This demonstration, which took place on Saturday morning, marks a potential turning point in Britain’s anti-migration politics. In the social-media era, the most important aspect of protest is the image it presents to audiences watching elsewhere, and this was a spectacle designed to appear not just intimidating but, more importantly, organized and disciplined. That message was further amplified by the protesters managing to catch the authorities unawares, leaving them free to block a major port without the escort of high-vis police minders that tends to make such events look like futile tantrums.

What followed on Sunday night in Portsmouth was more messy. Another large group of demonstrators, apparently including a contingent of locals, tried to prevent the authorities from moving a newly arrived boatload of Channel migrants inland, leading to chaotic nighttime skirmishes with riot police. But here, too, there was a concerted effort to look organized and even official. Danny Thomas, the activist who appears to have orchestrated both protests, was filmed parlaying with police, making demands and requesting meetings with senior politicians. At one stage, he even read out a statement from a lawyer on a loudspeaker. In both Dover and Portsmouth, the demonstrators ultimately withdrew rather than escalating.

Having caught the country’s attention, Thomas has now burst onto the political scene. He describes his movement, Patriot Platform, as a “Christian patriotic army” which originated in a South London church (one of its slogans is “Christ is King”), and he claims it numbers in the tens of thousands. According to news reports, his previous career involved a number of manual and white-collar jobs, as well as a two-year prison sentence for attempting to kidnap someone at knifepoint over a drugs-related dispute. Besides his Christian awakening, in the past decade Thomas has been an associate of Tommy Robinson and has become a full-time anti-migration activist, traveling to the French coast to deter migrants from crossing.

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The most intriguing aspect of Thomas’s past, though, is his stint as a tank driver in the Royal Hussars. As the Dover protest suggests, he aspires to a quasi-military style of politics, nonviolent but muscular, masculine and regimented. As he told Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf in a public dialogue this week, “we have working-class men… who build the houses that you live in, they build the roads that you drive on”, and now “they’re standing up for their women and children”. Insisting that he had no intention of breaking the law, Thomas theatrically asserted that the goal was to forge a mass-movement which would deliver a political party to power at the next election: “we are building a voting bloc… and that voting bloc will go to the most suitable candidate, and to the most suitable party that is able to bring this country back into order.” He ignores the fact that a patriotic Christian voting bloc sounds very much like the sectarianism which mass-immigration is routinely blamed for.

It remains to be seen whether Thomas really has the authority or the motives he claims, but any degree of professionalization in anti-migration protests will be a significant change. Until now, participation by concerned locals and sympathetic groups such as the Pink Ladies has tended to be overshadowed by aggressive and inebriated men seeking out confrontation with the police. This has suited the Government and other opponents quite well. Their strongest defenses against such demonstrations are social stigma and a police force which tracks down and arrests wrongdoers after the fact. So long as protests are associated with hooligans, coke-heads and petty criminals making a fool of themselves in front of police cameras, their political impact will be limited.

A movement with a semblance of structure could present a more serious challenge, to the state and potentially to British society as well. Protesters backed by a considered legal and public relations strategy will likely be more difficult to contain than those who simply want to express themselves. But, more ominously, a lesson of the 20th century is that disaffected young men find uniforms and institutional discipline rather appealing. In times when manpower mattered more than technology, political movements of Left and Right, and indeed entire nations, organized themselves around the mobilization of men in clubs, unions, and other associations. Dressing up and parading around for a political cause offers a sense of purpose and belonging, something that is hard to come by in an atomized, economically stagnant society like our own.

There is something to Orwell’s notion that this tendency has been less pronounced in England than elsewhere: in response to Mosley’s Blackshirts, the Government in 1936 went as far as banning political uniforms in public, a law that some have suggested should now be used against Thomas’s movement. But the picture looks rather different when you include Ireland. Armed and uniformed supporters of the Irish Unionists marched through English cities in the 1910s, and paramilitaries were, of course, central to the carnage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties. That period of sectarian violence was the precedent that many observers reached for after Saturday’s demonstration in Dover.

The main reason for such chilling comparisons was the protesters’ use of masks and balaclavas, essentially a threat of anarchy in visual form. It is true that large masked crowds have been a feature of Palestine marches for years, and that masked adolescents on e-scooters have become commonplace in British cities since the pandemic. The latter may reflect the influence of drill music and its associations with gang culture, but generally speaking, masks are a natural consequence of the panopticon quality of contemporary society, where identification by the authorities or by online partisans is an ambient threat that can lead to entering a police database or being hounded out of employment. This was the basis on which Thomas defended the use of masks at protests. He will find sympathy from parts of the Right, where there is already a culture of online anonymity, presented as a necessary precaution for dissidents against a woke police state.

None of this changes the fundamentally threatening character of a group of men in masks. Whatever the intention, it is a gesture that communicates a willingness to act beyond the bounds of law and social norms. Given that our faces are our most intimate means of communication, it also signals a rejection of the public sphere as a place of political dialog. It is a sign of how powerful this symbolism is that it instantly created a divide within the broader anti-migration movement, with Nigel Farage and other Reform politicians denouncing the masked protesters in categorical terms. Farage has since gone further and proposed a ban on all face-coverings in public, including religious ones, on the grounds that “in a civilized soci­ety, people should be identifiable in pub­lic”.

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This looks like an obvious way for Reform to draw a clear line between itself and more extreme expressions of anti-migration sentiment, but in fact, a figure like Thomas is a nightmare for the party. To offer him any kind of backing would leave Reform open to the very real risk that his protest movement will unravel into violence and criminality. That would be a stupid bet to make; but not making it will drive Thomas’s supporters towards Reform’s rival on the Right, Restore Britain, whose leader Rupert Lowe has endorsed the masked protests as “perfectly reasonable”. Lowe is targeting a smaller and more radical section of opinion, and so has less to worry about in terms of reputational harm; but his base is already big enough to cause serious electoral damage to Reform.

Another clear winner is Andy Burnham, who has denounced the weekend’s events as “the politics of poison”, and who can now use the specter of fascist mobs to help him lure Left-leaning voters back to the Labour Party. The only way that anti-migration protests are likely to persuade a broader section of the public is through the participation of people who appear ordinary and non-threatening, but it is unlikely that Thomas’s outfit will be any-more attractive to such people than his scrappy predecessors were.

Still, much will depend on how a more organized protest movement, assuming such a thing actually emerges, chooses to act. The most instructive examples come, ironically enough, from Left-wing politics, which has had a far greater impact in terms of direct action in recent years. In one scenario, the migration protests could follow the lead of groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Defend Our Juries, staging provocations that are calculated to polarize the public and thus build pressure on political parties. Another possible outcome is suggested by Antifa in the United States, a movement which exudes chaos and violence to the extent that it is more likely to discredit politicians who fail to distance themselves from it.

Antifa, of course, is no stranger to masks and uniforms, and herein lies the starkest warning about this style of politics. Orwell hated aggressive military displays because he thought they represented the raw enjoyment of power, in the form of a laughable spectacle that one is not allowed to laugh at. But when this tendency seeps into the politics of the street, another danger emerges. Uniforms may suggest a degree of order and discipline, but they are more likely to produce chaos: they invite individuals to submerge their identities in a collective commitment to a cause, a radicalizing process which can rapidly become a conduit for reckless and unpredictable forces to emerge. Thomas thinks he can direct his anonymous foot-soldiers, but once you put men in masks and identical clothing, you have started something that you likely cannot control.

Yerbury, by his own account, is an “ethnocentric nationalist” and a third positionist. His economic views lie somewhere between capitalism and communism. He might also be called a fascist. Growing up in Australia, he returned to Britain, his parent’s homeland, and joined the army at 20 in 2015. Six years of service left him with an appreciation of military discipline and structure. Society, he thought, might be better organized along those lines than as a multi-party democracy. Collective will trumps liberal individualism. 

Back on civvie street, Yerbury joined Patriotic Alternative, a hard-Right outfit led by another admirer of Hitler, Mark Collett, but came to believe it had no solutions to the nation’s problems and quit after about 15 months. He founded the National Support Detachment to back anti-migrant protests, but this also came to little. 

In 2024, Yerbury registered the National Rebirth Party (NRP) with the Electoral Commission. It has high ambitions. Within 10 to 15 years, Yerbury told me, he expects to win national power. The Labour Party had taken longer to move from inception to victory, he acknowledged, but the scale of the crisis facing Britain is greater now. Progress seems slow so far, though. To date, the NRP has a little over 100 members. 

The party is interested in addressing the causes of Britain’s demographic shift to a multiracial, multicultural society, rather than simply condemning immigration. Were its cadre to take power, they would establish a one-party state and deport as many non-whites as they could, while recognizing that a 100% white Britain is likely a pipe dream. 

“The aim,” Yerbury told me when we first spoke over the phone, “should be for the country to be as homogenous as possible.” 

“If you’re running for election,” I suggested, “sort of the pitch to the public is: ‘Vote for us, and we’re gonna be in charge forever.’” 

“Well,” he replied, “I would say the pitch is actually: vote for us for a genuine national rebirth.” 

***

A decade on from the murder of Jo Cox at the hands of the white supremacist Thomas Mair, a new generation of hardline neo-Nazis believe they are standing on the edge of a historic breakthrough. Following the Southport attack, asylum hotel protests and the murder of Henry Nowak, they see an opportunity to latch onto a large and dynamic movement. In their eyes, locals concerned about unvetted migrant men are ripe to be converted to a far more radical ideology. 

Anti-migrant demonstrations, one particularly hardline activist told me, had achieved two things: expanding the social base for racial nationalism and normalizing violent, physical resistance to the state. “That sense of momentum,” they suggested, “is a powerful recruiting tool even if it’s chaotic.”

Over the past 10 years, meanwhile, Holocaust denial and explicit antisemitism have burst into the mainstream. The world’s most famous rapper wrote an ode to Hitler; young male streamers attack Jewish influence; the President of America dined with Nick Fuentes, an impish Shoah revisionist. “Six million cookies?” he asked in a 2019 video, comparing dead Jews to baked goods. “I’m not buying it.” Dark energies, once constrained by historical memory, have been let loose.

***

One day earlier this year, members of the National Rebirth Party gathered in Stafford to proselytize. It was raining heavily before I arrived, and the river had burst its banks, its brown water rising to engulf a line of benches. Yerbury and his followers were meeting in a former cinema, now a Wetherspoon’s pub, in the center of town. Under its arched ceiling, they ate fish and chips and discussed their plans.

These men provided something of a cross-section of British fascism. Daniel (who, like most of those present, would not provide his surname) was dressed like a football casual, in dark jeans and a thin jacket. As we spoke, he leaned towards me conspiratorially, his leg shaking underneath the table. He had dark circles below his eyes. 

Daniel had grown up in a sectarian, Protestant community in the Black Country, he said, working as a manual laborer from the age of 16 before moving into white-collar management. His father was a Thatcherite, but his friend’s dad had introduced him to national socialism. Its sense of ideological rigidity appealed. “Asking for remigration is like giving someone painkillers because they broke their leg,” he said. What Britain needed, he argued, was to tackle the “international financiers” behind demographic change. When I suggested that was a euphemism, he laughed. “I don’t think Jews are the only problem. Anglo-merchants are an issue too.”

While Daniel seemed charged with a nervous excitement, George was more doleful. A heavyset young man with a silver nose ring and ear stud, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, he looked as if he might be a young Labour activist en route to party conference. It was only the small pin on his lapel bearing the NRP’s logo that revealed his true affiliation. 

When he was nine or 10, George’s dad had walked out on him and his mum. He doesn’t know whether his father is alive or dead, and can remember little of him but flashed images of a bald man in a football shirt. He isn’t sure what his dad believed politically but, he thinks, he certainly looked like he was far-Right. For a while, George studied PPE at the Open University, but he dropped out after his mother developed a blood clot in her leg and was forced to have it amputated. Now, he serves as her carer. 

He told me he had always been interested in the Second World War. But while he “took his hat off” to Britain’s fallen soldiers, he was not a fan of Winston Churchill. His heroes — in order — were “The Führer”, Julius Caesar, Oswald Mosley, and Benito Mussolini.

***

How closely to embrace Germany’s example has defined this country’s neo-Nazis since 1945. For all in the movement, Hitler is an inspiration. To some, out on the esoteric fringes, he is a pagan folk deity, or the reincarnation of a Hindu god. But in a country that went to war to defeat fascism, he can also be an embarrassment. It was a great mistake, National Front founder A.K. Chesterton once argued, for nationalists to be tied too closely to the “putrescent Nazi corpse”. 

One man strapped closer to the corpse than most was Colin Jordan, whose undiluted vision of pan-national Aryan unity and undying commitment to paramilitary violence remains an inspiration for some. Born in Birmingham in 1923, he was first radicalized at Warwick School by Action, the house journal of the British Union of Fascists. During the war, he worked in a southeast London hospital, having been allowed to dodge military service because he supported a negotiated peace between Britain and Germany.

After the war, Jordan entered an extreme Right dominated by outlandish dilettantes. He joined a party led by the Duke of Bedford, who, according to Nancy Mitford, used to feed roast beef to his pet spider. He took intellectual inspiration from Arnold Leese, a world expert in Jew hatred and one-humped camels who avoided smoking and drinking with puritanical vigor. Writing in his autobiography, he claimed: “I think history records that England was at its best when it knew nothing of tobacco… and had no Jews.”

Across the Channel, Jordan developed ties with the alte kämpfer, or old fighters: former SS officers keen to mount a fascist resurgence. Then, after tumbling through a series of hardline groupuscules, he formed the National Socialist Movement (NSM) on 20 April 1961 — Hitler’s birthday. At the party’s Notting Hill headquarters, supporters were served a swastika cake. The NSM, which never had more than a few hundred members, was, according to a Met Police note at the time, composed of “converted fanatics” and “illiterate dupes”.

Later, the party held an international convention in a Gloucestershire woodland. Attendees, including American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell and a former French SS officer, hailed Jordan as their “world Führer”. Seemingly oblivious to such a momentous development, angry villagers invaded the camp and captured its swastika flag, triggering police officers to move in and put a stop to the gathering. 

Beneath this atmosphere of high camp stalked the threat of real violence. Searching the NSM offices later, the police found several tins of sodium chlorate, a weed killer that can be used as an explosive. Written on one were the words “Jew killer” and “place a few crystals in a sealed room full of Jews”. Convicted of breaching the public order act, Jordan was jailed for nine months. 

Prosecuted alongside him was John Tyndall, who got six months. On most points, the two men agreed. Both venerated Hitler and both sought a white, Judenfrei Britain. But while Jordan believed in international white unity, Tyndall preferred an Anglo-Saxon Reich. And while Jordan emphasized an unbreaking commitment to paramilitary violence, Tyndall attempted to build a broader, mass movement as the leader first of the National Front and later the British National Party. Britain’s neo-Nazis have alternated between these two poles ever since: the violent cell versus the populist party; the street thugs of Combat 18 versus the besuited electioneering of the BNP. The NSM would eventually mutate into the British Movement, which still exists as one of the country’s most overtly neo-Nazi groups. (The party declined to comment for this article, telling me only that “racial consciousness” had begun growing in Britain long before the Southport attack.) Jordan himself stepped back from active politics in 1974, after he was caught stealing red knickers from Tesco. He had been, he later claimed, the victim of a Jewish plot. 

***

After their fish and chips at Wetherspoons, the men of the NRP marched into a multi-story car park, got lost, and marched out again. Then they marched into town and set up a small gazebo on the high street. “If 500 people walk past and see that’s the same as giving out 500 leaflets,” Yerbury told me.

The rain began to pick up again and I walked underneath an overhanging shopfront with Alex Bramham, an affable, awkward man who grimaced as he smiled and seemed to alarm members of the public when he spoke. Lighting a cigarette, he told me that he had joined the NRP thanks to Yerbury. “He’s great to work with,” he said. “He’s very professional. His experience in the army shows. He’s put together a good foundation of policies and structure.” 

Just a few years earlier, Bramham’s politics had been far more moderate. As recently as 2021, he was standing for election for the Social Democratic Party and writing about going to Pride celebrations for The Critic. His recent social media activity suggested a slide into darker territory. “Hitler was incredibly cool and championed many excellent policies,” read one post on X made last year. “The land of Shakespeare, Newton and Turner,” went another, “is now overrun by negroes and controlled by the Jew.” Sharing an advert for a chocolate-scented body spray, he wrote: “The racial undertones to this are real, sinister and controlled by the Jew.”

“I was looking at your tweets because you followed me,” I told him as he smoked. “I noticed you were tweeting about ‘the Jew’?”

“Uh, I won’t comment on that if it’s—” Bramham said, breaking off as he began to walk away from me, his cigarette butt in hand. “I’m just going for a bin there.” 

“I’m just wondering because it’s something, obviously, you wanted to put that out there,” I said. “I’m not so familiar with the Jew?” 

“I tweet things in a personal capacity,” he replied. “And I campaign in a political capacity. Sorry, I’m not trying to walk away from you,” he added, as he walked away. When he stopped, he insisted he would not discuss his views. 

Then, finally alighting on a response, he said emphatically: “I strongly oppose usury.” And then he explained his views on usury. But he never told me why the Jew supports chocolate-scented body spray. 

***

At the stall, NRP members milled around and handed out flyers detailing the party’s manifesto. In Yerbury’s United Kingdom, only people of British heritage would have the inherent right to citizenship. The Green Belt would be defended. The state would be controlled by a “strong national government with total authority”. 

Is this what the public wants? For one bald man in a sheepskin jacket, the answer appeared to be yes. “I’m a gas engineer, so I travel to Nottingham, Derby, Wolves, everywhere, and I see the ruins of everywhere,” he said, as his son spun around a tree nearby. “Stafford’s a very unique place. We’re not overrun by immigration.” He unrolled a litany of complaints. Dossers were sacking off work by saying they had ADHD; women were having children to get benefits; gay people were pushing their lifestyle on children. Circling, the NRP cooed their agreement.

“It’s easy to identify the problem, but actually articulating an alternative is hard,” Yerbury told him. 

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“But the thing is, if you label me racist as soon as you bring it up, then it’s hard, isn’t it,” said the man. “And that’s what they do.” 

“I’ll be straight,” replied Yerbury. “I don’t care if people call me racist. I’m comfortable with it.”

After he had left, I asked Yerbury if he thought the engineer would have taken a leaflet had he been open about his Nazi sympathies. For the NRP’s leader to assume that anyone who wanted to restrict mass migration was a latent fascist seemed to be the same error made by some on the Left. Yerbury insisted that his party neither officially liked nor disliked Hitler. “It’s an academic point,” he insisted, “that is actually politically irrelevant.” 

***

For some of Yerbury’s fellow travelers, however, Hitler remains very relevant. Popping up at asylum hotel protests across Britain, White Vanguard, a neo-Nazi cell, have donned Helly Hansen jackets because the company’s logo, HH, might also stand for Heil Hitler. Posing for a photo with British Movement activists last year, members of the group sieg heiled in unison. 

Just as in the Sixties, Britain’s fascists today are forced to shoot for either mass appeal or sectarian purity. Mark Cotterill, the editor of Heritage and Destiny, a hardline magazine, told me he did not think the asylum hotel protests had provided the racial nationalist movement with opportunity for growth at all. They seemed too full of “druggies, football hooligans” and “Tommy Robinson-style civic nationalists”, he said. Since he had joined the National Front in 1977, the cause seemed to be at an all time low. The time for a large, radical political party may have passed, he said.

Yerbury, by contrast, appears to sincerely believe he can win democratic elections. But the distinction between these two strategies — vanguardism and mass politics — has always been blurred. Though Tyndall tried to win office through the National Front and the British National Party, he also venerated extremists and praised Manfred Roeder, a German neo-Nazi who carried out a bombing campaign against asylum seekers and Holocaust memorial sites. National Front activists regularly launched attacks against ethnic minorities and Left-wingers. And while Yerbury will not publicly call for violence, he has endorsed it online. Writing about Boris Johnson and his cabinet on YouTube in 2021, he asked: “Where’s Thomas Mair when you need him?”

***

When I emailed White Vanguard requesting an interview, they said they no longer spoke to journalists. “Look into Aryan Front,” they added. “They are more likely to engage and a bit more extreme than us.” Aryan Front, it transpired, are a lot more extreme. Made up of a hardcore of activists that split from White Vanguard last year, they advocate for a “racial holy war” against Jews and non-whites. 

The splinter group follows not the political ideology of Nazism but the religion of Creativity, which preaches racial separatism and is associated with a string of violent hate crimes in America. Online, Aryan Front has promoted the idea that journalists, among other such regime stooges, should be slain en masse on the “Day Of The Rope”. So, when I emailed, I was surprised to receive a polite response. 

“I didn’t arrive here through hatred,” their spokesman explained. “I arrived here through what I see as pattern recognition and self-interest.” The group aims not for power, they said, but to maintain loyalty between whites in preparation for the racial holy war they see as inevitable. “Survival, not governance, is the measure of success.” 

It can be hard to take such beliefs seriously. White Vanguard appears to have just a few dozen members; Aryan Front demos attract a handful of people at most. It is difficult to imagine that anything much could be achieved with such numbers. Within the state, though, the fear is that some will turn instead to terror. 

While MI5 say that Islamist extremism remains the primary threat to Britain, extreme Right-wing terror is a growing concern. According to a 2022 report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the risk of tech-savvy young men acting alone is on an “upward trajectory”. “Few belong to organized groups: they are difficult to identify and monitor,” it concluded. Since they tend to be highly individual and driven by personal grievances, it is challenging to identify how, why and when they may attack. 

Dominic Murphy, who until recently ran the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror squad, told me that he had spent his tenure concerned about unsophisticated, self-initiated terror attacks of any ideology. Over the past decade, however, the authorities had developed a growing concern about young people engaging in violent, Right-wing extremism. According to the Community Security Trust’s database, in the decade since Cox was killed, 16 extreme-Right terror plots have been foiled.

Thomas Mair’s attack was archetypal. A loner in the most total sense of the word, he’d developed hardline beliefs in isolation, ordering extremist reading material from America but shunning physical ties. “Tommy’s nowt to worry about,” his neighbors in Birstall, West Yorkshire were reported to have said of him. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” But inside his sparse, semi-detached home, he had built a library of Nazi literature as he fantasized about the white race being forced into a “long and very bloody struggle”.

Others move from the internet to real-world connection. Last year, three neo-Nazis were jailed at Sheffield Crown Court after stockpiling body armor and weapons, and plotting attacks against mosques and synagogues. Their leader, Brogan Stewart, had British Movement propaganda on his bedroom wall. He had attended a meeting of Yerbury’s National Support Detachment. 

Many of those who have not yet given up on politics, meanwhile, have begun to gravitate towards Restore Britain, buoyed by its spokesman’s ethnic definition of British identity. Take, for instance, Chris Mitchell, a self-described “Nazi-Buddhist” and Holocaust denier who has delivered leaflets for the party in Great Yarmouth and been photographed with Rupert Lowe. 

When Restore Britain allowed nationalists to join, “they jumped on board, and I can’t really blame them,” Cotterill told me. “If I could join a political party… I may well consider joining [Restore].” 

That the National Front and the BNP were led by neo-Nazis put a cap on their vote share, even if their policies on immigration commanded wide support. For the UK electorate, veneration of Hitler remains a red line. But Lowe, who has no such background and who gives the impression more of an avuncular Tory squire than a jackbooted thug, presents a different proposition. Britain’s fascists hope that he will provide them with an electoral vehicle they can manipulate to their own advantage. 

“If you want to be involved in electoral politics, the only party to join is Restore and the only man to follow is Rupert Lowe,” wrote Mark Collett on Telegram earlier this year. “To have a party led by an MP that is openly espousing an ethno-nationalist position is a reason to celebrate.”

Steve Laws, a remigration campaigner who has described Hitler as “misunderstood” and protested alongside White Vanguard, has also encouraged his followers to join Restore. “I would advise any of you not as damaging as myself to get in as branch officers, candidates etc,” he wrote on Telegram in February. “We can create a stronghold in that party and really hold some weight over the direction.”

When the NRP finished canvassing, they packed up their gazebo and retreated from the rain. Tom, a law student in a blue suit, expressed disdain at the small crowd Yerbury had managed to attract. He was local, he told me, and could have got 120 people to turn up if he’d tried. 

We chatted about his beliefs, and he said he liked Zoomer Historian, a Nazi-apologist YouTuber, and Varg Vikernes, an iconic black metal musician who had murdered his bandmate and now promotes an esoteric, extreme belief system. Tom said there were some good sides to Hitler’s rule and downplayed the Holocaust, but he also said that he did not wish to be publicly labelled far-Right. He wanted a career, he said, maybe in government. He was playing the long game. 

None of this brought joy to Israel. In its unsmiling sobriety, the Eichmann trial represented the country’s only opportunity to bring a leading Nazi to justice. Over 100 witnesses testified to the horrors of the Final Solution, leaving the new Jewish State, then still home to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, mesmerized, shocked, traumatized. “Justice,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her famous account of the trial, “demands seclusion, it requires sorrow rather than anger.”

Eichmann’s was the second and last judicial execution ever carried out in Israel. And, as the atmosphere around his death implies, it was framed by robust moral reasons. In a country created as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust, the very notion of legally executing other human beings went against the grain for large parts of the population. Judaism generally frowns upon the judicial killing of others, albeit with a particular focus on other Jews, while the historical legacy of Jewish persecution meant a long-term insistence on the sanctity of human life.

Yet if the death penalty for murder was abolished back in 1954, it has now returned with a literal vengeance. Late last month, the Knesset passed a law permitting the execution of Palestinians in the West Bank. If that wasn’t stark enough — among other things, it explicitly excludes Israeli Jews — the law’s passage was also accompanied by celebration. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s security minister, popped champagne, proudly wearing a noose-shaped lapel pin as he went.

Ben-Gvir’s law is not entirely new. As the Eichmann execution implies, Israel already permits the death penalty in exceptional circumstances. These include involvement in genocide, but also a range of security offenses, from warmongering and undermining state sovereignty to treason.

In practice, though, these laws were almost never enforced. The only known case of legal execution besides Eichmann’s occurred in June 1948, when one Meir Tobianski was accused of passing military secrets to Jordan. But he was posthumously cleared of treason, while the death sentences of several Jewish murderers were commuted, largely thanks to the injunction that since man was created in the image of God, only God has the right to deprive him of life. The final abolition of the death sentence for murder came following a lengthy discussion in the Knesset, where Jewish tradition, universal humanitarianism, and the lack of deterrence were all invoked.

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As for Palestinians accused of murdering Jewish Israeli citizens, and sentenced to death by Israeli military courts, their punishments were repeatedly overturned by higher courts. This was in part because of the same legal and moral arguments applied to Jewish criminals. As Adi Carmi, a former senior Shin Bet official, said in March: “as an Israeli citizen living in a Jewish and democratic state, any encounter with terrorists should end with their neutralization or if needed taking them out. Once the terrorist has put up his hands and been arrested and cuffed, from my point of view the battle is over and he needs to be tried. As a Jew who sanctifies the sanctity of life, I do not want to see the death penalty.”

There have historically been more hard-nosed reasons to avoid executions too. As security-minded officials have warned, executing those who resist Israeli occupation, normally referred to in Israel as terrorists, would be counterproductive. Transforming them into martyrs, their deaths would merely fuel the cycle of violence. This reluctance also played a part in Israel’s claim to have joined the general trend in the West of viewing executions as inhumane — in contrast to its Arab neighbors, where the death penalty has been more common, or to Iran, whose theocratic regime has carried out public hangings and other gruesome acts.

In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu himself opposed a proposal by members of his own coalition to adopt the death penalty. Only six MKs supported the law and 94, including most of the Right, opposed it. In this, they were only following tradition. Writing in 1969, Natan Yellin-Mor, a leader of the extreme-Right underground during the British Mandate in Palestine, warned that “if the death penalty is used at a time of a national struggle, it may elevate the person sentenced”. For their part, former security officials have also worried about the international repercussions of the death penalty, with Carmi noting that it could harm Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors. Other experts have made a similar point about Israel’s wider reputation abroad, with former Shin Bet official Lior Akerman suggesting that executing Palestinians could “exacerbate attitudes toward us by states around the world.”

All this has now changed. Ben-Gvir’s party is called Otzma Yehudit — the Hebrew for “Jewish Power”. The far-Right, ultra-nationalist party traces its ideological roots to the outlawed Kach Party, itself banned in 1994 for its outright support for racism and Jewish terrorism. Kach’s most infamous supporter was Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born settler who murdered 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Ben-Gvir has described Goldstein as a “hero”, and until 2020 hung a portrait of the killer at his home in an illegal West Bank settlement.

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The death penalty voted into law by the Knesset on 30 March is an extraordinary piece of legislation, even by recent Israeli standards. The law makes absolutely no pretense about being exclusively directed against Palestinians, stating that any resident of the West Bank found guilty of killing someone in a “terrorist act” must be sentenced to death by a military court, barring exceptional circumstances that would impose a mandatory life sentence instead.

At the same time, a death sentence no longer requires, as it previously did, a unanimous decision by a panel of military judges, nor that they be at least at the rank of lieutenant colonel. Indeed, according to this new law, the death penalty must be imposed even if the prosecution asks for a lesser sentence. As for the state of Israel proper, the new law vaguely mandates that any killing intended to undermine the existence of the state must similarly be punished with death or a life sentence, and that the execution must be carried out within 90 days, barring intervention by the prime minister. In short, the new law clearly imposes the death penalty only on occupied Palestinians — and potentially on Palestinian citizens too — but not on Jews.

Before the law can go into effect, it will be reviewed, and possibly overturned, by the Supreme Court. This could happen for humanitarian reasons — in reference to Jewish law and to the “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” of 1992 — or, given the law’s prejudicial nature, on judicial grounds. In recent years, however, the court has increasingly veered to the Right, as well as becoming ever-more timid, and it may well either hedge in some manner or allow the law to be enforced.

Whatever the judges decide, it is impossible to define this new law as anything but blatantly racist, making a clear distinction between two groups, Jews and Palestinians, on the basis of their nationality and ethnicity. It is another substantial step in the ongoing establishment of an apartheid regime in the West Bank, as well as its creeping extension into the state of Israel itself. The same state that, just over six decades ago, executed a Nazi perpetrator for implementing a racist genocidal policy against European Jews — in a trial that in many ways served to establish the Jewish state’s legitimacy as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust — is now in danger of abandoning its last claim to a just legal system.

The consequences of this new legalized racism, deeply rooted in the far-Right’s ideology, are unfathomably destructive. Beyond his antics in the Knesset, Ben-Gvir made that clear, promising the law would ensure “a day of justice for the murdered” — and “a day of deterrence” for Israel’s enemies. And if legal experts from the Israel Democracy Institute see things differently, defining the law as “unconstitutional, immoral, and contrary to Israel’s commitments according to international law”, it is hard not to see a more basic moral collapse from Arendt’s sombre reflections.

I grew up in Israel before the occupation of 1967, and recall listening to recordings from the Eichmann trial on the radio with my family every evening. For someone like me, the transformation of Israel from a country that perceived itself as the clearest answer to persecution and genocide — to one that is engaged in systematic oppression against Palestinians, and is now seeking to legalize their judicial killing, is devastating. These are not only the actions of extremists such as Ben-Gvir and finance minister Itamar Smotrich; more than half of Knesset members voted for the law. That Zionism, which set out to emancipate the Jews, has now become an ideology geared towards dehumanizing Palestinians, is not only tragic. It is, I think, sufficient cause to reject the ideology altogether, and call instead for the remaking of the state into a just and equal society for all its inhabitants. For now, it remains to underline that the law is a breathtaking plunge. One is hard put to think of a more stunning turn of events.

Some were wearing Christmas hats and one woman was selling them, though many were also convinced that the festival’s spirituality had been downplayed in favor of secular commercialization. To get to this gathering, attendees had walked down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, which is currently displaying an elegant wooden nativity scene, a giant menorah and a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth featuring the faces of hundreds of trans and non-binary people, which seemed a fitting reflection of our confused public realm.

They had come at the invitation of Robinson to sing carols and, they said, to put the Christ back in Christmas. In September, I had watched tens of thousands march down the same street for a protest organized by the former EDL leader in which Christianity took a surprisingly prominent role. Demonstrators brandished giant wooden crosses and framed photos of Charlie Kirk, who had been shot just days before.

By contrast, the carol service was to be a more intimate affair, with around 1,000 in attendance. The crowd was genuinely diverse, with many fervently devout Africans trying to recruit to their own churches and noticeably fewer young white men than at a typical Robinson march.

Like Robinson, many of those at the service had little time for the Church of England. Steve Edwards, sitting in a collapsible chair as he ate a chicken bake, said he found the Church of England disgusting. “It’s full of wokeism,” he told me, a Union flag flying above him. “I went to church as a kid but it was not my choice. I don’t go now.” The advertisements about the carol service had been clear that it was not a political event: it was solely about celebrating Christ and Christmas. For Edwards, however, there was clearly a political resonance to such an act. “I think my prime motive for coming is to defend Christmas against the Muslim hordes and eroding of our culture,” he said. “It’s a day out, but a useful day out.”

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To the left of the stage stood a group of women wearing pink who had been campaigning in Havering against the housing of asylum seekers. Kim, a founder of the group, said that, although she was a Catholic, she did not consider that to be related to her activism. She was also not opposed to people practicing other religions, she insisted. “They can have theirs and we can have ours,” she said. “The key word is love: everybody should love each other.” There were limits to that love, however: the women were clear that they did not wish to have undocumented and uninvited small boat migrants in their town.

Soon enough, the service began. Instead of a pulpit, there was a temporary stage on a trailer flanked by large, white crosses and garlanded with tinsel. Preachers reading extracts from the Bible alternated with musicians, including Doolan’s band and Star, a young black woman with a mellifluous voice. The crowd sang along to the hits — from “Come All Ye Faithful” to “Away in a Manger” — and speakers exhorted us to pray for persecuted Christians in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Several of the speeches drifted from theology to politics. Liam Tuffs, a long-term Robinson wingman, declared that he had not been a Christian himself but that he planned on pumping religious content out from his social media channels in 2026. “Young Bob”, a 17-year-old activist with a mop of hair, spoke of how he had become depressed and suicidal at secondary school as he committed the sin of atheism and other “sinful acts”. If it were not for Jesus Christ, he said, he would not be here. If it were not for Jesus Christ this nation would not be great. “And wouldn’t it be great to see this nation restored back to its ancestral roots?” he asked to cheers.

Walking among the crowd was Robert Wallace, who claimed, when we spoke, that had been to prison in five countries. He said had swallowed balloons of drugs to smuggle them. He spoke of how he had sunk into alcoholism and casual violence and lost himself for a time to a kind of madness that took over his life. But now he has rediscovered Christ and been born again. And so, he and his brother, John — both short men with greying hair buzzed low — found themselves at the carol concert.

Born 18 months apart, the pair look as if they could be identical twins. “When we were younger we went to Sunday school and church,” said John. “A lot of people lost that root. Now they’re turning back.” For the brothers, Christianity represents their childhood and a lost Britain of innocence and moral rigidity. “We used to run around outside and pray,” Robert said. “Then, when I came out of the army, we [Britain] were in Europe. Our country is flooded. It’s changed.”

With their lives of sin and winding journey to Christ, the pair were not so dissimilar to the man who had brought them to central London. Though raised by an Irish Catholic mother, Robinson has said he was not religious himself growing up. When dark had fallen and the carols were over, he finally took the stage. The crowd pushed forward a little and began chanting his name, as if forgetting for a moment that this was a religious festival and not a rally.

Robinson spoke of his hatred for Britain’s Anglican establishment. “When I started [the English Defence League] in 2009, the Church stood against us in every city we went into,” he said. “The Church leaders stood and opposed us. That drove me away from Christianity. In fact, I hated the Church for them betrayals. We, all of us, were their lost sheep. The way they’ve acted this week [by criticising Robinson as divisive] is the reason churches are empty.”

It was only during a recent stint in HMP Woodhill that he began speaking with a chaplain and studying the life of Jesus. Then, he was visited by Doolan, a former musician who — by his own telling — spent his life partying and sinking “endless cocktails of drugs” before he stumbled across a Sunday service and, struck by its beauty, was driven to repent. Thirteen years later, Doolan is a pastor at Spirit Embassy, a Pentecostal church led by a charismatic Zimbabwean prophet. His band is a regular feature of Robinson’s rallies.

Speaking to me a few days before the carol service, Doolan said that he had sat with Robinson inside prison and talked for two hours about the Gospel, a spiritual awakening he believes is taking place in Britain, and the importance of Christianity to our national history. “He said that he’d always felt a presence when he was going through, you know, hard times or heavy persecution or whatever it is that he’d been going through,” he said. “There would always be a feeling of something willing him to continue.”

With two prison guards standing over them, Doolan led Robinson through a prayer of salvation. The former English Defence League leader, a veteran of a Luton hooligan firm, convicted of assault and fraud, who once bragged on camera that he could score gear anywhere in the world, admitted his sins and asked Jesus to enter his heart.

The carol service, which Doolan was heavily involved in organizing, was aimed in part at helping others follow Robinson’s path. Standing amid the tinsel and the crosses, the activist proclaimed that “something great” is happening in Britain. “I’ve seen it at each one of our Unite the Kingdom events as I saw the cross start playing prevalence, as I saw ‘Jesus is king’ [banners], and I felt something happening and I felt it again today,” he told the crowd.

Not every Christian in attendance was willing to take this change of heart at face value, however. As I watched a series of Bible readings on stage, I was approached by two young men, one German and one English, from a non-denominational church in London. “Tommy is not really a Christian,” said the German. “He doesn’t follow the Bible.” While he could not know the contents of Robinson’s heart, he said, he did not believe he had truly renounced sin.

The duo were at the protest to evangelize to those who believed in God but were not yet practicing Christians. The faith, the Englishmen said, had saved his life. With the Union Flag pulled over his shoulders, he launched into a denunciation of the nation’s spiritual values. All men in this country care about, he said, is chasing women and going to the pub and doing bumps of coke. If he had not found Christ, he would still be doing the same, he added.

The vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Tooting, who coincidentally is called Angela Rayner, was handing out leaflets with an AI image of the nativity featuring black people, Muslim women and three white men wearing Union Jack T-shirts gazing at baby Jesus in his crib. Only one in 10 people at most would take a Christian flyer outside a train station, she told me. Here, almost everyone was willing to accept them. She hoped she might be able to convince fans of Robinson that everyone was welcome in the Church of England.

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Earlier that day, another group of Christians had gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral to counter Robinson’s message. I watched as they staged a nativity scene in which two people playing Joseph and Mary sat in a small rubber dinghy. Behind them, about a dozen others in smart coats, woolly sweaters and hiking boots were singing hymns and holding banners that claimed Jesus as a refugee. “Love your neighbor,” read one, in red letters, with another below adding, in black spraypaint, “that includes the ones in hotels”.

Walking about in front of this display was Krish Kandiah, an evangelical leader and founder of The Sanctuary Foundation, a charity that supports refugees into work and housing. He is, I suggested to him, exactly the kind of Christian Robinson professes to revile. The former EDL leader had only recently become religious, though, Kandiah said. Robinson had clearly not yet developed a real understanding of Christianity.

“We need to help Tommy get to the heart of the faith,” he said. “The Bible is very clear that every human being had intrinsic value and worth.” While Kandiah accepts that some people fear immigration is out of control, he also believes that Britain has the capacity to help those in need. “We need to work out our responsibilities to them,” he said.

Kandiah said he was concerned that people were using the Christian message to gain followers for cynical reasons. “It is hard to understand how Christians of good faith can hate on people and promote division,” he said. The scale of the messaging operation coordinated over the past week by the Church of England and other mainstream Christian groups implies they are deeply concerned that Robinson’s position might catch on.

The feeling of resentment and suspicion is mutual. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Robinson retweeted a statement she had made backing the Black Lives Matter movement and wrote: “their churches will stay empty, a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine christiany is coming not this weak drivel.”

The idea that Christianity is experiencing a revival in Britain is one shared by many worshipers who both love and hate Robinson. A report published by the Bible Society earlier this year claimed that church attendance had surged since 2018, driven in particular by young men. “People are giving church a try, or something has drawn them back in again,” the Evangelization coordinator for the Diocese of Westminster, Teresa Carvalho, told The Guardian. Others have questioned the value of the society’s evidence, however. David Voas, an emeritus professor of social science at UCL, has pointed out that its report was based on unreliable opt-in surveys rather than probability sampling. The Church of England and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales record shrinking turnouts since the pandemic.

When I spoke to Doolan, the musician-turned-pastor, he said he had witnessed growing Christian faith. This was evidence, he argued, that I could expect to witness, in my lifetime, the arrival of the Antichrist, who will take control of a one-world government. The “masculine Christianity” advanced on Saturday, under which the Church’s move towards liberalism on borders, gender and sexuality would be reversed, may therefore be one element of a Christian revival, even its driving force.

After Robinson spoke on Whitehall, there was time for one last carol. Attendees held plastic candles with electric lights aloft and began to sing “Silent Night” amid a reverent quiet. For those in attendance, though vastly smaller in number than previous Unite the Kingdom rallies, this was the start of an epochal shift. Next year, Robinson said, he would host the same event again and, he claimed, he would pack out Trafalgar Square. Then the Church of England would really have something to worry about.

Now, the most storied think tank in the history of modern conservatism has fallen.

On Thursday, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, took the side of Tucker Carlson in a dispute over the former Fox News host conducting an interview with Fuentes. Roberts declared, “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and vowed that Carlson would always be a friend of Heritage. Those criticizing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes were part of a “venomous coalition,” Roberts said, that is “sowing division.” While denouncing anti-Semitism and disavowing some of the things Fuentes has said, Roberts argued that he shouldn’t be canceled, but debated.

This was widely seen as a capitulation to the Groypers, coming down on their side over and against those who criticized Tucker’s interview and his more general descent into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. For his part, Fuentes applauded Roberts’s “courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”

For readers unfamiliar with the term, “Groyper” refers to the loose network of mostly young, male, hard-Right types who orbit around Fuentes, a live-streamer and social-media personality from suburban Chicago. Fuentes built his following through hours-long webcasts mixing irony and an ideology that is a combination of racial nationalism, Christian theocracy, and hostility toward feminism and immigration.

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His supporters call themselves “America First” and have traditionally been Donald Trump supporters. Yet the movement takes cues, above all, from Fuentes himself, who has regularly expressed contempt for JD Vance based on the fact that the vice president and MAGA heir apparent is married to a non-Christian brown woman. At one point, Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” He’s also taken a liking, ironically, to Gavin Newsom, seeing the “beautiful genetics” of the Democratic California governor and his family of four white children as more worthy of praise than Vance’s mixed-race progeny. Fuentes is also known for insights such as the idea that sleeping with women is gay.

This may all seem too absurd to take seriously. Some young people, it will be tempting to tell ourselves, cycle through nutty politics before burning out or settling into grownup conservative or liberal worldviews; there will always be a fringe. But Fuentes has a substantial following, 1 million and growing on X (formerly Twitter), and he increasingly sets the tone for the entire conservative media ecosystem.

One way to see the radicalization of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly is that they are adopting Fuentes-Lite positions on issues like immigration and vaccines. Fuentes has spin-offs and haters throughout the Right-wing influencer ecosystem, including British and Portuguese imitators. There are X personalities whose entire claim to fame revolves around hating him. Watch any event with a prominent conservative speaker these days, and you’ll find Groyper or Groyper-adjacent young men asking the questions that end up going viral on social media. It was indeed this kind of in-person pressure that, as Fuentes has bragged, got Kirk to turn against even legal immigration.

The fact that Heritage, too, has now fallen in line suggests that what we’re seeing is something much more ferocious and remarkable than even the most pessimistic critics of the online Right appreciated. It has led me to conclude that I’ve underestimated not only the pace and extent of the Groyperization of the Right, but also its potential to have a large and lasting effect on our political culture.

The comparison has been made to wokeness taking over the Left beginning in the mid-2010s, through many of the same mechanisms, primarily social-media mobbing of mainstream figures and institutions. But we must consider the possibility that we’re observing something much more capable than wokeness of remaking one side of the political spectrum and thus enduring as a long-term force in American society.

The Roberts statement was prompted by Fuentes sitting down for a friendly chat with Tucker Carlson. Previously, Carlson had expressed contempt for Fuentes, calling him a “weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago.” But then Fuentes appeared on a few other podcasts, and it became safe for Carlson to have him on. Carlson predictably forgot all other principles and objections as he did what comes naturally to him: chasing an audience. That’s how you become the top news podcaster in the country, which Carlson is, at least according to Spotify rankings.

If all you see of Carlson these days is a few clips of him saying outlandish things — like that he was attacked by a literal demon — you might think that he, too, has turned into some kind of fringe figure. On the contrary, there are few who are more mainstream within the MAGA movement. Days after Kirk was assassinated, Carlson was speaking with JD Vance about his legacy. He then went on to insinuate, at Kirk’s memorial, that the Jews may have killed him — just as people “eating hummus” in Jerusalem did to another hero 2,000 years ago — while attempting to maintain plausible deniability. Fuentes hilariously mocked the attempted spin, cutting through any supposedly non-invidious interpretation of Tucker’s words (Yes, Fuentes is very funny — unlike Tucker, who switches between brooding and manic laughter directed at things no one else finds funny.)

Tucker matters, perhaps more so than any other media personality on the right, with the possible exception of Fuentes himself. And after attacking Fuentes repeatedly, he deigned to invite him to his show. But how? How can Carlson call someone a gay federal infiltrator one minute and schmooze with him the next? The thing to understand with these people is that it’s all a show. They hit each other over the head with chairs one week, and then the next week team up together. The ultimate thing the audience wants, of course, is for their influencers to encourage people to vote for their kind of Republican — anti-immigration and aligned with MAGA views and aesthetics — even as they enjoy feuds and eccentricities outside of election season.

The same goes for the Vance-Fuentes relationship. I had also assumed that it would be going too far to expect that Fuentes would endorse Vance after attacking his wife on account of her race and religion. Now that seems silly. Of course, he will likely endorse Vance, or at least not go full Newsom. It’s fun for Groypers in 2025 to gush about Newsom’s beautiful white family and hint that they’re going to jump ship at the prospect of an Indian First Lady. But that’s just an angle to create a new storyline and keep the show exciting. Raise tensions, rant about how much Vance sucks, and then perhaps make a big show of allying when he denounces Indian immigration strongly enough in time for the 2028 primaries.

To wit, Vance was recently grilled at the University of Mississippi by a Groyper type about having a non-Christian wife. Already, the vice president feels the need to reassure his supporters that his wife wasn’t raised in a religious household, contrary to what she herself has previously said. While once talking positively about being in an interfaith marriage, he now knows that there is a not insubstantial portion of his base that finds Hinduism strange, if not downright demonic, and his wife has become a political liability.

The only thing that might stand in the way of Vance and Fuentes being on the same side in 2028 is Fuentes’s own cantankerousness. He has an independent streak — in October 2024 he said he wouldn’t vote for Trump — while Vance would abandon almost any previously cherished principle if it raised his chances of being president by a few percentage points on Polymarket.

We’re at the start of something, not the end of it. This is more like wokeness in 2014 than wokeness in 2022. And to make a comparison to wokeness might be underselling it. I would point to three factors that potentially make Groyperism stronger.

First, the appeal of wokeness was always largely astroturfed. The woke relied on censorship and nonstop propaganda from elite institutions. Relatively few Americans bought into the craziest ideas about race and gender. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility may have sold more than a million copies, but Carlson has nearly five million subscribers on YouTube. I asked ChatGPT how many podcast downloads he gets per episode, and it came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 4 million to 8 million (8 million to 15 million, if you include video). Candace Owens is in the same ballpark. And these are actual fans, not people encouraged to buy a book for a class or h.r. seminar.

We’ve never seen numbers like this for anything affiliated with wokeness, which was a hysteria driven by individuals in the rarefied fields of journalism, academia, and activism. They were always outnumbered in the rest of the country, and relied on being able to control powerful institutions and the informational ecosystem.

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The second point is related: namely, that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. From a historical perspective, large numbers of young people wanting to experiment with a different gender is quite odd. Usually, males and females seek to portray and cultivate traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. Members of a majority group supporting discrimination against themselves is likewise unnatural, but this has always been core to DEI and the ideology of white guilt. One of the reasons that cancel culture was so intense was that proponents were always pushing against people’s preexisting inclinations; we were bound for a correction.

But racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries. While most Americans aren’t inclined toward a Groyper worldview, it does seem strong enough to take over one half of the political spectrum in a country with a great deal of education polarization. And while there were ballot-box backlashes against wokeness, the Right becoming more crudely populist has been associated with relatively high levels of electoral success.

Finally, the Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits. During the Great Awokening, these institutions were often taken over by aggressive upstarts speaking the language of academic seminars, and their leaders would repeat the magic words demanded by identity-focused activists. At the same time, the institutional framework in which these battles took place allowed for pushback from within. The New York Times editorial board is capable, for example, of gently shifting away from trans extremism. Universities can adopt free-speech policies, as many have done, in response to both internal and external pressure.

In contrast, it is unclear in what format moderates on the right would take on the fringes. Individuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson — in addition to countless lesser influencers — get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians. There is no Groyper faculty senate where people can get together and vote to condemn anti-Semitism in the same way that leaders of the University of Michigan decided to take a step back from DEI. Robin DiAngelo is no longer cited in the media, and Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist center was closed down. Without institutional support, their power and influence have waned. By contrast, the podcaster who reflects and shapes the minds of the most engaged GOP voters can’t in a similar way lose his place at the center of political discourse.

Could the Republican voter ultimately be a check on all this? Doubtful. Right-wing media’s political atmosphere should generally be taken as predictive of what the Right-wing electorate will do. The Republican base loves Trump and flocks to news sources like Owens, Carlson, and an increasingly conspiratorial and demon-obsessed Megyn Kelly. Thus, there is little reason to think the party’s core electorate will act as much of a moderating force.

One factor working in the opposite direction is that Groyperization has occurred among the relatively weak and disempowered. One could therefore argue that Left-wing identitarianism is naturally more influential. The truth of this consolation, however, has diminished over the last several years. Radicalized Republicans are appointing similarly radical people to top positions, and there’s relatively little educated elites can do about it.

Nonetheless, the ongoing elite status of the Left suggests that at least when Republicans don’t control the federal government, Groyperization will be less powerful. We won’t see something like Trump’s first term, in which the president was Right-wing but the political Left was so mobilized that the culture moved in the opposite direction from the one that the government was pushing. I have been accurately foreseeing the Groyperization of the Right for a while now, and when I have been wrong, it’s always been in the direction of underestimating how much the conservative coalition has changed, and how quickly things are shifting towards conspiratorial ethno-populism. At points, I assumed that there was still a Republican establishment that could exercise a positive influence on Trump and Trumpians — hence, my endorsement of him last year — and it turned out that this largely wasn’t the case.

If there is any hope of effective resistance against the direction of travel, it needs to come from a powerfully influential individual leader. It can’t be Trump, as it is as difficult to imagine him making coherent arguments as it is to imagine him taking a stand against his base for the greater good. By contrast, Vance, as the presumptive heir, is articulate and has been viciously attacked by the Groypers.

While he has denounced Fuentes in passing, the vice president is capable of making a much more passionate case against those he considers political enemies when motivated to do so. What is needed is something like a speech denouncing Groyperism, rather than a quick criticism followed by a pivot towards attacking the Left or the media. Up to this point, the vice president has never found it in his political interest to go after any substantial part of the conservative coalition. While he would clearly much rather avoid the energetic wrath of the Groypers, if things continue on their current path, they might leave him with no other choice.

This example should remind us that, though people typically associate fascism with Germany and Italy, there is also a French story. Ernest Nolte, one of the first historians to study the ideology, published a 1963 book called Three Faces of Fascism which argued that Action Française, an antisemitic nationalist movement founded in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, was the precursor of modern fascism. Most did not agree: Action Française is a counterrevolutionary movement that lacks the dynamic radicalism of fascism.

That did not stop Zeev Sternhell, a Polish-Israeli scholar, from locating the origins of European fascism not in Italy but in the convergence of the anti-liberal Left and anti-liberal Right in late 19th century France. Yet other historians have debated whether the so-called French Social Party (PSF), a genuinely mass movement which could have won elections in 1940, might be fascist too. It’s surely no surprise that the party’s slogan of “Work, Family, Fatherland” was adopted by the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Pétain.

After the collapse of Vichy, extreme Right politics was discredited in France. The postwar populist movement of Poujadism proved a flash in the pan. The extremists who resorted to terrorism against de Gaulle’s policy of accepting Algerian independence had little popular support. It was only in 1983 that the extreme Right remerged as an electoral force, when the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which had its roots in several extreme Right traditions, scored its first electoral victories. Today that party, now rechristened the Rassemblement National (RN), looks a contender to win France’s next presidential election.

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This alarming situation is the subject of Ugo Palheta’s Marxist analysis, Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen. Marxist interpretations of fascism have always linked it to economics. In the interwar years, the Communist Third International always stressed that fascism was a result of the crisis of capitalism, as the bourgeoisie resorted to extreme methods to preserve its power. The argument was that since capitalism was in terminal crisis, communist parties should steer clear of any attempt to shore up democracy: democratic socialists were as much the enemy as the Nazis. This eased Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany. As for France, the Communists hastily reversed course and allied themselves with socialists and even liberals in the so-called Popular Front. This was an updated version of the old policy of “Republican defense” going back to the Dreyfus Affair — in which parties of different political stripes temporarily joined forces in the higher cause of defending democracy.

Reading Palheta’s book evokes an odd sense of nostalgia, as all those rancid debates of the last century come flooding back. In the Seventies, we are told, the “crisis of capitalism” caused the bourgeoisie to opt for “neo-liberal” solutions: which duly paved the way for “neofascism”. Then, in the Eighties and Nineties, the “triumph of capitalism” allowed the far-Right to revive and take root, before a “crisis of capitalism” “put fascism back on the agenda” by eroding “the foundations of bourgeois hegemony” and pushing the “ruling classes” to opt for more authoritarian solutions. Macron’s “centrist authoritarianism”, we are confidently informed, is the last gasp before fully fledged fascism can emerge in the form of an RN victory. Etc, etc, etc.

In reality, there are significant differences between what was once considered to be “fascism” and the RN. Though one can be legitimately suspicious of the genuineness of Marine Le Pen’s detoxification of her party, it shows no insurrectionary tendencies. There is no sign that it intends, or would be able, to dismantle the institutions of French democracy and impose a dictatorship. The comparison with Meloni in Italy might be instructive here. That said, whether or not one wants to call it fascism, the extreme ethnonationalist and identitarian authoritarianism of the RN is a genuinely worrying threat. Among other things, a planned policy of “national preference” would condition access to social rights, including health care, to those with French citizenship. At the same time, Le Pen may end up actively discriminating against France’s million Muslim citizens, not least in her erstwhile enthusiasm for banning the Islamic headscarf in public spaces.

In a couple of years, then, France could soon be faced with a mix of Trumpism, Orbánism and Pétainism — clear enough from the polling numbers. Between the elections of 2017 and 2022, after all, the RN’s final vote rose from 34% to 41%. It is possible that Marine Le Pen herself may be ineligible to run, unless her recent court conviction for financial fraud is overturned. But her “dauphin”, the inexperienced Jordan Bardella, is no less popular, and his policies are largely indistinguishable from hers.

So how is this threat to be combated? Palheta’s book briefly offers an answer in the last chapter. It proposes establishing “popular, anti-racist and pro-feminist defense structures” and “local committees” to fight for “real democracy”. Etc, etc, etc. Who would organize and mobilize this grassroots activism? The suggestion seems to be that only the populist La France Insoumise (LFI) movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers the “anti-liberal, anti-productivist rupture” that might block the path to fascism. But if Palheta is right that the LFI is the only hope, then there is no hope.

All the same, this depressing prospect does, at least, prompt some thoughts about the history of the French Left in general. In the interwar years, Léon Blum, leader of the French Socialist Party and the most morally inspiring leader in the history of European socialism, desperately tried to hold on to the party’s Marxist ideology: partly because he feared being outflanked by the Communists to his Left. He resisted any “revisionist” ideas that offered a plausible non-Marxist program. All the while, Blum tied himself in knots by distinguishing between the so-called “exercise of power” and the “conquest of power”. Yet what he patently failed to do was reflect on the kind of policies that the Socialists might actually pursue once in power. According to Marxist dogma, after all, this was only a provisional step towards the final revolution.

Those revisionists who tried to escape from this binary straitjacket of reform or revolution were dismissed as heretics. This was the fate of the most brilliant interwar Socialists, the Belgian Henri de Man, who had a wide following in France. The rejection of his ideas pushed him, and some of his followers, toward fascism. He ended up collaborating with the Germans.

After 1945, partly because of the example of people like de Man, the French Socialist Party refused to rethink its Marxist theory while in practice participating in governments that carried out torture in Algeria. There was never in France, as in Germany, a “Bad Godesberg moment”, when the SPD abandoned Marxism in 1959. On the western banks of the Rhine, “social democracy” remained taboo. In 1971, though, the defunct Socialist Party was hijacked and reconstructed by François Mitterrand, a man who had no previous Socialist beliefs or culture. Yet his supreme political skills allowed him to outmaneuver Michel Rocard, the figure in the party who offered a new version of revisionism. Rocard was a representative of the so-called “second Left”, which offered a less statist vision. He had no truck with the rhetoric of a “rupture with capitalism” espoused by Mitterrand, who, for his part, was politically cynical and economically illiterate.

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By Tom McTague

The result was predictable. Mitterrand, elected in 1981, had abandoned most of his policies within two years, while never actually offering any kind of doctrinal rethinking. He lurched from socialism in one country to ultra-liberalism in less than a decade. This was the beginning of the end of the French Socialist Party. Its death rattle took the form of François Hollande, whose inner Mitterrand prompted him in 2012 to offer some fiery rhetoric about his enemy being “money” — only to completely reverse course within a year of being elected.

This void on the Left offered an opportunity to Mélenchon, a former member of the Socialist Party. Enter La France Insoumise, which performed well in the presidential elections of both 2017 and 2022. Yet if LFI identifies Macron as its main enemy, it is an ironic mirror image of Macronism in that it exists solely as a machine to allow one man to take power. La Meute: Enquete sur la France Insoumise, a recent book by two French journalists, has exposed the party’s authoritarianism, bullying and sectarianism. The slightest criticism of Mélenchon leads to immediate exclusion. This, after all, is the man who once uttered the words: “La République, c’est moi”. Also problematic is Mélenchon’s admiration for Chavez and Putin, and his posturing on the Middle East. One must not fall into the trap of lumping all critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemites: most are clearly not. But Mélenchon goes beyond anything that Jeremy Corbyn was (perhaps unfairly) accused of, not least when his party described the October 7 massacre as “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces”.

The idea, then, that this man, at this moment, offers a path to the “real democracy” that Palheta craves is delusional. That, of course, still leaves the question of how to deal with the RN. Unfortunately, there is nothing better on offer than the old policy of “Republican defense”. The liberal center has moved so far to the Right, in France as elsewhere, that a lot of nose-holding will be necessary. In the years before the Popular Front of the Thirties, the Communists used to say that the choice between the parliamentary center and the anti-parliamentary Right was like plumping for “plague” over “cholera”. However bad things may have become in France today, they are not quite that bad. The choice, for now, is between “plague” — and maybe measles or flu. The RN is definitely the plague.

We are still haunted by the ghosts of last summer. This month, rolling demonstrations have taken place outside a so-called “migrant hotel” in Epping. The unrest follows accusations of crimes committed by an immigrant against a child. Like last year, demonstrators scream “Save our kids!”, and again, journalists write about “disinformation” and the “far-Right”.

We have had a year to pick through the rubble of the riots — to plot out the chain of cause and effect, ruminate about the role of social media, and self-loathe in the mirror of national reflection. But are we any closer to understanding what is really going on?

For the past nine months, I have been working on a documentary which traces the story of last summer from start to finish. The commissioners wanted to know, in their words, “What the fuck happened?”. And so I thought our mission was simple: to piece together a single ugly event which took place over 10 chaotic days.

But the more I worked on the project, the clearer it became that tracking the sequence of events only took you so far. To tell the story of the riots is to glimpse the deep veins of unease that run through our country. I wanted to understand what motivated ordinary people to commit destruction and violence on such a massive scale, and to examine whether the simple logic of cause and effect was enough to make sense of what had happened.

I first visited Southport in December, five months after the riots. Along Hart Street, pink ribbons were tied around lampposts and front gates in memory of the murdered girls. At one end of the road, I found a scrap of police tape still knotted to a bush. A five-minute walk away, tradesmen were fixing metal bars to the downstairs windows of the mosque.

I wanted to speak to Norman Wallis, who runs Pleasureland, the town’s historic fairground. Norman knows everyone, so I hoped he might open some doors if I could get his blessing for the work I was about to embark on, which would inevitably involve asking difficult questions of people in town.

I was immediately disappointed. “What we need now,” he said, “are happy stories.” His message was clear: if we’re not careful Southport will become Dunblane, defined by its worst day. So don’t dwell. Don’t talk about The Southport Stabbings or The Southport Riots. This town was, is, and will be a happy place. Nothing to see here.

Normally, you begin making a documentary with access to someone who is keen to tell their side of the story. You leverage that access to encourage others to talk. Not so here. No one wanted to talk, and everyone had a good reason not to.

The rioters wouldn’t go on camera because they thought they’d get locked up; their victims wouldn’t because they feared reprisals from the rioters; online provocateurs because they had no faith in the mainstream media. The police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Government all refused to take part. I figured they wished it would all just go away.

The team decided that the heart of the documentary must be an interview with one of the families of the innocent children who were attacked that morning. The whole story stems from what those children endured. But it was way too soon to make an approach.

So we talked to whoever would talk to us: local journalists, residents who watched the riot from their bedroom windows, tradesmen in caffs who may or may not have been there. Conversation about the murders and riots often dried up fast. But people spoke freely about Southport as a place — about the town they grew up in and the town they have now.

If you’re born in Southport, you’re a Sandgrounder, and Sandgrounders have a proud history. Southport used to be advertised as “The Paris of the North”. The story goes that Lord Street — the town’s main high street — inspired Emperor Napoleon III’s plans for the boulevards of Paris.

Now the beach is turning to mud and no one can explain why. Deer can be spotted where there were once sunbathers. Lord Street still impresses, but the shops keep closing down. The town’s bathing lake was closed and then demolished in the early Nineties, and people fear the same will happen to Southport’s iconic pier. It has been closed since 2022, a mile-long finger of rust jutting out to sea, pointing nowhere.

“It used to be beautiful,” Tim, a local reporter, told us. “But if my parents came back now they’d be mortified.”

Sandgrounders can feel their home gently rotting. The beach, the pier, the closed shops are daily reminders that Southport is there and not there at the same time.

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This sense of drift is not new, nor is it unique to Southport. It is felt in towns up and down the country, especially in England’s deindustrialized north and along the coast — places haunted by a loss of meaning as much as prosperity. But this unresolved mourning is now being exploited by a predatory ecosystem of online conspiracists, who paint a picture of a nation in freefall.

They say this: England is not yours anymore. The things you cherish are gone. You have been betrayed by globalist elites, and humiliated by immigrants who profit from that betrayal; “two-tier” police stamp down on patriots, while minorities and woke mobs get away with open revolt; you can no longer fly the England flag without being called a Nazi; you are witnessing an invasion of millions of “fighting-age males” on small boats, intent on preying on your women from the comfort of luxury hotels which you’ve paid for. Patriotism, pride, the fabric of your democracy and your justice system are falling apart like wet tissue.

There is something primal in the story, and appealing to a certain kind of man. Your house is falling down, with rising damp and peeling wallpaper. A stranger strolls in uninvited, raids the fridge, and curls up in bed with your daughter. You are the man of the house in name only.

The complicated truths of our uneven justice system; the real but not existential threat of small-boat migration; the truths of Islamist terrorism and urban ghettoization; the decaying of proud places — it all concertinas into a single, compelling story.

And last July, in the days leading up to the Southport stabbings, a rapid succession of events seemed to show this story reaching its tragic climax. First came the Harehills riot on 18 July. The local Roma community took to the streets after social services tried to take a family’s children into care. A police car was overturned. The narrative spread that the police had retreated in an act of “two-tier” leniency. There were whispers that the rioters had actually been Pakistanis.

Five days later, on 23 July, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Teeton was allegedly stabbed by Anthony Esan, a black man. To some, this looked like the murder of Lee Rigby all over again.

That same day, a video was released showing a police officer stamping on a British Asian man at Manchester airport. Men chanting “Allahu Akbar” gathered outside Rochdale police station to protest against police brutality. The officer in question was pilloried in the media, only for more video to emerge which recast his actions as a response to a brutal attack on his colleagues. Cue accusations of “lying media”, “two-tier justice” and Islamic extremism.

On 27 July, thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters rallied at Trafalgar Square — the event was called “Unite the Kingdom”. The next day, Robinson was arrested using powers afforded under the Terrorism Act for failing to comply with a police search. His followers quickly connected his detainment with the rally the day before.

Less than 24 hours after Robinson’s arrest, Axel Rudakubana walked into the Southport dance workshop with a knife. To many people, this felt like an escalating pattern of rapid deterioration. England was losing her mind before their eyes.

The cacophony of conspiracy and half-truth was prelude to everything that followed. So it is unsurprising that some people felt they knew who to blame for the Southport attack almost instantly — they were working to a script.

I scoured X for audio recordings of discussions going on in the immediate aftermath of the attack. That evening, in an X Spaces chatroom titled “THE TIME IS NOW UK NATIONAL ACTION”, users were hardly able to contain themselves. “People keep saying oh wait till the name comes out, even by the one percent chance it’s not a Muslim or a black man,” one user mused. The emotion was raw: “I’d rather die on my feet than fucking live on my knees to these fucking ratbags,” another user said.

And then a name did come out — “Ali Al-Shakati”. He had apparently come to the UK by boat, was known to mental health services, and was on an intelligence watchlist. The name sounded Muslim. The name was a complete fabrication, but it didn’t matter. The misinformers and the misinformed were partners in one dance. “Shakati” made sense of their grief — he was the nemesis in England’s national tragedy.

Andrew Tate grasped the tenor of the moment. He posted a rant on X from his sports car: “The soul of the Western Man is so broken that when the invaders slaughter your daughters, you do absolutely fucking nothing.” The provocation was clear: “Prove me wrong.”

We began sifting through the online archive of those hours between the murders and the first brick being thrown, searching for the moment that Southport’s tragedy was destined to become a national catastrophe. The tipping point was streamed live to a huge audience by a YouTuber called DJE Media, who is notorious for videos where he flies his drone over private property and trolls anyone who tries to stop him. That day he was filming on Hart Street.

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It was late afternoon in Southport, the day after the murders. News had just come through that a third child, Alice da Silva Aguiar, had died overnight in hospital. The crowd had been waiting for Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the baking sun and the tension was rising. DJE Media’s camera was trained on Starmer as he arrived to lay flowers. “Is it my children next?” an onlooker asked. The mood soured. Instead of turning to address the crowd, Starmer retreated to his black car without saying a word. “Make a real change, Prime Minister! You’re not wanted! Go away!” The camera pivoted to a woman in tears — “I’ve just found out that my friend’s nine-year-old daughter has died — the child I held in my arms, and you can’t do shit! He can’t do shit!” She was now wailing, bent over. “He’s meant to be the prime minister!”

The whole thing lasted about a minute. Unedited footage of a local community grieving their children was being fed to a national audience who thought their homeland was unravelling. The lines between local loss and collective loss were blurring into one. A critical mass of emotion had been reached, and there was no going back.

By 8pm, hundreds of people had gathered on St Luke’s Road outside Southport Mosque chanting “Who the f**k is Allah”, setting fire to a police carrier, and injuring more than 50 officers. Was the mosque targeted because the rioters made a cold causal calculation that the killer had been a worshipper there? Or did the killing of those girls and the presence of the mosque both remind the rioters that their homeland no longer resembled itself?

As the bricks flew, they chanted “We want our country back! We want our country back!” Their words were a lament just as much as a threat.

It became clear that I would need to spend more time in Southport if we were going to make any headway finding people to go on camera. Driving up from London, I stopped overnight at my grandmother’s house in Ellesmere Port. The next morning, I reminded her I was heading up to Southport.

“Oh we’d go to the beach there. It has a wonderful pier,” she said.

I had explained my plans the night before, and twice already over breakfast. At the front door, she asked me again where I was going. “Southport, Nanna,” I said.

“Oh we’d go to the beach there. It has a wonderful pier.”

Driving away from her house, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was angry at my grandmother. I was struggling to accept who she had become because I couldn’t let go of who she had been.

In 1999, the psychologist Pauline Boss first wrote about something she called “ambiguous loss” — situations of unresolved mourning. Something terrible has happened but it is unfinished and indeterminate. It is “frozen grief”. It baffles and immobilizes and gnaws at you. It gnaws at me when I speak to my grandmother, who is there in flesh and blood and at the same time no longer there at all.

Could the logic of frozen grief help me make sense of what had happened in Southport too? Nearly everyone we met, to some degree, shared a feeling that English people were becoming estranged from themselves and their homeland — their very identity was hollowing out. They felt cut loose from a proud history, and condemned to watch the ensuing decline.

Ambiguous loss can cause what some therapists call “complicated grieving”, distinguished by its intensity, duration, and its tendency to trigger severe dysfunction. It can provoke violence. You fixate, freeze, and spiral. And in the era of the echo chamber, it is easier than ever for ordinary people to become trapped in the grievance vortex. As the fires in Southport burned into the night, online spaces came alive with discussion of what was unfolding.

The disorder spread: Hartlepool, Aldershot, Whitehall, Sunderland, Nottingham, Hull, Liverpool, Tamworth. Over 10 days, nearly 30 towns and cities erupted. At Manvers, near Rotherham, rioters tried to burn down an asylum hotel with more than 200 residents still inside.

We spoke to one of them — a man who had fled Central Asia more than a decade ago and had been drifting through our immigration system ever since. His room was on the first floor of the Holiday Inn. “We smashed the hotel up,” he told us. “Some of us broke furniture, others grabbed fire extinguishers, or knives. We were ready to fight.”

Had police not managed to drive the rioters out of the ground floor lobby, the battle through those smoke-filled corridors would have been brutal and bloody.

Watching the footage of the riot, we found that this wasn’t just a mob of hardcore, masked-up thugs. While the most violent rioters were universally young men, the crowds of baying onlookers were more mixed: you could spot teenage girls, OAPs, and mums with their kids.

We wanted to understand what could make hundreds of ostensibly ordinary people cheer on such extreme violence. So we drove to Manvers to meet Katie Edwards, a writer who had grown up a stone’s throw from the estate.

Like Southport, Manvers is a place that has lost its way. “The center of the universe, if you’re from here,” Katie said, pointing at a Costa Coffee near where the riot took place. The estate, she told us, was built on top of the old Manvers Main colliery, part of a trio of pits which together made up a vast mining complex. The pit was closed in 1988 and in its place came call centers. Then they closed. Now there’s an Amazon packing warehouse. “There’s a very strong sense of having been something and now there’s nothing,” Edwards told us. “There’s that sense of kind of being lost.”

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Manvers was planned as an aspirational newbuild development, all trim gardens and picket fences. There was going to be a supermarket in the center — an upmarket one: Sainsbury’s or Waitrose perhaps. It turned out to be an Aldi. Next to the Aldi was a hotel, which started life as a Radisson Blu. Then the Radisson became a Holiday Inn. Then, without announcement, the Holiday Inn stopped taking public bookings. To begin with it housed Afghan refugee families. But families are prioritized for re-housing so within a couple of years the hotel was home to men only. The residents were given about £8 a week and weren’t allowed to work. So they sat in their rooms, played cricket in the car park, and wandered around the lake. By the summer of 2024, then, Manvers was home to a glorified low-security concentration camp.

If you watch videos from the Manvers riot, you’ll hear shouts of “paedo” and “nonce”, reflecting the painful legacy of Rotherham’s grooming scandal. But the rioters also chanted “Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!” as they launched their assault on a building which in a very real sense signified the community’s fading away. It was a stupid, cruel and futile attempt to recapture their dream of a happier past.

Does Keir Starmer understand that this is a problem of the emotions, just as much as a problem of policy? Boss writes that “the greater the ambiguity surrounding one’s loss, the more difficult it is to master it”. What has the Prime Minister delivered but greater and greater ambiguity? In May, Starmer gave a major speech on immigration, presumably designed as an exercise in listening with a capital L. “Fair rules,” he said, “…give shape to our values.” Without them, he claimed, “we risk becoming an island of strangers”. Two months later, however, he doubled back and said he deeply regretted saying “island of strangers” at all.

The people I have met over the last nine months believe they are already living on that island of strangers: estranged from an older, better version of England. It does not matter that the country they mourn is half-remembered and half-imagined. What matters is that they feel the loss deeply.

The past year has seen a steady drip of concessions to the rioters on immigration, delivered by Starmer with all the vigor of a hostage reading a list of ransom demands. Until last year, the center-left had clung to the belief that, for all its faults and frictions, Britain was a non-violent, multicultural place. The rioters tore that utopia to shreds. And now liberals feel like their prime minister, maddeningly, is picking up where the rioters left off. Disenchanted and estranged, they mourn their fragile utopia and scream “Far-Right” just as their enemies scream “illegal immigration”.

Under Starmer, Britain is becoming a begrudgingly tolerant country. It will never satisfy the Right but it dismays the Left. And so this island of strangers gets stranger, as we sink deeper into collective bewilderment at who we have been, who we are, and who we may become.

There is, however, nothing ambiguous about the loss suffered by the victims of last year’s knife attack. One family agreed to give us an interview. Two of their daughters survived that day, though their eldest suffered serious internal bleeding from multiple wounds. She has to sit in a special chair at school because the normal ones hurt her scars.

Six months before meeting her, we stood outside Liverpool Crown Court listening to her victim impact statement on the trial’s livestream. She was the only child to address the court in person and did so against the advice of adults who were worried about her wellbeing. She overruled them, and addressed her words directly to her would-be killer: “I hope you spend the rest of your life knowing that we think you are a coward.”

On the day of her interview with us she had that same stubborn dignity, making us wait while she did her makeup and showed off her new nails: squared ends and black tips. She cried only once, quietly and briefly, when she said she wished she could have saved Alice’s life. She said she thinks about it every day. And then she stopped crying and raised her eyes back to the camera. A victim’s power often lies in refusing victimhood. That is her power.

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We asked her mother if it mattered to her that the man who stabbed her daughter was the son of immigrants, or that he was not white. “I choose not to make that a reason,” she replied.

Driving away from their house, I wished the rioters had been there at those interviews and witnessed the raw power of responding to loss with grace.

Nine months spent examining last year’s riots has left me with a profound sense of unease. I met many people who were pessimistic about Britain’s future while grieving an irretrievable past. For this hungry audience, conspiracists will continue to spin wild tales from the real threads of our national decline.

While we work out how to arrest this decline — something that could take the political equivalent of geological time — we will have to come to terms with our unresolved grief. The idea of ambiguous loss can help us understand the chaotic, self-destructive, and compulsive behavior exhibited by normal people last summer, and today. To recognize the riots as a phenomenon of frozen grief as much as politics is to recognize their staying power.

“If we ask the fundamental question, ‘Why did this happen?’ we must be prepared to look beyond the neat equations of cause and effect and learn to live with uncertainty,” Boss writes. “This is a frightening thought for many.” It frightens me. The program I helped to make lays out the neat equations of cause and effect. But it does not get to the bottom of the unresolved mourning.

My grandmother will watch the documentary. After the end credits, she will turn to me and tell me that she used to visit Southport. That it has a wonderful pier. I cannot make her remember, any more than the rioters can make their England feel like it used to.

We have entered a period of complicated grieving, and we must brace ourselves for what that means.

***

One Day in Southport was broadcast on Channel 4 on 24 July, and is available to watch online. James Parris is writing in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of Amos Pictures or Channel 4.

The Year of the Rat is a revealing book, but not in the way it aspires to be. The extreme fringes of the British far-Right, it turns out, are, well, pretty extreme and the oleaginous assortment of oddballs, cranks and grifters Shukman meets there are racist, sexist and homophobic. Which is to say that the big revelation of the book isn’t all that revelatory. What the book reveals instead, despite its driving thesis, is the dire state of Britain’s far-Right, which, far from becoming “mainstream”, is so exotically fringe and weird that most normies wouldn’t even have heard of its various ideologues and acolytes. It also reveals the dire state of a progressive mindset that can’t seem to discriminate between Alan Partridge-sounding populists such as Nigel Farage on the one hand and mouth-frothing racists on the other.

What little drama there is in The Year of the Rat depends on the conceit that Shukman’s cover could be blown at any moment. As part of his disguise as Chris, a zip-up fleece-wearing everyman who is “concerned about demographic replacement”, Shukman grew a mustache and cut his hair short. “I wanted to get close to the British far right, find out what kind of people join, and, if possible, do what I could to disrupt their operations,” he writes.

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To read Shukman’s breathless prose about Chris’s “infiltrations”, “safety protocols”, secret meetings with his “handler” Patrik Hermansson (who himself went undercover in 2016) and the many near-misses where his hidden camera is almost discovered, you could be excused for thinking that he’d breached the inner sanctum of a terrifying Mexican drugs cartel or a sword-wielding, spy-hating jihadist group. But the far-Right activists with whom Shukman ingratiates himself are more ridiculous than terrifying. People like the Basketweavers, a “far-right community” that no one has ever heard of.

According to Shukman, the Basketweavers are “a kind of clandestine discussion group” that scorns online communication and only meets in person. Indeed, Hermansson “has good reason to believe that this is no ordinary community”. It soon transpires that instead of weaving baskets, the Basketweavers trade in racist conspiracy theories, doing this in the backrooms of British pubs where they regularly meet up in small and exclusively male groups. It also transpires that the number of people who belong to the Basketweavers is tiny: around 2,000 worldwide, with “hundreds” from the UK.

Shukman devotes a whole chapter — his first — to the Basketweavers and in it we learn that once he infiltrates the group, he discovers that they are very racist and harbor an especial antipathy toward Jews. Revealingly, Shukman observes that it’s “remarkable” that the Basketweavers “have so far escaped media attention”, seemingly oblivious to the idea that no one cares very much about the Basketweavers’ racist pub chitchat.

Next Shukman goes to Tallinn, Estonia, where he infiltrates a far-Right conference organized by someone called Fróði Midjord. He runs into a host of unsavory characters who are very racist and make little or no effort in concealing that they’re very racist, such as an American white nationalist who talks about the “capture of America by non-whites” and a Holocaust denier who insists that African-Americans should be repatriated “back” to Africa. Indeed, almost the entirety of The Year of the Rat is organized around Shukman meeting a lot of racist people no one has ever heard of and surreptitiously recording them saying racist things. It is thus quite a boring book, enlivened only by the bits where Shukman comes close to having his cover blown.

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One activist who I had heard of and who Shukman met and skirted around is Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right party Britain First and the protégé of Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP. Britain First, Shukman explains, is no ordinary party: it pickets refugee centers with flash mobs and conducts “mosque invasions”, where its activists berate Muslims about the evils of Islam. And Golding himself is no ordinary party leader, having been found guilty of hate crimes and a terrorism offense (the latter because he refused to hand over the pin codes for his electronic devices to counter-terrorism police on re-entering the UK from Russia in 2019). “I want to understand what Paul Golding is like,” Shukman confides, with all the sincerity of a pick-up-artist who feigns interest in a woman’s point of view. In Shukman’s telling, and to no one’s surprise, Golding is a nasty piece of work: a bully and grifter who trousers party donations which he duly splurges on a 10-day holiday to Thailand.

Golding’s crew of minions, which includes a coke-head with missing teeth, isn’t much better and Shukman soon discovers, with “horror”, that many believe that the Holocaust is made up. “Here was proof that Britain First is a nasty party whose activists traffic in some of the vilest conspiracy theories,” he writes, as if relaying some dark truth he’s just brought to light. But most people who have heard of Golding know full well about the nastiness of his politics, which is why his party has so few members — no more than 40 active ones, Shukman estimates — and why it has failed so abysmally at the ballot box; in the London mayoral election of 2024, Britain First received fewer votes than a candidate called Count Binface.

This is emblematic of a deeper problem with The Year of the Rat, which is that it’s a profoundly dishonest book. It is so, in part, because it suggests that the far-Right activists who Shukman infiltrates have a hidden agenda, when in fact only an imbecile would be surprised by Shukman’s “revelations” about the far-Right, not only because it’s so unabashed about what it believes but also because so many journalists and experts have been loudly warning us for years about how its odious beliefs — about race science and the “great replacement” — have gone mainstream.

It’s also dishonest in the sense that it attributes far more political power and cultural sway to the far-Right than it actually possesses. Not a few, he says, are “sophisticated” campaigners and “enjoy the support of American tech tycoons and Conservative policymakers”, which may well be true. But most of the characters that populate his book are the sort of people that any normal person would determinedly avoid on the street or in a pub. Shukman clearly knows this and takes no small amount of pleasure in reporting on the abject political failures, internecine squabbles and ineptitude of the sorry activists he joins and spies on. For example, when canvassing with Britain First in Finchingfield, Essex, the entire village makes it very clear that they’re not welcome. This must have heartened Shukman, but it’s a detail that doesn’t exactly flatter his thesis about a powerful and ascendant far-Right in Britain. No less dishonest is Shukman’s use of the term “far-Right”, which he uses to refer to figures as ideologically far apart as Golding and the Reform Party’s leader Nigel Farage. But because the latter has a substantial following and sounds the alarm about tens of thousands of undocumented migrants milling around in the towns and villages of Britain, he is “far-Right” and hence proof-positive that it has gone mainstream.

If Shukman has a bad conscience, it’s not chiefly because he’s deceived so many people in the process of researching his book — he actually justifies deception as a necessary if regrettable tactic to get close to the far-Right, which is suspicious of outsiders, and to expose all its unpleasantness. Rather, it is because he felt morally tainted — “complicit”, as he puts it — by participating in their activism while undercover with them. On several occasions, he uses the word “grubby” to describe how this made him feel.

Shukman should feel grubby, not just because he lied to people, but because he lied for no discernible benefit. Indeed, he has not advanced the study of the far-Right one inch. He has no theory of mind of the far-Right activist and nothing of interest or originality to say about why or how people become part of its orbit, other than referencing some trite clichés about loneliness and alienation. And the revelations he discloses are scarcely earth-shattering.

In fact, Shukman, along with several other researchers who shamelessly tout their proficiency as undercover infiltrators, has likely set back the study of the far-Right, making it much harder for genuine researchers to study its members up close and to win their trust. The next time such a researcher approaches the far-Right with a research project in mind they ought to be prepared for something decidedly more earnest than the mock punch Paul Golding launched at Shukman when they first met.

It’s rare to meet relaxed French police at a political event, even rarer when a good chunk of them are CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité), the baton- and taser-wielding riot police. The latter are here in case of an Antifa attack, which is unlikely. Far from the French capital, where she’s never managed to poll above single figures, and exactly one month after a Paris court sentenced her to four years in prison (two suspended), a €100,000 fine, and a five-year ban from running for public office, Marine, as everyone here calls her, has come among her own people to fight for her political life.

Three hours before kick-off, cheerful queues are already forming. Since last year’s snap election, all three Aude MPs belong to the National Rally, part of the 125-strong intake that made the Rally the largest single-party group in the French National Assembly. The maps published after the runoff showed the entire Mediterranean coast of France, from Perpignan at the Spanish border to Menton next to Italy, as one almost solid block of navy blue (“bleu marine”). Three red islands (Marseilles, the university town of Montpellier, posh Avignon) and a single Macronista yellow speck (half of Toulon) were all that remained of legacy parties.

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Even though the two-round electoral system ultimately disappointed Rassemblement ambitions nationwide, when a hastily-cobbled Front Républicain alliance between the Left and Macron’s centrists beat back many of the Rally candidates who’d been in the lead, similar Rally blue areas structure the new map of France: in the northern rustbelt where Le Pen herself has held her Pas-de-Calais seat for eight years; in Lorraine and other once-prosperous north-eastern mining and steelmaking towns; even in places such as Burgundy and Corsica, where they won unheard-of tallies of close to 40% of the vote. The Marinisation of the country seems proof of Le Pen’s achievement in “detoxifying” a brand that was once embodied by her fire-breathing, provocateur father.

My driver and Languedoc-whisperer, an Anglo-American friend who’s lived here for two decades, says the jolly queues and party atmosphere reminds him of MAGA rallies. One difference is that nobody starts insulting us once we’ve collected our press badges. On the other hand, the minute people recognise Yoann Usai, a reporter from CNEWS, the conservative all-news channel, derided by Parisian progressives, they crowd him affectionately for autographs and selfies. “Thank you! You’re speaking for us! You’re defending us!”

As in America, the mood is against “le steal”. “C’est une décision politique!” insists the first person we ask about the judicial condemnation in Paris — and the second, and the third. Le Pen, a barrister by trade, earned herself the solid enmity of her judges, as well as a harsher sentence, when instead of admitting that she’d wilfully broken European Parliament rules (and French political party financing laws) by paying, for almost two decades, Rally officials in Paris with salaries supposed to go to Brussels parliamentary assistants, she claimed she was singled out for political censure. But victimhood plays well among the faithful here. “They all do it and get a rap on the fingers, she gets jail and a ban from running”, says Josette, a 68-year-old former shoe shop assistant. “Ils ont voulu nous faire un sale coup!” (“They’re trying to pull a fast one on us!”), say Linda and Christelle, 20-somethings in crop-tops and ripped jeans, hoping they will be able to get within selfie-reach of the handsome Bardella.

It’s true that both France’s current PM, the centrist François Bayrou, 73, as well as the hard-Left France Unbowed firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also 73, have also been targeted by judges for similar rule-breaking. But neither Mélenchon, nor those of his party’s Brussels parliamentary assistants currently being investigated for alleged misappropriation of some €500,000 over 9 years, have yet been formally indicted. (France Unbowed denies all charges.) While nine of Bayrou’s Modem Party assistants were condemned last year (to fines and suspended sentences), he himself was acquitted, although the public prosecutor has appealed against “excessive leniency”, and Bayrou will have to stand trial again. In both cases, the sums involved are one-third of those siphoned off by Le Pen’s party; and the practice is “less systematic” (than regular payments into Rassemblement coffers for non-existent jobs for over twenty years). But that’s far too much detail to dispel this crowd’s belief in the fix.

Inside, rock music is blaring, of the unadventurous Radio 2 variety; Gloria Gaynor, Queen, Black-Eyed Peas, even Aznavour and Piaf: the vibe more rave party than political funeral. In addition to their parents and grandparents, there are crowds of young people in the wide pit, perhaps two-thirds of the 5,000-strong throng. They are the ones who form the bulk of Bardella’s two-million-plus TikTok followers, but they shout “MA-RINE, PRÉ-SI-DENTE!” at the top of their voices until Le Pen shows up, and is greeted with wild applause. Earlier, with the clever analyses of Paris political pundits in mind — the aristocracy of established newspaper and magazines columnists variously billed this “last-chance rally” as the moment when Bardella would “commit matricide” (Le Point), “cast himself as the Crown Prince” (Challenges), “put her to pasture” (Libération) — I had tried asking as many people as possible for favourites: who would they ultimately prefer to give their vote to? Nobody would play. “They’re inseparable.” “They go hand in hand.”

“You don’t understand,” Josette told me. “We love him, but she’s family.” “She understands us,” her husband said. “She does all this for us. Yes, if it comes to that, I will vote for Jordan; but that’s because I know she will be at his side, she’ll advise him.” Jean-Marc, the owner of a local garage, who for years voted for what was then called the Front National, headed by the old Jean-Marie Le Pen, said he tended to favor Bardella’s more pro-business policies. “Marine is sometimes too Left-wing, she would spend more on benefits when the country can’t afford it. If he’s her prime minister, he’ll bring balance.”

Often disappointing in television debates — Emmanuel Macron, the ultimate class swot, destroyed her twice, in 2017 and in 2022, pushing even the most faithful of her supporters to predict that she’d never make it to the Élysée — Marine Le Pen is never better than when cornered. A week after stalking out of the court that had apparently killed her political prospects for good, she gave a one-hour interview to the respected parliamentary journal “L’Hémicycle”. As she pointed out, applying to her a specific disposition that enforced her ineligibility immediately, even though she was appealing, and therefore presumed innocent, meant she was being put into the category of dangerous gangsters and terrorists, and deemed a risk to society. “I don’t suppose anyone really believes I shall flee abroad?” she asked. It was a fine performance, one of her best, and at the party that followed, in a Michelin-starred Champs-Elysées restaurant that once belonged to Referendum Party founder and press maverick Jimmy Goldsmith, she was crowded by the exact kind of people ­— political journalists, society types, business leaders — who supposedly want to keep her out of the game.

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Strangely, in Narbonne, Le Pen chose to speak first, unconcernedly leaving Bardella to deliver the finale. The grandson of Italian immigrants, born in France’s poorest département north of Paris, and a university drop-out, Bardella doesn’t threaten her — though he is probably the fastest learner in French politics. “They’re instinctive personalities, no book-readers, so neither will try intellectually snubbing the other, and they have an almost filial relationship,” says a Rassemblement MP.

I spot a candidate for the mayoralty of a large provincial city in the 2026 municipal elections. The candidate is standing for UDR: Union des Droites Républicaines, the Les Républicains rump that seceded last year to ally themselves with the Rally, and were damned accordingly. Marine Le Pen runs a surprisingly relaxed shop, I’m told. “It’s such a relief after the constant backstabbing at Les Réps. One of our leading MPs went to her to explain our group couldn’t support the Rally in a coming parliamentary vote of no-confidence on pensions reform, because it went against stated policy. It meant 16 fewer votes. She said, ‘Yes, I understand; that’s not what your voters want from you.’ No drama! No recriminations! Well, that’s how you explain her relationship with Jordan. She promoted him several times, because she liked what she saw. Of course he’s ambitious; of course he realizes younger voters connect to him. But it’s easier for him to wait, because there’s no resentment; he’s been far better treated than her own niece Marion Maréchal, who left the Rally to join Eric Zemmour.

Marion, the wife of the former Fratelli d’Italia MEP Vincenzo Sofo, is a gifted but temperamental maverick. Once a Zemmour MEP, she recently created her own mini-party rather than altogether re-joining the Rassemblement. She is a Le Pen, which used to be everything in the party — but the new message is now that loyalty is more prized than family. When Bardella recently produced a best-selling (200,000 copies) autobiography, “Ce que je cherche” (What I Seek), which he had very little hand in writing, she immediately agreed to rally side-events in which he was mobbed for signed copies. At Narbonne, you could see dozens of young people clutching their copies like a fashion accessory, with their hero’s black and white cover photo well in evidence.

This pair know their audience. And they know the sure-fire way to get an entire hall to boo on cue is only to utter: “Monsieur Macron…!” In Narbonne, both Le Pen and Bardella grab the opportunity at regular intervals. (“Madame von der Leyen!…” works too.) Le Pen is strong and fluent, talking about the economic crisis, lack of jobs, de-industrialization — far more than on immigration and insecurity, as if, to this audience, that was already a given. Bardella is punchier: using precise figures, against the Green Deal and the costs it meant for the less well-off; on zero tolerance on crime; on France’s “humiliation” by her former colony, Algeria, (whose the 79-year-old president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has directed French-Algerian influencers to stir up their communities against the French state, and imprisoned an 80-year-old French novelist on trumped-up charges.) The crowd, who applaud Marine from sheer affection, roar at Bardella’s arguments, including a well-crafted sentence on rising knife murder. “No crime can be tolerated, no one should walk into a mosque to kill a young man with impunity.” (He is referring to the killing of Aboubakar Cissé, 22, in La Grande Combe, 90 miles north-east of Narbonne, which Mélenchon immediately grasped as an instance of “Islamophobia.”) But even if you could feel the excitement Bardella, a strong speaker, generates, it wasn’t strong enough that Le Pen could feel slighted.

If now were truly the time for the fight for leadership that analysts predict, it would have put Bardella one step further to so-called victory. But even if this “ideal son-in-law” of mesmerizing poise were tempted to unseat his mentor, he knows perfectly well that any hint of disloyalty would spell his end with Rassemblement voters, a bloc who feel, rightly or wrongly, that every government and politician in France has betrayed them. Loyalty is all they have, and all they prize. Besides, even if Bardella only were to run in 2032, he’d still be the exact age of Emmanuel Macron when he won the presidency in 2017.

Winning is now realistically in the Rassemblement sights. Emmanuel Macron, who cannot run again, is so detested that his probable successors have little hope of victory on his negative coat-tails. The most interesting is his 36-year-old former PM Gabriel Attal, who had 240 days in the job before last year’s disastrous snap election; but he suffers from being perceived as a Macron clone. The Left is irretrievably split between half a dozen parties, from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed to a shattered Socialist Party whose best hope is a comeback of François Hollande, still smarting from his minister Macron’s betrayal. On the Right, what’s left of Les Républicains cannot hope to be in the runoff. If Mélenchon gets there, the Rassemblement will win easily, possibly with 60%. If Hollande’s dream of a comeback catches on (and that’s a big if) on the Left, he still may not be able to benefit from another Front Républicain.

That leaves the oft-discounted, even more often derided Marine Le Pen. Her appeal should be heard next year. Even if she cannot stand a fourth time, she will have shaped the next French presidential race.

Yet amid this spontaneous outpouring of fraternal affection, there was something else. You saw it on the graffiti, spattered on the walls of small Polish towns. “Banderites go home!” they read, a reference to the infamous Second World War-era Ukrainian militia leader Stepan Bandera, who Poles associate with a dark period of ethnic violence. You heard it, too, in whispered disapproval as sportscars with Ukrainian number plates glided by. Last year, Polish farmers blockaded the border, unhappy at how imported grain hurt their fragile bottom line. These motivations were hardly just economic, with allusions to expelling Ukrainians from Poland a regular refrain.

What started as a trickle has now become a flood. Surveys now find that a slim majority of Poles oppose sending additional weapons to Ukraine. There’s something else too: Poland’s ultranationalist Right, formerly on the country’s margins, has barrelled to the mainstream. According to two separate polls, Sławomir Mentzen of the Confederation Party has overtaken the Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate to take second place in Poland’s presidential race. Even polls that show Mentzen behind PiS’s man show his support growing, and the difference between the two is now less than the statistical margin of error. If the numbers hold, May’s election could be the first without a PiS candidate in the top two spots for 20 years.

This result is far from guaranteed. As the longtime party of choice for Poland’s Catholic traditionalists, PiS commands a robust political network that won’t be upended easily. Yet having lost to a coalition of center-left parties in 2023, and with looming financial troubles biting at their heels, PiS is increasingly looking like the sick man of Polish politics, ripe for a challenge from the Right. More than that, and as the ominous references to Banderites imply, history is also ripe for a revival of anti-Ukrainian nationalism — even as the past hints at other futures for Poland and its people too.

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Can Poland ever forgive Ukraine?

By Michal Kranz

“There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.” So goes a quote from Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the founding father of modern Poland, who ruled the country during the interwar period. The line has frequently been repeated by Polish leaders explaining why defending Kyiv is in Warsaw’s national interest. But this adage also speaks to something deeper within Piłsudski’s philosophy. Called Prometheism, the project aimed at weakening Russia by encouraging ethnic minorities in its empire to establish independent states of their own — much like Prometheus had uplifted humanity with the gift of fire. As for Poland itself, Piłsudski was a believer in pluralism and envisioned a multi-ethnic state that, supported by newly erected buffer states like Ukraine, would form a powerful bulwark against Moscow.

Of course, not everyone saw things that way. Roman Dmowski, Piłsudski’s chief political rival, advocated for a much less internationalist and diverse national identity. Rather, he envisaged an ethnostate for Poles, and only Poles, created by Polonizing or expelling minorities like Jews, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians. Though Dmowski held little real political power in interwar Poland, his National Democracy movement was a force to be reckoned with. Piłsudski pursued them relentlessly in his later years, arresting many of its members and leading the movement to effectively vanish by 1945.

Not that the Second World War brought understanding between Warsaw and Kyiv. Those references to Stepan Bandera remain so evocative because of what his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists did as they tried to carve out an independent, ethnically Ukrainian state free of Polish interlopers. Allying themselves with the invading Germans in 1941, with the Nazis offering Bandera a measure of autonomy in their new world order, his followers massacred as many as 100,000 Poles living across what are modern Ukraine’s western fringes. Their actions, along with Russian population transfers at the end of the war, ultimately resulted in the wholesale expulsion of Poles from the area around Lwów, a city which had been part of Poland during the interwar years. By 1947, Polish Lwów had been redubbed Ukrainian Lviv — and at least 100,000 Poles had been driven from their homes.

The long decades of Soviet tyranny were unsurprisingly fallow for the Polish far-Right, while the early post-communist years were focused on building a new capitalist economy. Yet in the 2010s, a new far-Right party emerged in Poland. Called the National Movement, it branded itself the spiritual successor to Dmowski’s National Democracy. Among its founders was Krzysztof Bosak, who having been elected to the Polish Parliament at the age of 23, was then the second youngest MP in the body’s history. In 2019, Bosak’s National Movement entered into a coalition with another Right-wing party, and the Confederation Party as we know it today was born.

In those early days, Confederation was considered too extreme to pose a serious challenge to Poland’s political duopoly, with the PiS battling the centrist Civic Platform. Its ranks were filled with sexists, Russophiles, and anti-Semites. Perhaps the most notorious example here was Grzegorz Braun, who in 2023 used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles of a menorah in the Polish Parliament. Since then, and much like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Confederation has tried to “detoxify” its image, expelling the likes of Braun and focusing instead on liberal economic policy, libertarianism, and a Poland First strategy on the international stage.

Instead of fielding dreary ideologues like Bosak, who gained a mere 7% of the vote when running for president in 2020, the party also found a new champion in Mentzen, who holds a PhD in economics and enjoys the largest following of any Polish politician on TikTok. With his no-holds-barred, unfiltered diatribes against rival politicians, Mentzen knows how to whip his online crowd into a frenzy, and even Poles who don’t support him often find his viral content popping up on their feed. If the latest polls are to be believed, Mentzen has more than tripled the party’s support since Bosak’s campaign.

Mentzen is certainly not without baggage. In 2019, for instance, he infamously stated that Confederation wanted a Poland without “Jews, homosexuals, abortions, taxation and the European Union”. He later claimed he was joking — at least about the Jews. His 2025 campaign website outlines an assertive agenda that includes cracking down on illegal migration; lowering taxes; combating “Leftist ideology”; continuing to build up Poland’s armed forces; opposing any Polish troops in post-war Ukraine; and standing up to the EU, among other provocative ideas.

Yet despite not being mentioned in his platform, a core part of Mentzen’s appeal has been his uncompromising language on Ukrainians. “They treat us like suckers,” he said in a TV interview this month. “We are sending weapons, money, social benefits to Ukraine, we are treating Ukrainians in Poland for free. In return we get slander, they insult us and show absolutely no gratitude.” Mentzen certainly is not calling for the forced assimilation or expulsion of Ukrainians. Yet in an echo of Dmowski nearly a century ago, his central message is that the Polish state must prioritize the wellbeing of ethnic Poles above all else. Mentzen personally alluded to the dark history between Poland and Ukraine last month when he visited Lviv, where he condemned the city’s numerous statues of Bandera. In response, Kyiv branded him an “enemy of Ukraine” and accused him of “inciting ethnic hatred”.

The distinction Mentzen therefore makes is not one of citizenship or residency — but of blood, culture and spirit. And, in the eyes of Confederation, this is where PiS got things wrong. Though the party took a hard line on illegal migration while in power, it not only welcomed millions of Ukrainians, but also encouraged the arrival of thousands of legal immigrants as cheap foreign labor. In fact, Poland under PiS has led the EU in granting first residency permits to foreign workers from outside the bloc since 2017. The party was also implicated in a visas-for-cash scandal shortly before the 2023 elections, ultimately costing the party its grip on power.

Karol Nawrocki, PiS’s candidate in this election cycle, has scrambled to align himself more closely with Confederation’s position on immigration. But Polish populists apparently aren’t buying it — at least not enough to keep Mentzen at bay. Yet if Rafał Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform’s candidate, will almost certainly win the election, his party’s government has also shifted its policies. That’s clearest around its approach to a post-war Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has repeatedly refused to commit Polish soldiers to any future peacekeeping force, the subtext being that Poland may find it needs its troops at home instead.

As the best-armed state in the region, Poland will likely be forced to deploy its soldiers to Ukraine sooner or later. But the fact Tusk feels compelled to temper his party’s platform speaks to Confederation’s rising soft power. This is likely to only continue. Poland remains much less diverse than the multi-ethnic nation inhabited by Piłsudski and Dmowski, to say nothing of Western European states like France or Britain. All the same, this is a country whose national makeup is indeed changing, especially in urban areas, inevitably fueling Confederation’s ultranationalist vision.

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Though it won’t replace PiS anytime soon, then, it’s only a matter of time before Mentzen becomes the primary force on Poland’s Right. Yet here, again, history may make itself felt. Forget Dmowski or the Banderites — the country’s past encompasses an even broader paradox. Despite Piłsudski’s efforts, after all, modern Poland is unaccustomed to being a regional hegemon, let alone an empire, and has resisted several opportunities to become one. Even at the height of its power, in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest states in Europe, the country’s potential was squandered by a self-interested nobility.

Today, Poland once again finds itself wobbling between narrow isolationism and a leading role in Europe, one that would require it to become a guarantor of security far beyond its own borders. This, it goes without saying, would encompass many more people than simply ethnic Poles. Confederation’s rise is at least in part a response to this geopolitical moment and aims to force Poland’s leaders to make a choice between two futures that’ll dictate the country’s future for decades to come.

Aside from certain details, this choice is the same one that Piłsudski and Dmowski offered Poles a century ago. Though Piłsudski eventually emerged victorious, his plans were cut short by his own death, by the annihilation of Poland in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and by the country’s long domination by the Soviet Union. Now, though, Poland may finally have a chance to revisit the matter and settle it once and for all. Because while history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes — in Poland more than elsewhere.

The shocking attack has reignited the debate about immigration only weeks before the German federal elections on February 23, and exposed the weakness of its political elites. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU opposition and front-runner in the race to be chancellor, will propose legislation this week to permanently end free movement across all of Germany’s borders. Radical enough in itself, such a change would signal the end of the political firewall, or Brandmauer, his party had erected against the far-Right Alternative for Germany. The firewall is a pledge among the mainstream parties that there would be no cooperation with the AfD under any circumstances — no coalition, no confidence and supply agreement, and no joint legislation at federal level.

Previously, the CDU had rejected an offer from AfD co-leader Alice Weidel to vote together for a change in asylum policy, committing to pull its support for any law that would only pass with the votes of the AfD. Now things have changed. As Merz put it: “I am no longer willing to refrain from putting the right thing to the vote in the German Bundestag just because the wrong people might agree to it.”

Merz then went even further, doubling down with another pledge. He said, echoing Donald Trump, that if elected chancellor, he would pass an executive order on his first day in office to reintroduce border controls. German chancellors, however, are not as powerful as US presidents. Proportional representation means they have to co-opt other parties into coalitions. And there is no way that his potential centrist partners would accept such an executive order — the coalition would fracture on day one. And so the CDU leader has, effectively, erected a new firewall — this time against the other parties. There are only two scenarios whereby he could enact what he promises: either, he wins an absolute majority, which not a single German poll predicts. Or, he cooperates with the AfD.

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By Wolfgang Munchau

This seemingly local debate about immigration has important ramifications for the EU project as a whole. For if Merz were to reintroduce border controls, this would permanently end the EU’s Schengen passport-free travel system — one of the significant achievements of integration, along with the euro and the single market. If Germany were to resurrect passport controls to keep out refugees, all its immediate neighbors, and their neighbors, would have to do the same, because nobody wants to be stranded with its rejected refugees. Schengen — which includes 29 European countries — would collapse within hours. To solve the problem of illegal immigrants would require a fully functioning European immigration policy. There is no chance of that happening either. And so, for the EU, this would be worse than Brexit; it would mark the first step towards the disintegration of the entire EU project.

Friedrich Merz is an impulsive politician with lots of good ideas. He was enjoying a secure lead in the polls, strong on national security and on the economy. He is the only senior German politician who understands at a deep level that his country’s economic model is broken. A critic of Germany’s digital protectionism, he has a better grasp of 21st-century technologies than any of his peers. But nobody is talking about his ideas for economic transformation and innovation now because everybody is now talking about immigration and firewalls.

Voters know that given Germany’s system of proportional representation, parties can promise whatever they want but it is the coalitions that decide. They also know that Merz will almost surely go into a coalition with a centrist party, like the Social Democrats or the Greens, neither of which support permanent border controls. If current polls are right, the CDU will have to govern with at least one of them, possibly both. The more parties, the harder the coalition talks will be, and the less of his agenda Merz will be able to implement.

There are moments in politics when politicians have to take big risks. But this was not one of them: it would have been enough for him to promise a review of immigration policies. When you make up policies on the hoof like this, people are bound to question your sincerity. After all, it was only a little over a week ago when he told a campaign rally to loud applause that “one 1933 is enough for Germany”. This was a reference to the year when Hitler came to power. He was essentially comparing the AfD to the Nazis. Until Wednesday, his firewall was a firmament of German politics. Today, people are no longer sure whether it still stands.

Austria just showed us how fast a firewall can crumble. The center-right Austrian People’s Party had one in place against the far-Right Freedom Party, the winner in last year’s election. Karl Nehammer, the former Austrian chancellor and leader of the People’s Party, wanted to negotiate a “losers’ coalition” with the Social Democrats and a small liberal party. But the negotiations failed because Nehammer, like Merz, insisted on immigration policies that were tougher than the centrists could stomach. After the talks collapsed at the beginning of this month, Nehammer resigned both as chancellor and party chairman. His party has now agreed to collapse the firewall and form a coalition with the Freedom Party. Its leader, Herbert Kickl, will become the next chancellor.

What happened in Austria is that two competing red lines clashed. If Merz ended up in a position where he would need both the SPD and the Greens to form a coalition, there is no way he could implement his immigration policies. If as in Austria, the German negotiations also ended with no deal, then the only viable coalition option would be for the CDU to form a coalition with the AfD, or a minority government with the support of the AfD.

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Why Europe fears free speech

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Most probably, Merz’s high-risk gamble will end up with him having to eat his words and cobble together another centrist coalition with the same old parties and same old policies that failed in the past. In this scenario, the AfD would become the main opposition party, with a strong chance of winning the 2029 elections. Weidel would stand a good chance of becoming the next chancellor. In both scenarios the AfD wins.

But this iteration of the AfD is a far cry from the party which started out 12 years ago as a conservative-libertarian group, founded by economics professors who wanted Germany to leave the euro. Today, the professors are long gone, displaced by nationalists, including some who are close to the neo-Nazi movement. Weidel herself is not in that camp. But nor is she a Javier Milei or an Elon Musk. Weidel’s party, though popular with the younger generation — and with Musk, who appeared at an AfD rally at the weekend to decry multiculturalism — supports a return to Russian gas and heavy industry. The AfD may claim to understand new technology, but it is not a party of innovation.

My message to all libertarian conservatives, then, is to be careful what you wish for. The AfD is a party that would not have you as a member. But the increasingly desperate attempt to keep them away from power is what sits at the heart of Germany’s dysfunction and prevents it from addressing its economic paralysis.

Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have no firewalls. These countries are governed by coalitions of the center-right and the far-Right. Austria will soon join them. It was a choice the voters in those countries have made. They will make other choices in the future. A firewall would have deprived them of the choice.

If as a German voter, you wanted change in economic policy, there is currently no path for such a preference to be implemented. No matter how you vote, you always end up with the same homogenized centrist policies. Ending the firewall is the only way to prise open the failing political cartel which has Germany — and the EU — in its suffocating grasp.

Between the riots of last summer and record migration rates of 900,000 in 2023, a broader feeling of discontent has been supercharged by the return to the headlines of Asian rape gangs — in particular, the apparent failures and cover-ups by establishment politicians. Farage’s softer nationalism, as well as his online spat with Elon Musk over support for the activist Tommy Robinson, has presented parties to the Right of Reform UK with an opportunity. Reflecting a resurgent brand of impassioned ethnonationalism, they feel like their moment has come.

At heart, the ethnonationalist believes that nationhood — and the resultant social and political benefits — can only truly be shared by those with a common race. Their movement is fueled by the sense of a coming threat, the idea that a racial identity dating back over a thousand years could be wiped out. The flood of immigration in recent years and the ensuing change to Britain’s ethnic make-up has given succor to ethnonationalist arguments, and these are growing louder on the political fringes.

The far-Right in the UK was once dominated by the British National Party, led in its heyday by Nick Griffin. The BNP reached its peak in 2009 when it secured two MEPs and a little under a million votes in European Parliament elections — spurred on by migration figures that had reached around 200,000. Later that year, the party received further notoriety when Griffin appeared on the BBC’s Question Time, during which he managed to refer to the Ku Klux Klan as “almost totally non-violent” and claimed that “a lot of people find the sight of two grown men kissing in public really creepy”.

But the 2010 general election, in which the BNP failed to win any seats, marked the beginning of the end for Griffin. He stood down as leader in July 2014, before being expelled later that year for allegedly harassing BNP staff. The party has now been essentially inactive for the past half-decade. Tommy Robinson may be the poster boy of the English far-Right, yet the English Defence League he co-founded has effectively been defunct for years too. Just as many on the ethnonationalist Right judge Farage to be a liberal in populist clothing, Robinson is also widely dismissed in those circles as a self-promoter who isn’t serious about building a coherent and lasting movement. That work is being done further below the surface.

For it is the personalities involved in Griffin’s fall a decade ago — a chain of events encompassing power struggles, ideological splits and murder threats — who are furthering the cause of Britain’s ethnonationalist Right, threatening to spill its grievances on to the streets.

One key figure is Mark Collett, who leads Britain’s largest and most proactive explicitly white nationalist group. Called Patriotic Alternative (PA), by its own count the organization has over 16,000 supporters. Collett starred in the 2002 Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi and Proud, produced when he was leader of the BNP’s youth wing. The film describes him as one of the party’s “best and brightest”, while a proud Griffin refers to him as a potential successor as leader.

But after admiringly claiming in the documentary that “Hitler will live on forever” and admitting that he was a “Nazi sympathizer”, at a time when Griffin was attempting to detoxify the BNP brand, Collett was temporarily expelled from the party. He returned, rose to become publicity director, and again positioned himself as an heir to Griffin. This progress was undone in 2010, a matter of weeks before the general election, when Collett was accused of plotting a BNP palace coup before being arrested for allegedly threatening to kill his leader.

His new organization is similarly controversial. PA has been linked to National Action, a proscribed terrorist organization, and it was namechecked last year in Parliament in relation to the new Government definition of extremism, accused of promoting neo-Nazi ideology. Unsurprisingly, Collett’s hard-Right group has thus far been unsuccessful in registering as a political party, its applications rejected at least four times by the Electoral Commission. With both the group and Collett himself banned from Twitter for, among other things, celebrating a 2023 riot outside a Merseyside hotel housing refugees, online operations have largely moved to the messaging app Telegram, where the PA leader has over 20,000 followers.

There, he argues that immigration initiatives are “all part of a concerted effort to destroy the country”, and following the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen he posted a tribute praising the National Front founder’s “pro-White ideas”. The obituary concludes: “Le Pen’s memory today urges us to continue struggling unapologetically for our worldview, which is neither right nor left, but White.”

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Central to Collett’s belief system is the idea of “remigration”. The euphemistic term for forced mass repatriation of immigrants is one well-used on the Right, and increasingly heard in the mainstream. The view was adopted by the far-Right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) which came first in last year’s national election, and invoked again at the weekend by Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), who called for “repatriations on a large scale”. When US President-elect Donald Trump proposed remigration in America, the policy was compared in the press to ethnic cleansing. The term disgusts even Marine Le Pen, who split with the AfD over proposals to “remigrate” Germany’s foreign population.

Remigration is also vital to the platform of another burgeoning force on Britain’s nationalist Right: the Homeland Party, which was established in 2023 by former PA officials who had lost patience with Collett’s messianic brand of leadership. Unlike PA, Homeland managed to register as a political party at the start of 2024, though a Home Office official had previously expressed concern that the group would try to force a successful application “by stealth”, using different names or applicants with no far-Right background. Several of Homeland’s activists have been revealed as former members of neo-Nazi groups, and have engaged in Holocaust denial. Party chairman Kenny Smith, who led the breakaway, is alleged to have recruited armed members and in 2022 pled guilty to firearms offenses.

Perhaps in an attempt to counter these optics, Homeland’s website has endeavored to convey a political platform that reaches beyond immigration concerns, addressing proportional representation, fixing road infrastructure, and preserving the green belt. Homeland will fix your potholes. Indeed, in leaked audio from the group’s first meeting, as reported in The Times, Smith, another BNP alumnus, told activists: “The organization needs a focused approach to winning power, taking control of budgets and policymaking in places. Ultimately we want local authority, and then who knows beyond that.”

But its shiny website can’t conceal the uglier views aired online. Consider its posts on TikTik, including a clip criticizing the England national football team for featuring “Africans” such as Bukayo Saka and complaining that “we have to pretend that David Lammy and Olakemi Olafonteu Adeoke [sic] are both British or English”. The latter is otherwise known as Kemi Badenoch, and Homeland accounts consistently refer to the Tory leader using her full Nigerian birth name. Smith has posted that she “needs to return to Nigeria”.

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This is arguably feeding the rising anti-immigration tendency among the young. As Paul Jackson, an expert on Britain’s far-Right, tells me, “social media has transformed far-Right politics and allows for the easy sharing of quite extremist positions.” He adds: “youthfulness and rebellion are core tropes of the far-Right, and in recent years the online space has become filled with far- and extreme-Right messages designed to appeal to these sentiments.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, around 70% of its 700-odd members are aged under 30.

But if Homeland has attempted to hide its extremist elements beneath a reasonable-sounding policy platform, other groups aren’t so cautious. Collett argues that electoral politics is “a waste of time, money and resources”, with PA instead turning to initiatives such as raising money to support the families of convicted rioters.

If anything, these hard-Right groups seem to thrive on national chaos. Another of the groups which emerged from the ashes of the BNP, Britain First, is similarly described by its leader Paul Golding as a “street defense organization”. Golding himself has multiple convictions for offenses, including acts of terrorism and religiously aggravated harassment, while former members have claimed that the organization routinely plotted violent attacks on British Muslims and harassed asylum seekers. “I want this country to become a shithole,” Golding told an undercover reporter for a Channel 4 documentary last year. “I want this country to descend into a fucking nightmare, because that’s the only thing that’s going to get people off their backsides.”

The danger here is that as Farage softens his offer, he pushes his more radical supporters towards more extreme organizations. Homeland knows this. As one of its more presentable activists, Pete North, formerly of Ukip, wrote last month, “Farage should note that while he takes the credit for killing off the BNP, he could just as easily revive it” by disavowing Robinson’s supporters and “softening his line on immigration”. North claimed that “for every new voter [Farage] attracts as he moves his party to the center, the more the grassroots right may conclude that another party better represents their interests.” Meanwhile, Patriotic Alternative has claimed Starmer’s comments about the Tories’ “open-border experiment” as a victory for the “great replacement” theory.

How, then, does mainstream politics respond to this threat? Labour cannot assume that popular anger over immigration will be confined to the comparatively benign Reform UK. Indeed, Jackson predicts that, in the next couple of decades, an openly ethnonationalist party could exceed the level of support the “amateurish” BNP commanded at its height.

As the resurfacing of the grooming gangs scandal and last summer’s riots have proved, the main parties are ill-equipped to deal with such growing resentment. And with powerful figures such as Elon Musk fanning the flames, Nick Griffin’s protégés are poised to capitalize. The sense of febrility and fury is growing; the violent unrest which tore through England’s capillary towns and cities last summer was just a taste. As Starmer’s tenure is increasingly undermined, ravaged by social unrest and economic sclerosis, the nightmare of which Golding speaks may yet lie on the horizon.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who in August had been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution”.

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was first published on 3 August. It was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Granted, in Thuringia at least, forming a stable governing majority in the state parliament might now be tricky and require some unusual alliances, such as between the centrist Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Left-wing Die Linke, which the CDU for decades has denounced as the irredeemable successor to the old GDR’s Stalinist ruling party and thus beyond the pale. The new left-conservative BSW party of Sahra Wagenknecht, who has ruled out collaborating with the AfD, has also signalled its openness to entering into a coalition with the CDU if certain conditions are fulfilled. In Saxony, meanwhile, the current ruling majority of CDU, Social Democrats (SPD), and the Greens will remain in power, even though the SPD and Greens barely passed the 5% threshold needed to win seats.

The outcome of Sunday’s elections, then, is that the AfD will remain an opposition party, Germany’s largest, but still one without any real power. Some privileges come with the AfD’s strong showing in Thuringia: because it now holds more than a third of seats in the state parliament, it can block a number of measures for which two-thirds of votes are needed, such as changes to the state constitution or the election of state judges. An inconvenience, perhaps, but hardly a revolution.

And this seems unlikely to change. Since the AfD was founded in 2013, Thuringia and Saxony have been its strongholds, which means that for now the party seems to have reached a preliminary ceiling. Except for the AfD’s few office holders at the municipal and district level, the Brandmauer (firewall) erected by all other major German parties against the right-populists remains rock solid. There is simply no clear path to power for the AfD short of an absolute majority of votes, which it is extremely unlikely to secure anywhere. The centre and the policies that it represents will hold — until, at least, a major war or devastating economic crisis further destabilises the crumbling European order.

The more interesting question, then, is not what the Right-wing firebrands will do with their newly won seats, but rather how Germany’s leadership class will react to their increased prominence. And if past is present, this is likely to take two forms. First, they could threaten the German Right with legal challenges and bans; and second, they could carefully adopt some of its positions to take the wind out of its sails.

Let’s start with the idea of outright AfD ban, a theoretical possibility which is being discussed openly in the German mainstream media. Such proposals normally start by acknowledging that the Federal Republic of Germany is the legal successor to the Third Reich. To distinguish itself from its predecessor state, the framers of the Federal Republic’s constitutional order wanted to make the nation a wehrhafte Demokratie, which loosely translates to “resilient democracy” or “well-fortified democracy”. As a result, the Federal Republic was given the legal tools to defend itself against challenges from within, including its domestic intelligence apparatus, the Bundesverfassungsschutz, which can monitor political activists and parties even if they haven’t committed a crime. If a party is deemed “extremist” and in opposition to the German constitutional order, it can be banned and its assets seized. The idea is to stop a new Hitler in his tracks before he can even give his first beer-hall speech. A denazification before the fact, in other words.

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Since its inception in 1949, the German state has already made use of this power in numerous cases, most notably against the Communist Party in 1952. Most recently, in July, the German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser used it to unilaterally ban the publication of the AfD-adjacent magazine Compact for its “extremist” views. While the move appeared like a major assault on the freedom of the press, the ban won widespread support from the German mainstream, with even the public news broadcaster Tagesschau denouncing the magazine’s agitation against a “vaccine dictatorship”. Since then, however, the Federal Administrative Court has suspended the ban and Compact is temporarily back in print, although the litigation continues and could still result in an eventual ban.

By contrast, the decision to outlaw an entire political party that nationally polls at just below 20%, and is the most popular in some eastern German states, could be deeply destabilising. Most obviously, it would expose the centre’s democratic pretensions as little more than a façade. This would also risk isolating AfD voters further from the political system, merely confirming them in their belief that the powers that be are out to get them.

So, if banning the AfD isn’t a viable option, can the centre adopt some of its policies? Certainly, the AfD’s most distinct policy position — hostility to immigration — has increasingly become normalised. Only last month, after a Syrian migrant carried out a mass stabbing attack in Solingen, CDU leader Friedrich Merz called for a Trump-style block on all immigration from Syria and Afghanistan, though he has since walked back on his proposal after denouncements in the mainstream press.

More likely, it seems, is the introduction of a patchwork of bureaucratic measures designed to streamline the deportations of some migrants with criminal records. Shortly before the state elections in Thuringia, Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted that his government had deported 28 Afghan criminals — simply to show that they are actually doing something. But the small number, as well as the fact that each of the migrants was given €1,000 as an allowance (technically mandated by law), led to widespread ridicule. To the AfD supporters, the deportation of 28 offenders is a drop in the ocean. Many AfD supporters want that figure to be in the millions, making it unlikely that the ruling parties will ever credibly co-opt the party’s anti-immigration views.

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for Wagenknecht’s BSW. She has already stated that one condition for the party’s entrance into a coalition with the CDU is an opposition to further military aid to Ukraine and the stationing of US long-range missiles in Germany, which had already been jointly announced by the Biden and Scholz administrations. It is doubtful that the hawkish CDU will submit to these demands, nor do state parliaments make foreign policy, so it will be interesting to observe who will cave first. If the BSW does and helps the CDU into power to spite the AfD, its carefully maintained maverick image will crumble barely a year since the party’s inception.

But perhaps that would be to the AfD’s benefit. In such a scenario, the party would be left once again as the most credible source of opposition in many voters’ eyes — and its thwarted revolution simply deferred.

***

For more analysis of the German results, watch the below:

The reality is that, excepting a few enclaves, crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken. We’ve never had much use of such foreign imports to be rude to our compatriots. For we have our own very English system of discrimination, and it is called the class system — at times, subtly registered through the policing of accents; at others, less subtly so, as when Thatcher brought out the blowtorches to discipline the miners.

Seen in the longue durée, there was only a brief mid-century blip — Enoch Powell’s Britain — when many abandoned class-thinking and became race-mad, in no small part on account of the identity crisis provoked by the shrinking of the British Empire into the British nation. This had damaging consequences: two generations without black and brown representation in the Commons (not a single person of colour was elected between 1929 and 1987); scores of race riots and hate crimes; and a general aura of unpleasantness and violence, captured with brio in This is England.

Yet there have undeniably been some stabs at course correction in the new millennium. Race is mostly passé. Class is back. It’s a point that Tommy Robinson’s near-namesake Tomiwa Owolade made in a compelling polemic published last year, the gist of which is conveyed by its title: This is not America. These days, there isn’t much of a racial gap to speak of. In Britain, blacks earn 6% less an hour than whites (in the US, 22% less), even outliving the latter (in the US, they die four years earlier on average). The wage gap increases to 13% between Caribbean and white men, and to 42% between Bangladeshi and white men; yet Indian men make 13% more than white men. Class more convincingly accounts for these disparities than race, Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities being overwhelmingly working class. Indian and Nigerian migration, by contrast, tends to be more middle-class.

Therein lies the rub for the hammered herberts who howl “Ingerland” at far-Right rallies in SW1, appealing to a misplaced sense of racial solidarity. For no such thing exists. Their white bourgeois brethren, in fact, see them as an atavistic bunch of yahoos and yobs, primitives from another planet. Ironically, the only people likely to sympathise with their lot are their dark-skinned working-class neighbours, the very migrants they detest.

All of this Tommy Robinson learned in a hard school earlier this month, when, from his Cypriot resort, he exhorted his million followers on X to “show your support” for the “real” England, after the stabbing of three children at a dance class in Southport by an embittered Taylor Swift critic apparently called “Ali al-Shakati”, supposedly a former small-boat passenger. As it was, that the attacker was born in Cardiff to Rwandan immigrants didn’t deter the dregs that drool at the dicta of Robinson from rampaging through the Midlands and the North, torching mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. The extent of public support for the Robinsonistas was duly revealed a week later, when racist protestors were vastly outnumbered by antiracist counter-protestors across the country. Robinson was shown his station.

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Despite their numerical insignificance, though, there’s no denying that the Robinsonistas represent a Powellite neuralgia that hasn’t entirely died out in Britain. Most Brits have moved on, seeing race as a non-issue, as relevant to the business of friendship and marriage as handedness. Yet a tiny section has clung to its empty certitudes. Suffice to say it pays to inquire into this milieu, its penchants and thought-world, which is why I laboured through Robinson’s literary productions, a dud triptych of semi-literate reflections on race relations.

The facts of his life are well-established, and covered in extenso in his first memoir, Enemy of the State, which appeared in 2016. Né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a name that conjured up images of bespectacled hippiedom, our antihero very early on took up a rougher nom de guerre for much the same reasons, it seems, that Herr Schicklgruber preferred not to go by that handle. The original Tommy Robinson was a Luton lout, a football hooligan of some prominence in such circles. The one born in 1982 qualified as an aircraft engineer, but then derailed his career for the faux pas of kicking a police officer — intervening to prevent Robinson from attacking his missus — in the head. “For that one kick, I spent five months in jail.”

Thereafter, Robinson set up as a plumber, moonlighting as a football hooligan boss. He turned to politics in 2004, joining the BNP in response to British Muslims allegedly celebrating 9/11. Still, he first became aware of “racial trouble” at a much younger age. Aged 13, he had discerned a “growing gang mentality among the Muslim kids”. In Enemy, he paints a tenebrous picture of Luton — drugs; knives; rapes — as something of a Caracas on the Lea. This he pins exclusively down to the character of Islam, much as one would, I suppose, blame Catholicism for the curse of the Colombian drug cartels.

But he misses the elephant in the room. As the Luton-born, working-class academic Thomas Peak has recently pointed out, if Robinson’s Muslim classmates in Eighties Luton appeared less “integrated”, it was at least partly because they sought safety in numbers after hooligans destroyed their neighbourhood following a football match; the 1985 Luton riot was one of the most egregious of that decade. Despite that episode, Peak recalls a fairly post-racial youth, kids of all colours having a laugh together at the local boxing club and Luton Carnival.

Slow on the uptake, Robinson left the BNP after belatedly discovering that it was a racist outfit. His black friends — who seem to exist only to point to his own reserves of tolerance — were made to wait at the door, since membership was reserved for whites. Five years later, he established a tanning salon and the English Defence League, the latter after having recoiled in horror at Muslim protestors holding up such heretical messages as “butchers of Basra”, as if one had to be a rabid Islamist to oppose Blair’s war, which pointlessly dispatched countless Brits and Iraqi civilians to a premature grave.

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For brawling, then breaching bail conditions, Robinson was sent to prison in 2011. HMP Bedford was full of surprises. “A problem more and more these days,” he incredulously writes, “is that you just don’t know who the Muslims are. Everyone’s dressed the same, and it isn’t just Asians who are Muslims. So blacks, whites, mixed race… anyone and everyone can be a Muslim.” The converts riled him up. “This white geezer McDonald said, ‘I’m fucking Muslim bruv’. And the way he said it, well, that was it. We ended up fighting across the servery and I battered him.” Later, Robinson went on a hunger strike because — so he claims — he was being fed halal meat.

In 2013, our recidivist found himself behind bars again, this time for using a friend’s passport to circumvent a travel ban in order to attend an Islamophobic symposium in the US. Once again, in another telenovela-ish turn, he recanted, making a big show of leaving the EDL and breaking naan with Mo Ansar, the disgraced Lloyds Bank employee turned soi-disant voice of British Islam (one of those dodgy “community leaders”, whatever they are) who helped “reform” Robinson. Profiled in the Telegraph, Ansar was described thus:

“He speaks the language of tolerance and moderation, yet he refuses to condemn the chopping off of hands for theft in Islamic states or homophobia… He has creatively, and quite dramatically, sexed up his professional experience, including falsely claiming to be a lawyer… He runs a sock-puppet Twitter account which he uses to defend himself and attack perceived rivals.”

Incredibly, Robinson warmed to him — “if every Muslim was like you there would be no problem” — even if later in his memoirs, he struck a less charitable note: “Mo was very much a cartoon character, a muppet Muslim.” At all events, it seems that the clincher for leaving the EDL was an £8,000 cheque paid by the think-tank Quilliam, which in return took credit for Robinson’s deradicalisation. But the good character shtick didn’t last long. Yet another prison sentence came hard on the heels of When Tommy Met Mo — the documentary about the encounter — and Tommy wound up in jail once again, this time for mortgage fraud.

Some of the stuff in Enemy of the State is admittedly rather tame. In his criticisms of the niqab, for instance, he appears to have the making of a clubbable French Lefty: “at least the French had the courage to ban the face veil.” But time and again, his racial idée fixe rears its ugly head: the “ethnic cleansing” of Luton by brown Muslims, who apparently have an innate fondness for “grooming gangs”. The facts, of course, tell a different story. As the Home Office concluded in 2020, “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”. Across Britain, race appears tells us little. But then again, nor does economic deprivation, there being wide variation in similar councils. Sometimes statistics can be illuminating, and sometimes they aren’t. This is a case of the latter.

The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class, as if the “white” in “white working class” means anything, as if him and Helena Bonham Carter might just have more in common than he does with some thick-necked Muslim bruiser he once shared a cell with. There are passages where he almost gets it, as when he wryly observes that the working classes, irrespective of hue, are typically appreciated only when they dig trenches and die en masse “on the orders of the snooty and superior upper classes”. But then he veers off on a tangent, whingeing about the white working class being “racially victimised” in Britain. Even so, he’s sanguine about the prospects of a cross-class white coalition. His job, he thinks, is to convince “middle-class Englishmen and women to say enough’s enough”. But there are some real howlers in his understanding of class markers — “middle-class tweedies” are apparently “too busy catching up on the latest Sky Atlantic box set” — which makes one suspect whether he’s the right messenger for his audience.

Yet one can see why Robinson might be squeamish about using the c-word, or even “working class” for that matter, without qualifying adjectives. This is because, economically speaking, he has seceded from it. Soon after Enemy came a lucrative gig with the Canadian website Rebel Media. Practically a sinecure, he was paid £8,000 a month for his canny ability to materialise, mirage-like, camera in hand, at the opportune moment when Islamists struck Britain. All the same, he scarcely lasted a year in that job, because he was raking in far greater sums through donations to justify having a boss. These days, he’s toying with the idea of taking up Spanish residency to evade an HMRC investigation; along with two cronies — his ex-wife Jenna Vowles and Man Friday Adam Geary — Robinson owes the state something like £800,000 in unpaid taxes.

It was perhaps only natural, then, in the time-honoured tradition of the gentleman amateur, for the newly minted man of independent means to aspire to the scholarly vocation. Accordingly, Robinson donned his skull cap and set to work on his second opuscule. A departure from his autobiographical obsessions, Mohammed’s Koran, co-authored with the grooming-gang obsessive Peter McLoughlin in 2017 and bearing the lurid subtitle “Why Muslims Kill for Islam”, is a work of Koranic exegesis. But it is not a tome intended for Muslims, we are told at the outset: “If you are a Muslim, please put this book down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of Islam more thoroughly.”

Pitched as a corrective to the thought-world of the “educated” elite, Mohammed’s Koran tells us that peaceful Muslims exist, to be sure, but they’ve got it all wrong. They’ve misunderstood their faith. The rest of the book is taken up with the reordering of chapters of the Koran. The game here is that old parlour game of the Muslim clerical classes: naskh, or the doctrine of abrogation, allowing for the repeal of Koranic verses contradicted by later passages to iron out inconsistencies. By rearranging the text like a clerical DJ, Robinson is able to place all the peaceful bits in the book fairly early on, and so “abrogate” them in favour of the later, violent bits. There you have it: a most vile, violent faith. It’s desperate, puerile stuff.

The exegetical turn proved short-lived. Within weeks, Robinson was back on his laptop, counselling the terrorist Darren Osborne, who went on to drive a van into a Muslim crowd in Finsbury Park, killing one and injuring 11. “I’m not justifying it,” Robinson later wrote on Twitter, adding with a touch of apophasis that “the mosque where the attack happened tonight has a long history of creating terrorists”. Two years later, in 2019, our jailbird did time yet again, for contempt of court, after which he appealed for asylum in the US on InfoWars, a website that vends conspiracy theories and dietary supplements: “I beg Donald Trump, I beg the American government, to look at my case,” he said on air. Sadly for him, this cut no ice with his ochre overlord. He had to stay content in his country pile in Greater Manchester, complete with a hot tub in the garden and a TV set above his bathtub.

A fool and his money are soon parted, however, and Robinson had to pay £100,000, plus legal costs to the tune of £1.5 million, for libelling 15-year-old refugee Jamal Hijazi, who was assaulted by far-Right thugs and forced to relocate after Robinson falsely accused him of attacking “young English girls”. Even Robinson was forced to concede that he had cancelled the kid on the strength of faulty intel: “I have been completely had, how embarrassing man.” He declared bankruptcy soon after, busying himself by stalking an Indy journalist and her partner for which he received a five-year stalking protection order, and swearing at a taxi driver in Bologna: “little paki who drives a car… I’m going to punch you in the head, kick you in the face, because I am the king of the whole Islam race [sic].”

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Like a dog that returns to its vomit, Robinson returned to the Hijazi affair in his third book, Silenced, a tedious reprisal of who said what to whom about who. Telegraphically put, a précis could read thus: “I was right. The courts were wrong.”

For all his energetic antics and massive platform – Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Today programme, Oxford Union, BBC, a Channel 4 documentary, all supplied by a guilt-ridden bien-pensant commentariat questing for earthy authenticity — it is cheering to note that only a miniscule minority of souls have fallen for Tommy Robinson’s grift. In 2019, he polled a mere 2.2% when he ran for MEP. When Gerard Batten brought him into the Brezhnevite bureaucracy of Ukip as “grooming gang advisor”, Farage and seven other MEPs promptly resigned, fearing reputational damage. These are, after all, rather different traditions: Ukip’s origins lie in a fairly conventional postwar Euroscepticism, whereas Robinson’s roots are in the interwar fascism of Oswald Mosley’s kind, now beyond the pale.

Robinson, in short, is an anachronism. There is no existential struggle between white and coloured Britain. Rather, what we have on our hands is an existential struggle between white and Muslim fundamentalists, both sides as thick as mince, and, after a fashion, two sides of the same coin. It is no accident, then, that Robinson has recently praised Muslim conservatives for being “strong in principle” and joined them in opposing the teaching of tolerance to sexual minorities in schools. “Homosexuality is a heinous horrible thing,” a conservative Muslim told the press; “it’s not acceptable in Islam.” Robinson’s response: “I stand with the Muslim parents.” A plague o’ both your houses.

Yet dig a little deeper and things become a tad more nuanced. For all the caustic characterisations thrown the rioters’ way, their motives were far more complex and varied.

Thus far, police have made more than 1,000 arrests connected to the riots. More than 40 people have already been sentenced and that number is likely to rise markedly in the coming weeks. Already, however, what is striking about this group is their heterogeneity. Among the not so usual suspects: a 43-year-old woman who pushed a wheelie bin at police; a 34-year-old homeless mother-of-five who contrived to do the same, but instead ended up face-planting at the feet of her intended target; a 25-year-old homeless man; an 18-year-old with ADHD, a 15-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy; a bingo-playing gay couple; and a 69-year-old retired welder.

The nature and seriousness of the violence of the rioters seems to vary greatly too, ranging from vandalism on cars to punching a police officer in the face. While the worst of the violence was very grave indeed — a library was torched and sacked in Liverpool, and there were attempts to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers — some was more ridiculous than properly lethal: one teenager, aged 19, lobbed an egg at the police while chanting in support of Tommy Robinson.

Yet while there doesn’t seem to be a single profile of a rioter, three profiles have emerged — profiles that, ultimately, we need to distinguish if we’re to understand why these riots took place. Based on trial information and extensive online footage of the riots, they are: Combatants, Geezers and Scallies, and Losers.

The first group — Combatants — refers to the kind of rioter that many have in mind when invoking the image of the far-Right thug: namely, inveterate racists alongside self-proclaimed patriots motivated by fears about white replacement and hostility to the British state and police for their perceived collusion in this. Combatants are almost exclusively men who see themselves as defenders not only of English culture, but as the protectors of English women and girls — from, in their eyes, the rapacious sexual desires of non-white, and especially Muslim, immigrant men.

Despite this relatively strict categorisation, what remains unclear is how many Combatants were involved in the riots, how much of the violence they were responsible for, and whether that violence had been planned in advance. Nor do we know whether they were members or affiliates of organised far-Right groups or looser networks of ex-EDL activists and hooligans, like 28-year-old Liam Ryan who assaulted a black man during unrest in Manchester city centre and was already subject to a football banning order.

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The second group — Geezers and Scallies — refers to older and younger men respectively with criminal backgrounds whose participation in the riots was motivated not by any considered ideological grievances, but an abiding interest in manufacturing mayhem and the drama of violent contention. Historically, riots have always attracted this kind of dissolute stress-seeker, because they present ripe opportunities for a tremendous tear-up, including hand-to-hand combat with reviled authorities and the ritualised looting of goods that are later invariably discarded or destroyed.

Unlike the violence of Combatants, there is no instrumental logic to the violence of Geezers and Scallies: it is done and enjoyed for its own sake, because it’s thrilling and existentially satisfying. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the violence is senseless; indeed, during much of the past fortnight’s disorder, it’s hard to miss the blatant defiance, spite and mockery on show towards the police. One rioter, for example, prior to having a brick thrown at his groin, danced effeminately in front of riot police, an act of mockery that was captured in camera-phone footage that swiftly went viral.

The final group — Losers — refers to that type of rioter, both male and female, whose participation in the riots was spontaneous and situational. Many of these accidental rioters were drunk when they entered the fray, either because they’re alcoholics or had been out on a bender or both; one 30-year-old rioter who hurled metal sheeting at police in Hartlepool had reportedly drank 30 cans of larger and had no memory of his involvement in the disorder. For some, it was the first time they had been in serious trouble with the police before, unlike the other two categories of rioters, many of whom have extensive rap-sheets.

It isn’t fully clear why the roughly dozen Losers sentenced so far participated in the violence, and none can coherently explain it, other than that something in the spectacle of violence beckoned them to enter it and join in the communal revelry of semi-authorised transgression. This is something most now deeply regret and not a few have sought to distance themselves from the ideological convictions of the Combatants they were rioting alongside. For example, Kieron Gatenby, whose sentence of 16 months in prison for lobbing an egg at police in Hartlepool seems especially harsh, did not harbour any racist views, according to a probation report. “He says he is disgusted at being involved with people who were chanting racist slurs,” Gatenby’s solicitor told Teesside Crown Court at his sentencing hearing. Similarly, it transpired at the hearing of Stacey Vint that her involvement in the riots in Middlesbrough was animated more by alcohol than ideology.

Of course, the overall picture may yet change. But it does seem to suggest that the narrative that the riots were wholly the handiwork of far-Right thugs is oversimplistic. Many of the rioters didn’t see themselves as part of some political resistance; they were bored and some were angry.

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The other salutary effect of looking at the profiles of the rioters is that it humanises them: in those pallid and lived-in faces in the police mugshots, we see a cross section of English working-class people from mostly northern towns. We read reports of teenage boys and girls who were involved in the disturbances and perhaps wonder about their turbulent lives and “lived experience” of white privilege. We read about someone like Stacey Vint, who is homeless because she fled an abusive relationship, and perhaps feel a stab of sympathy for her — or at least some sense of injustice that she was given such a punitive sentence (20 months in prison).

By contrast, you don’t find much humane empathy towards the rioters on social media or in the liberal press, but instead contempt and loathing. This expresses itself in different ways, one of which is a blatantly classist revulsion that sees the rioters as an odious and atavistic skidmark on multicultural society. The other is a kind of elite disdain that hides its moral revulsion under the cover of alarmist concern over the “radicalisation” of white working-class people; here, ordinary aspects of white working-class culture such as piss-taking are interpreted as signs of extremism in precisely the same way that ordinary aspects of conservative Islam were once red-flagged by Right-leaning terrorism experts like Sebastian Gorka.

None of this is to say that we should be sentimental or lenient towards the rioters. But it is imperative that we avoid painting them all with the same brush — and that means doing the more painstaking work of looking closely at their profiles and motives. Those who do otherwise — whether they are the Prime Minister, a think-tanker or a grifter angling for the Government’s attention — can call the rioters far-Right thugs or even terrorists if they like. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they’re doing anything other than playing the grubby game of politics, much less providing any understanding of why the riots unfolded, and how they could unfold again.

Granted, Robinson hasn’t gone as far as to declare that the riots are an inarticulate rebellion against capitalist society, much less a “form of queer birth”, as Vicky Osterweil might put it. But he has suggested that they are an all but inevitable response to white working-class grievances that have been ignored by the elites in the media and government.

At the same time, progressives who once expressed support for those who participated in the George Floyd protests of 2020 have adopted a decidedly harsher line on the current anti-immigration protests. Back in June 2020, for example, the former head of British counter-terrorism policing, Neil Basu, encouraged his colleagues to show empathy towards BLM protesters and their “legitimate anger”. “We need to listen to our communities, and our people, and focus on what we in the UK can do better,” he counselled in a conciliatory tone conspicuously missing from his comments about the riots of the past week. They are “bullies and cowards”, he said of the rioters, coming close to describing those who had tried setting fire to a hotel in Rotherham as terrorists. “Not only does it fit the definition of terrorism, it is terrorism,” he remarked. Basu may well have a good point; it’s just not one he showed much interest in raising about the torching of the Minneapolis Police station amid a George Floyd protest on 28 May 2020.

The ironies here are obvious and worth probing for the light they shed on today’s confused discourse. Consider, first, the Left-sounding apologia of the Right, as expressed by Tommy Robinson in the following post on X: “When British people are ignored and labelled ‘far-Right’, when children’s safety isn’t a priority, and when fighting age men from foreign lands come here to take the piss, something has to happen. This is on the British government, they own this problem, because they created it.”

This is not a fringe view. Matthew Goodwin, for example, wrote in a recent piece on the riots: “What did you expect? Seriously? What do you expect ordinary British people to do given the deeply alarming things that are now unfolding around them, in their country, on a daily basis?” Among those things, he singled out the mass rioting in minority communities in Harehills, the stabbing of a British Army Officer by “a member of a minority community”, and a Kurdish migrant who pushed a man onto the tracks at a London Underground station. Douglas Murray, too, has similarly lamented how “completely predictable” the riots were. “Labour and Conservative governments”, he said, created “a powder-keg”.

It is important to note that Robinson has not openly justified the riots, and both Goodwin and Murray have explicitly condemned them. But the substance of their remarks and the shifting of ultimate blame onto the Government serves, in effect, to minimise the agency of the rioters, who were somehow launched or pushed into violence by circumstances beyond their control. Indeed, the current insistence on “understanding” the roots of the riots bears a striking resemblance to the way that apologists of the 2005 London bombings insisted that they were “only” trying to understand the causes of that atrocity, while also firmly pinning the blame for it on Britain’s involvement in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Consider, next, the progressive narrative of the riots. This is typically clobbered up in the garbs of an undergraduate-level media sociology that holds that the riots are being fuelled by a combination of misinformation and Right-wing populist demagoguery. As has already been exhaustively documented, many prominent X accounts had circulated false information about the identity of the Southport attacker, claiming that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had illegally entered the UK by boat; he was, in fact, born in the UK to Rwandan parents. According to a report by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “disinformation and social media correspondent”, this served to “inflame pre-existing tensions” and likely affected the trajectory of the events that followed. Alan Rusbridger went even further, arguing in Prospect that “a foul virus” of misinformation and far-Right hate speech on X had “led to the rioting” in Southport; Owen Jones blamed “a much broader Right-wing populist ecosystem” that had whipped up ordinary working-class people into an “anti-migrant and anti-refugee frenzy”.

There are two key problems with this line of analysis. The first is that it assumes that, had the rioters in Southport not been exposed to false information, they wouldn’t have taken to the streets in protest or violently targeted a mosque in the town. But this doesn’t really hold up, since the disturbances in Southport happened after it had become clear who the perpetrator was. Indeed, in the violence that unfolded, the police and the mosque had, in effect, become reviled effigies for the Southport attacker and the indifferent government the rioters blamed for producing him.

The second problem is that, by assuming that the protesters had been radicalised by a far-Right online outrage machine, progressives fail to take seriously the possibility that they may have had reasons of their own for protesting. If the rhetoric of Tommy Robinson resonates among this quarter, it might just well be because it faithfully captures their “lived” experiences and not because Robinson himself has mythical powers of rhetorical manipulation.

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An alternative and more promising way of analysing the riots would be to focus on the profiles of the violent few at the forefront of them, what links (if any) they have to Right-wing activists, and whether their violence was planned in advance. But we won’t know this until convictions are secured — and this will take a while. Based on online footage of the disturbances, the majority of the violent few appear to be young men and the violence itself looks poorly coordinated and incompetent. There also seems to be a carnivalesque aspect to some of the violent exchanges between rioters and the police: a not-insignificant number of rioters are clearly enjoying themselves and it’s not inconceivable to think that their involvement may have been driven by the sheer thrill of smashing things up and defying authority.

In his brilliant study of English football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, Bill Buford writes of the “state of adrenalin euphoria” that comes with crowd violence and how the euphoria itself, and not deeper social scientific factors, is the key to understanding it. We shouldn’t underestimate this as a factor in the current riots, especially in places where joy is in short supply. Many participants, too, are filming the disorder on their phones, and perhaps they too are getting some vicarious pleasure from doing so, just as the actual rioters are perhaps getting an additional pleasure high from knowing that they are being filmed.

Returning to the issue of the protestors’ grievances, it is obviously important that we understand what they are and take them seriously. After all, many protesters and their supporters have been clear about what they are. They believe that there is a system of two-tier policing in this country that favours Muslims and other minorities over whites; they believe that the mainstream media is biased in its reporting of crime and disorder; and they believe that privileged elites in government hate them and their culture, while going out of their way to appease Muslims and other non-whites.

Keir Starmer was right to unequivocally condemn the rioters. But this should not come at the expense of addressing these concerns. Whether or not you are sympathetic towards them, it’s undeniable that we really do need an urgent and open conversation in this country about uncontrolled migration, the involvement of asylum seekers in violent crime, and how this impacts citizens with already limited opportunities and resources.

At the same time, we also need to recognise the vast causal chasm between deeply or even rightly held grievances and actual violence, property destruction and looting. Most aggrieved people who protest do not carry out acts of violence, while many of those who do commit violence do so for reasons that are not always related to rational grievances. Any explanation that elides or fudges that chasm is unlikely to tell us much about how and why riots happen — and, as we have seen, may even end up excusing those who are responsible for the ensuing carnage.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution.”

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Venner stopped in front of the altar. A large, golden cross stood above him. It gleamed in the afternoon light. Venner went down on one knee. He took out an envelope from his jacket pocket, put it on the altar. Then, discreetly, he took out a gun. There was only one bullet in it; it was all he needed.

Venner opened his mouth wide, slid the gun into it. He could feel the cold metal against his tongue. Calmly, Venner put his finger on the trigger and pressed. A blast followed. Blood splashed on the altar. The date was 21 May 2013.

This was no ordinary suicide. Venner was a French far-Right intellectual who thought of himself as a samurai. His suicide was inspired by that of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese nationalist author who committed seppuku in 1970 in the wake of a failed coup. He had always wanted to end his life in a similar way. He killed himself to send a message to his French compatriots. He had picked Notre-Dame to do it, he told friends, because it was “the most symbolic place to call out to our people”.

Hours after Venner’s death, his suicide note was made public. “In the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength,” Venner wrote. “I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilisation. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.”

More than a decade after his suicide, Venner continues to cast a long shadow over French politics. Last Sunday, the National Rally, the party of Marine Le Pen, won a resounding victory in the first round of the legislative elections. It’s now on the brink of power. This would have been impossible without Venner’s influence. He theorised the political strategy — often called dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) — that normalised the French far-Right.

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Renaud Dély, a French journalist who wrote a gripping biography of Venner, said that “Marine Le Pen is the heir of the ideological project and method of Dominique Venner”. Le Pen, in fact, paid homage to Venner after his suicide in 2013. “All our respect to Dominique Venner,” she posted on X, “whose final, eminently political act was to try to wake up the people of France.” According to Dély, Le Pen also sent an emissary to Venner’s funeral. He told attendees that his boss was there “through thought”.

To understand Venner’s legacy, we must first know his life story. Venner was born in 1935 into a well-to-do family. His father was an architect who built churches, as well as a member of the French Popular Party, a pro-Nazi party that was disbanded after the Second World War.

In 1954, aged 19, Venner volunteered to serve in the Algerian War. At the time, the country wasn’t merely a French colony — it was a French department. But Algerians wanted their independence. It was Venner’s worst nightmare. “In Algeria, we are fighting for ourselves, for our dignity, and to keep our property, a land acquired by right of conquest, blood and sweat,” he said at the time. “We fight for our race!” And Venner fought hard. In hunting down Algerian nationalists, he proved to be a ruthless, even sadistic soldier. His superiors felt his conduct went too far: Venner was too reckless and put other soldiers in jeopardy.

After a two-year stint in Algeria, Venner returned to metropolitan France seething with rage. Military authorities were too complacent. In his mind, they lacked the guts to do what was needed to keep Algeria French. Moreover, as he had learned, it was the politicians in Paris who called the shots. If Venner wanted to make a difference, it would have to be through political militancy. And so Venner entered the far-Right underground. He became a member of Young Nation, a nationalist group, and was soon taking part in violent attacks. His targets: supporters of Algerian independence, communists, socialists, bourgeois, minorities.

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At the height of the Algerian War, in 1958, Charles de Gaulle returned to power and founded the Fifth Republic. Venner saw him as the enemy. In 1940, de Gaulle had sided against Vichy. And now, Venner believed, he was about to sell out French Algeria. “General de Gaulle prefers métèques [derogatory term for non-white people] to his officers,” he wrote.

Venner went on to join the OAS, a nationalist group that opposed Algerian independence and staged terrorist attacks. In 1961, aged 26, he was arrested for his involvement in a failed military coup against de Gaulle. The sentence: 18 months behind bars.

In the silence of his prison cell, as Dély explains in his book, Venner came to a realisation that would change the course of French politics. In hindsight, it seems obvious. But, at the time, it represented a paradigm shift. The far-Right would never be the same again.

His realisation was that the far-Right would never gain power through insurrection. Instead, if it hoped to govern someday, it had to win at the ballot box. In modern democracies, violence wasn’t only inefficient — coups, as Venner knew first-hand, could easily fail — but it also turned ordinary people off. The OAS hadn’t managed to keep Algeria in French hands or even boost the cause of French Algeria. “Indiscriminate terrorism is the best way to cut yourself off from a population,” Venner wrote. “It’s a desperate act.”

The far-Right, Venner now believed, had to forsake violence if it was serious about one day implementing its violent project. Drawing on Lenin, he argued that revolution was “less about seizing power than about using it to build a new society”. To do that, the movement needed to develop a coherent ideology and create an organisation to spread that ideology in society.

But — and this is the most important part — the far-Right couldn’t be transparent about its ideology. The reason: ordinary people were brainwashed. “Through permanent one-way propaganda, to which everyone is subjected from childhood,” Venner wrote, “the regime, in its many forms, intoxicates the French people.” The far-Right had to outwit the regime. “A revolutionary struggle, a fight to the death against an all-powerful, wily, experienced adversary, must be fought with ideas and cunning rather than force.”

As such, it was necessary for the far-Right to hide its true nature. People weren’t ready for it. Instead, without abandoning its core tenets, it should adapt its appearance. In Dély’s pithy phrase, the far-Right should “know how to change its attire to better reassure and seduce”.

Venner had been mulling this strategy for a while. Back in 1959, when he had founded the Nationalist Party, a violent group which would soon be dissolved, Venner had told new recruits that they should be careful about what they said in public. “Never discuss subjects that may shock newcomers by the way you present them,” he had warned them. “For example, the métèque problem must never in a presentation or a conversation be approached with the perspectives of the crematorium or the soap dish.” In other words, never say that you ultimately want to exterminate all métèques. When you are a fascist, you can kiss but you can never tell.

Shortly after leaving jail in 1962, Venner published his pamphlet. Titled Pour une critique positive (Towards a Positive Criticism), it became a self-help manual for generations of French far-Right activists, for whom Venner is the closest thing they have to an Antonio Gramsci. With his bold, iconoclastic text, he laid the ideological groundwork for the National Rally to become the most popular party in France. And he pioneered the strategy of dédiabolisation that has been at the heart of Marine Le Pen’s political career.

For years now, commentators have marvelled at how Le Pen detoxified the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie, a convicted Holocaust denier. In 2015, she even expelled him from the party for making antisemitic comments. Since then, Le Pen has worked hard to soften her rhetoric. For instance, she doesn’t use the loaded term “Great Replacement” anymore; instead, she talks about “mass immigration”. And unlike her erstwhile rival Eric Zemmour, she doesn’t limit herself to talking about the threat of “Islamic extremism”. She has spent considerable time talking about economic issues.

Le Pen has also nurtured a new generation of far-Right leaders who don’t raise their voices or go off-script. With their tailored suits, they look like respectable politicians. Jordan Bardella, the National Rally’s 28-year-old president, is the prototype. Tipped to become prime minister if the party wins this Sunday, Bardella is the face of dédiabolisation. He smiles so much his face is frozen in a rictus. It should come as no surprise that his speechwriter, Pierre-Romain Thionnet, is a Venner devotee.

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But it would be a mistake to assume that Le Pen and Bardella are the first to put dédiabolisation into action. In fact, the strategy’s use can be traced to the presidential campaign of far-Right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965. A lawyer for the OAS, his candidacy marked a turning point for the nationalist camp: for the first time since the Second World War, they were seeking power at the ballot box. That, in and of itself, was an act of dédiabolisation. Vignancour was advised by — you guessed it — Venner. And his campaign director was none other than Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Vignancour won only 5% of the vote, but a seed had been planted. It blossomed in 1972 when the National Front — as the National Rally used to be called — was founded. The party was the brainchild of François Duprat, another far-Right activist who was influenced by Venner. Jean-Marie Le Pen was picked to lead it because he was seen as a far-Right moderate. That might be hard to believe today, but, in his day, Le Pen too contributed to dédiabolisation. A charismatic speaker, he helped popularise far-Right ideas in French society. In the space of 30 years, he united the movement and brought it to the second round of the presidential elections in 2002.

This was no accident. A National Front memo from 1985 shows that dédiabolisation is baked in the DNA of the party. It reads: “We are surrounded by hostile forces… In public, we must only evoke what our propaganda lets appear of the tip of the iceberg… We cannot impose on the masses outside the movement just any ideas. We must always start from a pre-existing mental substratum and blend it with our own key ideas.” Venner couldn’t have phrased it any better. And Marine Le Pen couldn’t have implemented it any better.

Over the past decade, Le Pen has not only ditched her father but also her most extreme positions. Gone are the calls for Frexit. Even in the last few weeks, whenever its programme came under scrutiny, the National Rally has moderated its policies or pushed back their eventual enactment. Banning the veil worn by Muslim women, for instance, would only happen in 2027 at the earliest. The end goal is obvious: to assuage fears and appeal to moderate voters.

And yet, despite the National Rally’s softening, it would be unwise to forget Venner’s influence on the movement. This was a man who was willing to sacrifice himself for his mission — a man who understood the power of the long game.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive – or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter – only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”.  With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

Both parties engaged in a campaign to mainstream this ideology, most recently through a rejection of the far-Right’s most infamous association — antisemitism. Faced by the Hamas attack on Israel, they have made a point of affirming their freedom from this taint: Marine Le Pen is one of a clutch of far-Right leaders denouncing Hamas, flatly stating that “the security of the Israeli people is non-negotiable”. Zemmour, himself Jewish, took part in a march in Paris in solidarity with Israel on 12 October. Indeed, it has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical Left group La France Insoumise, whose ambiguity over the attacks has attracted the most criticism. The French Prime Minister, Elizabeth Borne, whose father survived Auschwitz, called Mélenchon’s stance “revolting”.

However, excising old hatreds is just one part of this new wind which is reshaping French politics. For a start, there is no contradiction between the youth of its leaders and their beliefs, with over 40% of 18-34-year-olds voting Le Pen in the second round of the last presidential election. To be in these posts is doubtless a vast responsibility for a young man and woman with no experience of international relationships or of government beyond local level. Yet, as activists since their teens, they act with the swagger of revolutionaries, dedicated to a radical politics built on Euroscepticism, national sovereignty, minimal immigration, strengthened families, raising Europe’s declining birth rate, and the regeneration of the Christian faith. It is a direct challenge to liberal politics of every stripe, at a time when liberalism itself is under several kinds of attack.

They have a better than even chance of success, with a combined third of the country polling for both parties in the lead up to next year’s European elections, ahead of the Left alliance and Macron’s own party. And if they achieve any elected office, they will transform more than France. They will destroy a Franco-German geopolitical engine, fuelled by constant pro-EU leadership in both states, which has kept the European Union together for decades, and without which most EU officials believe it will sputter and fail. But though they have this ambition in common, Maréchal and Bardella are near-opposites in constitution and character. Between them, they capture two faces of this new politics, and explain how it has managed to attract such a large section of French society.

Marion Maréchal is, in the world of fringe politics, the establishment candidate, brought up within the wealthy Le Pen family. Her grandfather is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who originally founded the Front National but is now 95 and only occasionally heard from. For some years Maréchal took his name and her adoptive father, Samuel Maréchal (married to Yann Le Pen, who has taken no part in her family’s politics), was leader of the National Youth movement. At the age of two, she was already appearing with Jean-Marie in election posters.

She joined the RN, successor to Front National, at 18, and became the youngest member of the French National Assembly at 22. At around this time, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie and Maréchal‘s aunt, inherited the party from her father, and set about trying to rid it of his obsessive antisemitism and white supremacism, while retaining its core nationalist and anti-immigrant positions. In November last year, she passed over the leadership of the RN to her protégé, Bardella, taking for herself the leadership of the much-enlarged party in the Assembly, with the intention of standing once more for the presidency in 2027.

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Bardella’s youth was nothing like Maréchal’s — aside from his passion for far-Right politics. He was born to a family of part-Italian origin and grew up on a social housing estate in Drancy, a north-eastern suburb of Paris. He joined what was still the Front National at 16, saying he was inspired by Marine Le Pen, and became a regional secretary at 19, before launching a group called “Patriotic Suburbs”, aimed at reaching out to voters “in the forgotten territories of the Republic”. He would go on to be part of Le Pen’s 2017 presidential campaign and thereafter, supported by her, was raised through the ranks to the leadership.

In the course of that rise, he has learned how to enthuse his own supporters. I bore witness to his abilities when, at a Fête de la Nation in Le Havre on 1 May this year, he declared his party had the ability to govern France “tomorrow”, before he gestured for the audience to rise. Unbidden, they broke into a chorus of the Marseillaise. He continued in his speech, excoriating Macron — then at a low ebb in popularity — and at the end, they sang the Marseillaise again.

But he is also more than capable of taking the fight to his opponents. In August, Macron sought to regain the domestic initiative with a 12-hour discussion with all the party leaders, lasting until 3am. Bardella, in a near 15-minute exchange with the President, reportedly pressed him strongly for better security, stronger controls on migrants and a referendum on the public’s views on immigration — a demand which was met with a neutral response. Along with the other participants (though more politely than those from the Left contingent), he later expressed disappointment that the marathon deliberation had led nowhere.

This is typical of him and the modern RN: committed social conservatism and nationalism, but without the sulphur of Jean-Marie. Bardella doesn’t like same-sex marriage, but when in power, he says he would not ban it, nor tamper with more recent trans legislation. He would, however, refuse access to social services for illegal immigrants: like many in the working or lower-middle class everywhere, low wages and shortage of money have sharpened his eyes for diversion of public money into what are seen as underserving pockets. “My family,” he has said, “didn’t follow politics. If I’m active politically, it’s because I saw injustice very early social: at the end of the month, my mother didn’t have more than €15.”

Maréchal is cut from a different cloth — not just in birth and upbringing, but also in the way in which she has played the hand dealt to her. From the moment of her birth, she became a scion of a family which, uniquely among the far-Right parties of Europe, is a dynasty as well as a centre of activism and ideology. Her father Samuel was close to Jean-Marie, acting as his head of communication when the former leader was still in his prime in the Nineties and early 2000s and who, in his five attempts to win the presidency, positioned himself as the only politician who fully endorsed “a France of national patriotism” — a claim often spiced with derogatory comments about Jews.

Jean Marie led the Front National until he passed over the presidency to Marine in 2011, when Maréchal was 22. After her father separated from her mother in 2007, she remained close to her grandfather. A member of the RN, and a member of the Assembly in 2012 when it had few far-Right members, Maréchal joined the party’s executive board and was talked of as a future presidential candidate. But in 2018, after losing a regional election in the south of France, she retired from active politics and founded a college (the Institute of Social Sciences, Economics and Politics) in Lyon. From 2019, however, she was seen accompanying the well-known Right-wing journalist Éric Zemmour, who founded his party Reconquête as a direct competitor on the far-Right to RN. In 2022 — endorsed by Maréchal, who made her apostasy from the Le Pen family public — he came fourth in the first round of the presidential election.

The split with her aunt was a bitter one: resigning from the RN, she said that Le Pen had brought about “incessant ideological and programme changes… [which showed a] lack of logic and vision”. Le Pen, clearly distressed, said the decision was “brutal, violent and painful”. But this ideological split had been brewing for some time, a product of Marine Le Pen’s attempts to moderate her party. When she fired her father Jean-Marie from the party in 2015 — after he said the Holocaust gas chambers were a “detail” of history and that France should unite with Russia to save the “white world” — Maréchal did not follow her aunt’s lead, failing to condemn her grandfather.

Her social conservatism has more in common with her grandfather than her aunt. A strict Catholic (she has been on at least one pilgrimage, in 2018, from Notre Dame cathedral to Lourdes), she sees Islam as a dangerous opponent to her certain idea of France. She has said that, as a mother of two girls, “the prospect of them growing up tomorrow in a country where the veil and the abaya [a loose-fitting Middle-Eastern female dress] are a daily issue, a country that is shaped by the destruction wrought by riots, rapes, and gratuitous murders committed by illegal immigrants, is a prospect that makes me despair”. Marine Le Pen, who also warns constantly of the Islamist menace, would be unlikely to use such language.

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Yet while Maréchal emerges as someone determined to succeed in the far-Right political milieu, she has shown less consistency in pursuing her goal than Bardella, a trait which may mar her leadership. The young man from the Drancy housing estate has been rock-like in his attachment to Le Pen, a careful study and practitioner of stump rhetoric, with a self-confidence which allows him to happily battle the President of France. This will be an asset going forward — Marine Le Pen was demolished by Macron on economic issues in the presidential debate of 2017.

In her affection for her grandfather, her conservative Catholicism, and her alliance with Zemmour (who attributes France’s decline to feminism and egalitarianism, and has been convicted of incitement of hate against Muslims), Maréchal presents herself as on the harder, older Right than Bardella. He has worked diligently to be where he is now, and retains a sense of the unfairness of lower-class life, which neither Zemmour nor Maréchal appear to share. And his seriousness in political debate appears to have impressed Macron — who reportedly told aides that “he was the only one of the party [of opposition leaders] who understood what the exercise was about and who really worked on preparing for it”.

Yet for all the popularity and abilities of their protégés, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have made a gamble in promoting them. Firstly, because these bright young things will likely still struggle to do as well as their elders expect; and secondly, because, for all their rhetorical and political strengths, they remain short of experience at the head of a sustained and brutal political battle. Their calibre will be tested next June, in the European elections: after which, should they survive at the top, they will meet an ordeal by fire in the presidential elections. Still, youth will have its fling, as the song from The Mikado goes — and, whether or not they make it to the top, this particular dalliance promises to shake Europe in the years to come.

Admittedly, Wagenknecht hasn’t gone out of her way to make friends. In her 2021 book Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous), she condemned the rise of a so-called “lifestyle Left” that was made up of “the academic middle class, software programmers, and marketing experts” whose obsessions with political correctness, climate change, and unregulated immigration threatened to alienate Die Linke’s supporters in the working class and among the unemployed. The attack was taken badly by her comrades, who saw the book as a declaration of “literal war against her own party” and “the marginalised”.

But perhaps Wagenknecht doesn’t need their support. For months now, rumours have been circulating in the German press that she is planning to found her own party before the end of the year. The tabloid Bild claims to have confirmed that the launch of the new party is imminent, while one Wagenknecht ally, the political scientist Ulrike Guérot, told the news magazine Cicero in August that she had been offered to run on the new party’s ticket for next year’s elections to the EU parliament. If Wagenknecht goes ahead with her plan, the German political landscape might realign in unprecedented ways, both condemning Die Linke to oblivion and possibly slowing the rapid rise of the AfD.

Born in 1969 to a German mother and an Iranian immigrant father in the former GDR, 54-year-old Wagenknecht was associated with the Stalinist party faction “Kommunistische Plattform” until 2010 when she left the group. Since then, she has noticeably moderated her image, dressing in conservative pantsuits, wearing her hair tightly pinned up — and approvingly quoting Roger Scruton’s “philosophy of belonging”, which she pits against the “individualism and cosmopolitanism” of the “lifestyle Left”.

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Still, she continues to appeal to popular anti-capitalist sentiments. Her worldview, which she first set out in her 2011 book Freiheit statt Kapitalismus (Freedom over Capitalism), sees the sovereign nation-state as the essential bulwark against what she calls a “rule-less, globalised capitalism”. National welfare systems exist, she writes in Die Selbstgerechten, “to protect domestic workers and domestic consumers” (the italics are hers). German Leftists, still deeply scarred by the country’s national socialist past, see such protectionist appeals to national interests as little more than far-Right dog whistles.

Yet to many, she is a bold tribune of the people. In her YouTube show, she presents herself, somewhat awkwardly, as a news anchor commenting on the latest news in simple German. She regularly advocates views that are commonly associated with the German Right, whether it be attacks on Covid vaccine mandates or the Biden administration, which she accuses of having sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines last year. A fierce critic of Germany’s membership of Nato, which she blames for having provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she demanded that the German federal government publicly reveal everything it knows about who blew up Nord Stream. But the Scholz administration responded enigmatically that “in the interest of the welfare of the state” the findings needed to be kept secret.

Predictably enough, Wagenknecht has been condemned as “Vladimir Putin’s voice in Germany”, especially after she helped initiate the Manifest für Frieden (Manifesto for Peace) petition in February that demanded an end to German weapons deliveries to Ukraine and a diplomatic settlement of the war. This ultimately triggered a falling out with her party: after she refused to condemn the support of the manifesto by Right-wing activists, Die Linke leadership denied its endorsement of the peace initiative.

Yet her actions drew praise from surprising corners. Björn Höcke, an influential voice of the AfD and an advocate for Russo-German rapprochement, suggested that Wagenknecht should join his party. His proposal, however, was clearly tongue-in-cheek — the AfD leadership is aware of the dangers that a Wagenknecht party would pose to its unprecedented rise in national polls. While the AfD would be the second strongest party in the Bundestag if elections were held today, a new Wagenknecht party might slice off as much as a third of its support. “We’ll need to regard a Wagenknecht party not as an ally but as a competitor,” Höcke said recently, adding that a Wagenknecht party would more likely provide “opposition within the ruling cartel than opposition to the cartel”.

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Neither side is keen on an alliance. Wagenknecht has regularly condemned the AfD as beyond the pale of acceptability and excluded any collaboration with it, despite overlapping on crucial issues such as immigration, Nato membership, and the reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines. “To me, any cooperation with the AfD is absolutely unacceptable”, said Amira Mohamed Ali, co-chair of Die Linke faction in the Bundestag and one of Wagenknecht’s closest allies who would most likely follow her into a new party. “The AfD is a party which in parts holds extreme Right-wing views… Many politicians in the AfD do not clearly distance themselves from the National Socialist era and its rhetoric.”

Such a view is common in German political discourse. The oppositional Christian Democrats (CDU), who were in power for most of the history of the post-war Federal Republic, most recently under the 16-year chancellorship of Angela Merkel, have self-imposed a so-called “Brandmauer” (firewall) that mandates a total prohibition on any collaboration with the AfD. The CDU party chair Friedrich Merz recently had to reaffirm his commitment to the firewall after causing an uproar when he told the public broadcaster ZDF that the party would have to be “pragmatic” at the local level if CDU council members were confronted with resolutions put forth by AfD politicians. His point was that if AfD members of a small-town council suggested repaving a road, the CDU faction shouldn’t reflexively oppose the measure.

Elsewhere, this firewall rhetoric has boxed the CDU into a corner. Recently, the party proposed a bill in the state parliament of Thuringia to cut taxes. But after the AfD faction voted in support of the bill, embarrassed handwringing ensued. Did the CDU inadvertently violate its own firewall by taking a position with which the AfD agrees? Should it withdraw proposals if it becomes clear that the AfD might endorse them? Some prominent CDU members indeed seem to believe so.

In this, the CDU has found an unlikely sympathiser in Amira Mohamed Ali. “What should they have done?” she told German media. “Refuse to propose a motion or withdraw it after the wrong ones voted for it? I find that rather absurd.”

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Might this present an opportunity for a future party led by Wagenknecht? While the AfD and a potential Wagenknecht party would likely denounce each other in public and promise no formal collaboration, on key issues of the day — such as the Ukraine war or energy policy — they could vote in line. And even though the AfD might earn smaller vote shares with Wagenknecht as a competitor, the two parties together may still earn a larger combined vote share than the AfD does by itself. This would allow them to form subtle coalitions on specific issues.

The status quo, by contrast, limits Wagenknecht’s reach because in national polls Die Linke is stagnating around the 5% mark that parties need to cross in order to gain seats in the Bundestag. In Sunday’s elections for the state parliaments of Hesse and Bavaria, the party incurred heavy losses and failed to win seats in either parliament — in Hesse, Die Linke earned only half as many votes as in the last elections five years ago. Prominent Linke politicians blame it all on Wagenknecht. “It is the stated goal of Wagenknecht and her associates to destroy Die Linke,” tweeted the Bundestag member Caren Lay.

But Wagenknecht could still lose her nerve. After all, this would not be her first time trying to launch a novel political organisation. In 2018, she helped to form an extra-parliamentary movement named Aufstehen (“Rise Up”), which she modelled after the British Momentum campaign of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, to provide grassroots support for her Left-wing goals. Yet the project quickly fizzled out after Wagenknecht complained that she felt “burned out” and withdrew from leadership.

If she proceeds, Wagenknecht will have the crucial support of Klaus Ernst. The former union executive helped to lead a sizable chunk of members out of the Social Democratic Party in 2005 to protest the party’s cuts to social welfare during the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. He then helped to form the Left-wing social-democratic party WASG, which in 2007 merged with the Party of Democratic Socialism to become today’s Linke. Ernst, who is discontented with Die Linke’s support for “genderism” and apocalyptic climate activism, recently told Cicero that if Wagenknecht were to launch such a party, “it would really be a realistic option for me to participate”.

The combined vote share of Germany’s Nato-supporting mainstream parties is ever-shrinking as more and more Germans, especially in the East, feel alienated from Berlin and seek to punish their leaders by voting for disruptive populist forces. So far, the AfD has fought a lonely fight in total rejection of the status quo. If Wagenknecht starts to address many of the AfD’s complaints against Germany’s energy or foreign policy as well, the Right-wing populists may not be lonely for long.

Journalists wrote alarmed pieces about nice boys and girls being transformed into jihadist monsters. Politicians made speeches about the “disease of Islamic extremism”. Academics constructed entire theses on the etymology and evolution of Jihad. Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz even seemed relevant. This all now seems a distant memory. How did this happen? Did the jihadists go away, or did we just get bored of them?

Unfortunately, the jihadists haven’t disappeared; Isis, for example, is reportedly resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa, as are its rivals, al-Qaeda. But global jihadism as a movement is in grave disarray . The Isis caliphate is gone, and doesn’t look set to return anytime soon. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader, is dead: he blew himself up in October 2019 when US Special Operations forces raided his compound in Idlib, Syria. His replacement, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, is also dead, biting the Syrian dust earlier this year. But few Western journalists took much notice, and nobody was writing op-eds on a posthumous “martyrdom bump” for Isis, or how they would come back stronger after his demise.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is arguably in better shape, maintaining footholds and some measure of success in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel. But its capacity to stage attacks against the West is greatly diminished, thanks to a sustained and successful counter-terrorism operations by the US and its allies, and a shift in the group’s strategic vision, which now prioritises local grievances over global contention. The killing of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year in a US drone strike has further weakened its internal solidarity and outward prestige.

According to terrorism scholar Daniel Byman, the last significant jihadist attack in the US was four years ago when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate shot and killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. We have to go back even further to locate the last jihadist attack in the US that resulted in mass-casualties: that was in 2016, when Omar Mateen, inspired by Isis, went on a shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

The last deadly Isis-inspired attack in America — Florida again — was in March 2018, when a 17-year old stabbed to death a 13-year old at a sleepover. And while several individuals, including a teenager, have recently plotted in the name of Isis, none have been able to successfully convert inspiration into competent lethal violence. It certainly doesn’t compare to the 2014-2016 period, when Isis-inspired individuals were responsible for more than three-quarters of all deaths (107 in total) caused by jihadist terrorism in America since September 11, 2001.

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A similar downward trajectory can be seen in Europe, although the threat there remains far greater than in the US. According to a recent report by Scenor, there were 105 jihadi attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2022, involving 133 perpetrators and resulting in 405 deaths, far exceeding the death toll of all deadly jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11. The vast majority (90%) were carried out by so-called lone-wolves and most were Isis-related. But the tempo and lethality of attacks has changed. The deadliest (Paris, Nice, Brussels, Manchester) were carried out by Isis attackers, both directed and inspired, between 2015 and 2017, resulting in a collective death toll of 270 victims. But since losing its caliphate, Isis has neither been able to coordinate attacks in Europe nor inspire attackers there in any great number. And when those attacks do happen, they are often amateurish and of limited lethality.

As the threat of jihadist terrorism has receded in the West, so too has media interest in it. And it is hard to exaggerate what a sea-change this represents. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Zawahiri wrote in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of Isis, in 2005. A decade later, the consensus was that Isis had conclusively won that war. “They’re using the internet better than we use the internet,” as Trump put it in November 2015, simplifying a widely held view that Isis propaganda was far more sophisticated and “slick” than anything the US State Department could come up with.

But the victory was jettisoned as rapidly as it was acquired. By July 2017, the Isis horror show was almost over: in that month, it lost Mosul, its de facto capital in Iraq, and three months later it was to lose Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. At the same time, new horror-shows were vying for our attention, much closer to the nascent obsessions that now polarise the political landscape in the West. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. It had all the hallmarks of an Isis attack, except that before his attack, instead of proclaiming to be a “soldier of the caliphate”, Minassian had declared the arrival of an “incel rebellion” on Facebook. All of a sudden, incels seemed to be everywhere. Then, in March 2019, just as Isis was losing its last sliver of territory in Syria, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

All of a sudden, white supremacists seemed to be everywhere too. And then something strange happened: journalists and extremism experts who had once made careers out of covering jihadists started to cover the far-Right in almost exactly the same way. Just as Isis had been a transnational, “networked” threat, so too were the white supremacists. And just as Isis had been radicalising children in their bedrooms over the internet, so too has the far-Right. Almost overnight, Brenton Tarrant became the new “Jihad John”, Andrew Tate became the new “charismatic” jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, and 8Chan became the new radical mosque, incubating hate and inciting violence.

The broader context for such a dramatic transposition was the culture war and its insatiable demand for new folk devils with which to wage symbolic battle. For one side in this war, a malevolent progressive ideology, promoted by Left-wing activists, is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life. For the other, a no less toxic ideology of white male supremacy is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life.

Correspondingly, the chief bête noire of anti-progressives are radicals who embrace gender non-conformity and who want to abolish the patriarchy, prisons and much else, while for progressives, the root of all evil lies in the figure of the toxic white male. Jihadists, however, resist assimilation into this classificatory scheme for the obvious reason that they’re Muslims and (mostly) from minority backgrounds. Indeed, in some respects they serve to threaten this scheme, because they’re both anti-LGBTQ and militantly opposed to classical liberalism.

Hence jihadist violence has become a symbolic cul-de-sac for both sides in the culture war, affording neither the opportunity to bring attention to or amplify the concerns — pre-eminently around race and gender — that so preoccupy them. This new hermeneutic regime was sharply in evidence in the lethargy which marked the response of both progressives and conservatives to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess two years ago by a British Isis supporter. The very day after his killing, the Metropolitan Police declared it an act of terrorism with “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. But among British elites there was little appetite for exploring that link; instead they chose to focus on the proliferation of online hate speech aimed at MPs.

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Two months prior to Amess’s murder, a 22-year-old British man from Plymouth went on a shooting rampage, killing five, including his mother, before fatally shooting himself. Devon and Cornwall Police did not categorise this rampage as a terrorist incident. But that didn’t prevent many British journalists and commentators from trying to turn it into one. This was because the perpetrator, Jake Davison, supposedly had links to the incel subculture: he was a self-confessed virgin; he believed that women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance; he had made references to the “blackpill”; and he had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

Within 24 hours of the attack, The Guardian had described Davison as “a hate-filled misogynist and ‘incel’”, and speculated that “Plymouth shootings may be a sign ‘incel’ culture is spreading.” A day after the murder of Amess, an editorial in The Observer sternly reprimanded anyone who was in mind to “politicise this tragedy” on the basis of “scant details”. No such reprimand was issued by that paper in the days after Davison’s killing spree, despite the considerable uncertainty surrounding his motives. They were too busy politicising it, because they could. By contrast, Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born man who murdered Amess, couldn’t be so readily marshalled for symbolic service in the culture war over race and gender.

It was proof that, in some ways, we have become jaded by jihadists, desensitised to their threat and moral squalor by over-exposure to a media discourse and entertainment industry that, for over a decade and a half, couldn’t get enough of them. If they were once exotic and possessed a certain “jihadi cool“, they now resemble some ageing crooner trading on past glories. We just know too much about them and their shabby pasts as failed rappers, drug-dealers, potheads and porn enthusiasts. Jihadi terror has transmogrified into jihadi triviality.

Yet as Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, once observed, society needs its criminals. We just don’t need jihadists anymore, since new and seemingly more forbidding folk have displaced them. And they have done so not because they are objectively more threatening or murderous (they’re not), but because they reflect the shifting existential anxieties of Western elites in a moment of great and rapid change. These anxieties were once focused on the threat of Islamism to democratic norms. Now, they are entangled in fears and loathing around gender and race. And when these moral panics eventually burn out, no doubt a new breed of devils will emerge, too.

Many of them had travelled to the capital from the coastal towns where al-Shabaab was most active, and where all the structural “push” factors one could imagine are present: poverty, boredom, marginalisation, corruption — and extrajudicial killings. Perhaps that’s what enabled them to diagnose one of the central shortcomings of the policies generally known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), of which Britain’s Prevent Strategy is a part. In his independent review of Prevent, published last week, William Shawcross came to the same conclusion: the overemphasis on vulnerability in the process of radicalisation strips individuals of their agency, obscures reality and sucks the politics out of political violence.

This framing is inadvertently written into the policy from its birth in 2011: according to Prevent’s foreword, one of its core objectives is to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (emphasis mine). In this model, the individual is a passive participant in their own descent into terrorism, sometimes manipulated by mysterious online recruiters or pushed by socioeconomic circumstances beyond their control. Over time, the strategy moved into more and more safeguarding settings, and this notion evolved further. As one practitioner told me: “radicalisation is just another form of grooming”.

Such thinking has seeped into broader counterterrorism discourse, but perhaps worst of all it has allowed now-stranded jihadists in Syria to play back Western tropes for domestic consumption. In their versions of events, they were groomed, manipulated or brainwashed into joining Isis, just as they were only ever cooks or engineers in the Caliphate. It’s “only following orders”, updated for the therapy era. The type of people Prevent interacts with has helped to crystallise this notion. No doubt many of those referred to Prevent have various sources of instability in their lives, but this should not be surprising for a policy which relies on local authority services such as mental healthcare as some of its main vectors of delivery. Drawing conclusions about radicalisation based on Prevent referrals and interventions tells us about the type of people referred to Prevent, not necessarily those joining terrorist movements.

Likewise for the increasing concern over the radicalisation risk to children and young people, particularly online. Of course children make up large numbers of referrals for a strategy which is a legal duty for schools. But the involvement of children in political violence is exceptionally rare: the majority of Isis recruits were in their 20s (many much older), and most terror attacks in Western countries to further a racist worldview are being perpetrated by, as Naama Kates puts it, “grown-ass men”.

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Prevent may well be doing a fine job of diverting genuinely vulnerable people away from extremism, but it should be just one part of the strategy’s function. What of the people unlikely to appear on the radar of local services — those who are stable and confident enough in their convictions to justify violence? The man considering killing a human being for eternal reward or the survival of his race is not simply misled or a walking checklist of needs and vulnerabilities; he has never been more assured. It’s not clear Prevent has an answer.

Another concern identified by the review has proven the most controversial — and already the most mischaracterised. Shawcross found that there is a disproportionate focus on the far-Right, and that while Islamist extremism is defined so narrowly as to only take in the likes of Isis, far-Right extremism is defined so loosely as to sometimes include Brexit, populism and garden-variety conservatism. To explain this, it’s necessary to describe the Prevent sector as a whole, which extends well beyond the civil servants, local coordinators or police officers it employs. It includes Prevent-funded civil society organisations, academic centres, NGOs and think tanks (one of which I belong to). Not all of them have a formal connection to Prevent, but all of them help to shape and guide the discourse on extremism and terror. And where the discourse goes, policy praxis follows.

It’s easy for a headline to blame “woke civil servants” for not wanting to talk about Islamist extremism, but the reality is: delivery is bent out of shape by parts of the Prevent sector which have nothing to do with government at all. These are the institutions which churn out paper after paper on the video game-extremism nexus or the trauma of their own work, but which are deafeningly silent when a schoolteacher is decapitated across the Channel and another is forced into hiding closer to home. Some of the organisations which influence thinking are based in North America, which has an entirely different threat picture, but the online discourse flattens this distinction. The effect is clear in Shawcross’s observation that, inside Prevent, resources are distributed concerning organisations with no actual presence in Britain.

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Those delivering Prevent are also subject to external pressures which help pull the strategy “out of kilter” with Britain’s counterterrorism apparatus, as one senior official put it. On one school visit, I was anxiously informed by the concerned headteacher that some of his students’ parents are Daily Mail readers. I have seen third-sector organisations show slides of Mail headlines immediately after Dabiq — Islamic State’s blood-soaked propaganda rag. Others I worked with had slides counted by audiences to ensure equal time was given to the EDL as to ISIS. This was in 2014-15 when hundreds of Brits were travelling to the Caliphate, and in parts of London with no far-Right presence whatsoever. These are the external pressures, but in other cases the call is coming from inside the house, such as the suspicion and accusations identified by Shawcross against those who focus or specialise on Islamism. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s not clear the strategy can ever function properly while this persists.

Given these pressures, it is not hard to see why some will opt for the easy life or go along with the mantra that the far-Right and jihadists are simply two sides of the same coin. They are of course worthy of a response, but the street hooligans of Britain First or the EDL (let alone the Daily Mail) simply do not exist in the same tactical or moral universe as the present-day génocidaires of Isis — in that they are not orchestrating the mass killing of civilians or exterminating minorities in the Middle East. Since my own experiences some years ago, this trend of equivalence has accelerated and entirely new categories of extremism have come into the Prevent sector’s purview, in what one insider described as the “Andrew Tate-ification of counterterrorism”. Any strategy which concerns itself as much with the EDL as with Isis is probably suffering a lack of conceptual clarity, but any strategy which concerns itself as much with adolescents watching Andrew Tate’s videos as Anwar al-Awlaki’s is probably so broad as to be rendered meaningless.

It means, for instance, that in the past week, violent demonstrations in Knowsley have been used to discredit the Shawcross review and its alleged dismissal of the far-Right threat. Having slugged through all 188 pages, I can confirm no such dismissal is made. In fact, this narrative rather makes the review’s point: that there is a clear difference between unrest — even law-breaking and violent unrest — and the bombing of children at a pop concert or the assassination of an MP. After all, if there is no such distinction, then to remain ideologically fair, Prevent must consider the frequent law-breaking and unrest perpetrated by Left-wing environmentalists. But it largely doesn’t, and nor do I think it should.

While some of the findings of the review will be shocking to many on the outside, the actual demands made of those delivering Prevent are hardly earth-shattering. In fact, amid years of controversy, the review is potentially a lifeline. Shawcross’s only demand is that it returns to its core purpose: preventing the next Thomas Mair or Salman Abedi, not the next online shitposter or Andrew Tate.

For the sermon, the priest switches from ecclesiastical Latin to everyday Polish. “You used to be so passionate about your faith and your national identity,” he says. “Now all that is gone. Why?” The reproach seems to be directed exclusively at the male members of the congregation. They lower their heads penitently.

The mass was held at a small chapel belonging to the Society of Saint Pius X, an organisation of Catholic priests established by Marcel Lefebvre, a controversial French archbishop who was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II, patron saint and supreme icon of modern Polish Catholicism. Performed in traditional Latin rather than Polish, the ceremony at Wawer contained deeply traditional elements that even the most conservative of Poland’s churchgoers might have found archaic. It was arranged at the behest of the Independence March Association, a Polish far-Right organisation that convenes an annual march on Independence Day, rallying tens of thousands of ultra-nationalists to declare their hostility to “cultural Marxism” while affirming their “patriotism” and “traditional” Polish values.

The head of the Independence March Association, Robert Bakiewicz, is the closest thing to a leader for Poland’s extra-parliamentary far-Right. At the mass in Wawer, he could pass for the doorman of an upmarket nightclub — burly physique, smart grey overcoat, military-grade haircut. Contemplating the altar, he is periodically interrupted by uniformed lieutenants equipped with wireless earpieces and armbands.

Bakiewicz is among the minority of Catholic traditionalists worldwide who prefer to attend mass in the original Latin rather than in their native languages. The traditionalists believe the mainstream Catholic way of worship has strayed from dogma and become too liberal. As they see it, the Latin, or Tridentine, mass still preserves the splendour and sanctity of the pre-modern Church.

On social media, the Latin mass is associated with the “trad Caths” — Anglophone internet-speak for an increasingly visible new generation of online Catholics. The trad Caths of Instagram and TikTok share content celebrating the values and aesthetics of traditional Catholicism, in tones that veer between the playful and the unabashedly sincere. Bakiewicz has joined in the fun, but his trad Cath identity is also a political statement. It signifies a rejection of the Polish clerical establishment and a recalibration of the far-Right’s relationship with Church and state. It also underlines his own credentials. To lead the far-Right, you must be more nationalist than the nationalists, and more Catholic than the Catholics. And there is no better way of demonstrating that in today’s Poland than by being seen at Latin mass.

Poland’s nationalists have traditionally been close allies of its Church leaders. Through Nazi occupation and Soviet dominance, they served as joint custodians of national identity, active in the resistance and in the preservation of Polish culture. Over the last decade however, the clergy has been hit by a series of scandals that have weakened its standing, leaving it looking like the junior partner in its alliance with the Right-wing government. Media reports have exposed the profligacy of Polish bishops, who spent donations to the Church on expensive cars, real estate and lavish renovation schemes. More damagingly, senior clergy in Poland have been implicated in committing and covering up child abuse.

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The scandals have prompted accusations that the clerical establishment has been behaving like an unaccountable elite, corrupted by power and privilege. Indeed, the far-Right’s criticism of Church leaders has a distinctly populist tone. “I will send my men to protect churches,” Bakiewicz told me in October 2020, as an effective ban on abortions ignited anti-clerical protests across Poland. “But I will never send them to protect the palaces of bishops.”

Matters have not been helped by the current Pope. Hailed as a reformist by liberals, Pope Francis has irked conservatives in Poland and beyond, prompting many to question his judgement. Traditionalists have been particularly troubled by the Pope’s decision to restrict access to the Latin mass, reversing efforts by his predecessor, Pope Benedict, to restore some legitimacy to the ancient rite. Where the era of Pope John Paul II marked the consolidation of the relationship between Poland’s nationalists and clergy, the era of Pope Francis coincides with its weakening. “It’s not like we disobey the Pope, the hierarchs,” Bakiewicz said. “But one cannot ever accept others preaching a false gospel, even if it is — to quote Saint Paul — an angel descended from heaven.”

In the battle with liberal values, the far-Right in Poland is broadly aligned with the government. Led by the national-conservative Law and Justice party, the government picks fights with Brussels, intimidates independent judges and journalists, demonises the campaign for LGBT rights, more or less prohibits abortions, and persecutes refugees and migrants unless they happen to be Ukrainian. Poland’s far-Right movement supports these policies on the streets, and some of its biggest players, such as Bakiewicz, are in turn supported financially by the government. Investigative journalists in Poland have revealed that the government has paid more than €1 million in public subsidies to organisations linked to Bakiewicz.

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According to Mikolaj Czesnik, a political scientist and professor at Warsaw’s SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, the government uses far-Right figures such as Bakiewicz to fly a kite for its most hardline policies. “You do not need an army to do that — a few people on the streets of Warsaw is enough,” he said. “The nationalists openly hate Brussels, the people hear that, and this allows the PM to come out and say that he is taking a tough stance against the European Commission because he values the Polish people over some foreign, cosmopolitan greater good.”

Bakiewicz began his political career as a foot soldier in the ONR, the largest and oldest formation within Poland’s far-Right eco-system. The ONR — its initials stand for National Radical Camp — claims to be the ideological heir to an organisation of the same name whose cadres hounded Poland’s Jews and leftists in the run-up to World War Two. Its present-day membership is known for its Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and hostility to LGBT rights, as well as its belief in an ethnically pure Poland. A recent ruling by Poland’s supreme court decreed that the ONR could reasonably be described as “fascist”, although the court stopped short of endorsing that description. The movement rejects the label — fascism is technically outlawed in Poland — even if some of its members have been pictured marching in brown shirts and performing Roman salutes.

Bakiewicz became known at the ONR for his rousing speeches and all-round tough guy image — qualities that, according to his supporters, have helped shake the far-Right out of its anomie and restore its sense of purpose. He was born in 1976 in Pruszkow, a satellite town of Warsaw that acquired a reputation for gangland violence in the post-communist transition. As a young man, he ran a small construction company, filing for bankruptcy in 2011, around the same time as he became active in the ONR. Media outlets also reported that he had been granted a divorce at around this time, with his financial problems cited as a contributory factor. Bakiewicz has refused to speak to the press about this period in his life.

He agreed to our interview on condition that we would only discuss matters of faith. Questions about his financial history were strictly off-limits, and nor was I able to ask him about a 2017 interview in which he used a slur for gay people and referred to homosexuality as an illness threatening the traditional family.

Our meeting took place in Bakiewicz’s office, in a tower block in Warsaw’s genteel Zoliborz district. I waited in a hallway where religious icons hung on the wall. A stack of newspapers beside the chair contained a range of Left and Right-wing publications, many with handwritten comments scribbled on the front-page stories. Bakiewicz tends to avoid speaking to established media outlets, opting to get his message across via his YouTube channel. I began the interview by asking about his enthusiasm for the Latin mass. He responded that the modern mass, replacing the Latin version, undermined the Church’s claim to universality — the claim, in other words, that its teachings applied equally to everyone. “The Church cannot suddenly start changing what it used to preach,” he said, because universality also meant that the institution “needs to be understood in the same way”.

Almost all churches in Poland conduct the mass in the Polish language, a legacy of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5), which resulted in sweeping liberalising reforms. Importantly, priests were permitted to celebrate mass in the native language of the congregation rather than Latin. Deeply conservative factions within the Church, however, rejected the changes. Some of these factions, including Lefebvre’s Society of Saint Pius X, were eventually cast out by the Vatican. Bakiewicz embraced the Lefebvre movement three years ago, after a public spat with Church leaders in Warsaw who had refused to host a Latin mass for his followers.

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In the interview at his office, Bakiewicz heaped scorn on the clerical establishment. He accused it of taking a passive stance during the protests against the abortion law in 2020, thereby neglecting a fundamental duty to stand up for the faith. He also criticised the clergy over its response to the arrival in Poland of more than three million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict with Russia. Ukrainians now account for nearly 8% of Poland’s population, marking a dramatic shift for a country characterised since World War Two by the absence of any sizeable minorities.

The homogeneity of contemporary Polish identity is typically upheld by the far-Right as a virtue. Toward the Ukrainians however, allies in the confrontation with the historic Russian enemy, there is no overt hostility. “These people came to us from a war-torn country,” Bakiewicz said, striking a paternalistic note. “It’s not the time to think about trivial, materialistic things.” But the Polish clergy, in his view, was once again at fault — it had missed an opportunity to bring the Ukrainians, most of whom follow a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church, within the fold. “I am disappointed that the Polish Church is not fighting for these souls,” Bakiewicz said.

The proposed mass conversion of a displaced people may sound like anachronistic fantasy, but it encapsulates a particular view of faith and nation on the far-Right. Some refugees are welcome, in this view, if they can be assimilated into the faith, reinforcing rather than altering it. According to the traditionalists, it is the willingness of the Church to be altered, to change with the times, that lies at the heart of its current malaise. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican has softened its rhetoric towards LGBT minorities, condemned Europe’s policy towards migrants, and sought to find common ground with the leaders of other faiths. “If the Pope suggests that all religions are equal,” Bakiewicz said, “it means that the Catholic martyrs, those who were put to death because they refused to convert, would have died in vain.”

Despite their vocal objections to the current Pope, the traditionalists maintain that they have not crossed the line into outright defiance of papal authority – a move that might call their identity as Catholics into question. One of Bakiewicz’s ideological soulmates in Polish politics, Robert Winnicki, threads the needle between criticism and defiance of the Pope by painting a bleak picture of the Church in peril. “The ship is sinking and the lifeboats are being lowered,” he said. “The Latin mass movement is one of those lifeboats. It will not operate against the Vatican, but in spite of it.”

***

This story was produced as part of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Editing by Neil Arun.

It’s why I’m sceptical about any discussions regarding the prospect of American fascism. The latest trigger was Italy’s general election, which swept the ambiguously populist Right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia into power. But this is only the most recent. Before that, President Biden himself singled out segments of the GOP as “semi-fascist”, and while he didn’t elaborate, a number of commentators doubled-down on it. Earlier still, scholars in highly-coveted positions, such as Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have created veritable cottage industries out of a moralised analysis of what they treat as a global surge in fascism.

The fascism discussion is increasingly taking on a meta dimension, in which half of the arguments now circle around the usage itself, and whether disputing its usage perhaps makes one, if not fascist, then insufficiently dedicated to the spirit of democracy (as well as pedantic, and so on).

But why do we keep returning to this subject, and why do we find it so difficult to even agree on the terms of the debate? The second question is the easier to answer. For, despite being one of the major forms of modern political organisation, fascism is probably the least well understood. The great Italian historian of fascism Renzo de Felice remarked that unlike liberalism or communism, fascism had no defining texts — no Second Treatise of Government, no Das Kapital. And while it attracted major thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, neither produced a work that served to systematically define it for future generations.

It is the least systematic of the major ideological tendencies of the 20th century, and generating an inductive understanding is complicated by the confounding factors in each country’s specific manifestation. In Italy — the original incarnation of fascism — you have inter alia the particular character of Mussolini, but also the unique role of the Vatican, the country’s geopolitical situation, the recent and still ongoing colonial ventures, and the rising importance of diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, other Right-wing regimes of the 20th century — Spain, Portugal, Greece, Argentina, Syria — all incorporated elements or factions of fascism without necessarily embracing fascism tout court. And over all this hangs the shadow of Nazism, which is of course a variant of fascism, but one whose most salient features — race worship and Jew-hatred — are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions of fascism.

All of which is to say that confusion surrounding the term is probably inevitable, though this has hardly limited its usage. On the contrary: it has by now become an almost obligatory grace note of disapproval, regardless of how far removed from the subject at hand (nor is this dynamic limited to the Left — cf. Jonah Goldberg’s lazy manifesto Liberal Fascism). Of course, this is demonology, not political analysis. As George Orwell put it: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” It is in this sense, the domestic equivalent of bringing up the Munich Agreement in foreign policy debates.

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But fascism is not just an empty ideological vessel; it describes a programmatic way of organising political society that differs from either liberalism or communism. Fascism is a totalising project — one that channels all subsidiary institutions from the family to business corporations to the nation toward the interests of the absolute state. And as Adam Tooze has pointed out, this almost always operates in concert with extraordinary military and economic mobilisation against perceived threats, both foreign and domestic.

If this doesn’t sound very much like any major political phenomenon today (and it doesn’t), why then do we obsess over it so? It is clear that the idea of fascism — however nebulous — continues to exert a unique, dark fascination for us (alas, poor communism, with its nearly 100 million dead, apparently lacks a certain je ne sais quoi). And perhaps this is nothing new. Almost 50 years ago, Susan Sontag noted how: “For those born after the early 1940s, bludgeoned by a lifetime’s palaver, pro and con, about communism, it is fascism — the great conversation piece of their parents’ generation — which represents the exotic, the unknown.”

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But I think there’s something more at work in the collective quasi-obsession with identifying and rooting out fascism in our own society. Machiavelli has a great line where he notes how Roman writers would “praise Caesar but blame Catiline” as a coded way of talking about what were in effect Caesar’s crimes. Something similar seems to be at work with respect to how we discuss the defects of democracy — assigning those tendencies we least like to some external phenomenon that we call “fascism”. Overweening executive power? Militarised deep state? Consolidated corporate authority working hand-in-glove with centralised bureaucracies? Immigration restrictions? Political demagoguery? The truth is that all of the elements that we have seen fit to attribute to the external threat of fascism are perfectly compatible with democracy.

Some of this is simply a function of the phenomenon identified many decades ago by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève: that diverse ideological tendencies are submerged under the overarching form of the modern state. But it is also the case that democracy itself — like Whitman — contains multitudes. And our insistence on associating all political virtue with democracy and vice with various opponents (authoritarianism, autocracy, fascism, etc.) has blinded us to this fact. Like it or not, our ongoing political disputes ultimately remain family disputes, and we will— not for the first time — have to work them out among ourselves.

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By treating fascism as kind of eternally recurring political tendency, rather than a historically distinctive phenomenon, we have elevated it into an Aristotelian taxonomy of political life, but without anything like Aristotle’s philosophical rigour. The result is that our political understanding is reduced to a sliding scale with democracy in the middle, and communism and fascism at either end, serving as permanent tendencies against which we require constant warning from the great and good among us. This account is both too small and too big: on the one hand, this represents an impoverishment of our political imagination; but on the other, it needlessly introduces external ideological categories in lieu of a serious analysis of the political tendencies distinctive to democracies themselves.

In the end though, does any of this matter, beyond its importance to the egos of a handful of public intellectuals? I think it does. First, because — as the motto of Faber College has it — knowledge is good. The “everything is fascism” discourse presents an impoverished understanding of political possibilities, and leaves its audience less informed than when they started. But it also matters because, if you think as many do that our democracy is in a bad way, then a misdiagnosis is practically and not just intellectually dangerous. Getting it right is a concern for citizens, not just scholars or “Historian here!” types on social media. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed doctors of democratic society, having diagnosed the disease as fascism, lambast anyone who disagrees with them as being a partisan of the disease itself, even as the patient grows sicker and sicker.

Held on 17 September outside the Bank of England, the demonstration was pithily titled the “Nationwide Rally for Freedom: For Truth, Justice & Freedom”, and featured speeches by Piers Corbyn and David Icke. It was, notionally at least, against Covid jabs — but some attendees had their own agendas.

The couple introduced themselves as Lee and Morag, and explained the message behind their jumpers. It refers to Satanic Ritual Abuse, and it imagines that devil-worshipping paedophiles operate a trafficking network that kidnaps tens of thousands of children every year in order to ritualistically rape, torture and murder them.

It goes, of course, all the way to the top. Believers in the various iterations of SRA think that the court system has been paid-off to separate children from their parents, and that these kids are smuggled to remote country estates via vast underground tunnels so that senior figures in the British establishment can dismember them in grotesque rituals. “It’s going on, 100%,” said Lee.

Later in the rally, I found Piers Corbyn marching alone, shouting a protest chant through his megaphone. I asked him what he thought about SRA. “It’s real,” he said. “It’s happening. We ought to press on talking about it.”

SRA is the conspiracy theory that refuses to die. An American import, it arrived here in the Eighties and Nineties, and became accepted in some circles as gospel truth. The NSPCC even gave a press conference in 1990 alleging that mothers were handing over their newborn babies to be sacrificed in occult rituals. Therapists, social workers, and writers began spreading sensational claims: children being hung upside-down by hooks so their organs could be cut out; women having their foetuses aborted, carved up and eaten. It’s hard to gauge how many people in the UK today believe in SRA, but one well-known activist, a retired police officer named Jon Wedger, has 36,000 subscribers on YouTube.

It sounds horrific, but so do plenty of made-up things. Rosie Waterhouse, an investigative journalist who researched SRA claims for the Independent on Sunday, found that there has never been any evidence to substantiate them: “No bodies, no bones… no bloodstains. Nothing.”

But try telling that to Lee and Morag. The couple frequently go to Hampstead in north London, where, in 2014, a group of parents was falsely accused of running a satanic paedophile ring that tortured babies to death in the local McDonald’s. For years, these parents and their children have been hounded by conspiracy theorists. When I asked Morag what she and Lee do in Hampstead, she gave a startling response. “Harassment,” she said, laughing. “We go around harassing people. We know the families. They shit themselves.”

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I’ve researched conspiracy theorists of all stripes for my website, Scout, and I’m continually struck by how many share the common denominator of antisemitism, accusing Jews of malign, behind-the-scenes influence. Jewish people were not the focus of SRA activism in the Nineties, but today that seems to have changed. This January, an SRA campaigner, who cannot be named for legal reasons, organised a rally targeting the Rothschilds, whom she called “the most powerful, vile family in the world”. It was held at Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire estate owned by Ferdinand de Rothschild, a 19th-century banker from the Jewish finance dynasty, and 50 people turned up to accuse the family of hunting children for sport.

Back at the London march, Lee told me about how “Khazarian Jews” (a conspiracy theory about a powerful Jewish cabal) are ultimately responsible for satanic abuse. Later, a campaigner named Grant told me that abducted children are transported through secret tunnels that run underneath the Rothschild & Co bank.

This may sound like a load of dismissible basement crankery, but accusations of satanic abuse have real consequences. In 2020, a campaigner named Wilfred Wong kidnapped a child in Anglesey, claiming he was a victim of satanic abuse in need of rescue. Wong held a knife to the throat of a foster carer while an accomplice snatched the eight-year-old boy from a car. The child was bundled into a waiting vehicle: the plan was to drive to an airport and take him out of the country. Police stopped the car 150 miles away in Northamptonshire and the boy was safely recovered. Wong is now serving a 22-year prison sentence, but his work in the SRA movement continues to inspire followers.

One of those followers is Susan Fownes, who seems to be a key player in the movement. She has set up an organisation called Pacha House in the Highgate area of Birmingham, which has become a hub for activists campaigning against satanic abuse. At Pacha House, Fownes organises conferences and activist get-togethers. She rents it from Birmingham City Council, which gives spaces in the former Quaker Friends’ Institute to community groups. Pacha House is not a registered charity, although it is considering an application to the Charity Commission.

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I wanted to understand what was going on at Pacha House, but having seen Fownes’s Facebook posts about her distrust of the “MSM”, I was certain that she wouldn’t respond to an ordinary interview request. So I got in touch under a pseudonym, identifying myself as a potential donor, and she invited me to visit.

Pacha House is set in a crumbling Victorian mansion. On the surface, it looks no different from any other ramshackle community project: there’s a kitchen garden, a room filled with art supplies, a study with an old computer. It fits with the wholesome image that Fownes is keen to project. “Providing space for seeding initiatives for holistic living,” reads the aims of Pacha House on her Facebook page. “Advocating wellbeing through the common language of nourishment and nature.”

However, this appears to be cover for Pacha House’s real purpose: campaigning against ritual abuse. Fownes told me she first became wary about SRA after seeing the same young mothers on her estate pushing prams containing different babies. “And you start to wake up to the fact that these girls are delivering babies,” she said, referring to the conspiracy theory from the Nineties that claimed women were being used like broodmares to provide infants for sacrifice.

Fownes has posted Facebook videos in support of Wilfred Wong and invited “survivors of SRA” to come to Pacha House. Sharing a video of one SRA influencer, she wrote: “We are debating these themes and others that affect the wellbeing of our communities and children in Pacha House’s Knowledge Library, Fridays and Saturdays.” On her website, Fownes has shared (and since deleted) a list of celebrities, politicians and other public figures baselessly accused of ritualistic abuse and murder.

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During our conversation, Fownes suggested that she may have misled Birmingham City Council about Pacha House’s true purpose as an SRA campaign hub. Advising me to set up a sister operation, Fownes said: “I wouldn’t use the word ‘front’, I would say ‘set up a community service project, community engagement’, all of that, but you know between yourselves why you’re really there. And just allow it to grow.” In dealing with the council, she said: “Don’t talk about SRA, don’t talk about child abuse, none of that. Say you want to do a community project… but your real intention is to create the space for people to talk about what’s going on.”

Fownes boasted that councils “can’t really refuse” an application, and indicated that Pacha House was beyond scrutiny. “We’re a private club, so it’s none of their damn business,” she said. “We’re not doing anything wrong: we pay our rent, we look after the space that they have not looked after.”

But the most surprising revelation was yet to come: Pacha House, an organisation devoted to eliminating the apparent scourge of ritual abuse, has itself been accused of putting children at risk by inviting men convicted of sexual assault onto their premises.

On 25 June, Fownes hosted an event at Pacha House, and invited a fellow activist called Jane Kelly. Kelly brought her son with her, a man named Stelios Andreas Anatselopoulos, who was jailed for six years in 2014 after taking four children hostage, punching two of them and sexually assaulting a girl.

The incident led some activists to split from Pacha House. Maria Clarke, an online paedophile hunter who was briefly associated with the organisation, said she left after learning that Anatselopoulos attended the meeting. “How can you let a man convicted of child sex abuse in?” she said.

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In my meeting with Fownes, she brought up the Anatselopoulos incident without my prompting. She insisted she was unaware of his conviction, and that while children and parents do come to Pacha House, none were present when he visited. “I was absolutely shocked that I had someone on our premises who had a sexual assault conviction on a girl,” she said. “I was furious.”

However, during the afternoon I spent with Fownes last month, there was a knock at the door, and she excused herself from the library to answer it. When she returned, she explained: “That was a guy who comes in. I know he has a previous conviction for sexual assault, which was a few years ago, but as long as there’s no children here I let him in.” Fownes continued: “His personality has changed such a lot,” she said. “I explained to him from the beginning, if there are children here you can’t be here, I’ll have to refuse you entry, but Tuesdays and Fridays you can eat here with us.”

Fownes, without a hint of self-awareness, told me: “When you label someone as a paedophile, you’re actually putting them at risk of harm.” If only the same courtesy could be applied when it comes to accusing innocent people of satanic abuse.

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When I put this Birmingham City Council, it responded that it expects Pacha House to abide by its safeguarding rules. “The city council takes its duties under the no-platform policy seriously,” said a spokesperson, “and if presented with evidence that this policy is being breached we would look to take appropriate steps, depending on the circumstances.”

Fownes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. And I’m still uncertain what drives her. But the researcher Karen Douglas says people can turn to conspiracy theories when they feel anxious, uncertain and powerless, typically when the obstacles of life upset their equilibrium. I’ve interviewed plenty of hardcore conspiracy theorists who mention their unhappy stints in the army, their alcoholism, and their lost custody battles.

Contrasted with this, believing in SRA offers a reassuringly simple view: shadowy satanic elites are secretly responsible for the wickedness of this world. Perhaps fighting back, even if that just means standing on a north London pavement to yell at people, is one way to feel powerful. As Morag told me at the protest: “I’ve always been a rebel.” Turning to her partner Lee, she added: “We’re freedom fighters, just the two of us together.”

Surely moral progress has stamped out such vicious, childish status games? Alas, no. “Contagion” provides the best explanation for why Italy’s new Prime Minister, a figure generally described by her own country’s press as “centre-Right”, has been widely described as “far-Right”. Never mind reporting accuracy, the aim is disciplinary: entire moral territories can be designated as low-status or unclean. If you touch them, you will incur Contagion.

The same dynamic also underpinned a rash of disputes last week, over the moral hygiene status of women who assert that humans can’t change sex. Such women were denied a stall at the Labour Party conference, prompting a furious salvo on Monday from Labour-supporting writer Joan Smith. Elsewhere, Arianne Shahvisi imputed recently in the London Review of Books that even otherwise impeccable Left-wingers are “in league with the far-Right” if they cling to the notion that humans are born either male or female.

And Shahvisi’s response to a letter protesting this framing recounts how a teacher shamed her by comparing her views to those of Margaret Thatcher. Shahvisi approvingly describes internalising the following lesson in political groupthink: “if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view”.

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Contagion, you see, is a radically movable feast. There is no person, principle or — as evidenced by the expulsion of basic biology from acceptable Labour Party discourse — objective fact that can’t be rendered beyond the pale, if someone with enough social clout makes it the butt of a Contagion game. And those (such as, by her own account, Arianne Shahvisi) who are both socially attuned and morally ductile will fall uncomplainingly into line.

This poses a conundrum for those women who find themselves unable to follow Shahvisi across the line of principle-free tribalism into fairy-tales about the total malleability of our sexed bodies. These “gender critical” feminists are often otherwise fiercely, passionately Left-wing — or at least were, until the Contagion game abruptly re-designated them as fash.

Some bridle at having been thus infected, and seek to clear their own names — not least by launching drives to expel any taint of “the far-Right” from among their own ranks. The latest such skirmish, in a long-running battle, concerns a recent Brighton rally for women concerned about trans activism, organised by “Posie Parker”. Real name Kellie-Jay Keen, Posie is a punchy and highly recognisable activist, whose approach to campaigning against gender ideology has had considerable viral impact. The difficulty arises in her — for some — inexcusable willingness to share airtime with the Right.

But despite all the furious debate Posie Parker’s approach has occasioned over the years, efforts to insulate gender-critical activism from accusations of being anti-progressive may be futile. For a step back from the accusation and counter-accusation reveals that for those who still know biology exists, the enemy really is progress.

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Of course when adults play Contagion, its impact goes far beyond classroom jockeying for status at the expense of a low-status scapegoat. Real, material decisions, alliances and consequences arise depending on who is considered part of the in-group, and who can be scapegoated and excluded. In terms of how it’s played by the now-dominant progressive class that controls access to so many of those resources, defending yourself from contagion means accepting the implicit premise that there exists a substantive positive set of values, towards which Progress is, well, progressing. Aligning yourself with these purported positive values makes you one of the Good People.

What, then, does this look like where women are concerned? The women’s movement is of course rich and fractious, but when we look at the big-picture changes generally trotted out as the story of feminist progress — from gaining the vote, through leaving domesticity for the workplace to controlling fertility — it’s difficult to infer any governing theme except “freedom”.

Is this just a story about values, though? You can trace much the same narrative in terms of economic transitions and technological advances: changing work patterns, labour-saving devices and — crucially — control over reproduction. All of these, too, constitute “progress”, more convincingly from some perspectives than others: on closer inspection, most of the tech-driven changes that powered women’s march toward freedom are not unambiguously beneficial, but rather produce their own winners and losers. And often, the only party for whom “more freedom” has no trade-offs turns out to be commerce: the sexual revolution, for example, delivered pros and cons for both sexes, but only benefits for the sex industry.

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“Progress”, then, is the name we give a replacement of natural limits by technological control, to the benefit chiefly of commerce. And for some time now it’s been plausible (at least for a bourgeois woman in the developed world) to act as though feminism, freedom and technology are in perpetual lockstep, as facets of “progress”. But cracks are beginning to appear.

For having freed women from a number of biophysical limits, science has rolled right on. Now, following the same broad trajectory of freedom and progress, many believe we should apply the same liberatory logic to all sexed limits. And why, indeed, should only women have the right to tinker with our endocrine systems, and only in the context of fertility? If we have the technological means, and you accept the basic premises that we’re entitled to free ourselves from sexed physiology and that liberation is generally good, why not extend radical bodily autonomy to everyone, so we can remodel ourselves as we see fit?

But it’s increasingly obvious to anyone who is paying attention that this tech transformation will — just like previous ostensibly feminist tech transformations — also come with winners and losers. And feminists were the first to notice, not least because a great many of those casualties are female, while many beneficiaries are male. The difficulty, for feminists, lies in challenging any of this without taking aim at the wider hydra of technology and progress — the very hydra that gifted us feminism in the first place. For today that hydra has an iron grip on the terms of the progressive Contagion game.

And if you look, after all, at the growing list of things recently dubbed “far-Right”, most of them are in fact assertions that we should place some limits on the forward march of commerce and technology. When you adopt the “far-Right” argument that national identity should be protected against globalisation, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can — or should — remodel the polity in the interests of growth. When you oppose natural food and health to Big Ag and the vaccine-industrial complex (two discourses which over my lifetime have migrated from Left to “far-Right”), you’re saying there are limits to how far the junk food and pharma industries should meddle in our food chains or bodies. And when you defend sex dimorphism, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can allow the biotech industry to offer (for-profit, highly lucrative) self-customisation options for our meat avatars, and to extend those options even to our kids.

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In this context, feminists find themselves in an awkward position. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re revolted by actual racism, or hardline misogyny, or radical hatred of Islam, or any of the other (actually pretty fringe) opinions held by tattooed thugs in big boots. Most people dubbed with the “far-Right” contagion don’t, in fact, hold those views. But if you’re even vestigially uncomfortable with the ongoing, tech-powered liquefaction of everything, in the name of commerce — if you show the slightest sign of questioning its self-evident moral goodness — then you’re already “aligned with the far-Right”. It’s just a question of degree.

The function of the great game of Progressive Contagion is making every possible counter-argument to the onward march of tech-enabled commerce intolerably low-status and radioactive. As such, the whole argument about whether or not gender-critical feminists are “aligned with the far-Right” is happening within a space that is already defined, by Progressive Contagion, as “the far-Right”.

No wonder, then, that Giorgia Meloni has been tarred with this brush, even if her substantive politics will, as several commentators have suggested, turn out to be quite moderate. For Meloni has positioned herself explicitly against the tech-powered liquefaction of everything in the name of commerce, thundering in her acceptance speech that “everything that defines us” — a list that for her includes faith, nationality, sex and motherhood — is now “an enemy” to “those who would like us to be perfect consumer slaves”. On a smaller scale, too, we might argue that Posie Parker’s principal crime has been refusing to disavow the possibility that there may be other limits to the liquefaction of everything, alongside sex dimorphism.

It’s of course true that people of good faith can disagree about what those other limits may be. But the other side will just call it nitpicking. No amount of protesting that you’re revolted by actual racists and the like affords any defence against this. It doesn’t matter how hygienically anyone sticks to defending sex and motherhood against Progress, or how strictly those who stray outside this narrow territory are disciplined. It’s all resistance to the juggernaut — and that, by the ever-moving goalposts of Progressive Contagion, is already “far-Right”. Those still trying to avoid infection by rushing to expel what they perceive as the real “far-Right” are, in practice, serving only to enforce a frame of reference controlled by their political enemies — and that will, in due course, be used against them.

There is no longer anywhere to stand that’s safe from Contagion. Nowhere, that is, except in accepting (like the world’s Shahvisis) that your principles, your body, and even your basic grasp of reality may be subject to dissolution and remodelling at a moment’s notice, in the name of Progress.

The messaging had a familiar ring to it: politicians, Åkesson reiterated, had for too long been allowed to make Sweden “uglier, poorer and more dangerous”. It was time to take the power back. “Sweden will be good again,” was the title of the video. Not quite “make Sweden great again”, but close enough.

While Britain, the US and most of Europe have seen populist parties, populist candidates and populist party factions move into power, Sweden remains the outlier. Despite steadily growing support for the Sweden Democrats, the party has effectively been powerless since it won its first seats in parliament 12 years ago.

At first, the other parties simply shut them out. In 2014, six parties even made an elaborate agreement to guarantee the largest bloc passed its budgets — effectively voiding the far-Right’s mandates. The agreement fell apart less than a year afterward, which sparked a debate within the conservative coalition whether to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats or not.

It might sound odd that the conservative and centre-Right parties in Sweden have hesitated for so long. In neighbouring Denmark, the Conservative-Liberal coalition government took parliamentary support from the Danish People’s Party as far back as 2001. But the Sweden Democrats are an odd shrub in the Scandinavian Right-wing flora. While its far-Right sister parties in Denmark and Norway started out as fairly standard Right-wing populists, the Sweden Democrats has roots in racist and neo-Nazi organisations.

The Swedish Democrats, as Anders Ygeman, now a government minister for the Social Democrats, once told a Danish newspaper, “was founded by people who celebrated the German occupation of Denmark and not the Danish liberation”. This is perhaps a bit pointed, but the Sweden Democrats’ troublesome history is a fact that no one questions: the party’s own white paper about its history, released just a couple of months ago, basically confirmed that it was founded by people from different racist groups.

It has been a difficult couple of years for the conservative and liberal bloc. Despite a solid, non-socialist majority in parliament, the Social Democrats have held on to power because no consensus has emerged as to how to handle the Sweden Democrats. In the last election four years ago, the Sweden Democrats gained 17.5% of the vote, making it largely impossible for conservatives and liberals to form a government without their support. After months of negotiation, the Centre Party in the end jumped fences and decided to support the Social Democratic prime minister.

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Now, the other three parties in the former centre-right coalition — the Moderate Party, the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats — have decided to take the Faustian Bargain and ally themselves with the far Right. Will centre-Right voters follow suit? Ever since the Moderate Party began its reluctant courtship with the far-Right, it has siphoned off voters. Since the election of 2014, the last election in which they had a clear line against the Sweden Democrats, they have lost more than a fifth of its support — which is now down to 18% in the most recent polls.

In order to win, they need some of those voters to come home again. Or at least choose the Christian Democrats or the Liberals. The polls suggest the race is too close to call. In any other country, this would be a pretty good environment for the Right-wing bloc to take power. Law and order issues are higher on the agenda than they have ever been in a Swedish election, inflation is running rampant, and households fear what their electrical bills will look like this winter.

The rise in crime, in particular, is a weak spot for the governing Social Democrats. So far in 2022, the Swedish police have registered 47 killings and 273 shootings, putting this year on track to be the deadliest in a series of violent years. Reports of innocent passers-by getting killed or injured also strike a new kind of fear in people. On August 19, less than month before the election, a man was killed and a woman was seriously injured by a teenage shooter at a shopping mall outside of Malmö.

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But for many liberal, or even conservative, voters, it is difficult to opt for the Moderate Party or the Liberal Party this year, since a win will inevitably lead to a big influence — and maybe even government posts — for the Sweden Democrats. The far-Right party will likely become the biggest part of the new Right-wing bloc and have insisted that they won’t settle for providing passive support, although they don’t appear to seek the prime ministerial post.

At the same time, however, many Swedes are aligned with the Sweden Democrats on some of their policy proposals. One telling data point is that about a third of all voters say the party have the best migration policy. Many voters also associate the rise in gang-related shootings to the steep rise in migration over the last decade.

But there is more to its package than just a curb on migration. Prominent Sweden Democrats’ MPs have in the last couple of years put forward a host of illiberal proposals, such as control over the Swedish bar association, a replacement of all police chiefs in the country, more government control over the media and so on. In a column for the liberal weekly Expressen, the political editor Anna Dahlberg calls it an “incredibly difficult” choice for voters to make, but still comes to the conclusion that “good liberals” can vote for the Right on Sunday. Other famous liberals — such as the former Liberal Party leader Bengt Westerberg — have come to the opposite conclusion. Last week, he announced that he won’t vote for his old party, citing its decision to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats.

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Perhaps most peculiar are the many issues that are completely absent from the election. Neither the country’s Nato accession nor its pandemic strategy are on the agenda. Instead, it all seems to boil down to whether to let the far-Right in or not. The Social Democrats appear to have come to the same conclusion. One of their key messages is what a gamble it is to let the Sweden Democrats near power. As polls now show the Sweden Democrats becoming the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats have asked for one-on-one debates with Åkesson, instead of with the Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson, to hammer home their message. The Green party leader went one step further in a radio debate recently, calling Åkesson a “Nazi”.

Will this be enough? Certainly, Swedes appear to genuinely fear the rise in crime, and they don’t trust the current government — with its pro-migration coalition parties — to deal with it. On Sunday night, we will know which fear is stronger: the fear of crime or the fear of the far-Right.

The platoon commander, “Pedro” — soldiers here all use noms de guerre, a tradition drawn from Ukraine’s long history of resistance to foreign occupation — turns to me, nodding at the treeline at the edge of the field. “That’s it,” he says. “This is the closest road I can take. The Russians are behind those trees.”

We park, reversing the SUV under an oak tree to keep it hidden from Russian drones, and hurry, crouching through the long grass, to the mortar section. The steppe landscape of the Donbas region is rippled with folds and gullies; the copses of tall oaks that have taken root in these shallow nooks provide perfect cover for guerrilla war, an archipelago in the endless sea of grass and ripening wheat. The mortar team have been concealed here for two days, in a tiny salient almost fully encircled by the Russian advance, observing enemy positions with their quadcopter and getting ready to strike.

Pedro points at a white house about a kilometre away at the edge of the Russian-held town of Svitlodarsk. It’s the Russian base. “Our Intelligence found a location with Russian mortar positions and an ammunition dump, so now the plan is to go, prepare the mortar, fire and leave immediately,” Pedro had told me as we were leaving. “With a quadcopter you can find a position to hit in 20 minutes — but once we fire, it will only take the Russians a couple of minutes to find our position and return fire.”

It is strangely tranquil, lying in the long  grass fragrant with wild herbs, listening to the cuckoos and the rustle of the oak leaves — until the radios crackle and the mortar squad shout out their orders. Now. In just a few minutes of furious activity, the 120mm mortar belches out a dozen rounds in bursts of flame, as the quadcopter operator sits cross-legged in the grass, ordering them to adjust their elevation, then grins at his tablet screen as the rounds land directly on the Russian position.

Then it’s time to go: we race to the SUV and drive off at high speed, bouncing over bumpy dirt tracks until we reach the village road, as the retaliatory Russian artillery rounds land harmlessly on the road behind us. Pedro lights a cigarette, watching the road anxiously until the mortar squad join us in their pick-up truck.

Today was a good day for Pedro. He’s brought all his men back unharmed from another mission, and the target was destroyed. The following day, Pedro, who has an ongoing social media feud with mercenaries from the far-Right Russian Wagner Group on the other side of the frontline, in which they threaten to kill each other, would show drone footage of the Russian soldiers in their trenches getting obliterated by his mortar fire on his phone, overlaid with a death metal soundtrack and cry-laughter emojis. Welcome to war in 2022.

I spent a week in rural Donbas with Pedro’s platoon, fighters from the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps or DUK, the militia of the nationalist Right Sector party, on their first mission since they were formally absorbed into the Ukrainian army as a special forces unit just a couple of weeks earlier. Formed during the Maidan revolution, in which they played a prominent role fighting the police and unseating Ukraine’s then pro-Russian government, Right Sector has since played a starring role in Russian propaganda as evidence of Ukraine’s takeover by Right-wing radicals.

It’s nonsense, Volodymyr Demchenko told me, back at their rear base in central Ukraine. Known as “Fransuz” or “Frenchman” (because his great-grandfather served in the French army after World War One), Demchenko is a 33-year-old documentary filmmaker from Kyiv with a hipster haircut and an engaging manner, who’s also become something of a Twitter celebrity since detaining the journalist John Sweeney for breaking curfew in Kyiv earlier in the war.

“Right Sector is a Christian, conservative organisation. Okay? Done,” he told me in his office cluttered with piles of books — Aristotle, Kafka, Umberto Eco — a postcard of Ernst Jünger propped on his bookcase next to the cafetiere and scent diffuser. “Like, I’m a liberal. I support LGBT, I have, like, all the time conversations about that here with the guys, and you know what, here I have freedom of speech to say that.”

Fransuz insisted that far-Right political movements were stronger in Western Europe than in Ukraine, citing the strong showing of those parties in the West compared to their marginality here. Yet Western journalists fixate on the far-Right symbols occasionally worn by Right Sector fighters, he told me with a weary sigh, “but I don’t think it’s a very interesting story, to be honest. They just want to be badass, it’s fucking cosplay, man. But if you’re talking person to person and try to find this ideology in him you wouldn’t. But here we don’t tell you what you can wear or what you can’t wear, because it’s bad for morale, every man can explain these things for himself.”

Formed as a coalition of Right-wing organisations during the Maidan Revolution, Right Sector suffered from an internal split when Andriy Biletskiy broke away to found the more radical Azov movement in spring 2014, which has since surpassed Right Sector in numbers and media attention — both good and bad. Part of the rift between them was Right Sector’s clampdown on far-Right symbolism, an aesthetic Azov leant heavily into until its recent rebranding.

Neither fascist nor National Socialist, despite the lurid reputation it has been given in Russian media, Right Sector instead draws a line of descent from both Ukraine’s early 20th century OUN nationalist movement for independence from the Soviet Union (whose red and black flag, for the rich Ukrainian soil and the blood shed for it, it has adopted) and from the anarchic, freewheeling Cossack war bands of Early Modern Ukraine. At times, the government has found the group a little too anarchic for comfort: in 2015, Ukraine’s previous president Petro Poroshenko futilely ordered them to disarm after a shootout with police in the western city of Mukachevo.

While foreign journalistic depictions of the group tend to flicker inconsistently between “Right-wing” and “far-Right,” Right Sector has always rejected the latter label, while Ukrainian academic specialists on Right-wing politics have stressed that the group’s electoral programme “does not contain any specifically ultra-Right or ultra-nationalistic ideas” and instead “seems to reflect a rather liberal worldview”. The group’s mission statement on its website asserts that its goal is “Ukraine’s liberation from both external — Kremlin’s — and internal occupation of clan-oligarchic groups, as well as struggle against the imposition of extreme-liberal, cultural-Marxist ideas upon the Ukrainian society.”

In a recent statement aimed at an English-language audience, the party’s leader Andriy Tarasenko insisted that Right Sector “is a nationalist formation; we unequivocally stand against all the fascist or Nazi things that Putin attributes to us. This is purely Russian propaganda, and we have nothing to do with such ideological positions.” Characteristically, the statement also notes that “We consider president Putin a liar and in general our people call him a ‘dickhead.’”

Three months and much fighting into his DUK career, Fransuz was a constant presence in the group’s rear base. One day I saw him staggering along beneath boxes of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet receivers, which have won great publicity for their use by Ukrainian forces. These must be useful at the front, I suggested. He looked at me like I was an idiot. “This? No way man, if we took them to the front, as soon as we turned them on the Russians would send a missile right on top of us, as soon as they see all this data going up into the sky.” He shook his head and carried on with his endless bustling around.

Fransuz joined DUK at the beginning of the war, taking part in the defence of Kyiv, and then the heavy fighting in Barvinkove, where they destroyed dozens of Russian tanks in close fighting, and lost their battalion commander and 13 men to Russian shelling. In Barvinkove alone, they destroyed 64 Russian armoured vehicles in their two-month deployment. “We had a position on the road and they kept sending tanks, and we kept destroying them, every day — it was like a cemetery for tanks”, laughed Hasid, the group’s officer in charge of reconnaissance (he comes from the town of Uman, a pilgrimage site for Hasidic Jews, hence the name). “We saw one column, 600 vehicles. We let them keep coming, then we hit them from the front and kept hitting them from all directions and then we escaped in this car, driving over fields,” he said, pointing at a battered Skoda Octavia.

“Soviet tactics are just to use mass, lots of tanks and lots of artillery, infantry aren’t important in their doctrine,” Hasid added. “We instructed our new volunteers to use small groups in cars that are very mobile and can ambush huge columns — this technique will be in the handbooks now, I’m sure.” Have the Russians learned from their earlier mistakes? “No, No, No,” he replied. “Fear and panic. Even if the soldiers learned, their commanders still give them the same orders — and if they disobey, they shoot them.”

But in the Donbas, the Russians do seem to have learned from their mistakes: massing their troops together behind a devastating wall of artillery fire, the invaders are creeping forward every day, taking ground and eroding the Ukrainian army’s ability to fight. With the Ukrainians suffering up to 200 soldiers killed and 500 wounded each day, according to President Zelenskiyy, the next few weeks in the Donbas may decide the outcome of an increasingly brutal war.

“I was on the frontline from 2014, but now the situation is really crazy, fuck, lots of planes, artillery, everything,” “Veloshka”, the commander of DUK’s medical unit and wife of Right Sector’s leader Andriy Tarasenko, told me. A big woman with bleached blond hair and sleeve tattoos, Veloshka smokes and swears incessantly. “When you’re killed,” she told me, “I’ll be really upset, fuck, it will be an international scandal. Fuck, maybe I should just give you a puppy and send you away home,” she added, nodding at the litter of sleeping puppies on a nearby bed.

DUK’s two ambulances, named Hope and Pikachu, veterans of the Maidan revolution, are now serving with their crews on the Donbas frontline, painted dark green and hidden under trees in a secret location near Bakhmut. Soon I would join them, to meet and live with the DUK fighters on the frontline. Scrolling through Twitter in the meantime, watching Russian drone videos of Ukrainian positions being obliterated by accurate artillery fire, was not a reassuring experience.

The DUK battalion has deployed a company-sized formation to the Bakhmut frontline, divided into an HQ element and a number of small sections living in deserted cottages among the local Russian-speaking population. I was sent to live with 1 Section, a squad of artisanal craftsmen, farmers, writers and eccentrics, most from the West-Central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, who had joined up together at the start of the war. On my arrival in the courtyard of their cottage, I was seated down at their table under the trees and given a bowl of meaty borsch, by Kuts, a lean, heavily tattooed 48-year-old with a Cossack chub haircut and long drooping moustaches.

Kuts — the name refers to a type of benign devil in Ukrainian folk belief — is a jeweller and traditional swordsmith from Kharkiv. He showed me a medieval longsword on his Facebook page he was in the process of completing when the war began: “I didn’t get to finish it because of the katsabs (butchers),” he told me. Pulling out his self-forged, oak-handled combat knife from his assault vest, Kuts told me that the oak is a tree of great significance in Ukrainian folk culture, and that he saw his service in DUK as following the traditions of his ancestors. “Right Sector is like a modern Cossack Sich,” he told me. “Different people have gathered together from all walks of life in a time of need. We don’t care about gender, preferences, age. We learn a lot about our traditions, our ancestors, our family values, in order to not lose our connection to our Ukrainian culture, because those traditions are what make us Ukrainians. And now we have to fight for them.”

What is their political orientation, then, I asked? “Cossack Sich,” replied Kuts. “It’s a movement that doesn’t tolerate any political oligarchies, it stands only for the interests of the nation,” added “Bayonet,” a shy, humorous middle-aged man with a long reddish beard. “We are the Cossacks who will give our lives for Ukraine, without question, or we’ll take the enemy’s life. The Russians have a 10 to 1 advantage in this offensive, but every one of us can take out 100 Russians.” And what if Russia wins the war? “Impossible! No, No, Never!” replied Kuts in English, “Our motto is Ukraine or death, so they would have to kill us all.”

“The Russians will never be able to win a war here without using mercenaries,” he added. “They want to eradicate us because they fear us. Ukraine was always the best nation at fighting, and now we have confirmed that we Ukrainians are warriors at heart, and not any of this other bullshit.” Will postwar Ukraine be different, I asked. “Yes!” said Kuts, “We must kill the internal enemies, the fucking separatists. We are not the ones that just talk, and sit at home, the ones that have a ‘practical solution.’ We always look our enemy straight in the eyes, even the dead ones.”

Like other nationalist battalions, Right Sector’s deployment in the long-running Donbas conflict has long been controversial: they were accused of human rights abuses against suspected separatists by Amnesty International in the war’s 2014 opening months, a period characterised by the kind of intimate brutalities typifying civil wars. It is difficult to gauge how they are viewed by locals in the Donbas. “When I heard Right Sector were going to liberate my village, I was like ‘Uh, we’re all going to die,” one former Donbas resident, Sasha, told me, laughing at the memory: now she fights as a member of the group.

But for now, the Ukrainian government has embraced Right Sector. Previously used as a deniable proxy to seize strategically important positions from the separatist forces during the long years of frozen conflict in the Donbas, it has been formally incorporated in the Ukrainian army as a special forces unit, tasked with harassing the advancing Russians. It’s a mixed relationship, DUK fighters told me, in which the disadvantage of increased bureaucracy is outweighed by the sudden flow of new weapons donated by Western countries. I sat at the table one day as the group prepared a shopping list of new equipment — sniper scopes, night vision goggles, thermal weapons sights — to obtain from the government following a request from Pedro.

“It’s OK now we’re in the army,” 22-year-old Anna, or “Athena” told me in flawless English, with a remarkably posh accent acquired from watching Dr Who and Torchwood. “It’s a way of getting our weapons and doing our job more effectively, so it’s worth the extra regulations. The regular infantry have in some ways a more difficult job. We go on special missions and the rest of the time are just chilling, but they spend all their time in foxholes under constant shelling. It’s a very difficult job.”

The group is recruiting heavily, with its rear base in Central Ukraine crammed with new recruits training for combat beneath the tall trees, and learning how to use the new heavy machine guns donated by the West. Most seem apolitical: when asked why he joined DUK, one recruit, the local sales manager for a large German company, told me it was simply because he didn’t want his wife to be raped and murdered by Russian soldiers, “like in Bucha”.

Most have joined DUK for the chance to see combat as soon as possible, without the petty regulations of regular army life. Unlike the regular army, DUK has an anarchic, democratic atmosphere in which soldiers discuss orders with their commanders and feel free to add their own suggestions. “No-one here asks if you’re a nationalist, or an anarchist,” Athena told me. Like Fransuz and most DUK fighters I spoke to, she’s not a member of the Right Sector party. “We’re all just here to do our job.”

Brought up in a Russian-speaking Catholic family in Vinnytsia, the daughter of a surgeon, Athena was a poet and English translator before the war, with a sideline writing essays for American college students. She first volunteered for frontline service at age 18, straight from university. With her black hair cut in a neat bob, she was a distinctive presence whenever she returned from special missions in her baggy, second-hand British uniform, shrugging off her heavy body armour and ammunition pouches, and leaning her heavily-customised assault rifle against the table as she lit up a cigarette.

“I’m not a feminist,” she told me. “I don’t like modern feminism, they march around but don’t have solutions for anything.” A child prodigy, she was a contestant on the Russian version of Britain’s Brainiest Kid aged 11, and recently published a letter to the host, a Putin supporter, condemning the Russian invasion. In a perfect illustration of the complexities of the Ukraine war, Athena’s Russian husband, a political dissident, is currently fighting as a member of the Ukrainian army, while her uncle was a senior officer in the Russian army.

“Me and my husband would quarrel with these sweet little grannies who’d call us butchers and fascists at Victory Day parades in Kyiv, when they’d be shouting ‘Donbas, we are with you!’” she told me. “And we were war veterans — I remember one little granny calling us butchers and baby killers,” she tutted, dragging on her cigarette.

But the current war in the Donbas is not going well for Ukraine. Concentrating its resources in one front, the Russian army is now driving through Ukrainian lines like a slow, unstoppable bulldozer. In his secret cottage headquarters elsewhere in the village, I met the company commander “Tuman” (“Fog”), a map of the ever-encircling frontline spread out across the coffee table in front of him. A 29-year-old veteran of the French Foreign Legion, who had fought in Mali, Tuman had flown back to Ukraine from his job selling cars in Provence just before the war broke out, leaving his eight-month pregnant wife at home.

“It’s like the first part of World War I here,” he told me, “when massive artillery started to appear but there were still no trenches. During my service abroad in the Legion I’ve never seen such intensity of fire. But taking into account the intensity of fighting we cannot just wait around. We are taking part here in active defence, we are doing counter-artillery and counter-sabotage work. All we can do is slow down the Russian advance.”

The disparity of materiel between the opposing forces was total, Tuman told me. “Russia uses almost all the resources they have, strategic aviation and submarines. It’s a force created for a war against Nato and now they use it all against us.” But he had no option but to fight, Tuman told me. A member of Right Sector since the very beginning, in the Maidan revolution, he told me: “I fight for freedom. My country is just a bit older than I am, but Ukraine is ready and I’m ready. Now we have the majesty of fighting, even though it sounds pathetic. We are not helpless. We can fight!”

Tuman’s deputy in holding back the Russian onslaught is his platoon commander Pedro, a giant of a man, covered in tattoos of ancient Ukrainian warriors and kings, the solar wheel of Slavic paganism on his chest, and a rosary around his neck — he’s a practicing Catholic from the Western city of Ivano-Frankivsk. Fighting alongside his younger brother “Bob”, Pedro plans and leads the missions into no-man’s land to take some of the pressure off the regular troops struggling to hold the line.

I joined Pedro’s mortar team on another mission, jostled in the back of his SUV as the fighters in the front nodded along to heavy metal on Ukraine army radio, swerving at top speed to avoid the pheasants scuttling along the country lanes, the driver scrolling through his mobile phone for the latest checkpoint password. The Russians had spotted the mortar position, I was told, and now was the last chance to hit them from the location before it was abandoned. Hidden in the undergrowth, the mortar squad had laid out a dozen heavy mortar rounds ready to be fired: “Admin”, a young Tatar Muslim from Russian-annexed Crimea, and a chef before the war, showed me where he had scrawled “Crimea is Ukraine” on them in marker pen.

As the sun began to dip over the steppe, the squad fired the heavy rounds at the Russians in quick succession, as other fighters pointed at the sound of munitions buzzing dully through the air around us. “Is that ours?” one asked, to a shrug. The layout was confusing: the Russians were more or less everywhere around. The Russian return fire landed harmlessly in the fields a few hundred metres away, a couple of mortar shells exploding in scattershot puffs of grey dust. My driver, “Kolos”, pointed at the thick plumes of black smoke now rising from the white building on the edge of Svitlodarsk where the Russian target was based. “Good work,” he said.

But for DUK’s fighters, their mission in the Donbas is frustrating. Their semi-guerrilla war of harassing Russian troops is necessary, but not what they came here for: they want to be assaulting the Russians head on. Unlike the infantry forces holding the trench positions on the first lines, they are based in a location where they can reach any sector of the Bakhmut front within a short drive, but which is itself strangely free of Russian artillery fire.

Driving around Bakhmut’s outskirts, you see the forested hillsides wreathed in smoke, and the flashes of cluster munitions as the Russians rain death on the Ukrainian defenders. But DUK have been deployed in what they see as a frustratingly boring island of rural peace at the heart of the largest war in Europe since 1945. The roar of outgoing Ukrainian artillery is constant, and the sound of incoming Russian artillery, the different rocket launcher types discernable from the pitter-patter tempo of their munitions, punctuates the day as it falls on nearby Ukrainian lines. But only once, when an incoming Russian missile made the windows quake, and sent me out for an unnerved 3am cigarette under the stars with the sentries, did Russian artillery feel like more than an offstage menace. “It’s no good just sitting on your ass,” Petrik complained to me, “I need to work.”

But apart from their combat missions, the squad lived lives of quiet rural domesticity, cooking, cleaning and smoking endless cigarettes, watching the Netflix show Euphoria on their phones, and enjoying the cool breeze in the trees. For Ukraine’s industrial heartland, the Donbas is strangely bucolic. Sitting under the cherry trees, the long days spent with them were like something from a Russian novel: one day we went to the village banya together, where a crop-headed boy shoved chopped wood into the furnace as we sweated ourselves clean in the steam (“Now you are one of us,” Athena told me afterwards). They bought jugs of raw milk from local farmers, and accepted big enamel bowls of cherries from the villagers, brought as gifts. “You know what they say,” Athena told me, “our soil is so fertile because of the dead bodies of our enemies.” One day, I went mushroom-picking in a nearby forest with the medical unit, as bursts of machine gun fire echoed dimly through the trees from somewhere nearby. “Thor,” a chubby, kindly paramedic pointed angrily at a pile of trash local picnickers had left under a tree: “Fucking human pigs,” he said.

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With a tattoo of a Carpathian mountain scene on one arm, and the portrait of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko on the other, Thor had joined up with his pink-haired wife “Iren” who he was serving alongside in the medical unit: “I would feel sad if we were apart,” he told me. For Thor, love of Ukraine was not just for the abstractions of flags and borders, but for its mountains and forests, lush meadows and broad flowing rivers. He told me that he had joined Right Sector at the beginning of the war because he liked its ideology, and because of its reputation from Maidan: “My mama likes Right Sector,” he smiled. What was its ideology, I asked? “Killing Russian bitches!” interrupted “Lektor,” a 19-year-old medical student from Lviv. Thor waved him away smiling. “It is following the example of our ancestors, our grandfathers who created this country, for the independence of our nation, for living by our own rules. We don’t need foreign things from anyone, and we won’t take what is not ours from anyone. This is our war of independence.”

If there’s one thing that bothers DUK’s fighters most of all, it’s Right Sector’s reputation in Russian media — and often in the West — as extreme Right-wing radicals. Tuman was furious the day I arrived because a French journalist who had visited them at their rear base for a day described them as neo-Nazis, an epithet based on the self-consciously edgy frontline aesthetic of a minority of their fighters rather than their words or deeds. “Just write what you see,” he replied, when I asked him how he would describe their ideology, “We want truth, just as it is. We can allow ourselves the truth.” Some of their  tattoos give off a fearsome appearance, though one belied by the gentleness and hospitality of the soldiers themselves The rare Nazi-adjacent markings were written off as legacies of youthful dalliances with more hardline groups; pressed on their beliefs, all the fighters disavowed any extreme sentiment:

“We’re not fascists, you might sometimes see people wearing these symbols but it’s not serious, we do it to troll the Russians because they call us Nazis,” Athena insisted. “We understand in reality that the Nazis were as bad for Ukraine as the Communists were. Me and my husband have got anarchist friends, fascist friends, nationalist friends, lesbian friends — that’s just how it is here in Ukraine. Before you go to war, you’re into Right-wing politics, political violence and stuff, and then when you come back having seen it, you just want to drink cocktails in Kyiv and spend time with your family, enjoying life.”

“A lot of notions about Right Sector come from liberal left propaganda, but in reality we are just ordinary Ukrainians defending our country, our sovereignty, and our Christian values,” Lis or “Fox,” the section commander, a taciturn blond-bearded 27-year-old solicitor from Vinnytsia told me. A fan of death metal, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and the Warhammer 40k gaming universe, Lis is the local head of Right Sector in Vinnytsia. “2014 was a hybrid war, and this is a Great War,” he told me. “But it doesn’t matter which war, the Russians will die either way. You have to believe in the [40k] God-Emperor,” he grinned.

Lis joined DUK along with Athena, Petrik and “Boroda” or “Beard,” a dark-complexioned hipster with a top knot hair style and long black beard. A beekeeper and mead brewer, Boroda missed his hives. “It’s very relaxing working with the bees. When I’m with them I forget about everything else. When I lived in an apartment in Vinnytsia, I kept them on my balcony,” he smiled shyly.

“We call him “Moldova” because perhaps he is a gypsy,” laughed Athena, “but he’s a good gypsy.” “I’m a quarter gypsy,” Boroda replied. “All gypsies are cockroaches,” replied Kuts, spitting on the floor, as they all laughed, Boroda included. Like all soldiers, especially in elite units, the squad roasted each other mercilessly. The highlight of each evening was Petrik’s phone calls to a drunkard wannabe recruit, entirely unfit for service, in which he pretended to be a strict colonel imparting life advice as they all clustered around the blue glow of his mobile phone stifling their laughter. They’d play fight constantly, fencing with metal pipes, each taking turns to cook and clean, and talking about the first drink they’d have when they got home: alcohol is strictly forbidden on the front line, its place filled by luridly colored energy drinks. Petrik, who had just bought a 32-acre farm, was angry at the Russians for — along with everything else — preventing him from sowing his first cabbage crop.

Athena, too, is resigned to the conflict between her desire to fight and her dream of an ordinary middle-class European life. “Ukraine has always been a country at war. It’s just geographical determinism, I guess,” she told me. “It was weird going back to Kyiv the first time after the frontline, but I guess that’s what we’re fighting for. I want people to drink iced lattes, smoke weed, make love. After the war I want to live my best life, because I had lots of friends who can’t do that any more.”

But instead of living their best lives at home, they are billeted in the far east of Ukraine in a war now turning in Russia’s favour, among a local Russian-speaking population with whom relations are at times strained, many of whom would prefer to live under Russian rule. While some local farmers smile and wave, and bring gifts of food, others are distinctly unfriendly. “Some are friendly, some not, some are enemy. You won’t know until they kill you,” cautioned “Paul”, a softly-spoken middle-aged tour guide from Kyiv turned paramedic.

Walking through the long grass and undergrowth of the semi-abandoned village to the local shops with the heavily armed soldiers, to buy energy drinks and ice creams from a pointedly unfriendly shopkeeper, Athena highlighted the eerie atmosphere of dereliction. “It’s weird out here, it’s almost as bad as Detroit,” she said with wonder — Athena had spent a year in a Michigan high school as an exchange student. All from elsewhere in Ukraine, they were fighting among a local population whose loyalty to the nation was not guaranteed, and found it a strange and frustrating experience.

“In the majority of countries, there’s one national language, but the problem here is that people refuse to use the national language,” Kuts said. Kuts had grown up in a Russian-speaking family in the border city of Kharkiv, he told me, but now he disavowed the language in search of his Cossack roots. He had been a Young Pioneer under Communism, he told me in broken English: “Shit. Fuck Communism, Fuck Lenin.” “Hora”, a young commercial filmmaker, added that because he was from Western Ukraine, he had never been bothered by the language question, but seeing people here refusing to speak Ukrainian distressed him.

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“I want to make a big explosion in Moscow,” Bayonet, who had lived a few years working in Balham, suddenly announced in English. “Voronezh, Rostov and the Kuban [in southern Russia] are Ukrainian lands,” he continued. “We stand for historical justice, and we have to return these lands to the nation.” But Ukrainian forces are struggling simply to maintain their foothold in the Donbas. If and when the Right Sector fighters get their wish and tackle the Russians head on, many, perhaps most of them will die over the course of the summer. “We know that if the Russians capture us, as Right Sector, they will kill us straight away, on the spot,” Athena told me. “And for me, as a woman, well… you understand what would happen. That’s why we each carry a grenade with us.”

Returning to Dnipro, a haven of charming cafes and hipster cocktail bars a five-hour drive west from the front, the hotel bellboy who guided me through the blacked-out corridors to my room had a Right Sector screensaver on his phone; he beamed with pride when told we had just spent time with them. Catching up with a liberal Ukrainian friend, I told her I had just been at the front with Right Sector: “Yeeees!” she replied, “They are super cool!”

“Compared to other nationalist movements,” Lis told me, “Right Sector didn’t mess up like the others. Right Sector is the best nationalist movement in Ukraine.” But while vital in war, they know they are a marginal presence in peace. “The government will try to eradicate us after the war,” Petrik warned, “because they are afraid of us, because we stand for the truth. The politicians are afraid of revenge.” Tuman, too, sees the war as a watershed moment for Ukraine and for Right Sector, the greatest clarifying moment since independence in 1991. “This is like our postponed war for independence,” he told me. “Maybe we could have had war in 1991 and a peaceful 2022. But Ukraine didn’t introduce fierce wartime laws. The economy wasn’t transformed. After this war everything must change.”