In modern Ireland, as the writer Alexander Poots notes, what is most remarkable to English eyes is “chiefly the matter-of-fact way in which the supernatural is discussed”, a diminution of the spectral realm to that of minor inconvenience. At one family party, for example, I was told the story of an otherwise no-nonsense in-law bothered by a ghost that kept pulling the bedcovers off in the early hours of the morning. His eventual response, shouting out “Will ye piss away off ye wee ghostie, I’m trying to get some sleep here”, was apparently successful in quietening the unquiet dead. What made the story worth sharing was the Ulster-Scots-tinged homeliness of his Antrim dialect, amusing to Belfast ears: the role of the ghost itself was assumed as an unexceptional domestic irritant. 

But do I believe in ghosts? It would be difficult to maintain the pose of a dispassionate and level-headed observer of human foibles and say yes. But even still, I have my own story I can and do bring out when the wind and rain lashes against the windows in the dark winter, and the conversation around the fireside turns, as it inevitably does, to such unknowable matters. 

A few years ago, through a combination of impulses both romantic about a simpler way of life and pessimistic about the future course of world events, I removed my family from the coastal Kent townhouse where they were happy to an isolated farm in deep rural Ulster, where they were less so. The farm itself, all 80 acres of bog and woodland and mountain, was surprisingly large for the listing price. The farmhouse, too, though it had been derelict for some decades, was unusually spacious for such poor and marginal land. It had been built, records showed, by a prosperous Protestant tenant farmer in the early 1800s. The stone barns clustered around had been mean cottages once, as part of an older clachan — a communal living and farming arrangement for closely interrelated families that survived from at least medieval Gaelic society until the rationalization and consolidation of unproductive smallholdings into larger parcels, held by tenants who could pay more rent. 

Such was the case, I assumed, with my own holding: within the surrounding boggy meadowland was another, ruined clachan, from whose limestone rubble gnarled hawthorn trees grew and a gushing spring ran forth. The very ground beneath our feet was uncertain. You quickly learned to memorize paths across the fields that would not leave you stuck up to your calves and sinking deeper. Seemingly deep and dark pools of water would suddenly appear in the meadows, and then vanish when you next looked for them. 

Archaeological evidence indicates the ancient Celts felt obliged to sacrifice their wealth in watery places and turbid pools, for mysterious reasons of their own: friends and family warned I had fallen victim to a similar compulsion. In the wettest county of a country not celebrated for its clement weather, when it rained, which was often, both the farm and the house seemed more composed of water than land. At the foot of a steep and rocky escarpment, constantly shrouded in mist, and much of which belonged to me, the setting was beautiful, if you happen to like bleak and inhospitable isolation. Unfortunately, not everyone does. Tradesmen, displaying the practical unsentimentality of rural Ulster, uniformly advised me to tear it down and start again. The only note of appreciation came from the local removals man who delivered my furniture from storage, whistling expressively before saying “there’ll be rare ghosts in here”. 

There is a danger, when writing as an outsider about rural Ireland, of exoticizing or fetishizing the local ways, in a manner that rolls the eyes of the sophisticates of Belfast or Dublin. It was the 2020s after all, in what is at least tenuously part of the UK, with all its retail parks and chain stores and gastropubs and garden centers. But it is the simple truth nevertheless, and a valuable cultural resource of the farm’s immediate area, that folk customs still survive locally from, no doubt, very ancient sources. Even in the county town, a handsome Plantation settlement laid out like an English market town deposited on alien soil, the local Facebook buy-and-sell group is filled with requests for “cures” — either folk remedies, or the services of an otherwise ordinary man or woman, gifted since birth with the magical ability to cure a specific ailment. 

The nearest churchyard to our farm contained the grave of a parish priest, venerated locally for his saintliness in life, from which a teaspoon of his grave soil, it is widely believed, will cure most ills. Rationalists will be reassured to learn that, according to medical science, this may well be true. Either way, so widespread is this belief still that a laminated notice next to the grave provides clear instructions in warning capitals: “ONLY A SPOONFUL OF SOIL SHOULD BE REMOVED AND MUST BE RETURNED TO FR MCGIRR’S GRAVE ON THE FOURTH DAY”, with dire if unspecified consequences for those who fail to heed the stern advice. 

The farmhouse itself had been empty for decades, having been abandoned at the death of the elderly bachelor farmer who had owned it. Yellowed newspapers, agricultural calendars and farm subsidy paperwork lay scattered around, along with stacks of turf for fuel in an outhouse, and a broken Child of Prague statuette to summon forth good weather for haymaking. So much soil had been washed down, over the years, from the hill behind us that the back of the house seemed half-underground, the windows opening directly onto a disconcertingly vertical wall of grass. The great stone slabs that made up the floor had been laid directly on the soil, and a musty, earthy smell rose up from them. So did, at times, a sudden strong whiff of pipe smoke, a sharp and fresh vestigial memory of earlier occupants dislodged, no doubt, from deep within the house’s fabric by my DIY renovations. 

The house had been built according to the ancient, formalized pattern of Irish cottages, with rambling outbuildings and three large rooms on the ground floor, extended upwards by an extra floor at some point in the 20th century. The central downstairs room was dominated by the giant stone hearth, blackened with two centuries of turf smoke, around which, traditionally, the family would have lived and worked and cooked and slept. The room to the east became my office. I chose the “West Room” — the traditional formal room, warmed by the hearth wall, and preserved for honored guests, or in older times, family elders approaching death — for the kitchen. As a reserved, formal space, filled with furniture not to be touched, and crockery not to be used, the idea of the West Room still, just, lives on among older Irish people as the “good room”. But as the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg observed, well into the 20th century the traditional cottage west room “had still another association, of a supernatural cast”, being a room treated “with respect and perhaps a little fear”, for “traditionally the west is the land of the dead”. 

As a kitchen, certainly, my wife found it both wanting in domestic comforts and an unpleasant space in which to spend time. But for me, the entire package was perfect: it was exactly the kind of place my grandparents had fled at the first opportunity. Moving in before the rest of my family, to make it habitable, I had the electricity reconnected for the first time in decades, and running water installed for the first time ever. Until then, I collected and filtered drinking water from the spring, precariously hauled back over the quivering bog in steel buckets. I used my outhouse composting toilet with smug satisfaction and washed myself with ice cold water in a ewer and bowl: here, I told myself, I would find the peace and isolation to write my Great Book.

The concept of the book — I still regret that it will never now appear — was that through the history of the land I now owned, its tenants and landlords, I would be able to tell the history of the county, Ulster’s wildest and least populated, and the only part of Northern Ireland that could reasonably claim to be part of Ireland’s remote and underdeveloped West. The overarching theme was that the English conquest of this part of Ulster, where isolated colonial settlements hacked out farmland from the wilderness, fearful of raids from the deep, surrounding forest, and the tribal warriors lurking in it, both presaged and explained the course of colonialism in America, where many of the first settlers promptly moved on to more forgiving land. 

There was no shortage of local color for the book, regarding either rural drama or the patterns of agrarian resistance and rebellion that so excited my imagination. An early 20th-century predecessor, a widow, had been poisoned by her nephew, I was informed by a farmer neighbor, who grazed his cows on my pastures according to the age-old conacre letting arrangement, still legally beginning on Bealtaine and ending the first morning after Samhain, or Halloween. “I never thought we’d see another family in here,” he added. A nearby cavern — the limestone crags around, including what was then my own sliver of mountain, are pitted with the deepest cave shafts in these isles — is known as Noone’s Hole, commemorating an informer against the Ribbonmen, the secret society of Catholic agrarian rebels, who was waylaid from a cottage dance and thrown into the abyss. There is a 19th-century novel on the murder, drawing on local traditions, and written by the “Bard of Knockmore”, Peter Magennis, teacher at the old National School directly opposite my farmhouse. In the novel, the peasant wedding party from which he was abducted took place in a cottage directly opposite the National School. There being no other houses for some distance, the coincidence certainly piqued my interest. 

May and June saw a rare heatwave, family barbecues and frenetic renovation. That July — the wettest ever recorded in Northern Ireland — we learned that we were unexpectedly expecting our third child. The prospect of giving birth or caring for a newborn in a house slowly being dragged into the 20th century did not appeal to my wife, a more sensible character than me. The house’s isolation, though romantic enough, admittedly lacked certain practicalities. The only phone signal — which came with a WELCOME TO IRELAND text, so close was the house to the border — could be attained at the foot of our boreen, a long walk in the rain that swiftly palled when authenticating bank transactions or making work calls. If you left the place for a week or two, you would come back to find the wooden furniture, and books and leather items covered in a thin film of bright green mold. 

The pregnancy was not an easy one for my wife, who suffered terribly from hyperemesis. When not in hospital, she was confined to her bed by nausea, watching the lashing rain against the window and the fire in the grate, far from friends and family and with sufficient time to reflect on the drawbacks of a rural isolation she had not been enthusiastic about in the first place. Over the early course of the pregnancy, she became convinced that the house was imbued with the presence of a woman, who had suffered great sadness, and that this presence had now become intolerable. Certainly, when you were alone in the house, you never actually felt alone. The instinctive sense the consciousness has that another person is present, waiting in the room next door, or sometimes moving between rooms, could not be shifted. Sometimes, you would find yourself looking up sharply towards the door to greet an arrival who was not there. 

But there were of course rational explanations, as I repeatedly suggested. My wife was gravely ill, the change of lifestyle was dramatic and abrupt, and the living conditions represented a sharp downgrade in comfort and familiarity. Of course, I suggested, she was projecting unhappiness with her circumstances onto the fabric of the house itself. This was perfectly natural and understandable, and would resolve itself once the baby had been born and the house was finished and the weather improved. Perhaps, as science suggested, it was the presence of mold in a damp and until recently derelict house causing us to imagine things that were simply not there. Maybe, as a rather dubious theory claims, the stone walls were themselves imprinted with some kind of emotional memory, palpable but neither sentient nor supernatural. No doubt the freakishly horrible weather was instilling some form of cabin fever in us. These discussions, when the children were asleep, went back and forth. When one morning our elder son asked who the woman who sat in his room at night was, that was the end of the debate. My family removed themselves to sunny and ghostless Greece while I was instructed to prepare the farm, rather unwillingly, for sale.

At least, writing my essays, staging the property for any similarly romantic or reckless buyers, I didn’t feel alone in the house. If there were a presence there, a question on which I still have no firm answer, I did not find it objectionable. Indeed, perhaps over-confident of my personal charm, I sometimes told myself I would win it over. “Oh, it’s you,” I would say to myself as I got a sudden whiff of pipe smoke, looking up briefly from whatever essay I was engaged in. When, the morning after my only Halloween in the house, I woke up to find the front door I was certain I had locked wide open, the only possible response was “Sure, why not?”. I was ambivalent then, as I am now, about the existence or otherwise of ghosts, though insofar as I could blame them for giving up my beloved farm, they had become more than a minor inconvenience. There is only one single occurrence that, whenever I am asked if I have experienced a ghost, causes me to pause for a second, weighing up how my interlocutor will receive the answer, and reply “Maybe”.

Alone in the house one wet November night, the wind howling off the mountain, I was drifting off to sleep, wrapped up in bed in front of a coal fire, when I heard a woman weeping in the bedroom across the landing. In my half-sleep I assumed it was my wife, suffering the turbulent emotions of a difficult pregnancy, and got out of bed to comfort her. But why is she in this room, I wondered to myself as I approached the door, before remembering that she was not, and that she was in Greece. I stood at the threshold, not opening the door, and the weeping continued. I went back to my bed, and the weeping still continued, for some, rather unsettling time. All the rational explanations I gave my wife apply to me too, of course: it was a strange and emotionally draining time, in an unfamiliar and seemingly luckless environment: whatever pride I may feel in my cold rationality, my sense of perception is not infallible. 

Eventually, I sold the house and farm at auction, and when the movers returned, on the long drive together to our new house in Belfast, they asked, after a polite period of discretion, why our sojourn there had been so short. I made an offhanded laugh and said my wife thought it was haunted. “Oh, she’s right there,” they said. They had hated the job, they told me, and hated being in the kitchen most of all. “It’s quare haunted, that place,” the burlier of the two men told me, the both of them saying that as soon as they left the grounds, both the first time and then, they felt they had been freed from a dark and oppressive presence. “Even just now, I couldn’t wait to get out, sure it would make your blood run cold staying in that house.” 

The two of them regaled me, laughing at the memories, with tales of other haunted houses in the locality they had worked in, of which there were apparently many. The driver’s assistant, a large and otherwise phlegmatic working-class Protestant, told me that he rented a house in a nearby village, built on a Famine mass grave, whose spectral residents kept turning on his Sky TV and toaster whenever his girlfriend came round, to the point she now refused to stay over. The stories themselves were less remarkable than the matter-of-fact way in which they told them. My wife’s course of action was sensible, they agreed, my own pose of indifference unnatural and rather irresponsible. We’d bought a house that turned out to be haunted, it’s annoying, but sure it could it happen to anyone, and often does, they reasoned, before asking me which football team I supported. 

So do I believe in ghosts? No, I’d say. Well, perhaps. The house was a strange place, certainly, but then it was a strange time. There are rational explanations for everything recounted above, no doubt more plausible than the spectral presence of unhappy women, or long-dead farmers, or renegade Ribbonmen. Blaming my failure on ghosts is, perhaps, an easier answer for all involved than the alternatives. Years on, far away from it all, in a fully-equipped and comfortably ghost-free house in a leafy part of Belfast, an unsettling year in the countryside has faded into a strange anecdote, one not unusual in itself in a society that takes pleasure in retelling such stories with a display of matter-of-fact indifference, real or performed. 

If Ireland has a gothic sensibility at the best of times, that of Ulster is even more so — a notable strength of modern Northern Irish writing. As Reggie Chamberlain-King, editor of Black Dreams, a collection of “Strange Stories from Northern Ireland”, observes, “if the weird intrudes on the post-conflict writing of Anna Burns or Jan Carson, that is because the weird was there at the time of writing.”

The Donegal historian Breandán Mac Suibhne suggests the purported 19th-century haunting of a farmhouse in windswept, isolated Fanad is attributable to the shifting political balance of the era, the ghostly presence being an outward projection of Protestant fears. As he writes, “while the story of the ghost, in its first telling, can be read as concerning the overcoming of a colonial past and embracing of a republican future”, it is also “a parable about the need for vigilance given an omnipresent threat to the status quo”. Change, particularly unwanted change to a previously secure and comfortable existence, is by its nature unsettling, and can manifest itself in strange psychological projections. Britain’s uneasy politics, haunted by an ancient past, real or imagined, and an uncertain and threatening future, is surely proof of that. If there is any meaning to any of it, perhaps the acceptance of uncertainty, and of the shifting ground threatening suddenly to open up deep beneath your feet, is the very point. 

But at Halloween — the one festival of the Gaelic calendar, and of the ancient beliefs behind it, to have imposed itself on the English cultural consciousness — it is customary, when the nights draw in, and the wind rises, and the veil between the seasons reaches its thinnest point, to share such stories, and to shiver at the difference between the chill outside and the warmth within, and at the risk of the firewall between them being, if only for one night, removed. Did it happen, and to me? Maybe. But then, sure, couldn’t it happen to anyone? 

To galvanize the nation, Labour’s posable action figure Al Carns has made a video urging us all to “be ready for an emergency”, but he, too, is eerily silent on what exactly that means. The bathetic chasm between jumpy headlines and strangely repressed instructions — buy in a bit of bottled water and tinned food, write down a few phone numbers, order medication in good time — is also jarring. Should the National Grid fail, then so will every refrigeration unit, food production line, and water treatment plant in the country. The difference between dying of thirst immediately and doing so three days later seems somewhat academic; and the same goes for eking out small amounts of food and meds. Are we really supposed to be facing down the apocalypse with half a big shop each?

Some might prefer to take a leaf out of the grizzled North American handbook and get serious about survival. The internet is full of information for disaster preppers, as they are known, and bits of it already seem pertinent to British life. Start small by assembling what is known as a Get Home Bag, designed to help you bypass paralyzed transport systems during blackouts, and also for when you are stuck on Avanti. Next, graduate to a Bug Out Bag, useful for fleeing your house for 72 hours at short notice in order to go to a music festival. After that, though, it all gets complicated and expensive. The basic kit for civilizational collapse includes a renewable-powered generator, water filtration system, and waste disposal system; none of which is really practicable when you live in a small terraced house or flat. It is all slightly easier when you live on the prairie or in the desert, able to whip up a solar gravity shower or compostable toilet without needing planning permission first. 

Browsing websites for useful tips, it appears there are psychological pitfalls to avoid here as well as practical ones. A big one is not letting the whole prepping project take over your life; hard to do when the main motivator is cold sweat in the middle of night, and there is no upper limit to what counts as being adequately prepared. A different problem is when your partner is not quite as fixated on doomsday scenarios as you are. Some men online seem to long for global breakdown, just so they can justify all the money they have spent on methane-harvesting septic systems to their wives. 

more from this author

Morality lessons from Alastair Campbell

By Kathleen Stock

Resentment arrives from another direction in discussions about what the best attitude is to take to blindsided normies. Some imagine themselves as generously sharing their knowledge and resources during future disasters, but these tend to be in the minority. Having invested so much time and money in securing their own family’s future, most preppers insist no mercy will be shown to clueless panickers begging for shelter and spare tins of spam. They had so many chances to ready themselves for Armageddon, yet chose to go to Disneyland instead.

Take this line of thought only a little further, and you start picturing aggressive attempts by others to steal whatever it is you own. Indeed, the presumed covetousness of others puts a prepper of average sociability in a strange position: tempted to brag about the sheer scale of his root cellar on Facebook, while also being aware he might just as well be making an advert saying “free food here!”. The truly sagacious doomer would surely not bother to build or buy much himself, but simply keep a map of the most productive and least ferocious-looking local preppers handy for a rainy day.

For this sort of reason, most of what is loosely called “the prepper community” seems to spend a lot of time and money securing their set-ups from the predatory designs of fellow members. Alongside husbandry tips, their websites are also full of information about the best motion sensors and automatic weaponry to buy. The track from hobbyist to Hobbesian looks fairly short. One minute you are buying zucchini seeds, the next you are contemplating the ferocity of human nature and investing in camo and a crossbow.

When imported into Britain, such visions of rugged self-sufficiency look immediately comic: less John Rambo and more The Good Life. Faced with the prospect of intense competition for resources, plus the collapse of established order, there is not enough land here to avoid encountering hostile others altogether; and nor (thankfully) are we allowed to stockpile weaponry in preparation. If there had been a supply emergency in Surbiton, Margot and Jerry would presumably have cheerfully waltzed straight off with Tom and Barbara’s marrows.

Whatever the Government pretends, transplanted into our relatively small-scale, close-knit setting, the notion that a household could be “emergency ready” on its own is obviously fantastical. When it comes to national disasters, there can be no substitute for a shock-proofed state to manage the response. Slowly, the authorities do seem to be realizing this. Under Keir Starmer, Labour instigated a lot of programs in the name of increasing national “resilience”, though whether they work in practice remains to be seen. My own impression of key organizations such as the UK Resilience Academy and the Centre for Long-term Resilience suggests that far too many bureaucrats and effective altruists are leading the conversation, and not enough ex-military.

As the 2025 UK Government Resilience Action Plan correctly puts it, “building a truly resilient society requires a fundamental cultural shift”. The point applies as much to professional organizations as it does to individuals: lanyards and nice-sounding platitudes are not going to cut it in a genuinely dramatic crisis. But equally, we will need citizens with a strong sense of agency, who possess the skills and aptitudes helpful for negotiating energy- and screen-free zones. 

It is a shame, then, that so many of us are avoidant about leaving the house now, and horribly dependent on technology for things that we used to do ourselves; and that successive authorities have cheered this trend on. To take just one example: a society that prefers to deal with the obesity crisis by introducing highly complex international supply chains, rather than simply telling people to run about a bit, does not exactly inspire confidence that it will cope WTSHTF. 

There are accelerationist figures, both on Right and Left, who desire a world where our heads are always in clouds and vice versa. Goodbye, physical objects; hello, total tech dependence. The more we blindly go along with their superficially appealing program, the worse the shock of systemic failure is likely to be. As Thomas Hobbes once wrote, with his pen, human beings are “made fit for Society not by Nature, but by Education”. But do we want to educate people for the society where they have hoverboards and Meta glasses, or for the one where they contemplate eating their pets?

Until our politicians decide to prioritize a modicum of self-reliance, talk of emergency prep will continue to ring hollow. Even tinned goods are no use when nobody remembers how a can opener works. And if there really is limited time left before some amorphous entity attacks civilisation as we know it, we should probably use our remaining internet hours wisely, skip the Al Carns videos, and learn a few basic knots and self-defense moves instead.

Smith is in no doubt about the damage she believes is being done within — and by — her profession. Psychology should be a lifeline for youngsters struggling with their mental health. Yet according to a small but growing number of clinicians, their ability to help is being undermined when it comes to those experiencing gender dysphoria.

At the center of their concerns is the rise of so-called “affirmative care”: an approach which treats a young person’s declared gender identity as something to be validated rather than explored. Complicating the matter yet further is the Conversion Practices Bill, which will criminalize any attempt to instigate conversations around sexual orientation and gender. In other words, it will criminalize those psychologists who attempt to prompt deeper thinking in minors who are gender confused.

I spoke to dozens of psychologists for this investigation, all of whom expressed fears about the professional consequences of speaking openly. The institutions that should be defending them have instead helped create a climate in which voicing skepticism can carry serious consequences — both for clinicians themselves and for the vulnerable young people in their care.

***

Michael Kerr, 34, describes himself as “a walking example of what’s wrong with trans ideology and affirmative healthcare”. When he was 18, and not long out as a gender non-conforming gay man, Kerr was raped in a nightclub. Traumatized by the experience he used drugs and alcohol to cope, wanting to dissociate from his body. He fell in with a queer crowd in the gay scene, who tried to persuade him that he was really transgender, and should live as a woman. His GP referred him to the Sandyford gender clinic (known as the “Scottish Tavistock”) in 2018, and his first appointment was in 2020.

He was, he says, affirmed by every medical professional he met. “From GPs, to receptionists, the gender clinic — [they] all instantly started referencing me as a woman. It was almost intoxicating to be recognized like that.” After a couple of sessions, he was told he could go straight onto a course of hormones even though he was also struggling with depression and self-doubt. No questions were asked, except which pharmacy he wanted estrogen to be dispatched to.

From then on, Kerr says he was led down a path to full transition. “I now know that my problems came about because I had been raped and had no support to deal with it,” he tells me, “but I was just sent on a single path towards transition, and ended up living as a woman for seven years before realizing it was a huge mistake, and starting on the path to detransition.”

Kerr, who set up Detransition Pathway UK this year, has suffered numerous health conditions since stopping estrogen and starting testosterone. He is almost always in chronic pain, and has gynecomastia — excess breast tissue. But, he says, there are no agreed protocols to support people like him.

Neither his GP nor anyone at Sandyford suggested Kerr might try generic mental-health support. “Any decent clinical psychologist should be able to recognize that so many of the young people presenting with gender identity issues have got underlying trauma under conditions,” he argues. “I am a living, breathing example of how not to deal with someone in mental distress.”

Transactivists have long argued that the number of those who regret transitioning, or revert back to their actual sex, is small, tending to estimate the figure at perhaps 0.1%. Kerr believes the figure is far higher, and suggests this is the fault of medical professionals looking after them. Even when he voiced doubts about his gender treatment, he says, the clinic told him to “keep going”.

Hilary Cass foresaw the problem back in 2024 when she published her review of gender identity services for children and young people. Back then, she addressed the fact that some practitioners had become reluctant to provide psychological support because they feared being accused of “failing to affirm a young person’s gender identity or of practising conversion therapy”. Cass was anxious that any future legislation “should not make workforce problems worse than they are”.

The British Psychological Society (BPS) does have a Code of Ethics and Conduct (2021). This outlines four key principles to adopt when working with patients: dignity, privacy, consent and self-determination “of all persons”; working only within one’s trained expertise; avoiding harm and safeguarding welfare; and honesty and transparency.

These principles are particularly vital when working with children and young people, for obvious reasons. The trouble is, the body that is supposed to be advocating for children and professionals is failing to properly care for either.

Two years on from Cass’s review, the psychologists I spoke to attest that, if anything, things have got worse. Underlying complex presentations remain unexplored and insufficient time is given to evaluate psychological needs. As the conversion practices bill strides ever closer to legislation, fear within the profession is growing — yet hardly anyone dares to speak out. Of that small but significant minority of child clinical psychologists who have questioned the affirmative approach of “gender medicine” — all have been roundly punished. Some have lost their income, been labeled transphobic, or worse, held responsible for the deaths of “trans kids”.

“I’m seeing kids now who really need a psychologist who isn’t going to instantly affirm them and send them down the ‘gender’ route,” says Nancy Reed*. Clinicians are afraid to speak out, says the clinical psychologist based in London. “If they heard bad things about me [professionally] and their parents took them away from my care, they would be instantly affirmed by someone else, and that would be the end of that.”

The current model for gender treatment resembles what clinical psychologist Leslie Jones* describes as a “trans conveyor belt”: the affirmation approach leads to social transition, which in turn leads to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and seriously risky life-long medical trajectories. We already know this. But what’s surprising is that the direction of travel isn’t changing. Jones was “horrified” by the “ideological stance” that had gripped the private gender clinic he worked in. Gender became the sole focus, with all of the problems which may have been behind the gender distress unexplored and left to fester. And as another clinician confirmed, we have “gone miles from evidence-based psychological thinking. It’s infiltrated everyone as well as the systems, the people, society.”

***

Consultant psychiatrist Az Hakeem believes the ideological capture of the mental health establishment first took hold two decades ago. When he began practicing in 2000, Hakeem specialized in using psychotherapy to treat adult gender dysphoria. He trained in forensic psychotherapy at the Portman Clinic. This went on to become part of the Tavistock, where the now-disgraced and closed Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic, itself entirely focused on clinical psychology, was located. For Hakeem, who worked at the Tavistock until 2012, psychology was a crucial part of the diagnosis and treatment. He has always seen gender dysphoria as a “symptom” of broader mental-health problems, not simply a medical one. There is a significant distinction, as he saw it, between the work the psychologists were doing, and the work the physicians carried out. “The surgeons [carrying out sex reassignment procedures] were like master craftsmen,” he tells me. “They didn’t know what was happening in the mind of the patients; the psychiatrists simply referred them for surgery.”

In the early days at the Tavistock, he says he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “It was just horrific what I was seeing. All I could see were children who’d just be gay. They were like camp boys and tomboy girls. And I remember saying to the person who ran it, ‘Isn’t what you’re doing mad?’”

Hakeem was an early heretic, one of eight clinicians working at Tavistock to sign a 2002 letter published in the Telegraph which criticized a European Court ruling allowing a trans-identified male to marry his same-sex partner. The signatories described it as “a victory of fantasy over reality”. He knew, unlike many outsiders, exactly what was going on because he had worked closely with both pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals. “They gave me a very good insight into how transitioning unhappy people with psychological problems is not the answer,” he told me. “In fact, their problems are almost always exacerbated. Some of the post-operative group members warned those that hadn’t yet had surgery to avoid it at all costs.”

In any other context, he says, the medical professional would explore a patient’s beliefs and motivations, in order to understand what else might be going on. And yet, right from the start, this was not the approach taken by mental health professionals with gender confused patients.

As far back as the early 2000s, in other words, concern was being expressed, and indeed allowed to be expressed, about the fact that little, if any, treatment other than cross-sex hormones and surgery was available to gender-distressed patients. But if Hakeem was able to be relatively open about his views, the professional culture soon started to change.

***

Sam Wood*, a clinical psychologist for some decades, says the rise of transactivism “really hit hard a decade or so ago”. Such is the degree of its current entrenchment that the vast majority of clinical psychologists will avoid expressing any disagreement in public. Indeed, many are choosing not to work with gender distressed children because of the requirement to either affirm them or be accused of practicing conversion therapy. “You’re going to get attacked by transactivists, including colleagues,” she tells me. “They can wreck you.”

Many clinical psychologists warn of this “chilling effect” when discussing the draft conversion practices bill, currently at the pre-legislative scrutiny stage. The Government claims the legislation is designed to criminalize abuse, as opposed to punishing parents or psychologists who resist the push to affirm. The problem is that what Cass suggested in her review two years ago is already coming to pass. Clinicians fear they will be accused of conducting conversion therapy if they take an exploratory approach with the patient — essentially, doing what they were trained to do. And so, instead of questioning the kids, they are urged to enable them. Psychology, it seems, has forgotten what it is for.

As Anna Hutchinson, a clinical psychologist with significant experience in child and adolescent mental health says: “Psychology is not just a profession that provides support and reassurance. It is supposed to be a scientific and clinical discipline, which requires us to question assumptions, scrutinize evidence and consider different explanations in all kinds of ways for all sorts of things. Gender shouldn’t be made an exception. If we lose the freedom to do all of this, we lose something really fundamental.”

Tony Lane*, who trained as a clinical psychologist in 2020, makes a similar point. “One of the first things I was told was: ‘If you have a butch-presenting girl, or a feminine boy… you’re going to have to affirm them as trans, unless their parents are hostile to the idea, and then you’d probably be sacked for conversion therapy’.”

He added: “I thought they were exaggerating, but it turned out they weren’t.” More worrying still, Lane says he was constantly told that being transgender was not a mental health problem despite the repeated insistence that if these children were not seen and affirmed urgently, they might end up suicidal. “Surely that is a clear sign of extremely precarious mental fragility?” he asks. “I felt like we were being told: ‘agree with everything your patient says, do not scrutinize, meet their demands or they might die, and then you’ll have blood on your own hands’.”

It hardly helps, Sam Wood* says, that there “isn’t much of a backbone in the profession”. She tells me that as a result of this lack of resolve, “trans activists can easily steamroll, and just take over, delivering the training courses on gender, and writing the rules pretty much”.

The backbone should be provided by their representative body, the BPS, which is supposed to advise and advocate for its members. But instead, supported by charities and lobbyists such as Gender Plus, Gendered Intelligence, and Pink Therapy, it is delivering courses which pretty much uniformly encourage the affirmation approach. As one old hand who attended such a course complained: “It was hard-line DEI, with constant talk of how race, class, disability, and all the other currently popular oppressions overlap with gender identity.”

More from this author

Why are British women going to Turkey for sex?

By Julie Bindel

That politicization is now standard, with the BPS silencing any skepticism and pushback. “Their view is, anyone who hasn’t worked with gender is ‘not an expert’,” one former GIDS employee told me. “This mystical ‘expertise’ simply means being willing to affirm anyone and everyone who says they are the opposite sex.”

“If you want an easy life as a psychologist affirming people, [it’s] a dream!” says Lianne Smith* who isn’t smiling. She is deeply frustrated by what has happened to her once meaningful clinical practice. “It takes a high cognitive load to sit with someone for 50 minutes trying to attune to their words, body language, [and] subconscious. Then there are the deeply traumatic stories of rape, childhood abuse, and loss. Gender affirming care takes away all the negativity and just leaves clinician and patient feeling happy and productive.”

What particularly upsets her is, somewhat ironically given the avowed commitment to diversity, is the one-size-fits-all approach. “The kids I work with, they are so varied,” says Smith. “The fact they’ve got the same diagnosis is utterly ridiculous.”

“There’s a lot of victimhood about,” another whistleblower tells me. “There are individual [practitioners] using the fact that they are LGBTQ+, or autistic, or black as a qualification, as opposed to their skills as an actual clinical psychologist.” Indeed, she goes as far as to say that within the profession there are those “who are not cut out to be psychologists” — they simply want to “‘be kind”’.

If the affirmative model dictates that gender dysphoria is not a disorder — and the only “treatment” which can be offered is to kindly say “yes” to any request from the patient, fearing that to do otherwise would be an inducement to suicide — then the inevitable result is medicalization. As Smith explains: “All identity is socially constructed, trans is no different. And in the case of ‘trans’, the identity has been constructed by and with medics and psychologists. No other identity needs medical affirmation to be legitimate, but this one does. It wouldn’t exist — in its current form at least — without medical and psychological compliance.”

There are some who dare speak out. But the consequences can be grim. Anne Woodhouse is an independent consultant clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience. She nearly lost her job when, in 2022, she was reported to the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) for posting and interacting with Twitter posts critical of transgender orthodoxy. Only after three years of investigation was she cleared when no compelling evidence was found that she was unfit to practice. Regardless of the outcome, though, “the process has been the punishment,” she says. “Those three years were so stressful, and to have this serious threat to my professional integrity and career, pretty hellish.”

“I had completely missed how all the organisations had been captured,” she continues. Her case perfectly illustrates the stakes of professional disagreement. Any questioning of the orthodoxy could lead to complaints not just from within the professional body, but also from the general public. In fact, Woodhouse was referred to the HCPC by the deputy head of her child’s school — a part-time drag artist.

I did find another psychologist to push back on the record. But Sandra Pertot is retired and in Australia, whose psychological society likewise refuses to support any form of mental health practice that does not “affirm” children who say they are transgender.

Pertot specialized in sex therapy before retiring as a clinical psychologist four years ago. “In the Seventies and Eighties, I saw a lot of young kids who were confused about their sexuality. I used what has become called ‘watchful waiting’ with them and didn’t tell them whether they were gay or not gay.”

In 2006, Pertot moved to a small town and “naively” began airing her concerns about the rise in children presenting with rapid-onset gender dysphoria at her practice. “I knew nothing about this transgender drama that was going on in the rest of the world,” she says. “And I saw these young kids come in saying they were trans and I didn’t think anything of it. I just did some work, watchful waiting and the interesting thing was none of them suicided, none of them threw hissy fits.”

Then, around 2019, Pertot saw two girls who both independently determined they were male. Unconvinced they met the criteria of persistent gender dysphoria, she sought the opinion of a psychiatrist who specialized in gender. She was told: “Sandra, If they’re saying they’re trans, they are trans.”

“Both of them ended up going on hormone therapy, but it really bothered me,” Pertot continues. “So I started to question this, and this is where I got into trouble.” Like Woodhouse on the other side of the world, she received a complaint against her, and was told she was “the most hated woman in the Sydney queer community”. She’s only speaking out now because she’s retired. As she told me: “They can’t do anything to me now!”

***

So who protects the psychologists? The BPS, which represents 50,000 practitioners and shapes standards and the public debate, is the profession’s representative body. It should advocate for the integrity of the profession. But every single person I spoke to for this investigation holds that the BPS is, at least in part, responsible for the current climate of fear. It has failed to reassure practitioners that legitimate clinical disagreement will be protected. Indeed, it has shut down attempts by those within psychology to stand up to activism — and it has failed to stop activists from embedding themselves within the profession.

Pat Harvey, a retired BPS office holder, is among the Society’s most outspoken critics. She helped set up BPS Watch with other retired clinical psychologists concerned about the organization’s direction. For her, the problem is not merely the BPS’s public position on gender, but how it has responded when members have challenged it. Its position is represented by the in-house magazine, The Psychologist. Harvey has made several official complaints about Jon Sutton, its long-standing editor, accusing him of personal bias and failing to foster balanced debate around gender ideology. Instead, she claims the publication has “regularly promoted the views of proponents of transgender ideology… actively suppressing those of gender critical or sex realist psychologists”. She also claims that the BPS’s gender guidelines were resolutely “affirmative” and minimized the importance of co-morbid mental health concerns. Sutton, meanwhile, bats the complaints upstairs, confident that he will be supported.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the magazine’s promotion of the online clinic GenderGP. Run by Helen Webberley along with her husband Mike Webberley, the controversial service regularly prescribed puberty blockers to children with only minimal consultation. Helen was suspended for two months by a tribunal after putting three patients at “unwarranted risk of harm”, and Michael was struck off by the General Medical Council following a “catalogue of failings” and serious misconduct. When Harvey contacted Richard Stephens, at the time chair of the BPS’s editorial board, and now chair of its research strategy board, to complain about The Psychologist promoting GenderGP, he told her that the magazine’s advisory committee did “not propose to advise amending the article”.

“[Stephens] wrote that the day after the final Cass report was published,” Harvey says. “Doctors had been told that they should not prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on the advice of GenderGP as it does ‘not provide physiological or psychological support to patients’. This clearly indicated that they should amend the entry or remove it.” Eventually, they took it down.

Others have submitted similar complaints about being silenced and curtailed from doing their jobs effectively to no avail. One said that he was called a bigot for questioning the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative and told he shouldn’t be practicing as a psychologist.

Sutton, says Leslie Jones*, is “ideologically signed up” to trans ideology. “He said explicitly to me and several other people that he’s not actually going to produce any questioning or critical content relating to trans stuff, it’s all going to be affirmative because ‘trans people are the most marginalized and oppressed’.”

For Harvey, all this runs counter to the very purpose of psychology. “Psychology is supposed to be there to help people navigate their way through difficulties in their mental health, and understand how they became unwell,” she insists. It does not exist, “to validate social justice causes.” However, this is what happened to the BPS. And without the supportive oversight of the body purporting to protect its members, any psychologist exercising critical thoughts — essentially practicing according to their training — is left at the mercy of activists.

Trans rights activists these days wield a lot of power when making complaints about “transphobic” clinicians. The Trans Safety Network (TSN), formed in 2020, extensively scrutinizes the work of healthcare professionals, in particular clinical psychologists and those working in gender-identity services. Its stated mission is that it will “record evidence to understand the timelines and escalation of organized harm against trans people in the UK.” It looks into institutions to ascertain whether or not they are “transphobic”, and reports on alleged misdemeanors. “Trans people are not required to transition in particular ways, experience particular feelings, or obtain medical approval in order to be considered trans,” reads its values section.

In 2021, TSN was successful in its efforts to cancel a conference for trainee psychiatrists, hosted by Great Ormond Street Hospital, claiming that attendees would feel “unsafe” because two “trans skeptical” speakers would be attending. “There is no possible way in which this event can be a ‘safe environment’ for LGBTQ+ and especially trans participants,” they wrote. Health Education England agreed to cancel the event.

The TSN has also devoted considerable time and resources trying to discredit the Cass Report. It has opposed Wes Streeting’s decision to ban puberty blockers; and it has poured scorn on the NHS for failing to immediately validate “trans children” and offer instant access to “gender affirming” drugs. The TSN also takes aim at the Royal College of Psychiatry, criticizing anyone who suggests that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones may not be good for children.

For his part, TSN’s director, Mallory Moore, has invested a great deal of time harassing clinical psychologists, and making numerous complaints to regulators and management. In an article published in 2023, Moore wrote: “I’ve been reporting conversion therapists to professional medical and therapeutic bodies in the UK for over two years, facilitating survivors to make complaints”.

It’s worth remembering, here, what Hilary Cass said about clinicians worried about the affirmative approach: “The majority of [their] patient presentations were extremely complex, with a mix of trauma, abuse, mental health diagnoses, past forensic history, ASD and ADHD, and therefore this limited assessment was inadequate. These other clinical issues were not addressed or considered in decisions to prescribe masculinizing or feminizing hormones.”

***

Audrey Taylor* has worked with gender-distressed children and young people for her whole career. “I became known as the one that parents struggling to talk to their kids about sexual identity, or the difficulties they were having approaching puberty, would come to, because they trusted me. I’m a bit gender-unconforming myself, and I know how both boys and girls internalize punishing rules about how they should behave.”

Initially, Taylor, who qualified in clinical psychology in the early Nineties, suggests that the kids who came to her would more often than not turn out to be lesbian and gay — or simply not fit the traditional mold of boys and girls. But, as she tells it: “Things got much more confusing once we got into the 2010s and beyond. Kids started telling their parents what to think, and the tables were turned.”

“Parents were being dictated to by their children who told them that they had no idea what it was like to be trans,” Taylor continues, “and that they knew exactly what the issues were, and that they didn’t need a psychologist to work it out for them. They diagnosed themselves.” She adds: “And the parents, this later cohort, appeared to be frightened of their own children.”

Taylor recalls that parents would initially make contact and tell her that their child was suffering from gender dysmorphia, or simply that they were transgender. “I’d never had patients or their parents self-diagnosing. I wasn’t sure what my role was anymore. I would try to scrutinize what the issues were, but I was usually shut down as soon as I started exploring other issues, such as trauma, potential neurodiversity, or some kind of mental health condition.”

Indeed, it’s hard for parents to know how to manage gender confused children, who may get kudos from their peers for identifying as trans, and validation from schools and social services. Given the ever-lengthening waiting lists for psychological help from the NHS, and the explosion in anxiety and autism among children, many desperate parents will seek help elsewhere — and private psychologists are happy to help. “If they are going through difficult times, for all kinds of reasons, they’ll just put all their eggs in one basket and say: ‘We’ve got a gender incongruent child’.” Private clinics will then give them instant validation. “Then the problems really begin.”

By this she means medication. Despite the warnings in the Cass Report about the weak evidence base for prescribing puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, this is an increasing problem. Not counting those who are in private treatment, today, more than 250 primary age children, some as young as four, are in line for “gender care” treatment at NHS clinics. What this care actually consists of is unclear. Although the use of puberty blockers has been banned, Cass has thrown a crumb to the activists, who may be able to access medication via clinical trials; Cass believes that otherwise, children will procure drugs from “unregulated and dangerous routes”.

In the meantime, with the explosion in mental health problems among the young, NHS waiting lists are growing ever longer, and private providers are thriving. In 2024, a private clinic called Gender Plus Hormones, for “gender questioning” young people, became the first service of its kind in the UK to receive approval from the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Part of the provider Gender Plus, it offers hormone treatment to those over the age of 16 following psychological assessment “by a team of clinical psychologists across a minimum of six sessions”. Its CEO is Aidan Kelly, who in 2024 wrote in the Guardian that clinicians should be the only ones deciding whether or not to ban puberty blockers, not politicians. He points out that puberty blockers can be helpful for a “carefully selected minority of transgender youth who have a clear and consistent understanding of their gender identity”. The trouble is, if these children have been affirmed in that identity without challenge from a young age, as seems to be the case within the profession now, how are they to know that this is truly what they want?

Currently, Gender Plus Hormones is unable to prescribe puberty blockers, but they have commissioned what they’re calling “an independent review” to assess the evidence behind the decision to ban them for children. Dr Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has been commissioned to write it: he has referred to the Cass ban as a “moral panic”.

So while a few clinical psychologists are battling to discuss whether their young patients have underlying trauma, others are applying to gender dysphoria the same logic that they might apply to preventative dental work, i.e., the earlier we get in there, the better.

This tortured debate over puberty blockers raises a serious question for psychologists: how are the effects of transition actually measured in the young? And this is something David Freedman, a retired social science researcher, has studied in depth. In 1998, he co-edited a book by the founder and former director of Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), Domenico DiCegli, called Stranger in My Own Body: Atypical Gender Identity Development and Mental Health. “At that time,” Freedman tells me, “there were relatively tiny numbers of people who claimed to be trapped in the wrong body.”

More from this author

The Gloria Steinem I knew

By Julie Bindel

Some years later, as he saw growing disquiet within the profession with regard to children presenting with gender distress, Freedman came out of retirement to examine an early intervention study by GIDS and University College Hospital. The study involved 44 children aged between 12 and 15 recruited over three years. It concluded that the puberty blockers brought “no changes in psychological function”.

The methodology included information compiled from questionnaires from both parents and children about feelings, relationships and depression. Yet when Freedman, along with Professor Susan McPherson of the University of Essex, re-analyzed the data, they found a huge range in the outcomes in terms of mental health. While just 29% had improved, 37% showed no change, and 34% had deteriorated. Their 2024 paper on the topic caused consternation among transactivists who had previously argued that puberty blockers do not cause harm.

“I felt children were actually being abused,” says Freedman, “and that they were being entrusted to a service that was not offering the best possible treatment to them.”

“Puberty is crucial,” he continues, “children build bone mass and [the drugs] suppress growth spurt and skeletal strength. We don’t know yet exactly what effect it has on the brain, but we know it can and does affect functioning. This is unforgivable abuse.”

Nonetheless, following the closure of the GIDS and a growing call for the puberty blocker trial to be canceled, Cass told the British Medical Journal that she still considered it justified. “Her own review found that the evidence for puberty blockers is extremely weak, that there is no demonstrated benefit, and states that the longer-term risks are unknown,” says Lianne Smith. “And now Cass is a staunch defender of conducting a trial involving 250 child guinea pigs…”

***

Could there be another motivation behind the push for blockers? Joanne Hall*, who worked with young adults in a gender service, believes there might be. She says she discovered the limits of her freedom when she began questioning whether patients’ wider psychological needs were being adequately addressed. “Of the patients that come to the clinic, there is high rates of autism, of complex trauma, of abuse. Those things are clearly relevant, but I was called transphobic for saying it.” Hall says she took her concerns to senior managers, but was eventually pushed out of her role. She recalls confronting one manager: “I said, “We’re castrating people as a treatment option when this is about trauma and autism.” He said, “I agree with everything you’re saying. The thing you don’t understand is that the gender service bankrolls the mental health service in this city.””

Her account raises a question that is arguably bigger than the dispute over gender medicine per se: what happens when someone’s clinical judgment comes into conflict with the priorities of the institution employing them?

***

Today, Parliament will hear the first oral evidence on the Conversion Practices Bill. Which way will it go? And will the outcome be indicative of whether this bitter battle is lost or, finally, won? It is worth remembering Cass’s emphasis, in her review, that young people experiencing gender distress should receive comprehensive, evidence-based mental-health support, just like any other child with similar psychological or neuro-developmental needs. But that would require psychologists to be brave and robust enough to stand up and say that their profession doesn’t advocate for this approach any more. It would also require their regulatory body to support them.

Will the BPS do that? The jury is out. I contacted them, offering a right of reply regarding the numerous complaints made by members and former members. And I also asked what they had to say about Sallie Baxendale’s shortlisting for the Maddox Prize, following her research into the effects of puberty blockers on brain development. The prestigious prize is awarded to scientists “whose courage and persistence in promoting or defending evidence despite facing obstacles have had significant real-world impact”. And, as Baxendale pointed out: “It is a sign that something has gone very wrong when ordinary clinical enquiry and following the evidence needs to be recognised as an act of courage.”

“The BPS should have been the strongest advocate of the concerned clinicians at the Tavistock,” she says, “and should now be celebrating them as examples of the very best of us.” But while the BPS declined to respond, there is a glimmer of hope. A number of psychologists have gravitated over to the Association of Clinical Psychologists (ACP-UK), which does take a firm stand against the instant affirmation model.

What will this rupture do to the practice and integrity of clinical psychology? Today’s parliamentary hearing will give an early indication of how this battle might play out. But amid all the furor, a more important point risks being forgotten. Those who have the most to lose from this struggle aren’t the psychologists or the credibility of their discipline; the greatest price will be paid by the vulnerable people it exists to help.

* Names have been changed. 

In his own understated way, Andy Burnham has also profited from turmoil: first from the oddly dysfunctional Starmer years and, more broadly, nearly two decades of economic malaise. So while Milan and Tirana are beset by disorder, and French town halls are ablaze, British politics suddenly feels like a haven of calm — however fleeting that may ultimately prove. Normal without being boring, charming without feeling pompous, Burnham’s personal qualities are enhanced by the chaos preceding him. He is, for many, a welcome antidote to the broiling disorder of Southport, Southampton and Gosport in recent years.

It’s true, of course, that Burnham has reached the 100-day mark without facing any big challenges. And if tomorrow’s Budget risks changing that, it’s also true that the Prime Minister is better placed to endure the storms ahead than his hapless predecessor. Unlike Keir Starmer, after all, our latest prime minister is at ease with social media, especially when “out in the country” beyond SW1. His daily missives on parking fines, and people “sodcasting” on public transport, are guerrilla policy-making perfectly tailored to the attention economy. And if Starmer generally viewed such trifling issues as “noise”, Burnham’s No. 10 now recognizes that permission to address the big issues, from the social-care crisis to the pensions triple lock, requires getting everyday concerns right. Rather than playing a fatuous game for eyeballs, the objective is to win time and trust — two things in short supply when you’re the country’s seventh leader in a decade.

More from this author

What I learned occupying London

By Aaron Bastani

There are strong echoes of Harold Wilson’s “little things that mean a lot” initiative here. There were no iPhones or Instagram back in 1974, of course, and the emphasis was less on a comms strategy that could connect with the public. But both Labour prime ministers are passionate about the local and seemingly mundane: back then it was local breweries and banning hare coursing, today it’s fly-tipping, potholes and bus fares. More than Wilson’s, though, Burnham’s politics are arguably best understood via the Great Helmsman himself — adopting a heavily personalised form of centralisation, which goes hand-in-hand with mass politics.

While fighting a guerrilla insurgency against both the Japanese occupation and Chiang Kai-shek, Mao developed his theory of the “mass line”. Put simply, this meant the party’s positions were informed by their engagement with the masses in the Chinese countryside — the very people Mao and his cadres relied on for survival. Those experiences were later codified, not least in a report written by Mao for the CCP’s central committee in 1943. Overall, Mao advised, leadership should consist in first going to the masses and learning from them, allowing the party to synthesize their experiences into clearly articulated principles and policies. From there, the party should disseminate formed-out ideas among the people, exhorting them to put principle into practice. Condensing the whole approach into a pithy sentence, Mao described the mass line as “to the masses, from the masses, to the masses” — though, this being Communist China, there was no actual voting.

Far from abstract idealism, these theories had huge implications, from the “patriotic health campaign” of the Fifties, which sought to address public hygiene and eradicate scourges like cholera and malaria, to the “Barefoot Doctors” who transformed healthcare in much of China’s rural heartland. Neither policy was overtly ideological, instead focusing on helping the working class, embodying the slogan of “serve the people”. And, notwithstanding genuine disasters like the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s efforts really did help create a literate, healthy and politically unified society. By 1978, when Deng Xiaoping became leader, life expectancy already stood at 63, far above the derisory 35 of 1945. At the same time, these successes laid the foundation for China’s system today, defined by some as “consultative Leninism”.

There’s a striking comparison to be made here with policy formulation in the Labour Party during the Corbyn years: and not because the tabloids cast him as an Islington Red Guard with an allotment. After all, following Corbyn’s surprise leadership victory in 2015, members increasingly determined party policy, a tendency which culminated in Labour backing a second EU referendum during its 2019 conference. Never mind that Corbyn objected — Rejoining proved disastrous in that year’s general election. This was, in essence, the Bennite vision of Labour: a party led by the wishes of its members, rather than the often exaggerated necessities of parliamentarism, or the compromises of the trade-union bureaucracy. It’s worth saying here that a similar approach is presently being tested by the Greens, though Labour’s conference was never sovereign over policy, something ultimately determined by the party NEC.

The approach of Burnham’s Labour, which embraces certain aspects of Left populism, appears to have entirely disavowed this activists-take-all approach. Instead, the Prime Minister seems to have adopted a kind of consultative Leninism, where centralized authority to actually do stuff goes hand-in-hand with input from below. That includes social-listening exercises on digital platforms, something Labour had started to get good at before Starmer’s demise, but which the ex-PM seems to have had little interest in. When Burnham used the term “Boriswave” on GMB yesterday morning, you can be certain that a great deal of data and analytics went behind it. Besides that is Burnham’s policy shop. Even before Labour won the by-election in Wigan, Josh Simons, the ex-MP for Makerfield, was reputedly taking soundings on policy development from a wide range of voices across the party — including think-tankers and campaigners close to the Labour Left. Anti-social behavior on trains, new powers on fly-tipping, and Burnham’s harsh words on HMOs are all downstream of that process.

Most important, though, is the role played by the party’s metro mayors, whom the Prime Minister appears to take more seriously than any of his colleagues in the Commons. Unlike MPs, mayors have the resources, and scale, to act as policy incubators. As a result, they are increasingly central to the policy-making process, regularly attending the National Economic Council, which meets at No. 10 North, where they work alongside the leaders of the devolved national administrations as well as Louise Haigh, Burnham’s deputy, and Chancellor John Healey. What makes this unique is that policymaking, and listening, includes figures from parties other than Labour: a precursor, perhaps, to a time when Labour must work alongside other parties under PR. Either way, its guiding animus is wholly different to the adversarial norms of Westminster.

While the appointment of Healey as Burnham’s Chancellor surprised many, it really shouldn’t have — not least because the veteran Brownite is happy to do as he’s told. It’s ironic, perhaps, that a Prime Minister who has promised to transfer power beyond Westminster is simultaneously concentrating more power in his person and office than anyone since Thatcher. Even before entering Downing Street, Burnham’s team was briefing about the need to move away from an “imperial” Treasury machine. And while the media may have focused its attention on the subsequent announcement of “No 10 North”, the creation of a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet was what really mattered. This is, in Britain’s own way, an emerging form of consultative Leninism: at least within the context of the country’s extraordinarily arcane, labyrinthine civil service. It’s a major development, but Labour’s critics — on both the Left and Right — are yet to see it. Some act like they’re still fighting Starmer.

But if Burnham understands the value of an outward-facing populism, but without much input from party members — then what about his colleagues? And while he’s transforming the government he runs, is the same happening within the Labour Party itself? In an inversion of Bennite orthodoxy, the PM is addressing the state, and indeed the public, before being particularly bothered about his own party. Might that backfire?

Suggested Reading

Rejoining would destroy Andy Burnham

By Jonny Ball

Perhaps. But moves are certainly afoot, with Labour’s political culture on Burnham’s radar too. That can be discerned from last month’s appointment of Joe Fortune as the party’s new general secretary. Fortune, like Burnham, hails from the North-West, but the two men aren’t reputed to be especially close. Labour’s latest top bureaucrat is, however, an ally of soft-Left powerbrokers like Haigh and Annelise Midgley, Burnham’s chief whip, as well as enjoying close links to the big trade unions. Precisely what Fortune will do to placate members if they try to drive party policy on issues like Palestine, or removing the triple lock, remains unclear. What is certain, though, is that in the place of influence over policy, members will need other outlets. The idea, perhaps, is that they will increasingly focus on local concerns, not least as larger local authorities are created and more metro mayoralties established. At any rate, the notion of constituency Labour parties driving national policy, as the Left dreamed under Corbyn, seems farther away than ever. Of course, many won’t mind in the medium term: as long as progress continues to be made in the polls, and political defeat for Reform looms on the horizon.

The irony, here, is that in a strange way, the political foundations of Burnhamism aren’t so different to those professed by Nigel Farage: hyperleadership and robust policy-making in the center, driven by the perceived concerns of the public at large. Yet that’s where the similarities end. Because while Burnham does appear to have a genuine connection to the public, not least through powerful regional actors like Steve Rotherham and Tracey Brabin, Reform’s policy-making process is already subject to capture by the ultra-rich. This is less a criticism of plutocrats buying influence in the political process — though that’s certainly a problem — but simply an observation that it leaves Reform ill-equipped to address the grievances of the country’s downwardly mobile working and middle class. As a result, they are retreating to being a single-issue party.

Not, of course, that the next election is won just yet. But it’s been a hugely impressive first 100 days from the new prime minister, from reconfiguring parts of the state to delivering an effective comms strategy and taking votes from both his Left and Right. Perhaps, to paraphrase another Chinese statesman from the 20th century, Zhou Enlai, it’s still too soon to know the true consequences of a fraught, and often confused, decade of politics since Brexit.  The chaos might not be over — but Andy Burnham clearly intends to take advantage it.

The backdrop to this week’s Budget is gloomy. Britain’s high streets remain a grim collage of betting shops and vape stores. Public services that were outdated a decade ago now groan under their own bloat. Prices rise and pay packets stagnate. Young people go without work or training, opportunity drying up as the cost of creating it climbs. Two-thirds of British adults think today’s children will be worse off than their parents. In such a country, narratives of doomerism and decline are all too easy to reach for.

But I for one am optimistic about Britain’s future. Our country has the capability not just to survive in our radically changing world, but to thrive in it. It has endured seven shocks in 18 years — two of which were self-inflicted — and yet it is still standing. Britain’s economy is clearly resilient. The question now facing John Healey is how to grow it.

The answer is AI. Love it or hate it, it doesn’t matter: because AI is “the thing” and trillions of dollars are being poured into it for good reason. It’s a transformative technology that is here to stay, whether or not the bubble surrounding it bursts, just as the railways and the internet outlived the bubbles that built them.

Clearly, AI presents profound challenges. It will change the labor market, destroying jobs and creating new ones. It threatens the climate but could also heal it. And it throws open the question of sovereignty: which values will govern the world when a handful of American and Chinese firms own the models remaking it?

So it is not AI in and of itself that fills me with optimism, but Britain’s ability to shape it. The technology will create and it will destroy. But of all the countries it will transform, few are better placed to harness it to bring about progress and prosperity than Britain. The Chancellor’s Budget this week must recognize this. It should be a watershed moment that ends the old political imprisonment of tax and spend — now busted, as taxes reach postwar highs, and spending eye-watering levels — and ultimately secures Britain’s place in our new AI world. 

Just think about how AI could transform the NHS, which already holds the cradle-to-grave records of almost 70 million people, built over decades. This data is as valuable as any tax rise or spending cut. And, powered by AI, it is a stepping stone to creating a truly preventative health service. Yes, the politics of using it are hard (google Palantir and you’ll understand why) but we shouldn’t cower from making the argument for a data-driven, cheaper, better NHS. Health spending has grown by 3.6% every year, on average, since the NHS was founded — which is much faster than the economy that pays for it. Britain is fatter and sicker than its neighbours, with 2.5 million people out of work due to ill health. This is an economic and moral crisis, and yet we are still debating spending levels, watching as game-changing weight-loss drugs improve the lives of those who can afford them and struggle to reach those who need them. 

A preventative healthcare system, powered by AI and able to capitalize on the latest scientific discoveries, will be able to stop a heart attack or a stroke before it happens. It should be central to the Chancellor’s Budget, and offer a template for wider public-service reform, with every government department seeking to accelerate AI-enabled transformation.

A similar approach could be taken to the Prime Minister’s proposed national care service. There is a risk this becomes yet another burden on Britain’s finances. So it would be better to look at the root of the problem — dementia — which affects around four-in-five care-home residents and costs the country £42 billion a year. Just 1.4% of NHS spending on dementia goes to diagnosis and treatment — this proportion should be far higher. Britain’s science and technology sector is powering a revolution in dementia treatment. The first drugs that slow Alzheimer’s already exist and the next generation can be cheaper and better. DeepMind, which was founded in London, cracked protein folding, contributing to the transformation of medicine development; its spin-out, Isomorphic, now designs medicines with its tools. 

No other country apart from the US is better placed to seize this moment. AI is an expertise accelerant and Britain has an economy built on expertise. We could train AI on the best legal system in the world — English law governs around 40% of global business and financial transactions — or on the Premier League’s data, the BBC’s archive, the City’s markets or the research of our top-tier universities. It’s a recipe for wealth-creating unicorns. 

Suggested reading

The Budget is Britain’s tribal ritual

By Terry Eagleton

We are on our way already. British start-ups raised $23 billion in the first nine months of this year, more than a third of everything raised in Europe. And our manufacturing base, which we often bemoan as a shell of its former self, is now churning out cutting-edge equipment. Rolls-Royce builds the reactors for our submarines in Derby, while Broughton builds the wings for Airbus. These are rare, best-in-class products, and making them here is a boost to our sovereignty and power. These are products most countries can’t make and none can go without. 

This is why the Budget should encourage even more innovation, particularly in the defense industry. It should, for instance, lay the groundwork for manufacturing AI robots with arms and legs, which could be used for both civilian and military purposes. Or it could back apprenticeships at scale, to teach young people how to build the defenses our country and its allies need. This would be as good an answer to a million young people out of work and training as any benefit reform. But for this, the Chancellor would need to prioritize defense spending in the interest of national security. 

Meanwhile, Britain has quietly built leverage in the AI race. The world’s frontier models are tested at our AI Security Institute before they are released, putting Britain in the room where the rules are written. As Britain’s very able AI minister Kanishka Narayan told me recently: we build “capability tonight, convening tomorrow, leverage the day after”. 

The biggest barrier to this future? Us. We are our own worst enemies. Sure, a yawning deficit and astronomical debt don’t help, nor does the fact that the UK’s investment levels have been the lowest in the G7 in 24 of the last 30 years. But if we choose to embrace the AI revolution rather than continuing with the status quo of decline, we will have greater influence on our future. 

It’s not the easy choice. If the Chancellor does make this the Budget that harnesses AI’s potential, he will face a British system built to say no: a broken planning regime; a civil service too scared to act; pension funds that won’t back the country they operate in; a dysfunctional energy system pushing bills through the roof. 

He will need to fix the energy system first: we are paying almost £2 billion a year to switch wind farms off because the grid can’t carry their power to the places where it’s needed, leaving us with some of the most expensive electricity in the world. Investors make decisions worth billions on that fact. The approval of the Jackdaw gas field was a flicker of pragmatism, and Rosebank should follow. But clean power, rather than cheap power, remains the overriding goal of energy policy, even as the facts scream at us to change course. Only this month, Microsoft pulled out of a landmark deal with a data center in Essex because the site couldn’t access electricity before 2030. The goal of Cheap Power 2030 should therefore replace Clean Power 2030 on Wednesday.

If this Budget falls short of being the first step in reversing Britain’s decline, then doomerism will evolve from mood to habit. People will hesitate before starting a business or backing one. They will think twice about retraining or upskilling because they no longer believe a better future is possible. The temptation for political leaders may be to adopt easy retail politics, or to retreat into nostalgia, pointing to those better days gone by. But leadership of the highest order — which we need now and haven’t seen for some time — isn’t about trying to work out what voters want and giving it to them, but working out what the country needs, convincing voters it’s what they want, and taking them into the future. 

As you may have already guessed, persevilience is a mashup of perseverance and resilience, “perhaps with a little bit of persistence and patience thrown in”. But our author repeatedly emphasizes that the confection is more than the sum of its parts. His friend Keir Starmer, for instance, possesses both perseverance and resilience, but as Labour prime minister “lacked sufficient reserves in the persevilience bank”. In contrast, Tony Blair had reserves in spades. Whether Andy Burnham is truly persevilient remains to be seen, but the signs during the leadership crisis were at least promising. Like a character in a video game, “Burnham’s persevilience simply overpowered Starmer’s resilience, no matter how hard he fought”.

Even at this early stage in the book, I had a few questions, and not just about how the friendship with Starmer was now going. One of these concerned whether readers were supposed to take any of this seriously, though it appears so: a couple of jokes are included, but most of the book’s content is delivered straight-faced. The publisher’s blurb, reproduced on Campbell’s personal website, even compares Persevilience to Francis Fukuyama’s seminal The End of History, trumpeting that it too “has the potential to enter the bloodstream of political conversation and, ultimately, help us better understand and thrive in the ever more challenging world around us”. (I know what you’re thinking — how very ambumptious — but that’s Alastair Campbell for you.)

My next burning philosophical question concerned what the attribute of persevilience really amounts to, given that our author keeps insisting it isn’t just perseverance plus resilience, plus a few semantic sprinkles. Anyone can take two familiar concepts, put them together, and make up a new name for the conjunction. You may have noticed that I just did. One could also observe that on his smash hit podcast The Rest is Politics, co-hosted with the intermittently prignorant Rory Stewart, Campbell is mostly hubristling and shrugnacious; while in the writing of his books, he tends more towards the mawkward. But is the discovery of persevilience any deeper than this?

To be fair, the former Labour spin doctor does have a stab at defining his big idea for the benefit of future dictionaries. Persevilience, he tells us, is “the ability of an individual, group or organization to turn any situation, setback or meaningful experience into a positive opportunity to grow, to advance and secure their core interests and beliefs”. “Positive”, “grow” and “advance” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The aim seems to be to connect the concept of persevilience firmly to Left-liberal values and role models — that is, to differentiate it from its suspiciously conservative-sounding conceptual relatives — and much of the rest of the text bears this interpretation out.

More from this author

The cult of AI armageddon

By Kathleen Stock

Fittingly persevilient heroes offered up for contemplation include Campbell’s close friend, the magazine editor Lindsay Nicholson, who lost both her husband and young daughter to cancer; the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith; and Nelson Mandela in his Robben Island days (“he was persevilience in human form, and is now persevilience personified in historical form, for all time”). And whereas Campbell thinks perseverance and resilience are “words of drudge and struggle”, persevilience “is all about hope and progress”, requiring regular doses of optimism and joy.

If you focused only on these particular sections of the book, you might conclude that persevilience is distinguished from its more mundane ancestors by being aimed only at noble social causes, and thrillingly set to “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream. But here we hit a bump in the road; for after a lot of uplifting, air-punching rhetoric, Campbell suddenly admits that persevilience can be dedicated to nefarious ends too.

Through evidently gritted teeth, he states that sworn foes such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage — regularly excoriated on The Rest is Politics — also make the cut. Trump has survived scandals and shootings; Farage has weathered a car crash and a plane crash; both have achieved great political success. Campbell does not flinch from his unpleasant conclusion: “I must reluctantly accept that I cannot stop [persevilience] being applied to certain people just because I disagree with their politics or don’t like the cut of their jib”.

At this point, I longed to ask: but why must you accept this, Alastair? You have made this whole thing up, after all. Can’t you just make it refer to whatever you want? You don’t need to allow that there is, by your own lights, evil in persevilience (even if, as a matter of spelling, this is literally true). It’s your word!

Yet still our hero insists on facing the unwanted conclusion: “persevilience can be used for bad as well as good, wrong as well as right”. And with this admission, the book collapses; for its main selling point was clearly conceived as a guide to changing the world for the better, in a soggy, progressive sort of way. It wasn’t supposed to turn into The Art of the Deal halfway through.

In some ways, it seems absurd to be seriously analyzing this stuff. As the narrative meanders along, the combination of the author’s fierce commitment to his project and frequent repetition of the word “persevilience” becomes exponentially ridiculous and Partridge-like, at times reducing this reader to shoulder-shaking hysteria. How the man could type sentences like “Complacency is a killer of a persevilient mindset” without cracking up entirely, I do not know. Yet at the same time, the book illustrates an interesting fact about modern conceptions of virtuous characteristics, albeit inadvertently: namely, nobody knows whether they are supposed to be valuable as means or as ends.

In antiquity, aspects such as courage and temperance were self-evidently admirable; constituents of a flourishing life, by definition. In early Christianity, too, habits such as charity and prudence were not just the means of getting something from God; on the contrary, they were beautiful and holy in themselves. But as centuries passed, Western culture started to lose the idea that human characteristics could be admirable in this way, regardless of what they led to. Instead, behaviors and attitudes seemed to get their value from contributing to wider desirable ends, either socially or economically or both.

In Victorian times, for instance, industriousness, thrift, and sobriety were prized; each conceived of as likely leading to a more harmonious, economically productive whole. But since the relation between virtue and value was now extrinsic, it followed that you could sometimes use virtuous habits and attitudes for bad ends as well as for good. Industry, thrift, and sobriety could sometimes help evildoers reach their goals more quickly, just as they helped more saintly types.

In today’s liberal and post-Christian climate, neither approach to virtue sits particularly well. There is little agreement about wider social or economic ends: do we want growth, or degrowth? Assimilated social cohesion, or a riot of individuality? Without consensus on shared aims, there is zero chance of agreeing on a particular set of “virtuous” attitudes and behaviors that might count as a useful means — as a useful means to what, exactly? And at the same time, without a classical-style or religious metaphysics, it is hard to justify the lingering sense that some habits and behaviors are just more admirable than others, full stop.

As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, what we are left with is a set of outdated intuitions about the virtues, orphaned from the cultural traditions in which they found their original meaning. We can’t decide whether habits like perseverance and resilience are genuinely good in themselves, or whether they inherit their value (or not) from the social goals to which they are directed. And so it is that Campbell’s heart wants to construe persevilience as the preserve of deeply admirable heroes, while his head puzzledly concedes that arch-enemies can be persevilient too.

The lack of grounding is also apparent in his incredibly vague wording about what persevilience really is, and about what it can lead to — the finding of “meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction”, as he puts it at one point. As long as you can’t specify what these things are much more concretely, you leave open the awful possibility — presumably personally devastating to Campbell — that Donald Trump has meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction too.

On the plus side, this also means that the terrifying technocratic future Campbell enthusiastically conjures — a place where principals instruct their students about persevilience, and businesses do “persevilience audit[s]” — is unlikely. Surely even the civil service couldn’t operationalize something this chronically vague. Take my word for it: if you ever hear persevilience being talked about somewhere other than The Rest is Politics, it will be a sign that we are absolutely scrucked.

There is more than a touch of fetishism here, as the Chancellor raises his battered little case and exhibits it first in one direction and then another, as a priest displays the sacred host in the monstrance. Fetishism means endowing an inanimate object with an uncanny power, whether we’re speaking of the Budget box or a pair of tight leather trousers. The opposite of fetishism is reification, since to reify is to turn something animate into a thing. It’s the way Charles Dickens’s novels see people in general, as bizarre assemblages of bits and pieces. The Chancellor’s little case does both at once: it has a pseudo-sacred aura about it that every press photographer in the business wants to capture, but at the same time it turns something animate — the life and labor of millions of men and women — into a lifeless object.

This red box isn’t in the least beautiful. If Donald Trump were Chancellor it would be made of burnished gold and the photographers would have to wear shades. But the fact that it isn’t is the point. It’s a tarnished, much knocked-about little container that proclaims the word “tradition” in its every dent and blemish. Tradition, roughly speaking, means doing the same kind of thing your ancestors did. But the Americans tend to value innovation over continuity. Trump’s ancestors might well have engaged in much the same cruel and inhuman activities as he does himself, but he would probably consider this a drawback. I once showed an American friend around Oxford University, only for him to comment: “It’s very old.” It wasn’t meant to be a compliment. It wasn’t meant to be banally self-evident either.

More from this author

AI: a very human tragedy

By Terry Eagleton

There is a strange race of people called Laputans in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels who carry bags on their backs, which contain Language. They’re experimenting with a new kind of speech in which they dispense with words and instead take from the bag the objects they might need to converse about, holding them up mutely to each other. This might be alright for “toothbrush” and “coconut” but there are problems with “maybe” or “vertiginous”. The Laputans’ bags must be bottomless, given the number of things in the world one can talk about, but this, alas, is not so with the Chancellor. The economy may be extensive, but running and repairing it is confined to a highly limited range of tools, rather as driving an enormous truck depends on a surprisingly restricted number of instruments. This, however, is appropriate enough for the ritual nature of the event. In fact, it’s a wonder that John Healey doesn’t wear body-paint on the steps of No. 11. Tribal rituals resemble nothing as much as neurotic acts of repetition, as one seeks for the umpteenth time to exorcise demons, placate the gods or beseech them to bestow great riches upon you. The Chancellor, rather similarly, needs to drive out the demons of inflation and unemployment, placate the back benches and save a ton of money. Most tribal rituals are unsuccessful, which is one reason why they must be repeated, and the same goes for most Budgets, not least when it comes to the bestowal of great riches.

The curious thing about the Budget is that it is a theater, a spectacle, a public exhibition, yet one performed for grimly utilitarian reasons. In his classic work The English Constitution, the Victorian thinker Walter Bagehot famously distinguishes between the practical and ceremonial aspects of social life, and the Budget neatly combines the two. The English have only to look at a routine human activity to turn it into a theatrical rite. Instead of saying “Hey, have you locked up yet?” the Yeomen at the Tower of London bellow “Who Goes There?” “The Keys.” “Whose Keys?” “King Charles’s Keys.” Don’t try this at home. You’ll just end up carried away by the rhetoric, forget to lock the front door and have your washing machine removed by the neighbors.

Not all rituals resemble the Budget in having a purpose. Some of them are performed simply for their own sake. This used to be true of sport, before the capitalists got their hands on it. It’s still true of kicking a football around a school playground. Apart from feeding the hungry and caring for the sick, all the finest human activities are done just for the hell of it. Pointlessness is next to godliness. There’s no rationale for joking, falling in love or staging a Christmas panto in your community center. This is why the arts are exemplary of the good life. Simply by what they are, not necessarily by what they say, they offer a degree of resistance to the crudely instrumental form of reason which dominates our kind of civilization. They represent what Marx calls the flourishing of human powers as an end in itself, which was his definition of communism.

The more a society devotes itself to the functional and pragmatic, the less it knows what to do with what one might call the symbolic realm, other than to harness it to the business of making a profit. Traditionally, that realm has had three major constituents: the religious, the sexual and the artistic. The split between this and the business of acquisition and accumulation — the business, in a word, of the Budget — runs right down the human body. The more the body is reduced to a laboring or profit-making machine, the more the energies which might stymie these pursuits must be siphoned off elsewhere, to an insulated arena generally known as culture. This is certainly the case with religion. There used to be a saying that once religion begins to interfere with your everyday life, it’s time to give it up. This appears to mistake religion for alcohol, and doesn’t seem quite what Jesus had in mind when he preached that you are saved by helping the injured and visiting the imprisoned, not by some set of esoteric rites.

What religion, sexuality and art have in common in the modern age is that they are all privatized. Privatizing religion is known as Protestantism, which in its more radical manifestations views the whole affair of salvation as a private negotiation between oneself and God. Sexuality, too, becomes essentially a matter of what goes on in the bedroom, at least until the point when feminists and other sexual dissidents insist on its relevance to social and political existence in general. This, incidentally, had been the whole point of the churches seeing marriage as a sacrament. A sacrament is a sign or foretaste of a fulfilled human future beyond the frontier of history. It’s a matter of pointing to certain realities in the present, such as the enduring love between two people, and declaring that the so-called kingdom of heaven will be a bit like that. Whether the people in question are formally married, or of different genders, isn’t the point. The point is that such love cuts against the grain of a degraded present, and thus points in a shadowy way beyond it.

More from this author

On plagiarism

By Terry Eagleton

As for the arts, there was a time when they faithfully served various social functions. There were jobs for painters, writers and composers in those days. They could sing the military victories of the tribe, ritually recount its triumphant history, praise God, flatter a monarch or aristocratic patron, entertain the king at court, help to form a community of public-minded bourgeois, or (as in the Victorian era) play a key role in edifying and consoling a nation wracked by dire poverty, the fear of social revolution, the death of God and humanity’s newly discovered kinship with the ape. It’s true that having a function came at a high price. It meant that the arts were generally speaking a medium of political authority, and had to dance to the tune of sovereign power. When they ceased to have much of a social function, however, they were at least able to act as a critique of other social institutions. This was the moment we know as modernism.

Besides, from Romanticism to aestheticism, the utter pointlessness of works of art could be seen as exactly their point. Their function was to be functionless — to remind us that there’s a life beyond waste disposal, the accumulation of capital and Nigel Farage. Figures like Oscar Wilde could be politically relevant simply by being outrageously themselves (though Wilde was also a devout Irish Republican, which a lot of the British prefer to forget). To turn yourself into a work of art meant not to stand in the corner of the drawing room in a suitably alluring posture but to realize your creative powers as ends in themselves. Samuel Beckett was another Irish writer whose art is superficially unpolitical, though he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in the French Resistance. Even so, his drama is all about failure, brokenness and defeat, thus acting as an oblique critique of the values of a Trump. Or, indeed, of Britain in its imperialist heyday. When Beckett was asked by a French journalist whether he was British, he replied: “Au contraire.”

Our own period has witnessed a reassertion of the political value of the symbolic realm. Art, religion and sexuality have been gradually recognizing their complex responsibilities to society as a whole. Just as some forms of art have become more politically sensitive, however, so politics has become more aestheticized. Much of it is now a matter of spectacle and “optics”, media and public relations, the grooming of stars and the assiduous polishing of images. The aesthetic has penetrated to the heart of modern political life, and in all the wrong ways. The quaint little ceremony we know as the Budget is by no means just for the hell of it. There is a lot in social life that can’t afford to be. But we mustn’t forget that if there is bread, there are also circuses.

A little over a year ago, a deal was struck to underwrite Britain’s biggest data center. Nscale, a British company that builds and operates data centers on behalf of software companies, had made Microsoft its anchor tenant at a site in Loughton, Essex. Comprising 23,000 Nvidia chips at an initial capacity of 50 megawatts, the £2 billion data center would be large by European standards, but middling in American terms. Nonetheless, it was an agreement significant enough to be bundled into the package announced by the British and American governments during Donald Trump’s most recent state visit. “What a day,” said Keir Starmer, sitting alongside the President at a press conference. The suite of deals, said the then Prime Minister, was “the biggest investment package of its kind in British history”.

Last week, however, Microsoft pulled out of the data center agreement, depriving Nscale of its lead tenant. The project’s failure augurs poorly for Britain. AI is not solely a force of wolfish destruction; it is also an economic tool of immense promise. The frontier models, of course, are owned and operated by American and Chinese companies, but there are plenty of benefits, economic and otherwise, to hosting some of the associated infrastructure. British data centers don’t generate many jobs in themselves, but they allow us to store sensitive data on these shores rather than elsewhere; to support industries, such as banking, whose success depends on being closely connected to servers; to maintain something of a bargaining chip, even if only a small one, in the hyper-competitive new AI economy; and to create more capacity, at least in theory, for the training of British frontier models.

Whatever its faults, Starmer’s government acknowledged this reality, not only in that press conference with Trump, but also in the ambitious AI strategy, authored by the entrepreneur Matt Clifford, that it published in January 2025. Among other measures, the plan called for a twentyfold increase in public compute capacity, partly through the creation of deregulated AI growth zones. The Loughton data center was not situated in one of those zones, but it had government support all the same: ministers are reported to have lobbied local councillors to push through Nscale’s planning application.

More from this author

Welcome to the AI doom wars

By Tom Ough

The lobbying worked. Early last year, Nscale said the data center was to be opened toward the end of 2026. In February this year, though, visiting Guardian journalists found that the site was still a working scaffolding yard. In July, it was reported that the data center would be delayed; in mid-September, it emerged that delay might last until the mid-2030s. That Microsoft lost patience should be unsurprising. If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is an aeon in artificial intelligence.

So what went wrong? The answer, it seems, is that Nscale has been unable to secure a timely connection to the national grid. Data centers aren’t plug-and-play; instead, they need a small town’s worth of electricity, with the infrastructure to match. The power arrives at a high voltage that must then be brought to a lower voltage by bulky equipment including transformers. This process takes place in a substation, and substations cannot be rammed into a grid, or a neighborhood, overnight. It might take years for a project to obtain planning permission, and that’s hardly the finishing line: the blueprints must then be implemented by electrical engineers who, given the fast approach of 2030 and its target of 90% clean energy, are thinly stretched.

To make matters worse, a nominally completed substation must not be plugged straight into the grid. Instead, it must be plugged into a temporarily isolated portion of the grid when power demand is low. Those slots are booked years in advance, meaning that one delay can cascade into further delays. In these dangerous times, UK Power Networks (UKPN), which handles such work in the South-East, tends not to share with inquisitive journalists the finer details of its physical infrastructure, but we can safely assume that Loughton is short of a gleaming new substation.

The Government, then, is now discovering that announcing plans for an exciting new data center is very different from actually cutting the ribbon. Loughton, alas, is not a one-off: earlier this year, for instance, OpenAI paused a comparable project in the North-East. One of the problems was the speed, or otherwise, of connecting to the grid, but another — one whose effects every Briton encounters daily — was the country’s industrial energy prices, which are the highest in the developed world. Under Starmer, AI was a high priority; but Net Zero, which has hoovered up the electrical engineers while continuing to discourage the use of gas, is so deeply plumbed into our laws and regulations as to make data centers all but unbuildable. Ed Miliband, it has been alleged, continues to block investment in data centers, even as foreign secretary — though he denies it.

Suggested Reading

The grey belt was made for Big Tech

By Greg Noone

We can expect that civil servants, under duress from ministers more sympathetic to AI, will find enterprising ways to make the grid-connection process marginally less ineffective. Perhaps some legislative jiggery-pokery will enable sites like Loughton to jump the queue for UKPN’s attention. And maybe data-center developers in growth zones, which already have queue-jump privileges, could be empowered to build their own connection under Ofgem supervision.

But most of these measures would amount to a rearranging of finite resources rather than the introduction of new ones. Elsewhere, though, others are more muscular in their approach. China, whose data center capacity far outstrips ours, upgrades its power grids in anticipation of increased demand rather than in response to it. It purchases transformers in advance and in bulk. And though it encourages its data-center providers to use renewable energy, China permits them to use baseload power, which is largely dependent on coal, if they must.

The US, meanwhile, being composed of varying regulatory polities, has no single answer to the question of how to rapidly build data centers. Because the internet’s earliest users included the American government, the state of Virginia, being close to Washington, has historically had America’s largest data center capacity. But Texas, whose deregulated power grid stands alone from the other, much larger, multi-state grids, is forecast to overtake Virginia by 2030. Texas, in short, offers cheap land, cheap gas and solar, and a nimble regulatory regime — all of which are highly attractive to data center builders.

The lesson here is not simply that gas is a vital stopgap in the quest to harness AI. Paradoxically, an explosion of data centers ought, in the round, to be helpful for decarbonization. American hyperscalers, far too impatient to wait for grid upgrades, are now some of the most generous investors in clean power. Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in geothermal, a bet that might ultimately make this hitherto unreliable method of power generation readier for commercialization. Microsoft is helping to underwrite the revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and Amazon is investing in small modular reactors. Technocapital has never before been so ravenous for energy, irrespective of where it comes from.

Even on environmentalist terms, then, the hunger for reliably-powered data centers ought to be harnessed rather than fought. It is also possible that the current construction boom might contribute to breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, in which AI is a promising fit for what is partly a fluid dynamics problem, or in materials science, where AI might help us discover crystal structures of use in batteries or solar cells. Intelligence, after all, is a resource that we can apply to any field of endeavor we choose. Thinking in those terms, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has envisaged that a single data center will one day be the equivalent of “a country of geniuses”.

One need not agree with Amodei’s forecast in order to bemoan Britain’s inability to get things built, be they data centers or otherwise. We have neither the wide regulatory menu of the US nor the world-historic ambition of the Chinese state. Instead, as our governance deteriorates, we are veering from prime minister to prime minister, each with their own pet projects, with the main constant being the continued shirking of overdue reform. Factories and refineries are shutting down, while airports, railway lines, motorways and power stations remain unbuilt.

The transformative technology of the day has not escaped the chaos. Starmer, in addition to commissioning the AI strategy, set up a council whose job it was to prepare Britain’s grid “for the AI revolution”. Andy Burnham, more interested in trivialities such as private parking fines than in leading that revolution, appears to have let the council slip into abeyance — though he has promoted Kanishka Narayan, the well-regarded AI minister, to his Cabinet. Meanwhile, the engineers who run Britain’s power systems complain that the rush to Net Zero is compromising their ability to keep the lights on.

We can still hope for better. A more aggressive planning philosophy, resembling those that work best abroad, could both accelerate grid connection and enable easier in-house power generation. In the short term, data centers would use gas, but in time, renewables would take over. We can imagine Cornish geothermal energy powering the data centers of the South-West; legions of batteries, made cheaper by deep-sea mining, balancing the vicissitudes of wind and solar. Hyperscalers’ nuclear projects, too, could provide reliable baseload power to both data centers and the grid at large.

The data centers might even be beautiful. In this richer, wiser Britain, anything is possible — even, by the mid-2030s, the opening of the data center in Loughton.

Observing this, my thought was: but this isn’t the future for America! This is recent American history. Does no one remember the summer of 2020? Six months into Covid, George Floyd’s death triggered riots across the USA. Cities burned, youths rampaged and looted, and at one point an anarchist group took over central Seattle, declaring it the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”. The total cost in insurance claims would, according to reports, total more than a billion dollars.

There are parallels between the Floyd riots and the disorder now sweeping France. But there is one significant difference. The Floyd riots didn’t stop at the borders of physical America: they permeated digital America, and spilled back out into other physical places, triggering copycat protests wherever social media holds sway.

Back then, the mimetic riptide was swift and widespread. The Guardian reported BLM protests in locations without any black people. In Manchester, Bristol, and Westminster, crowds chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” at British police officers who — unlike their counterparts in the US, where the chant originated — almost never carry guns. There have been mimetic echoes of the French violence in other European countries; but no one in Minneapolis has come out on the streets in solidarity with the banlieues of Paris or Marseilles. Why not? Well, while we have grown used to thinking of the digital realm as sort-of neutral, a de-materialized “public square” in which every voice carries something like equal weight, the reality is that it’s not neutral. It’s American.

That means the mimetic currents mostly flow the other way. Arguably recreational protest looting is itself mimetic and (as Time put it) “as American as apple pie”. For those of us who live substantially inside the Anglophone internet, but outside geographic America, it’s easy to forget this. Like the protesters chanting at unarmed British bobbies, this can sometimes have absurd or comical effects. In 2023, for example, the British Left-wing commentator Ian Dunt decried the damage the Tories’ then-proposed “Rwanda bill” would do to “separation of powers” in Britain. Except that “separation of powers” is a political concept native to the USA, but nonexistent on this side of the pond.

More from this author

America's new doctrine of Empire

By Aris Roussinos

But perhaps this is understandable, given that the online realm is as much a projection of US soft power in the 21st century as Hollywood was in the 20th. Joseph Stalin is reported to have once said: “If I could control the medium of the American motion picture, I would need nothing else to convert the entire world to Communism”. And, back in his day, the US State Department was sharply aware of Hollywood’s role as a vector for soft power, working closely with film industry bodies to entrench US movie-making dominance overseas.

In our own time, digital tech plays an analogous role. Just recently, for example, the US ambassador to the EU threatened “devastating” retaliation to EU proposals to reserve some satellite bandwidth for local operators, a proposal that would weaken US competitors such as Starlink in the European market. Ongoing tussles between the US and EU over “freedom of speech”, and proposed US legislation against overseas speech restrictions, can also be understood in this light.

The result is not just a tight American rein on economic and legislative leadership of digital media, but also an ideological and discursive landscape in which everyone is incentivized to filter their own country’s news through an American register. Last week, in explaining to Americans her decision to move back to Britain, the writer Freya Sanders felt compelled to describe her homeland as “a silly little country”, and there are many more such cases.

Ever since the Great Depression, it’s been said that “when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold”. So I say this mostly without rancor: empires gonna empire. We in Britain had our turn being Top Nation. But the important thing is not to get confused. And it’s easy to get confused: as the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald has noted, the sheer volume of money, and the loudness of transatlantic Anglophone discourse, can have a distorting effect on domestic politics outside the US.

The absurdities of the Summer of Floyd vividly illustrate this. As Tomiwa Owolade has pointed out, so too does the propagation of American progressive race politics in cultures without America’s history of slavery and segregation. More recently, the Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna added his Left-wing contribution to the general noise of American projection onto European affairs. This time these events were pegged not as the tragic consequence of open borders, as Trump suggested, but what happens “when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few”.

This kind of projection and confusion abounds on the Right, of course, and is not confined to commentary on France. It’s most pernicious when it works to refocus contentious issues away from domestic coalition-building, toward whatever sells in the international clickbait economy. For instance, Elon Musk’s contribution to amplifying domestic British debate on the so-called “grooming gangs” certainly did much to draw attention to the issue. But it was also an egregious case of this precise dynamic in play: the cost of this amplification was a hyper-focus on internationally legible, highly emotive aspects of the crimes, particularly race and sexual torture. These aspects are real. But the net effect has been further siloing the topic as a Right-wing talking point, foreclosing otherwise fruitful lines of coalition-building. And, in the process, a crucial point has been drowned out, namely that the industrial-scale horrors suffered by British girls at the hands of these gangs is the tip of horrifically large iceberg: entrenched, networked, predominantly Pakistani-heritage organized crime, active across a plethora of criminal activities beyond child sexual exploitation, and most likely embedded in British local authorities.

Tackling this represents a policing challenge roughly analogous to the measures required to curb the Sicilian mafia, which plagued American cities in the last century. A problem of this kind, and on this scale, ought to be a clear bipartisan issue. No one, Left or Right, wants to live in a mafia state. Unfortunately, a large and eager market exists, well beyond Britain’s borders, for prurient ragebait about sexual torture. That market is likewise eager for proxies through which to debate “mass immigration”, “Islamification” and the like. And when all the incentives pull toward rage-bait, anyone trying to get a hearing for a concrete program to tackle organized crime can forget it.

More from this author

The return of English tribalism

By Mary Harrington

Let me be clear. None of this is to say that everything in Europe is hunky-dory. Ethnic mafias is no one’s definition of “hunky-dory” here in Britain. The riots currently raging in France, meanwhile, are the most violent and widespread since the gilets jaunes protests of 2018. There is footage reportedly of private homes being invaded, and unconfirmed reports of some rioters being found with guns. If true (and not hysterical clickbait) the situation may be escalating. France has deep underlying demographic and fiscal problems. These structural issues are real, and a version of the same pattern now plagues most developed nations to varying degrees: a shrinking tax base relative to welfare liabilities, and social solidarity weakened by the demographic pluralism embraced by political leaders, the latter done in an attempt to mitigate the former.

But also? The Floyd riots did a billion dollars of damage, but America did not “fall” in 2020. France has not “fallen” this week either. The point is this: while the structural patterns producing this week’s riots may be echoed across many Western polities, the political choices best placed to respond will vary in each case. France’s political process will grind on, toward a leader able to grip the country’s domestic difficulties. This is a matter, in any case, for the French to resolve. An overwhelmingly loud, one-size-fits-all internet discourse has little to contribute to that process, except Schadenfreude and its own projections.

And this is perhaps most urgently a lesson for those polities that share a language with the USA, but diverge in political culture. The French remain at least somewhat insulated by the barrier of language. By comparison, divided as we are by a common language, we in Britain are all but defenseless. As for becoming better-defended, inasmuch as it’s possible at all, this likely entails some strategic blocking and muting. It might also entail knowing our own political history and constitution better than Ian Dunt, and by that I don’t mean the castrated postwar account approved for “Western Civilization” enjoyers.

If the AI boosters are right, American hegemony is going nowhere. Though also, if they’re right, social media will soon be so overrun with bots and slop that everyone abandons it. That might be a mercy all round. But whether Britain would emerge on the other side with a distinct political culture once more is anybody’s guess. Perhaps instead by then we’ll all just sound like AI.

Meanwhile there’s still that standing invitation, from the internet, to offer up our home for likes and reposts. As a spectacle, a “silly little country”, a cautionary tale, an object of scorn or synthetic pity: a succulent morsel for the clickbait economy. Don’t take it.

***

A previous version of this piece incorrectly attributed the “silly little country” comment to Freya India. This has now been corrected. 

It’s worth underscoring that Mamdani has himself consistently described events in Gaza since 2023 as a genocide. Indeed, right after that ceremony, he met Palestinian New Yorkers at a restaurant named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old killed in Gaza two years ago. Nor have his interventions been solely symbolic. On his first day as mayor, Mamdani revoked several executive orders signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, including the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism and a ban on city agencies participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Whatever one thinks of these moves, they were clearly significant concessions to the pro-Palestine movement. Yet parts of the radical Left, including individuals who claim to have previously campaigned for Mamdani, now oppose him with a vigor usually reserved for the extreme Right. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, with a vigor that is rarely reserved for the Right. After all, Andrew Cuomo, JD Vance and even Donald Trump himself aren’t held to account for their stances on Gaza to such a degree. And yet an elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who has used his platform to highlight the Palestinian cause, is considered a suitable target.

To many not on the Left, this must seem hilarious. It’s the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to lose — a set of actions so politically obnoxious and self-destructive that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate about the role of bad faith or even crisis actors. But no, this is simply how a minority on the radical Left now conducts politics. What’s more, far from being an isolated phenomenon, those opposing Mamdani symbolize a powerful trend in Western activism, specifically in the Anglophone world. This transcends Left and Right: and goes by the name of “virtue hoarding”.

To be clear, virtue hoarding is distinct from “woke” — by now a meaningless phrase generally deployed by old conservatives to disparage single-origin coffee and avocado on toast. Indeed, virtue hoarding is a far more precise term: and a political style that seeks to redefine “vanguardism”. It is also distinct from the old Leninist tradition of offering leadership to the masses. Here, the point is not to win power, but rather to display an unbreachable moral superiority over the rest of society. The point is to lose.

The term virtue hoarding was coined by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu in her 2021 work Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. It’s a book that, despite its brevity, helps explain a great deal of seemingly inexplicable behavior, not least the political peccadilloes of the professional middle class (“PMC”).

More from this author

How the West got addicted to trauma

By Aaron Bastani

Liu describes how the desire to hoard virtue has become increasingly central to a form of managerial liberalism that emphasizes bias over inequality, and visibility over exploitation. For the virtue hoarder, policies about economic deprivation and racism always circle back to enhancing their personal “sense of political agency and cultural and moral superiority”. In other words, this unspoken, often incoherent doctrine, allows powerful, credentialed individuals to feel good about themselves — all while failing to address actually-existing exploitation.

Last month, for example, the Boston Globe published an extraordinary report about an LGBT bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where the heightened moral scrutiny of the Covid pandemic seems never to have ended. The Last Ditch, facing insolvency and rising debts having only been in business a year, had recently announced it would no longer require customers to wear masks on Saturday nights, though they would remain mandatory from Monday to Friday. That post, published on the bar’s Instagram page, led to a deluge of complaints and abuse — even calls for a boycott. As one comment put it: “I hope your venue gets firebombed”.

Never mind that there have been no recorded cases of Covid in Greenfield for months, and that almost every other venue in the state stopped enforcing masks years ago. Yet just as protesters branded the most pro-Palestinian politician in America a genocide apologist, so too did mask-supporting zealots attack the one venue anywhere close to agreeing with them.

The far side of the Atlantic is facing something similar. Once you recognize the phenomenon, countless political stories become clear — on both sides of the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the recent Green Party conference, for instance, some wondered whether passing a motion that “Zionism is racism” (which won by only a few hundred votes) was a smart strategy: not least because the Greens are struggling to deal with a Labour government now led by Andy Burnham. Just when the Greens needed to address the country with bold, broadly popular policies, critics argued, they had turned inward to debate the meaning of words.

And yet, once again, it was these same people — who are on the whole entirely sympathetic to the claim that Zionism is premised on ideas of racial superiority — who stood accused of being Zionists themselves. Some of the Greens’ newer members even called for the expulsion of the likes of former leader Caroline Lucas and Green MP Adrian Ramsay: someone able to win the Greens a seat in rural East Anglia. I myself was called a Zionist! I had said I understood why some European Jews, in 1945, were attracted to the Israeli cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But for the virtue hoarders, of course, that signaled little more than my own moral depravity.

Of course, such behavior isn’t entirely new, particularly on the radical fringes of politics. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud expanded on his idea of the narcissism of small differences, where minor disagreements with those closest to you assume an outsized importance. You can see this everywhere, from intra-city football rivalries to religious sectarianism and bickering siblings. Later still, in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin offered a sociological critique, arguing that political purism is a temporary habit of the anxious middle strata — as movements mature and learn — rather than a universal psychological feature.

Both theories are arguably in evidence in the stories I outline above. All the same, it does also feel like something else is going on too, not least when it comes to the internet. This is the argument made by James Marriott in his recent book The New Dark Ages: that digital media is taking us closer to a post-literate age, whose “mystical, tribal and autocratic” characteristics feel more reminiscent of our “pre-literate past”. In the same vein, Liu sees virtue-hoarders as trying to transform all social struggles into “individual passion plays” — a phrase that might sound familiar to anyone acquainted with Instagram.

Still, it’s worth questioning whether Liu’s definition of virtue hoarding goes far enough. She observes virtue hoarding most clearly in academia and in white-collar professions. But it’s clear the habit has spread to the downwardly mobile graduates of Britain and North America. Such people are less likely to own a home than their parents and grandparents and should, in theory, be more inclined to a materialist politics.

What’s more, virtue hoarding has made movement politics functionally useless, capable at best of intermittent gains before abruptly imploding. Compare that with, say, the Bolsheviks, whose very name came from the Russian term for “majority” (a label they were canny enough to adopt even when it wasn’t strictly true). For his part, Antonio Gramsci wrote extensively about establishing a majority common sense for Left-wing ideas through cultural production, something he referred to as “hegemony”. It doesn’t matter what you think about Lenin or Gramsci: for two centuries, the Left’s chief ambition was to win over the masses. But now that’s changed.

More from this author

What I learned occupying London

By Aaron Bastani

That’s happened for two reasons. First, because vanguardism has seemingly become an end in itself. If virtue can only be hoarded so long as it is a minority position, then once mainstream opinion shifts towards you, you have to move once more. That is what is most striking about labeling Mamdani a Zionist, or declaring that Caroline Lucas should be expelled from the Green Party. It is precisely because power has made concessions, and the Left has made very real gains that the anger is directed at allies instead. If you’ve ever wondered why some on the Left can’t “take the win”, the concept of virtue hoarding should help explain why.

The second reason stems from the first. For Liu, the PMC rejects debate as a meaningful way of advancing knowledge or settling disputes. Instead, political disagreements generally assume a moral tone. As a result, the politics of virtue-hoarding proves unable to build coalitions around a minimal program — the basis for collective action and social progress. For virtue hoarders, the role of debate is instead replaced by a constant impulse to humiliate political opponents — another straightforward way to accumulate cultural currency on social media — or simply discredit their views as morally suspect because they don’t possess certain immutable characteristics.

It’s worth stating that none of this is limited to the Left, though it does remain most obvious there. Just look at the Right: no sooner had Reform stolen supporters from the Conservatives than Restore appeared to steal supporters off them. The point of Restore isn’t to win, but merely to be part of a vanguard whose prestige and sense of self-worth rests on isolation from mainstream opinion. Were Restore ever to usurp Reform as the default choice of the radical Right, you can rest assured that Rupert Lowe would be presented as a traitor to the faithful alongside Nigel Farage.

Perhaps the saddest thing in all of this is that those engaged in virtue-hoarding generally don’t recognize what they are doing. Still, there’s no doubt that they’re committed to bad politics. If you truly care about your cause succeeding, it’s worth isolating their behavior and explaining why they’re wrong. Because when you have the virtue hoarders on your side, who needs enemies?

Altai is an Amur, or Siberian, tiger, the largest wild cat in the world. From a population once numbering around 30,000 across Siberia, only about 500 remain in the wild, mostly in the ancient forests of the Sikhote-Alin mountains in the Russian Far East, between China and the Sea of Japan. Much of this forest is uninhabited and virgin. I know because I am one of the relatively few foreigners to have gone there.

My path to that forest and its tigers began much earlier. Some people run away to join the circus: at 16, I left home to work at Edinburgh Zoo, where I stayed for almost two years. The experience ignited in me a fascination with wildness itself, and with what captivity does and does not change in a wild creature. In those days the dangerous, glamorous animals, including the tigers, were allocated to the men, though I spent a great deal of time observing ours. After birds and marmosets, deemed appropriate charges for my age and sex, I graduated to being the largely unseen butler to the great apes.

The principle at the zoo was that animals should remain fit to return to the wild: no petting, no relationships, and no entering the enclosure of a dangerous animal. Our female orangutan would sit behind the bars watching me clean her sleeping quarters, sometimes pushing her huge fingers through. I had been warned not to respond.

One day I looked up from scrubbing the floor and saw her holding a rag, copying me. Our eyes met. I put down my brush and sat opposite her, just beyond the reach of her fingers. Look into the eyes of a great ape and there is a sensation I can only describe as someone being home. There was recognition, kinship, an almost unbearable awareness that this highly intelligent creature and I were divided only by bars and the absence of a shared language. I felt embarrassed, then terribly sad.

The zoo’s director had told me that two kinds of animal suffered particularly in captivity: the thinkers and the roamers. The orangutan was a thinker. Her suffering made sense to me because, as a primate myself, I could recognize something of myself in her.

That experience sharpened my obsession with the tigers. Look into the eyes of an Amur tiger and there is no answering sense of kinship. Asocial, solitary and accustomed to total dominance, the tiger remains illegible to us. But if the orangutan is one of nature’s thinkers, the Amur tiger is one of its roamers, and I wanted to understand it.

Not all zoos worked to keep the barrier between humans and wild animals intact. John Aspinall, the owner of Howletts, built an entire philosophy of animal husbandry on crossing it. He believed close-contact relationships between keepers and their wild charges were not only possible, but desirable. In 1980 two keepers were killed by an Amur tigress in his care; in 1994 the Head Keeper was killed by an Amur male. Aspinall nevertheless insisted the risk was worth it for the animals’ wellbeing. Although his breeding record seemed to bear out his claims, the deaths demonstrated that even undeniably close relationships between Amur tigers and humans did not suppress wild behavior.

Timothy Treadwell made a similar claim for exceptional intimacy with wild creatures, spending 13 summers among Alaska’s grizzlies, who seemed to accept his presence among them. In 2003 he described himself as a “fully accepted wild animal brother to these bears”. Not long after, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed by a bear. The error was not his love for these wild animals, but believing that love created an exemption from their nature.

Years after I left the zoo, writing my second novel Tiger, I saw my opportunity to tell a story about Amur tigers that was neither anthropomorphic nor sentimental. In late November 2017, in the depths of the Russian winter, I joined a somewhat seat-of-pants expedition into a closed-off part of the Russian Far East. I crossed 11 time zones, meeting a handful of other Amur besotteds from all over the world before traveling deep into the forest to camp with our Russian guides.

Our goal was to track tigers in the snow and capture them on camera traps. The expensive irony was that we were highly unlikely to see a tiger in the flesh. To those who know the forest, coming face to face with one is a grave failure. Russians and the indigenous Udeghe people alike pay close attention to tracks and signs, careful not to announce themselves in territory that is not theirs: survival depends on avoidance.

The habitat Altai is evolved to dominate is harsh beyond our comprehension in our temperate corner of the globe. Winter temperatures can fall to -36C, with snow six feet deep. A male, or King, Amur tiger controls a territory of around 500 square miles, patrolling and defending the scarce resources within it. Intensely solitary and rarely photographed by humans, it is known among indigenous people as the “Lord of the Forest”.

One day, on a tracking expedition, we found ourselves before the bloodbath of a recently killed boar. The blood was still wet, which meant the tiger was nearby. Our guides, carrying Second World War Kalashnikovs and flares they admitted would not stop an attack, told us to touch nothing. An Amur tiger can be 10 meters away in the winter forest and simply invisible. Its striped coat blends into the striped world of cedar and oak trunks and the shadows between. Its white belly vanishes against the snow.

Should it attack, it would come from nowhere as far as we were concerned. Its large paws make its approach silent; its flat face gathers information like a satellite dish; its ears turn independently towards the smallest sound, and its great snout pinpoints smells it does not forget. It would leap for the neck and snap it in seconds. Invisible yet omnipresent, it had earned its title.

I was afraid. Not anxious: afraid in the way an animal in danger is hyper-alert. My senses sharpened towards what I could not see but could feel. My heart beat faster. Later I would appreciate the discovery that somewhere inside this soft British woman still lies an animal self.

Suggested Reading

The pain of pet grief

By Kathleen Stock

As we stood there, the boar’s heart rolled out. Alexander, our lead guide, eyed it and remarked that it would make “great stew”. The guides debated nervously in Russian. I had read that, according to the Udeghe people, one prohibition is never to take from a tiger’s kill. The tiger, watching, will come for it wherever you go.

The Udeghe worldview is animist: all things, from rocks to tigers, are alive, and the forest is brimming with signs and communications that we in the West dismiss as superstition. But in tiger country, tracks, weather, even the bodily sensation that something invisible is nearby, are relied upon as vital information. What we might call “lore” is the application of acute attention to natural surroundings. Crucially, the tiger is practicing it too.

Our guides were disparaging of this kind of indigenous knowledge. Shamanism has been largely suppressed in Russia. Even so, when it came to it, the risk was deemed not worth taking.

“Time to go,” said Alexander, leading us away and leaving the heart behind.

To feel oneself toppled from the top of the evolutionary tree is a strange experience. In that forest we were not masters of anything, merely conspicuous, poorly adapted animals moving through the territory of a creature infinitely better fitted to its world.

In the zoo, the tiger’s grandeur lies partly in being seen. Its creamy underbelly, orange coat and vivid black stripes resemble a king’s robes: an ostentatious announcement of presence. In human culture, after all, this is how status is signaled. But in the forest, the tiger’s magnificence resides in disappearance, and in the fear of its revelation. Like most large predators, the Amur tiger avoids conflict: injury costs energy. It does not control 500 square miles by being a thug. It is supremely sensitive, cautious and single-minded, the perfect expression of its environment.

We, by contrast, blundered through that environment in deafening North Face outfits, unable to smell, hear or see much beyond what was in front of us. Even a gun could not be fired in time to save us. We were as exposed in the tiger’s world as Altai was in ours.

I think again of Altai in his exposed two-acre paddock, overlooked from every side and even from above. To us he looked regally powerful, but almost every natural advantage had been stripped away except the deepest one: the instinct to survive. Nice, calm, receptive: these are our judgments, not changes in the animal. The captive tiger had not ceased to be what he was; only the forest had been taken away.

When William Chapman entered the enclosure, the avoidance on which tiger and human normally depend was no longer possible. Altai would have known at once that the intruder was male and inside his domain. He was, perhaps, Eliot’s “broken king”, but he defended his tiny territory with the vigor of the Lord of the Forest.

For a brief moment, the great and the good of the realm, bejeweled and decked out in ermine, were at the mercy of a rabble of farmers from Essex and Kent. Over in Hertfordshire, while Wat Tyler was marching up the Thames to London, the townsfolk of St Albans ransacked the archive of the abbey, searching for a charter of liberties which they claimed had been given to them many centuries earlier by King Offa of Mercia. These rebels in 1381 were looking back to a time as far removed from them as they are now from us. The English have long memories.

Do those memories still stir? Modern socialists certainly hope so. If we in England are ever finally going to have the revolution that’s evaded us for so long, then history, radical history, will be our guide. We might never have had a grand theorist, a Gramsci or an Althusser, but our Marxists more than made up for it in the history department. There was a golden generation of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. In fact, the last outstanding member of this school, the medievalist Chris Wickham, died only last week. Another of our finest Marxist minds, Rodney Hilton, shaped how we think about the Peasants’ Revolt. Over half a century after it was published, Bond Men Made Free still makes for exhilarating reading.

The elites had squeezed their peasants many times before; but now, with Parliament’s new poll tax, they squeezed too hard, inviting a reaction. That reaction was swift and bloody. It quickly became about much more than tax: the rebels demanded the end of serfdom, the redistribution of wealth, and the lives of many of the king’s counselors. (To the boy-king Richard II himself they remained deferential.) Today you can still see the mummified head of Simon Sudbury, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, in a cubbyhole at the church in the Suffolk town that bears his name. You can look into the eye-holes in his skull and imagine what expressions they might have worn on each of the eight swings of the axe. Here, then, is a monument to the Peasants’ Revolt. It was a freak episode when everything stood on its head, and the masses enjoyed a brief and bloody respite before returning, not by choice, to the grinding cruelty of everyday life.

Tyler is so feted by the Left today because he is the best medieval hero they can hope for. What, after all, could they do with Alfred the Great or Richard the Lionheart? The fact they’re both monarchs is bad enough — but an “Anglo-Saxon” and a crusader? Such figures used to be harmlessly apolitical, but few things are allowed to be apolitical today. They represent a kind of Englishness that makes progressives feel uneasy. Tyler, about whom we know almost nothing, works better as an icon: a put-upon everyman, devoting himself to the class struggle. Tyler is a tragic figure, too, stabbed in the back by the Lord Mayor of London at Smithfield, a suitably bourgeois villain.

Suggested Reading

The English Question

By Aris Roussinos

And so Thomas Paine exclaimed, in a footnote to The Rights of Man, that Wat Tyler’s fame will “outlive” the falsehoods spread by more disparaging historians. If the barons who obtained Magna Carta from King John “merited a monument to be erected at Runnymede”, Paine added, then “Tyler merited one in Smithfield”. Two centuries later, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn unveiled a plaque commemorating the heroes of 1381 at the Highbury Barn pub — the site of the moated home of the Lord Treasurer Sir Robert Hales, “Hob the Robber”, which the rebels burned to the ground while delivering him to the same fate as Archbishop Sudbury.

And on it goes. The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s new film on the Revolt, is a jumbled-up medley of English socialist themes. It was marketed briefly, in America but not in Britain, as a Robin Hood origin story, as if that is something anyone was asking for: The Death of Robin Hood, released earlier this year, was a box office bomb. Here Rodney Hilton’s hand is again at work: for Hilton famously argued that the fictional Robin Hood might have been a mascot of sorts of the rebels in 1381. It is tantalizing that the first surviving reference to him in English literature comes from only a few years earlier. The popular image of Robin Hood — that he “stole from the rich to give to the poor” — is, however, of a later vintage, and it has been convincingly claimed that the medieval audience for Robin Hood was most likely the well-to-do, rather than the resentful downtrodden.

The film’s politics are even messier than its history. Robin Hood is, of course, a symbol of Midland (or, in some versions of the story, Northern) disaffection. The Peasants’ Revolt, on the other hand, was really a south-eastern affair. There was, it is true, some tumult in York, but this was to do with local concerns. Greengrass is alert to this, and makes a strained modern parallel. It is, he says, a “very English rebellion story”, taking place in “all the big Brexit places”, chiefly today’s Reform UK heartlands of Kent and Essex. Tyler, this late-medieval Che Guevara, is also often presented as a forerunner to Nigel Farage. And though it was Thatcher’s enemies who, in an inspired bit of demagoguery, brought “poll tax” back into political discourse, there was, perhaps, a proto-Thatcherite complexion to the Rising of 1381: “Essex Man” telling the taxman to bugger off.

Andrew Garfield, the film’s star, describes The Uprising as a “Rorschach test”: and the same goes for the Peasants’ Revolt as a whole. There is no proto-Thatcherism in his version of the story: he wants billionaires to watch it and to be “scared shitless”. The closest to this type of politics in the film itself is a shouty John Ball, the radical preacher, played by Jamie Bell with hints of Gary Stevenson. “Surrender to the rage”, he says, “and it will set you free”. For one of the great heroes of English socialism — William Morris wrote a book about him — and utterer of the much-loved ditty, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”, Ball in The Uprising is surprisingly unsympathetic. He appears as a religious fanatic. At one point during his rantings and ravings, Garfield’s laconic ploughman asks him, “Where’s God in any of this?”; it is reminiscent of “You ain’t no Muslim bruv”. And yet, by the film’s end, the ploughman seems to have come round to Ball’s (and indeed Garfield’s) way of thinking. Entirely fictitiously, the Lord Mayor of London, Tyler’s killer at Smithfield, gets his just desserts; and as the ploughman is roughing up the boy-king Richard II in the final scene, he drops his erstwhile royalism and says, “no kings”. Confusing the politics further, Tom Hollander’s oleaginous Hales at one point makes a Clintonian allusion to “deplorables”.

The Uprising isn’t the only piece of media to emerge lately about the Peasants’ Revolt. Fortunately, Doom Painting, a new novel that vividly fictionalizes the June days of 1381, is less anxious to find contemporary resonances in the late-medieval past. Its author, A.K. Blakemore, is more willing to let the story speak for itself, and so deals better with its many complexities. Her language recalls that of Langland and Chaucer, and is leavened with playful anachronisms. She has spent much time, as anyone should, playing around with the People of 1381 database, putting flesh on the bones of names which appear as lightning bolts in the records of 1381. There is a patriotic thread in her narrative; Thomas Baker, who sets off the whole Revolt early on, is a ruddy-faced Englishman and proud to be so, “volunteer[ing] himself as a synecdoche” for the whole country. “The angels come down blessing”, the book says, “not from heaven, but from Essex!” Tyler, for his part, is gruff and worldly, a manic-depressive charmer, tormented by his experiences fighting the French, and — what motivates him more than anything — that feeling that it was all for nothing.

Tyler is on a high for most of Doom Painting — he is “Christ re-fucking born” — and his sweaty, adrenaline frenzy is infectious. The novel captures the sheer fun of revolting, the kind of fun that teenagers seem to currently be having across France. There is a scene when Tyler and Ball peer outside the window and see a “gang of raw-boned youths” playing with an effigy of Archbishop Sudbury, “laughing as they take turns to grab hold of the noosed neck and mime fucking the limp dolly from behind”. “What could be holier”, says Ball, “than the laughter of children?” These are tragic words: we all know that the boys won’t get much more than these “few summer days of gaiety”. Unlike in The Uprising, where the rebellion is continued via a forest guerrilla, the historical Revolt was crushed almost immediately. John Ball was hung, drawn, and quartered at St Albans in July, in the presence of the king. When Richard II did at last get his comeuppance, it was at the hands of his nobles in 1399 — the sorts of people, court flatterers, schemers, and usurpers, whom the peasants had perceived as their main enemy all along. One of the reasons for the Peasants’ Revolt’s hold on the English socialist imagination is that it was an utter failure.

More from this author

The emptiness of Malcolm Gladwell

By Samuel Rubinstein

It’s fun until it isn’t, as Tyler and Ball learned the hard way. And if Hales, Sudbury, and the tax-collectors make the rebels easy to get behind, the socialist folk heroes are “problematic” in their own right. Contemporary chronicles make clear that the London rioting involved attacks on Flemish prostitutes and weavers. Chaucer, in “The Nun’s Priest Tale”, says that “Jakke Straw and his meynee. / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrill / Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille…” It is interesting that both Doom Painting and The Uprising, faced with this problem, adopt more or less the same strategy: to distinguish between their rebels, the good ones with pure motives, and the violent, unruly London mob. “They are of the belief” — Tyler seems to roll his eyes as he recites this hammy line in The Uprising — “that Flemish merchants are stealing their jobs”. He says this as though it is an uncouth and untrue notion: and all of a sudden our rebel is a bien pensant. In Doom Painting, meanwhile, one of the good guys is killed by Londoners while trying to intervene on behalf of a Flemish family. This, in a historical novel that is hardly light on fact, seems to be pure fiction. Is it too much to bear, for Wat Tyler’s latter-day admirers, that he probably didn’t care about London’s community of Flemish immigrants, and perhaps even thought that they had it coming? Our long memories are also selective. Like the St Albans rebels in 1381, we tend to know what we are looking for.

That leaves one more question: why now, in 2026, have two unconnected fictionalizations of 1381 appeared? The Uprising, as its confused politics suggest, doesn’t seem to know what connects us with the situation endured by 14th-century peasants. The epilogue to Doom Painting lamely offers up something about hereditary peers in the House of Lords — hastily conceding that, as of Spring 2026, there is not even any longer such a thing. The truth is that there is no obvious reason for the Peasants’ Revolt to be especially “timely” today. There is the specter of plague, on which both Doom Painting and The Uprising place great importance. But to compare Covid with the Black Death seems inapt.

I suspect it boils down to the fact that “Eat the Rich” stories are the flavor of the month, and the Peasants’ Revolt is England’s ultimate “eat the rich” story. Still, it is a propitious time for all things medieval, as the success of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum makes clear. Nobody seriously tries to make that “timely”. And when they try — as Andy Burnham wanly did — they miserably fail. In both cases, 1066 and 1381, it’s the drama, not the politics, that’s timeless.

The England of 2026 is impossibly different from that of the Paris Garden, and so is our attitude to bears. Instead of torturing them, we’ve turned them into the cuddly moral arbiters of the modern British state. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Paddington, who has become a metonym for the country’s “official” values. “Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for,” a magistrate said in 2024, as he sentenced two men for drunkenly vandalizing a sculpture of the Peruvian bear. “He represents kindness, tolerance, and promotes integration and acceptance in our society.”

Britain’s arctomania started a century ago, with a different bear: Winnie the Pooh. The first collection of A.A. Milne’s stories, about a “bear of little brain” who potters around the Hundred Acre Wood eating honey, hunting woozles, and playing pooh-sticks with his chums, was published in October 1926. It was an instant success, selling some 150,000 copies before the year was out. Children’s books had always been didactic — as far back as 1475, The Babees Book instructed infants not to pick their noses, bite their nails, or suck their thumbs. But Milne left this behind. Instead, he pioneered a “bossy” turn in children’s letters: his tone was one of adult condescension, an example of which appears on the book’s first page:

“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?”
“Ah, yes, now I do,” I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it’s all the explanation you are going to get.

And yet, like Paddington’s, Pooh’s moral code is a distinctly adult one. Milne’s stories, as the critic John Bayley wrote, “always seemed to belong more to one’s parents than oneself.” It feels as if he’s constantly reprimanding an idiot child for not quite being child enough. The facetious, italicized tete-a-tetes between the narrator and Christopher Robin evidence that. The sentences are filled with irregular capitalizations (“Silly Old Bear”, “Shortness of Breath”, “Hostile Intent”), which is an attempt to show the childish imagination: how each new thing, encountered fresh, appears singular and so must be rendered as a proper noun. This fails: children’s imaginations are wicked and Gothically capacious, but in the Hundred Acre Wood there is nothing of the sort. Children allow darkness; it’s only adults that must pretend it doesn’t exist.

Suggested Reading

The death of prep-school England

By Cosmo Adair

And these stories were an exercise in adult interference from the very start. Milne pillaged his son Christopher Robin’s imagination and his stock of cuddly toys, only to impose an entirely new meaning onto them — an official and inflexibly grown-up interpretation of what childhood is really about. In Pooh’s world, things can always be explained, and actions have rational consequences: “The only reason for being a bee that I know of,” Pooh says, “is making honey… And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” It is a far-cry from the illogical transformations of Lewis Carroll or the Grimm Brothers.

This accounts, in part, for Milne’s success. This was how adults wanted childhood to be, how they misremembered it: comfortable and stable, with no horrors lurking out there in the dark. Pooh lulled his adult readers “bump, bump, bump, on the back of the head” into the silly innocence of the Edwardian summer. The Hundred Acre Wood, after all, is a place where the trees haven’t been blasted bare by artillery fire, and the word “Somme” could only be countenanced as a plausibly Poohvian misspelling (“I want Somme hunny”).

Milne retired Pooh in 1928, and turned his hand to “serious” literature. But if his children’s books appealed to adults, his mature works didn’t. The most notable of these was Peace with Honor: a 1934 treatise that implored Hitler and Mussolini to conduct themselves less obstreperously, and the British and French not to rise to their bait. There was no need to fight wars, if we could be kind to one another instead. “It evidently came from the depth of the author’s heart,” wrote a New York Times reviewer. Even when he wrote about geopolitics, he seemed to do so from his study in the House at Pooh Corner.

Following Milne’s death in 1956, Pooh became a global icon — and swapped the King’s English for a gee-wiz Californian in a series of successful Disney films, the first of which, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, appeared in 1977. He became, like shortbread cookies and the Queen, a symbol of Britain’s soft power in an age of hard decline. In 2006, his 80th birthday was celebrated by the great and the good of Blairite Britain with a bill in Parliament. It applauded Milne for his influence on “the early development of fine values, honest principles, and decent morals amongst many generations of children worldwide”. John Bercow, Nick Clegg, and even George Galloway signed it. Once upon a time, Britain had exported slaughter and civilization throughout the world; now it offered a lazy, talking teddy-bear that encouraged children to be kind. In seeking to banish the fusty remnants of an older, imperial Britain, the Blairites had to find a new set of ahistorical values that they could call “British”. And those could be found in the Hundred Acre Wood. Yet cruelty belied the Blairite kitsch: the year of the Pooh bill, 34,000 civilians died in Iraq and the South Yorkshire police ignored Angie Heal’s third report into Rotherham’s grooming gangs.

Twenty years on, even Blairism’s legacy journal, The New World, concedes that the “mordantly twee energy” of Milne’s books has had a disabling effect on British society. Unsurprisingly, injunctions to “be kind” prevent serious political discussion. This is clear from Pooh’s inheritor: Paddington. The Peruvian stowaway had been quietly present in popular culture since Michael Bond published A Bear Called Paddington in 1956, but he assumed his current symbolic role after the release of the 2014 film adaptation. “Kindness”, “tolerance”, “integration”, and “acceptance” all functioned as stifling buzzwords in an era of political turmoil. In the period defined by the Brexit vote, Covid lockdowns, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and mass migration, all the sacred continuities of British society were undone. It fell on Paddington to cheerlead the social cohesion that shared symbols and institutions had once guaranteed.

Suggested Reading

JK Rowling is reaping the Potter whirlwind

By Poppy Sowerby

In his essay “On Toys”, the French philosopher Roland Barthes argued that toys are a means of indoctrinating children into bourgeois life: kids play with postmen and soldiers and police-officers, so that they can assume these roles as adults. Toys are homogeneous, factory-made, chemical and plastic, much as their handlers’ adult lives will be. So what would Barthes make of modern Britain’s teddy-bears, with their soft coats and state-approved values: kindness, tolerance and courteousness? Of course, the Elizabethans were wrong to chain bears up and bait them; but at least they knew they were scary beasts that eat people. By turning them into cuddly toys and fictional characters, the British have attempted to remove death’s sting — to cover up the nation’s discontent in kindness and synthetic fur.

Christopher Robin suffered because of his father’s interference in his own enchanted world, and came to resent the Pooh books and even his father. Once he arrived at boarding school, the saccharine lines of the poem “Vespers” (“Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers!) turned into regular jibes, spat out of bullies’ mouths. It took most of his life before he could recover from what his father had done to him, and this only when writing his own memoir. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, “almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.” Milne also left Britain with the emptiness of his creation, which will always be playing “in that enchanted place on top of the forest”.  

The controversy raised salient questions about the role of footloose billionaires in British politics. Must they meet some benchmark of commitment to the country before we consider their views? Or is their willingness to leave further evidence that we are not paying enough attention to the needs of business?

Over the past year, Britain has witnessed a succession of wealthy businessmen fuming at the mismanagement of the country and dabbling in politics, often from a position of opulent exile. The chemicals magnate Jim Ratcliffe, another prominent Brexit supporter who moved his tax residency to Monaco in 2020, has not been shy about criticizing his home country. Last month, Ratcliffe declared that Britain was “on the slide”. At one time, he recalled, “we had the greatest empire in the world, we were a great people. We won two world wars.” Today, by contrast, Britain suffers from high taxes, a “green eye towards wealth”, and a failure to control immigration and welfare spending. Above all, Ratcliffe has complained about “ridiculously high” energy prices, which have recently led his company, INEOS, to mothball three chemicals plants in Hull. 

These comments provoked a response from the wealth manager Peter Hargreaves, also a Brexit-backer, who started his company from a bedroom in the Eighties. Hargreaves quipped that Britain “isn’t on a slide, it’s slid… This country is never, ever coming back, it’s finished.”

Meanwhile, it was recently reported that David Reuben, the real estate tycoon who, together with his brother Simon, possesses Britain’s second largest family fortune, relocated to Monaco over the summer. The brothers tend not to comment on politics, but they donated £100,000 to Reform UK this year, having previously given just shy of £1 million to the Tories. This story has since been called into doubt, with evidence that David has already been resident in Monaco for over a decade, but there has been no shortage of super-rich individuals leaving Britain in recent years. Analysis of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index suggests that more than half of the country’s billionaire wealth has moved away since Labour took power in 2024. Hedge fund manager Christopher Rokos, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and shipping tycoon John Fredriksen have all left recently.  

It is naturally somewhat embarrassing for the government that successful businessmen are leaving the country like rats fleeing a sinking ship, in some instances taking hundreds of millions of pounds of annual tax revenues with them. Yes, Britain’s prosperity and public finances depend far more on raising economic productivity than on wealthy individuals, but insofar as a dim view of Britain’s prospects makes such individuals less likely to invest here, the two are not unrelated. Yet the problem of unhappy capitalists is surely priced-in by a Left-wing government, which can to some extent turn it to their own advantage. Look at these self-interested billionaires, they can say (making sure to utter the word billionaire with a sneer), they would rather abandon us than pay their share. 

More from this author

What Burnham can learn from Bismarck

By Wessie du Toit

By the same token, since many of these truculent expats are either Brexit supporters or Reform and Conservative donors, their interventions pose a problem for the Right. For parties promising to put British people first, it is awkward to be receiving financial and rhetorical support from ultra-wealthy individuals whose commitment to the country often does not extend to actually living here. This reinforces what Janan Ganesh has called a “patriotism problem” on the Right: figures like Nigel Farage claim to love Britain, but have almost nothing positive to say about the country as it actually exists. Then again, that stance is what endears Reform to the section of the electorate that thinks the country is fundamentally broken. For those voters, the fact that billionaires share the same analysis may matter more than their tax residency does. Their decision to leave the country is, after all, a powerful confirmation of the narrative.

A greater contradiction lies in Reform’s attitude to the wealthy in general. Farage, whose career began as a commodities trader in the midst of the Thatcher revolution, speaks proudly about his ability to earn money, and to attract it. His party has received tens of millions of pounds — the largest political donations in British history — from another pair of expat billionaires, the cryptocurrency magnates Ben Delo (until recently a Hong Kong resident) and Christopher Harborne (who has acquired Thai citizenship). Both have now returned to Britain after Labour attempted to block their contributions. Over the summer, Farage defended his monied backers as “men who’ve gone off around the world as entrepreneurs and succeeded — the sort of people we used to admire over centuries”. Yet his party appeals to struggling blue-collar workers and lower middle-class sole traders and small business owners, many of whom feel the deck has been stacked against them and in favor of the rich. Last week, Robert Jenrick criticized the Conservatives’ proposed inheritance tax reforms as “offering handouts to multi-millionaires”.

Wealth, however, may not be as important as we might assume. Dyson is an intriguing figure in this context because he has long argued that Britain’s problems are tied to the character of its elites, who esteem knowledge work and cultural literacy above the hands-on business of technology, invention, entrepreneurship and trade. In 2004, he even stormed out of his post as chairman of London’s Design Museum, complaining that it had become a “style showcase” chasing visitor numbers with frivolous exhibitions about flower-arranging and designer shoes, rather than a place to promote serious engineering.

In many Western countries, there is now a prominent dividing line between, broadly, managerial cultures and entrepreneurial ones. The former are those employees in institutional settings — corporations, the public sector, NGOs, and what Dyson calls an “Oxford-Westminster bubble” — who value credentials, are fond of rules, and assume that the world is shaped by ideas and narratives. By contrast, those of an entrepreneurial persuasion are interested in the material facts of how things actually work, while chafing against rules and prizing innovation and individual ambition. 

Consider the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. It included people who work in traditional industries involving cars, machinery or oil and gas, as well as those who do business outside of corporate structures, such as family-owned enterprises and venture capitalists. These groups were united in their resentment of a professional managerial class, stereotypically inhabiting a world of yoga studios and DEI policies, which stifled them with regulations and liberal mores. 

The revolt of Britain’s entrepreneurs indicates that a similar tension has emerged here. Terms of opprobrium such as “lanyard class” and “the Blob” try to capture a middle-class, managerial ethos that now runs through the country’s institutions like a stick of rock. Its priority is not how the economic and material underpinnings of modern life operate, but ensuring that they conform to the appropriate standards mandated by equalities law, environmental regulations and progressive cultural etiquette. There is an utter disconnect between this worldview and, for instance, the cowboy capitalism of post-Soviet Russia where the Reuben brothers originally made their fortune trading aluminum, or INEOS factories producing nasty chemicals and spewing out carbon emissions, or disruptive and potentially dodgy technologies such as cryptocurrency.  

The important thing to note about this conflict is that, while it is primarily expressed as a fissure within Britain’s elites, it is fundamentally a question of attitudes and social environment, and can therefore provide the basis of a much wider division. Less privileged staff at managerial institutions are likely to absorb the dominant assumptions of those settings, while people of widely differing means and backgrounds can identify with a message of self-reliance, ambition and scorn for meddling bureaucrats. Seen in these terms, there is a political logic in Reform courting crypto-billionaires, fossil fuel-reliant industries and broader swathes of voters who sympathize with an anti-establishment sentiment. Likewise, there is a logic in parties of the Left treating these things as threats to be resisted. 

The fundamental problem for the Right is that, 10 years on from Brexit, it is no closer to a viable program for the dynamic, free-trading Britain envisioned by its entrepreneurial supporters. That would mean lowering taxes on business and wealth — paid for by welfare cuts — and deregulating everything from planning laws to wages and the financial sector. It would mean, moreover, explaining to the public that they must struggle for survival in a highly competitive global economy, something which only Liz Truss has attempted in recent years, and she only succeeded in making the idea less palatable. British politics has become increasingly insular in recent years, focused on domestic stability and reluctant to compromise with a wider world that appears to be largely a source of insecurity and danger. This suits the Right when it comes to territorial and legal sovereignty, with both the Tories and Reform converging on a platform of tighter borders, withdrawing from international treaties and curbing multiculturalism at home. Yet neither party has found a way to reconcile its business-friendly instincts with a public that still desires a protective state. 

Kemi Badenoch’s new Conservative manifesto, The Right Way, is at least somewhat forthright in its diagnosis, emphasizing the need for Britain to be “competitive” in the conditions it offers to businesses. Yet details are notably scarce when it comes to the goal of reducing strategic dependency on China, a rather large and complex caveat to the statement that “free trade should be the presumption”. More importantly, this return to the Conservatives’ free-market, small-state default, greeted with a profound sigh of relief from what remains of the party faithful, is essentially a concession of electoral defeat. It marks the end of Tory efforts to compete against Labour and Reform in working-class, post-industrial regions.

More from this author

Britain's paramilitary nightmare

By Wessie du Toit

But nor has Reform reckoned with the degree of state subsidy that rebuilding British industry in these areas will actually require, or how this can be squared with Farage’s belief that, vis-à-vis Brexit, “we have not taken advantage of the opportunities to deregulate and become more competitive”. The answer, we are told time and again, is that scrapping Net Zero taxes and cutting wasteful government spending will boost industry and the exchequer alike, yet this simple solution belies the complexity of the problem. Even if an anti-establishment coalition spanning billionaires and tradesmen can work electorally, it will soon come under pressure from the conflicting interests and power disparities within it. The prodigious sums donated by Delo and Harborne suggest that a Reform government would likely follow a similar course to the second Trump presidency, beginning with ineffectual support for blue-collar workers before swerving into the warm embrace of global tech capital. 

Strangely, it is Andy Burnham’s Labour Party that looks best placed to capitalize on Britain’s siege mentality. The party’s identification with multiculturalism, and its instinctive support for immigration, has left the residual impression that it is an outward-looking political force. In fact, Labour now trumpets its pride in a diverse Britain while viewing the wider world with a mixture of suspicion and apathy. Burnham is the most domestically-focused prime minister in recent memory. Though his desire to invest in the country’s economic foundations is welcome, his big-state program offers no meaningful role for business or entrepreneurship. Labour has many antagonists — Donald Trump, American tech oligarchs, Russia, Israel — but few real friends. Rejoining the EU is increasingly the limit of its global imagination, and insofar as that vision does not account for the bloc’s own serious economic and political difficulties, it is an imagined one. 

The irony is that Burnham’s comforting insularity is only possible thanks to the degree to which globalization is already part of the grain of British society. This is a country that can afford an expensive commitment to national decarbonization, driving away industrialists like Ratcliffe, because it has resigned itself to dependency on China’s coal-powered factories. It can fund its social expenditures because the markets, even if they charge an ever-greater premium, continue to buy its debt. And it can produce a leader like Burnham because, as the recent scandal at Manchester City FC has reminded us, his municipal fiefdom was regenerated with oil and gas money from Abu Dhabi. 

Clearly, this strange settlement cannot go on forever. The chancellor is preparing for a budget in two weeks where neither borrowing nor taxes can sustainably go much higher, while the need to control runaway welfare spending and ease pressure on businesses is becoming pressing even from a soft-Left perspective. It has been easy to ignore billionaires lamenting Britain’s lack of competitive drive when relying on others has been so easy. That may not be much longer. 

Only last Saturday, William Chapman was mauled to death by a tiger at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. The circumstances were deeply sad. Chapman asked a fellow parkgoer to take a picture of him with the Siberian tiger in the background; he then leapt into the enclosure. “He was on all fours, praying and bowing down to the tiger,” said one witness. In footage which is by now unavoidable on social media, though police are asking you to please not watch, he points his pinky finger up to the snarling cat — signing the word “bad” in Makaton. He tells it to “stop being naughty”. 

The story quickly took on a vast parabolic power. Man and tiger were reduced to characters in a thought experiment about asymmetrical free will. The tiger is tethered to his own predatory nature; the man is unguarded, naive, jigging into his own damnatio ad bestias. Because the footage was so disturbing, people online began arguing with each other to rationalize why they watched it. The death was merely natural selection, brayed one camp; no, it was an indictment of “post-Christian morality” that the tiger was not gunned down, screeched another. Someone had to pay: the man, his absent carers, the authorities, the tiger himself. Until then, spectators will just keep watching the video, keep arguing about evolution, religion, disability, public safety and animal rights. And so we roll the dead man, and our own discomfort about his fate, quietly out of frame.

Many voyeurs even seemed to find the video darkly entertaining. These included President Trump, who posted the footage to his Truth Social feed along with the caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.” The White House Rapid Response account reposted this on the app formerly known as Twitter.

The footage quickly joined the ranks of social media’s many viral snuff films: jihadi beheadings, cartel executions, dark-web torture material… They are pure abjection in Julia Kristeva’s sense of the word: their victims hover darkly between man and meat. 

Though we might not consider ourselves snuff watchers, mainstream social media is full of it. Older Millennials have been watching atrocities online since they were teenagers. The adults of the internet were weaned on scary chain emails, Flash animations, shock sites, illicit imageboards and links distributed through schools. Sites like Rotten.com, launched in 1996, provided unmoderated archives of crime-scene photographs, autopsies and accidents. In 2000 Ogrish drove the model forward by introducing video. Its slogan, “Can you handle life?”, gave gore the undeserved sheen of journalistic integrity. Then came 2 Girls 1 Cup (a gross fetish film from 2007), Tubgirl (a shock image from the Noughties) and 3 Guys 1 Hammer (a real 2007 murder filmed in Ukraine and shared widely online). 

This material used to be relegated to the shadows, curiosities or titillations passed among groups of shrieking teenagers or paying perverts. Now, snuff is as accessible and commonplace on X, Telegram, TikTok and Instagram as baking tutorials. The gore sites of yore used to pull in anonymous voyeurs; today’s versions engage respectable citizens with government titles in bio, who watch them in between checking the weather and WhatsApp. On Monday, for instance, a man was ejected from a car on a rollercoaster at the Six Flags theme park in Georgia. Disturbing images of his death — including those captured for the ride’s souvenir photographs — were unavoidable on X. As usual, there were some calls not to share them out of respect for the dead man, but those stopped nothing. The viral video of Henry Nowak’s death earlier this year fit the same pattern. 

Of course, the snuff content that seeps into the mainstream is far from the worst of it; elsewhere on the internet lurks a blue-black mass of the worst depravity imaginable. Last week, a 30-year-old man from London was jailed for leading a ring of southeast Asian monkey torturers. He’d written the scripts for the animals’ mutilation and dismemberment; the resulting videos could be watched for $500. Modern snuff such as this is a distinctly online phenomenon: extreme violence is relished by a faceless and remote spectator. And while such sadists and freaks have always existed, their ability to convene and trade has not. It’s the classic “toaster fucker” theory of the internet: before anonymous forums, someone expressing an interest in copulating with a kitchen gadget would be shamed and set right. Today he would find community with 1,000 other toaster fuckers; his life goes up in smoke. 

Meanwhile, the culture of atrocity is even being embraced by elements of US government. The former US army major who killed 13 people and an unborn child at Fort Hood in 2009, Nidal Hasan, will be executed by firing squad on 3 December this year. The Pentagon announced last week that it would livestream his demise online, the first public execution since 1937. There have been objections — Vice President JD Vance, a devout Catholic, said he was “not going to be watching it”. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops called the potential stream a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death”. It is being limply proposed that the execution is a deterrent for other would-be jihadis, yet one grandee of the American Bar Authority instead condemned the “grotesque spectacle” as an ugly excrescence of the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “eye-for-an-eye” philosophy. Trump is yet to “make a decision” on the livestream.

More from this author

Inside the mind of a monkey-torturer

By Patrick Bateman

Whether or not it goes ahead — and it isn’t likely considering Hasan has federal appeals remaining — filming abjection is already part of the grammar of online culture. The legitimacy of the firing squad will be degraded in the company of online horror peddlers. What’s more, the fear and respect Hegseth expects the livestream to command may as well be an ancient Roman artifact. The internet’s collective morality, fattened on senseless brutality, is long inured to violence. 

We may have lost all hope of regulating the internet. Yet we should remember that we drive its depravity, pull our seats closer to the stage in the ancient theater of human cruelty. That confused man pointing his little finger at a Siberian tiger will almost certainly persist as a stupid, cruel meme for weeks to come. For what is a spectacle without an audience?

Kai looked out at the boys playing, and told me about his childhood during the war. He was, he said, younger than his pupils when he saw someone burned alive in front of him. The man was a rebel, and a few weeks previously, he’d shot another person, an act which Kai witnessed too. Now, the murderer was at the mercy of a mob, seeking revenge.

They shoved a tire around his neck, doused him with gasoline, and set him alight. This was 1997, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Kai and his family had been driven from their home in Kenema, a city in the east of the country, by the rebel advance. They arrived in Freetown among thousands of other refugees. “We were accused of being rebels, spat at, called ‘monkeys’, people said we had tails,” he says. Kai’s older brother didn’t make it – he was captured by the rebels and taken to Liberia.

Kai’s family were educated, but in Freetown there was no work. So Kai and his siblings sold charcoal to support themselves. They sheltered in a hotel commandeered by “Kamajors”, a civil defense militia, who wore voodoo-infused “body-armor”: string vests, hung with woolen charms and trinkets. When there was a general amnesty for weapons in 1999, Kai’s mother persuaded him to take in one of their guns to receive payment. It was a believable story – child soldiers were common. The money kept them going for a while. But “it was very, very hard,” Kai says. Throughout the war, he barely went to school.

***

It’s been 25 years since the end of Sierra Leone’s war. What began as an army uprising against the corrupt administration of the then-President Joseph Momah on 23 March, 1991, swiftly spilled into a bloody regional conflict. In a small country of five million people, more than 50,000 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands more wounded, disabled and displaced. At one point, the army rebels held almost all the country, including parts of Freetown. Speak to anyone in Sierra Leone over the age of 30, and they will have stories of trauma and loss.

It’s too easy to dismiss Sierra Leone’s conflict as a historic tragedy – simply the kind of thing that happens in Africa, as inevitable as the rains. But the British military intervention, which brought the war to an end in an extraordinary fashion in 2001 – through concentrated force, in-depth understanding of regional politics and clear, boundaried objectives – showed how Western powers can use military force humanely and effectively to create change, including in current conflicts, such as Iran.

Yet after a bright period of stabilization and peace, the country seems to be backsliding into the conditions which led to the war in the first place. Indeed, UnHerd can today report that Britain has ended its permanent military presence in Sierra Leone, citing security concerns. And as the Western powers have pulled out of West Africa, other countries – principally China and Russia – have hungrily stepped in to fill the breach. Sierra Leone today provides a front-row seat to the new Great Game, as Western and non-Western powers scramble to control their “spheres of influence” through diplomatic, military and economic might.

***

Even by the standards of Africa’s civil conflicts, Sierra Leone’s war was breathtaking in its brutality. It began when a breakaway commander in the Sierra Leone army, Foday Sankoh, led an incursion from neighboring Liberia. His nominal goal was to overthrow Momoh’s government. But sponsored by Charles Taylor, the dictator of Liberia, who wanted a piece of Sierra Leone’s diamond industry, Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) ran riot. Allied with elements of the Sierra Leone Army — a faction which came to be called the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) — the rebels terrorized ordinary Sierra Leoneans. In response, many formed militias, the Kamajors, to fight back. They were a rag-tag bunch: alongside their faith in voodoo-infused protection from bullets, they also believed that a mirror could deflect an RPG.

The rebels lacked a central command structure, and individual commanders effectively acted as private warlords, rampaging across the country, looting, raping and kidnapping children to fight for them. Among the various factions were foreign mercenaries from Britain and South Africa, the Kamajors and the West Side Boys, a gang of drugged-up thugs. Adding to the chaos were the Sierra Leone Army’s “sobels” — soldiers by day, rebels by night. Child soldiers were used by all sides — but were a signature of the RUF, as were mass mutilations. Fighters would cut off people’s arms to spread terror among the population, especially after the 1996 election returned a democratically-elected President. (“Vote for the government, lose your hand.”)

By late 1999, it looked like Sankoh and the rebels were poised to seize full control of the country. The previous decade had seen coups, counter-coups and democratic elections; there had been half-hearted attempts at peace deals and disarmament. Though the government was nominally run by Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, a former UN development worker who had been elected by a landslide in 1996, the power lay with Sankoh. He paid lip-service to the 1997 Lome Peace Agreement, which was supposed to defuse the fighting, but refused to disarm the RUF and had himself installed as Minister for Mines. The UN peacekeeping forces were underpowered and ineffective; the rebels were becoming increasingly assertive, attacking positions on the way to the airport and threatening Freetown.

Suggested Reading

Africa’s crisis is Europe’s too

By Wessie du Toit

At this point, the Foreign Office ordered a Non-Combatant Evacuation (NEO) — Operation Palliser — of British citizens, headed by the then-Brigadier, David Richards, who had already visited the country on several occasions. With a small team of British officers, paratroopers and special forces soldiers, he set about taking the fight to the RUF. This went explicitly against orders from London, who wanted Richards to remain solely focused on the evacuation mission. He ignored them, rallying beleaguered UN troops and forging an “unholy alliance” between the Sierra Leone Army (SLA), the Kamajors and warlord Johnny Paul Koroma’s West Side Boys — all of whom had been at each other’s throats in previous months. Using British troops as a spearhead, they pushed back against the RUF with maximum force. They were aided in this blitzkrieg campaign by Neall Ellis, an eccentric South African mercenary who piloted a Russian-made Hind Mi-24 attack helicopter.

Within weeks, the RUF were on the back foot, and driven to the negotiating table. Whitehall — despite sneers about Richards’ buccaneering tactics, earning him the nickname “Richards of Africa” — was forced to concede that Operation Palliser had been a success. The lightning campaign was the making of Richards’s career; afterwards, he went on to command NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and served as Chief of Defense Staff. By the end of 2000, Sankoh was in prison awaiting trial, and the democratically-elected government could begin to rebuild. Thirteen of the ringleaders of the conflict were put on trial in the high court in Freetown. Sankoh died before he could begin his sentence, but Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator, was sentenced to 50 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is currently serving his term at HMP Frankland in County Durham.

Yet Richards says now that he wasn’t concerned about the storm the Sierra Leone intervention caused back home. “I never expected to be a Field Marshal or anything like that. I had a rather romantic idea of what the military could do — that the Armed Forces could make people’s lives better, rather than the conventional view of armies as brutal killing machines. This was the last British-only foreign intervention. We had sufficient military muscle to do it then. I’m not sure we could do it now.”

***

Unlike the sprawling, messy interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan – and now in Iran – Richards’s campaign was short, sharp and goal-limited. There were no lofty aspirations about “regime change” or “sowing the seeds of democracy”; instead, the campaign was about supporting Kabbah’s military until they could stand on their own against the RUF, and then lending a hand as Kabbah sought to shore up his country again. To this end, for ten years afterwards, the British ran a training center for future officers in Freetown and provided foreign aid to support the government. “We helped get it back on its feet,” says Richards. “Most coups and dictatorships in Africa are born of the armed forces, so we were very keen in Sierra Leone that we had a democratically-elected president, with an accountable armed forces.”

After that first decade, British support began to dwindle. Since 2019, the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) has been cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of Gross National Income; and, as of this year, it will hit its lowest since 2008 — down to 0.3%. This drop in foreign aid has blindsided countries like Sierra Leone. In the country, things seem more precarious; politics appears to be polarizing along the lines of old tribal animosities. So far, presidential elections have peacefully rotated every five years between the two main parties, the SLPP and the APC, and no president has tried to push their two-term limit. But the current President Julius Maada Bio is seen in some quarters as autocratic and nepotistic — and some Sierra Leoneans I spoke to felt it was only a matter of time before the peaceful transition of power broke down. In addition, many of the factors that led to the war — illiteracy, uneven development, drugs and corruption — are still present; by themselves, each is a manageable issue. But taken together, their effect is corrosive, especially given the context of Sierra Leone’s endemic poverty. The minimum monthly wage is 1,200 Leones (less than £40), and outside of Freetown, mains electricity and running water are scarce. People make do with solar power units, but they also look across to the nearby Ivory Coast, which has almost comprehensive mains electricity coverage, and wonder what is going wrong.

One compelling answer to that question is corruption. It operates at all levels — I was frisked for money several times by policemen at the ubiquitous roadblocks — but, more damagingly, it pervades the apparatus of the state. Only 6% of businesses which can pay tax do so, and the main industries — mining, ports and defense — are run by the President’s inner circle. “My time to eat,” runs a local saying. This lack of altruism leads to widespread culture of short-termism: few ordinary Sierra Leoneans have many savings, and the economy still operates on a wartime GDP. After all, why bother to save, to build businesses, to invest, if an iffy contract or an insufficiently-stuffed brown envelope could undermine all your efforts?

Drugs are a caustic problem, too. “Kush” — a synthetic, psychoactive drug which sends the user into a brief, catatonic high — is endemic. Addicts are easily identified, stumbling in a zombie-like daze through the streets; in 2024, the President declared its abuse a national health emergency. It mostly leads to petty crime as addicts steal to afford a hit — but its long-term use is lethal. Last year, a corpse lay outside on the smart streets of the embassy quarter for days, as the unlucky soul had no one to bury them.

West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, also appears to be becoming a hub for global cocaine trafficking — and, most concerningly, the Sierra Leonean government seems to be involved. Jos Leijdekkers, a Dutch cocaine kingpin, sentenced to 25 years in absentia in the Netherlands, appears to be operating with impunity in Freetown, enjoying Sierra Leone’s lack of an extradition treaty with the Netherlands. He is even rumoured to be married to the President’s step-daughter and the father of her child.

Still, Sierra Leone is far from a failed state: some of the robust civil society so carefully built after the war remains. No-one, aside from the police and the armed forces, carries guns. And despite the occasional flutterings of unrest — there was a squib of a coup in November 2023, in which 17 soldiers died — the upper echelons of the armed forces are seen as competent and loyal. “Coup-proof”, in the words of one insider. (Though whether they would stand up to a determined incursion from neighboring Liberia or Guinea, a distant but plausible scenario, is another matter.) In addition, Freetown has a small but feisty independent media. And Sierra Leonean social media — while occasionally unhelpfully hysterical — is rambunctious and critical: a vital outlet via which to safely complain against the government and the state of the country.

***

Traveling through Sierra Leone 25 years after its war, you can’t help but call to mind other, more recent conflicts, such as Afghanistan and Iran. So what went right in the 2000 Sierra Leone intervention — and what is going wrong with more recent Western interventions?

For a start, militarily, there was sufficient use of concentrated force to deal a “shock and awe” blow to the RUF, vaporizing desire to fight. In one memorable episode, the RUF were goaded into attacking a small, isolated force of British soldiers near the airport. This was, in fact, a ruse and they were met with overwhelming firepower, killing dozens of rebels. “Clout, don’t dribble” was the maxim which lay behind any engagement with the RUF.

Richards also worked with a small, agile command structure, with responsibility for everyday tactical decisions delegated to trusted commanders. And he could also operate autonomously — free from both oversight and backseat battle-fielding from London, but also without having to manage other allies in the field. Lastly, he and his team understood the country. Their multiple previous visits meant that they knew its top people, knew where power lay and could navigate its complex tribal structures adroitly.

All of these factors were absent or lacking when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan — and it seems Trump is in danger of making the same mistakes with Iran too. From the first in Iran, there has been a lack of clear, obtainable objective — is it regime change? Neutralizing Iran’s nuclear capability? Reopening the Straits of Hormuz? It’s been all of these and more throughout the months-long conflict. Another key difference was that Sierra Leone was already at war: Britain could back one side against the other. In Iran, America initially appeared to be attempting to topple a regime, and keep a lid on any resulting instability indefinitely: “Pandora’s Box” doesn’t begin to do it justice.

And while the initial US strikes accorded with the idea of maximum, overwhelming force, they failed to deal with a knockout blow. The escalating nature of the fighting — and the way that Iran is able to wreak havoc through asymmetric drone strikes and small boat attacks — wasn’t factored in beforehand. Nor was the unpredictable way it might draw in regional allies. As Richards puts it, “I think it will be looked on as an example of how not to run operations, because of the chaos it’s caused to the global economy. And if it causes a recession, I don’t think Trump will ever be forgiven.”

Suggested Reading

Inside Tony Blair Inc.

By Tom McTague

And once the Iran intervention is over, what then? Again, Sierra Leone’s recovery, though imperfect, is instructive. After a promising start, which brought much-needed prosperity and stability, Britain and other Western countries took their eye off the region. In Britain’s case, this absentmindedness is especially unforgivable. The UK’s ties to Sierra Leone run deep — the state was established in 1787 by abolitionists as a refuge for escaped slaves, and it was a British colony and protectorate until independence in 1961. It sits in a key position geographically, with the largest natural harbor on the west coast of Africa. Yet even before the recent military withdrawal, Whitehall appeared to have no grand strategy for the country — or the region more broadly. There is not only, therefore, a lingering moral obligation to Sierra Leone, but also, most pressingly, an opportunity. English is widely spoken and Britain, unlike the region’s other former colonial masters, is largely looked on fondly. I remember whizzing on the back of a motorbike over stone bridges deep in the northern bush, while my guide proudly pointed out that they were built during the period of the British Protectorate, and still standing many decades on.

Into the breach, Sierra Leone has welcomed other partners. The Lebanese community, traditionally involved in the country’s mineral industry, provides 30% of the country’s GDP. China is heavily involved in mining as well. In fact, the Chinese have rebuilt the old British railway to neighboring Liberia, which last ran a passenger service in 1975; its massive, 90-carriage long trains now ferry gold, bauxite and coltan. Turkey is a key player as well. Its Karpowership, a floating power station anchored in Freetown harbor, provides 80% of the city’s electricity. Disputes over unpaid debts have frequently led to blackouts: powerboat diplomacy in action. Lastly, Russia is heavily invested in Sierra Leone’s shipping industry. Its boats provide a “shadow fleet” of Sierra Leonean-flagged vessels, running oil and avoiding international sanctions. Quite whether this is an explicit arrangement with the Sierra Leonean government is unclear; nonetheless, to date around 85 tankers registered to Sierra Leone have been sanctioned by the US, UK and EU for connections to Russian oil trade.

The danger here is twofold. First, that Sierra Leone might slip back toward the corruption, inequality and disillusionment which were among the factors that led to its 11-year war. Such a result would be a disaster for the ordinary people of Sierra Leone, and would have profound consequences for Western security. As it stands, Sierra Leone has been relatively untouched by the Islamic terrorism which has ravaged nearby Mali and the Sahel; a breakdown in law and order would create fertile conditions for terror. Any conflict would also create a massive refugee crisis which, as recent years has taught us, will inevitably end up on European doorsteps.

But even if that doesn’t come to pass, Sierra Leone deserves better than to become a vassal state, carved up between China, Russia. Or to become a safe haven for international organized crime. On my travels through the country, I found a deep optimism, a desire to reckon with its past and hope that, through education and a robust civil society, life might be different.

And by reaching out into the world again in this way, Britain may begin to strengthen its position – at home, and abroad. It’s perhaps naive to think it can recapture the swashbuckling success of the 2001 intervention. But to pull back entirely, and pull up the drawbridges, is also a mistake.

Less than a year before that crisp Sunday, Brand had been publicly accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. He denied any wrongdoing. He was subsequently charged with seven alleged offenses and today stands trial for them at Southwark Crown Court on three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, together relating to allegations dating from 1999 to 2009.

To some, there was something opportunistic about the timing of Brand’s religious rebirth. But the more interesting story is what kind of Christian he would go on to become. For he did not simply become a tea-and-biscuits Anglican: he moved, like a moth to a flame, toward a distinctively American religious and political ecosystem, one whose ideas about rebirth, persecution and personal testimony fit both him and the American Right strikingly well — even as the same trends are now following Brand back home to Britain.

Brand came to Christianity via Grylls and Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical church in South Kensington. Yet if British Christianity offered him a font, that was about it. Within days of the baptism, Christian magazine Woman Alive cattily argued that it was too soon to hold him up as an example of God’s redeeming power. A few months later, Brand gave the publication’s pearl-clutching readers something else to worry about: he began baptizing people himself. One self-released photograph showed him officiating in a pair of white budgie smugglers. The convert was fully dressed. One vicar quoted in Premier Christian News quipped that he had baptized a great many people over the years — and had somehow always managed to keep his clothes on.

County Road 30A couldn’t be more different from South Kensington. Running for a little over 20 miles along the Florida Panhandle, following the northern spit of Florida until it reaches Alabama, 30A is lined by beach towns, whose tin roofs and picket fences evoke a dream of small-town America. Locals dart between pastel villages by golf cart, past pale quartz beaches and the Gulf’s turquoise water. Seaside, the area’s main town, was the set for The Truman Show, a 1998 film about a man living inside a television broadcast and whose neighbors, unbeknown to him, are all acting for the cameras.

Suggested Reading

Russell Brand's latest addiction

By Tanya Gold

Brand moved his family here in the autumn of 2024 — a few months after his baptism, and just before Trump’s re-election — explaining that he could no longer live in a country whose media, government and judiciary would always find a way to muzzle anyone who became an inconvenience. He did not come as a man hiding from the limelight. Neighbors reported seeing him as a permanent fixture at the Saturday farmers’ market; he cycled through Seaside calling out blessings to passers-by; one morning in December, after bumping into a group of groomsmen on the beach, he accepted their invitation to the wedding later that day.

Brand worships at Good News Church in Santa Rosa Beach, which invites people to be “born again through Jesus”. In November 2025, The Times reported that he had begun baptizing willing converts in a penguin pool at the Emerald Coast Zoo, a nearby Christian-themed attraction. Never one to miss an opportunity to furnish his followers with devotional content, Brand posted the footage himself with a penguin emoji. It’s an odd thing to watch: the shirtless celebrity, the solemn words, the tilt-dunk backwards, all in the company of a colony of flightless seabirds going about their business. Then again, this is Florida, America’s great subtropical carnival of roadside oddities, religious revivalists, get-rich-quick schemes and anti-government eccentrics, a place where the sacred and the absurd have always rubbed shoulders.

A parody to many Brits, Brand is legible to Florida in a way he could never be in Henley. He has also landed in a place where his new faith sits comfortably alongside almost everything he already believed. The wealthy, photogenic beach towns of 30A are hardly a wilderness of sackcloth and penance. Here, Christianity, biohacking, hot yoga and Pelotons coexist with remarkably little friction. A man who has spent decades moving between spirituality, addiction recovery, yoga and anti-corporate politics barely has to change his clothes.

From the churches of 30A, Brand quickly found rather more powerful friends. Among the first was Sean Feucht, a long-haired, guitar-strumming evangelist and Trump devotee, whose ministry has been dogged by allegations of financial mismanagement. By February 2025, a few weeks before he was charged, Brand was lauded at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago hosted by America’s Future, a conservative organization that campaigns for “durable institutions” and “liberty”. There, Brand was handed a glimmering “Global Defender of Freedom” award, sharing the bill with Mike Tyson and the singer Ted Nugent.

Then, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, the first since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Brand opened his speech on his knees, thanking God for the example of forgiveness set by Kirk’s widow. He told the crowd that the words “turning point”, to him, meant repentance. When he replayed the speech a few days later on Stay Free with Russell Brand, his video podcast devoted to politics, spirituality and the supposed evils of the establishment, the episode came with a giveaway promoting Reborn, his own wellness brand, and which sells the sort of biohacking supplements beloved by the American alternative-health movement. First prize was a Jeep Wrangler and $10,000 cash.

Brand’s website continues in a similar vein, inviting visitors to join Awakened Wonders, a subscription community with whom he reads and prays weekly. The mailing list promises subscribers their “place on the ark”. Videos end with a nudge towards a premium channel on Rumble, where subscribers can join the “movement”. And this spring came a book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, 192 Tony Robbins-endorsed pages and yours for $19.79. The publisher: Tucker Carlson Books.

As these examples imply, Brand has entered a religious culture with few issues blending money and faith. From the television evangelists of the Seventies and Eighties, with their enormous hair, enormous congregations and even more enormous bank accounts, to the prosperity preachers of today’s megachurches, certain strands of American evangelicalism have proved remarkably adept at reconciling God with Mammon. Faith need not mean renunciation; it can promise abundance, better health, greater happiness and a more successful you. The language of salvation has mingled with that of self-improvement, and the American pulpit has become a platform from which to sell both.

It helps, too, that behind Brand’s swelling online following — 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and more than two million more on Rumble, a self-styled free-speech alternative — sits an architecture of belonging that he’s been building for years. Long before his conversion, Brand was cultivating a community of the supposedly awakened, first through online sermons railing against the mainstream media, then through podcasts and live events promoting his particular brand of enlightenment. Christianity has furnished the enterprise with a new vocabulary, especially given his new political contacts, but the business model is remarkably familiar.

Theology plays a role here too. “Born again” is a phrase from the third chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that no man will see the kingdom of God unless he is born anew. For much of Christian history, this was interpreted as the slow, lifelong work of worship. It was the Protestant revivalists of the 18th century who turned it into an event: a datable, theatrical moment in which a person becomes something new.

American evangelism has always had a special fondness for the “twice-born”. Take the revivalist minister Charles Finney, leader in the 19th century of the Second Great Awakening. He would seat the unconverted on an “anxious bench” at the front of a tent and publicly wrestle with their souls in full view of their neighbors, establishing “testimony” — confessional, mea culpa monologues — as a form of popular entertainment. It’s a short hop, conceptually at least, to the Emerald Coast penguin pool. The spectacle attracts the faithful; the faithful become followers; and followers, as Brand knows better than most, can be monetized.

Compare all this to British Christianity. Charismatic Anglicanism — the CofE’s emotionally expressive branch that emphasizes personal encounters with the Holy Spirit — may have given  Brand a theology of dramatic renewal. But it also came embedded in a national church whose instincts run pastoral and discreet, in a country where public displays of piety are more likely to provoke embarrassment than applause. The American habit of treating salvation as both a public spectacle and a commercial opportunity has never quite taken hold here. In Britain, a celebrity finding Jesus is more likely to raise eyebrows than confer authority. In America, though, finding Jesus can be the beginning of a lucrative new public life, even the start of a second career.

As Brand’s embrace by Magaworld implies, meanwhile, this is especially true given the broad political context. The New Apostolic Reformation, the radical fringe of the American charismatic network, whose ideas have shaped figures like Feucht, now talks about Christians conquering the “seven mountains” of culture: from government and media to education and the arts. “We want souls, and we want nations,” declares Lance Wallnau, one of the movement’s leading evangelists. And, under Trump, this vision of politics as spiritual warfare has found a receptive audience. A 2025 survey found that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants sympathized with or embraced Christian nationalist ideas. To be clear, not all these belong to the NAR, but the numbers suggest how far this fusion of faith and politics extends. Certainly, on 6 January 2021, as rioters stormed the US Capitol, leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation gathered outside, blowing horns, speaking in tongues and praying for angels to drive a demonic serpent from the Senate. For them, the struggle for political power was quite literally a battle between heavenly forces. In this cosmology, opposition from the press or the courts can be read not just as mere politics, but as a kind of spiritual resistance, a sign the believer is doing something right.

Suggested Reading

Donald Trump: false prophet

By Matt Feeney

Some of the congregants of Santa Rosa Beach remain unconvinced by their neighbor’s transformation. Josh Parish, a local Christian real estate agent, was quoted as saying he thought Brand was “a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman”. But to those who want it, a language is available — woven through its politics and increasingly through its churches — in which demonetization, de-platforming, hostile coverage can be narrated as the familiar sufferings of the faithful.

Little wonder Brand continues to make inroads into politics. In September, he appeared at Washington’s lavish Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, moderating a discussion on healthcare reform with senior Trump administration officials. Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary RFK Jr were also on the program. The spectacle captured something of the new American Right: evangelical Christianity, alternative medicine, self-optimization and political grievance mingling in a movement that has made suspicion of established authority practically a qualification for belonging. Brand, whose joss-stick spirituality and conspiracy-laden sermons have made him an increasingly eccentric figure in British public life, has found himself a place amazingly close to the center of US power.

And in a sign, perhaps, of how strong American culture-war currents now are, something similar is now happening back across the Atlantic. Where the nationalist Right once invoked Christianity largely as a marker of British heritage, some of its more radical figures are increasingly embracing the language of evangelical revival. Tommy Robinson, for instance, claims to have found Jesus in prison. Last year, at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London, crosses rose above a sea of St George’s flags; crowds chanted “Christ is King”; and a minute’s silence was held for Charlie Kirk. All this dismays many British church leaders. “The church is not the chaplain to any political tribe,” stressed Mike Judge, editor of the Evangelical Times. The Church of England, from which Brand’s religious journey began, has also joined Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist leaders in warning against misusing the cross to exclude others.

Yet more than politics or commercialism, there is one more way of looking at Brand’s conversion: as the latest in a long line of reinventions. After all, he has spent most of his life killing off previous versions of himself. There was Russell Brand the heroin addict; Russell Brand the priapic MTV presenter; Russell Brand the Hollywood actor and husband of Katy Perry; the revolutionary who wanted to overthrow capitalism; the wellness guru; the anti-establishment broadcaster who railed against big pharma, big data and the global elite. Christianity has offered him perhaps his most dramatic transformation yet, albeit with the added promise of eternal life.

Their near-total annihilation in urban Britain now, however, seems like the least of their problems after their 2024 omni-battering. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the bizarre air of complacency that hangs over their conference, which apparently hasn’t been much dented by John Curtice telling them that they have made no progress since their 2024 hammering, and indeed are actually doing worse. The submerged theme of the conference is that even their natural heartlands are slipping away from them. Worse, neither Kemi Badenoch’s decent personal ratings nor MRP polls showing the Tories reaching the giddy heights of 130 MPs can really cover up this still-ongoing destruction.

Take where I live, a fairly affluent village in rural Cambridgeshire. Over the course of this year’s local elections, not a single leaflet or communication of any kind from the Tories materialized. Indeed, one would have had to have been a detective of considerable ability to uncover any evidence of a Conservative Party activist — a living one anyway — within many miles of my home. When the vote duly came, the Tories came a bad third in my ward, only beating the Greens by 60 votes.

Suggested Reading

The death of the Young Conservative

By Alwyn Turner

Until perhaps a decade ago, places like this were rock solid for the Tories. Now, though, they’re pretty much a one-party Liberal Democrat state. There are now just two Conservative councillors left on the South Cambridgeshire district council, compared with 43 Lib Dems — who also comfortably won both of the local parliamentary seats in 2024. It wasn’t close, with Ed Davey’s party sweeping my constituency of St Neots and Mid-Cambridgeshire by over 5,000 votes. Since 2024, there has been almost no sign of a Tory recovery.

To be frank, if the Tories are still the political walking dead in St Neots, of all places — where there are more Green district councillors now than Tories — then anything they’ve said this week in Birmingham is probably a colossal waste of time. This is doubly true because the Tory collapse is not just a result of the short-term impact of Bojo’s travails, or even the Liz Truss debacle. Though 2024 represented a dramatic culmination of Conservative failure, it was not a sudden process.

Cambridgeshire is again a good example. As Cambridge became ever more expensive, the rest of the county has attracted more and more house-price refugees. Most are graduates; many are academics; and others work at tech start-ups in Cambridge Science Park, or at Addenbrookes Hospital. These educated, mostly socially liberal voters have transformed local politics. The farmers, the culturally conservative old rural middle class, the self-employed tradesmen and so on — they no longer dominate, and even many of them presumably couldn’t stomach voting Tory in 2024. Jeremy Clarkson may finally have shown up to their conference, but the people he speaks for are not those that the Tories need to win in their former seats. This new demographic intake is as likely to set up a local Orange Order and hold a “No Popery!” riot as they are to ever vote Tory.

So when I hear breathless online Tories talking up the “Kemi bounce” and the supposed Tory come-back, I can’t help but roll my eyes — and not just at her Timmy Mallett tribute act at the Young Tories’ disco. Yes, Badenoch has relatively good personal ratings; yes, Reform has clearly had a bad summer as Farage’s clown-car by-election backfired and his party’s backbiting intensified. One or two polls even suggest that the Tories may reach the lofty heights of second place.

Yet none of this can alter the underlying truth: that in large swaths of Britain, the Tories essentially no longer exist, because they have a small and contracting social base, which is itself vulnerable to Reform. They no longer retain a comfortable baseline of support anywhere, apart from places with very specific characteristics: non-urban; on average low educational attainment; elderly; white. The only one of these populations that is growing is pensioners, and even among them, polls often show Reform in the lead. That’s even as cohort effects — with whole generations that have no history of voting Tory soon coming of pensionable age — mean retirees are less likely to show loyalty to the party over the longer-term.

Meanwhile, across England’s affluent south, prosperous places that would previously have been Tory shoo-ins are now awash with graduates who can’t afford to live in big cities: Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire. These people will blanch at voting for any restrictions on immigration, or abolishing Net Zero, or withdrawing from the ECHR. How much future is there for a Tory Party that faces an uphill struggle to remain relevant in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, where they now have respectively one and two MPs?

Tory “moderates” such as Andy Street and Ruth Davidson like to claim that these places can be won back by changing tack on “culture war” commitments, and making a socially liberal, economically center-right pitch. But why the middle classes of Surrey, Cambridgeshire or Hertfordshire are going to favor nicey-nicey Cameroon redux politics rather than sticking with the more socially acceptable Lib Dems isn’t clear. Many of the upwardly mobile younger couples living in the affluent home counties who might in theory be attracted by the Tories’ promise on removing the £100,000 threshold on free childcare are those who have a rigid cultural taboo against voting Tory, even if such a policy would benefit them. They live in a world of ingrained cultural assumptions and status dynamics that make voting Tory an unthinkable solecism.

Even if struggling graduates in these places could be persuaded to vote Tory on a pro-growth platform, there is another obstacle. These same constituencies are also stuffed with older Nimbies, and if they do anything to annoy pensioners, the Tories might equally wave goodbye to their only remaining reliable voter bloc: the gray vote. This is why we have had to endure the contemptible spectacle of CCHQ attacking Burnham as some sort of granny-killing maniac for suggesting a tiny reform to a policy — the Triple Lock — that most senior Tories privately acknowledge is unaffordable. Perhaps such industrial-grade hypocrisy is the price of maintaining any activists at all: a Tory agent told me recently that their party membership is literally dying. Looking at the “deaths” column of a local newspaper is generally the most reliable way to keep their membership records up to date.

In short, it is still hard to see how the Tories can get out of their current dilemma, no matter how many infatuated young Tories write Katie Lam’s name on their pencil-box, and how sharp Badenoch may prove in PMQs. The underlying logic of polarization — between the left-behind provinces, and Home Counties progressivism — hasn’t gone away: and the Tories are still ill-positioned to capitalize on either side of this divide.

What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue-collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform. Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base. And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare “cliff edge” — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.

Much clearly depends on Andy Burnham. If he turns out to be Keir Starmer with a guitar — which is still possible, his fluent conference speech notwithstanding — then the main winners will be Reform. Certainly, it would take a singular collapse indeed to render Farage as unpopular in the Red Wall as the Tories are now; let’s not forget that the Conservatives lost their deposit in the Makerfield by-election. If, on the other hand, Burnham succeeds in sustaining a meaningful Labour revival and the Reform wave subsides, there will be only marginal benefit to the Tories.

Given all this, it still seems that even in the best-case scenario, all the Tories can hope for is holding onto their meager 2024 seat haul and perhaps slightly increasing their presence in the Commons. The only viable course for survival would probably be some sort of merger between the Tories and Reform, but even that is extremely hazardous for either side, bedeviled by personal resentments and the emotional fallout from recent defections. Bitterness means that such mergers tend to take a long time to happen: it took the Canadian Right a decade to unite after the main center-right party was near-annihilated in the 1993 election.

For now, the horrible truth for the Tories, irrespective of whatever optimism might be generated at their conference, is that their fate isn’t in their own hands. They have to hope that they can pick up enough scraps in forthcoming electoral scrambles to keep themselves alive. Their survival, let alone their existence as a major party, remains very much in the balance.

Opening the issue was an expansive and historically astute essay by Eric Hobsbawm, in which the historian charts the ascendency of neoliberalism as a governing doctrine in Britain, a doctrine that had taken first Thatcher and then Tony Blair to No. 10. Forged in the crisis-ridden Seventies, neoliberalism served to insulate the workings of the market from political control. It also created new forms of individualism, which undercut the collective solidarity that has formed the basis of the old labor movement.

Yet by 1998, a year into Blair’s first term, things seemed to be changing. The late Nineties saw financial crises in the once-booming economies of East and South East Asia, while in Europe and the US, the market economy was now producing increasingly unequal societies, as manufacturing jobs were offshored and communities decimated.

The special issue’s cover gave some clue as to what the writers of Marxism Today thought of New Labour’s Thatcher tribute act. Splashed in lurid red, and set over an image of a distinctly awkward and toothy looking Blair, was a single word: “Wrong”. For Hobsbawm, seemingly the only person who couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing was the man in No. 10. “If there is any way of losing the next election,” he wrote, “it is by not recognizing that the age of neo-liberalism is over.”

We know how that went. Now, nearly three decades on, we have a prime minister who is finally saying what none have said before: that neoliberal orthodoxy has failed the country. Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool may have been mawkish and light on detail. But it was remarkably radical in its forthright rejection of Thatcherism, with the Prime Minister proclaiming that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, before listing a litany of neoliberal ills from privatization to austerity.

Whether Burnham will be successful in stopping the rot remains to be seen; so far, nothing that Labour has announced has signaled the level of ambition needed to fundamentally reshape Britain’s ailing and deindustrialized economy. It will take more than cheap buses and electoral reform to undo the damage of 40 years of Thatcherism. Neoliberalism, it must be remembered, entailed a radical overhaul of the state, the economy and even personal identity. To overturn it will require an equally ambitious project.

As Hobsbawm’s essay implies, neoliberalism easily outlived its obituarists. Just how did it last so long? The easy answer is that Thatcher won. Her electoral success may have been as much the product of events as it was of her skills as a politician — in 1983, for instance, she relied on the warm glow of Mark VIII torpedoes in the South Atlantic, and on a divided opposition split further by the formation of the SDP — but you can’t argue with three electoral triumphs. Besides, success, by its very nature, can force the opposition to fight on terrain of your choosing. So much so, in fact, that by the early 2000s the New Labour stalwart Peter Mandelson was moved to declare that “we are all Thatcherites now”.

More from this author

Eric Hobsbawm's age of contradictions

By John Merrick

But there was something deeper at work too. As Hobsbawm himself concedes, part of the success of Thatcherism was its strain of autonomy. It answered a previously unfulfilled wish on the part of the electorate, not least a desire to see fundamental changes made to a statist system that appeared both remote and unresponsive to their needs. In this way, Thatcher was able to draw on what a number of historians have called “popular individualism”.

This new individualism emerged during the Seventies in reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of postwar Britain, and served to challenge them in more or less political terms. That decade saw the rise of new forms of mass politics in the feminist movement; in the growth of new forms of anti-racist organizing; and in radical forms of grassroots action within the previously hierarchical trade unions. Popular individualism also took more conservative guises, not least in the emergence of new modes of consumerism — think Habitat furniture, and the craze for dinner parties and DIY home improvements — as well as in the generalized and much remarked upon decline of social and political deference.

Importantly, these were not the products of Thatcherism; if anything, she was the product of them. Yet Thatcher herself skillfully exploited these forces, promising to give people a stake in the new system she was both formed from and was, in turn, creating. Nowhere is this clearer than housing. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme was part of the New Right’s promise to create a “property-owning democracy”, a foil for statist postwar social democracy. In the decade from 1980 alone, some 1.3 million council houses were sold at huge discounts.

In creating a new class of property owners, Thatcher struck a new political bargain with the electorate: give up the state-backed stability of the postwar decades, and in return enjoy home ownership and asset price inflation. All the while, Thatcher told a new story about ordinary life. The council tenant became an owner, even a landlord, while workers became shareholders. Dependence was now shameful; in place of an out-of-touch state, markets, we were told, would respond to what people actually wanted. In doing so, the relationship between citizen and the state was fundamentally refigured, while new voter blocs had a material stake in the order’s success. In this way, Thatcherism created not just a political settlement, but whole new political constituencies too.

Think, here, of “Essex man”. A term coined by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph in 1990, it described a kind of voter who had become increasingly influential over the past decade. As Heffer put it, Essex man was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”, a nouveau riche ex-Cockney working in the get-rich-quick City and now voting Conservative. To really hammer the point home, the image accompanying Heffer’s story showed an Essex Man standing squat and square in front of his shiny motor and his newly purchased ex-council house.

Yet if Hobsbawm was premature in his diagnosis of neoliberalism’s death — its demographic roots were far too deep for any single crisis to upend — Burnham’s seems belated. Since 2008, if not earlier, it has been clear that the old Thatcherite settlement is broken. Nothing has so far replaced it. No one seems to have either the will or the vision to forge a new economic consensus.

Perhaps this is why both the Right and the Left seem so haunted by the past. Burnham’s conference speech was brimming with nostalgic references to the stability of the Fifties and Sixties, when workers could earn a decent wage, and when ordinary people could feel confident that their lives were getting better. That postwar settlement produced the NHS; strong trade unions built on the foundations of solid industrial employment; and steady, even historically unprecedented, levels of economic growth.

For the Right, on the other hand, the golden age came in the Eighties, when Britain got its act together and the country reclaimed its confidence. Forget the miners’ strike and the dole queues: this was the decade when you could make it big, when wealth was made and flaunted, when Britain and its people were liberated from the albatross of national decline. All this happened before the advent of mass immigration. For much of the Right today, it is Blairism that is the wound, with the “Blairite revolution” ushering in a new statism of quangos and red tape while the world’s poor were allowed free entry.

Of course, there is a grain of truth here. Some people really did do well in the Eighties, and Blair really did produce a complex para-state system of regulations and subsidies that the energy historian Arthur Downing has called “Zombie neoliberalism”. But there is much missing, too. If anything, Thatcher was a response to the crises of the late Seventies, which saw the start of what the economic historian Robert Brenner has called the “long downturn”. Increasing international competition had, by then, begun putting a heavy downward pressure on profits, while the financialization of the global economy saw assets sweated even as investments dwindled.

Thatcher’s sell-off of state-owned enterprises, alongside a program of austerity and a steep rise in unemployment, bought some relief from the increasingly grim economic picture. But as Harold Macmillan put it, there’s only so much family silver to be hawked before the cupboards are finally bare. Another dose of Thatcherite medicine, with a bonfire of the quangos and a new free-market push, would therefore only deepen the malaise.

Likewise, the image of the relatively stable and prosperous postwar compact may play well against our increasingly precarious present — but there is no returning to postwar years. As the chancellor John Healey remarked in his own conference speech, “without growth, there is no social democracy”, a comment more apt than perhaps Healey himself knew. The political and economic conditions that confront the Chancellor and his boss are far more constrained than those faced by any of their predecessors. Britain’s economy, as economists like Brett Christophers have shown, is increasingly a rentier economy, with essential infrastructure converted into assets optimized for stable returns with minimal capital expenditure. For their part, climate and energy-induced inflation will only make these problems more acute.

Burnham therefore faces an unenviable task. A decade of austerity has failed to kickstart growth. The country’s privatized infrastructure is decaying, while industrial policy and nationalism are returning on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet if there’s clearly a broad public appetite for the state to do something about energy prices, water, rail and rents, Burnham’s politics must be based on more than fine words alone. The vacuum created by the fracturing of the neoliberal consensus must, instead, be filled by a democratic, ambitious and municipal-minded Left.

In this, there are lessons to be learned from the Thatcherite experience: to truly secure its revolution, a renewed Left must create its own political constituencies. A good start would be to relieve some of the pressure on renters. A wave of council house building — prompting a cultural shift that sees such accommodation as more than a last resort — would not only allow hundreds of thousands of people to live more stable and comfortable lives. It would also create a coalition of voters with a material stake in the system, just as Thatcher’s owner-occupiers once did. The same might be said of quality public transport; stable and clean energy; and indeed Burnham’s much-vaunted national care service.

At any rate, the stakes could not be higher. Failure from the Left now would leave the doors open to a Right intent on dismantling the last vestiges of the state, selling it off to whichever private contractor or crypto billionaire happened to be around at the time. God knows what Marxism Today would have to say about that.

Though not much is known about the second Lady Fiennes other than that she is a horse trainer, it sounds as if she rivals Prince Harry in the paranoia department. She is said to be convinced that King Charles hates her husband, despite his being an enthusiastic patron of Fiennes’s projects for years. She is also alleged to have told friends that Queen Camilla arranged for helicopters to fly over the couple’s property in order to annoy them. Her estranged son is now crowdfunding for a legal review of Fiennes’ situation, and other loved ones are expressing grave concern.

With the rise of dementia and the social care crisis so much in the news, it’s easy to see why this story has hit a nerve, though more difficult to decide whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. At the heart of the tale, there’s a titanic Lear-like figure, as well as a supposed Lady Macbeth. There are several identity changes, and not just for Fiennes. At least one intrepid family member smuggled herself into his residence under an assumed name, and a famous thespian relative also secretly visited (the one who starred in the film Shakespeare in Love, in fact). Fellow national treasures Joanna Lumley and Monty Don are said to be up in arms. A heartwarming screenplay is writing itself, to culminate in a thrilling care home breakout orchestrated by Bear Grylls.

More from this author

The cult of AI armageddon

By Kathleen Stock

But despite the certainty with which some are viewing the situation, alternative interpretations are available. The police say there has been no illegality in Millington-Cotes’ actions, and the Office for the Public Guardian has repeatedly refused to intervene. Her husband has given her lasting power of attorney, a common enough practice in later life, and it may well be that she is sincerely acting in the perception of his best interests. Indeed, she may even be following his instructions. At one point, Fiennes apparently told a safeguarding team he did not wish to see friends or relatives. Having been so obsessed with physical accomplishment in youth and middle age, it doesn’t seem impossible he might want to spend his last years hidden from view.

Fiennes was 61 when he married Millington-Cotes, and already slowing down a bit. By then he had given up on polar exploration and was confining himself to smaller projects — like climbing Everest, and tackling the North face of the Eiger from scratch. But his real passion was always for conquering frozen wastes larger than Europe. His autobiography, published in 2007, should be required reading for anyone who thinks they probably shouldn’t go to the gym today because they have a small twinge in their knee. Gangrene, blindness, kidney stones, and crotch rot are just some of the delights Fiennes stoically endured, during months of shouldering heavy sledges across treacherous ice floes.

At one point, he writes of removing his own frostbitten fingers with a fretsaw, turning each finger “around several times to cut it from different sides, like sawing a log”. Later in the book, he declares that “a life without the prospect of any physical challenge would be no life at all”. Here it is clear that he would not include laboriously tying one’s shoelaces, or climbing the stairs out of breath.

For those who knew the earlier version of him, so magnificently self-propelling and imperious, the notion of his confinement now must appear obscene. In a quest to indict Millington-Cotes, one outraged friend has seen fit to circulate footage of Fiennes shuffling slowly along with a wheeled walking aid; as cruel an action as anything his wife is said to have done to the man. The accompanying voice in the video is seemingly hers, and sounds unnervingly brisk and infantilizing; but still no more so than the voices of thousands of other carers across the country, addressing once vital adults as if they were naughty children. The whole situation is sad and unnecessary and perhaps even actively unpleasant, but none of this means it is public business.

At the heart of the furor is a confusing tendency to think of Fiennes as sempiternally granite-like and exceptionally vulnerable, both at the same time. Indeed it is fascinating to see how quickly the idea that he may have been heavily influenced by his wife in various matters — once again, a common enough occurrence in marriages, for better or worse — has translated into an image of him being heinously coerced. Charles Moore now even wonders whether the explorer’s surprising conversion in 2016 to supporting a ban on fox-hunting was a “ventriloquised” sham, controlled by his wife behind the scenes. Mere mortals are henpecked by their spouses, and nobody raises an eyebrow; but it is apparently easier to think that Fiennes has been deprived of free will completely than to think he might have been swayed by his wife.

In truth, no outsider can really tell what is going on, either in Fiennes’ marriage or in his mind now. If real evidence of abuse does arrive, that will be a different matter; but as yet, no compelling arguments for more state involvement have been aired. It is not even clear whether Fiennes has been judged to have lost mental capacity; and even if so, it is not obvious his friends would do a better job than his wife in making decisions for him. The Mental Capacity Act code of practice stresses that information about a person’s “past and present wishes and feelings” should be central to an assessment of best interests; and we still don’t know whether he ultimately wanted to be left alone or not. Many of those objecting to his current position say he did not, and would not; but equally, he might have confided different feelings to his wife. People can be complex like that.

Suggested reading

The truth about Britain's social-care cartel

By Paul Sagar

And we shouldn’t forget that, in Fiennes’ professional life, he spent years being radically alone. Arguably, no man has ever been more alone, unless you count Captain Scott dying in his tent. During particularly trying moments, Fiennes wrote that he would imagine his loved ones “right behind me, helping to suppress the ever-lurking urge to put a stop to the pain and the cold by giving up”. It seemed to work. For all we know, that is what he is imagining now. Perhaps he doesn’t think he needs the real people there too. Maybe — as with some of his expeditions —more companions would only mean more arguments about navigation.

Yet another reason for the fascination with Fiennes’ case may be selfish: most of us fear getting old and dependent, having to relinquish agency and let others take control. The prospect of loneliness is also frightening, knowing that many familiar faces are likely to disappear. In every British town or city, right now, there are elderly people sequestered away, feeling miserable and forgotten, and charities trying to reach them, in dire need of volunteers. There’s something strange about ignoring this fact, while fretting excessively about the unusually dramatic situation of a much more glamorous man — and especially when, for all we know, he might just be walking back out onto the ice.

This weekend, the Greens too will host their own conference, a scaled back affair in Brighton. Yet as Polanski’s resolute campaigning suggests, it’s the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, now less than a week away, that truly matters. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, not least because, this year, the great British by-election has re-shaped Westminster. Holborn is the fourth, and all but one, when Nigel Farage triumphed in Clacton against a man dressed as a bin, have been of national importance.

First came Hannah Spencer’s triumph in Gorton and Denton, the only by-election win in the Green Party’s history. Little more than two months later came a similarly strong performance in local elections, with success in London sealing Keir Starmer’s fate. Over the weekend that followed, Polanski emerged as a genuinely national figure, proudly asserting that two-party politics was “dead and buried”.

And so, in June, came Makerfield. More than simply deciding that constituency’s next MP, it was clear from the outset that it would also provide a launchpad for Andy Burnham’s ambitions: first into Parliament and then into Downing Street. Those vacillating members of Labour’s NEC, who had previously blocked the former health secretary from standing in Gorton, now changed tack, their endorsement underscoring how far, and how fast, their party had fallen.

Suggested Reading

The future of the Left will be decided in Holborn

By Jonny Ball

The Green ascent thus changed the fortunes of both themselves and Labour. Now controlling several London boroughs, a party which boasted a single MP before 2024 had triggered an internal revolution within Government. Yet a cruel irony to those accomplishments would inevitably follow. Polanski’s rise made Labour pursue otherwise unthinkably high-risk measures — measures which now appear to be paying off. No longer facing a moleish bureaucrat for control of the Left, Polanski’s struggle is simply to remain relevant.

Labour are confident of a win in Holborn and St Pancras, and the bookmakers have their candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, as the overwhelming favorite. And, to an extent, this makes sense. Camden Labour performed relatively well in May’s local elections, with the Greens failing to break through here as they did in less prosperous places like Harringey, Lambeth and Hackney. Polanski also doesn’t live in the constituency — which counts more than ever in Britain’s hyper-localized politics — as Reform found to their detriment with Matt Goodwin in Gorton and Denton.

Even so, having been to the seat, and spoken to campaigners and voters alike, Labour’s self-assurance does surprise me. As a campaigner, Abdi-Wali seems cagey and lightweight, with Camden Labour operating a “ming vase” strategy lacking the energy that infused the party’s Makerfield victory. Where Burnham was eager to talk to just about anyone in Wigan — from aging Lexiteers to people saying he was complicit in the grooming gangs scandal — Labour in Starmer’s old patch are protective and insular.

And while Burnham is pledging to “end neoliberalism,” Camden Labour — which controls the council, holds the mayoralty and, for now, represents both the borough’s parliamentary constituencies — is going full steam ahead. Among other things, the group is presently selling off a local recycling site, replacing it with one half the size. Their Community Investment Program, meanwhile, is regarded by critics as a giveaway to private developers. Public services, from street cleaning to  waste management, are all outsourced too, with some contracts renewed as recently as last year. Labour’s record at a local level is very much at odds with the rhetoric of its new leader.

Yet if Polanski is fighting hard against a politically exposed opponent — putting in the hard yards to win every vote he can — it’s also clear that his party has no real national message. From what I understand, the Green leader has been submerged listening to the concerns of local residents, from LTNs to parking. But that leaves little space for connecting those street-level worries to a broader set of principles, with Polanski more often reacting to the news cycle than defining it.  A case in point was his defense of the triple lock following Burnham’s speech on Tuesday, with the Green leader asking why Labour was “going after pensioners”. That might make sense — had the Greens themselves not pledged to end the triple lock at the last general election. Hardly Burnham’s conference-hall plea for hope through honesty.

Why, at their zenith, did the Greens take their foot off the pedal? There are many plausible answers, not least that some within the party view their role as being little more than a pressure group pushing Labour left. And so, with Starmer gone, some concluded it was mission accomplished. Then there’s the fact that building an organization in an age of frantic digital activism feels harder than ever, with ideological zeal on social media often masking lace-thin commitments off it.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the party’s core values remain unclear. The Green movement is stronger than ever: people, after all, are far more interested in the work of Friends of the Earth than the Fabian Society. So where were the Green politicians making vertical videos in Wisley this summer, when the Surrey village saw no rain for two months? Or when New Forest businesses were slammed after wildfires deprived them of peak-season tourist trade? Why, when the A31 was closed for almost a fortnight as a result of the flames, wasn’t the party making the case for temporary free train travel as an emergency response? In their defense, the Green leadership might say they were knackered after an extraordinary few months. That carries more than a grain of truth: rapid growth is often exhausting for insurgents. But national politics is utterly relentless, and things always move on. More reason, then, to focus on building an effective organization that transcends the gravitas and personal pull of any single individual.

Amid such frustrations, the Green conference in Brighton feels like a lost opportunity. It could have provided the party with a moment to reflect on a remarkable year, and debate their policy platform moving forward — especially in the very different context of a Burnham premiership. Instead, the party is offering refunds to members who’d paid to attend, but who now want to canvas in London. Holborn and St Pancras matters, of course, and the party is more competitive than many realize, but that also underscores a tendency of the radical Left towards “actionism”: where thinking, debate and theory counts for less than it should. Collective deliberation, and a vibrant intellectual culture, especially offline, are the lifeblood of any party seeking to transform society.

Not that it’s all bad for Polanski and the Greens. For even if it seems unlikely he’ll triumph in Holborn, he could come a close second — something which might end up benefiting both him and Burnham. The former never meaningfully expected to win, after all, and he’ll have built a formidable operation for when he stands (and likely wins) in one of the Hackney seats at the next general election. Making inroads into Labour’s majority, at the very moment that the Government is enjoying a honeymoon with a new leader, would remain an impressive accomplishment, whatever Polanski’s detractors might spin next Friday. As for Burnham, a narrow margin of victory might provide a valuable impetus to change his own party. The remnants of Starmerism would need to be dealt with.

More from this author

What I learned occupying London

By Aaron Bastani

Yet whatever the tactical result next Thursday, that still leaves the Greens in the same strategic quandary. Are they building an organization, and a movement of their own —  defined by thick offline ties, a vivid intellectual and social life, and local experiments in politics — or are they simply a response, or indeed a symptom, to a collapse in two-party politics? The same question can be posed of Reform, of course, but then it’s rather easier to avoid existential angst when you’re receiving tens of millions of pounds in donations.

For all the enmity between Polanski and Farage it’s clear that, until now, both men thrived in part because they weren’t the big two — with effective strategy often requiring little more than opposition to a moribund “uniparty”. But what happens when one. half of that uniparty, Labour, explicitly admits their complicity in decades of failure, and openly says the country has been on the wrong path “for a long time”? Suddenly, being purely antagonistic no longer works, and can even start to resemble puerility. That the Conservatives won’t do something similar, and admit their own fiascos on austerity, migration and Europe, should perhaps provide succor to Farage and Zia Yusuf.

What, then, should the Greens do? At a national level, they need to determine where they are distinct from Labour, and craft their message and policies accordingly. Clearly a large part of the answer involves climate change. That, after all, remains the basis for a potentially vast coalition: from the Countryfile viewers in the shires to urban graduates who are more likely to watch Gary Stevenson. It’s worth remembering, too, that while the Greens, Reform and Labour all have memberships of less than 300,000, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds boasts over a million. The National Trust, Europe’s largest conservation charity, has a membership five times that.

Secondly, the Greens need to decisively become the party of struggling urbanites. But this means focusing on problems like fly-tipping and quality of life as much as the housing crisis or other immediately Left-coded issues. If Auckland can build a new metro, in a decade no less, why can’t the likes of Leeds and Bristol? Solving problems like that, from supply chain constraints to planning oversight, should be the party’s bread and butter. Britain’s cities are appallingly managed, and the Greens should relentlessly seek to provide answers, even when those aren’t especially ideological. To put it another way, the Greens should be the party most committed to making Britain a more pleasant place to live: advocates for lapwings, but public lidos too. For that to happen, though, Polanski’s team will need to dump the reflexive negativity — instead linking values to policies that forge a national movement, all while being open about the threats and opportunities of a genuine green transition. Yes, some risks will be involved, and yes, any endeavor on such a scale will include mistakes.

There’s another, easier option available to the Greens as well: wait. Wait for Burnham’s honeymoon to end. Wait for the Labour in-fighting to return, as the party’s perennially toxic Right attempts to take back control. That will inevitably happen — not least because it is the Labour Right that still controls the NEC and much of the party bureaucracy. And, when it does, the Greens will be there, an oven-ready alternative for progressive voters. That’s an alluring strategy for Polanski, not least because it isn’t really a strategy at all. “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake,” Napoleon reputedly said. Fair enough: but, more often than not, that’s a line deployed by people who are simply unsure of what to do. Like the Prime Minister says, real hope comes through honesty. In these fractured times, that’s a line everyone in politics can learn from.

On Wednesday, Andy Burnham finally acknowledged the Iran link, and the defense secretary, Wes Streeting, admitted that Britain faces state-backed threats to our military bases. On the same day, Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had told Britain there was going to be an attack; and on Thursday, Scotland Yard said a 27-year-old British-Iranian man had been arrested in Westminster on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts.

In short, the details of the Fairford incident remain murky. But the wider story, at least, is becoming clearer. This week I have spoken to current and former military personnel, Ministry of Defense civil servants, members of the intelligence community, and family members of soldiers, for whom these bases are home. What emerged was an account of new technologies and new social phenomena imperiling military bases. British territory as a whole, it seems, can no longer be thought of as wholly safe and friendly.

Of the 2,000-odd military bases in Britain, among the most significant are the far smaller number that host runways and aircraft. An even smaller portion of these, such as RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall, both in Suffolk, as well as RAF Fairford, are used by the US Air Force. Fairford, like most runway-equipped RAF bases, has its origins in the Second World War, before being expanded in the Cold War. It is the only European airfield from which the USAF launches bombing sorties.

Even during the Cold War, the bases in Britain itself — those in Northern Ireland being a separate matter — faced few direct threats. As a result, they are far less secure than British bases abroad. Typically, they are guarded by a chain-link fence, a gatehouse, and a flimsy barrier. One army wife, who lives on a base, told me that damage to the perimeter fence has gone unrepaired for years. I was also told of procedural weaknesses as well as physical ones. It is widely-known that at some bases, staff do not check the ID of every person entering. 

Suggested reading

Inside Britain’s broken war machine

By Wessie du Toit

Those security weaknesses are becoming increasingly dangerous. Our adversaries, particularly Russia and Iran, conduct proxy and gray war against us, and have even recruited in-country agents via social-media platforms. On the one hand, these subcontractors might not have the competence of seasoned agents. On the other, they can offer our adversaries plausible deniability. And if they are caught, they will not be able to reveal much valuable information.

A recent example of this “Deliveroo terrorism” came via the Ukrainians whose arson attacks target a property and vehicle owned by Keir Starmer. These men were recruited via Telegram, and offered money for the task. There have also been instances of foreigners being seen around key military sites. Britain’s adversaries can call on organized crime networks of Islamists, Iranians or Albanians. “They can enact whatever form of mischief they want to create,” said George Simm, former Regimental Sergeant Major of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, calling it “terrorism by proxy”.

Worse, the recruitment efforts appear to have stepped up. Gwythian Prins, a geopolitics strategist and research professor emeritus at LSE, said that, since the beginning of the Iran War, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has switched to “swarm” tactics, meaning they are seeking to overwhelm our intelligence service by “recruiting useful idiots in the thousands”. “Can [the security services] monitor them? Not a hope.”

Many of these potential operatives have arrived via legal immigration, which has expanded in recent years to an unprecedented scale. Some of them have slipped in via Britain’s porous borders. Iran is among the countries believed to have sent agents or proxies via small boat. And if operatives arrive in boats which aren’t intercepted, or via light aircraft, they are able to bring with them equipment such as weapons or detonators. Simm warned that poorly guarded airfields are enabling adversaries to carry out smuggling operations “all the time — contraband, guns, people. I mean, the whole thing’s wide open”. This is a threat the state seems to be aware of, with Border Force issuing guidance in August encouraging people to report suspicious activity at private airfields. For its part, recent Royal United Services Institute report warned that “aviation misuse may extend beyond organized crime to wider national security”. 

Roy McComb, a former Detective Chief Superintendent in the Police Service of Northern Ireland told me: “If you’re a hostile force, you find the weakest part of your enemy’s armor. There’s no doubt in my mind that the border is one of those vulnerabilities, and if you wanted to bring people in who were going to be involved in a hostile act, the easiest way [is to] bring them in, have them go dark for a period of time, have them meet up with some of their compadres, and then go to work.”

The task of the subcontractors is made easier by advances in drone technology. Thanks to the technological foment of the war in Ukraine, one can now legally purchase devices that can carry 40 kilograms, and be controlled via the internet from anywhere on Earth. Modern drones, I was told by Steve Tisseyre, a former police officer who specialized in counter-drone work and is now a director of an aerial defense firm, are “attractive to anyone wanting to carry out surveillance, cause disruption or get around traditional security measures”. They could also, as we have all seen in the Ukraine war, be used to directly attack vehicles and kill people. 

Only in February did the Ministry of Defense establish restricted airspace areas over 44 critical bases. Until those orders were in place, therefore, it was legal to fly a drone over those bases. Indeed, it remains legal to fly drones over many other military sites. The MoD told me that restrictions will be put in place over 160 further sites “in the autumn” — surely an unnecessary delay.

What form could an attack take? Roy McComb, a former Detective Chief Superintendent in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told me that a “capable opponent” might even attack a base with an improvised bomb, “whether it’s placed within the fence, driven inside the compound, brought in as a proxy, or launched as a mortar attack, I don’t think most of the bases in Great Britain are ready for that.” Other forms of attack, I was told during the course of my reporting, could come via drone, on foot, or through surface-to-air missile strikes against military aircraft during takeoff. 

As McComb added, Troubles-era attacks on police bases in Northern Ireland resulted in significant effort and expenditure being directed towards hardening those bases with enhanced physical security, patrols and other measures. “Whether we get to the point of having to do that in GB is the question.”

Suggested reading

The English Question

By Aris Roussinos

Maximal physical security, however, is not necessarily optimal. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a retired very senior British army officer, told me that “there is a high degree of pragmatism necessary when one’s talking about protecting military bases, because the whole of the military could consume itself in marching up and down behind the wire.” 

What, then, does Fairford mean for the defense of this country? Prins described it as “a wake-up call… we have become lazy and lax. And we know that our exposure to infiltration through immigration is wide-open.” The situation is exacerbated, he said, by Israel’s decision, following Britain’s sanctioning of its West-Bank settler population, to withdraw its intelligence cooperation.

A spokesperson for the MoD told me that the Government maintains “robust and proportionate security measures across the Defense estate,” and takes action where necessary “in response to evolving threats.” The MoD , I was also told, has committed £790 million to strengthen protection from air, drone and missile threats. “Whilst we will not comment on specific security measures, the public should be reassured the UK, and its allies remain vigilant against potential threats.”

But concerns remain that we are not doing enough to be secure. For instance, the British military has been slow to adapt to drone warfare. On 1 March, Iran launched strikes on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. “The only way we could think of defending the RAF base at Akrotiri,” said the retired senior officer, “is to send one of our Type 45 destroyers out [rather than deploying] some sort of system in a box that could be whizzed out there”.

And military bases are far from the only potential targets of hostile states and their proxies. Our military supply chain, as well as our critical national infrastructure, including power plants, water supply and airports, are all at risk of attack. And the targets aren’t only on land. As Prins noted, we face an acute and proven sabotage threat to British undersea critical infrastructure — internet, gas pipelines, electrical interconnectors — from Russia’s formidable GUGI fleet of specialized submarines, which are designed to attack targets on the sea floor.

Intelligence is absolutely key to defending our bases. As Simm put it, that the men arrested near Fairford “could rock up almost to the fence unchallenged is a sign the system is overwhelmed or at least confused”. It doesn’t help that operatives are savvier than they used to be. “These days the terrorists are very surveillance aware and good at communicating in codes, which makes it harder to know exactly what they’re talking about.” This means that intelligence is rarely able to identify a “specific threat” unless we have “got an agent in there”.

As several of my interviewees said, Britain is still underspending on its military. We need better-resourced intelligence services and urgent investment in anti-drone technology — as well as radically strengthened borders, both at sea and at our airfields.

For the long peace is long over. The rules-based international order is dead. Soft power, always a comforting lie, must be cast aside. We need to get serious about security, serious about funding the military, and serious about our borders before it is too late. 

It was advertised as “a place where boys could be boys”, with its acres of park, valley and woodland, into which boys could disappear and beat each other with sticks and fenceposts and marinated conkers. Our sacred texts were the Dangerous Book for Boys, Cherub, Our Island Story and anything by Kipling. Girls, alien creatures of ill-repute, were absent, as were high academic standards. Instead, we were free to play sport and musical instruments, and to work on our “Character” — to become stable, self-assured Englishmen of the last century, who could stand firm in the flux of the present one.

I was not the first of my family to board there. In fact, I was “Adair minimus”, the fourth of my brothers (minor, major, and maximus) to attend the school. Each had returned, quieter, for their first exeat, insisting that it was such fun. And it sort-of was. It could not be avoided, so we had to make do. This was, after all, England’s annual trick of renewal, the ritual by which the country had sustained itself for nearly 200 years. To maintain an empire, the Carthaginians had sacrificed their children; the English merely spent vast sums of money on packing theirs off to board. This had once been considered “progress”.

Suggested Reading

Can public schools be redeemed?

By Matt Rowland-Hill

And yet progress has now left the prep school behind. By the time I arrived, in 2010, these institutions had been confused into taking one of two paths: rapid modernization or entrenchment. Mine chose the latter, and that made little sense: the world for which they hoped to raise us was long-since dead, and the ritual had become a hollow repetition. Eight-year-old children were being weaned not, as once, to rule the waves and administer an empire, but to lament their ill-fortune in therapy rooms and broadsheet supplements, or else to exert their wits in the lower rungs of the insurance market. Once upon a time, these old boys would have been public-minded; now they were just “posh” and their only certainty was that the rest of the country really cared how this made them feel.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the character of Earl Spencer, who has spent the past fortnight busily “ragging” the King. His life maps effortlessly onto the decline of the prep school, and the upper and upper-middle classes more generally: a transition from steely coldness to self-centered loquaciousness. Over his last two books, Spencer has done more to dismantle the vestigial myths of hidebound English “society” than the Labour Party could ever dream of. In his memoirs A Very Private School (2024) and last week’s Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, he has moved beyond the stoic and illusive stability of prep-school England into everything that is its antithesis, a confessional, tabloid desperation that Philip Roth might have deemed a very English berserk. Neither the prep school nor the Royal Family will ever quite return to their former innocence: these books, which he insists are not attacks but memoirs, have undermined the very structures that enabled 19 generations of his family to reside at Althorp.

Prep-school England is now dead. There are only 163 eight-year-old boarders in Britain, down from 468 in the year I started. This means a bygone elite will not reproduce itself. And yet, should these schools and their attendant way-of-life die, something will undoubtedly be lost because, however obsolete and exclusive they seemed, they did their best to promote an ethos we lack today: “Character” over results, the individual over the statistic, and the sort of self-restraint that could prevent these tabloid squabbles between the houses of Spencer and Windsor.

Mine was the county school, which meant that everyone in the county sent their children there, and that all the county’s fine class distinctions — between middle, upper-middle, and upper class — were quietly endorsed. There was a rifle range and a clay-pigeon shoot, and boys were permitted to skip lessons and ride to hounds at the hunt’s annual meet in the school parking lot. Then, the boys who rode would be served honey-mustard sausages and cups of Bovril by those who didn’t.

Our lives, our characters, felt old there — enchanted. The wars felt nearer than the local town, and the school register was haunted by the same surnames that appeared on our war memorial. It was a world without irony, much like the Boys’ Own universe described by George Orwell, in which “Everything is safe, solid, and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever and ever,” even if, really, it was already doomed. Each year, we re-enacted the Second World War and played a game called German Spotlight. The boys had to get from one end of the school site to another without being spotted by the SS officers, whose roles had been assumed by the teachers. I could never evade the Nazis for long, and would trudge back to the school building, where a film was showing for the re-imprisoned boys. “1940, Somewhere in England,” the credits read, and I would think of those boys still out there, sticking it to the boche in the frost-bitten grounds.

The school was founded in the late 19th century by a “monocled and fanatical Jacobite”. He designed it as a modern school, complete with concrete playground, Eton Fives courts, and a gaudy arts-and-crafts chapel. He chose the site for its “healthy aspect”, in the hope that this might prevent his charges from snuffing it too readily — a common problem in the earliest prep schools. This happened half-a-century after Thomas Arnold purportedly invented the prep school, back in 1837, when he decreed that he would not accept under-12s at his school — believing them to be unsafe among the older boys, many of whom were bullies, or pederasts, or both. And yet more than Arnold, it was the age that necessitated them: the rapid expansion of an empire that required officers and administrators — and somewhere to deposit their children — as well as a newly enriched caste of industrialists whose rougher edges needed a shine. In practice, that meant imparting “Character”: an Arnoldian idea that incorporated moral imperviousness, muscular Christianity, and an odd streak of anti-intellectualism. As Jan Morris wrote, Arnold had “implanted concepts of privileged service [in his students] that led logically to the idea of a new Rome”. His boys would become “Christian Gentlemen” — moral, not empathic, but with enough sense of duty and cold detachment to rule the natives in Gujarat or the Gambia.

This doctrine outlasted the century. Orwell, author of the best prep-school memoir, Such, Such Were the Joys, attended St Cyprian’s in the 1910s where he was thrashed for wetting his bed by the headmaster. In hindsight, Orwell thought, to enlist a child at prep school delivered them from the family to the nation, and so created foot soldiers — like Orwell himself — who, at only 19, could assume responsibility for some 200,000 Burmese subjects.

In Orwell’s day, there was a cruel logic to this. By John le Carré’s time, some 30 years later, there wasn’t. In his fallen Britain, there was a clear original sin: “the maiming of the privileged young.” They were thrashed, bullied, and buggered into eligibility for that Philoctetean caste of mandarins who presided impotently over national decline — their survivors’ coldness inflicted, now, upon British subjects instead of colonial ones. Thus, le Carré held the schools accountable for “the traumas, deformations, and truncations of character that explain the British Establishment from the appalling Doctor Arnold to the Thatcher Matronocracy”. Le Carré’s words blurbed Nick Duffell’s The Making of Them, a polemic that popularized the concept of “boarding-school survivors”. The BBC documentary followed several children in their first weeks at Maidwell Hall in the early Nineties, the very school where Charles Spencer was abused. It presents a collage of interviews with new-boys, middle-aged “survivors”, and parents — one of whom dismisses the idea of speaking to his eight-year-old on the telephone since “[children] can’t express themselves very well”. Often, what was most difficult for “survivors” to come to terms with was how parents who had suffered in their own time could inflict the same suffering on their own children. Not Charles Spencer — who desperately tries to excuse his parents. In A Very Private School, Spencer documents the scholastic North Korea that was Maidwell, where he was bullied, beaten, and sexually abused. His book weakened the prep-school ritual’s spell, to the extent that Maidwell itself closed down in the summer of 2025.

Britain stopped thrashing its privileged children soon after it lost Hong Kong. Corporal punishment was abolished in private schools in 1998, some 12 years after the ECHR had triumphed over le vice Anglais in the state system. Unsurprisingly, an hour-long detention proved no match for the slipper and cane. And as their disciplinarian Victoriana morphed into twee gentility, so too did the boys the schools produced. If, once, it had been necessary to drill them into inhuman stoicism, all they really needed now was a psychiatrist’s phone number and a recommendation for the MCC, and then it was off to an interminable lunch in Leadenhall Market or to oversee the decline of their familial estate. For all that these schools continued to market a timeless, Boys’ Own fantasy, these days they could only sell connections and access — a means for an impotent elite to reproduce itself. If they couldn’t build “Character”, they could, at least, make you posh.

This was clear enough in the boys at my school, much as my headmaster tried to drill us with old-fashioned, Anglican ideals. Bald and bespectacled, his was a doctrine of self-assurance and deference, which encouraged us to be polite, civic-minded, and Christian, as well as to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. And yet in daily chapel, his sermons confused the word of God with news of how the First XV had performed in their away match at Terrington. It couldn’t have been further from the “hellfire and masturbation” that Cyril Connolly remembered from his time at school. Perhaps that’s because it was markedly less sexual in my time, save for the wanking epidemic that briefly spread among the third form. Sex had fled the chapel, and now belonged in the PSHE classroom. It fell upon a science teacher to inform us how sex and its attendant organs worked. Modern parents, after all, weren’t paying to have their children terrified of sex.

More from this author

Foot-and-mouth was the start of the trouble

By Cosmo Adair

And that’s what mattered. “It’s difficult to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture,” Orwell wrote — and so all schools will do as the market dictates. Our headmaster had believed in the school and its vision, but the market increasingly didn’t. Modern psychology and the new British values made sure of this. Power moved from the headmaster to the parent, and boarding became flexible. Those who still boarded often went home on the weekends. The Fives courts were converted into classrooms and after the headmaster retired, the school became co-educational.

Their death could be blamed on Labour’s VAT policy, but, really, it was inevitable. Most old boys have, now, enacted their own little berserk — therapized out of their former class allegiances. And, besides, the only people interested in an old-fashioned education these days seem to be the Chinese and the Rees-Moggs. Most of Britain now regards these schools as they do the Catholic Church: as safe houses for perverts. Those that remain will be (mostly) southern, and will focus on “excellence”, not Character, and so will foster a new kind of snobbishness — the untethered, Spencerian sort, whose cruelty is its destructive self-concern. The much derided Arnoldian doctrine will, perhaps one day, be missed. It could have blossomed in a modern institution, cut loose from cosseted datedness and cruelty.

And what became of us, trapped between the old world and the new? The world in which we were raised bore no resemblance to the one we entered. The traditions were dead and the rituals meaningless. Civic-mindedness is of little benefit in a City career, where stoicism proves an inconvenient stopper on the second bottle of claret. Some could still lead vanished, institutional lives, but would find themselves to be hollow men clutching onto romantic visions of lost grandeur, or else expensive and out-of-date ideals. Character could take us so far, but that alone didn’t seem of much use in a world of chaos and smartphones and Snapchat and hardcore porn. “How I did loathe that preparatory school,” wrote the 19th-century author Herman Merivale, “preparatory, thank heaven, for a life that was not to be.”

Today, opposite the inebriated Labour spads and staffers jabbing furiously at their phones, Cammell Laird shipyard hosts Royal Navy frigates for repairs. One of only four remaining British oil refineries is visible in the distance to the south-east. And, out to the west, in the Irish Sea, a host of wind turbines turn limply in the sunshine. This, then, is the sweep of Labour Britain in microcosm: the one built by industrial laborers, and shaped by the trends of progressive interventionism. And you can see it all from within a sealed, airport-style security cordon full of lobbyists, millennial PR professionals from London, hacks-on-tour, wonks and assorted politicos. They all agree: “The vibe is very different from last year, isn’t it?”

In truth, of course, it’s the same conference bubble strangeness that we are subjected to every year. Each party has its own neuroses. Labour’s principal one is that it’s a party of progressive liberal graduates — but nonetheless clings to its original roots as a manifestation of genuine working-class ascendancy. And here it is encamped as a foreign object in an airless architectural carbuncle on the banks of the river, among the red-brick warehouses and shipyards and the very places that gave the labor movement so much of its original form. Its relationship with working-class Britain is akin to that of the adulterous husband, begging his wife for one more chance. One civil servant-turned-comms girl, here at Conference for the first time, has a slightly different observation. “There’s quite a lot of gimps, isn’t there?” But here, the gimps are king. This is their safe space, the place to indulge in all manner of comforting delusions.

During an extended visit in 1965, Allen Ginsberg called Liverpool “the center of consciousness of the human universe”. Brian Patten, Ginsberg’s weary host, later remarked that “I think Allen believed the center of human consciousness to be wherever he was at the time”. You could say something similar about most Labour types. They consistently engage in what the philosopher John Gray calls “the fatal conceit of the progressive mind”, namely “an invincible faith in its superior rationality”. In this world, if only everyone was party to the facts, nobody would vote Reform; if only more right-on types had their hands on the levers of power, then all would be well. With a straight face, one think tanker told me that the rise of populism could be put down largely to a lack of “up-skilling opportunities” in the left-behind English regions.

More from this author

The future of the Left will be decided in Holborn

By Jonny Ball

Wherever “the center of consciousness of the human universe” is today, it’s not located in the Conference Fringe Guide. Instead, we have “How Can Employer Partnerships Create Genuine Pathways into Work For Young People?”, and “Closing the Sports Gender Gap with Sky and Lucy Powell”. The slogan of the conference, “Hope Again”, is deliberately broad and absolutely banal. It adorns screens and billboards. For now, drunk on warm wine and good vibes, most attendees are prepared to believe. 

But these dreams will inevitably meet contact with difficult realities: tightening fiscal constraints as a result of geopolitical crises beyond our control; those pesky gilt yields; the recalcitrant PLP, who will meet with hostility any attempt at constraining current spending. The cost of government borrowing is now at a 20-year high. And, 20 years ago, the national debt stood at around 30% of GDP, not today’s 95%. We’re spending three times more on debt interest than we are on infrastructure, almost twice as much as we spend on defense.

But the problems are for later: this is Burnham’s time to shine. A year ago, he was shunned for what was billed as a premature attack on Keir Starmer and the bond markets. Today, he is dominant within a party that has identified him as its last electoral hope. The PM seemed to have a slogan of his own for a speech that rang as hollow as Hope Again: “All together now”. But, for his part, the speech was a success, a classic of mawkish, progressive soft-Left Labourist eulogizing. There were perorations on 1945, tears for his father in an open display of Men’s Mental Health, odes to his “gran”, and the beloved, abstractly conceived working class: who in actuality have abandoned the party in droves. 

Burnham is an infinitely superior speaker to Keir Starmer, and he knows what the Labour faithful want to hear. He has the self-confidence of Tony Blair, and a coherent narrative of how Britain found itself in its current woeful predicament. “Homes, water, energy, transport, care, were broken up and sold off”, he told the gathered activists. “The British Right talk about taking back control”, he added, “but it was them who gave it away.” 

The Prime Minister, in short, is a man who deals in an anti-Thatcherite, progressive social democratic nostalgia — one he hopes can reunite progressive Britain’s warring tribes. He makes Labour people feel good about themselves, which is more than can be said for Starmer. Some in the conference hall wept openly, perhaps in a show of what they like to call “solidarity”. Perhaps they’ve been waiting to hear such a bold assertion of their Labour values since the days of John Smith. There were moments of whooping and shouting reminiscent of a Pentecostal church on Sunday, the congregation all filled with the spirit of Andeh, the spirit of ’45. He is good at this, delivering a broad-tent vision of a liberal Britain that seemed pitched towards uniting left-of-center voters against what he called “division” (which we can translate as still-burgeoning national-populist insurgency). 

And the delegates lapped it up. It was as clear a signal as we have yet heard of the kind of coalition he wishes to build come the next general election: the modern Labour bloc of liberal professionals, public sector workers, young renters, ethnic minorities, students and sections of the old working-class who haven’t been lost to Farageism (particularly in the North). In other words, it’s time for the Green, Liberal and soft-Reform defectors to come home. It may even be enough to win the next election, at least as the largest party in coalition with Liberals and Celtic nationalists, pointing us towards a future of proportional representation, an elected senate, and smug Euro-style consensual technocracy. 

Aware that, as time goes on, the popularity of virtually all political leaders fades, No. 10 would be foolish not to consider the possibility that waiting until 2029 for an election heightens the risk of a Conservative rebound and a Reform-Tory coalition. Certainly, the need to raise taxes to pay for a National Care Service could be the substantive excuse to U-turn on early denials and to go to the polls seeking a fresh mandate.

More from this author

Why the British Left has fallen for China

By Jonny Ball

Yet if all this makes sense politically, nothing Labour has proposed so far will break the doom loop, nor alter the fundamentals of Britain’s decline. As ever, the yawning gap between the diagnosis and the prescription is the most fundamental contradiction in the Burnhamite project. Though it offers a story of systemic rupture, a “circuit breaker” on “40 years of neoliberalism”, it’s all told to justify a handful of discrete, piecemeal, modest interventions: a revamped help-to-buy scheme by another name; £2 bus fares; VAT off electricity bills; a commission on electoral reform; a slightly modified triple-lock to pay for enhanced social care. Elsewhere at the conference, Shabana Mahmood has agreed to make her migration reforms more palatable to Labour’s metropolitan liberal castes: Blue Labour’s lodestar has gone full woke with safe and legal routes for Gazans and Afghan women. 

This, then, is a shopping list of policies adding to much less than the sum of a “post-neoliberal order”. It didn’t even reveal a new strategy for growth, simply for more fairness within the current ailing model. It was a paean to safe soft Leftism, not an extrapolation of what would really constitute post-neoliberalism: the hard, social-democratic radical reforms that would rebuild state capacity; put us on a pathway towards a more cohesive national economy; and usher in genuine industrial revival and investment-led national renewal. 

Whatever else neoliberalism meant, after all, it really did entail a radical reorientation of the ship of state. It pursued a steady, deliberate retreat of the demos, the public, from ownership and direction over productive assets. It disciplined organized labor, outsourced services, and began to allow markets to allocate capital — in a way that used to be debated politically and enforced via industrial strategy, capital controls, trade barriers and incomes policies. The productive state, that engaged directly in investment and capital formation, became a regulatory state that taxed and tweaked with cash transfers from a financialized, privatized growth model. Nothing on Burnham’s wishlist approaches a reversal of this at anything like the necessary scale. 

Back on the Mersey, the tide is on the turn. Every political economy leaves its monuments here. The refineries and shipyards stand for industrial Britain; the regenerated docks for tourism, services and creative capital; and the turbines out in the Irish Sea for the net-zero revolution. Each epoch wasn’t built by tweaking the old ones. If Burnham truly wants a post-neoliberal order, he will have to build one, and that means large-scale investment in physical things meant to last generations: not regulatory fiddles while Britain smolders. Burnham’s problem, then, is a twofold gap: the first between a diagnosis of systemic rupture and a weak prescription of cheap bus fares and VAT cuts; the second between the hope in the hall and the grim arithmetic waiting beyond the security cordon. Even the grandest of speeches can’t bridge chasms that large.

The trouble is, it’s been so long since a full-on war that no one alive remembers what it was like. Our template for what “war” means is woefully out of date. And, worse, what’s driving us toward conflict now is the very architecture of institutions and beliefs that proved so successful, for so long, at keeping the peace. 

It’s perhaps understandable that young people visiting the IWM today should be left cold by its exhibits: we live in the successor polity to the Britain that is its subject. It marks 20th-century wars that were fought between nation states, including Britain. But the Britain we now live in is only sometimes, and in some respects, a nation on this model.

Nation states were the characteristic political form of the modern age, combining multiple tribes agglomerated by a border, legal regime, national language, and imagined community. Great Britain was one of the first to coalesce in this way, but by the 19th century much of Europe comprised such entities, some expanding into global empires. And all of this was, as the great political economist Harold Innis argued, inseparable from the role of print in consolidating, expanding, and mediating these nation-states to themselves. 

Our 19th-century nation states applied much the same template to geopolitics as classical liberal economics did to the free market. Every state was seen as an individual, pursuing its national interest. Statecraft consisted of jockeying to ensure a balance of power, in which no one nation-state became too mighty. For a long time, with the odd blip, this worked well. The 99-year era from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 is known as the Long Peace. But it couldn’t last. 

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan drew on Innis’s work to argue that electrified communications disrupted the 19th-century equilibrium by speeding up communication across vast distances, intensifying national-interest politics until war broke out. These days, we tend to frame those wars as Good vs Evil narratives about democracy and Nazis. But at the time, as A.J.P. Taylor recounts it, the concern was much more about balance of power. For British statesmen in the Thirties, the problem with Hitler was less a moral evaluation of his regime, than the geopolitical risks of allowing Germany to expand. 

Suggested reading

Europe isn’t ready for Russia

By Wolfgang Munchau

Even then, no one fully reckoned on the role industrial technology would play in scaling up the violence. The result was the frenzy of manufactured slaughter and industrial production and destruction commemorated by the IWM. In the aftermath, many blamed nationalism. From the understandable longing to avoid a re-run was born the America-led rules-based international order, and with it the now-dominant story about democracy and Hitler.

In this new world, culture and communications dissolved borders, flashing round the world via radio and TV antennae. Nationalism was re-envisioned as a thin, symbolic thing of sports teams and boring ceremonies. Its more atavistic 19th-century predecessor was consigned to oblivion, as the mortal sin of “racism”. The new internationalism set out to soften national interest through international trade, and porous borders. National identities, meanwhile, might be moderated through the intermingling and integration of peoples. 

Everyone’s model was America, the new hegemon and, aided by the transnational impact of American media, energetically promoted after the war as a “nation of immigrants”. Arguing  for American immigration law to be relaxed, Senator Ted Kennedy rejoiced at the way this broadcast empire globalized and homogenized would-be immigrants: “In an age of global television and the universality of American culture,” he said, “assimilation, in a real sense, begins before they come here.” Downstream of this ebullient, successful, inspiring example, every developed nation retrofitted itself on a similar template. 

In Britain, this consensus has diversified the national population. But notwithstanding all the school civics stuff about British Values, there are indications that the resulting post-war Britain feels at best ambivalently affiliated to the nation-state entity that preceded it. This is delicately implied by the IWM in its decision to rebrand: one that, its Corporate Plan stated, “reflects the growing number of people with no connection to someone who lived through the First or Second World Wars, or who was involved in the post-1945 conflicts”. 

Though it’s not spelled out by the IWM, this isn’t just about generational change but also the demographic kind. Any contemporary 10-year-old of historic English descent is certain to have had forebears caught up in the two wars, even if the individuals themselves are long dead. But while this is surely true of some more recent migrants to Britain, it’s less necessarily so. Given that 38% of schoolchildren in Britain are now from ethnic minority backgrounds, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if school groups visiting the IWM today don’t always feel a personal connection to that particular past.

A plurality of ancestries and historic affiliations isn’t axiomatically bad. But much as electricity intensified national-interest politics, so the internet is both intensifying and undoing post-war internationalism. Specifically, it’s both accelerating global mobility, and also algorithmically sorting people into tribes. The result is the “global village” McLuhan predicted — but not in the way the utopians hoped. 

The internet makes travel easier, facilitating legal and illegal migration alike. It also makes integration in a new country optional. Whereas a migrant to Britain or the USA in 1965 would have had to learn English, now between video calling, Google Translate, and social media, everyone takes their “community” with them. Concurrently, remittance services (and, less legally, money-laundering) have allowed finance to uncouple from nation-state economies and be re-routed via transnational familial, tribal, or ideological networks. 

Meanwhile, everyone, whatever their heritage, gets sorted by social media into epistemic bubbles, then fed agonistic rage-bait about outgroups. What’s emerging is a multi-layered and digitally networked tribalism among migrant communities — and, increasingly, also former nation-state populations. That is: not “global village” in the optimistic hippie sense of borderless planetary love-in, but closer to what McLuhan actually expected: “a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.” 

A lot of bread-and-butter culture war turns on street-level examples of such “arduous interfaces” and “abrasive situations”. That is: low-level aggro between re-tribalized subgroups, occupying contiguous or overlapping physical territories in the digital-age, post-national entity that used to be “Great Britain”. This is uneasy enough. But it gets more unnerving once mapped to questions of hard power and geopolitics, friend and enemy, whose most extreme expression is hot war. 

Here the tensions inherent in our transitional phase are uncomfortably plain. Human rights lawyers may treat “national interest” as a wicked impediment to the universal good, but nation-state Britain isn’t altogether obsolete. The tribally constituted, post-national entity is rather superimposed on the older model and its bewildered, angry former imagined community. Meanwhile the erstwhile nation state still retains some functions — including, albeit in a threadbare way, foreign policy and military power. 

A whole genre of low-grade post-national warfare has been incubated in the policy gap between these two versions of Britain. Incidents of domestic terrorism linked to geopolitics have grown frequent of late, of which the latest was genuinely frightening: over the weekend, an RAF base in Gloucestershire was evacuated, after a farmer spotted men in balaclavas leaving suspicious vans near the boundary. Five men have been arrested on suspicion of attempted bombing, and police are now investigating links to Iran. 

But should we be surprised? An ideologically post-national governing class has so far clung to the older model, as to drive the formal military capabilities of nation-state Britain to the brink of hard-power confrontation on several fronts. This would be bad enough if we still had much hard power, or a cohesive nation. It’s made infinitely worse by the insouciance shown by the same class, at the same time, over who can come in and out of Britain, and how freely. This is consistent with the post-national worldview provided everyone is living in peace and harmony. But every indicator suggests everybody is not, in fact, doing that. 

Instead, every element of the post-war order that once fostered peace is now doing the opposite. The internationalist regime of human rights has incentivized “grey zone” or “liminal warfare” conflict across operations such as cyber-attacks, sabotage, and weaponized migrant flows. The internet is accelerating and re-tribalizing demographic diversification, incubating sometimes radicalized subcultures within host nations. And the asylum regime, itself a post-war act of atonement by states which failed to do enough to prevent the Holocaust, has been weaponized for economic migration, organized crime, and infiltration by hostile actors. 

What does war look like, when everyone lives everywhere, and loyalties are not geographic but networked? When soldiers don’t even need to be in the same country as the explosive drones they pilot? When you can get a child proxy to do terrorism for you via a website? The 19th-century model offers no very useful guides. Nor does Jacob Rees-Mogg’s demand for stiffer upper lips, among Britain’s now very diverse and sometimes ambivalently patriotic youth. The 20th-century postwar model is what got us into this mess. I wish I could tell you how we get out of it again. 

Very obviously, no one currently in power has a clue what to do about the new normal. There are some obvious first steps to take, such as not granting citizenship to known senior Hamas operatives. We might also stem the tribalization of Britain by withdrawing from the asylum system, expelling known criminals and terrorists, cracking down on networked ethnic mafias, and being considerably more robust about ending the migrant dinghy industry operated by these mafias. But none of this would be anywhere near enough. The internet will still beam all wars everywhere, all the time, and whip everyone into agonistic tribes. 

And meanwhile, the principal obstacle even to trying such measures is our own elites and institutions. Still grimly living in the internationalist 20th century, these will fight tooth and nail to obstruct any substantive policy response to the 21st. And this, not democracy and Hitler, is the real lesson of how the Long Peace ended. Institutions, ideologies, and elites that delivered good results for a long time are not hastily abandoned, even when it’s plain that, under new conditions, they are careering toward disaster. Alas: change on that kind of scale more often comes through having learned the hard way.     

This late-flowering, politicized ethnogenesis among the English people is obviously the direct product of mass immigration, which has had the effect of rapidly diminishing the English population share within their own titular country. It was also obvious, and long-predicted, that the parallel growth and confidence of Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalism would, in turn, midwife an English equivalent. When we add to this volatile mix the obsession, in recent decades, of Britain’s political and cultural class with aping essentialist American rhetoric on racial and ethnic difference, valorizing minority identities while actively seeking to suppress and undermine (or “dismantle” and “de-center”, if you prefer) majority ones, then we see the perfect Molotov cocktail our elites have managed to assemble for us in the coming decades.

Is Rishi Sunak English? The question is so poisonous because it elides multiple distinct but partly overlapping concepts — ethnicity, culture, political identity — and is further obscured by late 20th-century British taboos and anxieties over race. One can be culturally English (as, for good or ill, I am) without belonging to the English ethnic group (to which I do not, being of mixed Greek and Irish origin). Like my suburban Northwest London contemporary Suella Braverman, I have my own ethnic identities, which I have inherited and been socialized in, and do not wish to give up, instead passing them on to my children. This is not a question of race — both Greek and Irish are European ethnic groups — but of ethnicity. I do not feel aggrieved or despondent that I am not a member of the English ethnic group, just as I do not pine to be Japanese or Basque or Hutu. But framing the question, as parochial commentators seem compelled to, as “can non-white people be English?” has, whether through well-meaning ignorance or willful obtuseness, led to the absurd situation where the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, as well as a cultural identity, is either denied or actively suppressed as a barrier to racial harmony. Indeed, for New Labour apparatchik John McTernan — proud possessor of Irish identity and citizenship through descent — “the concept of ethnic English is truly evil”.

At the same time, elements of the online Right are indeed objectively racist, denying English ethnicity to people of part-English origin by virtue of their mixed race. One of their victims, the MP Ben Obese-Jecty, who is half-English and half-Ghanaian, is clearly more English than me, ethnically, because I am not at all English. Given that a significant proportion of the new ethnonationalist Right often do not have to look back far to find non-English ancestors, then a preference for people of European but non-English heritage over non-white people with some English descent clearly shows a focus on racial identity over ethnicity or ancestry — another conceptual matter entirely. If some level of physical descent from ancestors from England were the central factor, then the vast majority of the Caribbean, or even African-Americans, would have a greater claim on Englishness or Britishness than the non-ethnically English descendants of European immigrants, though I have never seen today’s genetic purists make this claim. The racial aspect, on both sides of this debate, then, overwhelmingly obscures the matter supposedly at hand, that of Englishness as an ethnic identity, which is to say the existence of the English as a people, distinct from the Welsh, or the Tibetans, or the Iroquois, or any other of the world’s ethnic groups which are universally agreed to exist.

More from this author

Piddington’s very English revolution

By Aris Roussinos

Perhaps the online debate revolves around whether prominent non-white personalities can be definitively called English precisely because the question feels more loaded, and thus more dangerous to comfortably discuss. The existence, or otherwise, of the English as an ethnic group has become, politically, a sub-problem of the continued viability of a tolerant multiracial society within the context of vastly expanded mass Third World immigration. Without the policy choices creating this situation, this entire conversation would not be happening, and these neurotic, increasingly casuistical debates would simply not be taking place. The progressive claim that the English, alone among human societies, do not exist as an ethnic group is so absurd as to be unworthy of discussion: it is simply a means of evading the question of what political importance should be attached to being of English ancestry in the very land named after their ethnic group. If the reasoning is that the path to racial harmony lies in removing the English, alone, from the long list of the world’s ethnic groups, against the will of those who both are and believe themselves to be such, then permit me the adopted English understatement of saying that the outcome will not be positive.

To disentangle, as our purposefully obtuse commentators choose not to, the distinct issues of race and ethnicity, it is more useful here not to ask whether Rishi Sunak is English, but whether Andy Burnham is. Proud of his Irish descent (on his father’s side Irish Protestant from Drogheda, so we must assume of English settler origin), Burnham has made it explicitly clear that of the various regional and national — even pan-continental — identities he holds, Englishness comes last. As Tom McTague observed in his profile interview with the Prime Minister, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity”, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”, an identity which “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth”. With his Derbyshire surname, vanishingly rare in Ireland, no one can reasonably doubt that should he have wished, Andy Burnham could have chosen to assimilate into an English political, cultural, or even ethnic identity. For the most part, it seems he has chosen not to. Politically, he is British (and incidentally is strikingly more Unionist in dealing with Sinn Féin than his recent predecessors). Culturally, his Englishness is regional, urban and Northwestern rather than national: it is perhaps more difficult to imagine him bedecking No. 10 North with England flags in support of the national team than Starmer chose for the British state’s previous London regional office. Ethnically, should he even think in these terms, we must assume it is his “Irish roots” that dominate.

Indeed, when hosting Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin at Makerfield’s Brian Boru club last week, Burnham observed that “I certainly am proud of the Irish heritage that I have in my family. And I was with the Prime Minister of Canada at the new Everton stadium this week… Another Irishman, it wasn’t unnoticed, a Mayo man, I think.” Carney certainly is, or was — he relinquished the Irish citizenship he held from the 1980s on becoming Canada’s Prime Minister — “another Irishman” and “a Mayo man”. On the official Irish Department of Foreign Affairs website, one can find the lovingly-produced document “Aughagower to Canada: A commemorative history of the Carney and Moran families”, a masterpiece of sentimental old country soft power, tracing Carney’s forebears back to their peasant smallholdings, published “on the auspicious occasion of your visit to your ancestral home”. Carney acquired his third, British citizenship through necessity, as is mandatory on becoming Governor of the Bank of England (there is of course no English citizenship to acquire for what is, despite its name, a British role). What makes Carney “another” Irishman to Burnham? Is it citizenship? He is no longer an Irish citizen. Culture? Perhaps, though it is difficult to see exactly how this manifests.

More obviously, the answer is in descent, and the very idea of having “an ancestral home” in the first place. Such descent is a category recognized by the Irish state, like the majority of European states, for citizenship purposes, in a way the British state does not recognize its own British, or even English diaspora, in America, Canada, Australia, or other distant outcrops of the great historic wave of British transcontinental migration. But there is, still, an element of personal choice here: though less Irish, by ancestry, than either Burnham or Carney, that descendant of stout Hampshire yeomen, Joe Biden, chose to identify as Irish, in a distinctively bombastic Irish-American way.

Comparing Irishness to Englishness, then, we see that ancestry is a factor in the Irish case; citizenship another factor (though neither Biden nor Burnham are or ever were Irish citizens); and choice — the subjective matter of personal identity construction, itself a product of socialization from within and without the cultural in-group — the third. It is not any one of these things in isolation, but an interplay of all of them. If British progressives, trying to suppress a politically toxic, and, it is not difficult to foresee, potentially tragic outcome that they have themselves created, now find themselves denying the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, it must be said that much of the newly ethnonationalist Right exists in a similar state of confusion about the subjective element of choice in ethnic affiliation. If ancestry alone were the operative factor, that son of a Birmingham stonemason, Patrick Pearse (who incidentally blamed his “cold nature” and social awkwardness on his “English blood”), would be only partly acceptable as Irish, yet you cannot find even the most extreme neo-Gaelic nationalist online claiming so. When the London-born Englishman John Stephens changed his name to Seán Mac Stíofáin and led the Provisional IRA at the start of the Troubles, it was surely a triumph of will over ancestry, and yet he was nevertheless accepted as Irish by the most zealous Irish nationalists then available. Admittedly, spearheading armed rebellions may be a stiff benchmark for successful assimilation, but the Irish case — so geographically close and culturally similar to England, compared with the vastness of the surrounding world, yet so utterly dissimilar nevertheless — remains, as always, a useful foil to English certainties.

No one, at least until Irish progressives belatedly acquired once-fashionable Anglo-American opinions, doubted the existence of the Irish as a people distinct from others in the world, or that the Irish people, as such, are distinct from the English. Even the latter claim is, at least, still vestigially held by the Irish progressive class as the last remnant of Irish nationalism. Indeed, hapless Ed Sheeran has recently, by virtue of his disinclination to publicly condemn Israel, been stripped of his inherited Irishness by prominent Irish progressives, and presumably condemned to mere Englishness for his sins. This element of politicized cultural negotiation, from within and without the in-group, is neither an English nor a Right-wing peculiarity but an inherent feature of ambiguous cases in what is, by its nature, a socially constructed category. Ancestry, ethnicity, political identity: these are partially overlapping but distinct concepts, for Englishness as well as Irishness.

Yet the fact that many Irish people can claim English ancestry, like Gerry Adams, or Scottish, like Mary Lou McDonald or Conor McGregor, does not negate the existence of an Irish ethnic group, which both partially overlaps with British populations in terms of descent, but is also held in jealous contradistinction as a matter of identity formation. Indeed it is in Northern Ireland, where Irish and British ancestry is most closely intertwined in most families, that the cultural boundaries between them are most rigidly enforced. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth observed in his influential book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, it is the very existence of cultural boundaries themselves rather than the “cultural stuff” they are commonly held to contain, that makes the distinction between ethnic groups. The ability of individuals, in very particular and mutually negotiated ways, to slip between them, rather than deconstructing ethnic groups, reifies them as culturally meaningful categories. Ancestry, real or fictive, is an element, even a large element, in the existence of ethnic groups, but the two terms do not overlap entirely. Both sides in this interminable debate are conflating related but distinct concepts, and poisoning a debate that will result in serious real-world consequences for millions of people.

So when Jacob Rees-Mogg can claim, to online outrage, that the English are a “mongrel people”, then this is something that can be said of every ethnic group on earth outside uncontacted Amazon tribes or Andaman Islanders, it is not particularly meaningful. Even Winston Churchill, in his popular work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, took great pleasure in ascribing different temperamental characteristics of the English “race”, the common late-Victorian usage for what we would today term “ethnicity”, to the various ancestral strains in its makeup. Churchill, who was half-American of English descent, certainly did not intend to deny the existence of an English ethnic group: indeed, his work was intended to explain what he predicted as its domination of the earth, or at least justify the handover of power he oversaw from its mother country to its New World successor empire. It is sadly ironic that the man who sacrificed the British empire to defeat Hitler spent a large part of his life writing a multi-volume epic glorifying his own ethnic group, from its island birthplace to its vast new lands across the globe, that would now itself be considered tantamount to Nazi race science by the standards of British politicians in 2026. What a muddle these people have found themselves in, and what a sad and needless predicament for the English themselves. These are nuanced and complex terms, hedged with ambiguities at the edges, but at the same time, you should not need a DPhil in Anthropology to know whether you exist.

Where does all of this leave us? The observable fact that membership of one ethnic group or another, is in certain circumstances, and within certain cultural contact zones, mutable or negotiable, is less politically relevant than the fact that for the majority population of England, such circumstances have not existed since the early Middle Ages. The English were, until relatively recently, disinclined to center themselves as an ethnic group at home precisely because they were one of the very first in the world to form a nation-state, in which this identity was unchallenged. Later, when other European societies were undergoing the wave of explicit identity-formation that led to modern nation-states, the English had happily subsumed themselves into an imperial British identity, which no longer exists — except perhaps vestigially in Whitehall. But, just as the modern experience of mass immigration leads to complex and ambiguous identities in the descendants of immigrants, whether inherited or consciously maintained like Burnham or Carney’s layers of Irishness, at its current scale, it has now caused the English to adopt the same introspective anxieties and acts of conscious identity formation.

More from this author

Nothing can stop the break-up of Britain

By Aris Roussinos

We may say that the creation of hyphenated English identities have suddenly transmuted unhyphenated Englishness from an assumed cultural norm into a politicized identity. English demographic decline in England itself, with all the rapidly eroding taboos around its open discussion, is the central fact driving all of this discourse, around which everything else is displacement activity. It is the direct result of mass immigration since the Nineties that these questions of identity and ancestry and meaning, the stereotypical immigrant neuroses, have now come to overshadow the English themselves, who in their homeland have no other identities to play with, or assume, or explore.

Like any child of immigrants, I have made choices, rational or romantic or some combination of the above, and for good or ill others have been made for me, or inherited. Like Mark Carney, I have “an ancestral home” in Ireland, and have chosen to “return” to it. If Jacob Rees-Mogg thrusts Englishness upon me, I must therefore politely decline. Yet for those whose ancestral home is England, there is no escaping the problem. Some have chosen self-assertion; others have chosen self-negation: but there can be no real imminent resolution when what was once unspoken and merely assumed has, for the first time in many centuries, become a matter of political dispute and negotiation. Yet it is doubtful that either current position, maximalist or minimalist, on who gets to call themselves English has yet reached its final form, but should instead be seen like the first haggling at a bazaar. There is, presumably, a middle-ground between claiming that the entire world is composed of temporarily embarrassed Englishmen, and determining belonging solely by 23andme results.

In Greece, which went through this process in the 19th century, despite the strong ideology of shared ethnic identity and physical descent from the ancient Greeks driving the modern state, some groups, like Romanian-speaking Vlachs or Albanian-speaking Orthodox Arvanites, were adopted as fictive Hellenes, while others found less happy outcomes. In Ireland, the descendants of English settlers were twice absorbed into the Irish ethnic group, as Catholics in the 17th century, and as Southern Protestants only definitively after independence (the assimilation of Ulster Protestants into Irishness is, we may say, a distinctly unfinished project). But modern English political ethnogenesis is only beginning, and it is impossible to predict its final form, should there ever be one. It is very plausible that an accepted compromise will retain more of imperial Britishness than the current discourse would imply. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness is also politically unstable, and one possible route out, or deferral, of English angst over identity could be a revivified unionism, which indeed appears to be Burnham’s response. But the stakes, for those of ambiguous Englishness, are increasingly high, as the once uncomplicated English begin to argue among themselves. We may as well get used to these endless and increasingly sterile online debates, and the shadow they threaten to cast over our offline lives. All of us, English or not, are now stuck with the English Question.

So yes, information warfare is real, and yes, foreign powers use propaganda against their adversaries. This is hardly new: in Ancient Greece, the Athenian leader Themistocles engraved stones at a watering hole, encouraging his enemy’s Ionian levies to defect. If, however, the Government is right to combat outside threats, its domestic opponents are equally right to be suspicious about the National Center for Information Defense (NCID). Announced by Andy Burnham on Tuesday, it will disrupt “hostile information attacks” and “deepfakes”, and quash a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”. That’s fine as far as it goes — if only the NCID wasn’t conjured in a Whitehall that has proved itself a foe of legitimate criticism. 

Unsurprisingly, Burnham’s announcement first attracted the ire of free-speech campaigners, who quickly noted that the Government already has a bubbling cauldron of acronymic monitoring units at its disposal. The variety here is truly bewildering, from the Media Monitoring Unit to the Defending Democracy Taskforce to the National Cyber Force. At first blush, indeed, NCID seems to be a classically British amalgamation of existing units. By putting them under one roof, the reasoning goes, duplication and waste is avoided. 

The problem is that if Burnham’s innovation promises to save cash and pool ideas, it also concentrates power in the hands of civil servants. That only increases the danger that the NCID “grows arms and legs”, evolving like a fish wriggling out from a swamp, desperate to feed and grow. It hardly helps that interdepartmental rivalries will be triggered among the spooks, cops, civil servants and even soldiers involved in officialdom’s many online media monitoring operations, with the NCID doubtless eager to make its mark too. 

That matters, for the Government can increasingly not be trusted to separate opinion from genuine disinformation. During Covid, to give one example, dissenting voices found themselves on official watchlists, while only last year, Whitehall labeled people concerned with mass migration as “cultural nationalists” potentially worthy of Prevent referrals. To an old Special Branch hand like me, then, the NCID rings a distant Cold War bell. Subversion, it seems, is back in fashion — except this time, the primary “threat actors” are less sweaty Stalinists and more anyone challenging the post-1997 consensus. 

Suggested Reading

Is Burnham too Northern?

By John Merrick

Having worked in the field, both in monitoring online extremists and actual terrorists, the NCID operation strikes me as pure “parapolitics”. The liminal space between conventional politics, intelligence, security and propaganda, parapolitics is usually the domain of niche sociology journals. Parapolitical activity is sometimes practiced covertly. This time, though, the powers-that-be have decided to hide in plain sight. Yes, the Government seems to be saying, we’re watching. 

Of course, Whitehall has long maintained such capabilities, mashing up civilian media operations with politics long before the internet ever existed. During the Second World War, for instance, it established the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive, designed to counter Nazi propaganda, undermine enemy morale and — crucially — keep an eye on the home front by monitoring public sentiment. After 1945, the Attlee government created the Information Research Department to combat Soviet disinformation. As ever, the Russian bear looms large in the history of British domestic security, with hybrid capabilities developed to keep him behind the Iron Curtain. 

During the Cold War, monitoring and combating “subversion” became primarily an MI5 and Special Branch problem. The official definition, first introduced in 1972 by MI5, encompassed “activities which threaten the safety or well-being of the state, and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. The civil service effectively withdrew from the field, allowing anti-communist surveillance to become a classic quasi-political, quasi-policing issue. Were operations keeping tabs on communists designed for police action or pure intelligence purposes? In the parapolitical hall of mirrors that was postwar intelligence, no one really seemed to know.

This thinking wouldn’t survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, let alone the towers of 9/11. Nor is this surprising: despite the dangers of jihadi bombs, they hardly subverted the state. There was no overwhelming ideological threat from overseas, no evil empire. Islamist terrorism was too fragmented to seem threatening; to suggest Islamism generally might pose problems was long deemed politically unpalatable. Instead, the police and security services switched to a far more granular role, one encompassing proactive counter-terrorism intelligence and law-enforcement operations. Think less John Le Carré and more Jack Bauer. Not unrelatedly, the post-9/11 “CONTEST” strategy also saw “domestic extremism” downgraded in the face of al-Qaeda threats, with combating the puny far-Right increasingly contracted out to the social services, educational institutions and charities.

All the same, that didn’t stop the powers-that-be from gradually developing a digital panopticon, one capable of using content aggregation tools to harvest the internet for dissenting material. Online monitoring units would keep tabs on groups and individuals, flagging “actionable” content for removal, for intelligence purposes, and, occasionally, for criminal prosecutions. 

The Coalition government seemed perfectly happy with this Blair-era arrangement, and little changed until the late 2010s. Since then, the surveillance state’s appetite has only grown — especially with the development of new tools like AI, and especially now that, unlike in the 2000s, powerful anti-establishment forces really are on the march. Sure enough, every protest, riot and politically charged furore sees ministers, civil servants and chief constables demanding instant information, as if their intelligence minions possessed scrying balls and oracles. In their own way, populist protest movements have the potential to disrupt key infrastructure, as seen in Dover. They can also potentially incubate lone-wolf extremists. Before he became an infamous nail bomber, David Copeland had dabbled in the BNP.

And so the post-Southport disturbances, anti-immigration protests and “Patriot Platform” blockades have triggered, once more, Whitehall’s hunger for counter-subversion. The issue that concerns me here is proportionality. Where, in the end, is the line between lawful and unlawful protest? This, remember, is the era of non-crime hate incidents and knocks on doors, of journalists being warned of harassment for pursuing legitimate stories like Jason Arday’s. Then there’s interpretation. Does genuinely agreeing with a Kremlin-funded troll make one a dupe or a shill? Or, indeed, a traitor? Managing such questions is work for skilled investigators, not algorithms or quangos. 

The Government doesn’t seem completely oblivious to the dangers here. As Defence Secretary Wes Streeting put it yesterday, the new unit wouldn’t infringe upon “the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their Government, to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing, and then to have the opportunity to choose a different Government”.

Yet the party Streeting serves has previous for its own information-warfare shenanigans. One example is Labour Together. It shared an address with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose stated objective was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter?” Parapolitical indeed. And how many meetings or cutaways are there between Hope Not Hate and its former director of communications Matthew McGregor: now the head of political strategy at No. 10? It isn’t hard to see how such relationships could be exploited by Westminster’s mini Machiavellis. 

No genuinely free democracy has successfully managed to entirely censor the internet. British attempts so far have been more farcical than sinister, not least Ofcom’s quixotic attempt to silence 4chan, that venerable US shitposting site. Yet downstream from such debacles come the “ think of the children” excesses of the Online Safety Act, with the mandatory age-gating of content the preferred, if unspoken, option of politicians. I am prepared to bet the new disinformation unit will soon be forming working groups to wargame these “tactical options” for countering disinformation. Yet without transparent frameworks, for instance around who to target and when, we will never know how these ideas are formed. National security is a convenient firewall for policymaking on the sly, with technical possibilities around internet censorship occasionally “run up the flagpole” with investigators. 

There’s a broader point here too. Assuming the new agency is successful in identifying online content made in good faith from foreign propaganda — even if they happen to tally — how will they police one against the other? Kremlin trolls do tell outrageous lies, but some of the best information warfare is material that subtly toys with reality. The challenge is to know the difference and act on it accordingly. Most reasonable people want to see foreign propaganda called out for what it is. But I’m not convinced the threat is concomitant with the solutions proposed. Blurring the lines of legitimate debate is unlikely to soften the genuine anger that exists over issues like small boats. 

Again, these are matters of judgment. I remember monitoring Twitter one night when Tommy Robinson posted a copy of a hastily scrawled “Osman Notice” — informing him of a threat to his physical safety — pushed by police through his front door. Robinson contrasted it with the apparently favorable treatment of a Muslim cleric who’d been similarly threatened. “Can you get that taken off the Internet?” a senior police officer asked me of Robinson’s posts. Why? “Because it’s embarrassing and the chief constable doesn’t like it,” came the reply. I refused, having neither the power nor desire to involve myself in something so trivial. Yet these, more or less, will be the people in charge of the NCID. And I have no reason to believe they’re much better now. 

The most sensational allegations are already well-rehearsed. Charles seemed “giddily elated” after Diana’s death; that Diana said the now-King was “in love with his valet”, and that His Maj said after her death that “we’ll forget her soon enough”. Wasn’t it a bit dodgy to make all these un-falsifiable claims so long after the fact? Laura Kuenssberg asked ever so mildly, in a BBC interview on Sunday. Shouldn’t the good earl consider Harry and Wills before raking it all over?

Spencer’s retort cuts to the heart of Britain’s posho pathology. No, he insisted, it’s all a true account of what he remembers. Charles was always on about duty, he said, but Diana also had a strong sense of duty. And as “a witness to history”, the Earl intoned, he has a “duty” to tell his sister’s story.

Suggested reading

Can public schools be redeemed?

By Matt Rowland Hill

But what exactly do we mean here, by duty? Duty to whom, or to what? Over Britain’s high imperial era, this idea of “duty” always pulled in two directions. One half of the ruling-class culture that emerged in that age was a Spartan toughness and (at times) cold-blooded single-mindedness, that built institutions and infrastructure, and also extracted wealth or massacred recalcitrant natives. Institutionalized and reproduced in Britain’s chilly, disciplinarian public schools, this sense of “duty” supplied the former Empire’s stoical, institutional-building team spirit and capacity to set personal feelings aside in pursuit of larger goals.

The other half was a genuinely idealistic moral universalism. Born in industrial-age Britain’s Protestant predilection for social reform, and always more female-coded, this supplied a core of righteous zeal that animated the Empire’s missionaries and “civilizers”. Perhaps the most historically notable fusion of these two senses of “duty” is the point where (admittedly after a lot of campaigning) abolishing chattel slavery became imperial policy, realized through an immense expenditure of blood and treasure.

The British Empire’s legacy is immense and ambivalent, meriting both the acclaim of its nostalgists and also the critique of its post-colonial revisionists. And since its end, no subset of Britons has been left more lost, and less capable of reckoning with that legacy, than the upper class — especially the constitutional monarchy — whose purpose evaporated with its collapse.

It was not always thus. In the high imperial 19th century, our monarchs did their duty, just as they expected citizens to do the same. Prince Albert turned his abilities to diplomacy and or institution-building in areas such as museums, scientific societies, and military schools. Queen Victoria, for her part, espoused moral causes such as animal welfare, social reform, and injured veterans. Some monarchs and a whole empire later, even Charles’s mother was able to squeeze a lifetime’s “duty” from presiding over the Empire’s dismemberment while pretending everything was fine. But there was nothing left on that carcass by the time Her Maj died. So with little useful to occupy them, our upper crust has turned the twin moral turbine of their imperial upbringing loose on themselves, and all of us, to disastrous effect.

Nowhere did this appear in more vivid tableau vivant, than throughout the miserable marriage of Charles and Diana. Victoria’s and Albert’s instincts are discernible in, for example, Charles’s interest in youth education and Diana’s in landmine victims. Charles tried to personify “duty” in the sense of willingness to inhabit given roles, rules, and obligations, irrespective of personal feelings. And Diana personified “duty” in the sense of obligation to pursue a deeply felt moral mission wherever it led.

But unlike Victoria and Albert, Charles and Diana had only a Potemkin empire in which to play out their inherited roles: the “Commonwealth”. This entity, confected to save face as the real Empire imploded, was always an awkward hybrid of friendly-ish settler states such as Australia, plus former colonies whose disposition toward the Crown runs from ambivalent to openly and extractively hostile.

With only an at best ambivalent reception to enjoy, while doing the rounds in the “Commonwealth”, Charles’s and Diana’s institution-building and moral-reform instincts went in search of a canvas at sufficient scale. Alas: they found themselves reborn as warring emotional camps, in an America-led, globalized 24-hour TV entertainment cycle. In this frenzied setting, a sensibility that once ruled the world degraded into an ugly divorce battle, between “duty” in Charles’s sense of subsuming your feelings for the greater good, and Diana’s of pursuing personal truth, no matter what the cost.

This resonated more widely than just the Windsors, because the battle was also raging throughout our erstwhile imperial class. Long before Diana died, her combination of idealism and selfishness was a sufficiently common cultural hangover of the Sixties to have been vividly satirized in the Nineties sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.

The show’s two central characters, Patsy and Eddie, capture the hedonism and sentimental, self-righteous attitude this produced — while casting a sharp eye at Britain’s fraying upper class. Only Patsy is genuinely “posh”, but she also has no money: she lives a parasitic life in nouveau riche Eddie’s house, where she guzzles Eddie’s champagne, makes use of her chauffeur, and bullies her staid daughter, while weeping crocodile tears whenever challenged.

The year after Ab Fab stopped broadcasting, Diana’s sudden death declared her self-involved version of “duty” the winner in the media battle, as it were by martyrdom and canonization. As Tony Blair solemnly declared at the time, she was the “People’s Princess”. From there on in, the Patsy and Eddie version of “authenticity” was to be the new normal for Modern Britain. Small wonder, perhaps, that therapeutic navel-gazing plus globalized wokeness has since become the dominant moral registers for what’s left of Britain’s poshos, as typified by figures such as Kirstie Alsopp and indeed Diana’s son, Harry.

Watching Earl Spencer justify his latest salvos against King Charles to Laura Kuenssberg, I don’t doubt his assertion that if he really wanted to spill the tea, there are spicier truth-bombs he could drop. But clearly he doesn’t just want to screw King Charles. He wants us to understand how discreet he’s being and how utterly lovely his life is, and to be sympathetic about his (self-diagnosed) “ADHD” and “rejection-sensitive dysphoria”. Like Patsy and Eddie, he wants to destroy his enemies and not be made to feel guilty and still have everyone agree that he’s a really nice person.

What of the other side, meanwhile? If Britain’s posho moral-reform instincts have long since resiled into wokeness, philandering, and crybully emotional terrorism, the proponents of emotionally detached team spirit are just as gravely adrift. Shorn of an empire in which to act globally, and obviously reluctant to contract their field of vision to “little Britain”, this group has instead directed its energies either to renting out social cachet à la Patsy, selling off the family silver, or alternatively chasing a dream of universal institution-building, often at the expense of those whose interests they ought to protect.

Here, for example, we find hereditary products of Britain’s erstwhile imperial class such as Boris Johnson, opening Britain’s borders to the “Boriswave”. We find Jacob Rees-Mogg enjoining British plebs (presumably excluding himself) to “do their duty” and enlist to defend their nation, even as those plebs witness government after government refusing to defend Britain’s own coastline in the name of “international law”. And, indeed, we find the recent, cold-blooded assertion by Rory Stewart that the mass rape of British girls by Pakistani-heritage clan mafia networks is a trivial issue compared to real problems, such as the future of AI governance. We also find King Charles hiding in grand thoughts about our technological future: his reaction to Earl Spencer’s revelations was to attend a conference on AI. An aide retorted, in response to press enquiries, that “The King was rather more concerned about the future of mankind than the unkind claims of one man picking at the scars of the past.”

More from this author

What Farage can teach Prince Harry

By Mary Harrington

These two poles represent, between them, the spread of ways a decadent upper class can absolve itself of responsibility. On the one side, by resiling into Patsy and Eddie emotivism, and saying, of anything inconvenient or guilt-inducing: “It wasn’t my fault because I’m nice and a victim.” On the other, by fixating on “the future of mankind” rather than of a particular people, and offloading responsibility to assorted forms of technocracy, from institutions, to international laws, and – now – the dream of a “machine intelligence” that might finally liberate them from decisions and accountability.

A fish rots from the head down. Ordinary Brits are still demonstrably capable of self-organizing in a crisis, for the common good, at a pragmatic scale. If our country is in a bad way, ultimate responsibility lies with our leadership class, which long since committed itself to a general stance of “it’s not my fault”, or “we need to make things even more neutral”. Whether the supposed culprit is personal trauma, institutional racism, Donald Trump, International Law, or AI Swarm Gods, we’re stuck with this ghastly tranche of wet-eyed cry-bullies and cold-blooded universalists, none of whom shows the slightest interest in the one thing they’re supposed to do: lead and serve, in the interests of their own nation.

By contrast with the normal Brits who still cheerfully rally in a crisis, they should all feel ashamed of their own cowardice and crapulence. But they won’t. Shame implies choice, which signals responsibility. And the inability of the class that produces characters such as Earl Spencer, Boris Johnson, and Rory Stewart to feel shame, let alone take responsibility, is precisely the problem we need to confront, if we’re ever to climb out of our current morass.

It’s not really possible to do without an elite. But we really could do without one whose sole unifying refrain is “It’s not my fault”. So my fervent wish, at this point, is that “swan song” refers not just to Earl Spencer, or Diana, or even King Charles (A)III, but all of them: their whole class, generation, and hopelessly decadent worldview.

Miliband’s father was a distinguished Marxist intellectual at a time when being of the Left didn’t mean you had to deny Israel’s right to exist. And though Ed called himself a bridge between Corbyn and New Labour, the bridge was not a particularly sturdy one. Still and all, he seemed to be at the center of a powerful personal storm when he stood shaking at the dispatch box last week and helped put clear blue water between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer in the matter of Israel. If Burnham looked even more uncomfortable than Miliband, that was because he had more to be uncomfortable about. It was he who kicked off his premiership with the promise to turn the clock back on Starmer’s caution in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when the then prime minister refused to bow to the Politburo anti-Zionism of his backbenchers and held fire condemning Netanyahu.

Yes, bugger Netanyahu. But it was a moral imperative, initially at least, to go after Hamas who had made it public that they couldn’t wait to rape and massacre again. Not an imperative, though, to Burnham, who I don’t recall mentioning his misgivings at the time but who now must win back the traditional Labour haters of Israel, who deserted to Zack Polanski, or just deserted full stop. Well, politics is a filthy business, and it might have been that very thought that troubled Miliband, causing his eyes to dilate blackly and the dark antagonistic clouds of Marxist principle and Jewish agony to pass across his face, as though presaging thunder.

More from this author

Philip Guston's fight against evil

By Howard Jacobson

“I am a proud Jew,” he said. Part confession. Part warning. Was it also part apology for what was to come? I don’t mind admitting that I shuddered. I am a proud Jew, but….

So how bad was it? Well, the roof hasn’t fallen in on us. We haven’t been thrown out of the country as we were in 1290. And the target was shrewdly selected. The settlers. Who loves the settlers? There is some argument as to how much of what we see on the forever discredited BBC News tells the whole picture, how many of the settlers on the West Bank are running riot, how much of what they do is encouraged by the government. But that they are there at all is hard to take. A number of the early Zionists had wanted to see the back of religious zealotry. Had I been an early Zionist I’d have agreed with them.

I visited the West Bank 30 years ago or more, while writing and subsequently filming Roots Shmoots, a journey into Jewishness and, I suppose, myself. I didn’t find any of myself on the West Bank. And while I don’t, as a rule, make the mistake of being ashamed of what Jews who are not like me do anywhere, the words, action and deportment of the West Bank Jews I met turned my stomach. A seemingly intelligent American woman talked to me at the door to the settlement she managed. After 10 minutes of rational conversation, she threw wide her arms and said God gave her all I saw before me. I told her we had a problem in that case as He’d also given it to me. I further witnessed a fringed, orthodox Jewish teenager mocking an elderly Palestinian woman and that was enough. I saw plenty more that was ugly. But sometimes one small act can tell you more than a thousand big ones. Get the hell out of here, I thought. Not me, him.

So all right, maybe sanctioning them is a good idea. But then again, maybe it isn’t. Too many fanatics — for the deranged can be found on both sides of any argument — had been calling for sanctions. You are a proud Jew, remember, Mr Miliband. Do you want to number yourself among the ignorant and the bigoted who chant outside Marks and Spencer and hiss at people who buy the wrong figs? Do you want to give them even a sniff of hope that they have not chanted in vain?

You don’t need me to tell you, Mr Miliband, son of a Marxist intellectual, that revolutions and other movements of great change don’t grow out of despair. The spark is hope. Cast your mind back to that October 7 Massacre, which your boss won’t allow himself to be too voluble about in case it cedes another robotic voter to Zack, and recall the way it stirred the settler-colonialist professors on the campuses of Oxford and Harvard to rise up and call for more of the same, more blood, more hostages, more rape, more death. Hamas are pleased with you. “So far so good,” they say. “Good start.” Did you answer them, Mr Miliband? Did you ring Corbyn to get advice on how to talk to terrorists? Did you say thank you, comrades, while reminding them you’re a proud Jew and that’s all they’re getting. Or is there more in the pipeline? Is Burnham, too, hoping you won’t stop there? As I write, a Labour MP is recommending military action against Israel, which could be stretching our armed forces if we’re also having to go protect the Falklands again. But that’s what hope does. It makes men greedy and unrealistic. Even the Bishop of York is calling for a few more targeted sanctions while you’re on the job, at the same time as warning, as you would expect of a senior Churchman of York — where long ago there was another famous massacre of Jews — against the perils of antisemitism.

Antisemitism! Tut, tut, none of us want that. But will telling it we don’t want it be enough to put it back in its box. You dropped a few of the catchwords favored by the river-to-the-sea marchers in your troubled address. Demo-speak. “The occupation”, without explanation. “Ethnic cleansing” which, though there are some in Netanyahu’s ultra-Right coalition who admit they think along those lines, suggests a more systematic program of removal and destruction than we can be sure exists. You are on the foothills of the biggest of all the lies currently doing the rounds, Foreign Secretary and, if you’re not careful, you’ll soon be putting the definite article before “genocide”. THE genocide. I think I see the phrase beginning to form on Andy Burnham’s lips, though he pointedly resisted it when he was merely Mayor of Manchester and had only tram-drivers to answer to.

There is no point, Mr Miliband, offering to be confident that people with a Jew-grudge will listen sympathetically to the nice distinctions you are making between the West Bank and Israel and Israel and the Jews and the Jews and Israel, if you are not yourself fastidious in the language you employ. You rose and addressed a tinder box of a nation. Maybe you knew it. Maybe that was why your eyes turned black as though swimming in pitch. I am a proud Jew. But what might I just have put a match to?

Here, with nothing but good will, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you. Worldly wisdom is as important a virtue in a politician as a good heart. So is knowledge of the hearts of others. It’s a fine thing to be a proud Jew. But what we need even more than that right now is an intelligent Jew.

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel is Howl (Jonathan Cape)

On 8 October, the voters of this North London constituency will judge whether today’s Labour Party, a now tired vehicle born of Edwardian Britain, Methodism and industrial trade unionism, is still worth a punt against the siren calls of the radical Greens, who are offering “eco-populism”, festival aesthetics, youthful vigor and politics-by-meme. The result is likely to set the contours of Burnhamism over the years ahead, shaping the malleable politics of the new PM.

It marks a pivotal moment for both Burnham and his rival Zack Polanski: a contest over the viability of the Labour Party and its traditional hegemony over Left politics. It is freighted with expectations. Can Burnham reunite the Left’s broken voter coalition and reverse the precipitous decline stewarded by Starmer? Or will Polanski prove that his party’s poll surge can be translated into parliamentary seats, a first step on his path to “replace Labour” as the dominant Left force in British politics. Failure for either would be a humiliation: whatever the result, one man’s whole political raison d’etre will be deeply undermined, their respective coalitions left more fragile than ever.

For all his painfully awkward dilettantism, Zack Polanski has managed to turn the Greens from a kooky fringe outfit into a viable electoral force. Party membership has more than tripled to over 200,000 over the past year. As much as the march of Farageism across northern England saw off Starmer’s premiership, the Greens’ success in Gorton and Denton signaled to Labour MPs that his entire project was done for. It had failed to win back the disaffected postindustrial working class, and birthed a heightened national-populist insurgency — while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the Left coalition that won Starmer the 2024 election.

Part of that coalition found shelter in the warm embrace of the Greens, which briefly overtook Labour in the polls earlier this year, before settling more recently in the low double figures. That ceiling may well be down to Polanski himself and his enthusiasm for social media stunts. He has retweeted posts questioning the use of non-lethal force against an armed Islamist, mid-rampage in Golders Green, and reposted an image suggesting Nigel Farage should be guillotined. Nor is it easy to forget — or forgive — his mortifying history of promising to hypnotize women’s breasts bigger.

More from this author

Andy Burnham: King of normie populism

By Jonny Ball

Still, news of Polanskism’s early demise is greatly exaggerated, principally expressed as wishful thinking, and crucially missing the point: the Greens don’t need to appeal to the median voter, nor do they need to assemble a broad cross-class union of disparate social and cultural-political forces. Rather, their purpose is to energize, articulate and represent the interests of that small but significant portion of voters for whom Polanski’s Bluesky musings are not beyond the pale, but signifiers of superior virtue. Done well, that could be enough to wreck Labour’s prospects of being re-elected.

Altogether, the Green showing in Holborn will confirm whether Labour’s pains are principally superficial — the result of years of uniquely inept leadership under Keir — or structural. A Polanski victory would assert the latter narrative: if even Labour’s most popular politician is powerless in the face of the macro trend, then hope is surely lost. Perhaps, even under new leadership, the rot cannot be stopped; Labour’s decline is the terminal result of tectonic and sociological shifts that have plagued the movement since the decline of Fordist manufacturing. In this reading, Polanskism will flourish in a climate in which broad-based, rooted political projects have given way to mutually suspicious tribal bubbles.

But there is a paradox at the heart of this reading of defeat. For while losing his first by-election would doubtless embarrass Burnham, it would also temper the instinct for a more managerial, orthodox politics. His coalition problem cuts both ways: he needs the Green-curious metropolitan Left just as he does the Reform-curious disaffected working class. Defeat in Holborn would make this conundrum harder, not easier, to manage.

After all, efforts to mitigate the Green surge in North London could require a Leftward shift in all manner of tricky policy areas: not only on Mahmood’s immigration and asylum reforms, but also on North Sea drilling, wealth taxes, and Israel-Palestine. The seat has a decent share of Muslim voters (one in five), as well as stressed young renters in over-priced houseshares and thousands of students: all receptive to the central Green messages of inchoate anti-capitalism and Labour betrayal. The conflict in the Near East, in particular, has become a totemic struggle for the radical Left, the fulcrum upon which all social justice struggles now somehow hinge. For the fresh graduate class, the willingness to eagerly and interminably utter the word “genocide” has become the ultimate political axiom (simply “war crimes” or even “ethnic cleansing” won’t do). So Labour has been smart to select a hijab-wearing former child refugee as its candidate, a welcome reassurance for the Green-curious, for whom these markers of apparent oppressed minority bona fides really do matter. Not that Sagal Abdi-Wali is some tokenistic appointment. She has already been leader of Camden council, and has spent three decades as a well-known “community activist”.

Of course, Holborn is more complicated than just Camden, and not as straightforwardly Green as Hackney. As in much of London, there are pockets of urban deprivation, but the seat’s boundaries stretch to the smart facades of Doughty Street (home to Starmer’s former chambers) and includes the King’s Cross headquarters of Google as well as the homes of established liberal professionals in the Georgian terraces of Kentish Town. This seat is Rest is Politics, but it is also Novara Media. If that causes headaches for both Burnham and Polanski, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party candidature does too, proving attractive to conservative Muslims hoping to give Labour a bloody nose, and to those repelled by the vibes and coding of a party of hyper-liberal urban cool kids (the Greens’ cringeworthy efforts to appeal to Urdu speakers notwithstanding).

More from this author

Andy Burnham meets reality

By Jonny Ball

It is certainly true that running a party leader with an energetic local campaign might well turn the usual by-election distortions into massive swings. But even in May’s local elections, the absolute nadir of Starmerism, the Greens found themselves nine points behind Labour, and they will, according to the bookmakers, be relegated to second place in October too.

Still, even second place is no mean feat. Before 2024, the Greens were confined to a single electoral citadel: Brighton. Positioning itself rather smugly as a bastion of middle-class progressives, hedonistic students and New-Age crusties, the Sussex seaside town was practically synonymous with the old Greens. Then, at the last election, the party expanded its seat haul to four: Brighton, of course, and a similarly off-kilter hipster seat in Bristol, but also two true-blue rural constituencies concerned with over-development and nature conservation. This created a strange two-tier Green bloc. On the one hand, the party was for laptop-sticker postgrads; on the other for Countryfile-watching former Tories.

Needless to say, that is a shaky, contradictory political coalition, not unlike Labour’s own. And, under Polanski, the Greens have only looked to add further elements to the mix: northern mill-town biraderi networks, and Islamic migrant communities collectively appalled by Gaza. But Holborn doesn’t fit neatly into the new Green Party’s cultural-political triad: what you might call the Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance. It is a seat where the Green coalition’s internal contradictions are hard to hide: a constituency of students, renters and professionals for whom Gaza is important, gardens are largely irrelevant, and where clan politics holds less purchase than elsewhere.

Even if Polanski cannot forge his Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance into a winning vote here, his leadership of the Greens will continue. As long as his loss is respectable, it may even be read as portentous, further eating into Labour’s temporarily rescued Left hegemony. A Labour victory, however, will hand Burnham the argument that his party’s malaise was mainly Starmer’s: and that a mildly Leftward, pub-friendly patter and anti-Thatcher schtick is enough to reunite the Left bloc and hold off Balkanization.

Once in this North London seat, Marx sat at his desk, with Lenin a few years and miles away, and the Fabians busily drafting the machinery of a welfare state that did not yet exist. Today, we have a former hypnotist who can’t stay off his phone, going up against a Labour candidate whose task it is to prove that having a nice-guy leader is enough to stave off secular decline. That this will be enough for one of the candidates to succeed is perhaps the biggest indictment of the politics of our era.