperation in an institutional environment. “In my opinion”, Rufo said, “we are lacking some of this capacity.” When he made this point on X, one of the first responses promptly illustrated it for him, replying: “I’m kind of like fuck your institutional environment”. It’s a sentiment very much in keeping with “Nigga, heil Hitler”: one of pure opposition.

The clear inference is that what we’re looking at is not some notional revival of institutional Right-wing martial spirit, fascist or otherwise. On the contrary, it’s another iteration of Young Wertheresque emotionality, largely devoid of any clear object or organizational capacity. Kanye West has ironically reversed Hitler’s cultural achievement: not appropriating Romantic tropes for Nazism, so much as appropriating Nazi ones for Romanticism.

The result isn’t a philosophical ideology. It’s undirected rage. The good news, then, is that “Nigga, heil Hitler” probably isn’t an omen of approaching military authoritarianism. The bad news is that the longer-term prognosis this suggests is not much better: just one lurch after another, down the path of moral ugliness and brutalization that Spengler saw as characteristic of civilizational “Winter”.

Spengler might also point out that none of this is to rule out another spate of Caesarism. It’s just to say those singing along to Kanye’s tune are unlikely to be the first to enlist in his army. Put simply: they’re too ornery. “I felt crushed by the system, so I became an online Nazi” has been one of the internet’s drumbeats at least since GamerGate. It took the decline of Ye West to set it to music.

The grooming gang story is often framed as something that happened far away, in the North, in the bad old Nineties and 2000s. But this is a story about what is happening right now.

Ellie’s abuse began in 1996 and carried on for another four years. And as we know now, this wasn’t an isolated incident. The systematic abuse of literally thousands of children was taking place in Rotherham, Bradford, Derbyshire, Huddersfield, Oxford, Rochdale, and Bristol, among others. We only know about this because of brave victims, dogged whistleblowers and the resulting prosecutions. But while many resilient women have come forward, so many others remained silent — ashamed, disbelieved, ignored.

In January, Elon Musk targeted our country’s failings when he posted on X that: “[Keir] Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years (2008-2013)”, demanding that he “face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. It was in response to Jess Phillips’ remarkable decision, as minister for the safeguarding of women, to reject a national public inquiry into the grooming of children in Oldham.

Whatever his motivation, Musk was right in his analysis. This is a scandal that has been swept under the carpet for years. I’ve been following grooming cases for almost my whole career. Over the decades, a succession of inquiries and reports has indicated the nature and scale of the catastrophe, yet nothing has been done to address the underlying problem, let alone fix it.

In 2014, we had the Jay Report and Operation Bullfinch. There have been independent reviews into the failings of Greater Manchester, Bristol and Derby, among other cities. And it has been three years since the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which concluded that the current system is fundamentally flawed and incapable of protecting vulnerable children.

Yet despite the money, effort and desperate testimonials poured into each of these investigations, little has changed. The Conservative government was tasked with implementing the 20 recommendations of the final IICSA report. It did nothing, save passing the burden of responsibility on to Labour after last July’s election.

At the start of this year, it looked like something might be done. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a £10 million plan for a series of local inquiries into grooming gangs, as well as a rapid review of the current scale of exploitation across the UK. To lead the review, Cooper appointed Tom Crowther KC, who chaired the inquiry into child sex abuse in Telford. Published in 2022, Crowther found that more than 1,000 girls had been abused in the Shropshire town over a period of 30 years, amid “shocking” failures by the police and local council. Hopes rose that, finally, the Government was taking the problem seriously.

And yet, barely three months in, the wheels are already coming off. Crowther has expressed frustration with the little progress that has been made: the Government isn’t collaborating, the process is being watered down, and the political will simply isn’t there. That matters, and not just historically. Without asking why justice has come so slowly, and without attempting to understand why the grooming happened — and still happens — nothing will change. Communities will continue to be demonized, gangs will continue to operate with impunity, and a steady stream of offenders will continue to be released back into the community, many back into the very areas where their victims still live.

***

Almost 30 years ago, in 1996, I visited a tiny charity in the center of Leeds. There I met Angela*, a hard-working single mother, who described how she had discovered her daughter Jane*, 14, was being picked up in taxis by Asian men, who then used her for sex.

Her mother was desperate, on the edge of tears. “She stays out late and she’s been seen with older lads in the town center,” Angela told me. “I’ve given [the] police a load of car number plates and names but they say she’s choosing this lifestyle and there’s nothing they can do.”

Angela and her daughter lived in Keighley, a market town in West Yorkshire small enough for everyone to know your business, and a place infamous as the so-called ground zero of the grooming gangs. It was here, back in 2002, that Ann Cryer, the town’s then Labour MP, first exposed how groups of predominantly Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

I had long been aware of organized gangs targeting vulnerable girls. But it was only through meeting mothers of victims that I realized how little the authorities cared about these girls.

Even in those early days, the pattern was clear. The victims were generally vulnerable children from impoverished towns with high unemployment and racial disharmony — and society tended to see them as worthless. Even the police described them as “troublesome” and “slags”. Their families, if they had any, were seen as disreputable. All the while, social workers talked blithely about “personal choice” and “consent”.

There was another factor too: race. Throughout the 2000s, I was one of a handful of civilians invited to attend the annual Police Vice Conference, where experts in child sexual abuse and exploitation shared intelligence. It was at the 2004 conference that I heard, from one of the most senior police officers in attendance, that fears of “race riots” were growing — as more and more information came in about the predominance of Pakistani Muslims in child abuse and pimping gangs across the north of England.

This added another complication to the toxic mix: politics. In the absence of mainstream political support, other political agents would run to “rescue” — or weaponize — victims. This was certainly the case when Charlene Downes went missing from her Blackpool home in November 2003. Blackpool has always been a hotspot for child abuse, and a growing immigrant community back then was the source of much local suspicion.

Early on in their investigation, police became aware that Charlene, then 14, had along with various other girls been targeted by abusers active in the town, swapping sex for food, cigarettes and affection. It was a modus operandi that was becoming familiar to those who were following the escalation of these cases. “I found out,” her mother told me back then, “that Charlene was getting chips for a blow job. How can those bastards do that to kids?”

During the hunt for Charlene, police uncovered Blackpool’s open secret: Muslim men, from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, had latched on to the opportunities afforded them by the nighttime economy. Taxi drivers and takeaway workers would prey on girls, passing them around to each other, inviting friends and business associates to come to the back rooms of kebab shops, and the offices of mini cab firms, to have sex with them. This was organized, a business, run for money, with the perk of on-tap sex with terrified victims.

While it was by no means certain that Charlene was being solely abused by immigrants, far-Right political parties saw an opportunity. The BNP, with the support of Charlene’s family, latched onto her case as an example of the problem caused by Pakistani Muslim men “invading” Britain. Once they got hold of her, the narrative was set.

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The pernicious effect of the BNP could be seen months after Charlene’s disappearance. In 2004, Edge of the City, a documentary about gang grooming in Bradford, was due to be released. Abuse cases had been surfacing at an alarming rate, and the filmmaker Anna Hall was the first to expose the pattern we now know as gang grooming. But the BNP gleefully leapt on the film, describing it as “a party political broadcast” for its local election campaign. West Yorkshire Police, fearing a racist backlash, advised Channel 4 to withdraw the film from transmission at the last minute. Community cohesion took precedence over the rape of kids.

It’s something we’re still seeing. Since most of the worst cases we know about involve gangs of Asian, Muslim men pimping out white women, a reluctance to act is supercharged by fears of being accused of racism. In the past, authorities would rather have turned a blind eye. Today, despite everything we know, the same thing is happening. Only last week, Sir Trevor Phillips claimed that the Home Secretary was failing to push ahead with local reviews “because of the demographic of people involved… largely Pakistani Muslim background, and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it”.

Meanwhile, back in the early 2000s, Charlene remained missing. I kept an eye on her story, wondering if she’d ever turn up. By 2006, when the evidence of her being horrifically abused by multiple men had been exposed, I pitched the story to my then editor at The Guardian, Katherine Viner. She acted much as the authorities did. She called me and said: “We would be called racist if we publish this.” So I wrote it for The Sunday Times magazine. The day after it was published, I was added to the Islamophobia Watch website.

All the while, the politicization of the grooming gangs continues. Over the years, EDL poster boy Tommy Robinson has used the issue to further his own political agenda against “radical Islam”. Neither an expert in abuse, nor a particular champion of children or women, he has if anything made things worse for victims. In 2019, Robinson was imprisoned for contempt of court after breaching reporting restrictions on one rape trial and jeopardizing due process. Notwithstanding his motivation, he has been trumpeted as a hero by Musk and many others for his propagandizing of the issue. In the justice vacuum, bad actors spy an opportunity.

In the end, Charlene’s body was never found. The hunt for her has been one of Lancashire Police’s longest-running missing person inquiries. But, many years after her disappearance, rumors began circulating around Blackpool that her body had been chopped up and used as kebab meat, sold from the very takeaways where she and other girls were abused.

***

Court 1 at Preston Crown Court is the biggest in the building: the press bench is full, and the public gallery is packed with survivors and supporters, including Ellie Reynolds and myself. It is January 2025, and we are here to see the sentencing of three monstrous brothers who raped, sold, abused and tortured a succession of vulnerable young girls between 1996 and 2010. It has been 30 years since these men started committing their crimes.

Amran Miah, 49, Alman Miah, 47, and Shah Joman Miah (known as “Sarj”), 38, were violent predators who targeted girls in abusive family homes or care and foster placements. Some of their victims were as young as seven. The girls were lured in by promises of romance, rides in fast cars, vodka, cigarettes, cannabis and the freedom to hang out at the men’s apartments: they leapt at what they thought was a chance to escape. A life where someone cared. The promises couldn’t have been further from the truth, as they were prostituted from cars, on streets and in apartments across Britain. Often locked in rooms with nothing but a filthy mattress, they were forced into violent sexual acts, sometimes with several men at once.

Refusal to comply would mean being beaten with dog chains, forced to drink their own urine and tortured. One of the Miah victims showed me cigarette burns on her legs, stomach and arms. “[The pimp] used me as an ashtray,” she tells me, “and a few times when I was asleep he’d piss all over me, not bothering to go to the toilet, then make me get up and wash the sheets while he went back to sleep.”

Another girl, who was not in court but followed the proceedings by video link, was abused over a period of five years, from the age of seven. “He ejaculated into her mouth,” the judge tells the court. “She said that when [he] ejaculated she began to cry and make a noise and [he] replied, ‘Stop it or we’ll get found out’.” She was raped, filmed and photographed.

Elizabeth*, another girl, is in court that day too. During the lunch break, she tells me that she knew of at least one of the victims in the trial considering withdrawing their evidence because they were convinced they wouldn’t be believed. Elizabeth was a witness to the grooming gang activities, including seeing girls being taken to the room above a takeaway to be raped, some still in their school uniforms. She was a key witness for the prosecution, but after she reported what she had seen, word soon got around. “They smashed my windows,” she says of the threats she received. “I feel scared despite the police promising I am protected.”

In court, defense barristers make valiant attempts to introduce mitigation: one defendant suffered with depression, another has an autistic child, and each of the brothers has a work ethic and is “loyal” to the others. But the judge reminds the court of their depravity: “You threatened to tell [a witness] that if she said anything to the police you would set her house on fire. She spoke of attending hospital due to anxiety. I am satisfied that each of you acted in a predatory and pedophilic manner… You saw your victims as vehicles to be used and abused at your will and when you wanted to. You treated them with utter contempt.” The robust sentencing reflected the seriousness of the crimes: all three men were sentenced to at least a decade in prison. Facing the stiffest sentence, Shah Joman Miah was sent down for a minimum of 21 years and 232 days.

These children were treated as disposable rubbish by the men who raped and pimped them. But a similarly appalling punishment was meted out by the authorities tasked with protecting them.

***

For years, Sara Rowbotham was a sexual health worker in Rochdale. As the coordinator of the Crisis Intervention Team, a body linked to the NHS, from 2003 to 2014, it was her job to identify young people who were vulnerable to child sex exploitation.

Rowbotham repeatedly tried to alert police and social services, from as early as 2004, to the fact that girls were being systematically abused by gangs of older Asian men. She made over 100 referrals, none of which was actioned. During her time as a sexual health worker, she made something she called the “Boyfriend Book” — in which she kept records of all of the perpetrators, and their details as given by their victims. The book was eventually used in court as evidence. It is still being used today, at the ongoing trials at which she is called as a witness, some 20 years after the abuse first happened.

Rowbotham went on to provide key evidence that ended in the conviction of nine men in 2012, and 10 more in a separate investigation in 2015. “It was my job to keep those girls safe,” she tells me. “I tried to do that, I kept referring cases to police, to social workers, and they did nothing. They ignored me. They turned against me and shut me out.”

This reluctance among authorities to believe the young victims is borne out by research by Sarah Hall, who has been involved in child protection for 20 years. The social workers understood sexually exploited girls as being able to make choices, supposedly unlike girls abused in the home. Hall says she often heard the phrasing “putting themselves in risky situations”.

Because these girls were widely viewed as “sluts”, they were often ignored. “They were all Pakistani, except one who was Algerian,” Fiona tells me, recounting her abuse at the hands of a gang in 2008, back when she was just 13. “But the police denied they existed.” Fiona was in care, and staff knew from very early on what was happening. “They would have multiagency meetings but no one would turn up. They said, ‘Well she goes missing all the time so she must enjoy it’.”

Vulnerable, confused and angry, Fiona could only lash out. “Because I wasn’t getting listened to and my mental health was deteriorating quickly, I ended up getting done for assault on the staff and criminal damage on the care home… So my criminal record is all to do with criminal damage and assault of care home staff and police officers.” Think of it: this girl asked for help to escape her rapists, and ended up with a criminal record herself.

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Damningly, the serious case review conducted by the local authority, when it happened, found 18 instances of sexual assault or rape that the care home had failed to report to the police. Fiona has been fighting for “justice and accountability” for the past decade. Amber* was similarly criminalized. Barely 14 when she was first targeted in 2007, she was already on the child protection register in Rochester in Kent. The men lured her in, groomed her and then subjected her to repeated and violent sexual abuse.

That nightmare should have ended with the arrest and trial of the perpetrators. But instead, the police, CPS and even social services treated Amber as a criminal. In 2009, when she was 16, uniformed officers came to her mother’s house, arrested her and took her to the police station.

Because, like all the other girls, Amber had been told she had to bring her friends along to meet some of the gang members, she was portrayed as an assistant pimp. When nine of the men were eventually put on trial for crimes relating to Amber and other girls, she was part of the case — but not as a victim. The prosecutors had put her name on the indictment as one of the offenders.

Though she was neither tried nor convicted, the media described her in court as a “honey monster”. Nor did her ordeal end when the men were sent down. Social services pursued her with a view to removing both her very young child and her unborn second baby. The case dragged on for 18 months before the judge dismissed it. Five years passed before an apology and compensation came from social services. “It’s absolutely outrageous that none of them have still been charged for me, none of them have even been prosecuted,” Amber tells me. “I still can’t get my head around that after all these years.”

Two decades on, Sarah Hall insists little has changed. “There’s still lots of victim blaming,” she tells me, “blaming of parents, stereotyping, and young people are deemed to be making a choice and the systems back that up. Depending on where and by whom you are raped and sexually assaulted in this country as a kid, you will either be safeguarded or you won’t be.”

***

It is raining in Manchester when I arrive at the Crown Court, where eight Asian men from Rochdale stand accused of treating two girls as “sex slaves”. They are charged with 56 sexual offenses, include grooming, sexually exploiting and raping two 13-year olds between 2001 and 2006. It is February 2025.

There are police outside, sent from Rochdale to make sure “there are no security issues, due to the sensitivity of the case”. But the case is 25 years old, I say. “It is old,” replies one of the officers, “but unfortunately it’s still happening today.”

There are eight men in the dock, all Pakistani Muslim, ranging in age from 39 to 66. They are accused of rape and other sexual offenses against two girls between 2001 and 2006. Girl A and Girl B, both abused from the age of 13, were in court, surrounded by family and friends. The women are in their 30s now, but wear the look of deep trauma. Giving evidence, Girl A said that she had been abused by at least 100 men, but when she then mentioned the figure of 200, she was challenged by one of the defense barristers, implying she was lying. “There could’ve been more to be fair,” she replied. “There [were] that many it was hard to keep count.”

The abuse began when the girls, in local authority care, started hanging around the market, where Mohammed Zahid, one of the men on trial, had a lingerie stall. Both girls were casual workers on the stall, paid in clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. They were also expected to have degradingly sadistic sex with Zahid (known as “Boss” or the “Knickerman”) and his associates.

Though Girl A told local children’s services about “hanging around” with older men in 2004 — as well as drinking and using drugs, and having sex with men introduced to her by “Boss” — neither her school nor social services made any reports to the police. Instead, one of the girls was labeled a “prostitute” at the age of 10. Rowbotham was ignored when she reported it to police and social services. As she puts it: “I can only imagine how many other girls they went on to harm.”

Rowbotham tells me about one of the mothers of Girl A, back in 2005, before police were even acknowledging there was a problem. “Girl A’s mum was out of her mind trying to get the cops to do something — she phoned them constantly and I encouraged her to keep doing it even if they didn’t respond,” she says. “And she was not the only one desperate to get them to act.”

This particular case only came to trial after one of the girls tracked an abuser down on Facebook and spotted a second “selling fruit and veg out of a van near a school”. So many of these men are still prowling the streets. There are dozens known to have been active gang members who have never been arrested, or spent a day in prison. And those hundreds of men who paid to rape the girls remain invisible.

***

The number of abused girls we know about is easily in the tens of thousands. This dwarfs the number of convictions. Between 2005 and 2017, only 264 men were found guilty. Every historic review includes evidence that social services teams and police officers were reluctant to pursue groups of Asian men for fear of being accused of racism. It also seems likely that police feared civil unrest among the white population, not least given the rise of the BNP and the race-baiting of Tommy Robinson. Once again, these fears are surely relevant today too, especially given the disorder last summer.

Yet whatever the grim political logic, this attitude is hard to justify, especially when you consider the words of perpetrators themselves. One example is Shabir Ahmed, the leader of one of the Rochdale grooming gangs, who was convicted in 2013. During his trial, Ahmed made his feelings clear. “We are the supreme race, not these white bastards… You destroyed my community and our children. None of us did that. White people trained those girls to be so much [more] advanced in sex.”

As that statement implies, race is yet again a factor here, something also clear from the statistics. Of the few hundred men convicted between 2005-17, 84% of them were Asian. In the Rochdale abuse scandal of 2012, the men involved were primarily British Pakistani men. In Telford, according to the independent 2022 inquiry there, the abusers were also men of “southern Asian heritage”.

While white men are certainly involved in child exploitation, then, the continued predominance of South Asian men in grooming gangs is undeniable. Data released in January 2025 has found that Pakistanis are up to four times more likely to be involved than the general population. And figures from all 43 forces in England and Wales show that 13.7% of child sexual exploitation in the first nine months of 2024 involved Pakistani men, a rise from under 7% in 2023.

But it’s a mistake to think that these rapists restrict themselves to white victims. Zlakha Ahmed, a survivor of gang abuse in Telford, is testament to this. Now 62, her abuse happened when she was just seven. “It was two men who were close family members,” she tells me. “I was taken to a park one day and I was raped by a gang of men.”

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Farida*, for her part, was the victim of a gang of largely Pakistani men operating in Oxfordshire, 21 of whom have since been convicted. Between 2010 and 2020, 18 victims gave evidence in six trials about abuse spanning from the late Nineties to the late 2000s.

Zlakha Ahmed told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA): “It feels as though BME women and girls are shrugged off by statutory services, which are staffed by predominantly white individuals. When it comes to Asian children in particular, a lot of white workers bury their heads in the sand and then we are blamed as a community for not coming forward.”

It was the same for Farida. When she reported being raped and kidnapped by grooming gang members to police in Oxford, they did not believe her. “Because I am Asian and with a Pakistani name,” she says, “I didn’t fit the stereotype for this officer.”

The stark reality, then, is that police and prosecutors have a dismal record when it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of girls, whatever the class or ethnicities of the victims and perpetrators. Data from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse shows that during 2023-4, only 12% of reports were subject to any criminal justice intervention, and around two thirds of investigations were closed because of “evidential difficulties.”

***

Kevin Hyland is a former Metropolitan Police Officer, the UK’s first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, and an expert in human trafficking and sexual exploitation. He understands organized gang abuse and how to get the best results during investigations. More than that, he is keen to explore how law enforcement can stop gangs getting access to girls in the first place.

“If entire groups believe they can operate with impunity and start to target young girls but then feel the weight against them, it will deter some from offending,” he says. “That weight should be societal, it should be legal, it should be from their own backgrounds and culture.”

Maggie Oliver makes a similar point. Credited with exposing the Rochdale grooming gang scandal, in 2012 she left Greater Manchester Police in protest at its handling of the town’s grooming trial. She tells me that gangs are still active in Manchester, Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Blackpool and Leeds. More to the point, Oliver insists that the grooming gang phenomenon is linked to a belief system of people who don’t share the same values as the British public generally — “that this will just continue to explode unless we get a grip of it as the root cause of this sort of abuse.”

For Hyland, though, pushing the line that any type of crime is committed exclusively or even predominantly by one particular group allows those outside the demographic to hide in plain sight, and for law enforcers and social workers to fail to follow leads. As he says: “One of the big challenges we’ve got is that policing has become so complex, so politically correct, so influenced by outside measures, that the focus on the bigger picture is compromised.”

Not that there seems much appetite to address the problem. Amber, the victim from Rochester, tells me that men arrested in Rochdale are “still there, still delivering takeaways, still driving taxis.” She’s even given some names to police “but [they] don’t go and arrest them. I think it’s too much effort for them.”

All the while, how grooming happens is changing. Smartphones and the internet now mean that men no longer have to sit and wait outside a victim’s home. Instead, they can make initial contact through an online platform, which means less risk of being caught.

As Oliver explains, men will increasingly befriend girls online, pretending to be a younger boy, before coercing the child into sending explicit photographs — which will then be used as blackmail. The targets, anyway, are the same: vulnerable girls who feel as though they’re being treated like grown-ups, even as they’re forced to engage in terrible sexual activity.

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Oliver is well aware, through work at her eponymous foundation, that state complacency means grooming gangs are as entrenched as ever. No wonder, then, that this week she’s launching #TheyKnew, a new campaign aiming to bring legal action against officials who failed to act in the face of terrible abuse. Alongside Oliver are two survivors of grooming gang abuse, Elizabeth* and Samantha, both of whom I’ve met, a heartening reminder that some victims are managing to turn round their lives.

Unfortunately, good news is hard to come by, with Robbie Moore, the current Conservative MP for Keighley, worrying that the problem is actually worsening. “[W]hat we’ve unfortunately got here in Bradford is the local authority not willing to trigger that process of having an inquiry,” he says. “But Bradford, from the evidence I have seen, has a far bigger problem even than the likes of Rochdale.”

I know from bitter experience that where crime flourishes, so too does exploitation of women and girls. And child sexual exploitation has followed the growth of county drug lines. One policeman I know in southeast England says he constantly hears how the gangs are now dominated by pimps running girls. “I have taken statements from half a dozen girls, from age 14 to 18, in the past six months who want to bring charges against men who are, effectively, grooming gang leaders. The perpetrators are usually from immigrant groupings, and operate taxis and takeaways, but they also supply some of the drugs to the runners, and keep the girls for themselves to share around and sell to business associates.”

Resources aren’t usually made available to deal with the sexual exploitation element of these crimes, with officers encouraged to focus on drugs and weapons. One senior officer very recently told me that the victims are part of the problem and know exactly what they are doing — it’s the same old harmful narrative being trotted out again.

One recommendation from the 2022 IICSA report is that data should be collected on exploitation networks. Shockingly, it’s yet to happen. Another suggestion is the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse at school or the GP. Both of these recommendations, if properly implemented, would make a difference. But to date, nothing has happened.

While all the victims would welcome further scrutiny of the scandal, meanwhile, most of all they want to see broad improvements to the criminal justice system. What’s in no doubt is that it’s currently unfit for purpose: neither detecting perpetrators nor keeping victims safe.

Meanwhile, our politicians seem determined to keep looking the other way. Though Cooper announced those new local inquiries at the start of the year, Jess Phillips — allegedly the minister responsible for safeguarding women and girls — is already backtracking. At the start of April, she said there would be a more “flexible approach to support both full independent local inquiries and more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”. Translation: the $5 million set aside for the inquiries was no longer being allocated. It also meant that politicians, rather than independent agents like Tom Crowther, would drive the investigations.

This announcement was met by horror from many. That includes Trevor Phillips, who described the response as “shameful” because, he said, it was so obviously politically motivated. Robbie Moore, for his part, is “completely infuriated” by the Government’s update, arguing it’s an admission that pretty much no progress has been made. Let’s not forget: these inquiries were supposed to have been launched by Easter. Trevor Philips is right. It’s shameful that Jess Phillips, a self-styled advocate for abused women and girls, appears to have suddenly lost enthusiasm for dealing with one of the biggest child sexual abuse scandals in modern British history — likely for fear of being branded a racist. What hope is there for girls being abused right now, if our politicians still refuse to even admit the problem exists?

***

John’s* daughter Evie* was 14 when she was targeted by a gang of taxi drivers. He is now helping support another 14-year-old girl who remains under the control of some of the same men. Evie reported her abusers to the police, after eight months of rape, sexual assault and degradation. “She was made to strip naked and then dance for the abusers,” John tells me. “And she says money changed hands. They would have sex with her. She was just a kid.”

Sophie*, another girl, one day turned up on John’s doorstep in the northwest of England, having heard that one of Evie’s abusers had been convicted of rape, and realizing that the same gang was targeting her.

“I have told the police, repeatedly, that this gang is in operation right now, that that some of the same men that raped my daughter are now doing it to others,” John tells me. But despite going to the police in December last year, he says nothing has happened so far.

Sophie, for her part, is desperate, and has asked for help from the local domestic violence service to offer support along with a safety plan. But she is “shit scared to leave, and to report them,” John says, “because if the police don’t lift them, but they find out she’s dobbed them in, she’s dead.”

Twenty three years after Ann Cryer first spoke out about the widespread gang-related abuse of children in her constituency, little has changed — except that countless more girls have had their lives destroyed.

***

*Names have been changed.

Two minutes ’til race one. A rush to the bar. Hordes of children dart out to track level, bleary-eyed parents in tow. The trainers are out, the dogs at their blocks.

Race! “Go on boy!” a 10-year-old boy howls as the dogs whiz by the first bend, grains of track sand flying into the air. Cheers waft from the clubhouse. Patrons hang out the windows. Everything in the balance. The dogs cross the finish line, and the race is over, about 10 seconds after it begins. “Maybe next time, mom,” the boy says sullenly.

Order restored, bettors head back to the bar, families to their tables. Some linger outside, flecked by cigarette smoke. It’s a scene trapped in time, both 1925 and 2025. Soon, though, it could all be over.

Last month, Wales’s Deputy First Minister announced the Welsh government’s plans to ban greyhound racing. Animal welfare groups were unsurprisingly delighted. “Obviously,” says Tim Doyle, CEO of Greyhound Rescue Wales, “we are very pleased.” For the Valley, though, it’s a dagger to the chest. “We learned about it after a Welsh newspaper asked us for a comment,” laments Katie Bennison, a board member of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB).

No one truly knows why the decision came when it did. “It’s a class issue,” one Valley patron tells me, flat cap in hand, one eye on the track. Doyle disagrees. Greyhound racing, he says, has never been a working-class tradition. Others, like Tams and Bennison, blame the budget, and how the Welsh government is hellbent on pushing a half-baked policy through in time. Everyone has their theories.

Slice through the noise, though, and go to the Valley on a race night, and you’ll find more than mere discourse. You’ll find the old guard, pints of lager in hand. You’ll find Tams, who’s been coming since the track opened in 1975. He owned it until a few years ago, but still helps run things day to day. You’ll find children and families and teenagers and young adults.

Most are from the local area, though some visit from further afield. “Is it going to be banned, then?” asks one man with an undeniable Cockney drawl. He’d come from East London. “It’s a long way, but I know people here,” he says. “I used to go to the Wimbledon track but that’s long gone. It’s important to me to keep this thing alive, especially now my boys are old enough.” To show what he means, he gestures to two teenagers, clad in matching flat caps and Barbours.

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People come, of course, for the dogs — but as their variety implies, they also come for something else. Maybe it’s the clubhouse, a hangover from the age of the bingo hall. The Valley’s cheap wooden chairs, with tatty blue faux-leather seats, sit by sticky wooden tables. From suspended ceiling tiles beam sickly white lights, onto a no-frills bar stocked with plenty of cheap booze. Along the walls, there are frames. They immortalize prize-winning greyhounds — with names like “Boss” and “Pandy Bow” — but could quite as easily hold the pictures of amateur boxers or rugby players.

Maybe it’s all a ruse. Proletarian chic is a big commodity these days. Norman’s Cafe, in Archway, once a fulcrum of the working classes, now serves salt-of-the-earth food at sky-high costs. Few were shocked when Burberry held a fashion pop-up there in 2023. The veil, by that point, had long since fallen.

But you only have to chat with people at the Valley to find a way of life you can’t simply mimic. This sport burrows deep. Everyone has been touched by it in some way. When they think back to that first time, their eyes come alive and their mouths twitch, and they gaze off into the distance.

Malcolm, a small man with thick-rimmed glasses, whose facial features have taken on the pointedness of the very dogs he races, had greyhounds as a youth at the Valley. He speaks in sharp, passionate bursts, so characteristic of the men of South Wales, and so hard to understand. It’s only when he veers onto the topic of greyhounds that everything becomes slow and clear. “Back in the day, they were the best,” he says. “We had Bedwellty. Forest Fach. Skewen,” listing names of former race towns that have long-since gained mythical status in greyhound circles, as if without their tracks they cease to exist.

Overhearing our conversation, another man chips in. “I’ve been coming to the greyhounds since I was a boy. I’m 70 now,” he says, his watery blue eyes shining. “My grandfather took my dad, they both took me. I took my son. Maybe I won’t be able to take my grandson.”

Next to the clubhouse, in a little office with a worn “Staff Only” sign, Lee Blankley, the racing manager, recalls his weekends in the family caravan near Leicester as a child. There, behind the town hall, men in long coats and caps raced whippets round a track. He was hooked. Now, both he and his wife work at the Valley.

Perhaps I’m being a little too romantic. For animal rights groups, it’s simple: the greedy betting industry wants to work these poor dogs to death. And there’s some truth to this. Between 200 and 300 racing greyhounds die of injuries each year in the UK. There’s also no living shortage of the barbarous ways these animals have paid for the profit and joy of others. When I meet her, Jilly, an 11-year-old former race dog at the Valley, struggles to walk the short 10 minutes to the track from the nearby park. She wasn’t unfit: she only had three legs. “She lost it on the sharp bend at the Valley,” Essex Havard, her rescuer, tells me.

No one can deny the brutality in this. In the end, though, the dogs are only part of the attraction. It’s not all nostalgia either, for the Valley clearly matters in the here and now as well.

Tams greets many punters by name as they walk through the door. I stand and watch him for five minutes and become convinced he’s hiding a cheat sheet up his sleeve. “But that’s what it’s like here,” he says. “I know these people, and they know me.” Later, at the far end of the club, I find an elderly woman who turns up every week to cook burgers squeezed inside cheap white buns. “It’s my 70th birthday today and I’m here,” she says when I ask about the track. “I think that says it all.”

In part, such richness can be understood by history. For Keith Laybourn explains, an academic who specializes in British working-class culture, greyhound racing has been popular since 1926 when, after some success at home, a few Americans and Canadians brought the concept to Britain and set up a track in Manchester. It proved a hit, offering a cheap and glamorous night out, with its bright American-style lights and fast-talking announcers.

At the same time, dog racing was also the first time working-class people could legally bet, a bonanza which by the mid century saw totalisator turnover exceed £200 million. Until then, betting behind closed doors, in pubs or on the street, was illegal. The only place it was allowed was “settings” — strongholds of the wealthy like horse racing tracks. But with the coming of the dogs, working-class communities had their own special place to have a flutter.

The popularity of the greyhound caused a fuss. Do-gooders launched a series of legal campaigns against greyhound racing, and even Winston Churchill set out to squash the new trend among working people. In 1927, he wrote a letter to the Home Secretary warning of the dangers of what he described as “animated roulette boards”.

At the time, such objections felt churlish. Now, though, it’s hard to escape the sense that greyhound racing has had its day. The times I visited the Valley, it was only truly packed on St David’s Day, a special occasion. On a Thursday, maybe 30 or 40 make the trip. The numbers are a fraction of the 70 million who attended in 1946, with the decline really starting in 1961, with the legalization of high-street betting shops. Forget South Wales: from Aberdeen to Hackney Wick, Exeter to Northamptonshire, you could do a tour of Britain in shuttered dog sites.

There is a disconnect here, I think, one that cuts at the heart of modern Britain: how old ways co-exist with new moral codes. Is it more important to protect sentient life or to preserve a way of life? Both have beating hearts, even if the latter doesn’t bleed. And few who hate dog racing have ever been to the Valley. Senedd members did promise to come, but fewer than five actually turned up.

The sport, for its part, has tried to make racing fairer and safer. In 2007, for instance, the Greyhound Forum for Wales submitted a paper to the Welsh Assembly outlining a code of practice for greyhound racing in the nation. Many of these ideas were later taken up by GBGB, encompassing everything from monitored visits by vets to inspections of residential kennels. Once they hang up their paws, retired greyhounds must also be rehomed.

Yet despite these attempts at modernization, Laybourn suggests the sport’s overall decline isn’t so surprising. “When it goes,” he says, “the working classes will move to another sport to bet on. We’ll collectively lose a culture, but culture is always changing.”

Ystrad Mynach knows this all too well. It was blessed by the black gold found beneath its ground in the 19th century, and soon had everything that came with a mining town: a strong union movement, social clubs, community groups. When the miners’ strike hit the Valleys in the Eighties, volunteers worked around the clock to hand out food to families in need. Their base was the Penallta Workmen’s Library and Institute, not far from where the Valley Stadium now stands.

Most of that is gone now. Like towns across Britain, Ystrad Mynach has had life sucked out of it. The high street alone is indicative of this shift. Many beautiful early 20th-century red-brick buildings stand vacant. Three high-street banks have closed, leaving many locals unable to access their cash. It’s a trend common across the country, with more than 6,000 banks closing their doors since 2015.

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Telling, too, is what’s taken their place. There’s a big Tesco supermarket and a Lidl. There are two Kurdish barbers, two vapes shops and 12 takeaways. All are transactional, and do nothing to really keep Ystrad Mynach together.

None of this necessarily means the place is worse off than it once was. Though mining towns have struggled to make the transition to the post-industrial world, they’re not entirely hopeless. Doncaster, also a former mining town, employed 50% of its workers down the mines in 1931. And though, on the surface, the town appears to be in decline, today it has over double the number of jobs it did a century ago.

But economics only goes so far. These towns have lost something cultural, places to meet and share conversation. There are pubs, to be sure, rowdy spots whose names I shouldn’t share, but locals will know all too well. But drinking in Ystrad Mynach and elsewhere has lost what once made it special, with bathrooms awash with cheap cocaine and Noughties trance tunes blaring on £1 jukeboxes. That’s heaven for some, hell for most.

Where does one go, then, if you want company in Ystrad Mynach in 2025? “We go to the Valley,” one woman says, watching her seven-year-old boy following the bright lights of a TV showing replays. The Valley is warm in its shabbiness, familiar in the strange space it occupies in the 21st century. There’s no music, no shouting, no fighting. No one is seriously betting to make money. The top prize on St David’s Day was just £250, and even that was a sponsored race.

And on the contests go. Eight minutes ’til race eight. The clubhouse is rammed for the last race of the night. Katie, from GBGB, takes a position behind the bar. “In all honesty, I don’t know what will happen,” she says, between pouring pints. “We’re in limbo. The community is in limbo.”

Two minutes ’til race eight. The kids whiz past the bar and head outside, down to track level once more. Moms and dads grudgingly follow, grimacing against the cold. The older men stay at their tables. Others wait patiently, eager to put a few bucks down on the dogs. Many simply stand around, chatting and laughing.

The night is almost over. The dogs are out, strolling to the stocks from where they’d start their last dance. The 10-year-old shouts again, and the fans hang out the clubhouse windows. The buzz swells, the drinkers hold their breath.

And then, the announcer: Race!

Right now, it feels particularly difficult not to harden our hearts to the governments of our recent past. Layer upon layer of political failure has consolidated into a deep rock of mismanagement which grows more obdurate by every passing generation. Britain is just so bleak: the sense of decay and neglect is palpable across the country. Everyone knows something is fundamentally off; that things are out of kilter.

Was anyone really that surprised by the report published earlier this week which found parts of Birmingham and the North East are now among the poorest places in Europe? You only have to walk around these places to know they are profoundly poor.

During my last trip to Birmingham, the city of my birth, I watched a group of Bayern Munich fans wandering aimlessly through the town ahead of the match against Aston Villa. What were they making of our second city as they compared it with their German hometown? Britain must have seemed so much poorer. This wasn’t because of anything dramatic — boarded up shops or jarring poverty — just an unmistakable feel.

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The city’s problems run particularly deep, of course: failures of local government exacerbating failures of national Government. I’ve been reading David Lodge’s Nice Work, set in the depressed Birmingham of the Thatcher years. What is so striking about that novel, written almost four decades ago, is just how relevant it remains. That sense of decline and neglect captured by Lodge in 1988 has, if anything, only become worse.

Governments have come and gone, new ideas have been tried, grand promises made. And yet, here we are, Birmingham among the poorest places in Europe, a failing city at the heart of England: once Tory, then Labour and then Tory once again, but now, potentially, Reform. It should be no surprise that Nigel Farage chose the city for his party’s “BIGGEST Event Yet” last night.

But as deep as Birmingham’s problems go, they are far from unique — and it is this which goes at least some way to explain the national popularity of Reform in the polls. Even in London, which cannot be said to be a failing city in any real sense, there is now a sense of listlessness and decay in the air. As someone recently said to me, “It feels defeated.” London gambled on globalization before 2008, and now, like the rest of the country, seems lost.

Everything here seems to be out of sync. What were once seen as basic life expectations have become aspirational luxuries; three-bed semis, family doctors, functioning A&Es, pleasant town centers and simple family holidays. Those jobs that once guaranteed a comfortable standard of life and status, no longer do: teaching and medicine, social work and military service. A friend of mine calls this the crisis of the “downwardly mobile professionals” — the DMPs or dumpies. These are not the “left behinds” of lore, but the quietly seething dumped upon, unsure who or what is to blame, but aware that something is wrong.

Who should the dumpies blame? In one sense, it’s easy: the Tories. There is a strong empirical case that the government from 2010-2024 was the worst in Britain’s post war history; a period of rule almost entirely without merit. Not only did the Conservative Party leave office with taxes at record highs but public services were at record lows and people’s living standards had barely improved since they took power. The country’s prisons were full, its military power reduced, its police forces cut and utility companies disgraced. Heathrow was not given its third runway, HS2 was not finished, the Northern Powerhouse was abandoned, and old-age care left to rot. The failure is almost impressive in its totality. Not a single prime minister or senior figure from this period emerges with credit: from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak via Theresa May, Boris Johnson and the Liz Truss moment.

Such is the Tory record, it is fanciful to think Badenoch might have turned things around in the short time she has been limply in charge of the party. Yet, brother man, for the sake of honesty, we should not harden our hearts too much. The Tory record is disastrous, but it was book-ended by crises beyond even its own ineptitude. No one serious can account for the years of Tory failure without acknowledging the crash of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. We continue to live with the seismic consequences of those two events, as well as the stains of the 2016 Brexit crisis, which Cameron, May and Johnson cannot so easily wash from their hands.

But things go even deeper. It is not possible to travel around the UK without seeing not only the failures of the last period of Tory rule, but also the failed promise of the Blairite years of plenty before that, and the epoch of upheaval under Thatcher before Blair and Major. Andrew O’Brien, from the Council for National Resilience, has calculated that in 1975, when Thatcher became Tory leader, the country was spending around $19 billion a year in today’s prices on support for nationalized industries and employment programs. Today, we are spending $41 billion on unemployment assistance alone. We have few nationalized industries ensuring that the essentials of advanced economic life — like steel — are produced in Britain.

Given our current predicament, O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidizing British industry all over again. That we are even contemplating such things is telling. Old answers no longer make much sense. The country today is walking around in a daze, like those Bayern Munich fans, dimly aware that something isn’t right, but unaware how to fix it.

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All certainties are gone. In the Conservative Party, the children who worship at Thatcher’s feet have suddenly found their assumptions turn to dust. The transatlantic alliance, which was the alternative to Europe, is crumbling along with America’s commitment to free trade. What, then, is supposed to take its place? The Labour Party, meanwhile, has inherited a state which does not work in the way it assumed; it is unable to deliver either the improvements in public services or the economic growth necessary to begin to shift the malaise which is powering Reform into contention at the next election.

And yet, even Reform — Westminster’s disruptors — still cling to old Thatcherite orthodoxies which no longer make sense in a world where Trump and Putin hold sway and national resilience is the key, not just nationalism.

The failures of four decades have combined in this moment of profound national malaise. But Mantel’s plea for the compassion of future generations, contains a profound truth about life — and politics. It is too easy for us to pass judgement on those who made decisions in the past. Who, though, has the political bravery to try something new today? We should not harden our hearts to those who fail, only to those who never bother trying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, it is hard not to be spooked by the sense that once again we are entering one of these eras that will overwhelm our rotting old order. Waves of Chinese industrial might threaten to overwhelm the last of our competitive industry, while the alarming approach of AI and unpredictable rise of Donald Trump risk upending everything else. And as Keir Starmer prepares to set out his long-awaited “Programme for Change” even his close advisors sense the ground shifting beneath their feet. They have the feeling that they are representatives of both the emerging new world as well as place holders in an interregnum before something else entirely.

It is a striking image — of regents rather than monarchs — and surprisingly self-aware from a Government that in many other respects gives every indication of not appearing to understand the scale of the challenge it faces.

A sense of unease has settled over the country, too, barely five months into its new Government. The Prime Minister’s goal is to lift this ennui with the most important speech of his premiership. Yet he will almost certainly fail. Not because what he says will be unreasonable or the targets he sets wrong — they will be neither — but because we are entering one of those periods of change which requires a form of leadership that is beyond him. Perhaps even beyond any of our leading politicians today.

Charles de Gaulle governed France through two great moments of upheaval. Having created the “necessary myth” of a country united in resistance during the war, his second great achievement, according to his biographer Julian Jackson, was to turn France’s defeat in Algeria in 1962 into a sort of victory. He told the French that, “although militarily victorious, [they] had granted Algeria independence in accordance with her historic commitment to human rights”. The story was not true, of course, but after years of turmoil and shame, the French were happy to believe it. De Gaulle later reflected in his War Memoirs that however difficult the reality might have been during his time in power, he had always felt able to master it, “by leading the French there through dreams”.

It is this sort of leadership that is required in moments of great tumult, when a collapsing old order must be refashioned into a moral story of political will. It was, in essence, Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, killing the failing post-war consensus and ushering in something new with a story of industrial revival that did not come to pass, but which nevertheless provided a sense of purpose.

The problem with Starmer’s attempted reset is that he is moving in the opposite direction; lowering the nation’s sights, leading not through dreams but powerpoints. We know that in his speech, Starmer will attach at least one specific target to each of his five “missions”, along with an extra promise to reduce immigration. This is all part of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s belief that this government needs to kill the “fiction” that politicians can fix everything, because this in itself damages public trust. Instead of trying to do too much, McSweeney argues that Labour governments must remain focused on practical policies which improve people’s lives.

For those around Starmer there is no alternative. “Of course delivery is not enough,” one senior figure told me. “But if we don’t get waiting lists down and don’t get immigration down there is no story we can tell.” The purpose of Starmer’s speech today, then, is to make his “missions” more tangible, creating that sense of progress — if not achievement — that is currently so obviously lacking. Targets, not dreams. It is striking that those advising Rishi Sunak had the same idea. Such was the lack of faith among voters at the time, his advisers argued, that only a set of specific and deliverable objectives had any chance of convincing people he was serious. Yet by the end of his time in power Sunak appeared lost, unable to cope with the scale of the challenge, finding solace merely in the performance of power, completing his paperwork to give him a sense of progress and purpose if nobody else.

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The Sunak and Starmer approach to government is not without merit, of course. The danger of governing through dreams is that dreams are not real. As Gladwyn Jebb remarked of de Gaulle, his legacy was “to cast his country into a role which was beyond her power”. As a result, de Gaulle’s successors are doomed to live up to an impossible myth — just look at Emmanuel Macron.

So the danger of McSweeney’s approach is that as Britain’s challenges grow, the Government’s ambitions fall and public frustration increases. Because the health service is in such a bad state, for example, the new target is simply to get back to the kind of waiting times that we once took for granted. And meanwhile people’s everyday experiences of the NHS deteriorate. We can order Christmas presents to our doors at the click of a button, but to attempt to see a doctor is to do battle against an unresponsive, maddening and seemingly unreformable bureaucracy. It is pretty obtuse not to realize that public anger at this basic failure is bound to grow; the decreasing length of the waiting lists for routine operations will only infuriate those who can’t get through a GP’s door.

Politics, as the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, is ultimately the navigation of “a boundless and bottomless sea” where there is neither a starting place or an appointed destination. Yet it is impossible to steer your course without looking up to the horizon.

Those close to Starmer understand the dangers of appearing to fixate on a set of arbitrary targets as the world transforms around them; the boundless and bottomless sea suddenly raging while the captain merely stares at the map. As one senior aide reflected, the ultimate challenge is not just convincing Starmer of the importance of storytelling, but fashioning a specifically Labour story appropriate to the challenges facing the country. Because from immigration to energy transition and shifting social norms, changes are coming which threaten to overwhelm many of Labour’s most sacred shibboleths.

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“Something new is happening,” one aide told me, “and so many of the old beliefs are falling away.” This is taking place at such speed, he said, that the party has begun doubting itself. Labour today is no longer defending the benefits of immigration but attacking “the one-nation experiment in open borders” inflicted on Britain by the Conservatives. Facing its first motor plant closure, the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds declared he was not prepared to accept deindustrialization. What will happen when the flood of cheap Chinese-made electric vehicles sweeps through the country, and further plants begin to close? What then?

In previous eras of momentous change, new parties or ideologies rose in response: the Labour Party in the Twenties and Thirties, and Powellism followed by Thatcherism in the Sixties and Seventies. It has not gone unnoticed that Nigel Farage’s Reform lies in second place in 98 constituencies today — 89 of which are held by Labour, including 60 in the north of England and 13 in Wales. On each of the great challenges now facing Britain — immigration, net-zero, China and Trump — Farage is now well-placed to take advantage. He has his dream. He is also said to be ruthlessly focused on the “Waitrose moms” he needs to make his next great leap in the polls as part of his now public ambition not simply to win more seats, but to “win” the next election outright.

To succeed in government, then, Starmer must do more than deliver on the targets he sets today. He needs to lead the British there through the dreams they already have, not by fiddling with taxes and targets. It is a cliché that political leaders campaign in poetry but govern in prose, but in times of upheaval only those who retain a poetic imagination can write their own reality. Starmer, though, is no bard..

I’d also discovered, on the past occasions when I’d kept a notebook by my bed and recorded my dreams, that the books on dream interpretation I’d found made zero sense out of them. Maybe I’m just weird — unsurprisingly that suggestion has been made tolerably often — but my dreams didn’t seem to fit into any of the usual patterns. I read Freud, of course, and Jung, and also some of the literature on dreams that came into fashion in the late 20th century. But I ended up wondering whether I was dreaming in Martian or something. So, I temporarily filed the whole thing away.

Recently, though, since the passing of my wife Sara, I’ve had more time to fill than usual. After a series of vivid dreams, I decided to give dreamwork another try. So I put a notepad and a pen on the nightstand, and started collecting my dreams. But they were just as odd as before, and the dream books just as unhelpful. Then — ah, then! — came a dream I could actually interpret.

No, it wasn’t one of those big life-changing dreams that Jungian theorists like to write about. I was sitting at a table with three women, two of them older and one young. They were talking about craft projects. One of the older women explained to the younger one that, if she wanted her project to succeed, she would have to be ready to give presentations to audiences on the ninth day of each month. The young woman replied that this meant she would have to start collecting information right away. The older woman smiled and said, yes, exactly.

That was the dream. The context was that, the day before, I’d agreed to give a presentation towards the end of June about Masonic history to a local group of Freemasons, who, one must add, like to refer to their organisation as “the Craft”. I realised as I reflected on the dream that it was offering specific advice about my project: I needed to have my presentation finished by the ninth of June, and that I’d better get busy collecting information for it.

That is to say, it was making a prediction. That was when doors started swinging open, because until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right.

Yet in late 19th-century Europe, among the educated classes, opinion on dream interpretation started swinging away from those familiar positions and towards new theories of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud’s the most important figure here, though there were influential writers before him who laid the foundations for his work, and plenty of others after him that took his basic insight and ran with it, as often as not in directions that horrified him. Freud’s central claim was that dreams offered privileged access to the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts and feelings, and thus to the psyche with all its quirks and foibles. Most dreamwork has gone in that direction since: it’s about personality, not prediction.

Let’s change tracks here for a moment. It so happens that one of the other things I’ve been doing with my unwanted supply of spare time brought me face to face with a parallel shift, this time in the field of astrology. While I have a second career as a political astrologer, reading ingress and eclipse charts for entire nations, I’m also interested in natal astrology, the astrology of individual horoscopes. And one of the things I’ve been doing lately is studying the seven hefty volumes of astrological instruction written by Alan Leo, a pen name which referenced the author’s astrological sun sign at a time when astrology was still illegal in Britain. Leo’s series of books, with their focus on personality rather than prediction, can be taken as the starting point for most of modern astrology. The long history of astrology underlines how drastic this shift was. The entire science of astrology, born in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, had prediction at the very heart of its whole enterprise — but it sought to answer political, not individual, questions.

What happened on earth the last time something happened in the skies? That was the empirical question that intrigued those early astrologers. Over several millennia of careful recordkeeping, tentative hypotheses, failures, and successes, astrology as we know it came into being out of that research project. Personal horoscopes were only a side effect of that programme — the discovery that a king’s birth chart might offer some guidance about his behaviour and his impact on his kingdom helped to birth what we call natal astrology, but it was only until Alan Leo that a discernible shift can be observed.

While Leo set the movement in motion, his successors, Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones, went even further, redefining astrology as a study of personality and downplaying the entire tradition of astrological prediction. This attitude spread into other methods of divination. I’m old enough that I can recall the angry denunciations of “fortune telling” flung by tarot readers who focused on personality at the older generation of readers who focused on prediction. I also recall well, and profited from, the first ebbing of that particular tide. Early in my writing career, I used to go to various Neopagan events to make presentations and try to interest readers in my books; I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, and so I helped pay my way by doing geomancy readings for other attendees.

Geomancy, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is more or less a Western equivalent of the I Ching, using randomly generated four-digit binary numbers where the I Ching uses six-digits. What sets geomancy apart from most other ways of divination is precisely that it’s a method of prediction. You ask it a question and it gives you the answer, and by and large it’s right.

So I would settle at a table in the divination room and do readings. My rule was that I’d cast and interpret the readings and then the clients would pay me whatever they thought it was worth. I cautioned everyone who sat down for a reading that they shouldn’t ask a question if they didn’t want to know the answer, because geomancy doesn’t provide wiggle room; if you ask it “Will I achieve my fondest dream?” it’s perfectly capable of answering “No”. Of course there were people who didn’t believe me, asked questions like that, tried to get me to take back a negative answer, and ended up flinging a handful of loose change in my face and stalking away in a rage.

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While I remember such encounters, they weren’t the ones I found interesting. I was drawn to the people who wanted a straight answer even if it was negative. One woman in particular comes to mind. She sat down at the table, listened to my spiel, and asked about a grandiose and not very marketable business project. I cast the chart and it was a very strongly negative one. The woman burst into tears and thanked me, because she’d had a bad feeling about it all along, but she couldn’t get anyone — not her friends, her advisers, nor the other diviners she’d asked — to give her any response other than some mindless cheerleading. She then opened her purse, got out some bills with noticeably large numbers on them, and handed them to me, before getting up and letting the next person sit down for a reading.

My political astrology these days follows the same principle. I’m in the business of offering the most accurate predictions I can. While I’m certainly not infallible, my predictions are reliably better than, say, those of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. (Admittedly this is shooting fish in a barrel; if an economist tells you the sky is blue, go look.) As a result, I make a decent share of my income from the subscriptions I ask for in return.

My point here, however, is not to preen myself on my far from unmixed success as a prophet. It’s to point out that there’s a market niche for something that most astrologers aren’t providing: predictions, as accurate as possible, instead of personality-obsessed navel-gazing. The flight from prediction that gripped dream interpretation and astrology alike in the late 19th century has deprived a great many people of a resource they want.

That, I’ve come to think, points at the heart of the flight from prediction. The years that Leo was turning away from astrological prediction, and Freud was redefining dreams as a means of psychological introspection rather than advice about the future, were also the years when Jules Verne was inventing science fiction, and technological change was first becoming a steady process rather than a matter of occasional fits and starts. Furthermore, it was also the zenith of Europe’s rise to global empire.

It was during these years that the modern mythology of progress was invented. Victorian futuristic novels such as Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889) took it for granted that Western civilisation would suffer the usual fate. By contrast, Leo was among the early adopters of a very different view: the notion that the world stood poised on the brink of a new golden age in which all the miseries of the past would be laid to rest forever.

While that belief had been in circulation in its original religious form for a very long time, what distinguished the myth of progress was how it decked out the Christian belief of the Second Coming in secular drag, proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Millennium without any supernatural justification. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world over the long 20th century was shaped by the transformation of this secondhand mythology from a belief of fringe groups to the cultural mainstream Much of the intellectual history of the Western world since 1990, in turn, has been shaped by the gradual unravelling of the failed progressivist faith.

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By Tom Rowsell

What gives all this a bitter irony is that the world of the late 19th century was not on the doorstep of Utopia. Rather, it stood poised on the brink of utter horror. Imagine for a moment that Leo had been interested in prediction rather than personality, and that he’d been able to get a good clear look at the next century or so of world history. He would have had the chance to preview two horrific world wars, waves of genocide sweeping across much of Eurasia from Armenia in 1915-1920 to Cambodia in 1976-1978, the total collapse of European empires in a chaos of insurgencies and failed wars, the rise and fall of the Communist and Fascist movements, and much, much more of the same kind, with poison gas, aerial bombardment, and a couple of mushroom clouds in there just to add a little additional piquance.

As it happens, there were people who foresaw some of the horror in advance. One of the occultists of that era I find most appealing, the colourful Joséphin Péladan, proclaimed to a bemused Paris in 1891 that European civilisation had passed its peak. A leading figure of the Decadent movement which was also home to the now more famous Joris-Karl Huysmans, he predicted that eventually Chinese troops would conquer France and parade down the Champs Elysées —a prediction that seems far more likely right now than it must have done in his day. More generally, the entire point of the Decadent movement was the recognition that the West was in decline.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that this awareness was behind the flight from prediction. Too many people saw or sensed what was coming and so fled into a fantasy of a shining future. It’s understandable that they did so: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot noted in his interwar poem Burnt Norton. Yet there comes a point at which fleeing from the facts becomes too dangerous.

We’re arguably well past that point now. That’s why I could pay most of my travel expenses back in the day by doing geomancy readings that gave people the bad news nobody else would tell them. Outside of the airtight bubbles where our political classes spend their time many people have come to grips with the fact that the future is going to be more difficult than the past — the mirage of Utopia projected by our corporate pseudoculture will never be more than a slickly packaged daydream.

I’m not sure how long it will be before that realisation starts to affect the practice of astrology, or for that matter the interpretation of dreams. Nonetheless I’d encourage people to consider their predictive possibilities of either of these. As the long road down to the deindustrial dark ages stretches out before us, we can use all the guidance we can get.

I feel obliged to say that South Africa is a wonderful country, and a resilient one. For every horror story you see in the media — most recently the tragic blaze in Johannesburg — there are many things worthy of love. Nonetheless, three decades after the end of apartheid, it is obvious that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has failed in its historic mission: to spread the living standards formerly enjoyed by the white minority to the broad mass of the population. It has, if anything, achieved the opposite, overseeing the dereliction of the infrastructure and human potential on which any such improvement would depend.

Metaphors for this failure are everywhere. Railways that took my parents to their summer holidays as children now lie rusting and abandoned. Supermarkets sell asphalt for drivers to fill in potholes for themselves (the product is marketed as gatvol, which means both “hole-full” and “fed-up”). Criminal gangs, their numbers buoyed by an unemployment rate above 30%, cut down traffic lights for scrap, steal transformers from power stations and collapse roads with illegal mining operations. Eskom, the national power monopoly, is so ravaged by corruption that daily blackouts now last as long as nine hours.

Especially since the reign of former president Jacob Zuma, politics has descended into a looting operation that extends from multinational businesses down to local mafias, even as the impoverished majority finds its taps running dry and its sewage systems spilling over. Anger is quelled with promises to expropriate farmland and wealth from white citizens. Crime is rampant and the police are widely regarded as useless. As I say, Brits are far removed from this. They were heavily involved in Southern Africa during the 19th and early-20th centuries, sending settlers, redcoats, and gold and diamond prospectors, but today they mainly send nervous tourists. The pathologies of South African society seem as exotic as the hot, dry climate and the wild animals on the veld.

But are they really? Lately I’ve been questioning if the gulf separating the two countries is as vast as I assumed. At first it was just small things, sotto voce echoes of South Africa protruding into British life. A man begging from cars stopped at the traffic lights. An epidemic of urban homelessness. Universities renaming buildings to repudiate links with the past. A steady trickle of stories about police no longer bothering to investigate crimes. Now, a prison escape in the capital and parents scared to send their children to crumbling schools. Once I started paying attention, though, the resonances grew ever deeper. The media loves to measure Britain against the GDP of American states, European healthcare and Australian quality of life. This is supposed to be self-deprecating, but maybe it is more flattering than we care to admit. Analogies to South Africa can expose things that comparisons with rich countries leave obscured.

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Can we escape globalisation?

By Wessie du Toit

Consider the cloud of scandal and dysfunction which has settled over the UK’s privatised utilities, namely water, energy and railways. These services have increasingly been marked by cronyism, private gain, mismanagement and underinvestment, all familiar symptoms of corruption in South Africa. For years the water companies have been paying out huge dividends to shareholders, while racking up vast debt piles and spilling sewage on a daily basis. Last year, Govia Thameslink Railway was awarded a lucrative new contract, despite one of its subsidiaries, Southeastern, being caught defrauding the public purse of millions. Then again, bad trains may end up being the least of our problems, for the National Grid has warned that the UK may face power cuts in the coming winter, and is urging businesses to reduce their electricity use. There is a growing realisation that Britain does not have the grid capacity needed for the government’s decarbonisation plans.

It is becoming clear, in other words, that Britain’s post-Eighties regime of privatisation has led to a subtle form of the South African disease. The state fails to maintain and improve infrastructure, while allowing the asset-stripping of national wealth by private interests. Who needs criminal syndicates when you have hedge funds and private equity firms? There was something especially South African in ministers’ claims that Thames Water cannot be renationalised, despite its severe debt crisis, because doing so would scare away the foreign investors who prop up the UK’s economy.

Meanwhile, the Tory party does an increasingly passable impression of the ANC. Apparently convinced it will be in power forever, it has become little more than a vehicle for personal advancement and influence peddling, disguising its aimlessness with an occasional bout of populist rhetoric. This was especially evident during the Covid pandemic, when the genteel traditions of British corruption — peerages in exchange for political and financial support — gave way to the handing out of state contracts worth billions to politically connected companies, often lacking relevant experience.

The South African comparison also casts a revealing light on Britain’s social cleavages, though I am not talking about the kinds of ethnic tensions for which South Africa is infamous. It is true that the UK economy’s voracious appetite for immigration, an easy source of cheap labour and consumers, resembles South Africa’s habit of exploiting migrants from elsewhere in Africa. But one only has to look at the frequent anti-immigrant pogroms in South African townships to see that, for all the anxieties over integration, British society remains a relative picture of harmony.

The real issue is class. Brits often express shock that extreme inequality appears so normalised in South Africa, but an outsider to the UK could make a similar charge. In post-industrial Britain, working classes of all ethnicities are consigned to poverty wages in jobs such as cleaning, shelf-stacking and delivery driving, if they have not dropped out of the workforce altogether. London and its surrounding counties have become, like South Africa’s Western Cape, the luxurious facade Britain shows to the world; but other parts of the country are faring much worse, with healthy life expectancy trailing significantly in parts of Northern England, Scotland and Wales. Countless towns have fallen into abject poverty, regarded by polite society with little more concern than South African townships, their inhabitants ruled unfit for anything better by the very fact of remaining there. Social mobility, we are told this week, is at its worst in more than 50 years.

This wasted potential is tragic on its own terms, but it has wider ramifications, too. In South Africa, where 29 million people receive state welfare grants and only 7.4 million pay tax, the state is trapped in a doom-loop, with spending on social programmes hampering investment that could benefit the economy. But to look at projections for the British state’s ever-growing benefits, health care and social care bills, it seems we may be heading for a similar scenario. These parallels will doubtless seem absurd to many Brits, and doubly so to South Africans. Earlier this year, when I mentioned to some friends over there that the UK has its own problems with government incompetence, they literally laughed in my face.

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Will Russia split up the Brics?

By Brian Pottinger

After the Cold War, the rubric of “developed” and “developing” countries implied that the Western model was the endpoint of economic progress across the world. Three decades later, the distinctive features of that model — nation-states with strong civic cultures, meaningful democratic conflict, economic growth and a commitment to broad-based prosperity — have themselves been eroded by globalisation. Hence developing countries provide an increasingly plausible model for the future of developed ones, rather than vice-versa. In this sense, at least, Britain remains at the vanguard of global capitalism. And making this explicit ought to help in countering complacency. For all their gallows humour, the British are used to counting themselves among the world’s most advanced and admired nations, and so struggle to grasp the possibility that, in 50 years’ time, this may no longer be the case. Which brings me to the most disturbing echo of South Africa I’ve noticed in recent years.

This is something more amorphous: a matter of mood and mentality. South Africans have come to regard their chaotic and inept state with a weary resignation that borders on ridicule. It is a burden to be negotiated when necessary, and fended off where possible. For some time now, Britain’s attitude to its own governing class has been moving in the same direction. New Labour alienated large parts of the traditional Left, and now Tory incompetence has led to similar cynicism among conservatives. With each perceived betrayal, more people enter the reservoir of citizens who have given up believing that Westminster can do anything remotely useful.

These feelings have real consequences for a country’s prospects. Why do so many people stubbornly resist house-building and planning reform? Why do they see it as common sense to reject society’s claims on their resources? Part of the reason is surely that, once we lose faith in the nation’s political authorities, appeals to compromise for the greater good ring hollow. Or to put it in terms a South African would understand: the British are gatvol.

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

This drama of political decadence defies easy categorisation. Aristotle wrote that tragedy depicts people who are better, and comedy worse, than us spectators. Biden and Trump are certainly worse than those who voted them into office, but they are not remotely funny. Their antics are repellent and their goofiness unlovable. Observing them and the choral leaders that follow in their train — jerky puppets like Rudy Giuliani sweating hair-dye, or Anthony Fauci claiming to be science itself — Americans feel only shame and dread, without the cathartic release of laughter or tears.

These trapped emotions spring from the same source. They are visceral responses to the approaching death by senescence of the American experiment in ordered liberty. The problem goes well beyond presidential dementia. The US Senate (from the Latin senex, “old”) looks more like the waiting room of a geriatric neurologist than a council of wise elders. There’s Mitch McConnell, prone to falls and freeze-ups; wheelchair-bound and confused Dianne Feinstein; and John Fetterman, who at only 53 is less fit for public service than any other member of that formerly august body. It’s as if C-SPAN, a network that televises congressional hearings, decided instead to air absurdist, post-apocalyptic horror films.

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Ideology has poisoned the West

By Jacob Howland

The zombification of the Capitol — not to mention our city streets, which have become permanent encampments of the dazed and disturbed — is merely a symptom of the underlying disease. Like all institutions, politics falls apart without regular infusions of constructive energy. A modern democracy is healthy only if its major parties grow organically from their voters, representing their interests by habit and inclination even more than conscious effort.

But the grassroots politics Tocqueville admired when he visited the US in the 1830s gave way long ago to the top-down astroturfing of technocratic managerialism. Our governing elites represent no one but themselves and their cronies, and they don’t welcome shocks to the system. Insurgent candidates such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose public elevation of the concerns of many Americans aims to revitalise national politics, are censored and met with active resistance, even by their own parties.

It’s not just in politics that the wellsprings of individual and social vitality have dried up. Americans are marrying less and later, and having too few children, to reproduce themselves and the families that nurtured them. What is more, our public schools have largely ceased to transmit the accumulated knowledge and civilisational wisdom of the past to the children we do have. A taste for historical repudiation has taken hold across the culture, leading curators to “contextualise” art, city governments to take down statues, colleges to rename buildings, and publishers to censor or rewrite books. But creativity withers when it ceases to be nourished by the oxygenated blood of the tradition. Little wonder that Hollywood increasingly cannibalises its legacy by pouring old films into new plastic scripts.

Technology has exacerbated our national enervation. We have become charging-stations for our smartphones, which drain psychic energy with insistent distractions and overloads of information-babble. Video calls and work-from-home limit in-person interactions with actual existing individuals, who would otherwise be together for most of their weekly waking hours. Targeted advertising, fine-tuned algorithms, and politically stratified social media sharply decrease our exposure to new ideas. We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.

AI language-learning models offer a cautionary parable of these larger cultural developments. Programs such as ChatGPT, whose writing remains formulaic and prone to errors, learn by sifting through a sea of digitalised text, a growing share of which consists of AI-generated content. The predictable result of this feedback loop is the kind of levelling we’ve seen across our institutions. Like newspapers that drink their own ink — and which ones don’t, these days? — their product can only get worse.

Cultural exhaustion, social withdrawal, and the general enfeeblement of life forces are the practical expression of a will to nothing. There is a name for this spiritual and intellectual condition, and it is nihilism. Nihilism is demonic to the extent that the will to nothing is still a will, a life force. That it is only a negative one is by no means reassuring, because it is easier and more economical to tear down than to build up. Destruction is dramatic and accomplishes the illusion of vitality with relatively little energy. And who in this apocalyptic time, including the nihilist, doesn’t want to feel even a little alive?

Over the past few months, researching a book on Britain’s long, troubled relationship with Europe, I have found a strange solace in the almost seasonal nature of our national life, with its endless wintery crises (usually involving the weakness of the pound and our ability to pay our way) that eventually give way to spring-like calms. Ben Pimlott’s biography of Harold Wilson, for example, is like a thunderstorm of charm and disorder, short fixes and political escapism. There was, of course, plenty of honour and achievement along the way, but as you turn the final page, you cannot help but wonder what it all amounted to. Here was a magical politician who dominated British politics for more than a decade, only to fade from national consciousness with alarming speed, his ghost barely even troubling the minds of his successors let alone haunting them. Today, Wilson is back in vogue as the man who finally ended 13 years of Tory rule, a favourite of Keir Starmer and some Sixties nostalgics, but this was a man almost broken by his own decline — and his country’s.

Wilson, though, is the rule in this regard, not the exception. A similar air of despondency hangs over almost all of Britain’s post war leaders up until 1979, each of whom fixated on the notion of British decline but were unable to escape its clutches.

And yet, here is the strange reality: despite it all, the country continued its slow, steady trudge over the fells, never veering much from the path it had been on before, the economy growing at much the same rate, only more slowly with each passing decade. Britain’s decline was largely relative, the living standards of people in Britain improving year on year.

Anyone scanning the record of British economic growth from 1949 to 2022 would be hard-pressed to spot any transformative moment. From our entry into the Common Market in 1973 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, or, indeed, the referendum to leave the EU in 2016, we continued plodding along largely as before, however transformative we convinced ourselves one set of leaders or another was at the time. To the casual observer, it is the recessions which catch the eye more than the booms, most of which blew in from abroad, largely beyond the control of our leaders, the pandemic just the latest example. For Britain, the truth is that our crises are never quite as important as we imagine — and nor are our leaders.

To illustrate the point, here’s a challenge: when was the last time a British government or prime minister pro-actively achieved something of lasting importance, addressing some great strategic threat before it became an existential challenge? The disasters are far easier to list, but not the lasting achievements. Did any of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss leave us with any lasting monument to progress? It is hard to think of one. They largely managed crises — or, more often, caused them.

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What's wrong with our prime ministers?

By John Maier

Johnson took Britain out of the European Union, of course, but that hardly passes the test. The best that can be said for his Brexit negotiation is that it acted as a kind of emergency stent, unblocking the arteries of British democracy at a time when they had become fatally obstructed by the political failure to enact the result of the referendum. In itself this was no small thing, perhaps even a service to democracy, but it was an operation to deal with an emergency health crisis — not to stop one from happening in the first place. It also came at the obvious cost of creating a whole series of other crises that we are still living with today. Besides this, what else does Johnson have to show for his time in office that would not have happened without him? Ukraine has benefited from his instinctive, full-throated and continuing support, but let’s be honest, it is not British support which makes the difference in the Donbas — but American.

Johnson’s one strategic offer was his promise to use Brexit as a spur for a great national reset: “levelling up”. But what has happened since? Less than a year after he left office this policy already seems dead. Again, though, Johnson’s failure is not exceptional. In politics, turning the tide is almost impossible. Anthony Eden tried to protect Britain’s global status from the post-war reality only to reveal its decline at Suez; Harold Macmillan attempted something similar by trying to join Europe, only to be rejected by de Gaulle. Wilson’s grand plan to revolutionise the British economy with planning and science was then mugged by reality, while Ted Heath’s great corporatist alternative was similarly ended by events. All failed.

Even Margaret Thatcher, who is widely thought to have succeeded in her mission to radically reform Britain, is flattered by the narrative. A quick glance at Britain’s economic growth before and after she became prime minister suggests a far less revolutionary reality than we often imagine. Overall, Mrs Thatcher spent 11 years in power, her time defined by a period of decent but by no means extraordinary growth bookended by two deep recessions. In reality, her great success was relative. Britain grew faster than its European counterparts during her time in office, which had not been the case beforehand.

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Should Martin Lewis be Prime Minister?

By Chris Clarke

Today it is hard to look back at the premierships of those who came next and think of a single lasting endowment. Perhaps Cameron can put gay marriage on his ledger, but once again, it is hard to believe that had he not existed, gay marriage would be illegal today. As brave and principled as it was, the reform was largely a reflection of the great social change happening across the Western world. The banal truth is that our prime ministers spend most of their time surfing the zeitgeist, not making it.

I remember challenging Boris Johnson about this very point after travelling with him to Northern Ireland a couple of years ago. He’d told me he was reading James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year In The Life Of William Shakespeare (I later realised this must have been research for his biography). The book spends much of its early pages detailing the trouble Queen Elizabeth was facing that year in Ulster. And there we were, I thought, four centuries on, and the British prime minister travelling back and forward to Northern Ireland still unsure how to handle events there. “It’s very, very hard to change the fundamentals,” Johnson told me. Yet he was confident that he could. Quaint, really, and yet he is still trying to bend history to his will.

Blair is closest to Thatcher in leaving relics which continue to shape our world. And yet even his greatest legacies are now either crumbling or ambiguous. The Good Friday Agreement remains a source of almost mystic reverence — despite (or largely because of) the reality that few seem to know what it contains. But even this great covenant of peace is now barely functioning as a result of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol (though the peace it helped bring about still holds). Devolution, meanwhile, that other lasting legacy of Blairite reform, has lost its halo, no longer the stabilising constitutional act it was once supposed to be, but something closer to the opposite. Regardless, however profoundly important these two achievements were — and are — they were only parts of a wider strategy to turn Britain into what he saw as a modern European state. And if we judge him on this score, he failed just like the rest of them.

When surveying our political past, then, it’s hard to avoid the sense of an undercurrent pulling us along slowly, whatever frothy chaos we endure on the surface. When we are outperforming our European counterparts, we mistake the swell for normality, only to sink back down in time. Then, when we are being outperformed, we fret about permanent submersion. Over the long term, though, we bob along, like Poohsticks in a stream, change happening to us more often than not.

All of this might seem reason enough for despondency. But in a sense, it is evidence for hope. Britain might be in a tough spot right now, but the current flows on. Prime Ministers are never quite as transformative as they seem — for good or bad. In Westminster, managerial normality is already reasserting itself after the years of Johnson. What many hoped would be a great reset in national political and economic life has proved anything but. There has been no revolution in the country’s social and economic model, no great reduction in migration, or taxation, regulation or trade — so far only the old system, but with worse trading conditions.

To my mind, Britain should fear less calamitous, irreversible decline than soul-sapping unchangeable continuity. Leaders are rarely successful in diverting the great global currents that shape our world, but they must at least offer hope that they can be managed and used to the national advantage. Right now there is a dispiriting paucity of ideas about how Britain is supposed to do this today, or even a story for us to make sense of it all. Neither Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak has yet to show a way through the fog ahead.

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Liz Truss still haunts the Tories

By Robert Saunders

The tragi-comic figure of Liz Truss briefly tried something radical — and was quickly removed under pressure from the international markets. She may console herself that she is this country’s Barry Goldwater, the hero of the American right who lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 only to inspire the conservative revolution that eventually swept all before it. All defeated leaders turn themselves into prophets in this way. Such a fate is unlikely to be Truss’s however. But still, another lesson from Britain’s post war history is that the ideas which grow to define our national story often begin their lives on the fringes, dismissed and rejected until eventually they are adapted and then adopted. This was the case with pro-Europeanism once upon a time and then much later on anti-Europeanism.

In Robert Blake’s masterful biography of Benjamin Disraeli, he tells the story of Disraeli’s early radicalism in a group of like-minded Tory ultras known as Young England who opposed free trade and the erosion of the old order. “The history of Young England has all the charm and nostalgia which attend tales of forlorn hopes and lost causes,” Blake writes. “[But] the success of such movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure. They must, rather, be regarded as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation; showing that a gesture, however absurd it may seem to contemporaries, may sometimes live longer.” Is there a more uplifting message? Young England lost — and won. Disraeli became prime minister, created a new Toryism that continues to shape our political world but also accepted defeat in his opposition to free trade.

The search is on for the Young England radicals of today, the forlorn dreamers and romantics who will shape our future, alongside the diligent conformers who will manage it. The eurosceptics were once this band, but are no more — having secured almost complete victory after their years of seemingly hopeless retreat. But who will take their place today? Who will offer the country an imaginative glow to light the journey ahead? Right now, it is hard to see them emerging from either Labour or the Conservatives. But they will come. They always do.

“New Year should be a time of optimism and excitement,” he said. “Yet I know many of you look ahead to 2023 with apprehension.” Sunak cheerily called for a rejection of pessimism and fatalism, and refused to limit aspirations. Narrated like an adult reading a storybook to a child before bed, the speech’s sunny tone felt misjudged. And delivered with such cloying earnestness and saccharine enthusiasm, it had the subtlety and grace of a clown in a morgue.

Optimism is a powerful, unifying force, and Sunak is right to identify it as an important political goal. But there was something missing in his message — a reason to feel optimistic. Platitudes don’t pay for heating bills or get you seen by a GP faster — people need concrete, tangible reasons to believe that things are getting better, or at the very least, will do soon. The future of Sunak’s party depends on it.

When people are scared, they want realism — they to be levelled with. “I don’t expect you to like my message, but I hope you will understand and agree with my justifications for it,” he could have said. But the speech contained no comprehensive policy shift — no reason for people to buy-in to changes that might improve their lives with commitment and patience. It was just more of the same motherhood and apple pie that has been promised before, but delivered in an even more cheerful manner.

An ill mood grips the country, not just because of frustration at temporary factors like strike disruption or winter pressures on health services — our political economy is convulsing under chronic polycrisis. The annual NHS winter struggle began last summer, and continues to metastasise through record A&E delays, growing waiting lists and an overstretched ambulance service. Our sea border is, in practice, an open door with a criminal gang empire attached. Inflation stands at a 40-year high. Every train journey now requires strike planning. Nothing seems to be working. I sat with the foreign-born head of a large business recently who asked me, “Why do the British put up with so much? In France, Italy, or Spain, they would be rioting in the streets at half of this.” They are right to be perplexed by our passivity to mediocrity and relative national decline. Said to be one of our great and admirable national character strengths, the British stiff upper lip is proving our undoing.

But instead of introspection about economic growth and government competence — and where it isn’t coming from — ruling Conservative politicians are often wallowing in pessimism and giving up the fight: rising stars such as Dehenna Davison, and established parliamentarians such Sajid Javid and William Wragg have all announced their intention to stand down at the next election. And those who remain can be overheard moaning to journalists about how difficult being in charge is. Sympathy, as they say, is in the dictionary.

Tories, far from selling Sunak’s intended optimistic vision of betterment and progress to the electorate, are now shadowboxing an imagined liberal-Remain establishment that, after over a decade of holding the levers of power in No 10, prevents them from improving things. Far better to play fight with a pretend, ever-shifting and invisible enemy, than to properly look yourself in the mirror, and be haunted by the mundane reality of your own serial incompetence. It is no longer enough, or even credible in the eyes of voters, to say that Labour would be worse than this rabble.

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Will conservatism survive 2023?

By John Oxley

Government frontbenchers such as Andrew Griffith will not be taken seriously by voters if they actively celebrate the fact that the agencies they run work better under emergency army management, than they did under the previous staff of 12 years. Criticising the failure of national institutions is what oppositions do, not His Majesty’s ministers. Meanwhile, other senior Conservatives cosplay being poor in this season of squeezed incomes, as they spout tone-deaf frugality porn of ironing gift wrap from the comfort of their middle-class cottage, complete with wood-beam ceiling. At best this saves pennies, while offering the environmental benefit of perhaps a gram of sirloin steak. It is bread and circuses, without the bread, and without a circus.

Enough with this Stakhanovite Oympics of suffering in which the individuals engage in performative parsimony for the good of the nation. Instead of Tory MPs judging marginally above average-earning firefighters for using food banks, they should be asking themselves why food bank usage is surged under their watch, and why someone on an above-average income would turn to such a facility. They should be asking themselves if austerity actually achieved anything at all.

The Conservative Party has, recently, burned through as many ideologies as it has leaders, realising in turn that each are electoral dead-ends. First it gave up on Cameronite liberal conservatism. Then, under Theresa May, it gave up on austerity. Now, it has given up on optimistic Johnsonian boosterism. It’s all but given up on Brexit, electing to ignore the lack of delivery to date. And it’s in the process of giving up its one remaining ideology: power for its own sake.

It is not the leadership nor the senior parliamentarians of the party that are keeping the pilot light of conservatism lit. It is what remains of the scorched grassroots. Take the recently launched Next Gen Tories campaign group. Led by 27-year-old James Cowling, chair of the Greenwich Conservative constituency association, the group has a far more optimistic and comprehensive ideological vision for what the country needs to sail out of the economic and political doldrums than any government minister.

The group rightly identifies the modern Conservative curse — that by chasing its own electoral advantage by enfranchising and enriching elderly homeowners, it has yielded a highly unequal, low-growth society in which the young have no incentive to become conservatives themselves. This is not inevitable — as John Burn Murdoch recently put it, “Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics.” It could be a Greek tragedy: by mindlessly and greedily chasing power over policy outcomes, the vainglorious fool destroyed itself — and nobody cared.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

We should all be particularly worried by Sunak’s obsession with “innovation” — mentioned 11 times in his speech. Not because it isn’t a laudable aim, but because it is clearly his grand vision of where economic growth will come from. Certainly, we should increase capital investment tax breaks to incentivise businesses to invest in new technologies, as Sunak himself has acknowledged. But innovation in a modern economy requires not proximity to coal and iron ore and investment in new machinery; it requires great minds to meet in cities to discuss their ideas, and the larger the city the better.

This matters when the British planning system prevents the growth of cities and even the densification of already-urban areas. In a world where the basic tenets of 20th-century capitalism, such as homeownership, are not granted to the young as they mature into middle age, why bother moving to a city to better yourself? Sunak’s Tory electoral coalition of elderly homeowners have no interest in homebuilding to reduce the cost of living for their children and grandchildren. Nor do they care about innovation, now they have left the workforce.

Without growing cities, we can give up on productivity growth. And without productivity growth, we can give up on the money to solve our polycrisis society. “I pledge that I will be honest about the challenges we face. And I will take the tough but necessary decisions to ensure our great country achieves its enormous potential.” Sorry, Mr Sunak. You’ve fallen at the first hurdle.

The volume was the result of a research project funded by the Club of Rome and carried out at MIT, which at the time had some of the world’s most sophisticated computers. It was translated into 30 languages and sold somewhere in excess of 30 million copies. Robert C. Townsend, author of the then-famous book Up the Organization, summed up the general reaction in a neat sentence: “If this book doesn’t blow everybody’s mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput.”

Of course there was pushback. Within days of its publication, articles denouncing its conclusions started popping up in the media. Books followed, claiming to prove that there was nothing to worry about and infinite growth really could continue forever. Two things made the pushback fascinating to students of human folly. The first is that it so systematically misstated everything that the scientists behind The Limits to Growth were saying. The second was that it succeeded in drowning out what the scientists were saying and replacing it with a caricature that was easy to dismiss.

The same caricature remains glued in place today. Listen to defenders of the conventional wisdom, and you’ll find any number of supposedly serious thinkers insisting that The Limits to Growth claimed that the world would run out of petroleum by the end of the 20th century, or that some other catastrophe would arrive long before now.

It requires no more than a casual reading of the book to discover that these statements are quite simply wrong: The Limits to Growth said no such thing. Yet the lie continues to circulate, because it makes it easier for most of us to avoid asking hard questions about the future of the industrial world.

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It is thus worth taking a moment to understand exactly what the book was trying to say. To begin with, it wasn’t offering predictions. It was exploring principles. The World3 computer model used to generate the famous graphs went through dozens of different runs, each with its own set of initial assumptions. The goal of the project was to show how the complex system we call human industrial civilisation unfolds over time. It showed that two crucial factors, both of which behave in counterintuitive ways, set the stage for disaster.

The first of these is exponential growth. Most people have encountered the old story about the Indian sage who challenged a king to a game of chess and asked for a simple gift if he won: one grain of rice for the first square on the board, two for the second, four for the third, and so on through all 64 squares, with each square getting double the number of rice grains as the one before it.

When the king lost the game, he discovered that he had offered the sage an impossible boon: the total amount of rice he owed the sage amounted to more than 210 billion tonnes, enough to cover the entire nation of India with a meter-thick layer of rice.

Most people, when they encounter this story, insist that there has to be something wrong with the maths — that there’s no way a mere 64 doublings could amount to that much rice. There’s something wrong, all right, but it’s not the maths. The human mind instinctively imagines growth in linear rather than exponential terms. There’s probably good evolutionary reason for that — in the world our tribal ancestors inhabited for all those millennia, linear growth was the rule and exponential growth the almost unheard-of exception. But it’s a lethal liability now, when technology has unleashed a whole cascade of exponential growth curves that our minds can’t even begin to grasp without a serious struggle.

That’s one of the two crucial issues that The Limits to Growth anatomised. The other is the impact of delaying factors on the ability of human societies to adjust to change. To borrow a helpful analogy from the book, one of the things that drivers have to take into account is the delay between when they see a problem in the road ahead and when the car can respond to it. That’s why good drivers slow down when visibility is low, or when they are driving in residential neighbourhoods where a child might dart out into the street without warning. The bigger the vehicle is and the faster it’s moving, the more time it takes to swerve or stop.

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Delaying factors play an equally challenging role in steering or braking modern industrial civilisation, the biggest and fastest vehicle of all. Anthropogenic climate change makes a good example. Billions of tonnes of heat-trapping greenhouse gases were dumped into the atmosphere from smokestacks and car exhausts before anyone noticed that the planet was warming and climate belts were shifting unpredictably. Most of the climate impacts of the pollution already absorbed by the atmosphere have not yet happened, since the sheer mass of atmosphere and oceans imposes a big delaying factor on them.

In other words, even if we slammed on the brakes now, skidding to a halt is going to take a while — and since it’s still politically possible to ignore the consequences, most nations are still paying lip service to the climate change crisis and continuing to burn fossil fuels as though there’s no tomorrow.

In the real world, exponential growth leads to crisis far sooner than our intuitive models lead us to expect. In the real world, delaying factors make it a lethal mistake to wait until crisis arrives before enacting countermeasures. Combine those two principles and you end up with a stark warning of impending trouble— and that’s exactly what The Limits to Growth provided.

The warning, as we all know, was not heeded in any meaningful way. Talking heads pontificated for a few years, before other topics seized the collective imagination of the chattering classes, and the environmental movement struggled on gamely for another decade or so, before selling out to moneyed interests and turning into yet another set of slick corporate enablers. Most people dismissed the environmental prophecies of the Seventies out of hand, and embraced the conviction that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived. Meanwhile every variable tracked by the MIT study did exactly what the World3 model predicted it would, setting us up for our present predicament.

The close fit between the model and the reality didn’t quite go unnoticed. In 2000, investment guru Matthew R. Simmons published a paper titled “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?” Simmons assessed the predictions from the MIT study, compared them to nearly three decades of evidence, and pointed out that the World3 model stood up much better than the predictions of its critics: “For a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.”

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In 2014, a study published by researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia, headed by Graham Turner, factored in another decade and a half of data and got the same results. Last year, in turn, a study by Gaya Herrington compared the World3 model with empirical data and once again found the model to be impressively accurate. Did any of these findings influence public policy, or even start to clear away the fog of misinformation that surrounds The Limits to Growth half a century after its publication? Not to any extent that matters.

Thus it’s probably wise to assume that a model that yielded accurate predictions of the last 50 years can be expected to yield equally accurate predictions of the 50 years ahead. Here again, misstatements about, so it is worth reviewing what The Limits to Growth actually said about the future:

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

The growth trends of 1972 did in fact continue unchanged, and so here we are.

In most of the World3 runs that assumed realistic resource limits and unaltered public attitudes, crunch time arrives sometime around 2015-2030. That’s when pollution begins to cause significant global disruptions, global food supply falters, global industrial output starts a prolonged contraction, and global population peaks and begins to decline as well. If this doesn’t sound familiar, you might want to get out more often.

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It’s crucial here to avoid that bizarre astigmatism of the imagination that convinces so many people nowadays that the only possible alternative to business as usual is apocalyptic collapse. Most of the World3 runs, including the ones that match the real world most closely, don’t predict collapse. They predict decline. That’s the future The Limits to Growth traces out ahead of us: a long era of unstoppable contraction in which the exponential growth of the last two centuries or so slams into reverse, and global population and industrial output contract steadily, year after year and decade after decade, until these and other variables finally reach a level that can be sustained over the long term.

From within the conventional wisdom of our time, that long arc of decline is unthinkable. That’s why the warning of The Limits to Growth went unheeded. What too few people were willing to consider back in 1972 is that the future is under no obligation to behave in thinkable ways. Now that the limits to growth are rising up all around us, as global population peaks, industrial output falters, the point at which crisis can be averted is long past. All we can do is try to brace ourselves for a future that will leave the fake certainties of our age in tatters.