Elsie’s tragic tale cut through to the public in a way that statistics could not, despite some of the numbers pointing to a resurgence of almost-Victorian aspects of want. Rough sleeping, for example, has shot up by a quarter in a single year. There has been a “significant decrease” in the average age of death in deprived neighbourhoods. The government’s annual poverty figures have just recorded a million more sinking below the breadline and in the same data, released within 24 hours of the fastest food inflation since 1977, officials for the first time ever deemed it important to tally foodbank use.

And yet even the best-intentioned people can simply glaze over at figure-heavy headlines about Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. But if numbers are prone to being ignored, anecdotes can be unrepresentative. To paint a credible portrait of Britain’s new penury, therefore, we need to grapple with statistical tables and personal stories alike — with the quantity and the quality of poverty. I’ve dedicated the last few months to that, working with reporters who are lending an ear to the communities that many politicians would rather ignore.

They have heard tales of bitter hardship that wouldn’t be out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, or in the reporting of George Orwell and J.B. Priestley. In many ways, Britain’s new poverty is much like the old. The street urchins in Dickens’s London and the impoverished mill workers in Engels’s Manchester would be familiar with many of the experiences described by the testimony collated in Broke. The brute privation some describe — the bite of the cold, the gnawing of hunger, the terror of ending up without a roof over their head — would have been shared by many Victorian Londoners. The shock is to find such conditions resurgent in a post-industrial society incomparably richer than that chronicled by Dickens.

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Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

Our society may have grown too wealthy to fear mass undernourishment on a 19th-century scale, but our decade could still, like the 1840s and 1930s, earn the unhappy moniker “the hungry” Twenties. A hundred and fifty years after George Eliot likened poverty to leprosy in Middlemarch, on the basis that “it divides us from what we most care for”, a trip to a Tottenham foodbank reveals how poverty can alienate people from those dearest to them. Yvonne, a 63-year-old former social worker with a degenerative spinal condition, still refuses to let her four adult children know that she is struggling, and so cuts herself off from what should be her support network.

Such hardship gets under an individual’s skin and sometimes breaks the spirit. Staff at a GP practice in a run-down part of Glasgow which features in the book affirm how often such thoughts turn into deeds in their part of the world: overdoses and suicides routinely cut grotesquely short the lives lodged in their books.

Despite continuity with the past in the nature of poverty, a lot of the numbers concerning Britain’s current poverty crisis today are decidedly novel. From the Victorian “poor house” through to the Beveridge report, the problem of poverty in the past was — overwhelmingly — a problem of old age. No longer. Pick a pensioner at random and they are markedly less likely to be in poverty than someone plucked from the general population. In her hardship, Elsie has become the exception, not the rule.

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The flipside of ameliorating conditions for older Britons has been tanking fortunes for others. The total number of children growing up under the poverty line, which was falling around the turn of the century after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown vowed to eradicate the problem, is rocketing back to its Nineties peaks. The official tally is now just 100,000 short of the 4.3 million record, and once the rear-view-mirror data catches up with the energy crunch, it could scale shameful new heights. The link to specific cuts is getting starker, too. Take the “two-child policy”, a crude attempt to discourage cash-strapped parents from having kids, driven through soon after the Conservatives won single-party power in 2015, which ends up punishing third and fourth children by denying them support. Sure enough, according to Whitehall’s latest numbers, families with three or more children are now twice as likely to have resorted to foodbanks as their smaller counterparts.

Children aren’t the only ones affected. Disabled people, thanks to cross-party reforms from the Seventies, were rarely doomed to destitution. That is, until recently. Following a series of restrictions and freezes, a colleague and I calculated that single disabled people were roughly four times more likely than the non-disabled to be falling behind with their bills, six times more likely to be growing cold, and nine times more likely to be going hungry.

Given the drift of Britain’s demographics, the “new poverty” is inevitably somewhat more diverse than the old — but it is, perhaps, surprising to learn quite how far it skews. A lot of the political discussion, and a lot of very good reporting, has concentrated on England’s “left behind” coastal towns and ageing industrial towns, both of which tend to be white. But if we just concentrate on the hard finances, rather than a vaguer sense of malaise, all of the country’s main ethnic minority groups still suffer from consistently higher poverty rates than the white majority. For some, like British Indians, the gap is these days small; for others — like Bangladeshis and Black Caribbeans — the excess risk of poverty remains double or more. Meanwhile, for a large and growing band of migrants, the “no recourse to public funds” rule frequently spells automatic destitution.

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Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

Another break from the past concerns work. There is a particular irony here, given the way the austerity assault on the welfare state was sold as necessary to safeguard the toiling taxpayer. But the rhetorical binaries between “grafters” and “grifters” are ever-less plausible. Over the 2010s, there was a remorseless rise in the relative weight of working poverty: setting pensioners aside, less than half of poor adults lived in a “working household” back in the mid-Nineties; that same proportion steadily rose to 68% by 2019-20.

Can the poverty tide be reversed? We could learn from past success. Pulling the elderly out of poverty did not happen by accident: the change was the result of both successful social policy choices (including controversial means-tested support) and supportive private institutions (notably workplace pensions). There are questions about how sustainable the settlement is, and indeed pensioner poverty is just starting to creep back up. It’s also true that special political factors — a large and growing electorate of pensioners who reliably turn out to vote — helped unlock higher public spending in this field after the Turner Commission reported in 2005.

But these caveats should not distract us from remains an almighty, historic triumph. We should pore over the progress on pensioner poverty, and figure out how to replicate it. Many activists exhibit a weakness: the “despondency problem” sharply defined by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond as being “fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair”. To shrug off the ancient belief that poverty is inevitable, and build faith in change, we must shout about success where we can point to it.

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Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

At the same time, the average voter needs to care about poverty. This isn’t always a given. The uncomfortable truth, as Desmond heavily underlines, is that it flows from a system which in some respects serves the majority’s self-interests: the flipside of gnawing insecurity for gig economy workers is, for example, convenience for the consumers.

But one feature of 21st-century hardship may help the cause: namely, a disturbing sense of the boundary between the supporters and the supplicants of life getting blurred as the big squeeze goes up the income ladder.

UnHerd’s own polling underlines this point, with 62% of Brits now agreeing with the statement: “I worry about affording the necessities, such as food and energy.” When those findings are projected across the political map, every constituency across the land registers at least a modest majority in this position. This is the backdrop to the stories of two women we uncovered in Manchester: Phoebe, an increasingly indebted debt advice worker, who admits she’s too scared to commit her own finances to paper; and Sophie, a foodbank volunteer, who one day found she had no choice but to become a foodbank user.

Such tales are palpably disturbing. But they could also provide a chance to reset the debate. The missing ingredient in Britain’s conversation about poverty has been empathy — the poor are talked of as a different species, away on Benefits Street. As ever-more voters feel the pinch, the mood could change. Newly exposed, the majority might be persuaded to repair the holes that austerity has cut in the safety net. Then perhaps we might make progress towards fixing what is currently broke.

If you agree with the above statement, you are, I’m afraid, still in the minority. Three years to the day since Britain brought in its first nationwide lockdown, the latest wave of UnHerd Britain polling shows that only 27% of voters agree that lockdowns were a mistake, while 54% disagree and 19% are not sure. The strength of feeling also tilts in the other direction: fully 30% of people strongly disagree with the statement, while only 12% strongly agree.

Having estimated results for all 632 constituencies in Britain, our partners Focaldata could not find a single seat where the “lockdown sceptics” outnumber the “pro-lockdowners.” Chorley in Lancashire and Leeds Central are the closest thing to sceptical enclaves (here, supporters of lockdowns outnumber opponents by a single percentage point) but it is still a minority position. If “defenders of lockdown” were a political party,  it would sweep the nation in a landslide.

To those of us at the coalface of interrogating the wisdom of lockdowns for the past three years, it is a bitter pill to swallow. As someone who counts himself among the 12% of voters who strongly agree with the statement, allow me to tell you what life is like inside this embattled minority.

To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.

For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?

To those who place emphasis on good quality evidence, it has been particularly exasperating. In the early days of 2020, we had only intuitions — there was no real data as to whether lockdowns worked, as they had never been tried in this way. As millions tuned in to our in-depth interviews on UnHerdTV with leading scientists, we made sure to hear arguments in favour of lockdowns as well as against. Devi Sridhar made the case for Zero Covid; Susan Michie said we should be locking down even harder; Neil Ferguson (whose last-ever tweet was a link to his UnHerd interview) told me how exciting it was that the world was attempting to stop a highly infectious disease in its tracks.

There were periods when the evidence looked like it was going the other way, such as Sweden’s worse-than-expected second wave in winter 2020-21. Professor Fredrik Elgh dramatically predicted disaster for that country, which ultimately didn’t transpire — but he had me worried.

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How lockdown changed us

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In the past year, however, we have for the first time been able to look at the Covid data in the round. Many of the countries which appeared to be doing “well” in terms of low levels of infections and deaths caught up in the second year — Norway ended up much closer to Sweden, while countries such as Hungary, which were initially praised for strong early lockdowns, have ended up with some of the worst death tolls in the world. Due to the peculiarly competitive nature of the lockdowns, the results were neatly tracked, allowing clear comparison between countries and regions. While we spent the first year arguing about deaths “with” Covid as opposed to deaths “from” Covid, all sides in this discussion have now settled on overall “excess deaths” as the fairest measure of success or failure: in other words, overall, how many more people died in a particular place than you would normally expect?

My view on these results is quite simple: in order to justify a policy as monumental as shutting down all of society for the first time in history, the de minimis outcome must be a certainty that fewer people died because of it. Lockdown was not one “lever” among many: it was the nuclear option. The onus must be on those who promoted lockdowns to produce a table showing a clear correlation between the places that enacted mandatory shutdowns and their overall outcome in terms of excess deaths. But there is no such table; there is no positive correlation. Three years after, there is no non-theoretical evidence that lockdowns were necessary to save lives. This is not an ambiguous outcome; it is what failure looks like.

If anything, the correlation now looks like it goes the other way. The refusal of Sweden to bring in a lockdown, and the neighbouring Scandinavian countries’ shorter and less interventionist lockdowns and swifter return to normality, provide a powerful control to the international experiment. Three years on, these countries are at the bottom of the European excess deaths league table, and depending on which method you choose, Sweden is either at or very near the very bottom of the list. So the countries that interfered the least with the delicately balanced ecosystem of their societies caused the least damage; and the only European country to eschew mandatory lockdowns altogether ended up with the smallest increase in loss of life. It’s a fatal datapoint for the argument that lockdowns were the only option.

So why, three years on, do most people not share this conclusion? Partly because most people haven’t seen the evidence. Nor will they. The media and political establishment were so encouraging of lockdowns at the time that their only critique was that they weren’t hard enough. They are hardly going to acknowledge such a grave mistake now. Nor do I expect the inquiry to ask the right questions: obfuscation and distraction will continue and mea culpas will never arrive.

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Questions the Covid Inquiry must ask

By Freddie Sayers

But it can’t all be put down to the media. Over that strange period, we were reminded of something important about human nature: when frightened, people will choose security over freedom. Endless opinion polls confirmed it, and politicians acted upon it. Tellingly, those constituencies most in favour of lockdowns in our polling are leafy and affluent — New Forest West, Bexhill, Henley, The Cotswolds. Perhaps some people even enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, the dissenting minority is not going anywhere. This new class of citizen is now a feature of every Western society: deeply distrustful of authority, sceptical of the “narrative”, hungry for alternative explanations, inured to being demonised and laughed at. The dissident class skews young (it includes 39% of 25-34 year olds) and clusters around poorer inner-city neighbourhoods; it heads to alternative media channels for information. Its number was greatly increased over the lockdown era as those people lost faith in the way the world is run. They will continue to make their presence felt in the years to come.

As for me, the past three years have changed how I view the world. I feel no anger, simply a wariness: an increased sense of how fragile our liberal way of life is, how precarious its institutions and principles, and how good people, including those I greatly admire, are capable of astonishing misjudgements given the right atmosphere of fear and moral panic. In particular those years revealed the dark side of supposedly enlightened secular rationalism — how, if freed from its moorings, it can tend towards a crudely mechanistic world in which inhuman decisions are justified to achieve dubious measurable targets.

I hope there is no “next time”, and that the political class will never again think nationwide lockdowns are a proper policy option in a liberal democracy. But if they do, I suspect the opposition, while still perhaps a minority, will be better organised.

Hadleigh Castle, one of the featured properties, was built in the 13th century but now lies in ruins on a hill above a section of the Thames meandering towards the North Sea. People like me who grew up in this densely populated, marsh-fringed stretch of Southend might know Hadleigh as a right-of-passage destination for teenage drinking, rather than for any association with Edward III. Sheltered from the wind in one of the towers, you could truly escape the streetlights, Neighbourhood Watch patrols and trendies spoiling for a ruck.

The surrounding constituency of Castle Point — named after the ruin and containing Hadleigh, Benfleet and Canvey — is, according to new polling by UnHerd, the most monarchist place in Britain: 67% think it’s “a good thing”. Neighbouring constituencies had similarly high results. Essex, it seems, more than any other county, belongs to the king.

Castle Point is an area closely linked with the Thatcherite stereotypes of Essex Man and Essex Girl. It is notable, too, for being at the top of two other charts that have come to define Britain: it had the third-highest Leave vote in 2016, and it has the highest percentage of property ownership in the UK, with 82% of its dwellings owner-occupied.

Monarchism and home ownership are intrinsically linked; there are, after all, few more voracious property owners than the Windsors. As Londoners leaked into Essex in the postwar years, if they didn’t move to the new towns of Basildon or Harlow, they swapped a life of anxiety under landlords for a dabble at sovereignty. Soon, the transfer of the working classes from east London’s slums to Essex’s new suburbs became a shiny symbol of home ownership, particularly after Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme.

Yet property ownership in these parts was not triggered by Right To Buy, but by a boom in the sale of parcels of land on which migrating Londoners with not much money but plenty of resourcefulness built DIY homes. On to this patchwork of land, acquired wholesale by cunning developers, were built thousands of makeshift homes. It’s partly how my father’s family came to live in Essex, by building a bungalow in a woodland clearing in Thundersley, which is now part of Castle Point. The rectangular, pebble-dashed dwelling my Nan grew up in is long gone; the plot now houses a luxury detached property for the modern Essexperson on a street filled with SUVs parked on lit-up driveways. When I recently visited the area for my new book, I met a woman who lived in one of the surviving bungalows built by my great-grandfather. She was very keen to talk about the history of the people who built the original estate, but not in stories of kings and the queens. “I like real history,” she said.

Before the Coronation, 1953 was already a pivotal year for Essex: the Great Flood that swamped the lowlands up the east coast of Britain killed 120 in Essex, the majority in low-lying clusters of seaside bungalow communities in Jaywick and Canvey Island. The newly-widowed Queen Mother visited Benfleet near Canvey to meet evacuees, many of whom would never move back to their ruined homes. Her visit was reported in Hilda Grieve’s The Great Tide as a morale booster and source of salt-of-the-earth stories: “There was I in me nightie, up to me neck in water with the bloody cat in me arms. What was I to do? Chuck the bloody cat in the drink?’”

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Why doesn't Scotland love King Charles?

By Tim Burrows

The rescue effort relied on a flurry of Royal prefixes. Evacuees from suddenly sea-filled places such as Foulness Island were taken to the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham; missing persons on Canvey Island were diligently recorded in the form of case cards by the South Benfleet branch of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service. It was, as the social historian Ken Worpole observed, a purely practical upshot of a post-war society of “small platoons” and the omnipresence of the monarchy in a kingdom that had not fully realised its Empire was in terminal decline.

Yet Essex’s modern affiliation with the monarchy may still prove to have a limited shelf life. Many of the outbursts of fondness for the Queen after she died stemmed from the fractured connection between civic life and the monarchy, as if the decline of the country were somehow inexorably linked with the life and death of Elizabeth Windsor — whereas it perhaps has more to do with the policies of Right To Buy architect, Margaret Thatcher. As house prices outpace local wages, Essex property is less accessible to first-time buyers than ever, beckoning already wealthy Londoners to buy property in the county and chipping away at its reputation of offering upward mobility through homeownership.

John, a retired postman and sometime anarchist I met in a pub in Southminster on the Dengie Peninsula, talked fondly of receiving Royalty In Essex when he was a schoolboy in Walthamstow, which was still part of the county in the Fifties. John had voted for Brexit, but was not a card-carrying Conservative property-owner, much less a monarchist. He lived in a modest rental property in a side street away from the pub, trying to invent a new kind of software on a knackered PC that made spread betting more profitable for him (I don’t think it ever paid off). Back at his house, he pulled the slim book from a shelf, still in pristine condition, and talked at length about the hope and promise it had symbolised 70 years ago. When Britain’s tarnished king is crowned this year in a country that feels like it is bottoming out, Essex — and England — will not be able to say the same.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

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The secrets of Scotland's ancient capital

By Daniel Kalder

Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

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However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

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For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

The witch is Esme Boggart. She represents a new collective established to campaign against no-fault evictions, and to support the families affected by them. In this case, the owner of the estate had commissioned an architect to refurbish the cottage. But, when the architect recommending demolishing and rebuilding the house instead, the tenants were handed their notice. A family of seven, they had lived on the estate for 26 years. “The owners of this property don’t live here,” reads Esme Boggart’s campaign literature. “They don’t know our community.”

Esme Boggart, in contrast, stands for “people who belong to a landscape, but don’t own an inch of it”. The people behind the protest use her name instead of their own because they are afraid to lose their own homes. “We are sick,” they write, “of this neo-feudalism that governs our lives.” Folksy as it is, the collective is identifying a modern twist on an ancient and serious problem: though stereotyped as a world of affluent comfort, the British countryside is a place of profound inequality. As a new UnHerd polling map shows, forgotten provincial regions are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis equal to the inner cities, compounding an existing problem of rural poverty and working-class displacement. 

No-fault evictions are commonplace across the country — reports say they increased 76% in just three months last year — but there are no official statistics that break down how many take place in rural areas. If you speak to those who live in an Area of Natural Beauty, you’ll hear the same story again and again, of landlords evicting local people so they can make more money from their properties, often by turning them into holiday cottages. In some places in Wales, the Highlands, Cornwall and the Lake District, one in four properties are Airbnbs. When you add second homes to that statistic, there are villages like Elterwater in Cumbria where 80% of houses are unavailable to live in. Inevitably, it is the lower classes who are pushed out.

For hundreds of years, if you worked in the countryside, you were usually given a “tied” house to live in. Villages used to have a house for the doctor, the teacher, the policeman, and so on. Foresters were provided with cottages in far-flung, newly-planted forests. Cotton mills, which were first built in the depths of the countryside so that they could take advantage of the waterfalls to power their factories, provided dorm-like accommodation for their workers (who were mainly orphans: children were cheaper to employ). Slate, coal, copper and tin mining all provided rows and rows of badly insulated houses.

Many of these traditional rural industries are gone, and most with good reason. There is no point romanticising them. The homes they provided were often cramped and sometimes isolated. And if you lost the job, you lost the house too. The words of a Scottish crofter, from 1883, are evidence of the impact this insecurity had: “I want the assurance that I will not be evicted for I cannot bear evidence to the distress of my people without bearing evidence to the oppression and high-handedness of the landlord and his factor.” His words eerily echo those of Esme Boggart, a reminder that the old ways are not the best.

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Why the North needs its Angel

By Dan Jackson

While the old schoolhouse might have been sold off, this ancient status quo still exists for farmers, who have lived in “tied” houses for centuries. If you rent the farm, usually a home will be provided too. Currently, around a third of England is farmed by tenant farmers. But having lived and worked on the land for decades, they often find themselves forced out of the landscapes they love. Christine, who lives on a tenant farm in Yorkshire, will have to leave her home when she and her husband can’t farm anymore. In preparation, they have bought a small house in the nearest market town. They would have preferred to stay in the countryside, but they simply can’t afford it.

And while people who have worked the land their whole lives are forced to move off it, people who work in cities are retiring to the countryside in droves. The Highlands and Islands Business Federation, for instance, is worried that some areas will simply become “glorified retirement communities”. If there are no children left to go to the local school, and no-one left to run the county show, put on the pantomime at Christmas or run the shop, these things cease to exist. Businesses are already shutting down because they can’t find enough local staff.

Some sectors still provide homes for workers — usually the ones that cater to outsiders. Big hotels need plenty of staff, and will provide rooms for bar managers, waitresses, chefs, and cleaners if necessary. Distilleries provide accommodation. The National Trust houses workers on some of its properties. But most restaurants and cafes do not, and slowly but surely, they are closing.

This is a sign that it’s not just the older generation, whose working days are done, being forced out of rural areas and into towns. Rachel grew up near Hawkshead, in the Lake District. When she first left home, she worked at a hotel in a neighbouring village. “Obviously I couldn’t afford to buy round Hawkshead,” she told me. Any houses that come on the market in the picturesque village get snapped up by people who can afford to pay sky-high prices. “The cheapest house was in Kendal,” about 20 miles away. But it was subject to a local occupancy clause, designed to keep houses in the hands of local people. It wasn’t very well designed: “They said I wasn’t local enough! My whole family is from either Kendal or Hawkshead area!” She wrote to the local councillor arguing her case, and was eventually allowed to buy a one-bedroom house in Kendal.

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By Jacob Furedi

Ten years later, Rachel was married and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband applied for another local occupancy house in the same area but were, again, told no. This time the reason for refusal was because they didn’t have children. “I was about to have a baby!” And her choices were limited. There is still no way she could afford to buy in the village where she grew up. Opportunities to rent long-term are rare.

“It’s not a housing crisis, it’s an affordability crisis,” says author Catrina Davies. In other words, it’s not about building more. A decade ago, when she was in her early thirties, she wanted to move back to Cornwall, which has the largest number of second homes in England. Catrina spent her childhood there, but the only place she could afford was a shed. “Houses have become a luxury item”; they are supposed to be homes. The shed is over 100 years old and she has no running water, but it is just that: a home.

Rural areas have benefitted from the wealth of those who don’t live there for decades, but now the balance has tipped. Locals are being squeezed out by those with more money than them, and communities are starting to vanish. The government is, slowly, doing something about it. As of April 2023, a holiday home must be rented out for a minimum of 70 days a year to qualify for business rates as opposed to council tax. In Wales, local authorities have already been given the power to increase council tax on second homes by 300%. And in Scotland, properties intended to be used as holiday rentals will have to apply for a licence from local authorities.

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What if King Charles were your landlord?

By Tanya Gold

In England, however, the crackdown is slower. In December last year, Cumbrian MP Tim Farron campaigned for more powers to restrict short-term lets. It was voted down by 321 votes to 172. It is worth noting, at this point, that MPs are three times as likely than the average citizen to own a second home.

With understandably limited faith in the authorities, communities are fighting back. There are now over 200 community-bought woodlands across the nation, for instance, used for a range of things, from forest schools to improving biodiversity. And collectives are buying land on which to build houses that can unequivocally belong to local people, locking in clauses to make sure they are never sold off as second homes. But many, like the anonymous campaigners behind Esme Boggart, are too afraid to directly challenge those with the power to evict them. As for the family in South Oxfordshire that the witch represents, they have been given another six months. What then, who knows.

It is true that one nationalist group, Patriotic Alternative, promoted the Knowsley protest, and politicians who resort to inflammatory language to distract from their own failings deserve to be called out. But can these angry demonstrations really be blamed on a few bad apples, agitated by politicians and a generalised culture of racism? Or should they be seen as the symptom of a much deeper malaise, which has its roots in the impact of immigration on British working-class communities?

Uneasiness over immigration in the UK has been simmering below the surface for some time. Over the past few years, much has been written about the way in which anti-immigration attitudes among the British softened significantly after the EU referendum, despite the number of immigrants remaining broadly unchanged between 2016 and 2019. This left some baffled: it was the opposite of what they might have expected following the victory of a campaign which had been variously described as fuelled by racism, fascism and xenophobia. But in fact, it simply revealed the liberal elites’ ignorance of the real dynamics driving the Brexit vote.

Of course, the reason many people voted for Brexit was to lower immigration. There were both cultural and economic factors affecting this, the result of the very high and sustained immigration which took place under the Blair, Brown, and Cameron governments. However, it was also about sending a message to the country’s political establishment: citizens had been signalling their desire for stricter border controls at every election, only to be ignored. In this sense, immigration became the main focus of Brexit’s promise of greater popular sovereignty; not because of xenophobia or racism, but because it was where the political void between rulers and ruled had crystallised. It was mainly about accountability and democracy, not race or hatred of foreigners (which explains why the Leave vote had strong support among ethnic minorities as well).

This is why attitudes to immigration relaxed after the referendum: Leavers felt that they now had greater control over immigration. Or so they thought: since Brexit, the Conservatives have ushered in a system that, if anything, is even more liberal than before. As the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory points out, while the new system is more restrictive for EU nationals, who previously enjoyed freedom of movement rights, for the rest of the world “the policy reflects a notable liberalisation”. And we are now beginning to see the effects of this.

According to Home Office figures, there were 2.6 million visas granted in the year ending September 2022. While this represents an 18% decrease compared with 2019, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022, far higher than the previous record of 330,000. Work-related visas in particular rose to almost 400,000 — 80% higher than before the pandemic in 2019, and the highest number of work visas issued in any 12-month period since the data series began in 2005. Meanwhile, as a result of Brexit, the source of immigration has also begun to change in profound ways: net EU immigration has fallen steadily since 2016, while non-EU immigration has increased — mainly from countries such as India (worker visas are up 90%), the Philippines (93%), Nigeria (399%) and Zimbabwe (1,500%). This means that immigration is becoming more culturally, ethnically and religiously distinctive.

On top of this, we have also witnessed a significant increase in the number of migrants and asylum-seekers entering the country illegally. More than 2,300 migrants have crossed the Channel on small boats so far this year, according to official figures; over 1,000 migrants arrived in the first two weeks of February alone. Overall, in 2022, a record 45,728 people arrived in the UK, almost 90% of whom were adult men — an astonishing 2,000% increase over pre-pandemic levels.

And crucially, a disproportionate number of asylum seekers are being housed in some of the poorest areas of the country, with local councils and residents having no say in the matter. North East and Red Wall areas are housing respectively 13 and 7 times as many asylum seekers as South East England. Knowsley itself is the second most deprived borough in England, suffering severe problems of unemployment, ill health and child poverty. All this is driving a renewed stiffening in attitudes towards immigration compared with the past few years.

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Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

By Jacob Furedi

So, perhaps it’s unsurprising that, according to the UnHerd Britain data released today, a majority of Britons think immigration is too high, with 34% strongly agreeing with the statement. Interestingly, the results are more or less the same across all socioeconomic groups, though as one might expect, opposition to immigration is particularly high in the country’s poorer areas: Midlands, Yorkshire and North East England.

What does this tell us about Britain? What is driving this change in attitudes to immigration? Are we to believe that 34% of the country is racist? There is very little evidence to support the claim that engrained xenophobia is to blame. Rather, the country has become incredibly more tolerant and less racist over the past decades. If one thing is clear, it’s that racism is definitely not on the rise. A 2019 EU survey ranked the UK as the least racist in the 12 Western European countries surveyed, while a recent poll showed that a majority of Britons believe that immigrants have had a positive effect in several areas, such as the NHS, the arts, and start-ups. This highlights the fact that one can be opposed to high immigration levels, while at the same time being positively predisposed towards immigrants. Hence past surveys have shown it isn’t just the majority of the white working class that wants to see immigration levels reduced, but the majority of respondents of non-white ethnicity (whether UK-born or not) as well.

Aside from the resentment over the clear betrayal of the Brexit mandate, could there be legitimate concerns about the impact of the recent wave of immigration, especially of the illegal kind, on local communities? More often than not, those who expose themselves to great personal risk to enter the country illegally are fleeing from horrendous situations: war, poverty and persecution. But this also means they are more likely to come from disproportionately lawless societies. It is not unreasonable, then, for people to be concerned by the sudden arrival into their communities of undocumented young males they know little about.

It is well-known, for example, that Albanian gangs are involved in very serious organised criminality in the UK, be it drug smuggling, human trafficking, or prostitution — and Albanians made up almost half of all boat arrivals in 2022. Then there’s the issue of the potential abuse of women: the protests in Knowsley, for instance, were sparked by a video circulated on social media appearing to show a young refugee aggressively propositioning a local 15-year-old girl for sex. We don’t yet know the veracity of the footage, but we do know that government and social services have historically ignored the abuse of thousands of white working-class girls by grooming gangs out of a fear of appearing racist. Justified or not, it’s not difficult to see why locals would express concern at the hint of any predatory behaviour going unchecked.

The usual progressive response is that much of the working-class resentment against immigration has to do with government mismanagement, with the growing material and existential precariousness of the working class, and with the erosion of communities caused by decades of neoliberal policies. This is certainly true. However, in this context of top-down class warfare, immigration, though not the main cause of the impoverishment and marginalisation of native workers, can easily become an exacerbating factor.

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The rise of Ireland's anti-migrant protests

By Peter Ryan

Not only is immigration used to drive down wages but, in a context of welfare retrenchment and austerity, it can cause increased competition over scarce and declining public resources and infrastructure. This is why, historically, trade unions and the Labour Party were generally anti-immigration. It also explains why, even among those favouring lower immigration overall, 76% favour more high-skilled immigration — which would make no sense if people were primarily concerned about stopping immigration altogether.

That said, opposition to immigration isn’t all about economics. It also has to do with the fact that the majority of voters, unlike the globe-trotting cosmopolitan elites, continue to view themselves as national citizens who want to live in a community with some sense of a shared collective identity. Indeed, several studies show that, for most people, national identity remains the strongest form of collective identity around the world. A country’s national identity may be, to a large extent, an “imaginary” construct. It may also be hard to pin down, encompassing customs, culture, history, language, religion and social mores. But it exists and has very “real” effects, creating common bonds among members of — and giving rise to — a territorially defined community.

To deny the existence of the latter is, in effect, to deny the existence of society itself. All that’s left is a bunch of individuals who happen to share a piece of land. Indeed, democracy, as the term implies, presupposes the existence of an underlying demos. The latter is also crucial in generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to sustain the welfare state. Leftists used to understand this. As the Marxist scholar Paul Hirst wrote in 2005: “Unregulated migration would undermine both citizenship and welfare rights. This would threaten democracy, which depends on the notion of a national community”. Contemporary progressives, on the other hand, like to vilify the nation-state as intrinsically fascistic. But modern concepts of national identity are still incredibly “progressive”, in the traditional sense of the word, based as they are on transcending individual particularities — sex, race, biology, religion — to create cultural-political identities rooted in participation, equality, citizenship and representation. Yet, crucially, this isn’t open-ended: a society is by definition demarcated by borders and a relatively stable membership. While national identity is constantly evolving, the pace of that change is everything.

And here we get to the crux of the matter: anxiety over immigration is not primarily driven by racism or xenophobia, or even by an opposition to immigration per se, but by a desire to have a say over the form, pace and scale of immigration. This is why studies have shown that the strongest Leave-voting areas had experienced the fastest increases in immigration, not the highest absolute numbers of arrivals. When the national community perceives the pace of change to be too fast, it naturally, instinctively reacts against the breakdown of social cohesion.

This is not an argument against immigration or the evolution of a country’s national identity. It is an argument for respecting a national community’s right to have a say in the pace and form that such evolution takes. We have an obligation to try to welcome as many people as possible who are escaping hellish situations — many of which happen to be caused by Western interventions. But it’s ultimately up to the people who live in the receiving country to decide how this should happen. It’s called democracy, and our politicians, as the weekend’s protests demonstrated, disregard it at their own peril.

But who? There’s evidence that Ruby was a low-level sidekick of the Mafia, so maybe it was the Mafia who shot Kennedy. But why kill Oswald as well? It’s here that my devilishly ingenious theory comes in. There’s no real evidence that the Mob killed the President, but they might have been incensed that someone else had. Not because they had any love for their leader, but because they had intended to assassinate him themselves. After all, they threatened the lives of both Kennedy brothers several times. Before they could get round to it, however, a private entrepreneur called Oswald stepped in and did it instead. By having Oswald bumped off by a known associate of theirs, the Mafia made it look as though Oswald, had he lived, could have revealed their guilt. My theory, then, is that the Mob bumped Oswald off because they didn’t kill Kennedy. They just wanted people to think they had.

Is this true? Probably not. When it comes to the death of JFK, the hardest question is who didn’t do it. There’s a comically long list of possible candidates: Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s driver or his bodyguard, Right-wing Cubans, the Teamsters Union, perhaps (who knows?) a 21-year-old Harrison Ford. Members of QAnon probably believe they were all in it together. As with equality and diversity programmes, genuine conspiracies must leave nobody out.

One shouldn’t be too cynical about conspiracies. After all, as new UnHerd polling has shown, more people in Britain are conspiratorially-minded than aren’t. But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism.

Besides, the more individuals are in the know, the more fragile a conspiracy becomes. One reason why the US moon-landing wasn’t a put-up job is that it would have involved too many people, any one of whom could have blown the gaff. And if the truth (as conspirators see it) had got out, the United States would have suffered the most calamitous loss of credibility in its history. Its reputation would have been trashed beyond repair. Fear of being discovered is a primary reason why some events can’t be faked, just as one reason why most politicians try not to lie is not because they are more angelic beings than the rest of us, but because the consequences of being found out mean that it just isn’t worth it.

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Harry and Meghan's Montecito prison

By Terry Eagleton

If great masses of people maintain a certain belief over long periods of time, one can be fairly sure that there is something in it. This doesn’t mean that the belief in question is true, but it’s unlikely to be complete nonsense either. Myths tend to have a core of truth. For many centuries, everybody thought that the Sun moved around the Earth, which isn’t true; but it was a rational belief all the same, because the evidence seemed to support it. Much the same goes for paranoia. It isn’t true that creatures from Saturn have placed a secret device in your skull to beam your every thought to a control centre in the Glastonbury Tor, but it’s true that a mighty amount of surveillance goes on, much of it secret. Or to put the point more pithily, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. No civilisation in history has ever spied on itself so relentlessly.

Those who genuinely go off the deep end are those who imagine that we live our lives in private. The idea that what we do is covertly directed by a cabal of obscenely wealthy paedophiles is a delusion — but if you drop the “covertly” and “paedophiles”, it us not far from the truth. We are indeed governed by an elite, but there’s nothing particularly secretive about it. You can see them strolling around Davos or read about them in the newspapers. The phrase “Masters of the Universe” isn’t just a piece of flashy science fiction. There is a sovereign superpower whose presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of the globe, but its name is capital, not the Knights Templar. Like all power, what it needs to sustain itself is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just what is conveyed in seminars, but priceless stuff which people are prepared to kill for.

Conspiracy theorists are convinced that everything hangs together, which is indeed a symptom of paranoia. For the paranoid, nothing happens by chance. Even a gust of wind is secretly intended. The fact that the Prime Minister has five letters in both his first name and surname must surely be trying to tell us something. Freud thought that the nearest thing to paranoia was philosophy, because philosophers (he was thinking of the Hegelian type) also see connections between apparently unrelated items. There must be some way in which my left foot and the Vatican are secretly interrelated.

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Once again, this isn’t complete nonsense. Even the most trivial of our actions send ripple effects through the thick mesh of social existence, breeding unexpected consequences in unpredictable places. None of our acts is purely our own. Reading this essay may cause you to tear great clumps of hair from your head, thus making you look too frightful to attend the dinner this evening at which you would have been offered the Governorship of the Bank of England. And don’t just blame me: blame the editors, sub-editors, technical assistants and so on. We all had a hand in tearing your hair out. It was a conspiracy, but not a conscious one.

These ripple effects are random. None of them needed to happen, or to happen in exactly the way they did. And this is where they differ from conspiracies. For the conspiratorial mind, nothing whatsoever is random, any more than it is for the paranoid. This is an alarming thought in one sense but a consoling one in another. A world of chance and contingency is a bewildering one, upending our schemes and thwarting our purposes. Far better to imagine that there’s a plot to it all, in both senses of the word, than accept the fact that a lot of things just happen, without any particular rhyme or reason, and that this is part of the price we pay for freedom. This was presumably what Harold Macmillan had in mind when he remarked to a reporter that the hardest thing about trying to run the country was “events, dear boy, events”.

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The workers were never ignorant

By Terry Eagleton

Ironically, however, American conspiracy theorists are lovers of freedom. “Liberty or death!” ranks among their slogans, and by refusing to wear masks during the Covid pandemic some of them ended up with both. Among other things, conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom — from living in the precarious, unpredictable world of late modernity. They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history. Those who spin these yarns are for the most part on the wrong side of that history — those washed up by so-called modernisation, men and women who need someone to blame for their lousy living conditions but who point an accusing finger at fantasises of their own creation.

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent. Because these myths spring from insecurity, which in turn breeds hatred, the grand narrative in question is almost always a sinister one. Anyone with an eye to how the world is going will have no quarrel with that, even if they don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi is a North Korean spy. They will have no quarrel either with the central assumption of the QAnonites and their ilk — that behind the surfaces of social life there lurks some exceedingly nasty realities, and that the official story is rarely the whole truth of the matter. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The good news is that no conspiracy can be entirely successful, since if it were we wouldn’t know about it.

Wasn’t it strange, he suggested, that after the CIA had failed for years to find Osama bin Laden, somehow a regular camera crew had found his secret hideout and conducted an interview? Bin Laden was a US intelligence asset, Cooper asserted, and something was now afoot. “I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” he declared.

This attack, Cooper asserted, would be blamed on bin Laden. Two and a half months later, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. On that day, Cooper made a number of further predictions: the US would respond with bombs, somewhere or other; and shortly after that, new laws would impose draconian restrictions on the rights of American citizens.

Cooper later made one further forecast: “They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. Less than two months later, it happened. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it really was just a case of a far-Right nutjob resisting arrest for fraud. Cooper was certainly eccentric: among many other things, his 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse — reportedly one of the most shoplifted titles in America, as well as one of the most commonly read in prison — claimed JFK was assassinated to prevent a secret pact with space aliens.

But whether or not his death really was a political assassination, the paranoid, colourful mindset inaugurated by his book is no longer unusual. In the course of what Venkatesh Rao calls “The Great Weirding”, the triumph of digital over print media has brought a sense of reality coming somehow unstuck. In its wake, conspiracy discourse has become so common it barely registers as such. Recent headlines on train derailments in Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina, for example, swiftly coalesced online with the Chinese spy balloon and three other mysterious “lying objects” shot down recently to become a lively new thread in the ever-evolving conspiracy narrative.

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The truth about conspiracy Britain

By Freddie Sayers

And this mindset isn’t confined to America: according to UnHerd Britain polling this week, 38% of Britons agree that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”. This rising tide of feral hermeneutics has prompted a great deal of anxious commentary in recent years, as well as a growing corpus of (often themselves highly politicised) censorship regimes and self-appointed organisations dedicated to “fighting disinformation”. But it is a mistake to imagine that myth-making can be always “debunked”, no matter how superficially absurd its claims. And pointing out that conspiracy stories aren’t literally true misses the important sense in which, very often, they are.

I get most of my updates on the conspiracy front from my hairdresser, who is always abreast of the latest twists, from Pizzagate to tortured children in tunnels under Central Park to Joe Biden being a deepfake (you have to look at his ears, apparently). I look forward to our appointments at least as much for her chat as for her skill in civilising my hair. But it would be a gross insult to this intelligent, practical woman to suggest she uncritically views these stories as factually accurate. Rather, they exist in a space that’s neither true nor false, but closer to a mode of thinking that has fallen somewhat out of fashion: allegory.

Today, tales of gods, monsters, and heroism are largely treated as nonsense for kids, or at best confined to the deprecated category of “fantasy fiction”. But prior to the modern world, stories that had both a literal meaning and a secondary one as an extended metaphor — allegories — were a high-status literary form. So much so, in fact, that the cosmos was understood as a kind of allegory, full of secondary meanings written by God.

And you can view conspiracy theories as a kind of crowdsourced allegory: pooled observations about the world, conveyed in story form. This is perhaps easier to see with a bit of historical distance, via an older form of such story: fairy tales. The Grimms’ stories, for example, emerged out of a folk culture profoundly scarred by the Thirty Years’ War: a 17th-century conflict that turned into three hellish decades of rapine, starvation and bloodshed for the peasantry of Central Europe.

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In this context, Hansel and Gretel makes perfect sense as an only lightly embellished account of the dangers faced by orphaned or abandoned children, in a time of brutal scarcity. It’s probably not true that there was ever a witch with a gingerbread house; but there might well have been cannibalism. (There was in the Russian famine of 1921.)

Thus, fairy tales may be directionally true — even if not literally so. And the same goes for conspiracies as well. It’s probably not true that there are mutilated children and dead babies in tunnels under Central Park, kept so their organs can be harvested by Satanists. The following things, however, are true: firstly, that the Satanic Temple wants to secure abortion rights in America. Secondly, that foetus tissue has been used in medical experimentation, drug development and sometimes transplantation. And thirdly, that many American children have had their bodies amputated based on a view of gender theory whose modern proponents lean ever more enthusiastically into Satanic associations and iconography.

In sum, then: it’s not literally true that there’s a secret conspiracy of child-mutilating Satanists threatening the world. But it’s less that this has no relation at all to reality, than that it represents an allegorical, highly coloured folk-interpretation of data points that — while perhaps unconnected — are real. In this sense, we can view conspiracies as a shout of defiance against a defining characteristic of the “educated” elite worldview: its blanket prohibition on everyday pattern recognition. You don’t have to be well-educated to notice normative patterns in everyday life, and sometimes larger trends too; in fact education is a positive obstacle to noticing — for in the liberal world typically reinforced by university education, normative patterns are dismissed as “stereotypes”. The proper attitude to such stereotypes is firstly to insist that they’re socially imposed and harmful, and, secondly, that they should be eliminated.

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By Harry Shukman

And yet, “stereotype accuracy” is one of the most replicable effects in social science. In other words: by and large, at the small scale, folk pattern recognition is on point. And it’s on point, too, in many allegorical narratives that get dismissed as “conspiracy theories”. For example, it’s probably not literally true that the world is controlled by a shadowy elite. But it’s not directionally wide of the mark to notice that the same set of policies keep reappearing, no matter what people vote for. To take one recent example, Britain voted to leave the EU because of widespread objections to the downward pressure exerted by low-skilled migration on domestic wages. But after a brief blip in which migration really did go down and low-skilled wages went up, last year net migration was higher than ever. No one can point to any single factor that seems to have caused it; it’s just somehow, inexplicably gone on happening. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’m joking, of course. But the “Great Reset” isn’t a paranoid fantasy either: the WEF website devotes a whole section to it. Central Bank Digital Currencies really do grant governments vast new powers of surveillance and control. The vaccine passport infrastructure assembled during the pandemic really is being touted as a blueprint for future governance. The whole point of the Bilderberg Group is elite collusion, as it is with Davos. The WEF really is proud of having highly-placed members throughout world governments. Underage girls really were trafficked to Epstein Island to provide sexual services, and Epstein was linked to many famous individuals.

I sincerely doubt there are cabals of suit-wearing Dr Evil types, or lizards in human costume, setting out to enslave us all by genetically modifying us, tracking us with microchips, and imprisoning us under “climate lockdowns” to eat mealworm slurry, while distracting the restive masses with UFO stories. But there really are numerous government bodies keen to see advances in mRNA therapies, more centralised digital IDs, further emissions reductions through reduced travel monitored by surveillance and enforced by fines — not to mention top-down pressure to reduce global consumption of animal protein.

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There are (probably) no space aliens involved. Groups such as the WEF are probably not omniscient or omnipotent. But from a pattern-recognising perspective, this is secondary to the directionally accurate sense that the direction of travel is unnervingly post-democratic, in ways that have to do with digital technology, surveillance, biotech, and collusion between government and big business. If, where larger-scale political trends are concerned, this becomes a bit embellished, this isn’t so different from adding a gingerbread house to a plausible 17th-century story of abandoned children narrowly escaping death at the hands of a cannibalistic adult stranger, during a period of widespread famine.

This in turn points to why conspiracies really thrive. It’s not because people are stupid, or gullible, but because allegory is an efficient shorthand for disturbing but indisputably real patterns. For if these patterns form a single narrative, we can go on believing everything could still be induced to make sense; that there actually is someone in charge, even if their plans are nefarious.

And ultimately, this is at least slightly less disturbing than the prospect that the increasingly baroque chaos of 21st-century politics is just happening, without anyone at the helm. For if no one is causing it, that means no one can stop it either. And that is truly frightening.

It is a useful phrase to measure core beliefs because it takes us beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, with all their distracting details and absurdity, to the underlying intuition that fuels them. In this world view, the “elites” are faraway and malevolent, exercising control in self-serving ways; meanwhile, democratic politics and the mainstream media are regarded as little more than distractions, likely in the service of powerful secret masters.

Whatever people believe about specific conspiracies — and this week offered no shortage of them, from UFOs over North America to hushed-up explosions in Ohio — our findings reveal how widespread the underlying mindset is that propels them. Thanks to our partner Focaldata and a statistical process called MRP, we can now see which constituencies are the most and least conspiratorial in the country. The results shed new light on how these voters should be viewed by the main political parties.

First, it is clear that conspiratorial thinking is not a “Right-wing” phenomenon. Voters who believe in a controlling secretive elite are much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and much more likely to live in a safe Labour constituency. By this measure, the 10 most conspiratorial constituencies in the country are all safe Labour seats, whereas the 10 least conspiratorial constituencies are all Tory (except Chesham and Amersham, which switched to Lib Dem in the 2021 by-election).

As the above table shows, the “most conspiratorial” list is made up of poor and highly diverse inner-city constituencies, which may explain why people come to feel so alienated and suspicious. In these places, a conspiratorial world view is the norm — in Birmingham Ladywood, for example, only 14% of people disagree with the statement. Meanwhile, in the rolling Chiltern hills of Chesham and Amersham and the affluent enclaves of Henley and Mole Valley, where the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side, few are concerned. It is a useful reminder to politicians of all parties that, while they may find conspiratorial voters troublesome, many come from the most disadvantaged communities.

Second, the results should encourage new anti-establishment parties on both the Left and Right. Thanks to our unusually large sample size of more than 10,000 respondents, we were able to measure the attitudes of voters who chose even the smallest parties in 2019 with a high degree of confidence. More than any of the mainstream parties, including Labour, the voters most prone to a conspiratorial outlook come from the anti-establishment parties: 54% of Brexit Party voters agree with the statement, alongside 45% of Plaid Cymru voters and 43% of SNP voters. So, while the Brexit binary pushed a larger proportion of voters towards the two main parties in 2019, it seems there are millions of voters who remain potentially open to new populist appeals.

There is a specific lesson here for the Labour Party. When I first tested this phrase at YouGov during the Labour leadership election of 2015, the belief that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” was revealed to be a defining characteristic of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: 28% of Corbyn’s backers strongly agreed with it, compared to 16% of Yvette Cooper’s and just 7% of Liz Kendall’s. Today, 42% of Labour voters agree with it, of whom 18% strongly agree. Antisemitism may have finally been dealt with in the Labour Party, but the mindset that drove it has not disappeared.

This suggests that, rather than Brexit or the election of Trump, the shock outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election was the first real marker of the new era of low-trust and high-volatility politics; and the best way to understand it is by looking at the general election that took place immediately before. Today, it seems almost comic to recall, in the context of the eye-watering sums borrowed by successive Conservative governments, that the 2015 election was dominated by technical discussions of exactly what percentage point of austerity was appropriate to cut the deficit. Tory strategist Lynton Crosby calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that if nothing more interesting were discussed, the Tories would win by default. It was a cynical way to treat an electorate, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, meanwhile, frightened of seeming weak on economics, committed a Labour government to “austerity-lite”.

Come the election, the differences between the main parties were marginal; voters sensed a stitch-up in which the Tories and Labour had colluded to starve them of a more meaningful choice. It is hard to say they were wrong: 2015 saw the UK’s highest ever immigration numbers, for example, but this topic was hardly mentioned in the campaign. A rejection of this non-choice sowed the seeds not only for Corbyn’s election but for the Brexit result the following year.

The story of what happened in the years since 2016 is well-known. First came the attempts to frustrate the Brexit vote, which confirmed voters’ worst suspicions about cross-party collusion and elite disregard for the democratic process. And then came the rolling Covid lockdowns, which in turn radicalised a whole new constituency. There has perhaps never been a policy so life-altering and so little-debated, with a cross-party consensus parroted throughout much of the media. In those dystopian months and years, millions of people lost trust in authorities and turned to alternative explanations. These were not Right-wing activists or spotty teenagers in basements: they were mothers, grandparents and people who had never before been political. It’s hardly surprising that Google recorded the all-time high of searches for “conspiracy theory” in March 2020.

The pattern, from the 2015 election through to the pandemic, is that whenever views are suppressed, distrust and alienation follow. It is when the “Overton Window” is too narrow, not too wide, that politics feels fake and conspiracies abound. The distrust that now cuts across society is not the fault of a few small-time cranks and bad-faith opportunists — it is overwhelmingly the creation of elites who consistently tried to deny the electorate real choices.

Fast forward to the past few months, with the ejection of Liz Truss as prime minister and the rehabilitation of pre-2015 figures such as Jeremy Hunt, and many will be hoping that the era of political turbulence is finally coming to an end. It certainly feels it; for the first time since 2015, there are two technocrats at the helm of Britain’s major political parties. Centrists in both parties are hoping that as Corbynism and Brexit recede into history, the “grown-ups” will be back in charge.

But today’s UnHerd Britain data suggests that, beneath the surface, voter distrust and suspicion are more present than ever; and that the currents that propelled both Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit still run right through Labour’s heartlands. If the 2024 election is anything like 2015 — with the mainstream parties becoming harder and harder to tell apart — it could be the beginning of a whole new wave of democratic revolts.

Perhaps puzzlingly, this is despite the fact that, faced with practical questions about women’s spaces and women’s sports, there seems to be significant agreement that trans women should keep out of both. Had the latter results been the only ones revealed today, they surely would have suggested that, when push comes to shove, most people do not believe that trans women are women. For the alternative doesn’t add up: large sections of the British public believe there is a kind of anomalously shaped, baritone-voiced woman out there who also, for some reason, shouldn’t be allowed in a female changing room or on the sports field with other women.

A similar impression of confusion in the public mind emerges when the answers to two further poll questions are compared. A majority of respondents agreed that “people should be able to identify as being of a different gender to the one they had recorded at birth”. However, there was markedly less enthusiasm for making it easier to change “legal gender”. This too looks like a strange juxtaposition, at least at first.

In this case, though, the disparity is presumably explained by the fact that “to identify as being of a different gender” in the first question has been interpreted by respondents as nothing much more meaningful than donning fancy dress. To “identify” here mainly refers to men saying that they feel like women, and women saying that they feel like men (or at least, don’t feel like women) — perhaps with some non-conforming clothing thrown in for good measure. It would be an illiberal state indeed that tried to outlaw any of this, and at odds with our generally tolerant national character to try. Still, for poll respondents, rightly allowing people to express themselves freely doesn’t seem to have entailed that we should start handing out gender recognition certificates on the strength of it.

Yet the “trans women are women” answer remains an intriguing one. To my mind, the fact that 34% neither agree nor disagree is telling. And I don’t blame people for feeling befuddled. Pollsters inherit the limitations of dominant public ways of framing particular issues — and there is no more confusing framing than “trans women are women”. For a start, there’s the fact that the phrase functions like a mantra. As transactivists who frequently deploy the phrase no doubt realise, the repetition of the word “women” produces a slightly hypnotic effect. After all, it looks tautological — a bit like asking whether sausage dogs are dogs, or armchairs are chairs.

More fundamentally, there’s a widespread lack of clarity about who counts as a “trans woman” — a characteristic starkly exhibited in recent days by Scotland’s First Transactivist, Nicola Sturgeon. Is a trans woman someone who has had surgery to remove penis and testicles, and had a simulacrum of a vagina put there instead? Does being a trans woman require you to have taken artificial oestrogen for years, or to have had your natal testosterone suppressed? Do you have to own a gender recognition certificate?

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Or does the category include men who don’t have any special legal status, and who only cross-dress, and perhaps don’t even bother doing that? Does it include convicted rapists who suddenly find a feeling of womanhood welling up within their bosoms on the way to a sentencing hearing? The more confusion there is about who counts as a trans woman, the less likely it is that people will be able to answer whether a trans woman is a woman or not with any certainty.

Whatever the source of the public’s confusion, it’s a testament to the dogged persistence of the LGBT+ lobbying sector that there is meaningful disagreement about the matter at all. For however you look at the polling, it still suggests that a significant proportion of the general population now think adult human males can change their sex by some kind of behavioural process — whether that’s a medical, legal, or merely sartorial one, or even just muttering “I’m a woman now” to your lawyer as the prospect of a male prison looms.

This bizarre epistemic situation did not arise on its own. Lamentable as the national standard of secondary school biology probably is, it still seems unlikely that many of us have mixed up human beings with sequential hermaphrodites. Clownfish, for instance, really can change their sex, going from the production of eggs to sperm over the course of a single lifetime. But — not to put too fine a point on it — humans aren’t fish.

And nor, I think, should we pay any attention to academics coughing and spluttering about the supposedly well-understood distinction between “sex” and “gender”.  According to some of them, when someone says that a trans woman is a woman, they are not talking about adult human females at all. Rather, the speaker has accurately grasped something much more intellectually sophisticated — that womanhood is a “gender”, which some adult human males can come to possess, and some adult human females can shed.

The makers of this point conveniently ignore the fact that “gender” is used in multiple ambiguous ways these days, including as a polite synonym for biological sex, and alternatively as a name for a set of social stereotypes for femininity and masculinity. If you ask these same academics if they mean that womanhood is a matter of liking pink glittery things and tottering about on high heels, they get quite cross. And if you ask them to further explain what they think womanhood is then, if not conforming to sexist stereotypes, they may try to get you fired from your job. Either way, the idea that the general public is motivated by a deep comprehension of gender studies arcana seems to me somewhat optimistic.

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So really, the victory here — if it can be called that — belongs almost entirely to organisations such as Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, All About Trans, the Scottish Equality Network, and associated pals in the rainbow-hued phalanx. You really do have to hand it to them. Quite astonishingly, they have turned what used to be a boringly factual matter about whether Xs were Ys into a quasi-religious question revealing the respondent’s personal values. And at least to some extent, it has clearly worked.

Collaborating together over a decade, these organisations have poured resources — donated to them by well-meaning foundations, generous lottery distributors, and successive Tory governments — into guilt-tripping much of the nation into half-believing something nonsensical. A quick search of charity databases over the last decade shows tens of millions of pounds specially dedicated to trans projects — including many for “trans kids”. Such projects tend to heartrendingly represent trans people as a uniquely martyred class, especially vulnerable to threat and so in need of various kinds of support, resources, and encouragement to compensate. First among concessions demanded on their behalf has been that personal fictions of sex-change be validated by the world. It’s been presented as the very least we could do.

For years then, under the guise of equality, lobbyists have been spinning this line in UK workplaces, youth groups, schools, universities, hospitals, media outlets, government departments, police forces, local councils, and so on — and yes, in prison services too. They have relentlessly insisted that the question “are trans women, women?” is a test of individual character rather than a basic request for information. According to their imposed logic, “strongly agree” correlates with “minimally compassionate”, and “strongly disagree” correlates with “genocidal”. It’s as if the public has been sold a subliminal version of the Peter Pan story: say you believe that fairies exist, and you can save Tinkerbell from dying.

Meanwhile, for most for this same period, the British media has failed in its basic duty to investigate LGBT+ propaganda properly, much of the time simply passing it along to readers unexpurgated, as if doing PR. Even now, if your main news source is The Guardian or the BBC you will be lucky to have come across such complicating facts as, say, that around 60% of trans women in UK prisons are sex offenders; or that the starkly rising rates of rape among “women” may not be what they seem; or that murder rates of trans people in the UK are gratifyingly extremely low, and for the last few years non-existent. The story of the martyred UK trans woman continues to flourish, as does the moral pressure to try to keep her alive by saying the right words. Small wonder, then, that people still seem confused.

Depressing as this might appear, perhaps we shouldn’t despair. Poll results from Scotland in particular suggest that, however vague people seem to be about theoretical questions, when confronted by the practical consequences of treating a trans woman as a woman, thoughts get suddenly and quickly clarified. With the debacle of the Scottish Prison Service’s putting male sex offenders in the female estate perhaps freshly in mind, nine out of  the ten constituencies most strongly opposed to allowing trans women in women’s spaces were Scottish. And this doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

Relatedly, perhaps we should also consider that what people sometimes say might not actually be that good an indication of what they really believe. Many philosophers think that the content of a person’s beliefs should not be identified only in terms of individual things he says. Rather, his beliefs should be gauged in relation to how his statements more generally fit together with his behaviour and other expressed thoughts (or do not). For instance, someone who says she believes that the sky is falling in, but who doesn’t duck or otherwise mention it in other relevant contexts, is perhaps not being entirely reliable.

Equally, someone who in one context seems tempted by the thought that trans women are women, but who in another is clear that they don’t belong in women’s spaces or sports, perhaps doesn’t really believe that trans women are really women in the first place, no matter what she says directly on the matter. In that case, what the polling from Scotland may be telling us — at least, reading between the lines — is that for many north of the border, trans women are in fact men. When confronted with the evidence of eyes and ears, the decade-long guilt-trip is apparently running out of steam.

The results have been analysed by FocalData to produce MRP estimates for each constituency.

For each issue, the most “trans-sceptical” constituencies in Britain are found in Scotland. In aggregate, Scottish people are also more trans-sceptical than English people, meaning that a higher proportion of them disagree and disagree strongly with the statements we put in front of them.

This result confounds political cliches about the new gender ideology being synonymous with “progressive” politics, given that Scottish people in aggregate self-describe as more Left-wing than the English, and are led by a leading proponent of the ideology, Nicola Sturgeon. It provides a glimpse of what may happen in other nations when the debate moves from a theoretical side-issue to a mainstream political argument with real-world consequences.

The first thing confirmed by the data is that there is a bedrock of goodwill and understanding towards transpeople. Asked whether “people should be able to identify as being of a different gender from the one they had recorded at birth”, 52% of British voters agree and only 24% disagree. Every single constituency in Britain agrees with the statement. Even voters aged 65+ tend to agree, as well as Conservative Party and Brexit Party voters.

When, in a separate poll for UnHerd Britain, respondents were presented with the more philosophical claim that “transwomen are women”, it resulted in an unusually high degree of confusion: 33% agreed, 33% disagreed and 34% were unsure. And when asked if they agreed with the statement that “it should be made easier for transgender people to change their legal gender”, voters are also undecided. Overall, 37% agree, 33% disagree, and 30% don’t know.

The map of constituencies across the country on this last question reveals a broad rural-urban divide, with urban areas, along with historically liberal rural areas such as the South West of England, agreeing with the statement. More than any other demographic factor it is age that drives opinion on this issue, with 50% of 18-24-year-olds agreeing compared to only 28% of those aged 65 or older.

Once you start asking about specific policies and impacts, the results move in a decidedly more sceptical direction. Asked whether “transgender women should be allowed to use spaces reserved for women, such as women’s toilets or changing rooms”, 33% agree and 42% disagree. Most of the 53 constituencies that support the idea contain city centres and student towns, while all but one of the top 10 most opposed constituencies are in Scotland.

Whereas taken as a whole population, Scotland is only slightly more trans-sceptical than England and Wales (31% of Scottish people strongly disagree with the proposition about women-only spaces, compared with 28% in Wales and 27% in England), those areas in strongest disagreement are almost all in Scotland. In total, 45% of Scottish voters oppose the idea compared with 32% who support it. The result in Scotland underscores the political risk to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of her Gender Recognition Bill.

Most decisively, on the question of whether “transgender women should be allowed to take part in women’s sporting events”, voters have come to a settled view. Fully 57% of people disagree, with only 22% agreeing. There is only one constituency in Britain which is estimated to agree with the proposition (Manchester Central) and one that is equally split (Liverpool Riverside). Both are student constituencies. Every other constituency tends to oppose the idea, including all Scottish constituencies.

Taken as a whole, there seems to be a majority of voters coming to a nuanced position on this issue: supportive of people who wish to identify as a different gender, but sharply defensive of women-only spaces and sports. And on the evidence of Scotland, the more they are exposed to the arguments the clearer that view becomes.

Just kidding. What we French are mostly up to these days — when we’ve managed to jam ourselves onto a Métro train that’s neither on strike nor been literally de-platformed by the hapless Paris Region President Valérie Pécresse’s recent cuts (or a bus replacing those provincial lines SNCF finds too expensive to run) — is bask in unholy glee over Bregret. “C’est la Gueule de bois!” (It’s the worst hangover!), the headlines popped after the latest UnHerd polling showed that more than half of Britons felt Brexit was a mistake. “L’Anniversaire morose” (Gloomy Brexitversary), they went; “Étrange Bregret” (That strange regret); “Après le Brexit, le Bregret” (After Brexit, Bregret — an elegant riff on the Comtesse de Ségur classic books). On and on and on.

For the past seven years, I have been trying not so much to defend the Brexit vote, which I’ve always thought is a bit of an own goal, as to explain the issues of sovereignty involved. This has always gone down like un ballon en plomb here: after something like 50 of those debates, I am still considered a rabid Brexiteer, because Brexit, obviously, is such a mad decision in French eyes that even trying to explain it means you’ve gulped down the Kool Aid and begged for seconds.

Our own ambassador during the Brexit campaign, Sylvie Bermann, wrote a rather undiplomatic book about it called “Goodbye Britannia”, which was amusingly translated into English as “Au Revoir Britannia”. What her book mostly showed was that even when she invited the likes of Boris and the Spectator staff to Embassy dos, it was mostly as entertainment: her heart was firmly in N1 Remainer territory, the only ones quoted as “reliable sources”.

The National Assembly held dozens of committee meetings over Brexit, all coming to the same pre-ordained conclusion. The French Upper House, Le Sénat, sent half a dozen official missions to the strange land of the Britons, tasked to understand La Catastrophe du Brexit: their invariable, self-reinforcing verdicts over the years were variations on the “Tous Perdants” (Everyone’s a loser) theme. To give an idea of the method favoured by the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Senator Jean Bizet for his 111-page 2019 report, the first subheading of which was “Un bilan perdant-perdant” (A Lose-Lose Balance Sheet), the only British stakeholder he and his small group managed to interview during their fact-finding trip to London was Remainer activist Gina Miller. She is quoted at length in four different places of the final document. (“She is so sympathique, and it was very difficult to get to meet the others”, Bizet told me in the green room of the parliamentary channel talk show where we discussed his report.)

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Is this payback for decades of “Up Yours, Delors” and sundry other French-bashing British tabloid headlines over the years? Well, partly. But we’ve always been less conscious of Britain than you’ve been of France. Part of this is geography (ours is usually the country you first cross when venturing abroad), part of it is our universaliste doctrine as well as centuries of soft power when all of Europe wrote its correspondence and waged its diplomacy en Français. (Hence our fury when small dollops of English learned in our better schools are introduced into the public discourse. This has been one of Emmanuel Macron’s blunders: his fluent technocratese includes a lot of not-always-relevant English words that mostly underline his firm place on the bourgeois side of the class divide.)

There’s a lot of bad history between our two countries, which we enjoy bringing up at awkward moments. There’s also, genuinely, a canyon-deep gap when it comes to our respective notions of what sovereignty means. To us French, it refers to a barely veiled domination of French views, culture and influence far beyond our actual borders. There are French fingerprints all over the creation of the UN in 1945 (and before that the League of Nations in 1920); over the Bretton Woods System; the GATT and the WTO; and of course the Common Market. The official language of the international Postal Service is French. We have our own Commonwealth of sorts, l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, with 88 full or associate member-states: any country with a significant number of French speakers is eligible, and many of them, not always the same one, account for French-supporting votes at the UN. We fork out €11 billion for culture out of the French Budget (where the UK spends about €700 million). A great deal of this has international political outreach.

We call this le rayonnement de la France, a phrase better translated into German (Ausstrahlung). It implies that French ideas radiate their beneficent influence over the rest of the world — or at least congenial parts of it, such as the EU — like the sun (or possibly a made-in-France nuclear device). This links the Sun King, Louis XIV, whose magnificence led to emulative budgetary sinkholes from Potsdam to Petersburg and Caserta to Schönbrunn; to Napoleon, who gave the Code Civil to grateful places as far apart as Louisiana, Nuremberg and Phnom Penh; to Charles de Gaulle’s heroic 1940 stance, and deeply annoying Sixties non-aligned posturing. To this day, being deemed of having somehow contribué au rayonnement de la France will get you a Légion d’Honneur, Officer class.

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This also explains how Macron got away with all the EU flag-waving of his two victorious presidential campaigns. Heavily implied was “more leverage for France”, not “let’s be Europeans first and French second”. Whenever EU member states start pushing policies that Paris disapproves of, down comes the birch switch over their knuckles, sharply. In 2003, Jacques Chirac called Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria “infantile” and “reckless” because they had dared to co-sign a letter in support of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. “As new members of a club, they’ve lost a good occasion to shut up.” Last September, reports that Poland was placing a $14 billion order for planes, tanks and cannons from South Korea, not France, led to a flurry of recriminations. Worse, the Poles, like the Germans, buy American! “La Pologne se passe de la France!” the moan-a-thon went.

That is why Brexit has felt so personal to the French. Having finally been admitted into the European Communities (EC) in 1973, after years of Le Général’s veto, you ought to have been humbly grateful for our generous gift. In fact, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or thereabouts, you seemed to be. Italy was a cheerful shambles. Germany was rich and barely squeaked in dissent about anything. We liked having you around, except when Margaret Thatcher, an early pro-EC campaigner, started handbagging Chirac over the British Rebate. (François Mitterrand, the “cohabitation” president at the time, who’d been at the receiving end of many of Chirac’s political volleys, was delighted. He said of Thatcher that she had “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. Coming from him, it was a great compliment. During the Falklands War, he had quietly sent her the schematics of the Exocet missiles France had sold to Argentina, after all.)

So how dare you want to leave and destroy the self-image we’d constructed for Europe as, well, a largely French-inspired paradise? We saw this as a personal insult. We felt we were being jilted for aventurisme, lies, and deeply suspect financial practices.

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I happened to be in Brussels on the day of David Cameron’s fateful February 2016 visit, in which, depending on who tells the story, he never managed to get further concessions amending the Lisbon Treaty to prevent Brexit from European council president Donald Tusk (the British version), or “He got absolutely everything! It was highway robbery! And still the bloody Brits wanted more!”, which was the version several incandescent German and French bureaucrats told me moments after Cameron had boarded his flight back to RAF Northolt. The relationship never improved with time, with EU negotiator Michel Barnier’s office leaking at every stage how dissatisfied they were with the unpreparedness of the British negotiating party. It was obvious that the dispute was bitter, and touched on something quasi-religious.

And so the latest polls have, in one word, delighted the French. Try to recall the bitterest Remainer arguments: the “lies”, the “fake figures” on the flank of That Bus; Boris at his most shambolic; every fishing skiff in the Channel Island being threatened, in a kind of reverse Dunkirk operation, by flotillas of French marins-pêcheurs; the long and disheartening queues at Border Control in airports and Eurostar stations; the ridiculous postal delays and customs levies on mail between France and Britain. None of these are bugs; they’re all features in the Sacred Mission to make the British miserable over Brexit. (Macron’s previous PM Jean Castex said as much in an open letter to Ursula von der Leyen in October 2021: “It must be made obvious that it is more painful to leave the EU than to remain within it,” he concluded.)

Would France one day make a British return to Brussels easy? I fear our attitude is of that of a more inflexible religious order. Sinners must experience purgatory. It wouldn’t be fun, and it’s the best you can expect from us.

This was particularly true in Wales. Here, the Leave vote was strongest in post-industrial communities that successive governments in London and Cardiff had failed. These areas had benefited from EU investment, but it had done little to alleviate the corrosive social, cultural and economic effects of the decline of the coal industry.

In the 19th century, coal made modern Wales. It created a modern economy and a population boom, transforming rural communities into vibrant, industrial towns, each with a fierce sense of pride in themselves, their class and Wales itself. They were British places too: proud of their King, Country and Empire, proud that so many Royal Navy ships ran on Welsh coal.

In 1920, the number of miners in Wales stood at 290,000. Lured by cheaper production abroad, however, the United Kingdom they helped build turned its back on the Welsh coalfields, and decades of decline followed. The depression of the interwar years was devastating and led to mass unemployment and migration. The nationalisation of the industry in 1947 gave the miners some respect back, but it could not stop the decline of an industry gradually being replaced by oil. Between 1948 and 1970, the number of Welsh miners fell from 128,000 to 50,000. In 1974, a memo from Mid Glamorgan County Council to the Secretary of State for Wales said bluntly: “The Valleys are dying.”

As colliery after colliery closed, a slow-burning sense of anger started to grip communities that rightly felt forgotten and neglected. And as the industry that created them disappeared, many places worried they had no future. When Thatcherism arrived and finished the coal industry off, this anger intensified. Whereas previous governments had at least tried to manage the change, Thatcher seemed to relish hammering communities already on their knees.

The Brexit vote in post-industrial Wales owed much to this history. Voters there were disillusioned and looking for the better future so long denied to them. And that is what they were promised. They were sold a vision of a world where Wales and Britain had dignity and self-respect again, a world where there was a better economy and more money for the NHS. They were sold scapegoats for their ills: red tape and bureaucrats, immigrants and foreigners.

Three years on, the promises have not come true. Across the UK, the NHS has got worse, public services are on the brink, and inflation is fuelling a cost-of-living crisis. But in Wales, equally important — but less obvious — has been the way Brexit has distracted voters from the problems of devolved government. Particularly when it comes to discussions around the nation’s failing NHS, Welsh Labour must surely be thankful that voters’ eyes have focused on Westminster and Europe. And when attention does turn to their record, Welsh Labour points, not entirely unreasonably, to the lack of funding it receives from the UK government. Indeed, because so many Welsh Labour voters supported leaving the EU, it suits Wales’s strongly pro-EU government to blame Westminster rather than Brexit for its litany problems.

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Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Brexit also failed because of its Anglo-centricity. In their arguments, its prime movers and shakers paid little attention to the parts of the UK that are not England. It does not seem to have occurred to most of them to consider what might happen to the UK’s land border with the EU and how Brexit would intersect with the Good Friday Agreement. Brexiteers outside England should have known better, but they too seemed too distracted by ideological dreams to think much about the practicalities. The result was political turmoil and the effective end of the UK’s own single market.

In Wales, this gave a shot in the arm to those who seek independence. This may remain a minority cause, but Brexit showed that radical political change can happen. For many Remainers, Brexit has destroyed the liberal European United Kingdom they felt attached to; for some, independence offers an appealing route back to more tolerant politics. Meanwhile, for many Leavers, the failures of Brexit is yet another case of London politicians letting them down. For those who haven’t given up on politicians entirely, independence can feel the only hope they have left. Some feel they have little to lose.

For a while, Yes Cymru, the focal point of the independence movement, rode on the coattails of the disillusionment of Leavers and Remainers. But it has ridden into its own problems. A group of socially-conservative members became alarmed at Yes Cymru’s adoption of what they saw as socialist causes and they staged something resembling a progressive coup. In doing so, they destroyed the group’s momentum. Like Brexit, the cause of Welsh independence has been undermined by lack of consensus over what it is actually for.

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Nonetheless, now Brexit has put independence on the table of mainstream debate, it is unlikely to go away. In these debates, the mistakes of Brexit ought to be a cautionary tale. Those who seek Welsh or Scottish independence must learn that people’s fears about the practicalities of major constitutional change should be addressed, not dismissed as nit-picking or a “Project Fear”. They should see that winning a referendum has to be a beginning, not an end. And they should understand that sovereignty alone achieves little unless the power of the state is harnessed to direct and temper the markets.

Away from the ideological and political games, many people’s lives in Wales continue to worsen, and the economic pain is deepest in the very same marginalised communities — particularly in the southern coalfields — whose support enabled Brexit in the first place. According to UnHerd’s polling, the majority there now seem to regret Brexit. In 2016, Blanau Gwent was the region’s capital of Brexit, with 62% voting to leave the EU. Today, only a third don’t think it was a mistake.

Yet this whole sorry affair is further fuelling what made them vote for it: a sense of anger at being let down by mainstream politics. And they are right to be angry. For decades, post-coal Wales has been let down by Left and Right. Successive governments have spoken warm words about regional policy and levelling up. At times, significant money followed those words. But it was never enough and far too often it was spent on things rather than people. It did nothing to address how free markets could not undo the damage free markets had done.

There are no easy answers to the problems of the UK’s post-industrial communities. Some Brexiteers did at least recognise that the UK needs radical change, but that change is yet to appear. In Wales, it is little wonder that people regret; there is much to regret.

Three years on, the Robin Hood Inn has closed. If you want a drink on this street in Boston, just south of the town centre, you’ll have to make do with the Eastern European off-licence a few doors down.

Surrounded by fens to the north and marshes to the south, Boston looms over a dank sea of flat expanses; an island town that has always been the exception. Once, it was the biggest port in England after London. Today, it is the fattest town in the country, the least integrated, the lowest paid, the most murderous, and the most Brexity.

According to new polling by UnHerd, Boston remains the capital of Brexitland, albeit not by its 2016 margin, when 75.6% voted to leave. Still, Boston and Skegness is the only constituency in the UK that does not think it was wrong to leave the EU: here, 37% of voters believe it was a mistake, while 41% disagree. Our polling also reveals it to be the most concerned about immigration: 72% believe “levels are too high”.

Todor arrived here from Sliven, Bulgaria, a few months before the 2016 referendum, looking for the “breadbasket of Britain” and its promise of jobs for those who work hard. “I came with my friends after reading about Boston on the internet. We lived out of town in a caravan and picked cabbages, down on our knees for 10 hours at a time.” Now 29, he works in a food-processing factory, packing flowers, broccoli and potatoes for £350 a week. He can just about afford to rent a bed-bug-infested, one-bedroom flat with his girlfriend and month-old baby. “My friends and I were the first to come to Boston from Sliven,” he says proudly. “Since then, another 2,000 have followed.”

Sitting in his coffee shop on the corner of the town’s cobbled marketplace, Moroccan-born Anton Dani points out these new arrivals. “They come on a daily basis,” he explains. “You can tell who is new and who is not.” He gestures to the small groups of young men standing around the square; they are smoking, staring, whiling away the time until they can register for work. Dozens of families are milling about the city centre, too. “Often you know they are new because they are very poorly dressed — and they are with children who should be in school but haven’t been enrolled yet.”

Anton grimaces when I ask about Brexit: he is a Ukip-then-Conservative councillor, and was the town’s leading campaigner for Leave and its Mayor on Brexit Day. “I don’t think it’s made things better… Now we have a lot of migrants from Bulgaria and many of them are gypsies.” Brexit, everyone here agrees, has failed to stem the number of migrants arriving — though what that figure is remains unclear. We know that between 2004 and 2014, Boston’s migrant population grew by 460%; and we know that there was a tenfold increase between 2011 and 2021. But these are only the people who have registered their presence — and as Anton explains, “there are a load of houses with up to 10 people living in them”. Whatever the true number is, many locals feel like the town is no longer theirs.

The problem with Boston, Anton says, is not that people from the EU have come to live here, but that there is no infrastructure to support them. The local hospital is overstretched; traffic is a permanent blight; at one primary school, translators had to be employed after it emerged many of the children couldn’t speak English. “Brexit is failing,” he admits. “If immigration is to work, you have to integrate. But we’re not demanding this from people.”

Back in 1900, a local journalist predicted that, within a century, Boston will “be served by elephantine emporia”, while “aeroplanes will wheel and pirouette around the pinnacles” of St Botolph’s. The church still dominates the marketplace, but there are few elephantine emporia. Instead, Boston has West Street — known variously as “Polak Street”, “Little Poland” and “East Street” — with its scattering of Eastern European shops, bakeries and job centres. And rather than pirouetting planes, you are more likely to see the speeding minibuses which transport workers to the nearby factories or farms each morning. To those Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian immigrants yet to arrive, this is the Bostonian Dream.

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But for many of the migrants who have settled, as well as those locals who have always lived here, that dream has soured. “There was nothing wrong when they first came, but look at the marketplace now.” Stan Turner, who is 85 and has lived in Boston all his life, nods towards a group of young Bulgarian men smoking in one corner. “They are intimidating. I always used to walk around but now I’m too scared.” Many locals I speak to say the same, and each has a story to hand: about gang-on-gang vendettas, about a friend being stabbed for not having a lighter, about Eastern European off-licences illicitly staying open beyond closing time. “We now tell those staying with us, particularly old people and women on their own, not to go out at night,” one hotel manager tells me.

Locals avoid the marketplace at night. It is empty when, at around 8pm, men arrive five-to-a-car and wait. They don’t prowl. They park up in the middle of the square in pairs, trading words and more with those in the vehicle next door. The atmosphere is charged; headlights are kept on. They don’t hide. The point, I suspect, is to be seen. They sit there, presiding over an unnerving restlessness that feels like it could tip into violence at any time.

It was shortly after 6pm on a balmy July evening that Lina Savicke’s daughter was stabbed and killed on Fountain Lane. “My two daughters were playing outside my shop here, when I heard my youngest scream ‘Mama!’, and then…” Lina pauses to wipe her eyes. “And then it happened.” There were people milling about. Dusk was yet to descend. Lilia was just nine.

There are rumours within the Lithuanian community that it was an organised hit, paid for by a disgruntled family member back home. “But at the moment, we don’t have a clue,” Lina tells me. I ask if she thinks it could happen again. “Yes… It’s dangerous here, especially at night. There is hardly any CCTV or police presence. It means you can do anything you like. This is what happens when a town falls apart…”

If Brexit was about taking back control, in Boston, the opposite seems to have happened. Since 2016, the year the town was named the “Murder Capital of Britain”, Boston’s crime rate has increased by 25% — yet last week, Lincolnshire Police, the lowest funded force in the UK, announced it was cutting PCSO numbers by almost half. Today, it is not uncommon for people to install CCTV cameras on their houses, even in the town’s more deprived areas, such as Fenside. The owner of one house there, flying the Union Jack, has reinforced his garden wall (“they kept ramming their cars into it”) and installed seven cameras. “I just want to keep my daughter safe,” he tells me.

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Further up the road, I meet Nichola Williams. “I voted for Brexit,” she tells me. “It has nothing to do with immigrants who have jobs — I’ve worked with some fantastic foreigners here.” But, she continues, “you can go into town now and see others sitting around. We’ve had more murders and often it’s between themselves.”

This is borne out in Boston’s crime reports, though, as Nichola can attest, locals are hardly left unscathed by the anarchic cloud of insecurity and instability that the violence produces. “I lost one of my sons five years ago,” Nichola tells me. “He was only 32. He was the youngest and the cleverest and…” She tails off. I later learn he had mental health issues, lost his job working on the land, and started to drink heavily and take drugs. He was found by paramedics on a nearby riverbank in the middle of the day; a post-mortem report stated he had laid down and frozen to death after taking heroin and cocaine. “Then again,” Nichola adds, “I met someone from around here. You can’t say I made a mistake, but in many ways I did.” Is she blaming her son’s death on her decision to raise him in Boston? “Well… Yes and no.”

Unlike Lilia’s stabbing, the death of Nichola’s son received only a passing mention in the local press, but perhaps it is a more fitting symbol of Boston’s malaise. His actions keenly speak to the hopelessness and desperation that have taken hold in Boston in the past two decades. Ask anyone what they think of the town, and the standard response is “terrible”, “awful”, or “shit”. Ask why they think that is, and their answer feels fearful: a fear that their community is being dismantled, that the future looks bleak, and that all the institutions they once identified with — from the town’s defunct harbour to West Street in its prime — have been lost.

To some extent, Boston’s atomisation began well before the EU referendum. Perhaps it was sparked in 1970, when its direct rail service to London was canned, or, eight years later, when the medieval town was carved up by a dual carriageway. Or perhaps it started in May 2004, when the UK opened its labour market to Europe. Whatever caused it, by 2016, Boston’s decline was plain to see: in its extraordinary crime rates, especially when it comes to violent crime, and its sagging infrastructure.

Brexit was supposed to fix this. Forget taking back control of Britain; voters here would have settled for taking back control of Boston. Instead, immigration and crime continued to rise — and their town slipped from their grip.

This is where politics should step in, but, as Nichola tells me, “they’re all useless”. And to an extent, former Mayor Anton Dani agrees: “All politicians assume that people will forget things quickly. But the people here will not forget.” The legacy of this perceived betrayal is written in UnHerd’s poll results: in the fact that the root cause of Boston’s Brexit vote (its concern about immigration) remains strong, but voters’ belief in a political solution (Brexit itself) has plummeted. Politics was tried and failed.

“After Brexit vote, immigrants feel a town turn against them,” read one headline in The New York Times shortly after the referendum. Today, it is the locals who feel their town has turned against them — and many have given up on trying to win it back. That is the tragedy of Boston as Brexitland. It was supposed to be a Land of Hope and Glory, but the party only lasted one night.

In 2019, our “UnHerd Britain” survey used a statistical technique called MRP to map six big cultural questions onto all 632 constituencies in Britain; this year, UnHerd has again partnered with Focaldata to conduct a survey of 10,000 people across the country. Rather than asking for people’s voting intention, we have investigated the underlying cultural controversies, new and old, that form today’s divisions and alliances and mapped each one down to constituency level.  

We put 10 statements in front of voters, covering Brexit, gender ideology, political disillusionment, conspiracy, Net Zero, immigration, the monarchy, the cost-of-living crisis, housing and lockdowns. In each case, respondents chose whether they agreed or disagreed, and how strongly. Focaldata then analysed what the most predictive factors of each question were, including age, gender, working status, vote in the 2019 election and the EU referendum, and calculated estimates for each constituency. This technique, “multilevel regression and post-stratification”, or MRP, has been used with incredible accuracy to predict general elections.

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Labour is winning the Brexit revolution

By Tom McTague

You can look up any constituency, and see where it stands on the big talking points of the day. We will be releasing new results every week. 

We begin with Brexit. Three years after we officially left the European Union, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “Britain was wrong to leave the EU”. 

The headline result suggests the country has dramatically changed its view since 2019. Focaldata estimates that in every constituency in the country except three, more people agree with the statement than disagree — i.e. tend to think that Brexit was a mistake. The only three outliers are all located along the Wash in Lincolnshire: Louth and Horncastle, Boston and Skegness and South Holland and the Deepings. Of these, only Boston has more people disagreeing than agreeing: it is the only place in the country which doesn’t feel regretful about Brexit.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, in affluent Remainer heartlands such as Bristol West and Edinburgh South, as well as mixed urban areas such as Streatham and Islington North in London, support for Brexit has further dwindled. In Bristol West, for example, where 79% voted to Remain in 2016, only 13% now disagree with the statement that Brexit was a mistake.

The results also reveal a second finding, which is more subtle but the implications of which are profound for how we understand the country. When you compare the UnHerd Britain 2023 results to the 2016 results, it is clear that enthusiasm for Brexit has faded far more dramatically among Left-leaning areas and areas with higher Labour support than in the Tory heartlands. After six years of political argument and Conservative government, the Brexit question no longer cuts across party lines to the same degree: voting for a pro-Brexit party in 2019 is now a better predictor of whether you support Brexit today than whether you supported Brexit in 2016.

James Kanagasooriam, Chief Research Officer at Focaldata, commented: “The dovetailing of the Brexit divide and the country’s left-right axis has been ongoing for some time, but only with the receding waters of a depressed conservative vote has this pattern become so visible. The leave vote is fading and becoming less distinct from the conservative vote.”

By comparing the percentage of those who still support Brexit with the percentage who voted for Brexit in 2016, it is possible to identify the constituencies which have had the most significant change of heart over the past six years. Of the top 20, all but two are Labour seats. Barking in East London for example voted to Leave in 2016 by 60% to 40%; but now 54% of voters in that constituency think Brexit was a mistake. West Ham, Birmingham Ladywood, Dagenham and Rainham, Middlesborough, Walsall — all of these fit a similar profile: poorer areas with a very high proportion of ethnic minority voters. Many of them supported Brexit at the time, and they are now the most disillusioned of all with the project.

Saying Britain was wrong to leave the EU is a different question from whether Britain should rejoin — when asked, voters do not tend to want to re-open the argument. But the overall picture that emerges is that, after the Brexit shock of 2016 and the extraordinary realignment of 2019, the country is gradually reverting to a more traditional Left versus centre-Right divide. The power of the Brexit question to make people rethink their fundamental political perspective is receding into history.

Between 2016 and 2019, Brexit allowed the Conservative Party to win over parts of the country it had previously found almost impossible to conquer. Boris Johnson’s pledge to “Get Brexit Done” appealed to enough people in traditional Labour areas to flip scores of seats blue. Today, though the effect itself has flipped. Brexit has been done and most people have concluded it was a mistake. Swing areas in northern England, Wales and the Midlands have turned against Brexit more strongly than traditional Tory areas.

The problem for the Tories is that all those voters who regret Brexit also see it as synonymous with the Conservative Party. Labour, on the other hand, has become associated with Remain — even though it rejects the idea of rejoining the EU and has vowed to “make Brexit work”. Labour, then, finds itself in the enviable position of benefiting from the Tory party’s association with Brexit, but without having to actually risk reopening the old wounds of the referendum by pledging to rejoin the EU. “Making Brexit Work” is smart politics — for now.

We have been here before. Look at what happened in Scotland after the independence referendum. There, the No campaign saw off the independence movement in 2014, but the parties associated with its victory became unpopular shortly after. The same thing didn’t happen immediately after the Brexit referendum, but the effect might just have been delayed by parliament’s failure to deliver on that result until 2020. So, we may now be witnessing the “loser’s premium” that couldn’t kick in until Brexit had actually been delivered.

This could be potentially transformative, but is not without some peril for Labour — and the country. The more voters declare their regret over Brexit, the more pressure there will be from Remainers to re-open the constitutional question over Europe — in the same way that the issue of independence has not gone away in Scotland. It is at this point that the difference between believing that Britain should not have left the EU, and believing it should open negotiations (and almost certainly hold another referendum) to rejoin will also emerge. The old conditions of British membership, remember, have gone and so “Rejoin” is not “reverse Brexit”; it now means creating something new. Would this mean, then, even higher budget contributions than before, the adoption of the euro and accession to Schengen? It seems impossible that David Cameron’s renegotiated membership plan (remember that?) could somehow be resurrected. The history of Britain’s entry — and exit — negotiations suggests very strongly that it will not be Britain who sets the terms, but the EU.

Starmer is therefore right to conclude that “Making Brexit Work” is a far surer bet than Rejoin: he could capitalise on the public’s disappointment with Brexit. However, there is another challenge for Starmer and the Labour Party. Just as Franklin Roosevelt was said to have saved capitalism from itself in the Thirties (a disputed claim, of course) by deploying the full power of the state to wrench the country out of its great depression, it may fall to Starmer — the man who called for a second referendum — to save Brexit from itself. There are plenty of people, of course, who think it is simply not possible to make it work, who believe that the only option is ever more close alignment with the EU — thereby undermining the very purpose of Brexit in the first place. If the only way to make Brexit work is to give up control by adopting whatever laws are passed in Brussels, this, to put it mildly, does not seem a very sensible place to be.

Labour, though, insists this is not its plan — or, at least, not the entirety of its plan. It does want to reduce “unnecessary” trade barriers, seek more “equivalence” and “cooperation”, but it has pledged to “use our flexibility outside of the EU to ensure British regulation is adapted to suit British needs”. As it pushes this, the more Labour will create a record which it will, logically, want to defend but which would be impossible inside the EU and would have to be abandoned if the country rejoined. In other words, the more Starmer succeeds on his own terms by making Brexit work, the more he will have created a new status quo, embedding the very project more and more of his voters believe was a fundamental mistake. Fate is a funny thing.

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Just because the Labour party is currently committed to making it work doesn’t guarantee the security of the Brexiteer project. In 20 years, Britain went from voting for Tony Blair to voting for Brexit. And it was only 25 years before Blair that Britain joined the Common Market. Nothing is set in stone: over time, attitudes and positions shift. What we now see as marginal, politically impossible propositions can suddenly become possible and then popular and then, after being adopted, apparently inevitable. Just think of monetarism and floating currencies, for example, both marginal policies in the Seventies that became government policy in the Eighties. The idea of leaving the EU itself was once considered too extreme for all but the most hardline eurosceptics as well. Then it became the majority view in the country. There’s nothing to say the same can’t happen to Rejoin.

This current shift in public mood against Brexit isn’t just a Labour victory — it is very much a Tory defeat. The referendum in 2016 revealed a pent-up frustration with the status quo. Taken literally, it was a vote, according to the Leave manifesto, to control immigration, spend more money (and by implication, improve) public services  particularly the NHS — and change the basic economic settlement to improve more people’s living standards which had stagnated. Those who voted Leave did so for lots of different reasons, of course. For some it was a vote in favour of dramatic changes to the economy and the country; for others to slow or stop the dramatic changes they felt were already happening and for which they blamed EU membership. Sevenoaks voted to leave, as did Sunderland.

Either way, it was a vote against the old system. Yet for most people, nothing has changed — or if it has, it has got noticeably worse. And so is it any wonder people believe it was a mistake? Britain has erected a trade border within its own country without bothering to enforce its own borders. It has signed trade deals which seem to make it harder for British producers to export without making it harder for foreign competitors to import into Britain. It has allowed immigration to increase, failed to stop the small boat crossings, let the health service fall to bits and begun a new round of austerity. The Tories couldn’t have designed a set of outcomes less in keeping with the spirit of the Leave vote. The truth is, the Tory party lost its grip on the revolution — and is now paying the price.