Joe comes here most weeks, not to buy anything, only to talk. I follow him through the paddock, into the auction room, where a pair of young farmworkers doom-scroll in the corner. A door opens, and a Red Bull can skates across the floor. A police siren rises over the bleating sheep. The auctioneer enters: some 5,500 lambs will be sold today. I am at the furthest reaches of England, the Cumbrian-Scottish border, formerly known as “the Middleland”: the lawless marches which neither country could control for long.

Joe’s paranoia is rooted in history. On 15 February 2001, right here at Longtown Mart, under another Tupperware sky, he came to buy sheep at one of the busiest auctions of the year. Some 14,000 “yows” were sold that day, and he bought 12 of them. A few days later, at Cheale Meats abattoir in Essex, an animal bought at Longtown tested positive for PanAsia Type-O, a new strain of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) more viral and afflictive than most, killing some animals and laming many more. They say it first started over at Heddon-on-the-Wall, just outside of Newcastle, where old Bobby Waugh fed his pigs on illicit swill, made from a Chinese restaurant’s waste. But it jumped species at Longtown, meaning that, as the British countryside was harrowed into a hell of restricted movement and rotting corpses and burning pyres, it was north Cumbria that suffered most.

Around 70% of farms in north Cumbria had their livestock culled. Joe’s was one of them. Some farmers sold up, and some restarted; others just went mad. Nationally, there were only some 2,000 cases of the disease, and yet 0ver six million animals are estimated to have been culled (a Private Eye investigation suggested it’s much higher), costing the British economy some £8 billion. There was a human toll too. Over 60 farmers and three vets killed themselves in 2001 alone, and by the following year the suicide rate among rose to more than one a week, a figure that had been steadily increasing since mad cow disease struck in the Nineties.

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Altogether, it would arguably become the worst FMD epidemic in world history. But it should have been expected: foot-and-mouth has been around for hundreds of years, and is endemic across much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The last time it plagued Britain was in living memory, in 1967, which saw 2,364 outbreaks with some 430,000 animals slaughtered and burned. It was only a matter of time before it returned: limited customs checks made sure of that. “The single market meant we scrapped 500 years of port controls,” said Tim Land, a professor of food policy, in an interview at the time. Some would later claim that the wind blew it over the Channel.

It would always come; it should have been expected. Yet when it did, that dreary February, the trauma was made so much worse by the conduct of the Government. Its handling of the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic would prove the first in a long rollcall of 21st-century state failures that severed the connections between Westminster and its subjects, between the city and the countryside. “There was a big cultural disconnect between what people understood to be going on, who of course weren’t going to rural areas,” says Professor Maggie Mort, an academic at Lancaster University who studied Cumbria’s post-FMD recovery. “A lot of the trauma and isolation was to do with that feeling of not being understood.”

* * *

It was over a month before anyone came to check Joe’s sheep, by which time they were so lame they could hardly feed. A vet arrived, and then an execution squad was summoned. They would have used captive-bolt pistols, common in abattoirs but not for mass slaughter. They jam and overheat and lose power when used repeatedly, which means the killings can take hours, often more. Some animals were shot many times before dying. Over the course of a day, a farmer’s life could be reduced to a pile of corpses, either burned on a pyre or else left to rot in the farmyard before being crane-lifted into a còrtege of red “Snowie” trucks, which then proceeded to the mass burial site near Great Orton — all while making their owner, the eponymous Malcolm Snowie, the first “foot-and-mouth millionaire”.

As cruel as the killing was the time of year. “The hardest thing,” one farmer tells me, “was the sheep were lambin’ and they shot them as soon as they were born.” Peter Frost-Pennington, a vet, tells me that he remembers “standing at a farm, looking at all these dead sheep lined up and their lambs, and looking around at the countryside, completely devoid of animals, and I stood there, and just wept”.

Joe’s own sheep were burned on a pyre on the Roman wall. It would be days before the bonfire stopped, during which a thick, gray cloud spread uninterrupted across the landscape. The worst thing was the smell: the nidorous honk of bone and skin and fur and rancid fat, which permeated everything. All through Cumbria, the windows were shut, the washing lines brought in.

Back in Westminster, there wasn’t a plan. Each outbreak was a red pin stabbed into an outdated map; each farm and village a problem to be resolved more than a living place. Government-in-crisis always seeks solutions rather than understanding, and in postwar Britain that increasingly means delegating responsibility to “experts”. And so Nick Brown, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (Maff), made the precocious decision — later emulated by Matt Hancock — of outsourcing government to scientific advisors and computer models.

The latter, cooked up at Imperial College by Professors Neil Ferguson and Roy Anderson, miscalculated the disease’s spread. Fed on unreliable figures from Maff, it also didn’t account for the fact that FMD affects different animals differently. In practice, that meant Maff unnecessarily ramped up the “contiguous cull”, whereby all livestock on premises that neighbored an infected farm would be pre-emptively slaughtered — even though many at Pirbright, the national Animal Health Institute, considered this both cruel and incorrect.

The then-Prince Charles privately condemned it as “mindless” slaughter. And, far beyond the modeling, it was: there were stories of sheep being “accidentally” culled, such as Punderland Farm, Little Clifton, where an official’s misreading of a map led to the slaughter of a farm some 100 miles away from the target. In a sense, one can hardly blame them: some of Maff’s maps were so old that they didn’t even have the A66 marked on them. Even the disposal trucks got lost: one man at The Wellington pub in Great Orton remembered how they’d often stop outside the village school to ask for directions, uncovered carcasses in the back of the truck. Meanwhile, one small-talking executioner asked the farmer if the particular bull he was about to shoot was male or female. Elsewhere, in Monmouthshire, a gunman was filmed chasing sheep around a field and shooting at them. Naturally, the local council said that he wouldn’t be prosecuted; the farmer would instead — after all, he’d lost control of his animals.

Terrible as it was for culled farmers, at least they were compensated. Yet as those suicides of vets imply, FMD’s impact went far beyond the farmyard. Andy, 51, a tree surgeon, says business was so bad that year that “everything was just hemorrhaging money”. By 23 December, 2001, he had only £62 left in his bank account. To make matters worse, his brand-new Land Rover was stuck on a quarantined farm, irretrievable for the best part of a year. In hindsight, perhaps that was just as well: so neurotically was everything disinfected that, by the end of the year, most Land Rovers in Cumbria had been corroded by citric acid. 2001, at least, was one of the best years in living memory for rural car salesmen.

Back in London, Tony Blair kept insisting it was under control. Once he visited Cumbria on the 22 March, and saw the scale of the devastation, he called in the Army, and turned the airfield at RAF Great Orton into a “killing field” and mass grave: within only a week, some 20 trenches, four meters deep and 150 meters long, were hewn into the landscape. The General Election was delayed by a month, the first time since the Second World War, shortly after which Nick Brown’s Maff was replaced by Margaret Beckett’s Defra (“Destroy Every Fucking Rural Activity,” as one farmer quipped). Things were better organized now, but it was all too late: such ineptitude combined with bureaucratic slaughter had made a lasting impression. “You don’t give a shit about the North,” one protester shouted at Blair, as the prime minister slipped out of his Jag in Carlisle town center.

That was how most people felt back then; it still is. And no wonder. Joe’s flock hadn’t just been his livelihood, but his father’s too. Flocks are built up over generations; a living heritage destroyed in a day. The day the farm was culled, his mother slipped and broke her hip. She never recovered. Neither did he. Not long after, the next-door farmer was found hanging from a ceiling beam. “It was a bad year, a bad time,” Joe says. “Farm’s a hell of a mess.” Has been ever since. But he found salvation of a sort in his belief that the hill under which his cattle were burned was something special that the Council wanted to take away from him. He wrote three letters to the Queen, and one to Barack Obama. Neither replied. “I’d rather get in touch with them than the police,” he tells me.

And if Joe became especially paranoid, it was more a matter of degree. Such was the extent of the cockup that it fed conspiratorial thinking. Some blamed the EU, long-suspected of wanting to destock the countryside; others Blair’s attempt to neuter the Countryside Alliance by refurbishing rural England as a holiday destination. Someone even told The Sunday Times that FMD was a covert operation by Saddam Hussein. Even now, the farmers I speak to at Longtown tend at first to respond to my questions with an attribution of blame: three mention the “EU” and “destocking” but most blame either Blair’s indifference or his active resentment of the countryside.

To that extent, then, something like inheritance tax is just the latest humiliation in a long, long line. One man I speak to at the livestock mart curtly informs me that he won’t tell me anything, except that FMD was linked to 9/11, but then he keeps on speaking: about the migrant hotels in Carlisle, Peter Mandelson and “the Epstein stuff”, and the “tarts” and “dogs” and “crooks” in London. He visited London once, and was repulsed: as he recounts it, his handlebar mustache, half-concealed by distended cheeks, quivers in disgust.

Amid all this swirling resentment at urban Britain, even Nigel Farage is tainted. For all his pint-swilling Barbourism, Reform’s is a taut coalition of Kentish colonels and the Left Behind, of Middle England and the post-industrial white working classes, in which there’s little space for an organic political expression of rural Britain. Just 50 miles away, on the coast, is the home of 2019’s median voter: the Workington Man, who the political system has been scrambling to appease for much of the last decade. He’s not appeased yet, but Westminster continues, in its hamfisted way, to try to understand him — they need his vote. Given that only 1% of Britain’s workforce is in agriculture, no one needs to court the farmers. So if the last YouGov seat-by-seat polling has Reform winning every seat but one in Cumbria at the next General Election, it’s equally clear that many here crave something more attuned to their distinct and fragile culture.

One predictably popular option is Jeremy Clarkson, but really he feels more like a vessel for an inchoate kind of rural radicalism. “What we need is a new Cromwell, to walk into Parliament, and lop their heads off and fling them outside,” says Howard, a 68-year-old sprawled at the bar of the String of Horses at Brampton. Dressed in an undone, white-quarter-zip jumper, he’s on his fourth Snakebite and chaser of the night. Then he stands, his barstool scraping the stone floor. “Let it be me,” he cries, and mimics the executioner’s blow. Soon, Howard starts crying about his dead Labrador, and the bartender brings him a plate of chips.

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If there is room for such a Cromwellian figure in modern British politics, it’s likely Rupert Lowe. In his Restore Britain campaign video, released last weekend, he addresses his audience “from the farm… because places like this represent what proper Britain is about”. Though in Gloucestershire, his countryside is far from the dappled leafiness of the political countryside. With its skies drab and weather half-cold, and its common-sense inhabitants weaned on an elemental conservatism, Lowe’s England is epically different from the Cotswolds cliché.

Of course, how these credentials will hold up under the advice of metropolitan ideologues remains murky. That feels fitting. “Long after the last pyre has stopped burning,” wrote Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland at the height of the slaughter, “foot and mouth will stand as an indictment of British public life — and of the way we govern ourselves.” Yet who remembers FMD now? Outside of the Middleland, and the far-off places like it, almost no one. The only real memorial to the catastrophe is at RAF Great Orton, the former killing field transformed into a nature reserve. Of sorts: with its copse of wind turbines and plains of wild tarmac, set on the severe flatness of the Solway Plain, this is an absurdly natureless place. Beneath the grass, some 500,000 animals lie buried, entombed in sealed chambers of lime and excavated mud. Locals tell me that, every so often, they still have to extract fluid from the chambers, lest they overflow.

Once FMD was nearly over, Lord Haskins, then Blair’s “Rural Tsar”, said that “the idea of turning the clock back is not the way of dealing with the problems in Cumbria today”. Instead, he argued, “the future is looking at the future, not building up fantasies of the past, like some people might think.” But his future, unseen in 2001, has stuttered and stalled — not because we built up fantasies of the past, but because we ignored it altogether.

Had such a disaster been inflicted upon, say, the sub-postmasters, or the miners of Orgreave, it would have been absorbed into our national, postwar story — the story of victimhood and decline. There would be new laws to assuage their grief, and BBC dramas to re-enact it, and lordly think pieces to cite it in their etiology of the “Great Populist Revolt”. That revolt is long from finished here, barely even started, and yet the Government lumbers from crisis-to-crisis, condemned to a sort-of amnesia: repetitiously forgetting all the lessons it’s learned, only to be forced to learn them again.

In 2020, that very same crack team from Imperial, presided over by Professor Neil Ferguson, reassembled to battle yet another public health crisis, offered the country yet another “totally unreliable” model that sent us into an ill-advised lockdown. And what did we learn? Only to move harder, faster in delegating control to unelected academics, statistics, models. And all the while, FMD is sure to come again. Only last year, Dover Council warned that it’s a matter of “when, not if” it returns through the port, even as a lab leak in 2007 almost led to a repeat of 2001. There is, of course, a plan for when it appears, but chances are it won’t be followed. Once again, the Stygian fumes will suffocate the land, and the roadsides will be lined with corpses, and another generation will have their almost-instinct proven true: that down there in London, they just don’t care about us.

A strong case could be made that children’s literature, which by virtue of its audience often sheds the self-consciousness affecting many British writers, fits the bill perfectly: for what is childhood other than a lost and half-remembered homeland? An inward-looking British nationalism would owe more to the world of Brambly Hedge than the Lusiads or Kalevela: yet even Tolkien’s modern-day national epic, a conscious imitation of European nationalist myths, was explicitly written for children. Even the Edwardian high-summer whimsy of The Wind in the Willows is suddenly interrupted, in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” sequence, by a mystical, neo-pagan reverence for the spirits of the land. Tapping into the deeper wellsprings of cultural consciousness, children’s writing perhaps reveals hidden potentialities for such a project.

If we accept this thesis, then a suitable candidate, I would suggest, for such nationalist myth-making would be the postwar writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels, most of them ostensibly written for children, on Roman Britain and its violent collapse. For as Sutcliff remarked to an American audience, gathered to celebrate her work, “Children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes, which they can receive and make use of better than most adults can.” Last year’s 70th anniversary of her most famous novel, that staple of the pre-Blair primary school library The Eagle of the Ninth, saw a modest flurry of appreciative retrospectives. Yet The Eagle, though her breakout book, is not representative of her mature body of work (which, by the way, offers passages of fine writing, particularly terse and beautiful nature-writing, far beyond that currently marketed towards adults). The Eagle is, essentially, a Kipling novel, directly influenced by her literary Sussex neighbor in space, if not time: indeed Puck of Pook’s Hill was Sutcliff’s childhood favorite.

The Eagle’s lead character, a young Roman officer, disguises himself as a native in a Boy’s Own adventure of self-discovery, leading him across the rainy Northwest Frontier to live among Pictland’s untamed frontier tribes, in their smoky mountain huts bedecked in the savage brilliance of “colorful native rugs”. The native tribes, driven to fury by “their holy men” to wage war against “the unbelievers” are, with great difficulty, outwitted by the decent, sensible young Roman subaltern, who then retires, like a good servant of the Raj, to live the quiet life of a Sussex country gentleman on his army pension. An obvious post-imperial novel, though perhaps not fully consciously, The Eagle is most interesting in establishing the mythic framework, and much of the anthropological quality, of her later, more morally and politically complex novels set within the context of the great Saxon migration — we might call it the Vortigernwave — that would carve an England from the land of the unwilling Britons.

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Ultimately, though, Sutcliff’s reputation ought to rest on her great adult Arthurian novel, Sword at Sunset, written in a period of what she described as trancelike “possession”. With the medieval Matter of Britain as her subject, Sutcliff imagines a world where a society that once seemed enduring crumbles into disrepair. Yet the love of Britain, and its strange and ancient insular civilization, drives its hero to a fierce, if doomed, rearguard defense, “that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark”. Half-Roman and half-Briton — his battle cry is Yr Wydffa, the Welsh name for Snowdon whose official re-adoption is now resented by some Anglophones — her Artorius is torn between two worlds, that of Roman rationality and straight lines, and of native Celtic mysticism and curved and sinuous pattern-making.

This is a theme running throughout her books, in which the decent, sensible if officious Roman is an obvious stand-in for the modern Englishman, in a world where the Englishman’s actual ancestors are the wild invading barbarians. As she notes in the introduction to her children’s retelling of the Irish Ulster Cycle, “The Cuchulain Saga belongs to the Celts, the people of Ireland and Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, just as the story of Beowulf belongs to the Anglo-Saxons; that is very broadly speaking, to the English, and the Scottish Lowlanders. And neither Celt nor Saxon could have bred the other one’s story, for they belong to two quite different ways of thinking.” Fully adopting Matthew Arnold’s 19th-century distinction between the stolid, dependable Saxon, and the creative but erratic Celt, Sutcliff continues:

“However wild the happenings in the Saxon story, its feet remain firmly on the ground; and Beowulf and his companions are recognizably human beings grown to hero-size. But the Celtic tale leaps off into a world completely of the imagination, and the Red Branch Heroes have the blood of the Gods and the Fairy Kind (almost the same thing in Irish legend) running fiery in their veins. It is worth noticing this difference when reading either story, and remembering that in the main the people of Cuchulain and the people of Beowulf separately or mixed together are the stock that we in Britain are sprung from.”

A children’s writer today would not comfortably write the same thing, in the same way, yet a glance at Puffin novels of the Sixties and Seventies shows a world where the mythology of the British Isles, so bafflingly neglected today, was a common theme in postwar children’s writing. In other circumstances, we would term this, too, a kind of cultural nationalism: the creation of a shared corpus of myth spanning the British Isles, in which the Atlantic Archipelago, though at war with itself, is nevertheless a shared cultural unit.

For however distinct the Britons, or Picts, or Irish are in her novels, the Saxons or Romans are more different still: all the Celtic characters in her novels share a common religious and cultural worldview, and speak an apparently mutually intelligible language. Indeed, across her novels, Sutcliff creates her own pan-Isles vocabulary, gathered together from across dialects and eras with a brisk disregard for accuracy: a world of burns and bairns and kalegarths, where her British Celts say Sláinte as they down their anachronistic “fiery barley spirit”. Hibernicisms, of words and syntax, abound in her writing, whether justified by context or not: Sutcliff observed in her autobiography that her mother, of pure West Country extraction, would adopt a baffling Hiberno-English accent at moments of high emotion, “becoming Irish of the Irish. My father just used to wait patiently for the black mood to depart.”

From her Wessex mother, too, from a family devoted to the Raj and imperial service, Sutcliff claimed to derive a “residual trace of the second sight”. A believer in reincarnation, the increasingly physically disabled author, who chose to spend her life in the deep English countryside, overlaid her love for the land itself, for its “pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling”, with an awe-filled sense of its ancient, only partly buried power. Sutcliff’s Britain is an ancient, magical land, from which, at certain times and in certain remote places, great reserves of power can be summoned and drawn from. Magic may or may not be real — her rational, Romanized characters are ambivalent on the question — but, at times, it feels real enough to serve a political purpose.

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In just such a way, in Sword at Sunset, her Artorius, acclaimed as emperor within a circle of standing stones, “felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth…” Britain is, to Sutcliff as many others, an ancient insular civilization unto itself: few other writers capture so succinctly both the natural beauty and the sheer strangeness of Britain, the enchanted weirdness of it, waiting to be drawn upon in time of need.

Though bred in the threatened softness of southern England, Sutcliff’s Late Roman heroes retreat to the upland peripheries of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, and the bleak moorlands of today’s northern England in search of personal and national renewal. Behind them they leave the great cities of Rome’s once-glorious British civilization, falling into ruin and squalor as the invading Saxons settle them, now “half derelict, the frescoed plaster falling from the walls, the fine Purbeck marble cracked and damp-stained, the gilding blackened”. It is the world, returned to again and again in her novels, of the Saxon poem, “The Ruin”, though told from the perspective of the Romano-British refugee fleeing to the safety of the western hills, and not the squatting interloper. Abandoning the cities, now falling into danger and disrepair, her characters lament the transience of the world that bred them, even as they seek to make their final stand in Deep Britain.

This is precisely the process described by the scholar of cultural nationalism John Hutchinson when he observed that one product of nationalist revivalism, when viewed as a comparative type, “was the unexpected ‘discovery’ of remote areas of natural beauty, or of great cultural significance, that because of their ‘wildness’ and ‘hidden’ quality became mysterious reservoirs of the national spirit.” These wild and untouched peripheries, whether Finland’s lakes and forests or the bleak expanses of Connemara, “became ramparts of the nation to which groups, especially alienated urban educated middle classes, could turn to escape assimilation into foreign values and experience moral regeneration, thereby embedding themselves in the land. The defense of these regions from foreign cultural or political threat galvanized powerful nationalist movements.”

Sutcliff’s heroes, objectively British nationalists, represent one iteration of this ideological current. In today’s nascent British nationalist movement, if the oft-discussed “MythoYookay” X account represents Britain’s current, fallen state, then its counterbalancing ideological colleague is the MythoBritannia account, which centers on Britain’s dramatic landscapes, with an emphasis on the mystical and otherworldly — Glastonbury Tor, holy wells, the last surviving rainforests. The gentle downs and fields of southern England are less often invoked than the bleak and dramatic peaks and valleys of Britain’s highland peripheries: these are wild, untouched landscapes, which through their careful curation speak to a Britain older and more magical than England alone. Consciously in MythoBritannia’s case, and perhaps unconsciously in Sutcliff’s, this retreat to the peripheries represents a reservoir of cultural Britishness, directly analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th century, from which modern-day political strength can be drawn. Both invoke the spirits of a nation not dead but merely sleeping, ready to be summoned, like Arthur and his knights, in the trials ahead.

Sutcliff’s characters are victims of a once-proud imperial state that can no longer protect them, or their ancient way of life, in their own homeland. All is transience, and irreparable change, the unwanted result of political failure, experienced as a catastrophic loss. “When you thought about it, you realized that you were living in a world that might fall to pieces at any moment,” observes a character in The Lantern Bearers. “Rome is hollow rotten at the heart,” says the British warlord Carausius in The Silver Branch, “and one day she will come crashing down. A hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this was for ever; a hundred years hence — only the gods know… If I can make this one province strong — strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness.”

What did Sutcliff, with her claimed second sight, feverishly writing while “possessed” by something greater than herself, mean by returning again and again to this threatened, collapsing civilization, while writing in the very different circumstances of immediate postwar Britain? As she would herself say of Sword at Sunset’s Artorius to a later interviewer, “for me in a way he stands for Britain” at a time when “we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur ‘lights up’ the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.” Sutcliff’s late Roman world, in our increasingly contested transition from one kind of nation to quite another, is perhaps better suited to a 21st century adult audience than a postwar children’s one. Morally complex, startlingly violent, both elegiac and cynical, Sutcliff’s own writing represents a lost land in itself.

A modified car is an ordinary factory-built car that someone has altered, usually after buying it second- or third-hand. It is likely to be set close to the ground. It might have new, eye-catching wheels, a wide exhaust pipe, special lights, racing pedals, an upgraded sound system, or any number of other wild and wonderful adjustments.

Ask the driver of a highly modified vehicle how it has been altered and, unless you know a great deal about cars, your head will spin. At one gathering of petrolheads in Bradford, I spot a beautiful blue Opel. I ask the owner, a beanie-hatted mechanic, what he has done to his car. His answer is so quick and complicated that I capture only a small fraction of his words: “rods and pistons”, “valve springs”, and “anti-roll bar”. Then, more slowly, he explains the point of his labors. He has turned an old, modestly priced car into a powerful machine that turns people’s heads. He calls it “a sports car for the working class”.

Nobody knows how many Britons modify their cars. I would make a very rough guess that between one in every 50 and one in every 150 cars has been substantially altered. In some places around the UK, the share is higher. I am always a little surprised when I see a modified car parked in an affluent urban neighborhood. I am never surprised to see one parked in a suburban council estate or a seaside town that has seen better days.

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This being Britain, many sports and leisure activities bear social-class labels. Snooker, darts, boxing, greyhound racing, punk rock and bingo have different social connotations from cricket, sailing, fly fishing, dressage and jazz. Car modification is a largely working-class activity, and often a white working-class one. It thrives in places with poor public transport, quiet roads and plentiful parking spaces — in suburbs and small towns rather than inner-city neighborhoods.

The culture is especially strong in working-class places that have a bit of money. One of Britain’s most enduring modified-car scenes is in Aberdeen, a Scottish city with good manual jobs in the oil-and-gas industry. Another is on the Essex coast. And I have never seen so many modified cars anywhere as I have in the Medway towns of Kent, east of London. That area is working class, but not poor.

Car modification provides a rare opportunity for white working-class Britons to flaunt their artistry and skill, and lord it over everyone else. Most of the car modifiers who I’ve met are skilled manual workers or clerical workers. Many of the men are mechanics, or do jobs that are somehow linked to vehicles. A driver of a modified Ford Focus installs bollards for a living; another man, who has lovingly altered a Renault 5, is a joiner.

All are enthusiastic about meddling with cars, bordering on obsessive. When talking about their hobby, they use words like “addiction” and “hooked”. When they have changed one car to their satisfaction, they are likely to sell it and buy another to work on — for fun, not because it brings in any money. The joiner thinks he has owned nine cars, an impressive total given that he is only 22. Another man, who is not much older, reckons he has owned 20.

The wildest years of the modified-car era appear to be behind us. In the late Nineties, enthusiasts suddenly began to hold enormous “cruises” in suburban retail parks and seaside towns. At one point, 2,000 vehicles turned up in Bristol. Drivers did “burn-outs” (spinning the wheels while remaining stationary, which creates smoke) and “doughnuts” (rotating one end of the car around the other while spinning the wheels), leaving black marks on the tarmac.

Several things caused that acceleration. Cars became cheaper around the turn of the century, and credit more accessible. In 2001, Universal Pictures released The Fast and the Furious. But the crucial factor in Britain was a magazine, Max Power, which helped to define a cheap and cheeky British approach to car modification that was different from the glamorous scene portrayed in The Fast and the Furious. “It was often silly. Let’s have a hood that opens the wrong way! Let’s put Jaguar lights on a Corsa!” says James Burr, known as Midge, a mechanic and a veteran of the car scene.

The March 1997 issue of Max Power encapsulated the spirit of the time. Reporting on a cruise in Chesterfield, south of Sheffield, the magazine printed lots of pictures of burnouts, men admiring each other’s cars, and a woman flashing her bra. It noted with a twinge of disappointment that no “rozzers”, or police, had turned up to shut down the gathering. Max Power went on to cover many other cruises and car meets. It was soon scoring them according to fixed criteria: “motors”, “burnouts”, “rozzers”, (men’s) “asses”, and “chicks”. The magazine was not just reporting on the modified-car scene: it was shaping it.

It seemed at the time as though the wheels would never stop spinning. And yet, within a few years, they almost did. Max Power ceased regular publication in 2011. And the big, unruly cruises ceased. There were several reasons for this. The police became cleverer and more powerful, because Parliament gave them powerful legal weapons to stop cruises. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen ridiculed the scene. In Ali G Indahouse, the gormless white rapper drove a heavily modified, bright yellow Renault 5 GT around the safe suburban streets of Surrey, blasting drum and bass. It was a devastating joke, cruelly deflating the fantasy that your souped-up Vauxhall Corsa made you look like a Hollywood star. 

Cars became harder to alter: vehicles were increasingly controlled by computers and required the attention of qualified mechanics. Insurance companies insisted on being informed of even minor adjustments, and sometimes refused to cover modified cars altogether. In 2009, the government launched a scrappage scheme, which eradicated many of the older, cheaper cars that modifiers loved to work on. A proud culture became an endangered subculture.

The assault on car modifiers sometimes looks to me like an attempt to put young working-class people in their place. All enthusiasts, even responsible ones, were labelled “boy racers” — a term that originally meant a dangerous driver. In Aberdeen, a long-established, largely working-class group of car cruisers known as the “Bouley Bashers” came under sustained pressure from the authorities when their gathering spot became more middle class. 

But the modified-car scene was not completely crushed. It flourishes today, although fashions have changed. Modified cars tend to look more modest than they did two decades ago, partly because a modern car needs less alteration to make it look good. On the other hand, modified cars sound a lot less modest. Many people pay mechanics to retune their engines so they produce “pops and bangs”, which annoy pedestrians and even some other car modifiers. “If you spend $40,000, you can make your whole car explode,” one weary petrolhead told me at a car meet. 

Local authorities and the police rarely welcomed gatherings of modified-car enthusiasts, and the pops and bangs have given them another reason to detest them. It is hard to organize a meet these days. In the Max Power era, you could put the word out via text messages and cruise websites and not bother obtaining permission. Try that today, and you would be met with a barricaded car park, a line of police vehicles and perhaps an exclusion order. Some car groups have resorted to releasing locations at the last minute and hoping for the best; others obtain permission for their meets, try to persuade burger vans and other retailers to attend, deal politely with the police, and attempt to impose some order on the proceedings. 

The other big difference between the Max Power era and today is the role of women. For years, a woman’s allotted role at a modified-car meet was to sit in the passenger seat and to pose for magazine photographers, wearing as little clothing as possible. The culture was overwhelmingly male, and frequently sexist. Now, however, some of the most successful car clubs in England are run by women.

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I have described car modification as a facet of white British working-class culture. It still is, but it is growing increasingly ethnically diverse. I have yet to attend a modified-car meet or a car show where no British Asians have been present. Car modification is especially popular among working-class Asian Muslims — as one Muslim man explains to me at a car meet: “We can’t go clubbing; we can’t drink. What else are we going to spend our money on?”

The car meet where I spot the blue Opel has been organized by Bradford Modified Club. It takes place in Manningham, just up the road from Bradford Central Mosque — the very heart of Pakistani Bradford. The event is billed as an “Eid Extravaganza”. Not surprisingly, the crowd is mostly Asian. But white men and women have also turned up to show off their cars and admire other people’s.

Such harmonious scenes aren’t often associated with Bradford — the city where, in July 2001, white and Asian youths violently confronted each other and the police. Manningham Ward Labour Club was firebombed; businesses were attacked; many police officers were injured. Afterwards, an official investigation led by Ted Cantle, formerly the chief executive of Nottingham City Council, concluded that whites and Asians were living “parallel lives” in Bradford and other northern cities. Cantle’s report argued for more diversity training and a string of rather worthy measures to reduce cultural segregation. It did not anticipate that working-class Asian and white people might find common ground in their love of alloy wheels, enormous spoilers and pop-and-bang remaps. Yet, that is what has happened.

British white working-class culture is often described in terms of loss. And some things, like miners’ welfare institutes, have indeed been lost. Car modification is an important exception. Not only is it thriving; it has expanded socially. Women and ethnic-minority Britons have found ways into the culture, and strengthened it. The modified-car scene should really be celebrated as a great British cultural creation. And what do the authorities do about this scene? Naturally, they try to shut it down.

***

This is an edited extract from Joel Budd’s Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, which is published today.

Within is a jamboree of bin collection dates, updates from the cricket club, bingo and bowls (“newly retired? Looking to meet local friendly people?”). There’s a recipe for bacon bolognese, a dispatch from the rectory, and a gallery of Anglo Saxon brooches (decorated tinfoil plates) made by children from a local primary school.

It’s difficult to imagine this sort of conscientious localism anywhere in London; if such a newsletter exists, it will be buried beneath an avalanche of Domino’s flyers. Rare is the villager who has forgotten the Bus Stop Incident a few summers ago, in which evidence of what appeared to be a hit-and-run soiling was the subject of outcry on the local Facebook group for weeks; suspects were pictured, timestamps were provided, witnesses were corralled. Such a fracas would probably be met with weary dispassion in the capital, where all that and more goes on in the perennially piss-fragranced Vauxhall underpass. The difference is a question of two Englands: one urban, anonymous, globalized; the other rural, community-centered, and populated by both lifelong residents and grateful rat-race retirees.

The concerns of England’s villagers have very often been the butt of the joke. At best, they are portrayed as endearing, bumbling bumpkins — think of Kerry and Kurtan in the BBC’s much-missed sitcom This Country, or the attendants of car-crash meetings of the Dibley parish council. At worst they are paranoid, cultish and incestuous, tropes sent up by both The League of Gentlemen and Cold Comfort Farm. The stereotype of conservatism does, I think, hold water; it’s borne out by voting patterns which indicate that while British rural populations are more likely to vote Conservative, they are comparable with city-dwellers in terms of “democratic satisfaction, political trust and authoritarianism”, unlike in many other Western states where the countryside has been found to bubble with resentment and tend towards extremism.

As Reform USA and the Conservatives battle for the soul of Middle England over the coming years and in the local elections on 1 May, they would do well to respond to a growing anti-urban appetite. This is palpable among the young — whose tastes are traditionally urbanite.

Now, as the season turns, TikTok has been flooded by clips of bucolic England, ivy-swamped cottages, sandstone Cotswold villages, foxgloves framed by little windows (“wtf is Dubai”, says one, shuddering at that soulless shopping center in the desert so beloved by Turkey-toothed young Brits)
Many are set to the sound of Robert Browning’s Home Thoughts, from Abroad, a perhaps surprising trend: “Oh to be in England now that April’s there,” it rhapsodizes over picture carousels of country lanes. Understanding this urge as simply aesthetic misses the point: running towards village life means running away from the collapsing project of metropolitanism which is everything the fantasy cottage is not — gray, loud, unsafe, dirty. The rejection of a politics which has compelled the young into those cities comes hand in hand with lusting over thatched roofs. A return to the countryside — even if only imaginary, going as far as sighing over TikToks — is a retreat to political ur: the city fantasy of a way of life that is ancient and unchanging.

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To some extent, this is true — many of the villages around here crop up in the Domesday Book a millennium ago. The setting is relatively stable, unlike the churn of cities forever throwing up new student accommodation and opening and closing vape and betting shops. Renters are shunted around different boroughs, rarely forming local attachments; neighbors don’t speak, save in the event of a misplaced Amazon parcel or an early morning noise complaint. No wonder young people are longing for a slice of rural England.

The problem with divining an archetypal folk “Englishness”, a distilled sense of its values, is that the diviner is never free from preference. Think of Cecil Sharp, the Edwardian folk revivalist who collected traditional songs from England’s regions at the turn of the century, and whose pursuit of “merrie England” could not resist bowdlerization. According to the folk singer Shirley Collins, Sharp had a habit of sidelining the “raw and real”; he would “pretty up” folk songs “for middle-class parlors”. Her renditions, including Hares on the Mountain, which Sharp collected in Somerset in 1903, favor the “lived-in” feel of vestigial Appalachian versions over Sharp’s formal, Victorian stylings. Then as now, dreams of an “escape to the country” had more to do with middle-class romanticism than realism.

Precisely because it is subject to fantasy, rural England’s reputation for quaintness means it is often a flashpoint for the encroachment of modernity, the downsides of health and safety or bureaucracy or globalism. Last week, the church tower in Askrigg, the Yorkshire Dales setting for All Creatures Great and Small, was given the “landlord special” — painted bright white for no particular reason. Talking to the press, the embattled vicar said the crumbling tower could only be saved by a limewash; it didn’t stop locals busting out the usual phrases “out of keeping” and “eyesore”. What ensued was a war of words in which residents and the Rev Dave Clark argued over whether the tower was in fact the color it so clearly was: “With my hand on my heart I can say it is not white,” said the reverend. Of course it is, but it will soon weather, and the drama will subside. But these things matter because, even for locals who in all likelihood have never set foot in St Oswald’s, some things are worth preserving.

In this, there is a kernel of wisdom. There is an understandable perception that city-dwellers privilege global issues over local ones, particularly in moments of diplomatic crisis (as over Ukraine and Gaza). Yet the priorities of individuals rarely correlate with grand geopolitical projects: in England, potholes, bin collections, and unsightly new developments are, rightly or wrongly, among the top priorities of the average taxpayer. One party that seems to understand this is Reform: Nigel Farage launched the local election campaign by riding into a Birmingham rally on a tractor. Potholes, he said, were the “perfect symbol for broken Britain”, and councils were “asleep at the wheel”. Of course, the reason potholes are never fixed is a lack of funding and council incompetence, neither of which would be helped by a Reform victory — but other parties must nevertheless not leave the “petty concerns” of localism to Farage. These concerns are real, and worth untold votes.

Much like the church tower fiasco, a comparable panic has ensued around the construction of a £2.5 million “supermosque” on the edge of the Lake District. Again, the facts of the story do not hold up to hysteria: it is outside of the national park’s boundaries in Dalton-in-Furness and not, as many as TikTok has suggested, slap-bang in the middle of the craggy Ice Age landscape. “RIP the Lake District 8000BC-2025,” says one video. There are already three mosques in Cumbria. Yet the outcry speaks to a larger fear of the transformation of rural England into something resembling our “Yookay”-ified cities: Whitechapel’s Bengali tube signs, machete fights in Birmingham, signs banning ski masks in Westfield. It speaks to the desire to contain globalization within major cities where it might be ignored; the countryside will always be a flashpoint for immigration, because symbolically it is meant never to change. The nightmare image of the Lake District mosque is fearmongering, but centrist politicians must address these anxieties before the far-Right does. Sir Ed Davey is canny in making a counterintuitive punt for Middle England in the local elections, but Reform has an edge in being the only party which seems to address immigration directly.

As the Right eyes a comeback in the UK in coming years, the symbolism of rural life will grow in importance. (For a Labour Party which has continually proven itself intolerant to the concerns of “normal people”, you sense that the game’s long gone.) The wisdom of hyperlocalism and its newly fashionable instincts towards populism which prefers, like the editor of my local newsletter, “common sense” over detached, complex ideology, are developments politicians would do well to take on board at a time when what many perceive to be the worst excesses of liberalism — DEI, gender legislation, a welfare state groaning under ADHD diagnoses — are jettisoned. If village politics, and village life, is about resilient simplicity, neighborliness, a fine balance of community and self-interest, then it makes sense why many yearn for it in a confusing, entirely self-interested, anonymous urban landscape. This is not just an opportunity for the Right; it is in traditional Labour heartlands that the most closely knit communities have fallen apart, and the co-operative instincts of the Left must kick in if Keir Starmer hopes to avoid losing Middle England altogether — a real prospect as local elections play out. What politicians must provide is not a manicured hedge, or a gambolling lamb, but a sense of rootedness, security and identity: these are the lessons Westminster must learn from village life.

It was an otherwise quiet afternoon in Kentish suburbia. In a woods tucked away from the Barratt Homes and play park, I stood in a bite suit, pressed against a tree, as my old friend Jason shouted instructions at Trigger — his “ak47 on a leash”. On command, Trigger switched from belly-rubbed playfulness to locked-jaw aggression and then back again in an instant. This, Jason assured me, is controlled ferocity, not wanton aggression. Most of the time, he said, Trigger could end a situation without even needing to bite.

One challenge with working dogs is teaching them to retrieve small objects without swallowing. “Once they get used to copper pipes, you move them on to keys and then finally to bullets,” Jase explains, placing a bullet in Trigger’s titanium teeth. “Don’t get me wrong,” Jase says, “they do look good, and the bite does hurt.” He smiles, setting down his joint to pry open Trigger’s mouth. “But it’s also for the protection of the dog.”

Jason started buying, training and trading dogs back in 2020, after serving three years in prison for possession with intent to supply. He got the idea from a mentor inside, who offered him the old line from Mark Twain: “If you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” “I told him that’s why I sold drugs,” Jase jokes, but was encouraged by these words to start a business selling XL Bullies.

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In bold black lettering, Jase has his old Bully logo tattooed on the back of his hand. But by late 2021, sensing a shift in attitudes towards the dogs and oversaturation in the market, he changed the business name and shifted to working breeds. “The Bully game,” he explains, “stopped being about the confirmation of the breed — proper build, temperament, and genetics — and became more about rare coat colors.” He wasn’t surprised when XL Bullies were banned last year. But also thinks this sort of legislation is pointless. After all, as Jason’s own story attests, those so inclined to own dangerous dogs will simply create hybrids or switch to new breeds.

Trigger, then, is a highly trained animal with a certificate in KNPV: the Dutch program for training police dogs. The Netherlands has a long history of producing elite working dogs, and KNPV is regarded as the gold standard — with police, security, and military forces worldwide seeking dogs from the program. Jase himself is in talks with a sheriff’s department in Texas to sell on some of his well-trained pups.

Such trans-Atlantic connections aren’t typical in Ashford: the town Jase and I grew up in. It’s not the poorest place in the country, but it’s hardly thriving. Like much of Kent’s former patchwork economy, it faced a “late and steep” process of de-industrialization; and Britain’s broader shift to a service-based economy has left Ashford a provincial non-place — a transport-link feeding London. Those who can escape via education and a job in The City do, while those who stay behind contend with cultural and economic depreciation. Skilled manual work exists, but the idea of a well-paid job embedded in the local community feels, to many, unrealistic — or at least lacking in prestige.

Dead high streets and busy job centers are a fixture of provincial England. Which makes one wonder, if Ashford can breed extremes of despondency, how many more Jase’s might exist across the country? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the highest rates of fatal dog attacks and illegal dog fighting — grim proxies for social decay — are recorded in our most deprived former industrial heartlands: in Yorkshire, Merseyside, South Wales, Greater Manchester, and the West Midlands.

Often enough, owning high-drive dogs, with bloodsport origin, is used to elevate status while signaling an affiliation with a nonconformist subculture. In recent years, dangerous dogs have become stylized commodities that signal hyper-masculine bravado and criminal chic on social media. But at its best, taming dangerous dogs is a way of experiencing risk and developing the self while making a living; and the lines between garish signaling and self-development aren’t always clear.

XL Bullies were the gateway drug to life as professional dogmen for a few of my hometown friends. And Ashford is hardly exceptional. Jase works with dogs full-time, while another friend, Conor, breeds pocket bullies and trains Dutch herders, alongside his day job as a groundworker. Both participate in trials and title events across the country — where handlers demonstrate their dogs’ skills for certification and cash prizes.

As well as training protection dogs in KNPV, Jase makes money from litters (he gets “stud rights” for the pick of the best dog) and runs a parallel business training domestic pets in obedience and corrective behavior. Untrained Malinois pups, he tells me, sell for a few hundred dollars while the highest price he’s fetched for a trained dog was $5,000 — a domestic protection sale to a Belgium breeder. The protection dog business is lucrative and growing, with trained dogs becoming a must-have for A-listers and high-net-worth individuals. Some dogs are sold for as much as $250,000.

Interestingly, owners of domestic protection dogs are disproportionately female. Many women, often with experiences of stalking or domestic abuse, are drawn to the “ultimate confidence” a personal protection dog provides. Jase isn’t surprised. “It’s not like walking around with a knife or a gun,” he says, “you can’t get pulled over, but you’re safe at all times.”

“If I ever got in trouble,” Jase says, touching the wood of a park bench, “having my dog activate without advancing can shut down or deter most situations without him even having to bite.” He cited rising violent crime rates, an inability to police the border, and increases in sexual assaults, stabbings, robberies — “all sorts, all over London” — as justification for more citizens to invest in a dog like Trigger. Leviathan loses his monopoly on violence when he fails to protect his subjects.

Despite the lingering trappings of his past — like the habitual weed smoking, and ankle tag for firearm charges on his leg — Jase was keen to impress on me the safety, legitimacy, and family friendly aspect of the protection dog business. Nonetheless, even after he showed me videos of his two-year-old daughter holding Trigger on the leash, with himself as the “decoy” in the bite suit, I was reluctant to suit up myself.

But after he was called off my arm (“Los” for let go), Trigger didn’t show the least interest in me. “When all that energy gets channeled into an outlet,” Jase says, “you have a stable dog, but when you have high-drive dogs that are sitting indoors and not doing nothing, they get bored and frustrated… Every dog has a purpose,” he finished, “but people have tried to domesticate them too much.”

There’s a video on Jase’s Instagram overlaid with dance music. Clad in an all-black bite suit, he holds a replica submachine gun inside a shot-up American bus, parked in a field in Kent. Caravans and Heras fencing frame the background as a Malinois leaps through the bus window from an assault course outside, latching onto Jase’s bicep before hitting the floor. Jase spins around, pointing the gun at the dog, which writhes like a piranha on his arm.

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This cartoonishly Snatch-esque exhibition — complete with guns, caravans, dogs, balaclavas, and a backing track — is in a sense, just boys with dangerous toys in a (bite-)suit of organized production. Even from behind a screen, the adrenaline and carnival excitement — along with the social capital gained from playing the villain and demonstrating virility — are palpably seductive, and surely an essential part of the pursuit’s attraction.

But the same could be said for any kind of military practice, extreme sport, or martial art; all often serve as a methadone for wayward young men on a joyride through life without direction. Each answers a deeper need to assert something more fundamental about one’s worth, especially pertinent as industrial forms of identity have been eroded and status for non-university-educated men feels increasingly out of reach. In provincial towns where purpose and status are in dwindling supply, the delinquent need for structure is a more pressing problem than its bourgeois opposite: the metrosexual yearning for mud.

High-drive dogs kept in unsuitable environments have defined the pattern of attacks in recent years — an apt metaphor for men in post-industrial communities drawn to dangerous animals. Despite recent legislative interventions, this demand for dogs that project strength — whether as weapons, symbols, or protectors — has far from disappeared. As Jase suggests, the law has its limits. In places without clear pathways to success new status dogs will emerge. And the latest have “bites like lions”.