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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You see, Mahmood isn’t just Home Secretary: as she was so keen to remind conference-goers, she’s a Labour home secretary. Twice during her speech she put special emphasis on her party’s name, lest anyone close their eyes and think they were listening to Theresa May or Suella Braverman. And, by the standards of a senior Labour politician, this was a surprising speech. 

The main focus was the Government’s changes to “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) rules for migrants, the qualifying period for which will now be increased from five years to 10. Earlier this month, Reform UK pledged, if elected, to scrap ILR entirely, forcing migrants to re-apply for visas every five years. The radicalism of this proposal allowed Keir Starmer — himself compared to Enoch Powell by portions of the British Left — to cast Farage as “racist” and “immoral”. During a separate fringe event last night, Mahmood referred to the policy as “much worse than racism”. Indeed, Reform’s announcement was in some ways a gift to the Home Secretary, who could outline a Labour policy which is certainly robust, but which nonetheless takes a more humane approach to questions of migration.

“Open, tolerant, generous”: that was the Home Secretary’s pitch for what the UK has to offer newcomers, and that is only possible if stronger policies are introduced for protecting the country’s borders. Thanks to Conservative policies, she said, “the scale and the speed of change as well as the nature of [immigration] has frayed trust and eroded public confidence”. She added: “We need a system that is fair to people who are already here. That means cracking down on illegal working that undercuts British workers.”

But this outwardly nationalist rhetoric had its limits. If she fails in her task to stop the boats and bring down net migration, Mahmood’s Liverpool address may come to be remembered as the “Little England” speech. Surveying the crowd, she expressed her “belief in a greater Britain, not a littler England”, a line which received the heartiest round of applause of the whole speech. That response from the audience — which also cheered Mahmood’s references to her second-generation immigrant background, as well her drive-by attacks on the open-borders maniacs of the last Tory ministry — showed an enthusiasm for immigration hawkishness only if it was tempered by liberal caveats. The crowd held its collective breath when she began to criticize migrant hotels, then exhaled when she described them as “that totem of the Tory legacy”. Clearly, Labour’s conference-goers may not be ready for full-fat Mahmood. 

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Labour insiders had tipped Mahmood for the Home Office for several months before her elevation was hastened by Angela Rayner’s resignation from the Deputy Leadership. That reshuffle, early in September, gave Starmer an opportunity to bring in a tough minister to bring down both legal and illegal immigration — a task which successive governments have made seem impossible. Mahmood doesn’t deal in half measures. Last summer, in the wake of rioting across Britain, the then-Justice Secretary warned that “thugs and hooligans” would “feel the full force of the law”. A fortnight ago, she made the very same threat to Unite the Kingdom protestors who used violence against police officers. Speaking yesterday, she vowed to go after shoplifters in a vaguely Bolshevik-sounding “winter of action”.  And after she oversaw, as justice secretary, the early release of thousands of prisoners, which might have led to the resignation of a less capable minister, she turned it into an opportunity to abolish shorter sentences.

In doing so, she aimed to strengthen Labour’s appeal to the voters who are deserting the party. British electoral politics, across the spectrum, typically functions as a quest to win over swing voters who are in parts economically Left-wing, socially conservative, patriotic, and tough on crime. In its pithiest form, this worldview is summarized as: “Hang the paedos, fund the NHS.” Many of the Britons occupying this sweet spot would once have voted for Labour, but are now drawn to a Reform UK message which is tailored towards the disaffected working class. Mahmood, who settled for merely chemically castrating sex offenders during her time in the Justice Department, is viewed by prominent figures within Labour as the party’s best answer to this conundrum. Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour and an influence on Government strategists including Morgan McSweeney, has labeled Mahmood as “clearly the leader of our part of the party”.

Conscious of her role in the fight against Reform, Mahmood argued in her Liverpool speech that “working people will turn away from us — the party that for over a hundred years has been their party — and seek solace in the false promises of Farage”. The Right-wingers in teal aren’t even the most serious threat to national stability, in her eyes: at the beginning of her address she highlighted that when 150,000 people marched through London earlier this month, “they did so under the banner of a convicted criminal and a former BNP member”. In other words, this wasn’t an attempt to “unite the Kingdom” but the desperate howl of the Little Englander. 

There was once a time, as recently as the mid-20th century, when to be a “Little Englander” was not a sign of xenophobic small-mindedness but instead of progressive opposition to the British Empire. That it is now a universal term of derision is reflective of how thoroughly more middle-class, metropolitan sections of the center-left have come to dominate the Labour Party. In her speech, Mahmood stated that hers is “a patriotism that speaks but does not feel the need to shout”. That may well be true of many Britons of all political stripes, but the fact remains that Labour is now well behind in the polls to an insurgent movement which is only too happy to shout its patriotism from the rafters. 

Rather than drawing distinctions between its national plan and the pitfalls of being a Little Englander, Starmer’s party should do more to appeal to this group, which is still resolutely insular. Mahmood said in Liverpool that “where a nation is fearful, it turns inwards. When we feel safe, we can look outwards” — yet her speech was still given with one eye firmly on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), whose range of views on immigration tends to be narrower than that of voters. In response, a Reform press release stated that “her speechwriters may have toughened her rhetoric, but the Home Secretary’s speech won’t wash with the public”.

There are other issues where the position of Labour MPs and members is out of kilter with the public as a whole. Though a small majority of Britons support remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), there are more who think that the treaty should be reformed (35%) than left as it is (28%). Yet while the Home Secretary has made positive noises about reforming the ECHR, Attorney General Richard Hermer has suggested that any such move would amount to a “political trick”. Wanting to leave it altogether is a positively fringe position among MPs, and this summer’s welfare bill debacle demonstrates how hard it can be to get legislation past intransigent members of the PLP. Be that as it may, drastic legal changes may be the only way to actually remove failed asylum seekers in considerable numbers, as the steady stream of disrupted deportations implies. 

For all her strong rhetoric, then, Mahmood still needs to convince a party which, since the time of Tony Blair, has wedded itself to the cult of human rights, not to mention a Prime Minister who has become an emblem of this legalistic mindset. And the Prime Minister is likely to remain in situ. Andy Burnham Autumn has now run its course after barely a week, with the Greater Manchester Mayor telling a fringe event in Liverpool on Monday that he would not be challenging Starmer for the leadership. With the internal threat defused, the Prime Minister can focus his efforts on the Faragist menace, while Mahmood can worry less about trying to win over the Left of the party.

Despite the best efforts of Rachel Reeves, Labour is still trusted more than Reform when it comes to managing the economy. Its immigration policy, however, is a tougher sell, not least if the Chancellor pushes through a migration deal for young EU workers to boost public finances. And though Mahmood used her speech to praise the “one in, one out” deal negotiated with France by her predecessor Yvette Cooper, doubts remain about whether this ratio will hold firm in practice — and whether, more fundamentally, Starmer and his parliamentary colleagues have any desire to undertake the legal reforms that would enable Mahmood to do her job effectively. 

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“The story of who we are is contested,” Mahmood claimed in Liverpool yesterday. She was talking about Britain, and about the new class of ethnonationalists who have seized the previously unifying language of patriotism and twisted it into something darker. Yet she could just as easily have been describing her own party. As Labour’s conference moves towards its conclusion, Starmer’s assertions that he has planted his flag and made clear what he stands for are hardly convincing. Mahmood has put forward a more persuasive assertion of her personal beliefs. But she won’t win over any Reform voters by accusing their leader of racism, while Left-wingers, many of whom are presently beguiled by Jeremy Corbyn or the Greens, may be put off by her self-presentation as “a patriot, proudly so”. This Gordian Knot applies to pretty much everything Starmer does on domestic policy, and his home secretary should prepare to have her hands tied just as often. 

This hints at an even broader problem for Labour. Whatever the glamour of the conference, the fact remains that neither Starmer nor his Cabinet is currently guiding British public opinion. The Overton window is moving markedly to the Right, evidenced by the very real prospect of a governing party at the end of this decade with a plan for mass deportations. Given all this, even relative radicals like Mahmood risk being stranded as the liberal consensus folds and a political revolution rages around them. But at least she’s trying. Jonathan Rutherford, a political adviser who is another influential Blue Labour figure, has — somewhat grandiosely — hailed Mahmood as “perhaps the most astute and able politician of her generation”. She isn’t, but she may still be Labour’s best hope of stopping the more likely holder of that title from capturing Number 10 in 2029. If, that is, her party can hold its nose.