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.

The statement was laced with officialese: and Ogilvie is reportedly from Rathcoole, a predominantly Loyalist housing estate north of Belfast. Was the suspiciously polished family statement, many wondered, issued by the Government on the family’s behalf? And if so, why? Social media, unsurprisingly, decided “the State” dictated the Ogilvies’ response. Victims of controversial killings involving ethnic minorities, it was alleged, are manipulated by government spinners. And so the scene was set, digital barricades erected, culture warriors firing barbs across no-man’s-land. It’s hardly the favored territory of  officialdom, with police comms teams too often flailing in the septic tank of 24/7 social media. 

What, though, is the truth? Are families pressurized to give statements sympathetic to official narratives? How seriously does the Government take threats concerning racial tension? And, as Britain enters another potential summer of unrest, are police forces prepared?

First, the specifics of the family statement. Given the severity of Ogilvie’s injuries, a police family liaison officer — or FLO — would be assigned to support them throughout the investigation. Police FLOs are widely considered to be a success story, offering support to victims during distressing circumstances. Nonetheless, they are also detectives with a hotline to the Senior Investigating Officer. Furthermore, victims’ families do receive advice on issuing statements. Statements might be discussed over cups of tea, FLOs explaining how they might impact future criminal proceedings. All parties are likely to have been briefed by force comms officers, keen to dampen down contentious issues. Note how, for example, Henry Nowak’s father gave a full statement — one criticizing police actions around his son’s death — only after Vickrum Digwa’s trial. 

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It seems likely, then, that the Ogilvies’ statement would have been “managed” via the FLO and the wider PSNI. This is standard practice. Suggestions the security services might involve themselves in such matters, in my experience, are wide of the mark. Given the uniquely fraught circumstances Northern Irish officers operate under, not to mention the forthcoming marching season, any public statement would attract the interest of a three-ring circus of community and political groups. Added to this is the Sinn Féin majority administration’s pro-immigration policies, making the party vulnerable to allegations of being “soft” on issues of race. This is why John Boutcher, the (English) PSNI chief constable, tiptoes daily across a minefield of political sensitivities. This isn’t to say there wasn’t some authenticity to the Ogilvies’ statement, nor that the family’s contribution wasn’t heartfelt, but their words seem almost certain to have been polished.

Is the Ogilvie case, then, an example of comms management particular to post-Troubles Belfast? Or does the British government routinely control public sentiment in cases involving potential disorder? My experience working in counterterrorism suggests it does, albeit subtly, even if things have invariably evolved. Techniques pioneered to prevent post-terror attack riots are deployed against vaccine-skeptics and those on the “radical Right.” The Government clearly is spooked: only this week, Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, declared the Government would urgently seek to update the Online Safety Act so that it requires services “to take quicker action to remove illegal content circulating during times of crisis.”

Even during my police service, I witnessed how genuinely petrified senior police officers and civil servants are of wide-scale public disorder. The 2001 Oldham riots, involving three nights of racially motivated violence, focused their minds. The context, by 9/11 that September, was that of Muslim communities targeted by the far-Right after any terrorist incident. During the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, working in counterterrorism intelligence, I saw police commanders repeatedly ask the same question: how do we stop Muslim communities from going up in flames? How do we stop another Oldham? Liberal-minded officers, such as Brian Paddick, were accused of cravenness. Others sounded like colonial governors, fretting over restless natives. That was then. Now, we have pro-Gaza independent MPs exercising de facto control over police operations.

Central government is painfully aware of these problems. The United Kingdom, were it a car, would be a Cold War-era Trabant, its engine spluttering as an era draws inexorably to a close. This isn’t to say the powers-that-be haven’t mounted a spirited defense, updating the creaking two-stroke engine with a digital-management system. Post 7/7, the Government established the Research, Information and Communications unit, known as RICU. A relatively small unit, independent of the security services, RICU works with local authorities and media contractors to create and disseminate content. To counter Islamist narratives, RICU’s communications aim to “effect behavioral and attitudinal change.” These techniques are also employed elsewhere, as was evident during the Covid pandemic and in the aftermath of last summer’s anti-immigration protests. Now, though, public information and sentiment strategies intended to combat Islamist terrorism have been targeted at those threatening official narratives around “diversity” and “community cohesion”. During the same protests, the “National Security and Online Information Team”, a body within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, asked online platforms to moderate content critical of government narratives. 

Then, after the post-Southport riots, came the Home Office’s awful “rapid analytical sprint” report. Only 18 months old, the “sprint” has aged like milk. It posited a new offense of communications that inflict “psychological harm”, demonstrating Labour’s ongoing obsession with controlling language. It urged the police to increase their use of since-abandoned Non-Crime Hate Incidents. Perhaps most telling of all, though, is RICU’s use of “controlled spontaneity” after terrorist incidents — the kind of tactics the Home Office are likely to use in order to counter anti-immigration sentiment. In that vein, a veteran contingency planner told Middle East Eye that “this job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there? A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.” Controlled spontaneity involves bussing in peace-preaching imams. Putting up posters in railway stations. Facilitating vigils. The panoply of “Don’t look back in anger” theatre, inspired by the public’s (genuine) response to the 2017 Manchester bombing.

Admittedly, controlled spontaneity sounds a tall order in a city like Belfast, yet the mindset remains similar. Seize the initiative. Frame narratives. Control. But official narratives have become suspect, especially in racially sensitive cases. For the Government, the potential for widespread disorder explains the urgency of its internet-control agenda. Why? The alternative is unthinkable. Due to austerity, UK police forces are short of personnel, training, and equipment, with the consequence that their ability to keep order has been seriously diminished. For example, after the Stephen Ogilvie stabbing, the PSNI was forced to fly in 200 extra officers from the mainland to support its operations. At the recent pro-Palestine and Right-wing “Unite the Kingdom” demonstrations in London, the Metropolitan Police fielded 4,000 officers, but only with reinforcements from as far afield as Wales. Luckily for the Met, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. 

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This, ultimately, is why the Government devotes so much of its political bandwidth to messaging, communications and sentiment management: its capability to police public disorder has atrophied. An officer with a Home Counties force recently told me how senior officers are currently “wargaming” their response to any repeat of Southport-style unrest this summer. “We aren’t the Met, we don’t have dedicated public order officers,” he said. “We’ll be relying on PCs taken from other duties, guys with only basic shield training.” And the mood music in police HQ command floors? “Grim. They’ve run out of money. They simply don’t have enough people available.” His message was clear: if England “kicks off”, it’s every force for itself. As they head off on holiday this summer, this will prey on the minds of chief officers and Home Office mandarins. All this after the performance of Hampshire police during bushfire demonstrations in Southampton was mixed. 

The UK’s police “mutual aid” arrangements, as seen at the London demonstrations earlier this year, assume supporting one or two major incidents. Multiple outbreaks of serious public disorder would almost certainly collapse the system. “Basically,” said the officer, less prosaically, “we’d be fucked.” And what, I asked, of the last resort? Calling in the army? He laughed. “They haven’t got enough people either, have they?”

This, in the end, clarifies the relative importance of subtler measures. British governments pride themselves on their ability to negotiate. To parley their way out of problems, while assuming the UK remains a high-trust society. A society with a functioning social contract, the glue keeping the Trabant of state legitimacy on the road. This is why, when cuts are required, legislators axe the state’s more coercive arms — the military and policing. 

Yet now that public trust has eroded, along with the social contract, legitimacy is surely next. The Government, though, will continue with its displacement activity, fretting over internet misinformation and polishing statements made by grieving families. A frontline consisting of internet monitors and family liaison officers, armies of “performative spontaneity” coordinators urging us not to “look back in anger”.

The Trabant that is the UK state trundles along, held together with little more than duct-tape and good intentions. Such apathy typifies the mindsets of senior police and civil servants, until the predictable happens. With luck, next time, disorder will again be contained. Reviews will be commissioned and public inquiries launched. Lessons will, allegedly, be learned. And, somewhere, another violent man will cross a border unchallenged. Then another statement will be burnished, until the Trabant’s engine finally sputters and dies for good. 

“These people” are the million-plus civilians displaced in Lebanon since fighting resumed between Israel and Hezbollah in early March. Sweeping IDF evacuation orders, encompassing most of southern Lebanon and the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs, have made one fifth of Lebanon’s population homeless in just a few weeks. Almost all of them are Shia Muslims. Israeli officials claim that the orders are intended to protect civilian life in their campaign against Hezbollah, creating enormous free-fire zones where bombs can fall. But Lebanon has walked, and often slipped from, a demographic tightrope many times since its founding in 1943, and to move people here is to move politics. 

All told, Lebanon is just half the size of Wales. Within its borders, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, and Christians from 12 denominations share space, resources and control. Syria’s civil war saw Lebanon take in more than a million refugees, most of whom remain today. This diversity creates a mix so febrile that Lebanon hasn’t risked a census since 1932, fearing that the demographic assumptions upon which so much of Lebanese society is based might be proved wrong. In this, history is a warning. The demographic upset caused by an influx of Palestinian refugees, after Israel’s founding in 1948, was a big factor in the start of Lebanon’s own civil war from 1975. 

Lebanon’s confessional politics, designed to prevent the ascendance of one group over another, represents the chaotic web of invisible frontiers that span the country. Delineated by religion, history, fear and periodic violence, these frontiers split regions, encircle cities, isolate neighborhoods, and divide even the tiniest of villages. They are marked by roads, rivers and mountains but an uninformed visitor might remain oblivious to crossing them. Like a vase that has shattered and been repaired, Lebanon will break along the same lines if it falls again. Israel knows this well — and is pushing the vase to the very edge of the shelf.

Zahlé is a border town on one of these invisible frontiers. Founded around 300 ago, it is young by the standards of the Levant. Its position on the main Damascus-Beirut highway quickly made it prosperous, and it is now the third-largest town in Lebanon and the largest Christian city in the Middle East. Behind it, to the west, the heights of Mount Lebanon separate it from Beirut and the sea. To the east, the Bekaa Valley stretches out towards the anti-Lebanon and Syria. 

The vast majority of Zahliots are Melkite Catholic and Maronite, aligning the city culturally and politically with the Christian communities of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. But Beirut lies on the other side of the mountain, over a hair-raisingly narrow and potholed road that regularly closes in the winter. Economically, it has stronger links with the Bekaa, where the majority of the population is Shia and the rule of law is superseded by a complex mix of clan dynamics and Hezbollah hegemony. An oft-repeated saying here holds that Zahlé has its heart in Beirut but its stomach in the Bekaa.

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As well as running his restaurant, a simple spot offering grilled-chicken sandwiches and plates of hummus and salad, Masaad has been a mukhtar for 30 years. Mukhtars operate as local registrars, responsible for issuing official paperwork for a village or neighborhood. They are also important community figures, intimately familiar with their wards. When I ask Masaad what his constituents are afraid of, he looks incredulous, as though the question is profoundly stupid. “What are they afraid of? Everything! People are displaced, the state is broken, the banks took everyone’s money. The people most at risk are the ones at the extremities. Look, when it snows and the high roads get closed, the government opens the roads to the ski resorts but they don’t open the road to Zahlé.”

Lebanon’s recent history — one of socioeconomic collapse; massive, but ultimately failed, reform protests; the apocalyptic port explosion of 2020; soaring poverty and war — has made brittle even the glue sealing its cracks. Masaad’s comment about ski resorts references a deep well of resentment, as a thin slice of Lebanese society lives the good life while most struggle to get by. The state is seen as utterly impotent, the banks as thieves. Few are impressed by sectarian leaders who have achieved little but decline for decades, and their patronage is turned to as a last resort. Asked if Zahlé can rely on support from the Christian political parties, Masaad — a Christian himself — waves his hand derisively. “Curse the Christians, they all hate each other.”

In this atmosphere of abandonment and internal estrangement, the Israeli strategy of isolating Hezbollah and its base risks tipping Lebanon into all-out civil strife. Israeli messaging directed at Lebanon has, since the first round of this war in 2024, strenuously tried to frame its campaign as against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. So strenuously, in fact, that it has sometimes achieved an air of surreal gaslighting. On 13 March, an Israel aircraft dropped leaflets over Beirut urging the Lebanese to reject Hezbollah. “This land is yours,” they proclaimed. Yet within days, senior Israeli figures were advocating for the annexation of swathes of southern Lebanon. “The current war in Lebanon must end with a radical change,” said Israeli finance minister Bezelal Smotrich. “The Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon.” That river meets the sea some 19 miles inside Lebanese territory.

As Michael Young explains, that’s part of a broader strategy. “Hezbollah is a force that’s anchored deeply in the Shia community,” says the senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “What the Israelis are trying to do is break the relationship of the Shia community with a specific geographical area in which Hezbollah had created a virtual state within a state.” In Young’s view, the goals of this strategy stop short of pushing Lebanon into civil war. “They understand that they need to restrict Hezbollah within a broader society that can contain it and make it weaker, but they know that if you destroy all of Lebanon, the force that’s most likely to emerge from that is Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah was born in the wreckage of Lebanon’s last civil war, in conditions that appear eerily similar to those emerging today. Back in the early Seventies, the country’s Shia community lacked effective political representation, and therefore didn’t receive the same level of state resources and protection as sects boasting more entrenched political networks. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, aiming to remove the threat posed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had gained a firm foothold in the south. The insults and injuries of occupation were a galvanizing force for Shia communities. The Bekaa Valley, where the grip of occupation forces was looser, became a base for a patchwork collection of resistance groups.

The then-new Islamist regime in Iran saw an opportunity in the nascent Shia resistance forming in the Bekaa. Revolutionary Guard advisers and resources were sent to Lebanon, where they trained and organized these groups until, eventually, they coalesced into Hezbollah. As well as resisting Israeli occupation and attacking Western interests in Lebanon — a suicide truck bomb in 1983 killed 241 US Marines in Beirut — Hezbollah sought to fulfill the unmet needs of the Shia, providing services, employment and welfare. In this way they established their “state within a state”.

Even as the party became the dominant political force in the country, Hezbollah continued to lean heavily on a vision of the Shia as a sidelined minority. For the past decade or so, this narrative may have been more rhetoric than reality, but Israel’s attacks have now plunged the Shia community back into poverty. Today, in Christian East Beirut, housewives in yoga gear drink $10 matchas and complain about the whine of IDF surveillance drones overhead. A few hundred meters away, West Beirut is covered in the tents of Shia displaced from the south, sitting in the rain and wondering if they will ever be able to return home — or if they even have a home to return to.

Alongside the violent reopening of a class wound that never truly healed, another occupation appears imminent. Israel has massed forces on the border and started an incursion intended to create what it euphemistically calls a “security zone” up to the Litani. Even if Smotrich’s threat of annexation doesn’t happen, that would still constitute an occupation of 10% of Lebanon’s territory.

In short, the conditions are forming for a disastrous sectarian collapse. If Israel is hoping to defeat Hezbollah, and then deal with a neutered-but-coherent Lebanese state, they may have underestimated just how much the country has fragmented. That fragility is everywhere, running through every crack and seam of society.

The further you get from the invisible frontiers, the more this fragility has bloomed into fear. In Christian Ashrafieh, an affluent Beirut neighborhood of colonial-era villas and French restaurants, I’ve heard people say that they “hope the Israelis can finish the job we started.” Or, referring to the displaced, “How can they expect us to live with these people?” There are also many in Ashrafieh, especially among the young, who have set up kitchens and donation drives for displaced families. But they are battling a strong underlying sense that the war is happening because of another group, a somehow less Lebanese group. 

In Zahlé, where daily life demands interaction, these tensions are expressed more subtly, and are tempered by pragmatism. Salim Ghazale, Zahlé’s mayor, is a civil engineer who has spent most of his career working on infrastructure projects in the Gulf. He returned to Lebanon and ran for the mayoralty in 2025, bringing a desire to “help build the state” and a project manager’s zeal for efficiency. “We learned lessons from the fighting in 2024 and set up crisis management committees to prepare months ago,” he tells me with pride. “We leaned on the municipal police to vet people arriving. Nobody wants to take in Hezbollah.”

Zahlé is currently hosting around 6,500 internally displaced people (IDPs), mostly from the Bekaa, and Ghazale claims that the process has been smooth so far. “We don’t want to burn any bridges,” he says. “Zahliots own a lot of land in Shia-dominated areas in the Bekaa and we process a lot of the agricultural produce from there.” 

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Despite Zahlé’s calm, there are signs of caution. More municipal police officers than usual are visible on the street. At the large roundabout, where traffic exits the Beirut-Damascus highway, a technician is up a ladder installing a new set of surveillance cameras. Once again, it seems clear that these suspicions have been nurtured by Israeli tactics. In 2024, IDF bombing also focused on predominantly Shia areas. But there were several attacks on IDPs who had taken shelter in remote Christian-majority villages in the north, notably Aitou. These strikes were widely read as a warning against taking people in, compounding existing sectarian paranoia.

Nor is it just the sectarian seam that’s so evident in Zahlé. Some here also lament an absent or obstructive state. “I don’t think there is an issue of integration in these frontier communities,” is how Ghazale puts it. “The problem is how to bring them back into the state.” At the same time, though, the mayor seems equally frustrated when government flexes its muscles. Local municipalities send their tax revenue to Beirut, from where it is redistributed nationally. Ghazale claims that successful, tax-paying communities are effectively penalized under this system, held in hock to towns with whom they feel no affinity. “Financial decentralization would allow communities to decide how they live,” he says, “If you want to live Kandahar-style, you can. If you want to live Beirut-style, you can.”

That acid allusion to the Taliban aside, the real threat to Lebanon’s future is revealed in this contradiction. Sectarian tensions are historic, deep and inflamed by the current war, inequality severe and entrenched. But when even the most state-oriented communities in Lebanon view the government as deadweight or worse, it is hard to see how Lebanon can maintain its coherence in the face of the Israeli war machine.

Because Lebanon’s sectarian power blocks are often identified as synonymous with religious identity — Sunni, Shia, Christian, Druze — it is easy to think that politics and religion are identical here. The reality, of course, is more complicated than that. There are priests and imams who preach division and those who preach reconciliation. In Zahlé’s church of Saydit al Najat (Our Lady of Salvation), the approach to the town’s soul is as reasonable as its mayor’s approach to crisis management.

“As a church we keep saying that we are Lebanese and must support each other and pray for everyone affected,” says Father Elie Maalouf before he delivers his mass. “The trouble is, before there were shared goals. Today everybody is working towards their own ends.” He looks tired as he finishes rolling a cigarette and pours himself another coffee from a thermos, as though there is nothing new in this story. “From long ago Israel has tried to divide. We tell people to be aware of this because when they leave we will still be living together.”

Later on, Zahliots gather in the church for the evening mass, coats and hair damp from the chilly rain that has been falling all day. The congregation is subdued, drowned out by the grandeur of the church’s interior. The fresco that circles the walls was painted by two artists. One Russian, one Ukrainian; their work completed before those two communities collapsed into war. There is an air of grim determination in the rituals of the mass, fitting for this orderly, independent-minded town that finds itself neither here nor there.

In the same way, the emerging narrative that the Green Party’s Gorton and Denton by-election victory marks the emergence of a new, “sectarian” Britain does not seem quite correct. The existence of South Asian Muslim voting blocs is not a new development. Rather, the novelty is their accelerating abandonment of the Labour Party which once took their votes for granted — corralled through the clan and family patronage systems co-opted by Labour’s Northern England machine politics. But the political contest in Gorton and Denton, a matter of simple demographic arithmetic, was fundamentally one tipped by ethnic rather than religious mobilization: it was no more sectarian than, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin are devout Catholics, or the Shankill Protestant Boys Flute Band are devoted practitioners of quiet Bible study.

Indeed, there is little in the Gorton and Denton result to dissuade adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British political development from the theory. As the Manchester Evening News observes, the constituency is a highly segregated one, with 96% of residents in Denton East and Denton West self-describing in the 2021 Census as “White” — an awkward category, in this instance largely coterminous with ethnic British and Irish ethnic identity — declining to a low of 85% in Denton North. In the western half of the constituency, on the other hand, only 6% of residents in Victoria are white, and only 8% in Levenshulme North: a lower percentage, it may be noted, than of Catholics in Belfast’s proverbially Ulster Loyalist Shankill Road ward. At least in Northern Ireland the fact that elections are won in the census rather than the voting booth is open and taken for granted: in Britain, cultural taboos forbid such accurate depiction of reality. The Gorton and Denton by-election, given the polarized electoral map of its constituents, may just as accurately be termed the Gorton versus Denton by-election, in which Gorton proved the victor.

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By Aris Roussinos

Zack Polanski’s pre-election claim that “the public have moved on” from immigration was therefore disingenuous: his Green victory was built on the foundation of historic South Asian immigration in a constituency highly segregated along ethnic lines, in an election novel only for the increasingly overt nature of the ethnic mobilization and counter-mobilization now becoming the stuff of modern British politics. As Abubakr Nanabawa, the organizer of the Muslim Vote pressure group — which in this election backed the Greens “to block Reform, and to end Labour’s assumption that our communities can be ignored, disrespected, and still counted as automatic” — observed, this was to be an election decided by demographic heft, in a “constituency, with 76,000 potential voters, approximately 26% of whom are Muslims… split demographically into the Gorton side, which is more ethnically diverse, and Denton, which is more white working class,” in the latter of which the “the Right-wing Reform party has made inroads”. As Nanabawa pointed out back in 2024, “political parties and candidates ignore the concerns and priorities of Muslim voters at their peril, for their sway will only continue to grow, shaping the trajectory of British democracy” — a prediction also made, openly or implicitly, by Reform, as a threat rather than a promise, and as a means to mobilize the dwindling ethnic majority.

Ascribing the process to Muslim sectarianism thus obscures the nature of the ethnic mobilization now in play among Reform just as much as the Greens: as pre-election Opinium polling revealed, among white voters, Reform dominated the contest, with a vote share approximating that of the Greens and Labour combined. Indeed, at 57% of the population, the proportion of white voters in Gorton and Denton exactly matches that projected for the UK as whole by 2050. If the political maps of Britain are increasingly ethnic ones, then we can expect future elections to proceed accordingly, if in less binary form than Northern England. The rise of the Greens and Reform each now accelerate that of the other. The speed and extent of demographic change means that the collapse of the former mass parties of 20th-century Britain now appears baked in, even if neither the Greens nor Reform is likely to remain the ultimate protagonists of British political contest.

Against this argument, the writer John Merrick, one of the more astute Leftist  critics of the Right’s increasingly ethnic framing of British politics, dismisses the observation that the Palestine flag has become a marker of South Asian Muslim ethnic mobilization by remarking that objecting to Israel’s war on Gaza is not solely a Muslim concern. Indeed, he accuses those who have made this observation, particularly me, of attempting to “to lay the blame on specific ethnic groups” for what he terms the “widespread sense of alienation among often young British Muslims”. In that revulsion to the Gaza war is not solely a matter for South Asian Muslims, he is correct. Yet if Green strategy were merely a matter of principled internationalist politics, rather than of appealing to narrow ethnic loyalties, one struggles to imagine why the party should also wave the Pakistani flag in its campaigning, or release Urdu-language videos linking Starmer to India’s President Modi. Both are simply overt examples of ethnic Pakistani political mobilization, which, partly through willed ideological blindness and partly through mercenary electoral calculations, the Left chooses not to examine too closely. It is permissible, indeed electorally necessary, for progressives to engage in such open ethnic organizing: yet it remains taboo for them to remark upon it.

Free from such squeamishness, the Green Party’s Deputy Leader, Mothin Ali, is closer to the mark in noting that Matt Goodwin’s campaigning materials made repeated references to the defense of “Christian” identity, in what Ali termed “something that is quite sectarian that is harking back to those troubles [sic] in Ireland”. This is simply the Ulsterization thesis correctly observed, and applied for political gain, by the Green Party. Gorton and Denton was historic in that it was one of the first mainland British elections to be fought along near-overtly ethnic lines. Like Labour, the Greens mobilized white progressives and South Asian Muslims together against what they portrayed as Reform’s dangerous identitarian politics. As a national spectacle rather than a local campaign, specific political goals took a backseat to “keeping out Reform”, a party whose perception as one focused on narrow ethnic British interests is the unspoken context of all the Labour and Green rhetoric of “hope against hate” and “unity against division”. This is simply ethnic politics for a political system unwilling to name what it has become. Having lost both British Muslims and the white working class, Labour is at least now free to condemn their respective political manifestations.

Certainly, ecological issues no longer seem matters of particular interest to the Green Party, a development that appears to have passed Labour by. The pivot of the election was better understood by Jeremy Corbyn, announcing the need to vote Green to “defeat Reform, defeat the fascists and the racists”, which, translated out of Leftspeak, means parties addressing ethnic British voters and their collective interests as openly as the Greens so effectively did for their own new voters. In this, given the legal restrictions and political taboos against overt ethnic mobilization of the British electoral majority, progressives currently possess the upper hand, permitted to engage in open ethnic pandering while condemning the same approach for their Right-wing rivals. How long either of these political norms, a relic of Britain’s stable Nineties demographics, can last will determine the politics of the coming years. The radicalizing effect of the “Boriswave” and of the dispersal of boat migrants among parts of Britain previously unaffected by mass migration, causing race riots in Middlesbrough and protest marches in deep Middle England, lay in disrupting the unspoken, indeed accelerating ethnic segregation of provincial British life. What was hitherto politely implicit is increasingly becoming the central matter of Westminster politics.

For now, in any case, the Green coalition has proved a winning one. Yet, as Your Party has found in its struggle balancing narrow ideological zealots on the one hand, and British Muslims on the other, the alliance of young white progressives and South Asian Muslims is an inherently unstable one on matters other than defeating the Right in elections. It is, simply, a marriage of polling convenience rather than a political philosophy. All the internal contradictions displayed by Labour’s marriage of soft-Left social progressives attempting to represent religious social conservatives is true of both Your Party and the Greens, with each now possessing a far narrower electoral base than Labour at its height, given the near-wholesale defection of the white working class to Reform. Cannibalizing the Labour vote in urban districts containing a specific demographic cocktail of white progressives and South Asian Muslims is a strategy with a ceiling: one that can certainly topple Labour as the dominant party of the Left, but is unlikely to deliver the country.

Yet Reform, too, suffer from their own unstable electoral coalition, of white working-class Labour defectors, married to interventionist economic policies, and its largely Thatcherite lower-middle and middle-class voter base stretching inland from the party’s Eastern England Saxon Shore. If they are to sweep the country, in a political context increasingly shaped by ethnic mobilization, then it is ethnic British voters as a whole, including Liberal Democrats in their tacitly homogenous enclaves, to whom they will have to appeal. Doing so may be a harder task than winning the Red Wall, though further Green success, now that the collapse of the two mass parties of a vanished Britain appears certain, may yet work in Reform’s favor: it is risky to assume that in a direct contest between the two, the wavering British center will ultimately choose the Greens.

Certainly, the “sectarianism” discourse now apparent from political commentators who would shudder to be associated with Reform hints at a growing disquiet with the Greens’ open courting of ethnic bloc votes. Yet it is really no different, in its essential form, to the same process that once worked for Labour, to the absurd ethnic pandering of Tory politicians like Bob Blackman to the Hindu nationalist vote, or indeed to the claim by Zack Polanski, in his previous Liberal Democrat incarnation, that a vote for the Lib Dems is “a vote for Israel and a vote for Judaism”. The Greens have not advanced any particularly religious policies, and are unlikely to do so, given the fragile nature of their electoral coalition. If the issue is that British Muslim voters, of mostly South Asian origin, are an increasingly important electoral bloc, then the issue with which centrist commentators are increasingly perturbed is one of demographic change itself, rather than its second-order religious accretions. In just the same way, Reform’s recent pledge to forbid the conversion of disused churches into mosques is not a matter of bringing them back into Christian usage but of preventing their passing into the hands of the demographic “Other”: the issue is an ethnic rather than religious one, with religion functioning as a barely euphemistic marker. The charge of “sectarianism”, Greens are correct to observe, is here merely a dog-whistle for British politics increasingly centering around the questions posed by demographic changes which centrists are unwilling to otherwise notice, let alone navigate.

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The reshaping of Westminster politics into a battleground between the party of limitless open borders on the one hand, and of mass deportations on the other, will make overt what British political taboos still barely manage to keep implicit. If Reform are the Conservative Party’s DUP, a populist party cannibalizing the mainstream conservative vote on ethnic lines, then, even in the months since I first wrote about mainland Britain’s Ulsterization, Reform have already found in Restore its TUV, an even more Rightward challenger which may, as demographic anxieties proceed, eventually come to cannibalize its vote. The Green victory in Gorton and Denton accelerates Labour’s demise, but Reform’s strong second showing — and the demographic patterns underlying it — should be of at least equal note to Westminster commentators, who would be better examining the country like anthropologists than psephologists.

Rather than civil war, as darkly hinted at by Danny Kruger should Reform fail to win office, the more likely outcome is simply the formalization of voting along ethnic lines in highly segregated communities, and the consequent foregrounding of symbolic politics — of flags and monuments and the jealous rivalry over communal space — in areas where the two politically opposing voting blocs about each other. Gorton and Denton, a demographic bellwether for all Britain, acts as a crystal ball in which our near future can be divined. Both the Greens and Reform are able, for now, to ride the polarization of their supporters into Westminster. But for both the risk, as these dynamics accelerate, is that each of their new voter bases may soon enough outgrow them. It may not be the form of politics the parties of the Westminster center would wish for, but it is the one they have gifted us, before they finally shuffle off the stage.

Back home, however, things feel anything but open. Over recent months, this has been most clear in Sweida, a southern town rocked by anti-government protests. Sweida is home to many Syrian Druze, a syncretic faith born out of Shi’ism, and which claims the loyalty of 3% of Syrians. The protesters waved Israeli flags, and for the first time in Syria’s history demanded self-determination. They have also set up their own “national” guard, born out of the militias that enforced order during the long years of civil war.

No one apart from Israel — which has been lobbying Washington for a weak Syria — wants to see the Balkanization of the country. Al-Sharaa himself is now distancing his country from the putative Abraham Accords. The Americans, certainly, are keen on stability, and have stepped in to avert a civil war. The fact al-Sharaa took time out of his busy New York schedule to meet both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General David Petraeus, the ex-commander of US forces in Iraq, certainly hints at the hopes the White House now places in him.

Be that as it may, the Sweida violence suggests a country spiraling out of control, as do rumors of a resurgent Assadism on the coast. Yet in the end, such pessimism would be to misdiagnose the unrest. For the chaos is not an aberration, a disaster to be averted, but rather represents the birth pangs of a process long underway: the Sunnification of Syria. Whatever al-Sharaa’s claims, as he enjoys the world’s attention in Manhattan, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new Sunni state — and not the pluralist nation that foreign analysts might like to imagine.

Outsiders often read the Syrian revolution as romantically simple: the people rose up against the tyrant, and after years of brutal struggle finally secured their freedom. But that overlooks other interpretations, especially when it comes to religion. The Syrian conflict, after all, was also about the long-oppressed Sunni majority versus the Alawite minority — another heterodox offshoot of Islam to which the Assad dynasty belonged. Viewed through that lens, the fall of Damascus, and al-Sharaa’s own triumph, was merely the culmination of Sunni empowerment.

I witnessed these tensions first hand, in 2009, while I was teaching business English to staff at the Syrian National Bank. By then, I had lived in the country long enough to discern a student’s sectarian background through dress, mannerisms, attitudes. My classroom reflected the country: Sunnis — including Kurds — made up around 70%; Christians 10%, Druze 3%; and Alawites 13%. The students were all supposedly supportive of the stern-looking president, Bashar al-Assad, whose portrait hung in every room, paid their salaries, and claimed to run the country under the banner of Baathism, a secular pan-Arab socialist ideology which didn’t care about your sectarian affiliation.

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That, of course, was a lie. The Assad dynasty had stayed in power for 50 years by pitting the resentments and fears of the various sects against each other. They promoted Sunni clerics to positions of influence, based Syrian family law on Islamic jurisprudence, even married into a Sunni family — as Bashar did — yet still kept Sunnis out of power. All the while, they propagated the message that only they could protect minorities from Sunni tyranny. It was not uncommon for pro-government rallies to come with banners declaring “no to sectarianism”, the implication being that Sunni domination would result in the marginalization of Christians and others.

Such sectarianism also played out in my classroom. On exam day, no matter how hard the Sunni employees studied, or how rigorously I marked the papers — the Alawite students and those connected to the government would end up top of the class, with the results bitterly accepted by the Sunnis. Of course, I didn’t have the courage to make an issue of it. All of us, whether Syrian or not, knew what happened to the unruly. The horrors of Tadmor prison lived alongside us, as did slaughters of 1982, when the Hafez al-Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the central Syrian town of Hama.

In 2011, that brittle sectarian order shattered. Bashar al-Assad repeated his father’s strategy and tried to crush the Sunni-led discontent. The Sunnis, in turn, went from peaceful demonstrations during Friday prayers to violent insurrection, with al-Qaeda-affiliated Ahmed al-Sharaa being one of the rebellion’s most effective leaders. Eventually, his victory came not from the international community, but from a rebellious Sunni redoubt of Idlib, a small town in northern Syria which prided itself on having quite literally thrown a sandal at Hafez al-Assad. The Sunnis, in short, had helped themselves to power: or so they told themselves.

Throughout all this, Syria’s minorities were in an impossible situation. Should they side with the tyrant they knew, or with the revolutionaries, some of whom were jihadists? At the same time, they were bombarded with regime propaganda, plenty of it real. Sunni Islamists, after all, had massacred the Druze at Qalb Lozeh in 2015, and ISIS had attacked them at Sweida. Christians, for their part, had their churches desecrated, their people killed or kidnapped. The prospect of joining the revolutionaries, then, was not as clear-cut as it seemed to many Sunnis. But with victory going to al-Sharaa’s forces, even neutrality could be interpreted as complicity, especially given the terrors Assad had inflicted on Sunni civilians.

Out of this sectarian chaos came Ahmad al-Sharaa. He was a jihadist, aggressively Sunni, who believed that minorities like the Alawites should not only renounce their support for Assad, but also their “heretic” faiths. Yet by 2017, al-Sharaa was courting Druze and Christian leaders in his newly established “Salvation” government in Idlib. Either he had changed — or he was just a political Machiavel.

Whatever the case, al-Sharaa reversed a lot of the damage that his group had been responsible for. On 10 June 2022, for instance, he visited Qalb Lozeh. Many Druze in the area had been forced to convert to Islam, the better to escape the clutches of Sunni extremism. In a marked departure from his earlier rhetoric, however, al-Sharaa publicly assured Druze leaders that there is no compulsion in religion, and that they were free to practice their faith without fear. This statement sent a strong signal to his followers that his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group was changing.

Indeed, according to an informative new book on HTS, its political evolution is not unlike that of far-Right groups in Europe. To wield power, explain its authors Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon, al-Sharaa had to move to the center. Of course, there are still radicals on the periphery, but he increasingly relied on a broad Sunni populism over hardcore ideologues. Extremists — notably Osama Qasem, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once celebrated for his ties to al-Qaeda — were compelled to step down after being deemed a “liability”.

In al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was also a clue as to how the new Syria might look. His rump in Idlib was essentially a Sunni proto-state, as al-Sharaa transferred power from the warlords to a civilian government, run by a new generation of Islamist technocrats, each intimately connected to al-Sharaa himself. Certainly, Syria’s interim president has followed a similar path once he eventually took power in Damascus, filling state institutions, long hollowed out by Assad, with his own supporters, friends and family.

Maybe that explains why the Gulf kingdoms, which initially viewed al-Sharaa with deep suspicion due to his Islamism, eventually came round. Perhaps, they thought, he was someone who wanted to build a state not unlike their own — conservative, authoritarian, anti-Iran and pro-stability, all elements the emirs could work with. And, what was more, none of this contravened Sunni Islamic jurisprudence: which, as its long history testifies, has always taken a pragmatic approach to wielding power. Sunni Islam, as historians like Marshall Hodgson have shown, is quietist by temperament, and has happily lived alongside caliphs, sultans and presidents.

At the same time, al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was not intolerant of minorities. That was clear enough in his rapprochement with the Druze and Christians, but also his ban on the notorious jizya payments — a tax levied on non-Muslims for protection and exemption from military service.

By the time Damascus fell, Haenni and Drevon write, Syria’s minorities had gone from “dhimmis [protected minorities] no more” to “citizens not yet”. And if that hints at the ambiguous status they enjoy in the new Syria, al-Sharaa’s country is also being shaped by forces not directly under his control. Once again, the experience of Idlib is revealing here. Under years of Islamist rule, the rural hinterland had inevitably become more conservative. Meanwhile, Druze who had initially converted out of fear found that their children had forgotten the tenets of their faith, and prayed and fasted like Sunnis.

Yet if the Sunnification of northern Syria had begun long before the Assads finally fled, this must once again be tempered by al-Sharaa’s apparent moderation. When I last visited Idlib, in March 2025, it was a bustling town like any other, albeit with the occasional shop selling Kalashnikovs. There was no religious police enforcing the hijab, and shops remained open when the call for prayer came, just as they had before the revolution. Islamic laws were adhered to because people in Idlib — devout or not — accepted them. In post-Assad Damascus, too, life continued as before. In the Christian quarter of the Old City, alcohol was available in the bars, just as it had always been, and I suspect this will remain the case.

That’s shadowed elsewhere too. Al-Sharaa has repeatedly emphasized that the Syrian people are one. By March, when the interim government drafted its 2025 constitutional declaration, it confirmed that Syria would remain a republic, its president would be a Muslim and the republic’s source of law was Islamic jurisprudence. All the while, minorities and their personal beliefs were protected. All this is based on the 1973 constitution, and affirmed the secular social contract first drafted by the Assads.

Even so, and as the constitutional primacy of Muslims implies, Sunnis will ultimately shape Syria’s future. In many ways, it didn’t matter whether they’re Islamists, devout Sunnis or liberals. Most Syrian Sunnis, after all, are small “c” conservatives, traumatized by war and shaped by the fight against Assad. This has glued them together, allowing them to stand alone if need be.

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This Sunni supremacism has manifested itself in other ways too. For one thing, Friday sermons have become overtly Sunni in tone. Hezbollah — a Shia militant group — is referred to as Hizb al-Shaytan (“the party of the devil”). Black and white flags emblazoned with the Islamic declaration of faith, long associated with jihadists, are waved by Sunnis as they go about their business. When the bastion of traditional Sunnism Sheikh Osama al-Rifai — someone who has often disagreed with al-Sharaa in the past — returned from exile in January, he received a rockstar’s welcome. In fact, al-Sharaa appointed him the grand mufti of Syria.

All the while, the war’s aftershocks have continued to play out. In February, former Assadists tried to foment a counter-revolution of sorts, resulting in massacres of Alawites near the coastal city of Latakia. Sunni revanchism soon followed, and old scores were settled: former Assadists, paramilitaries and Alawite officers, who had raped and tortured Sunnis, were killed and buried in unknown graves. But so too were many innocent Alawites, simply caught up in the violence, with the sect increasingly seen as a fifth column. The Druze in Sweida have faced similar troubles. After the summer’s violence, Druze leaders accused al-Sharaa of siding with Sunni Bedouins: but then committed political suicide by calling for Israeli support and demanding self-determination. In the eyes of many Sunnis, they, like the Alawites, are edging towards treason.

In the end, though, Syria’s process of Sunnification will conclude only if Damascus manages to incorporate the Kurds into the new state. Most Kurds are Sunnis, and though they have spent years fighting the Arab majority, Damascus could probably bring them on board more easily than the country’s religious minorities. Mazloum Abadi — head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and one of the de facto leaders of the Kurdish enclave in Syria’s north — is a formidable political operator. But he is fast running out of political road. For one thing, the PKK, the SDF’s sister organization in Turkey, has disbanded. For another, the US have abandoned Abadi in favor of al-Sharaa, and if the former seeks support from Israel, or allies himself with the Druze, he’ll soon become discredited. The SDF, then, are outgunned both militarily and diplomatically, and the resources required to restart another civil war seem politically out of reach.

Either way, each of these stories — Druze unrest, Alawite reprisals, Kurdish bargaining — all point the same way: towards a Sunni majoritarian state. That doesn’t mean Syria will become an Islamist theocracy. But it does likely mean that pluralism, minority rights and perhaps even democracy itself will operate within a conservative Sunni framework. Whether that’s better or worse for the exhausted people of Syria will probably depend on where and how you pray.

“Normalcy bias is very powerful,” says David Betz. “It keeps people in their homes when they’re warned Category 5 hurricanes are coming at them.” Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. He’s pretty sure that civil war is coming. Not a civil war that we have been trained to recognize. There will be no ordered forces of uniformed troops, no Edgehill or Gettysburg. He foresees something messier, perhaps even more painful, like an abscessed tooth fragmenting in the mouth.

Betz speaks in calm, measured tones. There is very little umming or ahhhing. He quietly explains why what counts as normal in many Western countries today — the UK, the US, France, to name a few — has created ideal conditions for mass violence, dissolving government authority, and even social collapse. The factors at play are varied. The alarming thing is that they are all present at the same time. “To use the cliché,” Betz says, “it’s kind of a perfect storm.”

Anyone with eyes, no matter their political sympathies, knows that something is badly askew. Perhaps this is why Betz’s recent podcast appearance — 186,000 views, and climbing — received so much attention. So often, it is the little things. Visiting London last December, I noticed that the platform waiting room at Acton Town tube station had been locked. A sign on the door read: “THIS IS NOT A TOILET”. I passed that way again this week, to discover the door still locked and the sign still in place. The sign is wrong, of course. If a waiting room is consistently used as a toilet, then it’s no longer a waiting room. It is a toilet.

Everyone has their own examples of this granular decay. Think of the rats, so plump off Birmingham rubbish they’re now the size of cats; or the metal security tags protecting $4 fish fillets; or the depthless cringe of police officers who dress up as Batman and Robin to catch con artists within spitting distance of Parliament.

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Betz works with larger themes. Falling living standards and a dearth of well-paid jobs create an “expectation gap”, seeding resentment and apathy through whole generations. The creeping normalization of identitarian factionalism across British life, both daily and political, weakens our ability to function as a coherent nation. Unprecedented levels of immigration produce growing anxiety in the majority population, an anxiety that may metastasize into something darker. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Betz brings up a rising crisis of government legitimacy: “The primary thing to be tested is legitimacy. If you have legitimacy, you have no insurgent problem. If you don’t, you are very likely to have an insurgent problem. It’s as simple as that.”

In his academic work, Betz has described legitimacy as a kind of magic spell. If polls are anything to go by, it’s a spell that has now been well and truly broken: a record 45% of Brits “almost never” trust the government to put the nation first. As the academic says: “There has been a collapse in trust over the course of a generation.” The once awesome magus has been revealed as a syphilitic old soak, his robes stained sacking, his staff a rolled newspaper. Public trust in politicians, then, is at an all-time low (“Journalists aren’t much more trusted,” he adds in a wry aside), but Betz is deeply worried that faith in all kinds of institutions is diminishing rapidly.

There are often very good reasons for this trust deficit, especially in areas like crime and punishment. Take the recent furor over sentencing. “It’s ridiculous to deny that we have a two-tier justice system,” Betz says. “Just last week, the Justice Secretary said the sentencing guidelines are two-tier. Which begs the question of what a Justice Secretary is for… It’s outrageous.” Things are no better at the other end of the justice system. “Our police establishment is not neutral. It’s heavily politically biased,” he says, even as the Met fails to solve any neighborhood crime across swathes of the capital.

No trust means no legitimacy. And that’s when everything begins to unravel. Central government loses its gravitational pull on the populace, which proceeds to drift off into its constituent parts. If the state ceases to offer stability and justice, then people will do as the Romano-Britons did, and look to their own defense. There have been clues as to what this might mean in the coming years.

A recent video, purportedly from New Eltham, shows a street lined with Union flags. This is a perfectly normal sight in East Belfast, but comes as a surprise in South London. Perhaps it shouldn’t. The “Ulsterisation” of Britain in a purely visual sense — flags, murals, a repertoire of annual events designed to affirm and renew control over territory — might be welcomed by some as a simple acknowledgment of lived reality in many parts of the country. But the term means much more than a few flags snapping in the breeze. MacNeice called Ulster “the limbo lands”, a place unhappily webbed with competing claims and warring histories, never quite one thing and never quite the other. The danger is that this becomes Britain’s future too, with all that fate implies.

Betz thinks that conflict, widespread and devastating enough to qualify as a form of civil war, is now close to inevitable. “I don’t see an off-ramp from this,” he tells me. As MacNeice had it, “The bloody frontier converges on our beds / Like jungle beaters closing in on their destined / Trophy of pelts and heads.” Betz favors the work of another Irish poet. He quotes, as many have before him, W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”. The sickening vertigo of the falcon “turning and turning in the widening gyre”, beyond reason or recall, is a seven-word summary of Betz’s argument.

It is impossible to predict when this war will start, or what the inciting events might be. But Betz is pretty sure how it will be fought. Attacks on key infrastructure, most of it protected by no more than a locked door and a symbolic fence — gas compression stations, electricity substations, telecommunications cables, and the like — will be used to devastate cities and frustrate government attempts to restore order. Another Ulster parallel shows the effectiveness of these tactics. In March and April 1969, Loyalist paramilitaries bombed an electricity substation and a series of water installations, resulting in serious water shortages across Belfast. The Northern Irish prime minister of the time, Terence O’Neill, resigned on 1 May. O’Neill was beset by a great many problems, but he was in no doubt that those assaults on infrastructure dealt the final blow to his premiership. They were “explosions which quite literally blew me out of office”.

It doesn’t take a William Gibson to imagine the effect a similar, more prolonged campaign would have on London or Liverpool. “Cities will be dark, cold, rioting and unpoliced,” says Betz. The police barely managed to contain the 2011 London riots, a relatively small blister of disorder compared to the trouble he sees coming. “On any given night in 2011, there were maybe 200 really active rioters. Imagine that but 10 or 20 times worse, several thousand people rioting in a hardcore manner. And not just once, but every two weeks.” Any attempt to impose martial law would fail, given the military’s ever-shrinking manpower: “There’s no potential for the British army to respond to wide-scale civil disorder.”

Life would be desperate in those cold and lightless cities, returning us to earlier epochs but without the knowledge and materials that made such eras bearable. I think about the time I lost my glasses, and had replacements delivered within the week. Or about a friend with diabetes, who monitors her condition using a smartphone app and has an insulin pen in her handbag. All that would go, along with the cucumbers and the buses, the postmen and the bars of soap. The preppers would be all right for a time, until cold and hungry people discovered what they had, and took it from them. Betz observes that it wouldn’t be long before people start trying to heat their houses and apartments with whatever they have to hand — and once that starts, buildings will go up in flames. “Imagine,” he says, “half a dozen Grenfell Towers in a single winter.”

If Betz is correct in his analysis, then why aren’t preparations being made by the Government? The logical answer is that politicians lack both the ability and the desire to do their jobs. But there are some conscientious people in the British state. Betz has spoken to individuals within the security services who have reached similar conclusions to him, but “they’re embedded within a system that makes it practically impossible to address it openly… They’re very leery of thinking out loud, let alone planning for those contingencies, without a civil directive. It would take a very brave — morally brave — senior British police officer or military figure [to start planning], and it would probably be career-ending.”

Naturally, many in power simply don’t believe that prolonged mass violence is probable. The UK Government’s resilience website lists hazards ranging from severe weather to terrorism, but makes no mention of civil unrest, while Libération reports that a forthcoming French preparedness booklet will be primarily concerned with natural disasters. Perhaps politicians realize that any mention of civil war in an official publication would be a PR catastrophe. Or maybe they view Western citizens as simply too cosseted, too biddable. People raised amid relative plenty and security are simply not likely to erupt in significant numbers.

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Some might argue that this is especially true of Britain. The historian Robert Tombs writes that “as long as its present civilization lasts, England will not have a violent revolution, or a military coup, or a religious civil war”. The institutions and peoples of Britain, so the thinking goes, have profited from an English genius for innovation, adaptation, and compromise. In consequence, our island has been unusually stable for a thousand years. The key words, of course, are as long as its present civilization lasts. While it’s true that we have inherited a well of cool water, it’s not clear that we’ve continued to draw from it in recent times. It is also true, as Tombs himself points out, that the English are given to “a complacent and often apathetic assumption bred by a fortunate history that nothing seriously bad can happen”. This is one quintessentially Anglo characteristic that appears to be in rude health.

And if the prophets of eternal stability are proved wrong, there’s still room for hope. In How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, Professor Barbara F. Walter offers a number of strategies for pulling fragmented and unstable societies back from the brink. Leaders should seek compromise. Quality of governance should be improved, and be seen to be improving. Extremism should be combated, particularly where it has taken root in the state’s security apparatus. Efforts should be made to move towards “a truly multiethnic democracy”. Social media should be controlled in order to prevent pernicious factionalism: “Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls…” It all sounds very sensible. The problem, I suppose, is that countries on the brink of civil war don’t tend to be very sensible places.

Whether or not you find Betz’s arguments convincing, the chilling fact is that he doesn’t need to be wholly right. It seems to me that if even 20% of what he predicts does happen, then our lives will change, utterly and for the worse. For most of us, that would mean a smaller and more brutal world. There are so many variables that it’s a future almost impossible to plan for. Even so, Betz does have one piece of advice. “I’m a late middle-aged university professor, not a prepper,” he concedes. “I’m not sitting around planning my apocalyptic endgames… but for what it’s worth, I think anybody living in big cities — anybody in, say, London or Birmingham — should leave.”

It is difficult to consider a world so devoid of hope. Walking to Tesco’s in the spring sunshine, I feel my own normalcy bias bite. Do I really believe any of this? Surely things can’t be as bad as all that? Yet this uncritical faith in endless stability is precisely why we have arrived at a point where so many people are so angry, an anger that seems to be building by the month. I go home and open Autumn Journal again: “And so to my flat with the trees outside the window / And the dahlia shapes of the lights on Primrose Hill / Whose summit once was used for a gun emplacement / And very likely will / Be used that way again…”

To tell the tale of how a modern, multinational European country could slide from normalcy into the terrible vortex of civil war, the drama drew on the personal experience of BBC correspondents during the Balkan Wars of the Nineties. Broadcast in 2019, at the height of the Brexit crisis, when the atmosphere in the UK was indeed that of a cold civil war, the BBC dramatists succeeded in showing not only how little they understood Brexit but also how little their correspondents had learned about the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.

The history of Yugoslavia still provides fodder for fictional accounts of a second British civil war because it offers a convenient moral fable. There is the dangerous allure of nationalism, the pernicious role of charismatic demagogues, and the collapse of multicultural harmony. It is the smug conceit of a liberal West that thought it had escaped history through globalisation and European integration across the Nineties. But now that the story of both Britain’s national decline and Yugoslavia’s collapse looks very different, what — if anything — can the 21st-century British public learn from the collapse of Yugoslavia?

Unsurprisingly, the standard fable bears little correspondence to the historic reality of Yugoslavia’s collapse. While the nationalist passions created during the war were real enough, they were modern rather than deeply historical and were weaponised by the hackish nationalist leaders. More scheming bureaucrat than inspired orator, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević dredged up Serbia’s defeat in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje to reignite Serbian nationalism 600 years later. Seen as the point at which the Serbs martyred themselves before the invading Turks, that tale of rekindled historic grievance was clearly insufficient as an explanation of national collapse. If an independent Scotland ever did go to war against a Rump England, we can be confident that The New York Times would soon be carrying sombre stories about Edward Longshanks and Robert the Bruce, accompanied by chin-stroking editorials about ancient rivalries stretching back to the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn, adorned with quotes from Mel Gibson. But it would not serve as a useful explanation.

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The reality is always more prosaic. Yugoslav ethnic grievances were bound up with centrifugal political dynamics between core and periphery. In 1974, the Yugoslav communist leader Marshal Tito sought to dilute Serbia’s preponderance as the largest constituent republic of the Yugoslav federation by imposing devolved provincial administrations within Serbia itself. This inter-ethnic asymmetry would play out in the collapse of Yugoslavia across the Nineties, as the secession of the smaller republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were all afforded international recognition, while the secession of minority Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia was denied. To this day, the EU protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina expends much of its political energy in keeping Bosnia’s Serb population bound up in that rickety mini-federation, despite the Serbs’ hostility to the central state in Sarajevo.

Thus there is a lesson in Tito’s efforts at constitutional rebalancing. The attempt to boost peripheral smaller nations at the expense of the largest constituent nation risks precipitating a vicious cycle. The rights extended to smaller nations in order to placate and bind them more tightly to the central state can never be extended to the largest nation without disproportionately strengthening it, thereby risking the integrity of the central state. At the same time, the failure to extend the same rights equally across the constituent peoples of the state undermines the reciprocity and equality that is supposed to bind the state together.

We see this dynamic at play in the toing and froing over English representation in the union. Should we establish an English parliament? And what about the constitutional anomaly of the so-called West Lothian question, whereby Scottish and Welsh MPs have a right to legislate on English matters while English MPs do not with respect to Wales and Scotland? Devolution is indeed a nationalist cause, but, unlike in the narrative of First World Problems, not one of a “greater England”. It is the cause of Scottish and Welsh separatism, propped up by English metropolitan liberals who nurture Celtic separatism as a way of checking the despised voters of the English heartland outside of London.

In the Yugoslav situation, there was a critical catalyst which contributed to the process of decentralisation. According to Croatian political scientist Dejan Jović, the Yugoslav Communists’ political commitment to the Marxist “withering away of the state” propelled Yugoslav decentralisation further than mere administrative reforms. It was the Yugoslav federal state that bore the brunt of this forced degeneration, while leaving the constituent republics of the federation intact. Whatever the whining of former prime minister Liz Truss about socialist Britain, there is no Communist Party seeking to shrivel the British state. But there has been a parallel process of state shrivelling in Britain — which ironically was part of the very same neoliberal programme that Truss herself strove to revive.

The neoliberalism espoused by successive Tory leaders from Thatcher through to David Cameron’s tinpot version with the “big society” programme shares with Marxism a commitment to the vanishing state. The difference lies in the timing, function and ultimate end-state. Unlike the Marxian vision, in which under socialism the state is gradually absorbed by civil society itself, the neoliberal version seeks to defeat socialism by stripping back public power, especially state oversight of the national economy. This is done not by working-class revolution, but via state-led privatisation of state-owned industry, integration into the supranational EU, and the devolution of state authority to independent regulatory agencies such as an independent Bank of England or Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). In the neoliberal vision, this shrunken state remains in place to enforce social order — and private property.

In practice, the neoliberals never succeeded in repressing state spending as a proportion of GDP. They did, however, succeed in gouging state capacity and stripping back public authority far beyond their original intent. We can see the results of the neoliberal effort to wither away the British state all around us: in the closure of national industries, dingy high streets with boarded-up shops, pot-holed roads, a crumbling public health service, the disgorging of convicts from prison, and police forces incapable of policing. Instead of a vigorous civil society emerging to supplant the central state, the neoliberal decimation of the state only weakened civil society further — look at how George Osborne’s programme of austerity cascaded state failure across the nation as a whole. Today, a central state still strives to divest itself of its sovereign power. As Rachel Reeves empowers the OBR, Keir Starmer’s localist agenda intends to drive devolution further, all while sidling up to the EU and Nato, the better to outsource Britain’s foreign and defence policies.

Despite enduring a parallel process of state degeneration, Britain enjoys a geopolitical advantage that Yugoslavia did not. As a Nonaligned power perched between East and West, Yugoslavia was left exposed to geopolitical realignment with the end of the Cold War in 1992, and in particular to the hubris of a newly reunified Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided he would signal Germany’s return as a great power by flouting US Secretary of State James Baker’s instruction that no one was to recognise any of the break-away Yugoslav republics. Germany’s recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in 1991 lit the kindling that would send Yugoslavia up in flames. In the end, Yugoslavia burned for nothing as Kohl’s bid for European leadership floundered. The US re-established hegemony over its European allies by leading the Nato bombing campaigns first against the Bosnian Serbs in the Nineties, and then Serbia itself in 1999. Today, Germany lets its own energy infrastructure be bombed.

Here Britain is fortunate. It was our withdrawal from the EU in 2020 that has allowed us to swerve the dystopian scenario of a future civil war. By enforcing the principle of loser’s consent on those who wanted to rejoin the EU, and by undercutting the appeal of Scottish separatism, our withdrawal from the EU preserved the authority of the central British state and, with it, British democracy. If we are to make good on this historic fortune, then we must reverse the process that led us here by an energetic programme of centralised nation-building that will necessarily involve strengthening the state. This does not mean strengthening the state’s already bloated bureaucracy, but rather boosting the state as an authoritative and representative public power. If we can do this, not only can we reap the political blessings of independence, but we might also be spared any more BBC fables about the former Yugoslavia.

The first of these factors, immigration, has brought Leicester into the national spotlight in recent years. Since the Fifties, when small numbers arrived from the Commonwealth, the city has increasingly become known as a place of different cultures and faiths. Some 20,000 South Asians came during the Seventies, not from India but East Africa, where they had settled under the British Empire. Leicester is also home to Somali, Polish and Romanian minorities. But in 2022, the city’s vaunted harmony was ruptured by clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Highfields and the neighbouring Belgrave area. In a foreshadowing of the recent riots that followed the Southport stabbings, authorities in Leicester blamed the unrest on false claims spreading via social media, including rumours of attacks on places of worship and the attempted kidnapping of a Muslim girl. The mayor Peter Soulsby spoke of a campaign to recruit troublemakers from outside the city. But other accounts of the disturbances — including one I heard from a long-standing Gujarati resident in the city — have drawn attention to the recent arrival, via Portugal, of more assertive Hindus from the Indian regions of Daman and Diu.

The spectre of sectarian politics returned at last month’s general election. In Leicester South, the constituency where Highfields is located, former Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth saw his 22,000 majority overturned by an independent, the optometrist Shockat Adam, who channelled the anger of local Muslims over the war in Gaza. Ashworth complained that “I’ve never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation,” saying he was barred from mosques and chased down streets. Meanwhile, the only Conservative gain of the entire election came in Leicester East, apparently confirming the drift of the city’s Hindus towards the Tories.

These ructions may help to explain the suspicion I encountered in Leicester, from both council employees and members of the public. Many people did not want to speak to me or be seen speaking to me. Then again, I saw no signs of religious tension, with the exception of one angry diatribe about immigrants, and that came from an elderly Sikh man who had moved here in the Sixties. Leicester has also remained relatively peaceful during the widespread anti-immigration protests and riots of the past fortnight. Most of my conversations pointed to a different, more material problem raised by immigration: the difficulty of finding housing in a city that is growing rapidly, even as its authorities struggle with overstretched resources.

Recent demographic data for Leicester presents a picture of remarkable change. The city’s population was estimated at about 380,000 last year, a rise of 15% since 2011. The increase in its foreign-born residents has been greater than its overall population growth, suggesting that the latter has mainly been driven by international migration. In a single year to July 2023, the equivalent of 3.6% of the city’s population arrived from overseas. But Leicester has only added 25,000 new houses since 2001, despite gaining four times as many new residents. It is now one of the most densely populated local authorities outside London, a density that its ageing, low-rise housing stock is not well placed to handle.

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One result of this is fierce competition in the rental market. Leicester’s prices are rising even faster than London’s. An estate agent in Highfields told me she had received 10 calls in a matter of hours for a two-bed house at £900 per month, which is above the city average. She also said she did not struggle to find housing for newly arrived immigrants, since they tended to have good jobs — often in the NHS — and to be hard-working, wanting to “make a better life”. It is more difficult, of course, for those in the gig economy. The father of one family I met, who is an Uber driver, told me they had been looking for a one-bed flat in Leicester for six months, having originally moved to London from India in 2022.

Other losers in the housing market are those working for low wages, such as east Leicester’s textile workers. Their situation has become even worse since the local clothing industry was decimated by the Covid pandemic and soaring energy costs. Similar issues exist in white working-class areas in the west of the city. A 21-year-old street cleaner said he was still living with his dad and had no intention of moving. When I asked if this would make it difficult to start a family, he told me he already had a partner and two children there with him. Apparently most of his friends have similar arrangements.

All this has contributed to a surge of claims on the local authority. In 2022, Leicester City Council officially declared a crisis due to the numbers on its waiting lists for social housing, reported to be 6,400 households late last year. Half of those applicants qualify due to overcrowding in their existing homes; I heard of two-bed properties housing as many as 15 people. Yet the council’s ability to provide housing has been steadily undermined by a high uptake of Right to Buy, the Thatcherite policy which allows social tenants to purchase their homes at a discounted rate. It lost nearly 2,000 properties in this way in the five years up to 2022.

Recent years have also seen a dramatic rise in homelessness. Faced with the costs of housing hundreds of homeless families in bed and breakfasts and other temporary accommodation, the council this year borrowed £45 million to buy and rent more properties. It also cited the costs of 1,000 asylum decisions expected this year, and has taken out further loans to accommodate those arriving through humanitarian schemes.

The need for more housing in Leicester is evident; the question is where, and how quickly, it can be built. In theory, the obvious solution is to increase the density of terraced streets like those in Highfields, by building upwards. Yet even with Labour’s much-hyped planning reforms, a city like Leicester has neither the financial capacity nor the policy tools for such a challenge. Instead, it is currently committed to adding around 1,300 new houses annually, a target that is basically unchanged since 2006. The council cites lack of land as a constraint, though there are signs of the inefficiencies that have plagued house-building in Britain more generally. A large development in the north of the city, Ashton Green, received planning permission for 3,000 houses in 2011 (the site had been earmarked since the Seventies), but so far just 208 have been completed.

Housing shortages place heavy strains on the social fabric, and as such, they cannot be neatly separated from Leicester’s recent political convulsions. Few forms of deprivation are as liable to fuel resentment and undermine trust as the lack of a secure home.  Writing in The Guardian, Yohann Koshy suggests that a sense of dwindling resources has given life in the city “an edge of desperation”, as “communities compete for what remains”. In his victory speech, the new Leicester South MP Shockat Adam declared “this is for the people of Gaza”, but he has since claimed that “when I spoke at events or on my campaign trail, housing was the number-one issue”. Progressives rightly emphasise the impact of austerity on local authorities since 2010, which has left places like Leicester unable to handle issues such as unemployment, overcrowding and homelessness. The on-going consequences of Liz Truss’ disastrous financial experiment have made these significantly worse. But the charge sheet against Westminster must also include immigration policy.

Whatever one thinks of mass immigration in cultural or economic terms, the fact is that successive governments have rapidly increased the country’s population with no realistic plan for housing it with dignity. These were deeply irresponsible decisions, contributing to the return of slum conditions in many parts of Britain. The recent outbreaks of violence against migrants will only make politicians more reluctant to acknowledge the link between immigration and housing shortages; and yet, while this certainly leaves an open goal for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, it is foolish to imagine that only those who consider themselves native Brits will feel aggrieved. In British cities, it is often immigrants and the children of immigrants who must bear the instability of large, chaotic population flows, denying them the opportunity to put down roots. Leicester is a clear example of this, as the struggle for affordable housing afflicts a population that is well over 40% foreign-born.

However, Leicester’s recent experience also points to changes unfolding beyond urban Britain. When the city’s council said it was unable to meet new housing targets in 2020, an agreement was reached for an “overspill” of 18,700 houses be built in surrounding parts of Leicestershire instead. For some local authorities, such as Blaby and North West Leicestershire, this means doubling their existing housebuilding quotas up to 2036. This has not been without controversy. Local news is full of scare stories about housing developments swamping small villages and golf courses, while several Conservative MPs with constituencies bordering Leicester have protested the overspill scheme. Neil O’Brien, who represents Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, demanded that the city “meet its own housing needs locally, rather than dump it onto surrounding districts”.

Such tensions between city, suburb, town and countryside were bound to be a result of Britain’s housing shortfall. They have now reappeared at a national level, as Labour’s newly announced formulas shift housebuilding quotas from inner cities to less built-up (and less reliably Labour-voting) areas. These plans will doubtless meet with plenty of local friction, but the overall trajectory is already clear. Visit an affluent, medium-sized British town with decent transport links — a town such as Market Harborough, in O’Brien’s constituency, which is 15 minutes from Leicester and an hour from London — and the chances are that you will see redbrick new-builds going up around its outskirts. Given their available and affordable land, these places will inevitably be the focus of development over the next decades.

And they will become more of a destination for migration as well. Since their residents skew older and wealthier, there is demand for the kinds of service jobs and social care positions that many new arrivals occupy. At the same time, they will continue attracting middle-class Brits from immigrant backgrounds, who are doing as the middle classes always do and moving outwards from the suburbs. Since the post-war era, the story of migration to Britain has been dominated by urban, often relatively deprived areas like Highfields; the next chapter will also be set in leafy satellite towns.

Through it the nameless suburbs found form and attachment, the beautiful game rooted in every working-class community. Much has been made of its religious form; the real physical presence, the holy grail, the communal singing but for the churches in slum areas their interests were more prosaic. It was a form for resisting the demonic temptations of the new order; drink, avarice and sloth, praising instead fitness, teamwork and skill. It was a form of virtue to take on vice.

In Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool, football was also an expression of the sectarian divisions that characterised those cities, expressing, in England at least, an almost forgotten part of our Christian heritage. In Newcastle, Sunderland and Leeds the cities found an expression of civic loyalty and pride through a club that expressed their character. It was a distinctive addition to the civic ecology, an institution rooted in place and carrying its name.

Football allowed all that was denied by the routinisation of life and work. It allowed for love and hate, for a wordless beauty, the longing for glory, the shared witness of a momentary miracle, communal celebration and shared grief. When I was growing up, the contempt for people who left early, when we were losing was striking. And through that, my grasp of the English language expanded. A single shot could slay Goliath. Swindon could beat Arsenal. Don Rodgers, frozen in eternity. Once established, the football club became a permanent part of the urban firmament. Its status was always threatened by competition but supported by association. Love and hate.

In a deindustrialised and desecrated society, football clubs recognised that the bonds of affection and attachment that lurked around in the lives of their supporters could be easily financialised. For those exiled from their homes, with loyalty passed down through families, the sense of attachment became even more intense.

And this is a capitalist story of commodification: the transformation of something that wasn’t produced for sale — human beings, nature, or, it turned out a football club — into something available for sale on the open market. The European Super League was a logical development of that. The clubs who signed up to it are no longer owned by their members but by hedge funds, oligarchs and despots, the relationship with community and place replaced by television rights and branded shirt sales. And the move was logical because the logic of capital is that of both commodification and of oligarchy, towards the elimination of competition and the securing of permanent revenue streams in order to reduce risk. Towards concentration not competition, which explains the oligarchs.

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The maximisation of returns and the minimisation of risk is the core strategy of any established corporation. By freezing a hierarchy at a particular moment, by banning relegation, the Super League took the classic form of cartelisation.

In many ways, it is a consolidation of a long-term trend towards a disembedded and disembodied spectacle, mediated by television. The terrible reality of lockdown is that it dispelled the idea that the presence of fans was required in order to secure viewers. The script has been developed for a while. The Champions League need not be won by champions, but those who finish in the top four. Blowing the group phase need not eliminate the cash flow of European competition, just entry into the Europa League.

The thrill of games between European teams with their own traditions and styles was homogenised into clashes between large corporations drawing from the same managerial and player pool. Commodification is the process from virtue to the virtual. VAR was part of this trend, as the power was no longer in the ground, but removed to somewhere else. The crowd was silenced in two ways. The joy of scoring was tempered by the arbitrary judgement of Stockley Park, a secluded judgement from afar decides your fate. From within the ground came the verdict, “It’s not football any more”. And then the fans were gone.

I’ve been Spurs since before I can remember, it is a covenantal commitment. It links me to the dead, players and fans, Danny Blanchflower, my Uncle Sid and Peter Cook, as well as to those yet to be born in a community of fate, bound by shared memory and the eternal desire for glory. Like all clubs, we have our saints, Steve Perryman and Bill Nicholson, and our sinners, Sol Campbell and Terry Neil.

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By signing up to a cartel, we did not even deserve to be part of, Spurs broke a covenantal promise. Our objection to Arsenal is not only that they are from Woolwich but that they cheated us of a deserved promotion by rigging the composition of the new First Division in 1918.  And now Spurs wanted to be part of a rigged system that abolished relegation.  “we’re not Tottenham any more”.

I was born in the year that Spurs reached its perfect platonic form, the double winning team of 1960-61. A team born of the epiphany that Bill Nicholson experienced when watching the Hungarian national team beat England 6-3 in 1953. It was a full religious experience, he couldn’t sleep for three days and nights while he pondered over what he had seen and over the next eight years he worked on building that at Spurs. I never saw that team, but its memory permeated my childhood. The sacking of Jose Mourinho does not diminish his hostility to that tradition, his desecration of it. For all its history, Spurs were a distinctive member of the football family. Vulnerable, flaky, yet capable of glory. Blanchflower, Hoddle, Ardiles, Gascoigne, Dembele, Ndombele. Whatever the number they wore, the number 8 was the distinction, the midfield maestro. And Harry Winks can’t carry that cross. We have betrayed others, but also ourselves.

Love is a sublime faithful relationship with another person. It is a strange emotion to feel towards an institution that is committed to securitised income. I have tried to subject my love for Spurs to some kind of critical scrutiny; when we floated on the stock exchange, when the Premier League was founded. But I could not break the bond, and still it remains. What does astonish me is that I am not alone in this, that despite Marx’s teaching that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air and everything holy is profaned”, the sense of association, of tradition, of belonging still endures.

Ten years ago, I worked with Jon Cruddas and Clive Efford in developing a Labour policy for supporter representation on the boards of clubs. There was a strong sense of dispossession felt by football fans, particularly intense in the Premier League among supporters of Manchester United, Liverpool and Newcastle. From shirt and ticket prices, to the selling off of training grounds, to the emergence of foreign oligarchs who skewed the market. In the lower leagues, the feeling was more intense, that their civic inheritance was being plundered by a very dirty capitalism. The story of Wigan Athletic is a case study in the pathologies of globalisation and the Pharaonic nature of the pyramid. We developed this along with supporters groups and adopted the German model so that they would have a veto on pricing in terms of merchandising and kit, as well as the first option to buy if the club was sold. It was an attempt to re-embed the clubs in their place and with their support. It was also an attempt to limit the domination of money in the decisions of an institution that was not simply a commodity.

If globalisation is understood as the process through which finance capital escapes the bonds of domestic constraints in order to maximise returns, then the establishment of the Premier League created globalisation in one country. The response of the Premier League to our proposals was hostile and aggressive. They were proud of the model they had developed in which minimal regulation led to increasing global market share. By attracting foreign investment, the brand and the revenue grew. To have fans on the board was seen as nostalgic and an impediment to growth. We were accused of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and they were offended by the suggestion that they were fouling their own nest.

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Andrea Agnelli who, along with Florentino Perez, was the chief instigator of the Super League, was sure it was compliant with EU Law — but hadn’t noticed that the political era had changed from the heady days of uncontested globalisation. The Premier League had grown its market share with a new kind of owner in Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, who had secured their income streams through oil or gas, and were more interested in their reputation and power. PSG are also in that mode.

Agnelli and Perez knew that unless they securitised their income stream, the domination of their national leagues and European competition would be jeopardised by investors who were not concerned with money, but with power. One of the most widely quoted sayings in Italy is from Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard in which Tancredi says that “for things to stay the same everything must change”. Without the eternal backing that only states can bring, and with lockdown strangling match day revenue and sales, they made their move. But it relied on the English clubs to buy into it, and it is significant that Manchester City and Chelsea, the clubs least dependent on market share, were the first to withdraw. They recognised that the political consensus had shifted.

Boris Johnson hadn’t led a referendum on the basis of take back control and transformed the class basis of the Conservative Party in order to bow to the inevitable logic of globalisation. The new consensus is based on a greater economic role for the nation state, an increased importance of working-class voters and the places where they live. He immediately threatened to drop a “legislative bomb”, the call went through to the UAE to back off the proposal.

The threat of expulsion from the Premiership, withdrawal of police support on match days and the refusal to approve work permits were brought into play. By last Tuesday night all six English clubs had withdrawn their support leaving Agnelli and Perez stranded in the breach with nothing but their debts for company. It’s no wonder they blame Brexit.

There was no political response from the governments of Italy and Spain, no sustained opposition from their fans. But here it was different. It seems that the owners of the clubs only spoke to each other and shared nothing of their plans with the management or players, let alone the fans. There is now a consensus that this was a travesty that could repeat again unless changes are made.

The European Super League expressed the ultimate consequence of the domination of the financial interest alone, towards oligarchy and commodification and the elimination of competition and association. It is only through the transformation of governance through the equal representation on fans on boards that the broken covenant can be salvaged. Central to that is the notion that a football club is not simply a commodity, but an inheritance that cannot be trusted to the owners. They have acted in bad faith and are in breach of trust.

Without constraints, capitalism will eat itself, it will steal what it did not create and then destroy it. It is the fans who carry the tradition and must be trusted to save football from its owners by being given a golden share on strategic issues. In order to stay the same everything must change. La lotta continua.