They would soon be gathering at a cavernous venue on the fringe of Britain’s troubled second city. Inside, their party had built a turquoise fantasia to welcome them. There were tractors and buses to climb aboard. George Finch, the laddish young leader of Warwickshire County Council, was striding about with a camera crew buttonholing attendees. Jeremy Kyle was seated on a circular dais, broadcasting a show live to the jumbotrons above our heads. You could buy some roast hog or fly a helicopter simulator or sign a book of condolences for Ann Widdecombe. On sale were pens and mugs and tea towels that showed Nigel Farage doing the dishes and proclaiming: “Washing up is… boring, boring, boring.”

Conference was supposed to be a chance for “normal people” to gather — and for party leaders to unveil their serious plan for power, ready to be implemented on day one of a Reform government. Certainly, a change in conversation feels especially urgent for the party now. An embarrassing by-election, and a series of rows over funding, had driven Nigel Farage away from the spotlight and stalled his momentum. Restore were leeching votes from the Right, while just a few days before the faithful were due to gather, a poll had put Reform third, behind the Conservatives. It was the party’s lowest rating in 18 months.

But if Farage’s inner circle hoped Conference would now be a chance to reset after a torrid summer, there was the “James thing”. With key lieutenants James Orr and Dan Jukes caught on camera discussing a legally dubious funding operation in garish detail, and Farage filmed ordering oysters in the Essex sunshine, and insisting “it’s all above board”, it seemed Reform’s bid to fix itself was floundering already. The blob was fighting back.

Reform has since been reported to the Metropolitan Police by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, both keen to twist the knife. As for Farage himself, he told Laura Kuenssberg he was simply not paying attention. “I am not a compliance officer,” he complained. “I was in the middle of canvassing in the Clacton by-election. I turn up. I frankly wasn’t even listening.”

The ongoing project to professionalize Reform looked, then, to be a work in progress. There were other signs. On Friday, the first panel of the day featured a spread of Christians talking about freedom of speech. When the discussion was opened to the floor, the first comment was on the “gay issue”. While there had always been gay people, a woman mused from the front row, it felt as if there were now be more of them than ever. Had the panel considered the physical implications of hormone-disrupting chemicals? The panel did not wish to consider such things. With the microphone returned, they hastily moved back to freedom of speech.

More significant was the party’s struggle to develop its relationship with big business. Reform has always had a strong element of petit-bourgeois support — “normal people” running normal companies seemed well represented among the delegates. For the blue chips, though, associating with an insurgent political movement is not without danger. Why risk tying yourself to a Guardian exposé on racist language? Just think of the ESG rating. But despite this, and Reform’s rolling donation crisis, British industry has begun to shift. Slap bang in the center of the conference hall was a lounge sponsored by Heathrow. Major firms, including NatWest and Serco, attended the business dinner.

The morning after, though, the rumors were that it had not gone to plan; Farage is said to have mocked NatWest for debanking him and Serco for profiting from the asylum crisis. There were other frustrations too. Nick Marley, whose supply-chain management consultancy paid £6,000 for a booth, told me he was disappointed “senior folk” from the party hadn’t dropped by his stand for a chat.

Among the membership, there were far fewer doubts. Talk to almost any rank-and-file member and they will tell you the same thing: the establishment is trying to stitch up Nigel; they will use any trick in the book; if we have made any errors they have been made 10 times over by the uniparty before us.

Two young councilors from Salford were bullish. Their local party group chat had barely mentioned the exposé; it seemed destined to slide away, to be forgotten alongside other SW1 gossip. When one of the men asked for my view, I suggested that the drip, drip nature of financial misconduct claims would eventually become a problem. But the lads were not worried: we were at a reception, drinking for free, and Boney M. would be on soon. If Andy Burnham were to call a snap election, they both agreed, Reform would likely leapfrog the Tories to become the official opposition.

When I spoke to a Reform insider about Channel 4’s revelations, however, they were far less sanguine. The atmosphere the evening before, they said, had been “febrile” as the news broke. “This reflects a pattern of unprofessional behavior that was starting to be addressed but now needs to be supercharged”.

More from this author

Could the Middlesbrough crime spree spread?

By Felix Pope

The appointment of Zia Yusuf, who served as Reform’s chair from 2024 to 2025 before abruptly quitting, had been meant to bring the organization into line. But when I asked about his performance, my source was contemptuous. Yusuf had not helped, and indeed had perhaps made things worse.

After the evening’s entertainment had wound down inside the hall, attendees decamped to a nearby shopping center, where a dim casino served drinks until 5am and slot machines flashed neon-bright. Here, a certain anxiety seemed to be germinating through the party cadre. A Reform press officer, glassy-eyed, insisted that he simply did not care anymore. He did not care about anything.

Another functionary was eager to tell me that he had known and been deceived by William Lockwood, the undercover reporter from the Centre for Climate Reporting responsible for the Channel 4 sting. The Reformer pulled out his phone and began scrolling through dozens upon dozens of WhatsApp messages between the pair. “If I had a birthday party and invited 100 people he would be one of them”. He seemed wounded by the experience, on the edge of a nervous collapse.

The next morning, a small band of protesters gathered outside the conference. Separated from attendees by the police, they held a banner that read “Brum Youth Give Racists the Boot” and chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear: refugees are welcome here!” Many were wearing surgical facemasks.

Inside, Danny Kruger was delivering a talk about how to reform the state. Danny Kruger always seemed to be delivering talks on how to reform the state. Each day of Conference, he popped up at events throughout the hall, proscribing civil-service reforms and constitutional restoration and cost-cutting measures. On this occasion, he was in conversation with Mark Littlewood, the Liz Truss ally and director of Popular Conservatism, as he set out Reform’s preparations for power.

The party had intended for the conference to focus on such plans. Everywhere, the hoardings declared Farage’s team was ready for “The First 100 Days”. On stage, spokespeople were making policy commitments. But, in the wake of Channel 4’s report, nobody other than the party hardcore seemed to care.

In Kruger’s case, that was a shame, because his ideas are both serious and radical. Reform, he declared, would have to launch an “institutional intifada”. “I want Reform to be a radical insurgent party. A revolutionary spirit in the English tradition of revolutions, which is restorative, which is why restore is such a good word, annoyingly. Actually, we are about restoration not revolution but there is a radical spirit to that restoration that’s going to require some breaking of the furniture.”

Kruger and Littlewood agreed that the power of quangos would have to be severely curtailed. How many even were there? According to Truss, Littlewood said, there were 444. But he wished it might have been 666, given the demonic implications. Kruger, who is in charge of Reform’s preparations for government, working under Orr until the latter’s resignation, began throwing out policy on the hoof. He would like to abolish His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, he said, and was sure Yusuf would agree if he raised it. But, he conceded, “that’s a big job”.

For Kruger, and an increasing number of others on the Right, Britain’s modern ills can be traced back to 1997 and the election of New Labour. According to this theory, Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms started a process of political neutering, removing power from elected officials — and, by extension, the public — and placing it into the hands of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Electing a conservative government would therefore achieve little unless such vested interests were taken on. Following this line of argument, populism can be viewed merely as a means of re-establishing popular control of the state.

While the ostensible theme of the conference was demonstrating that Reform was ready to take office, that actually seemed to undersell its importance. For if the party is truly prepared to follow through on Kruger’s proposals, it will mean a vast and complex remaking of the British state. The constitution would be revised, the House of Lords faced down, the machinery of government re-tooled to conduct mass deportations. Such plans will face huge and sustained opposition. That the party’s own conference had been overshadowed by a Channel 4 exposé said little good for its chances of succeeding.

After Kruger’s talk ended, I spoke to David Starkey, who had been sitting in the front row and whose arguments regarding Blair’s malign constitutional influence have become influential in these circles. There were still several big question marks, he told me. “How far is Farage himself committed? How far is Farage capable of communicating these ideas? And finally, how far have they really done the preparatory work?” The effort required would dwarf the voluminous preparations made by Trump’s team in advance of his second term, Starkey said, while he could see no signs that key legislation was being prepared ahead of time.

In its clashing moments of frivolity and seriousness, the conference seemed to mirror something of Farage’s own internal divide. Is he a hard-drinking outsider, giving voice to a slice of the nation — but whose indiscipline and laziness will ultimately doom him? Or is he ready to move into No. 10 and transform the country in the twilight of his career? The question of whether Reform can now break past its core vote share largely depends on how the public answers those questions.

Then there’s the damage inside the party machine. Jukes, who started campaigning for UKIP at 18, is said to be like a son to him; Orr has deep ties to JD Vance and European conservative networks, and brought a much-needed intellectual ballast to the party. Farage’s relatives, the leader himself told Robert Peston, had been begging him to quit politics. “When your own family starts to turn on you because of what you do, [there are] some very thoughtful moments,” he said. “Very, very thoughtful moments.”

Suggested Reading

What Farage can teach Prince Harry

By Mary Harrington

One insider described the events of the past 48 hours to me as “sub-optimal”. Jukes and Orr had wanted “to show something shiny to the boss” — they had not considered the diligence required. Such problems, however, would help Reform in one respect. “External pressure keeps everything tight,” they said. “The cracks don’t show.”

Farage, the insider claimed, had come out of the summer in a much better place than before. “He’s much more chipper. He likes campaigning… yes, he’s a politician — he likes the sound of his own voice but he always listens.” In this telling, the Clacton by-election was not so much a busted flush as a period of rejuvenation, the Faragist equivalent of a yoga retreat in the Balearic Islands.

Another source insisted the conference had been great and the “hit job” from the press had been dealt with effectively: nobody wanted to hear from murky groups looking for gotcha moments. Jukes was a “generational talent”, they said, and one of the most loyal people in Farage’s circle. “To lose them to a fucking net-zero sting would be awful.”

As we spoke, Farage strode past in a turquoise suit, surrounded by a phalanx of security guards in black. “Andrew Breitbart… just used to say ‘walk towards the fire,’” the source said as we watched Farage head into the arena. “Whenever there’s a scandal or a hit job or whatever, I just think you have to walk towards that fire. You can’t be afraid, you can’t run away from it. And yet, there’ll probably be more. That’s the nature of life. You win some, you lose some.”

To end the conference, the leader appeared on stage for a final time. He seemed to be in an ebullient mood. “If it’s not fun then it’s not worth doing anyway, is it?” he asked. This had been the biggest and most fun conference they had undertaken. Did he really mean it? “My people’s army,” he continued, “I’m proud to lead you. Once again, I love you all.”

For the faithful in the hall, it was a moment of inspiration. “Farage is back to his best,” Peter Faultless, a wizened party member from near Walsall told me, as we walked away from the stage and back towards the real world. “He clearly wants to lead us.” For Faultless, as with so many other Reform members, there is no alternative. Yusuf is great and Jenrick smart, but Farage is the boss. “Reform is not going to win the election without him,” he added. “Without him — we’re not the same.”

A few dozen meters away, crime scene investigators in white boiler suits and blue helmets had broken from their work to drink Fanta. Behind them stood the charred remains of a modest suburban home. Last Wednesday, Natalie McDonald and her seven-year-old niece, Valentina Foster, had been killed as it burned. A 23-year-old man has since been charged.

In a small patch of green beside the property, a memorial has blossomed, with bouquets of flowers bunched on the ground and a balloon floating above them. “Rest in peace,” reads a red note tied to a fence, seemingly handwritten by a child. “I know angels are real but I know Valentina is one.” Looking up from here, one can peer through one of the shattered windows at black beams and black walls, the deep, charcoal black of total destruction.

Down the road and around the corner sits another memorial and more bouquets. Nestled between them is a small plastic police car. It marks a spot near where, four days before the house fire, in an unconnected incident, two constables and five young men were killed when the young men drove their Volkswagen Passat the wrong way up the A66. The youths had amassed 37 convictions, from car theft to racial harassment, between them and, according to Cleveland Police, were linked to serious and organized crime. In the hours leading up to the crash, a Volvo SUV had rammed a home inhabited by the father of Cole Worthy, one of the men in the Volkswagen Passat. The Volkswagen Passat chased the Volvo with the police in pursuit, and when the Volvo veered onto the wrong side of the road to escape it crashed.

At a vigil for some of the young men, masked mourners released balloons. At another, cars were spun around and torched in a field. A man has since been stabbed in a suburb near the site of the house fire, while yet another house has been rammed. In an attempt to reassert command, hundreds of cops were deployed to the area.

In this corner of Middlesbrough, then, violence seems to be spiraling, a series of tit-for-tat attacks escalating beyond anyone’s control. The town already has the highest crime rate in the country outside central London. It is akin to “terrorism”, says Andy McDonald, a local MP. It’s a “feral underclass” gone wild, says Andy Preston, the former mayor. Speak to locals and they will blame feuding drug gangs and their teenage runners, battling for market domination. 

Almost all of the recent crimes have taken place in just one postcode, TS6, a collection of deprived estates and suburban terraces in the town’s southeast. “TS6 has gone mad,” one local is reported to have told the Yorkshire Post. “It’s brutal.” 

The area is remote, out on the edge of Middlesbrough. Turn one corner and you can see hills, turn another and you might spot an industrial estate or a brutalist church. In a field behind one street, I found five horses, as still and as artfully placed as statues. (These, a resident informed me, were the product of a local trend to live as “wannabe gypsies”.)

Dave lives here in a dark brick and PVC terrace, as neat as a doll’s house. When I introduced myself, he had been on his hands and knees gardening, but when I asked him about crime he ushered me inside to show me his bat. Dave’s bat is very big. It was at least half my height and thicker than those used to play baseball with a black tape grip at its base. Dave is a sober professional who asked me not to reveal his job or use his real name. He is concerned he might be sacked if he ever uses the bat. But he is more concerned about the criminals. 

One night recently, while he was cleaning his bathroom, a lad knocked on the front door and asked for money to get home to his mam. Dave shut the door on him and called the police, but they didn’t come. One hour later, the lad was still in his front garden, so Dave stepped outside with the bat and said, “I’ll tell you once, fuck off while you can.” Eventually, the lad fucked off.  

Another time, Dave was out shopping and two young boys began following him, waving and repeating “hello” in an eerie, drugged out key. He wanted to give them a clip round the ear, like adults used to be able to do, but he worried about getting a criminal record. So he told two police officers, and when they searched the boys they found a knife. It was as long as this, Dave told me, holding his hands at least eight inches apart.

If his mates don’t have a bat they’ll have something else by the door: a decorative sword, an axe, a pick-axe handle. “Everyone’s getting the same mentality,” he said. “If someone’s coming in my house they’re getting it. It’s fight or flight.” He is putting up CCTV cameras and has learned the legal boundaries of self-defense. Where the state will not act, he is prepared to. 

By now we were standing in Dave’s kitchen, which was very white and smelled faintly of cleaning products. He had pulled off one gardening glove to vape. Everything seemed to be deteriorating in Middlesbrough, he said. He told me about a local smackhead he knows, only a little over 40 but as taut and pale as a corpse, shot and stabbed several times, his habit funding the violence coursing through the area. 

For poor children growing up in TS6, the easy money offered by selling drugs can be alluring. “I would see kids going past in scruffy clothes,” Dave said. “First they’d get a new bike, then they’d get a new phone. Then they’d have brand new clothes. Then they’d have an e-bike and they’d pull out a £20 note in the corner shop to buy milk and say ‘keep the change’. They’d pull it out of a roll of cash.”

Boys on bikes and electric scooters are constantly zipping around TS6. None of them seemed keen to talk. “What’s it like living here?” I asked a hooded young man with crooked teeth. “Shit,” came the monosyllabic reply.  

Once, this was Ironopolis. There was ore in the hills and a river running to the sea and from the dawn of the 19th century the place boomed, dragging in workers and throwing up industries. In the wake of iron came steel and chemical manufacturing and shipbuilding. A hamlet of two dozen people was transformed into a global industrial center. Visiting in 1862, Gladstone dubbed Middlesbrough “infant Hercules”: the youngest child of England’s enterprise. “We built the world,” wrote the poet Ian Horn many years later. “Every metropolis came from Ironopolis.”

Then came many decades of decline until, in 2015, Teesside steelworks closed. Sahaviriya Steel Industries, the Thai conglomerate by then in control of the business, blamed falling prices. It was, the Northern Echo declared, “The End”. For one local steelmaker, Ken McGlasson, that meant the end of 31 years of employment. “For the North East,” the paper mourned, “it is the end of an industry which was the bedrock of the regional economy for 170 years.”

Middlesbrough is now one of the most deprived places in Britain. In 2022, the local authority had the highest rate of drug and alcohol related mortality and the second highest rate of suicide in the North East. (“They’re not mentally ill,” declared a paper on the phenomenon, “their lives are just shit.”) As of last year, the town had the highest proportion of deprived neighborhoods of any council in Britain. 

Such statistics stack up here like steel girders, but do they explain the lawlessness? “Teaching kids right from wrong doesn’t cost a penny,” said Margaret (not her real name), who was standing in her front garden with her chin resting on a broom. Standards have collapsed within just a few years, she believes. People she knows are frightened to walk out at night while young men speed about the place on quadbikes. 

Close to her home is a green electrical box onto which someone has written “RIP LEW LEW” in white paint and pasted two photos of a young man. In one he is wearing a Gucci cap; in the other he is sitting on what appears to be an electric bike, his middle finger raised to the camera. This is Lewis Ward, killed four years ago when a car crashed into him while he was riding an e-scooter. One of the men in the vehicle had threatened to “ram” Ward, his friend later claimed, but no one was ever charged over his death.

For Margaret, the rocketing crime rate is down to soft parenting rather than economics, the result of a culture in which children are raised by teenage parents ill prepared to enforce discipline. In 2019, Middlesbrough had the highest rate of teen pregnancy in England and Wales. She still has faith in the police, she told me, but believes their hands are tied.

Ironically, given the events of the past fortnight, Cleveland Police had recently seemed to be on the up, to have recovered from a nadir. In the decade from 2009, the number of officers on the force fell from 1,756 to 1,198. Then, in 2019, the force was put into special measures after becoming the first in the nation to be rated inadequate in all areas. Its own staff told inspectors the organization was “directionless, rudderless and clueless”. One inspector had preyed on young women for sex, anti-terror legislation was used to spy on journalists, and the chief constable was found guilty of gross misconduct after he looked at his female colleague’s lap and told her that if she wanted to she could “touch herself”.

But in 2023, the force was taken out of special measures. An inspection last year concluded that it was good in half of all areas and inadequate in none. “We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure criminals see consequences for their actions,” then Chief Constable Mark Webster told the BBC. It is hard to find anyone in TS6 who would agree with that statement. 

Cole Worthy’s father lives in a quiet, blue-collar suburb several miles to the east. When I arrived, almost a week after the crash, the consequences of the ramming attack were plain to see. The front wall of the house was part collapsed, all the windows were shattered, and the front door was hanging open to the world. 

I wanted to understand what would drive a boy from a decent neighborhood to such a mindless death. But when I knocked at the neighbors’ doors they refused to talk. Cole did not stay here often, explained one woman. Another began shaking as we spoke. “I don’t dare,” she told me softly, explaining that she feared what would happen if she was witnessed speaking to a journalist. “You understand. I’m scared they’ll see you on the doorstep.” A third woman repeated the same concern and, apologizing, closed the door in my face. I understood.

When I spoke to Andy Preston, he told me that his constituents had said much the same to him while he served as their mayor between 2019 and 2023. It seemed that a code of omertà was developing across the town, as if post-industrial England had become Naples under the Camorra. Such fears were exaggerated, Preston said, but pervasive across Middlesbrough nonetheless. 

The thugs did, however, pose a threat to local politics, he added. When a councilor he knew tried to put up CCTV cameras to deter antisocial behavior, one of the boys who would later die in the A66 crash had threatened to stab them, Preston claimed. Other councilors were now scared of discussing crime publicly and would only comment anonymously in the media. “What’s happened in Middlesbrough in the last seven days, it isn’t normal in terms of the rapidity and the escalation but the individual issues and the tit-for-tat violence is normal,” he said. For years, a fall out between factions of the drug trade in the town had been fueling attacks. Criminals were brandishing machetes in the street and firing shotguns at houses, Preston said. “I’ve always been astonished that it takes an actual crisis for politicians to give a fuck about it.”

The police, meanwhile, have become desensitized to gang warfare. In Preston’s telling, Middlesbrough was just the most prominent flare-up of a national catastrophe: a limp justice system failing communities in which a culture of dependency and delinquency has festered. 

The idea that this culture was simply down to a lack of jobs was a convenient lie, he argued. For many years, employment had been available in Middlesbrough for those who wished to work instead of selling drugs and claiming benefits. And if the police were to lock up a hard-core of criminal leaders, the scrotes following them would back down. Instead, The Telegraph revealed last week, under a scheme run by Cleveland Police, criminals arrested for possessing knives can dodge prison by accepting mental health support and promising not to reoffend.

TS6, Margaret told me, was simply forgotten. Politicians cared about the city center, not the outskirts. It had taken nine deaths in a week for anyone to pay attention. Now there were police patrolling the streets in pairs, as if we had returned to the Fifties, and journalists with southern accents were walking around taking notes on the decaying urban fabric. No wonder they wanted us to fuck off. 

Middlesbrough may top some unfortunate statistical rankings but it is hardly unique. I have reported from postcodes in south Bristol and inner-city Birmingham which feature just the same blight. Young men, jobless and bored, circling the streets on electric bikes. Knife crime rates rising, pushed by TikTok beefs and escalating bravado. A fractious drug economy sustained by taut, pale users. Through chance, a crisis has exploded into view here first. It is unlikely to be the last.

It must also be one of the most journalistically picked-over places in Britain. Reporters have been taking the train here from the capital for years, stopping locals on the street to probe and poll their views; dissect their prejudices; stack their takes. White, deprived and elderly, it has become a stand-in for the large hinterland of Britain so remote from our elites. For some, the attention has become maddening. “Over the past few years we have become a joke and a cliche because of Nigel Farage,” says Sarah Elizabeth Cox, who is drinking a glass of JD Wetherspoons wine as her son snoozes in a buggy parked at the table. “I now say I’m from Clacton for my sins.”

Now, Farage is preparing to take a stand here against the establishment, or at least against a former BBC comedian wearing a bin on his head. If Britain has any unifying institutions left, Spoons must be one. Could I, sitting in the pub from sun-up till closing, plumb a little deeper than the psephologists?

When the Royal Hotel was built, it stood alone on a clifftop. Clacton-on-Sea was just an idea then. For a long time, perhaps forever, the area had been nothing but farmland out on the Essex coast. But then, in 1886, the land was bought up by Peter Bruff, a bearded Victorian engineer, who set about building railways and rerouting steamers and diverting capital flows to justify the construction of a new town. His ambitions were high. It would have, Bruff declared, “no slums or any object that could offend the eye”. The lowest type of London daytripper — “men, women and children who only seem to enjoy themselves when revelling in drink and obscenity” — ought to be discouraged from visiting.

Today, much of what was the Royal Hotel is occupied by the Moon and Starfish. Yet sitting in the garden just after 11am, Cox doesn’t want to talk about the pub’s most famous visitor. In fact, she wants to talk about everything but Farage. She wants to talk about Clacton’s problems, and once she starts it’s seemingly hard for her to stop. There is a huge issue with homelessness, she says. Like so many other English seaside towns, the deprived and the lost wash up here in search of help but end up freezing in tents all throughout the winter. Cox’s mortgage has become extortionate, more than her rent had been in London. Potholes are cracking open everywhere. Fires keep breaking out. Train prices render commuting impossible, even to nearby Colchester. She is angry with a broken social settlement that has allowed places such as Clacton to rot. “It is one of the abandoned seaside towns,” she says. “I love living here but I feel sorry for the young people.”

More from this author

Farage's Clacton reckoning

By Felix Pope

Clacton has the highest proportion of economically inactive people in Britain. Jaywick, a ramshackle settlement on Clacton’s western border, is the most deprived place in England. What went wrong? The classic account is that once British holidaymakers were lured to Southern Europe by bargain flights, the seaside towns, deprived of tourists, began to slump. It is notable that at the last general election, Reform UK took three such areas among their five seats — Skegness, Great Yarmouth and Clacton.

But as I wander through the pub, everyone I speak to is happy to be there — resident and daytripper alike. They praise a community feel that, perhaps, they think remains stronger here than elsewhere in Britain. Margaret Clayton and Shirley Sizer have come on an over-sixties group outing from Cambridgeshire. Margaret has been coming here since childhood, when she used to visit with her Salvation Army Sunday school. It hasn’t changed much, she says.

Jean and Terry Williams moved down from London 40-odd years ago. They were married in East Ham, East London, but decided they had to leave when their son went to school and, according to Jean, his class swelled with Indian children who could not speak English. There was no time to teach the native pupils, she says, because they had to provide language tuition for the migrants. That was not a problem in Clacton.

But the Essex coast is not immune to England’s demographic shifts. Jean and Terry describe a local street that, to their eyes, is starting to look like Beirut. Terry thinks many of the vape and kebab shops must be money-laundering operations. Jean is relieved their son is in his forties and that she therefore has no need to worry about the ethnic composition of the schools. They have fled one wave of migration, but are being met here by another.

It is the bright peak of the day and the octogenarian couple are drinking in the garden, their skin wrinkled and puckered by decades of seaside living. They like it here, and bat away any suggestion that its population is too old. People need a place to retire, don’t they? Both plan to vote for Farage, despite his recent travails. “Personally, I don’t mind him,” says Jean. “I think all politicians are the same. I’m not being rude, but they’re all crooks. I’m not going to vote for tin man.”

Her attitude is typical. If they’re all crooks, why single out Farage? A grinning man with a missing front tooth, twisting a £20 note furiously below the table, tells me hasn’t followed the story closely but that Nigel is the bollocks and can keep his £5 million for all he cares. “Did he just pocket it and fuck off?” he laughs. “He’s one of us then.”

The man is angry that immigrants arriving on small boats are housed immediately, fed and watered in three-star establishments across the country. He was recently sectioned and then placed into supported accommodation in Clacton, he says, but then kicked out when he was arrested for “something stupid”. Now the council won’t help him.

He is also archetypal of a category of man that can be found at every asylum protest across Britain: unmoored, his life dissolving around him. Then he takes a call on a tiny black mobile, one small enough that it might be smuggled into prison in a cavity, and excuses himself.

I retreat back into the pub, which is as dim and cool as a cave. Tim Martin, who founded and owns JD Wetherspoons, has attempted to construct his empire along the guidelines detailed by George Orwell in 1946. The clientele must consist of regulars, there for the conversation as much as the beer; the architecture should be “uncompromisingly Victorian”; no radio should drown out conversation. Orwell’s preferred pub name was Moon Under Water, hence Clacton’s maritime twist: Moon and Starfish.

And as in the fictional Moon Under Water, the punters do seem to know each other. Around lunchtime, a group of auld fellas congregate around two tables in front of where I am sitting for what seems a regular meeting. People shout greetings across the room. World Cup bunting zig-zags across the ceiling, while England flags are draped from the bar and over a window. There are paintings of ships on the wall and little brass portholes cut into the walls. It is as if we are all visiting the home of a retired admiral with a mania for vexillology.

The lunch crowd gathers, eats, and departs rapidly. For many of Clacton’s older residents, Spoons is effectively just a cut-price restaurant. I watch an old woman in a wheelchair defeat a popadom the size of her head. Beside me, a man and two women in floral dresses are laying into Farage: the by-election is a farce, a waste of money, and he may be forced to stand again anyway. They would like Count Binface to win, but are concerned he’ll have to remove his headgear in Parliament.

Later, I find Paul, back out in the garden. He isn’t a fan of Farage either. “I don’t think he’s done fuck all for Clacton,” he says. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the by-election is that Farage is a constituency MP at all. Nobody I meet makes any connection between their Member of Parliament and local issues. They like him because they want to cut migration, or they oppose him because they do not. Their views do not seem to be shifting either. Farage is baked in.

Paul is drinking Guinness and holding a spindly silver vape that looks like an alien hookah. Until a few years ago, he lived in Brentwood, in London’s eastern commuter orbit. He worked in construction, breaking tarmac. But Brentwood got too posh for him and, for reasons he does not specify, he doesn’t work anymore. But he had an opportunity to move near the sea and he took it.

“Honestly, I spoke to a copper a while ago,” Paul says, “I said, “is Clacton really bad?” He said it’s no worse than any other seaside town. Every single place has its bad people. I’ve never had any trouble.” Paul normally does not vote, but next month he plans to support Count Binface. “Mate,” he says, “if I had one million I’d be set for life and this fucker got…”

For years, Clactonology has described the place as “weary” or “divided”, even as residents have been held to really be the most powerful people in Britain. The most significant work in the canon was written a little over a decade ago by Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP and Times columnist. Clacton-on-Sea, he claimed, was going nowhere. “This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlor Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.”

More from this author

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

UKIP — then standing Douglas Carswell in a by-election here — was a natural fit for such a place, Parris concluded. “Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21st-century Britain needs to be going.” The Conservative Party had to abandon the voters of such places, were they not to be dragged down themselves.

His words caused such a furor that UKIP began quoting Parris on their leaflets. But today, 2014 feels like a foreign country. After Brexit and Trump, with Marine Le Pen permitted to stand for the French presidency and the AfD leading the polls in Germany, it is hard to imagine anyone dismissing all-our-yesterdays Britain quite so blithely.

Seagulls wheel and bank over left-over lunches as a new crowd materializes, alongside a bouncer in a white shirt. As it grows dark, I speak to Dave, a neat man with silver hair, who bemoans the unfair reputations of Clacton and Jaywick. He lived and worked in London all his life, before retiring from the civil service to see out his days here. “Living in Clacton is like living in the old East End of London,” he tells me. “People chat to you. These days in London, people won’t even look you in the eye. Here, people stop and chat to you when you walk the dog.”

Dave is amiable and relaxed, smoking a cigarette in the summer air. But he seems angry at the state of Britain. “One phrase I hate,” he says, “is when people say, “I’m entitled to this.”” Benefit claimants feel entitled to money; migrants feel entitled to free housing. He would like Farage to crack down on both.

Though JD Wetherspoon pubs don’t show football, as a rule, they seem to make an exception for the World Cup. And at 8pm, Belgium kicks off against Spain. I sit next to a 20-something window fitter, who thinks Clacton is run down with few opportunities for people his age. He doesn’t like Farage, but will vote for him if the alternative is a man dressed as a bin, for whom he evinces a deep contempt. The crowd is different, now, the punters markedly younger. A clutch of men in tight jeans holding little bottles of beer has formed by the bar. When I leave, shortly after midnight, the pub is almost empty; near me just a few teenagers remain, drinking shots and playing a garage track from a phone.

A Friday in the Moon and Starfish, then, is spent mainly with people who came here from London. They relocated for the cheaper cost of living and the clear air and also, in many cases, for somewhere that is still overwhelmingly white British. They are attempting, consciously or otherwise, to recreate a community that used to dominate much of the capital, along with the pie and mash shops that cluster round the pub.

But this is the end of the line for white flight. You cannot move further east than Clacton-on-Sea. You cannot move anywhere poorer than Jaywick. For those who seek greater ethnic homogeneity, there is only one other option left: to fight. That makes the Clacton by-election essentially meaningless. It is a circus. Farage is almost certain to win, risking only mockery in his campaign against Count Binface. What is more significant is the rage pulsating throughout this town, this country. That will remain, and it will decide our future. All-our-yesterdays Britain will have its revenge.

For the first few months, Rafał worked at a strawberry farm on eastern England’s great, flat plain. I assume this was tough labor, out in the sun and the wind and the rain, bent over in a field doing the work the English did not want to do at wages they would not accept. But Rafał, a compact 46-year-old with greying hair, is flippant. He did not find it difficult. It was an easy life. And besides, he was making money. Soon, he had new clothes, a new suit. “I had too much money,” he grins, holding his hands apart to indicate a thick wad of cash. In Poland, an hour’s work would get him two liters of fuel, but here he could buy eight or nine. Rafał had arrived in an East Anglian El Dorado. 

We are speaking on the pavement outside a Polish supermarket in one of Peterborough’s less salubrious districts, its streets tucked behind the train station. Almost 20 years ago, this was, the Daily Mail proclaimed, “the town the Poles took over”. “This has happened so quickly,” a pub landlord told the paper. “Two and a half years ago this was a lovely place to live. People would talk to each other in the street, shout good morning or visit each other for tea. Now the old people are scared to walk out at night.” It is clear, looking around, that the demographics of this corner of Peterborough have changed — and are changing again. I walk past an Eastern European shop advertising goods from Romania, Ukraine, and Lithuania, but it is closed and clearly has been for some time. Another European shop now advertises fresh dosas. Palestine flags flop from nearby windows. New cycles of migration are being fitted over the old, compounding like the layers of a Roman road. 

Observing the shift, Rafał’s attitude has begun to mirror that of the pub landlord two decades before. “Sometimes black people ask me for spare change,” he says. “I say ‘go and work’.” His girlfriend is often scared to walk to the shops on her own at night. But he is not bothered. He is not a conflict guy. Recently, though, Rafał has seen something more concerning via Polish language media. An 18-year-old British-Polish man, Henry Nowak, bleeding to death on a Southampton street, as he begs impassive officers for help. According to the latest census, 4% of Southampton is Polish. When protesters rallied following the conviction of Nowak’s killer, they were joined by members of the Polish community.

Video footage of the demonstration shot by AY Audits, an anti-migrant influencer, shows a group of ruddy Polish men in sports gear facing off against a line of police. One clutches a tin of beer in his hand. The Poles chant in their own language before the Englishmen around them begin shouting “wanker”, and then the two sets of voices merge. “The Poles are some people,” added a viewer on X later. “Give them a few cans of Tyskie and they’d go to war with us.”

Poles began moving to Britain in any real numbers during the Second World War. The arrivals were largely male and often keen to turn around and fight their occupiers. By 1951, Britain was hosting more than 160,000 Polish refugees; most wished they could return home. 

suggested reading

How to end the Brexit shitshow

By Dominic Cummings

Those that came from 2004 onwards were different. Like Rafał, they had been drawn by the promise of higher wages and the chance to escape a brutal post-communist transition. And while other European nations put restrictions in place to limit migration from Eastern Europe, No. 10 did not. In the decade to 2014, the number of Poles in Britain rose from 69,000 to around 853,000.

Ten years after Brexit, the Poles demonstrating in Southampton reveal how far Britain’s migration politics have shifted. Quizzed in 2015, Nigel Farage said that he preferred immigrants from India than Poland. It was wrong to have a system that discriminated in favor of Europeans, and against those from the subcontinent, he told LBC the year before. Appearing on BBC 3, a youthful Tommy Robinson claimed that all migration from Poland should be blocked. Buttonholed this year by a Polish YouTuber, he insisted the opposite. “I love the Polish immigrants,” he said. “I’m for them.”

Perhaps there was always an element of cynicism. It is harder for your opponents to accuse you of racism if you argue that white immigrants are a greater problem than non-whites. But anti-Polish, anti-Eastern European sentiment went far broader. Polish migrants, the press alleged, were pillaging swans and fish from the rivers. The “Polish baby boom” would, we were told, lead to schools and the NHS being overwhelmed. 

In 2015, Polish workers went on strike and gave blood to push back. George Byczynski, who organized the donation drive, told the press a compatriot in Kent had been subjected to an arson attack and graffiti telling him to “go home”. “There is an issue,” he said, “with the language politicians use and sometimes they do scapegoat Polish people.” After Brexit, though, bigotry truly exploded. “It was an extremely stressful time,” remembers Tomasz Wisniewski, a Worcester businessman and community activist. “I remember Polish shops being attacked, people on the street being attacked, children at school being attacked.” In one instance, a mother was beaten on her way home from picking up her kids. “I still have the pictures on my phone,” Wisniewski tells me. “You can see blood on their faces. I will never forget it.” 

For Wisniewski, the disregard for people who had spent years working in Britain was reminiscent of the way in which the Government had appeased Stalin by failing to invite Polish troops to a victory parade held after the Second World War. Many Poles, he says, made this comparison to him in 2016. He believes he only avoided discrimination himself because he always makes sure to wear a suit. As he puts it: “I noted that people respect other people in suits in the UK.” 

As Rafał’s Peterborough implies, the demographic mix of migrants to Britain has shifted once more. Free movement for Europeans ended; entry barriers for workers and students around the world were lowered. As a result, around 4.2 million people entered the country legally between 2021 and 2024. At the same time, tens of thousands began arriving yearly by small boat. 

The idea that the British state is practicing anti-white discrimination has meanwhile become central to Right-wing politics. Writing earlier this month on Substack, Nigel Farage argued that there is “nothing fair” about the way “White people” (his capital “W”) have been treated by successive governments. (Had he taken power in 2015, it might be noted, he would presumably have contributed to such discrimination by favoring Indian over Polish migrants.)

Acknowledging that the white British share of the population is due, in time, to become a minority, Farage appears to be positioning Reform UK as the white identity party for a balkanized nation. “Without a voice to speak up for [White Brits],” he concluded, “the future will be manifestly unjust.” The sight of Southampton’s Poles confronting the police alongside furious, anti-migrant Britons might therefore be read as a sign of their assimilation.

“So you had a Portuguese wave, you had a Lithuanian wave, you had a Polish wave and then you had Bulgarian wave and Romanian wave,” says Iga Paczkowska. “So now we are good foreigners. The other foreigners are bad, but we are good foreigners. ‘We don’t like foreigners, but we like Polish.’ This is something I heard so much, so many times.”

We are sitting in her office in the center of Boston, once the locus of Polish migration to the UK. When the 2011 census was taken, this rural, Lincolnshire town had the highest population of Eastern Europeans anywhere in the country. Workers had made a beeline for the place, taking jobs in agriculture and food production and transforming the area. In response, Boston registered the highest Brexit vote in Britain. Three quarters of residents voted to Leave. 

Paczkowska had thought it was impossible that Remain would not win. “For us, it was so ridiculous that it was unbelievable,” she says. Earlier in 2016, she had set up a business, Lincs-EU, that would help Polish migrants fill out paperwork and settle into Britain. A decade on, she is still busy, but far less than she would have been had we remained. Boston, which even for a provincial English town seems to have a high rate of shuttered shops, has declined since, she thinks. “It changed, here you are. But definitely not for the better.”

Like other British-Poles I speak to, Paczkowska is cynical about the attempt by some on the Right to defend Henry Nowak. Farage should be told about his preference for Indians over Poles, she says. “Let’s remind him that he doesn’t want to live next to Eastern Europeans.” 

The apparent co-option of Poles into a coalition against anti-white discrimination does not reassure her either. “I think that Farage is a great politician,” she says. “But this is the person who, in my opinion, is as stable as a gummy bear. Whatever way the wind is blowing he’s going to go. He’s just using Henry’s death for his agenda. He sees the opportunities to campaign and that’s what he does.”

Though she opposes Farage, Paczkowska is not uncritical of Britain’s immigration regime. A jump in Romanian migrants to Boston after Brexit has caused new social fissures, she says. “They are more loud, more noticeable. They are shouting, they are dancing. They are playing music on the street, they are playing bowl on the street, they are playing soccer.” 

Other British-Poles are paid up supporters of Reform UK, such as Adam Mitula, who served as the party’s interim campaign manager for the Gorton and Denton by-election until he was suspended over racist comments on social media. “Henry Nowak is half Polish. His dad is Polish. He could have been my son,” he wrote on Facebook after the trial of the teenager’s killer concluded. “I don’t want illegal immigrants in Europe,” Mitula added. “I don’t care. I don’t want foreign criminals in Europe. I don’t care.” 

Given that Poland has repeatedly elected governments opposed to mass migration and asylum, this is perhaps unsurprising. For many on the Right, the central European nation is an inspiration. Robinson, now all in favor of Polish migrants, has attended a Warsaw nationalist march. He counts Dominik Tarczyński — famous for his boast that Poland would not admit one illegal Muslim migrant — as a friend; the Law and Justice MEP would have spoken at the latest Unite The Kingdom protest had Sir Keir Starmer not banned him from Britain.

In many ways, we are a long way from 2016. Over the last decade, Poles have climbed the economic ladder. They are far less likely to work on a factory floor, far more likely to speak English, and many, like Nowak, are slipping into the native population, identifiable only by an unfamiliar surname. As Britain’s migration debate becomes more sharply racialized and as white identity politics rises, they may yet be assimilated further. 

When I ask Wisniewski if he now feels secure in Britain, he tells me it is still unclear. “What will happen in the future, it depends on the political mood,” he says. “If politicians say Polish people are taking our jobs and eating swans then we’re going to be in trouble again.”

Yerbury, by his own account, is an “ethnocentric nationalist” and a third positionist. His economic views lie somewhere between capitalism and communism. He might also be called a fascist. Growing up in Australia, he returned to Britain, his parent’s homeland, and joined the army at 20 in 2015. Six years of service left him with an appreciation of military discipline and structure. Society, he thought, might be better organized along those lines than as a multi-party democracy. Collective will trumps liberal individualism. 

Back on civvie street, Yerbury joined Patriotic Alternative, a hard-Right outfit led by another admirer of Hitler, Mark Collett, but came to believe it had no solutions to the nation’s problems and quit after about 15 months. He founded the National Support Detachment to back anti-migrant protests, but this also came to little. 

In 2024, Yerbury registered the National Rebirth Party (NRP) with the Electoral Commission. It has high ambitions. Within 10 to 15 years, Yerbury told me, he expects to win national power. The Labour Party had taken longer to move from inception to victory, he acknowledged, but the scale of the crisis facing Britain is greater now. Progress seems slow so far, though. To date, the NRP has a little over 100 members. 

The party is interested in addressing the causes of Britain’s demographic shift to a multiracial, multicultural society, rather than simply condemning immigration. Were its cadre to take power, they would establish a one-party state and deport as many non-whites as they could, while recognizing that a 100% white Britain is likely a pipe dream. 

“The aim,” Yerbury told me when we first spoke over the phone, “should be for the country to be as homogenous as possible.” 

“If you’re running for election,” I suggested, “sort of the pitch to the public is: ‘Vote for us, and we’re gonna be in charge forever.’” 

“Well,” he replied, “I would say the pitch is actually: vote for us for a genuine national rebirth.” 

***

A decade on from the murder of Jo Cox at the hands of the white supremacist Thomas Mair, a new generation of hardline neo-Nazis believe they are standing on the edge of a historic breakthrough. Following the Southport attack, asylum hotel protests and the murder of Henry Nowak, they see an opportunity to latch onto a large and dynamic movement. In their eyes, locals concerned about unvetted migrant men are ripe to be converted to a far more radical ideology. 

Anti-migrant demonstrations, one particularly hardline activist told me, had achieved two things: expanding the social base for racial nationalism and normalizing violent, physical resistance to the state. “That sense of momentum,” they suggested, “is a powerful recruiting tool even if it’s chaotic.”

Over the past 10 years, meanwhile, Holocaust denial and explicit antisemitism have burst into the mainstream. The world’s most famous rapper wrote an ode to Hitler; young male streamers attack Jewish influence; the President of America dined with Nick Fuentes, an impish Shoah revisionist. “Six million cookies?” he asked in a 2019 video, comparing dead Jews to baked goods. “I’m not buying it.” Dark energies, once constrained by historical memory, have been let loose.

***

One day earlier this year, members of the National Rebirth Party gathered in Stafford to proselytize. It was raining heavily before I arrived, and the river had burst its banks, its brown water rising to engulf a line of benches. Yerbury and his followers were meeting in a former cinema, now a Wetherspoon’s pub, in the center of town. Under its arched ceiling, they ate fish and chips and discussed their plans.

These men provided something of a cross-section of British fascism. Daniel (who, like most of those present, would not provide his surname) was dressed like a football casual, in dark jeans and a thin jacket. As we spoke, he leaned towards me conspiratorially, his leg shaking underneath the table. He had dark circles below his eyes. 

Daniel had grown up in a sectarian, Protestant community in the Black Country, he said, working as a manual laborer from the age of 16 before moving into white-collar management. His father was a Thatcherite, but his friend’s dad had introduced him to national socialism. Its sense of ideological rigidity appealed. “Asking for remigration is like giving someone painkillers because they broke their leg,” he said. What Britain needed, he argued, was to tackle the “international financiers” behind demographic change. When I suggested that was a euphemism, he laughed. “I don’t think Jews are the only problem. Anglo-merchants are an issue too.”

While Daniel seemed charged with a nervous excitement, George was more doleful. A heavyset young man with a silver nose ring and ear stud, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, he looked as if he might be a young Labour activist en route to party conference. It was only the small pin on his lapel bearing the NRP’s logo that revealed his true affiliation. 

When he was nine or 10, George’s dad had walked out on him and his mum. He doesn’t know whether his father is alive or dead, and can remember little of him but flashed images of a bald man in a football shirt. He isn’t sure what his dad believed politically but, he thinks, he certainly looked like he was far-Right. For a while, George studied PPE at the Open University, but he dropped out after his mother developed a blood clot in her leg and was forced to have it amputated. Now, he serves as her carer. 

He told me he had always been interested in the Second World War. But while he “took his hat off” to Britain’s fallen soldiers, he was not a fan of Winston Churchill. His heroes — in order — were “The Führer”, Julius Caesar, Oswald Mosley, and Benito Mussolini.

***

How closely to embrace Germany’s example has defined this country’s neo-Nazis since 1945. For all in the movement, Hitler is an inspiration. To some, out on the esoteric fringes, he is a pagan folk deity, or the reincarnation of a Hindu god. But in a country that went to war to defeat fascism, he can also be an embarrassment. It was a great mistake, National Front founder A.K. Chesterton once argued, for nationalists to be tied too closely to the “putrescent Nazi corpse”. 

One man strapped closer to the corpse than most was Colin Jordan, whose undiluted vision of pan-national Aryan unity and undying commitment to paramilitary violence remains an inspiration for some. Born in Birmingham in 1923, he was first radicalized at Warwick School by Action, the house journal of the British Union of Fascists. During the war, he worked in a southeast London hospital, having been allowed to dodge military service because he supported a negotiated peace between Britain and Germany.

After the war, Jordan entered an extreme Right dominated by outlandish dilettantes. He joined a party led by the Duke of Bedford, who, according to Nancy Mitford, used to feed roast beef to his pet spider. He took intellectual inspiration from Arnold Leese, a world expert in Jew hatred and one-humped camels who avoided smoking and drinking with puritanical vigor. Writing in his autobiography, he claimed: “I think history records that England was at its best when it knew nothing of tobacco… and had no Jews.”

Across the Channel, Jordan developed ties with the alte kämpfer, or old fighters: former SS officers keen to mount a fascist resurgence. Then, after tumbling through a series of hardline groupuscules, he formed the National Socialist Movement (NSM) on 20 April 1961 — Hitler’s birthday. At the party’s Notting Hill headquarters, supporters were served a swastika cake. The NSM, which never had more than a few hundred members, was, according to a Met Police note at the time, composed of “converted fanatics” and “illiterate dupes”.

Later, the party held an international convention in a Gloucestershire woodland. Attendees, including American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell and a former French SS officer, hailed Jordan as their “world Führer”. Seemingly oblivious to such a momentous development, angry villagers invaded the camp and captured its swastika flag, triggering police officers to move in and put a stop to the gathering. 

Beneath this atmosphere of high camp stalked the threat of real violence. Searching the NSM offices later, the police found several tins of sodium chlorate, a weed killer that can be used as an explosive. Written on one were the words “Jew killer” and “place a few crystals in a sealed room full of Jews”. Convicted of breaching the public order act, Jordan was jailed for nine months. 

Prosecuted alongside him was John Tyndall, who got six months. On most points, the two men agreed. Both venerated Hitler and both sought a white, Judenfrei Britain. But while Jordan believed in international white unity, Tyndall preferred an Anglo-Saxon Reich. And while Jordan emphasized an unbreaking commitment to paramilitary violence, Tyndall attempted to build a broader, mass movement as the leader first of the National Front and later the British National Party. Britain’s neo-Nazis have alternated between these two poles ever since: the violent cell versus the populist party; the street thugs of Combat 18 versus the besuited electioneering of the BNP. The NSM would eventually mutate into the British Movement, which still exists as one of the country’s most overtly neo-Nazi groups. (The party declined to comment for this article, telling me only that “racial consciousness” had begun growing in Britain long before the Southport attack.) Jordan himself stepped back from active politics in 1974, after he was caught stealing red knickers from Tesco. He had been, he later claimed, the victim of a Jewish plot. 

***

After their fish and chips at Wetherspoons, the men of the NRP marched into a multi-story car park, got lost, and marched out again. Then they marched into town and set up a small gazebo on the high street. “If 500 people walk past and see that’s the same as giving out 500 leaflets,” Yerbury told me.

The rain began to pick up again and I walked underneath an overhanging shopfront with Alex Bramham, an affable, awkward man who grimaced as he smiled and seemed to alarm members of the public when he spoke. Lighting a cigarette, he told me that he had joined the NRP thanks to Yerbury. “He’s great to work with,” he said. “He’s very professional. His experience in the army shows. He’s put together a good foundation of policies and structure.” 

Just a few years earlier, Bramham’s politics had been far more moderate. As recently as 2021, he was standing for election for the Social Democratic Party and writing about going to Pride celebrations for The Critic. His recent social media activity suggested a slide into darker territory. “Hitler was incredibly cool and championed many excellent policies,” read one post on X made last year. “The land of Shakespeare, Newton and Turner,” went another, “is now overrun by negroes and controlled by the Jew.” Sharing an advert for a chocolate-scented body spray, he wrote: “The racial undertones to this are real, sinister and controlled by the Jew.”

“I was looking at your tweets because you followed me,” I told him as he smoked. “I noticed you were tweeting about ‘the Jew’?”

“Uh, I won’t comment on that if it’s—” Bramham said, breaking off as he began to walk away from me, his cigarette butt in hand. “I’m just going for a bin there.” 

“I’m just wondering because it’s something, obviously, you wanted to put that out there,” I said. “I’m not so familiar with the Jew?” 

“I tweet things in a personal capacity,” he replied. “And I campaign in a political capacity. Sorry, I’m not trying to walk away from you,” he added, as he walked away. When he stopped, he insisted he would not discuss his views. 

Then, finally alighting on a response, he said emphatically: “I strongly oppose usury.” And then he explained his views on usury. But he never told me why the Jew supports chocolate-scented body spray. 

***

At the stall, NRP members milled around and handed out flyers detailing the party’s manifesto. In Yerbury’s United Kingdom, only people of British heritage would have the inherent right to citizenship. The Green Belt would be defended. The state would be controlled by a “strong national government with total authority”. 

Is this what the public wants? For one bald man in a sheepskin jacket, the answer appeared to be yes. “I’m a gas engineer, so I travel to Nottingham, Derby, Wolves, everywhere, and I see the ruins of everywhere,” he said, as his son spun around a tree nearby. “Stafford’s a very unique place. We’re not overrun by immigration.” He unrolled a litany of complaints. Dossers were sacking off work by saying they had ADHD; women were having children to get benefits; gay people were pushing their lifestyle on children. Circling, the NRP cooed their agreement.

“It’s easy to identify the problem, but actually articulating an alternative is hard,” Yerbury told him. 

more from this author

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

“But the thing is, if you label me racist as soon as you bring it up, then it’s hard, isn’t it,” said the man. “And that’s what they do.” 

“I’ll be straight,” replied Yerbury. “I don’t care if people call me racist. I’m comfortable with it.”

After he had left, I asked Yerbury if he thought the engineer would have taken a leaflet had he been open about his Nazi sympathies. For the NRP’s leader to assume that anyone who wanted to restrict mass migration was a latent fascist seemed to be the same error made by some on the Left. Yerbury insisted that his party neither officially liked nor disliked Hitler. “It’s an academic point,” he insisted, “that is actually politically irrelevant.” 

***

For some of Yerbury’s fellow travelers, however, Hitler remains very relevant. Popping up at asylum hotel protests across Britain, White Vanguard, a neo-Nazi cell, have donned Helly Hansen jackets because the company’s logo, HH, might also stand for Heil Hitler. Posing for a photo with British Movement activists last year, members of the group sieg heiled in unison. 

Just as in the Sixties, Britain’s fascists today are forced to shoot for either mass appeal or sectarian purity. Mark Cotterill, the editor of Heritage and Destiny, a hardline magazine, told me he did not think the asylum hotel protests had provided the racial nationalist movement with opportunity for growth at all. They seemed too full of “druggies, football hooligans” and “Tommy Robinson-style civic nationalists”, he said. Since he had joined the National Front in 1977, the cause seemed to be at an all time low. The time for a large, radical political party may have passed, he said.

Yerbury, by contrast, appears to sincerely believe he can win democratic elections. But the distinction between these two strategies — vanguardism and mass politics — has always been blurred. Though Tyndall tried to win office through the National Front and the British National Party, he also venerated extremists and praised Manfred Roeder, a German neo-Nazi who carried out a bombing campaign against asylum seekers and Holocaust memorial sites. National Front activists regularly launched attacks against ethnic minorities and Left-wingers. And while Yerbury will not publicly call for violence, he has endorsed it online. Writing about Boris Johnson and his cabinet on YouTube in 2021, he asked: “Where’s Thomas Mair when you need him?”

***

When I emailed White Vanguard requesting an interview, they said they no longer spoke to journalists. “Look into Aryan Front,” they added. “They are more likely to engage and a bit more extreme than us.” Aryan Front, it transpired, are a lot more extreme. Made up of a hardcore of activists that split from White Vanguard last year, they advocate for a “racial holy war” against Jews and non-whites. 

The splinter group follows not the political ideology of Nazism but the religion of Creativity, which preaches racial separatism and is associated with a string of violent hate crimes in America. Online, Aryan Front has promoted the idea that journalists, among other such regime stooges, should be slain en masse on the “Day Of The Rope”. So, when I emailed, I was surprised to receive a polite response. 

“I didn’t arrive here through hatred,” their spokesman explained. “I arrived here through what I see as pattern recognition and self-interest.” The group aims not for power, they said, but to maintain loyalty between whites in preparation for the racial holy war they see as inevitable. “Survival, not governance, is the measure of success.” 

It can be hard to take such beliefs seriously. White Vanguard appears to have just a few dozen members; Aryan Front demos attract a handful of people at most. It is difficult to imagine that anything much could be achieved with such numbers. Within the state, though, the fear is that some will turn instead to terror. 

While MI5 say that Islamist extremism remains the primary threat to Britain, extreme Right-wing terror is a growing concern. According to a 2022 report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the risk of tech-savvy young men acting alone is on an “upward trajectory”. “Few belong to organized groups: they are difficult to identify and monitor,” it concluded. Since they tend to be highly individual and driven by personal grievances, it is challenging to identify how, why and when they may attack. 

Dominic Murphy, who until recently ran the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror squad, told me that he had spent his tenure concerned about unsophisticated, self-initiated terror attacks of any ideology. Over the past decade, however, the authorities had developed a growing concern about young people engaging in violent, Right-wing extremism. According to the Community Security Trust’s database, in the decade since Cox was killed, 16 extreme-Right terror plots have been foiled.

Thomas Mair’s attack was archetypal. A loner in the most total sense of the word, he’d developed hardline beliefs in isolation, ordering extremist reading material from America but shunning physical ties. “Tommy’s nowt to worry about,” his neighbors in Birstall, West Yorkshire were reported to have said of him. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” But inside his sparse, semi-detached home, he had built a library of Nazi literature as he fantasized about the white race being forced into a “long and very bloody struggle”.

Others move from the internet to real-world connection. Last year, three neo-Nazis were jailed at Sheffield Crown Court after stockpiling body armor and weapons, and plotting attacks against mosques and synagogues. Their leader, Brogan Stewart, had British Movement propaganda on his bedroom wall. He had attended a meeting of Yerbury’s National Support Detachment. 

Many of those who have not yet given up on politics, meanwhile, have begun to gravitate towards Restore Britain, buoyed by its spokesman’s ethnic definition of British identity. Take, for instance, Chris Mitchell, a self-described “Nazi-Buddhist” and Holocaust denier who has delivered leaflets for the party in Great Yarmouth and been photographed with Rupert Lowe. 

When Restore Britain allowed nationalists to join, “they jumped on board, and I can’t really blame them,” Cotterill told me. “If I could join a political party… I may well consider joining [Restore].” 

That the National Front and the BNP were led by neo-Nazis put a cap on their vote share, even if their policies on immigration commanded wide support. For the UK electorate, veneration of Hitler remains a red line. But Lowe, who has no such background and who gives the impression more of an avuncular Tory squire than a jackbooted thug, presents a different proposition. Britain’s fascists hope that he will provide them with an electoral vehicle they can manipulate to their own advantage. 

“If you want to be involved in electoral politics, the only party to join is Restore and the only man to follow is Rupert Lowe,” wrote Mark Collett on Telegram earlier this year. “To have a party led by an MP that is openly espousing an ethno-nationalist position is a reason to celebrate.”

Steve Laws, a remigration campaigner who has described Hitler as “misunderstood” and protested alongside White Vanguard, has also encouraged his followers to join Restore. “I would advise any of you not as damaging as myself to get in as branch officers, candidates etc,” he wrote on Telegram in February. “We can create a stronghold in that party and really hold some weight over the direction.”

When the NRP finished canvassing, they packed up their gazebo and retreated from the rain. Tom, a law student in a blue suit, expressed disdain at the small crowd Yerbury had managed to attract. He was local, he told me, and could have got 120 people to turn up if he’d tried. 

We chatted about his beliefs, and he said he liked Zoomer Historian, a Nazi-apologist YouTuber, and Varg Vikernes, an iconic black metal musician who had murdered his bandmate and now promotes an esoteric, extreme belief system. Tom said there were some good sides to Hitler’s rule and downplayed the Holocaust, but he also said that he did not wish to be publicly labelled far-Right. He wanted a career, he said, maybe in government. He was playing the long game. 

Access to the mound was previously uncontrolled, which is how someone — most likely organized criminals — managed to dump so much crud here in the first place, on the outskirts of the village of Bickershaw. Now, it squats behind a thin wire fence. A sign put up by Wigan Council states that unauthorized access is a criminal offense. It reads: “Children must not play on this site”.

Bickershaw skirts the edge of Makerfield, one of the safest Labour constituencies in the country. It therefore falls to Josh Simons, who has represented the seat since the last election, to make entreaties on the villagers’ behalf. He is a wiry, cerebral young man who, before the age of 30, had joined and then left Jeremy Corbyn’s office over antisemitism, enjoyed an academic career at Cambridge and Harvard, and written a book on democracy in the age of AI.

But Simons has now been overtaken by a scandal of his own. It features a think tank he used to run, some donations from very wealthy people, a consultancy firm, a Sunday Times investigation. It is very Westminster. On Saturday, as Israel and the US started bombing Iran, he slipped out a statement resigning as a Cabinet Office minister.

Back in Bickershaw, locals — one of whom described the area a “black hole” — seem more worried about the mound. Daunted by the cost, no one wants to take responsibility. Not the King, who came to own part of the land on which the waste sits by accident and feudal right; nor Wigan Council, who have no money; nor the Environment Agency, who have no power. Residents are left furious that the latter is cleaning up an illegal dump in Oxfordshire, but not the one on their doorstep. Campaigning vigorously for May’s council polls, Reform UK, who came second in Makerfield at the last general election, sense blood.

When I visit Bolton House Road in the week leading up to Simons’ resignation, there isn’t much of a smell. This is not unusual, according to Chloe Humphreys, a blonde 29-year-old who lives in a neat, whitewashed house at the end of the street — closer than anyone else to the mound. The stench depends on the direction of the wind and how warm the weather has been. When it is bad, though, it smells as if Chloe is living with her head stuck inside a bin.

More from this author

The revolt on Streeting's doorstep

By Felix Pope

As we stand in her porch, she points out the broken fence across the road and abandoned trailers and dumped scrap metal beyond. “People are really nice around here but if you look back on Google Maps in 2011 people had pride, they made an effort,” she says. “Now it’s a state.” They may not have realized it themselves, but whoever dumped the waste was exploiting an area that was already on the decline, like a virus taking advantage of a body wracked by disease. “You kind of feel a bit like, ‘what’s the point? No one else cares’,” Humphreys says. For residents to do up their houses would be like, “chucking glitter at feces, really.”

When Chloe’s father, Andrew Humphreys, steps into the porch I ask his opinion of Simons. “I think he thinks everyone up North is stupid,” he says. “And if he thinks the person he’s talking to knows what he’s talking about he tries to shut him down.” I had only asked about the waste on their doorstep, but Andrew pivots immediately to Simons’ scandal: “To pay £36,000 to investigate two journalists is like…” he trails off, shaking his head.

Across Makerfield, knowledge of the affair seems hazy. Many people I speak to seem to have a sense that he has done something wrong. Fewer can articulate exactly what that is. Counting in his favor is a more pervasive sense that all politicians are screwing us in one way or another. If we know which rules Simons broke, then at least his sin is public.

The seat itself is a patchwork of urban and rural areas spread out below Wigan, in the badlands between Manchester and Liverpool. Flags — Union Jacks in some areas, St George’s Crosses in others — flutter from lampposts. Makerfield has been rock solid Labour for over 100 years now, but no one I meet can muster much enthusiasm for the party. According to an MRP poll published by Electoral Calculus in January, Reform would take Makerfield with over half the vote if a general election were held tomorrow. Simons, who won 45% in 2024, would crash to as low as 19%.

Ashton-in-Makerfield, the constituency’s largest town, is red-brick and handsome, albeit in a faded kind of way. A library endowed by Andrew Carnegie juts out at one central junction, but this great slab of Victorian architecture has been shuttered for years. Ashton Market was closed in 2017. There are “too many nail shops, vape shops, charity shops, kebab shops,” a middle-aged woman in a green apron tells me from behind the counter of a bakery.

She voted Labour because she was brought up supporting them and probably will do so again. “They’re doing a slightly better job.” She trusts Nigel Farage as far as she could throw him. But, she says, migration is a big issue. “People don’t feel safe in their own town any more, especially if they go out on their own at night.”

Personnel antipathy to Farage aside, it is this profile of voter that will make Reform confident they can make inroads here. Makerfield has a lot of working-class residents but is not particularly poor, falling near the middle of English constituencies in terms of deprivation. Demography helps in other ways too: at the last census, Makerfield was 97% white.

Altogether, then, many here vote Labour more from ancestral ties than conviction. Speaking last year at Reform’s North West Conference, Simons’ 2024 rival, Robert Kenyon, told supporters that Labour didn’t care that towns such as his had been transformed by the transplantation of “fighting-age males”. Talking to The Telegraph afterwards, the plumber said that the local Reform machine had “ramped up massively”. Already, he claimed, the party was putting on training workshops and gearing up for a fight.

Simons is well aware of the risk. Writing to ministers before last year’s spending review, he urged them to commit funding to build a road between Bolton and Wigan before the region lost faith that Labour might actually improve their lives. First proposed after the Second World War, Simons called the road link “among the most over-promised and under-delivered” infrastructure projects in the country. Certainly, the road between the two towns is often clogged bumper-to-bumper, slowing driving speeds to a crawl. Locals, Simons said, are “tired of being promised change but seeing little”.

Losing nearby Gorton and Denton in last week’s byelection, Labour saw its vote cannibalized from two directions. While some rejected the party over mass migration, others are turning Leftwards thanks to Gaza and Keir Starmer’s hardening rhetoric on asylum. Shaun Medvid-Staunton, keffiyeh-clad and walking his shitsus through Platt Bridge, a drab suburb running along an A road south of Wigan, is archetypal of the latter camp.

He tells me about how he was the first person to vote for Labour in Chester in 1997. He talks about serving as the in-house photographer for the party’s local branch when Ian McCartney — who described himself as the “Socialist MP for Makerfield” — represented the constituency. But, he says, “I watched the party become gentrified.” He considers Simons to be Blue Labour, not a proper Leftie. He will never vote for the party again.

Unlike in Manchester, there is no ethnic minority vote to speak of here that the Green Party might peel away with Urdu-language campaign videos. At the last election, they lost their deposit. But increasing their support among progressives such as Medvid-Staunton could help to deprive Simons of victory. Several people tell me they’re considering the party simply because they are neither the Conservatives nor Labour. One man, drinking alone in the town’s JD Wetherspoons, says he hopes Starmer will be replaced by Andy Burnham. If he isn’t, he may flip to the Greens.

If some are dumping Labour for more radical options, many others seem exhausted of politics altogether. At a gray pebbledash building, hunched behind a row of terraced houses, I meet Sarah Myler. When, as a small child, her daughter was diagnosed with serious health problems, Myler decided to teach her and her siblings herself. She discovered there was no home parenting group for Wigan — so she set one up. Then she realized how many elderly people in Ashton were lonely and how many others were broke, so she founded a community center. “I think it’s just, you see issues,” she tells me as we sit between rails of second-hand clothes and a pay-what-you-like café. “People moan about it but I’m more like ‘well, how can I fix this?’”

More from this author

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

A few years ago, Myler’s eldest daughter, Scarlett, was elected as one of three independent councillors for her ward. She was just 18. “I think people are just so, like, pissed off with the big parties,” her mom says. “So we tried Tories, nope. We’ve tried Labour, nope. It’s just picking between two bad things, really, isn’t it?”

Around Makerfield, the British state has proved unwilling — or incapable — of fixing problems. The illegally dumped waste squats by Bolton House Road; the road to Bolton is unbuilt; the high street keeps declining. A retreat into hyper-local politics and community organizing seems a natural consequence. Myler has been following Rupert Lowe’s independent inquiry into the rape gangs with interest. He, like her, took action after the Government declined to do so. If Myler had her way, she tells me, every political party would be dissolved.

As we speak, a gaggle of elderly locals chat on the other side of the room. I walk over and ask who they might support at the council elections. “They’re all as bad as each other,” says a man in a gray hoody. “At the last elections one man said, ‘I vote Labour’. I said, ‘what’re their policies?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I vote for them ‘cause my dad does.’” The group all laugh.

Then an older man, blind in one eye, says he can remember canvassing for a Labour candidate in St Helens when he was eight. “There was a gang of us running around singing ‘vote Hartley Shawcross, vote Hartley Shawcross’,” he says. “But I’ll tell you what — he only did one term in St Helens because he got what he wanted.” And then Sylvia Wilkinson, another independent councillor, whose thick gray hair is streaked with white, adds: “They’re all the same!”

But Hartley Shawcross did not do one term and leave because he’d got what he wanted. He served for 13 years. And he was not the same as any other MP: he was Britain’s lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, filleting members of the Nazi high command with an elegant grace. As attorney general, he ensured Lord Haw-Haw was hanged. Now, he is no more than a punchline. In its traditional home, all Labour representatives have become just as bad as each other. And if they’ve not yet been exposed for some disgrace, as Simons now has, their collective future still looks grim.

They splash through puddles on their way into town, but after a while the weather eases. The patrol wears mostly black, and stab-proof vests, though their work has not yet led to violence. Docherty, a joiner by day who founded Scots Active last year, has filled his pockets with the essentials: a yellow tube of naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses; a flashlight; a pack of cigarettes; and a can of 2in1 Self-Defense Spray — a legal alternative to pepper spray that stains an assailant’s clothes.

Scots Active is just one of a number of night patrols that have formed across Glasgow in the past year. Dubbed vigilantes by the media, and disavowed by the police, they insist they are merely concerned citizens. The groups are doing “something the government cannae do”, says Lee, a lumbering young security guard who’s joined us to provide protection.

Suggested Reading

How Nicola Sturgeon failed Scotland

By Kathleen Stock

Trudging about until the early hours of the morning, the group hands out blankets to the homeless, and checks bridges along the Clyde where people might be considering suicide. Their primary motivation, however, and the reason why they have drawn such controversy, is their belief that the city’s women and girls are under threat from an influx of migrants. Drawn by a generous housing policy, more asylum seekers have ended up in Glasgow than any other local authority in Britain. Under the strain of supporting them all, tensions are beginning to rise.

Docherty’s patrol is the most visible manifestation of the city’s troubles. As we walk for hours, up and down throughout the city center, we see others. A teenager hunched into the corner of a subway stop, a glass pipe pushed up against his mouth. A sweet, childlike man with an Alsatian tied to his waist, who tells us that earlier that week he’d waded into a lake to die until the dog splashed in after him. Homeless men, vibrating in the cold.

Glasgow slumped in the 20th century, depopulating faster than any other British city. Then it began to recover, becoming something of a model for how post-industrial areas might be revived. Now, though, progress seems to be stalling, if not reversing. Youth violence is ticking up, with Will Linden of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit warning of a sharp rise in knife crime. Glasgow still has the most drug deaths in Scotland — and Scotland the most in Europe.

The city’s Victorian architecture is meanwhile crumbling and burning and collapsing. When I arrive, a cube next to the train station remains cut off, weeks after a fire ripped out from a vape shop at the base of a 19th-century building. Peering over the barricades around it, I see black, charred stone.

In a 2023 essay, Rory Olcayto, an architectural writer, provoked debate when he described the city as a shipwreck. “Psychologically Glasgow is paralyzed,” he wrote. “It can’t imagine a future for itself.” The conurbation is too vast and sprawling for Scotland to cope with. It has discarded much of its past, but is unsure of what its future will be, leaving only a trite marketing slogan: People Make Glasgow. “It’s not the same,” bemoaned Ally McCoist of the city earlier this month, introducing a note of despair to TalkSport’s football coverage. “It breaks your heart to walk about Glasgow.”

Now, Reform UK, campaigning on the slogan “Glasgow is broken”, are predicted to break through at the Scottish Parliament election on 7 May. According to an MRP poll published last week, the party should win two seats in the city, pushing Labour into third place both here and across Scotland as a whole. With its growing discontent, anti-migrant neurosis and extrajudicial street politics, the country seems to be swiftly converging with its southern neighbor.

As the patrol tramps through central Glasgow, the crack-smoking teenager seems to appear behind us. He’s a lookout, Docherty claims, keeping an eye on Scots Active for a gang of drug dealers who loiter around the St Enoch subway station. As we pass by them, I see about a dozen of these boys hovering beside its curved glass wall, a puffa-clad mass.

Despite Glasgow’s recent travails, it used to be a far more violent place. While we walk, Docherty tells me about his adolescence on a “scheme”, or estate, in Govanhill, an ethnically diverse neighborhood south of the Clyde. He was raised amid running street street battles with other young “teams”, or gangs, from different areas. His secondary school, he claims, was a “race war” where white children battled Pakistani and black rivals. In one fight, a boy stabbed and stabbed at him, wildly, as he struggled to get away. It was only when Docherty finally broke free that he realized one of his testicles had been severed from his body.

In the press, Scots Active has been labeled far-Right. When I put this to Lisa, she insists that the group doesn’t discriminate and would help anyone in need. Yet discussing the supposed drug dealers, who are mainly non-white, Docherty makes his racialized view of Scottish identity clear. “They might have been born here,” he says. “But no, they’re not from Scotland. They’re not young Scottish boys.” That’s part of a broader trend: Scots Active has tapped into a Scottish ecosystem of anti-migrant politics, protesting alongside groups such as Unite The Clans, which has rallied around the country.

Later, Docherty and I begin talking about the suicidal man walking his Alsatian, and he says he has always struggled with depression himself. Sometimes he blacks out and starts smashing things up: his house, his mum’s house, the building site he works on. The only thing that quiets the negative voices in his head, he tells me, is self-medicating with cannabis.

Audrey Dempsey, too, has witnessed the alienation and violence bred by poverty. When she was hired as an addiction support worker, back in the 2000s, she says things were better than today. Then, Glasgow suffered some of the sharpest budget cuts of any local authority in Britain. The charity Dempsey founded in response — No. 1 Baby and Family Support Service — aims to make up some of the gap by providing second-hand prams, cots, clothes and toys. Visiting her charity’s users, Dempsey finds terrible, debilitating conditions. In one house, she met a mother who was cooking for her children on £1 disposable BBQs, bought after their electricity ran out. Schools approach her asking for nappies because their pupils were never toilet trained. She believes such colossal breakdowns are partly fueled by the state’s perverse system of incentives. “It’s as if,” she says, “they’re trying to create a benefits culture in Scotland.”

In 2022, Dempsey was elected to Glasgow City Council as a Labour representative for Springburn. Having expanded as a center of railway manufacturing, the area collapsed after the Second World War, becoming one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The high rises built here in the late 20th century, to rehouse those moved out of tenements, became hives of social dysfunction. In 2010, a survey found it to be the most-feared neighborhood in Scotland for violent crime.

I meet Dempsey in a café on a retail park amid acres of tarmacked carpark, close to where William Wallace was captured by the English in 1305. She sketches a bleak vision of her city. “What’s been happening for the past 18, 19 years is definitely not progress,” she says. “The place is filthy. It’s run down. Services don’t exist anymore.” Last month, it was reported that health and social care services in Glasgow are facing a funding shortfall of almost £34 million.

Contributing to this budgetary pressure is the asylum system. Since 1999, Glasgow has been part of the national refugee dispersal system, in which the Home Office spreads asylum seekers across the country. Today, over 6,500 such people are currently in, with more than half of those in Glasgow. Once they are given refugee status, however, the migrants become the responsibility of the local authority. And in Scotland, homelessness legislation means that everybody must be housed. As for Glasgow, which declared a “housing emergency” in 2023, this has become a totemic issue.

Like Scots Active, with whom she has been out patrolling, Dempsey now fears ethnic violence. With community halls and public institutions shuttered, she believes it is impossible to properly integrate migrants. The councillor is convinced that race riots such as those that swept England in 2024 — but avoided Scotland — could break out here.

Her shifting views on migration, Dempsey tells me, have been driven by what happened to her daughter. Last year, she says, her 12-year-old girl was attacked by other children. She believes this was racially motivated and so, in its wake, asked at a council meeting about “racist attacks on white children and teachers”. When her comments were made public, the Labour Party suspended her. Now, she is standing for Reform in the Scottish parliamentary elections next week.

Dempsey is hopeful the party might provide the radical change she believes Glasgow needs. When I suggest that Nigel Farage is not known for his focus on child poverty, she agrees. “I have to be quite frank and say when I think of Reform in Scotland, I don’t think of Nigel Farage, ’cause I’ve never met him,” she says. “I think Malcolm Offord. And he gets it. He understands it. Now he does.”

Offord, previously a Conservative member of the House of Lords, was recently unveiled as Reform’s leader in Scotland. Dempsey argues he demonstrated his commitment to change  learning about Glasgow with her by visiting a homeless shelter and walking around with the night patrols. “Are [Reform] gonna be Tory point two?” she asks. “I think there’s enough people in there who are hellbent in making that not the case.”

Dempsey tells me she’s still angry that Sky News misrepresented her views on migration after she spoke to them last year. She is baffled that the journalist who interviewed her had doubted her belief that asylum and immigration were the biggest issues facing Glasgow. “I said to him, ‘have you never walked down Sauchiehall Street and spoke to people?’ You know, you talk to anybody, that’s the type of thing they say to you.”

The next day, I visit Sauchiehall Street myself. The route is Glasgow’s central shopping thoroughfare but, in recent years, it has declined precipitously. I go past vape shops, kebab houses, a half-demolished building, its facade ripped away. Delivery drivers on electric bikes weave past pedestrians at speed. Andrew Neil recently dubbed the area’s condition a “national scandal” but I struggle to see what makes it unique. It looks like every other high street in Britain.

Of the people I speak to, none say that immigration is the biggest issue facing Glasgow. Instead they list the rising cost of food, bills and gas, the closure of centers where the elderly might meet, the pathetic standard of the politicians who govern them. Catherine, a small woman in tortoiseshell glasses, thinks pedophiles could never be rehabilitated. She would like to be the prime minister, she adds sunnily, so that she could kill them herself.

That isn’t to say migration is a non-issue. Brian, sitting alone on a bench, says migration is not a problem at all, before complaining about people coming into the country and being housed immediately. He’s a socialist and voted Labour for decades before flipping to the SNP years ago. Labour had abandoned their principles. Is Glasgow broken? “Most cities are broken,” he says. “Most inner-city areas have their issues.”

Over the past century, Govan became synonymous with such decline. The neighborhood, on the south side of the Clyde, had once been a world-center of shipbuilding, in 1913 producing more vessels than all of Germany combined. But such heights just increased the impact of the eventual crash. After 1945, the residents who could moved out to newly built social housing. Tenements were torn down to leave gaping scars in the streetscape.

On a windy afternoon, I visit a soot-blackened church where a gaggle of children are trying to bodyslam grown men into the ground. This is the Glasgow School of Wrestling, founded by Ravie Davie, a former young team member turned performer. Violence, Davie tells me, appears to be rising again after a period of decline. “A lot more kids are getting murdered or stabbed,” he says. “A lot are being put in prison.” The numbers partly reflect this: though the total number of children accused of violent crime has actually decreased, the level of those guilty of attempted murder has seen a sharp jump.

The trend seems to have an ironic cause. Because of Glasgow’s success in tackling postcode violence over the past decade, children can now travel more freely around the city. And that means they are more able to meet up for fights — and are more valuable employees for organized crime. If Docherty fought for “respect” and due to boredom, teenagers are now sucked into a more nefarious, profit-driven criminal vortex.

Below a monumental pipe organ, I speak to Davie’s cousin, Zander. The pair put a postmodern twist on their area’s reputation for violence, wrestling in character as tracksuited hoodlums named the Govan Team. Now, Zander says, they want to help get local children out of their bedrooms and away from trouble by teaching them this art.

Above Govan’s skyline loom vast sheds. It is along the docks here that Paul Sweeney began working as a shipbuilder as a young man, seduced by the romance of the Clyde’s industrial past. After being tapped by Sarah Brown, Gordon’s wife, he became a Labour MP and now represents Springburn in the Scottish Parliament. I had wanted to talk to him because Glasgow has recently been experiencing something of a shipbuilding revival.

Near where we meet stands the newly erected Janet Harvey Hall — a vast, otherworldly metal structure — where two Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. BAE has invested £300 million in modernizing these facilities, where new capabilities to combat drones and hypersonic missiles are being built. With history restarting amid global conflict, the Clyde may yet find itself central to British security again.

As we talk, Sweeney and I walk through Fairfield Heritage, a museum in the offices of what was once Glasgow’s preeminent shipping firm, now in the shadow of BAE’s sheds. He is wearing a Fairfield Heritage t-shirt and colorful socks with little drawings of trains on them. I ask him about the glut of asylum seekers that some believe is tearing Glasgow apart.

The SNP government in Holyrood had created a powerful incentive for refugees to present themselves in Scottish cities like Glasgow because single men have just as much of a right to be housed as families, Sweeney says, but they had failed to build enough houses to keep up with the ensuing demand. “It feels politically disingenuous to build the ends but not the means. That’s kind of my critique of the SNP is that they’re always about good things, nice things for everyone, but never actually make the difficult trade-off decisions.”

Even so, Sweeney dismisses the idea that migrants are depriving Glaswegians of resources, something he says has been egged on by Reform. Most of the party’s voters he had met were angry, older men who had spent too much time watching GB News. “If anything, one thing Glasgow needs is more people. It’s a city that’s the most depopulated in the UK. If anything, Glasgow needs an orchestrated attempt to reinflate its population.”

More from this author

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

We’d now reached what appeared to be the former Fairfield boardroom. It was all crown molding, thick red carpets and long wooden models of transatlantic ocean liners: an abandoned palace of the Glaswegian bourgeoisie. These men, who had fused Adam Smith’s Enlightenment with engineering genius, transformed the city, turning it into the dockyard of empire, the most easterly American city, the petri dish of industrial modernity. That seemed a long time ago now.

Glasgow had gone through a period of recovery since about 1990, Sweeney says, but then hit a phase of “one step forward, two steps back”. Devolution allowed the SNP to centralize power in Edinburgh, dragging resources eastward. He hopes the city might be granted a directly elected metro mayor, like Liverpool and Manchester, and thinks he would be good at the job.

Though he expresses optimism about Labour’s chances on 7 May, Sweeney also says that Starmer had become a drag on Labour’s chances of taking power in Holyrood, which now look slim to nonexistent. Anas Sarwar calling for the prime minister to resign had been essential, though. “It’s a bit like amputating an arm, you know? You would rather keep it, but if it’s gonna kill you, you might as well lose it.”

Next week, the SNP are expected to win Scotland again. The only remaining question seems to be whether they can claim an outright majority of seats. Neither outcome is likely to save the Glasgow shipwreck.

The night I accompany them, Scots Active’s patrol ends early. It had been a quiet night. They had seen a figure preparing to throw themselves to their death in the river, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a pole. Lisa had approached a lone girl, but she was just waiting for a bus. Some of the men had opened a mysterious, gray door behind which they feared migrants were doing something nefarious, but it only revealed a confused man who told them it was a pool club. Everywhere, phantasmagoric horrors seemed to lie in wait. But none were quite as they seemed.

It is an autumn Sunday morning in Hendon, and not many voters are opening their doors. It’s also Sukkot, a festival commemorating the end of the 40 years in which Moses’s followers wandered the desert, and in this heavily Jewish enclave of north-west London many seem to want to be left to celebrate in peace. For the dozen or so Reform UK canvassers who have gathered to leaflet here for an upcoming council by-election, the day is proving a disappointment.

Cunningham, who is becoming increasingly taken with the area as we walk, seems undeterred. “That’s a lovely porch,” she tells me as we pass big, detached Thirties villas set back far from the street. “It’s quite American. It’s like somewhere you would go trick or treating.” Wearing a blazer, running trainers and a bright pink strap that connects her bright pink phone to her body, Cunningham is bouncing up to people’s doors with a Tiggerish enthusiasm. “It comes down to getting votes out on the day,” she tells me, recalling her own campaign for a council seat in Westminster. “I was driving old ladies to the polls.”

When, in 2022, Cunningham stood in that election and won, she was a Conservative. In June last year, though, she quit the party and accused them of letting the country down. Now, she will run as the Reform candidate for London mayor. Announcing the news yesterday, Nigel Farage hailed her as passionate, articulate and entirely capable of defeating Sadiq Khan.

For Reform, Cunningham represents a shot at mainstream respectability in the capital. She is a former CPS prosecutor who now fronts Reform’s campaigns on crime — a major theme in their electoral strategy in London. She is a practicing Muslim and child of Egyptian immigrants outraged at the failure of other Muslims and immigrants to properly integrate. And, in somewhat of a pattern among Reform candidates, she is attractive and charismatic, with a telegenic smile and the zeal of the convert who knows their cause is on the rise.

With the collapse of the Conservative and Labour parties nationally, Reform hopes that with Cunningham as their figurehead they might make some headway in London. And while victory in the mayoral race remains unlikely, Tory supporters in the city’s affluent outer doughnut and disaffected members of the working class could be up for grabs.

Speaking to me at length over the course of a few weeks last October, Cunningham insisted that though open support for Reform remained “taboo” for some Londoners, they were waking up to her party’s appeal nonetheless. “There’s so much excitement with Reform because before there was never a choice, right? In London you were kinda Left-leaning, you went Labour. If you were kind of Right-leaning, you went Tory, and you didn’t really have a choice.”

Accompanying Cunningham through Hendon is a mixed crowd that attests to the genuine diversity of Reform’s support in the capital. Anirudh Shah, a gas and electric engineer who migrated to Finchley from India, tells me that he abandoned the Conservative Party for Reform because small business owners have been shortchanged for too long. “I believe Mr Farage will give back to those who pay,” he says. Among the British-Indians he speaks to, Shah claims, many feel the same way.

Suggested reading

Reform is coming for Dagenham

By Fred Sculthorp

Trailing behind this posse, accompanying their son in a buggy, is Michael Cunningham, a handsome but slightly pallid American financier married to the mayoral candidate. We discuss Britain’s industrial decline and Laila’s unflagging energy. When she stood in Westminster, Michael believes, many people voted for her personally with no thought for the Conservative party. “She comes across as very authentic,” he says. “Authenticity is the biggest currency in the world.”

Several days before the canvassing session in Hendon, I’d met Laila Cunningham for the first time in the gleaming marble atrium of Millbank Tower. In 1997, the Labour Party had their headquarters in this very building. In 2010, the Conservative Party was based in another in the same complex. Now, Reform have moved in and are busy planning for what they believe could well be their own national triumph.

In a suite of offices many floors up from the ground, Cunningham and I sit in a room with a small photo of Farage and his dog affixed to the doorframe. A clock on the wall displays the wrong time. She leans forward and then back to emphasize her points, speaking with all the kind of fiery passion you’d expect on the stump.

When I ask about Reform’s voter base in Dagenham, where Cunningham believes the party is winning support, she pivots quickly into what sounds like a jumbled summation of her future mayoral campaign. “Who the hell voted for less policing in London?” she asks. “Who the hell voted for no police stations? Who the hell voted for so many immigrants that they’re working hard to pay for, the Boriswave. No one. Who the hell voted for the highest taxation since World War Two? No one.”

As a councilor, I say, she was hardly high profile. Now she is a regular on GB News, and feted by the national press. Has she enjoyed the transition? Joining Reform, Cunningham insists, has liberated her. “It feels great,” she says. “I have a lot to say.” Public speaking, she continues, has become a joy. “With the Conservatives, I used to dread it. You know, I’d be like, ‘Uh, yeah, I’m really sorry, we messed up.’ That’s why I wasn’t active on Twitter. I didn’t really say anything because I couldn’t.” Now, Cunningham exudes confidence during her regular appearances on GB News, including one in which she left Labour stalwart Barry Gardiner looking a little flummoxed. When I tell her that it seemed if she were enjoying herself tremendously, she says that is thanks to her family.

Cunningham’s parents migrated to Britain from Egypt in the Sixties, fleeing Nasser, pan-Arabism and socialism. Arriving with little cash, by her account, they took a succession of menial jobs before borrowing money and becoming small-scale property developers doing up houses. “They worked very, very hard,” their daughter recalls.

Born in 1977, Cunningham grew up in Kensal Rise with four siblings. The cut-and-thrust of political debate in the family home (she would later become the only child to support Brexit) is what she believes sharpened her rhetorical abilities. Her parents’ background has also shaped her political convictions. She believes that Egypt thrived under the British, whom she credits with building beautiful buildings and introducing the rule of law.

More broadly, Cunningham resents the Islamic religious fundamentalism that emerged across the Middle East and beyond through the latter half of the 20th century. And now, looking at Britain’s issues with homegrown Muslim terror, she believes our government should copy the methods of repression used by Egypt’s secular military regime, under which, she says, “you just say the word ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, you’re thrown into a horrific jail”. (According to Amnesty International, the Sisi dictatorship arrested some 1,500 Egyptians for political reasons in 2024, with torture endemic in the country’s prisons.)

Cunningham is similarly strident about her own childhood, giving the London of the Eighties a sepia-toned glow. A sports-mad child who played around the city and slept with a basketball in her bed, she admits that Kensal Rise was less gentrified back then, but stresses that she never felt as unsafe there as she does now. There was no knife crime and no gangs in balaclavas. But now, Cunningham believes, crime is out of control in London. It is this argument, more than anything else, that forms the core of Reform’s campaign to win support in the city. “I dare you to walk through the West End of London after 9 o’clock of an evening wearing jewelry,” Farage told a journalist last year. “You wouldn’t do it. You know that I’m right. You wouldn’t do it.” Attacking Khan, for his part, Donald Trump has argued that “crime in London is through the roof”.

Statistically, the evidence is far less clear. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, crime has been on a steady decline both nationally and in the capital. Farage and Cunningham, however, do not accept that measure as reliable. “It is not actual data,” she says. “It’s people’s opinions and what they’ve been through. And surveys are not accurate.” London is “definitely” more violent than it was 20 years ago, she insists to me. In the year to September 2025, however, there were 95 victims of homicide recorded by the Met, less than half the number compared to two decades ago.

What seems clearer to most living in London is that, like in much of Britain, the public realm is deteriorating. Phone theft is up and the number of people living on the streets is at record levels. Friends regularly recount stories of men smoking crack openly on buses and subways.

As a mother of seven herself, Cunningham worries about her own children growing up in the city. When one of her sons wanted a “semi-nice” jacket for his birthday she told him no: he would just get mugged for it. She puts this change in part down to the lack of visible policing, and an absence of police stations. Young people, she claims, have meanwhile been abandoned to social media and allowed to run wild.

Cunningham would like to see stop-and-search rates increased and rejects the idea that this would drive a wedge between the Metropolitan Police and black Londoners. “That’s the political narrative,” she says. “The real narrative on the ground is mums do not want boys carrying knives on the street.”

For Cunningham, the softness of our criminal justice system is a central factor in the capital’s decline. She recounts a scene she witnessed in a youth court in which, she says, a teenage girl accused of stamping on her schoolmate’s head was summoned to face justice. Putting on an effete, pathetic accent, Cunningham parodies an anxious criminal justice worker: “Hello, Susie. Welcome to court. We’re all here to help you. You know, we’re here to make sure that you are understood. Whatever you need.” Then back to her normal voice: “The judge was like, ‘Can you take your sunglasses off?’ She’s like, ‘Fuck no’.”

When I suggest that her beliefs are well summed up by the phrase “spare the rod and spoil the child”, she agrees. “They’re treated with white gloves when it should be, ‘what you did is wrong and we’re going to teach you a lesson that will take you into adulthood that it’s wrong’.” According to Cunningham, the failure to adequately discipline children is tied to a deeper moral slump in Britain.

She believes that feeling pride in Britain and your family has been treated as shameful; it has become acceptable to be promiscuous; one of her sons is asked “all the time” by teachers what his gender is. “I would like to normalize tradition,” she adds firmly. “I would like to normalize love of country, love of family, love of community.”

Suggested reading

Has Mumsnet fallen for Farage?

By Mary Harrington

One of the most significant shifts that London has undergone over the past few decades involves demographics. With migrants coming from across the globe, the metropolis has sucked in a dizzying variety of communities at an historically unprecedented rate. As a consequence, white Britons have made up a minority of the city’s population since 2011. For some, such as Khan, who has described diversity as London’s “greatest strength”, this development is evidence of an economic and cultural success story. On the Right, however, ethnic diversity is increasingly presented as a threat to Britain’s stability.

Shortly before I first met Cunningham, Robert Jenrick was recorded discussing a recent visit he had made to Handsworth, a heavily Asian and black neighborhood of Birmingham. “It was absolutely appalling,” he told a local Conservative association, with his comments later published in The Guardian. “It’s as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country. But the other thing I noticed there was that it was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to. In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there I didn’t see another white face.”

The same, I suggest to Cunningham, could be said about some parts of London. Does she share the shadow justice secretary’s concerns? “I do have an issue with what he said because I don’t think being British comes down to the color of your skin.” Her issue is with people not speaking English and not being “culturally assimilated with Britain”. It was quite sad, she adds, that for Jenrick the problem seemed to come down to people’s ethnicity, rather than their values.

Unlike him, she continues, Reform is concerned with culture rather than race. In her eyes, parts of London are “full burqa with burqas sold on the market”: and therefore pose a problem. While London’s identity has always been shaped by the migration, not least in the case of Cunningham’s own family, the politician herself is concerned that some areas of the city now feel as if they are not in England at all. “You know,” she tells me, “all the shops are in a different language. Women are walking around in burqas, and I’m like, ‘what, what’s happened?’ I don’t think that’s a good thing at all and I think that is a failure of our government.”

While she remains an observant Muslim and credits the religion with promoting kindness and charity, Cunningham also thinks there should not be Eid celebrations in Trafalgar Square, which have been running since 2006. “We’re not a Muslim city,” she tells me. When I ask if she would also like to cancel public Diwali celebrations, she responds that she would not say that right now. “People are upset that Britishness and British holidays are not represented enough.”

According to Cunningham, though, if London’s communities have become more segregated, it is down not to mass migration and multiculturalism in of themselves, but rather something else: the Labour Party. “They put people in boxes,” she says. “I grew up in London, had friends from all walks of life. Honestly, we never even saw color, we never saw religion.”

The week after we speak at Reform HQ, Cunningham makes an appearance at the Policy Exchange think tank to debate criminal justice policy with Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, and Jonathan Hinder, a Labour MP who previously served as an officer in the Met. For Cunningham, the discussion, again on rising crime in the capital, is firmly in her professional wheelhouse.

A former prosecutor herself, she was anonymously dubbed a “vigilante mum” by MyLondon after stalking a gang of muggers that she believed had targeted her son. Addressing the small crowd of journalists and other attendees at Policy Exchange’s Westminster office, she begins by recounting this story, which has become something of a calling card. The comparison with Philp and Hinder’s own speeches, both fairly technocratic and dry, couldn’t be more striking, especially when Cunningham really gets into her stride.

The mayor has deprioritized public safety, she claims. You could probably find a knife hidden in “most places” around London because gangs are throwing them away to avoid arrest. The need for Arabic-language translators is hurting London courts. When Hinder refers to falling crime rates, Cunningham interrupts his address to tell him his facts are wrong — and doesn’t stop until the moderator tells her she must allow him to speak. The look on Hinder’s face reminds me of Barry Gardiner.

It’s hard to watch Cunningham in action here and not see a new politics taking shape in real time: demotic and blunt, always in attack mode, and totally uninterested in forming any consensus with Britain’s governing class. Philp and Hinder prepared for a Westminster panel discussion; Cunningham was ready for a brawl.

After the event ends, Cunningham disappears behind a curtain with her fellow panelists. Two young women from an Eastern European embassy tell me they have seen her on GB News, and think she speaks common sense. In their country, they say, they do not have to worry about their phone being snatched. The government just arrests criminals. Now, living in London, they have to think carefully about where they can play Pokemon Go.

At this year’s local elections and in the 2028 mayoral race, we will find out how many people in this city share their perspective. If Cunningham has anything to do with it, that number might be higher than many expect.

Some were wearing Christmas hats and one woman was selling them, though many were also convinced that the festival’s spirituality had been downplayed in favor of secular commercialization. To get to this gathering, attendees had walked down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, which is currently displaying an elegant wooden nativity scene, a giant menorah and a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth featuring the faces of hundreds of trans and non-binary people, which seemed a fitting reflection of our confused public realm.

They had come at the invitation of Robinson to sing carols and, they said, to put the Christ back in Christmas. In September, I had watched tens of thousands march down the same street for a protest organized by the former EDL leader in which Christianity took a surprisingly prominent role. Demonstrators brandished giant wooden crosses and framed photos of Charlie Kirk, who had been shot just days before.

By contrast, the carol service was to be a more intimate affair, with around 1,000 in attendance. The crowd was genuinely diverse, with many fervently devout Africans trying to recruit to their own churches and noticeably fewer young white men than at a typical Robinson march.

Like Robinson, many of those at the service had little time for the Church of England. Steve Edwards, sitting in a collapsible chair as he ate a chicken bake, said he found the Church of England disgusting. “It’s full of wokeism,” he told me, a Union flag flying above him. “I went to church as a kid but it was not my choice. I don’t go now.” The advertisements about the carol service had been clear that it was not a political event: it was solely about celebrating Christ and Christmas. For Edwards, however, there was clearly a political resonance to such an act. “I think my prime motive for coming is to defend Christmas against the Muslim hordes and eroding of our culture,” he said. “It’s a day out, but a useful day out.”

More from this author

The revolt on Streeting's doorstep

By Felix Pope

To the left of the stage stood a group of women wearing pink who had been campaigning in Havering against the housing of asylum seekers. Kim, a founder of the group, said that, although she was a Catholic, she did not consider that to be related to her activism. She was also not opposed to people practicing other religions, she insisted. “They can have theirs and we can have ours,” she said. “The key word is love: everybody should love each other.” There were limits to that love, however: the women were clear that they did not wish to have undocumented and uninvited small boat migrants in their town.

Soon enough, the service began. Instead of a pulpit, there was a temporary stage on a trailer flanked by large, white crosses and garlanded with tinsel. Preachers reading extracts from the Bible alternated with musicians, including Doolan’s band and Star, a young black woman with a mellifluous voice. The crowd sang along to the hits — from “Come All Ye Faithful” to “Away in a Manger” — and speakers exhorted us to pray for persecuted Christians in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Several of the speeches drifted from theology to politics. Liam Tuffs, a long-term Robinson wingman, declared that he had not been a Christian himself but that he planned on pumping religious content out from his social media channels in 2026. “Young Bob”, a 17-year-old activist with a mop of hair, spoke of how he had become depressed and suicidal at secondary school as he committed the sin of atheism and other “sinful acts”. If it were not for Jesus Christ, he said, he would not be here. If it were not for Jesus Christ this nation would not be great. “And wouldn’t it be great to see this nation restored back to its ancestral roots?” he asked to cheers.

Walking among the crowd was Robert Wallace, who claimed, when we spoke, that had been to prison in five countries. He said had swallowed balloons of drugs to smuggle them. He spoke of how he had sunk into alcoholism and casual violence and lost himself for a time to a kind of madness that took over his life. But now he has rediscovered Christ and been born again. And so, he and his brother, John — both short men with greying hair buzzed low — found themselves at the carol concert.

Born 18 months apart, the pair look as if they could be identical twins. “When we were younger we went to Sunday school and church,” said John. “A lot of people lost that root. Now they’re turning back.” For the brothers, Christianity represents their childhood and a lost Britain of innocence and moral rigidity. “We used to run around outside and pray,” Robert said. “Then, when I came out of the army, we [Britain] were in Europe. Our country is flooded. It’s changed.”

With their lives of sin and winding journey to Christ, the pair were not so dissimilar to the man who had brought them to central London. Though raised by an Irish Catholic mother, Robinson has said he was not religious himself growing up. When dark had fallen and the carols were over, he finally took the stage. The crowd pushed forward a little and began chanting his name, as if forgetting for a moment that this was a religious festival and not a rally.

Robinson spoke of his hatred for Britain’s Anglican establishment. “When I started [the English Defence League] in 2009, the Church stood against us in every city we went into,” he said. “The Church leaders stood and opposed us. That drove me away from Christianity. In fact, I hated the Church for them betrayals. We, all of us, were their lost sheep. The way they’ve acted this week [by criticising Robinson as divisive] is the reason churches are empty.”

It was only during a recent stint in HMP Woodhill that he began speaking with a chaplain and studying the life of Jesus. Then, he was visited by Doolan, a former musician who — by his own telling — spent his life partying and sinking “endless cocktails of drugs” before he stumbled across a Sunday service and, struck by its beauty, was driven to repent. Thirteen years later, Doolan is a pastor at Spirit Embassy, a Pentecostal church led by a charismatic Zimbabwean prophet. His band is a regular feature of Robinson’s rallies.

Speaking to me a few days before the carol service, Doolan said that he had sat with Robinson inside prison and talked for two hours about the Gospel, a spiritual awakening he believes is taking place in Britain, and the importance of Christianity to our national history. “He said that he’d always felt a presence when he was going through, you know, hard times or heavy persecution or whatever it is that he’d been going through,” he said. “There would always be a feeling of something willing him to continue.”

With two prison guards standing over them, Doolan led Robinson through a prayer of salvation. The former English Defence League leader, a veteran of a Luton hooligan firm, convicted of assault and fraud, who once bragged on camera that he could score gear anywhere in the world, admitted his sins and asked Jesus to enter his heart.

The carol service, which Doolan was heavily involved in organizing, was aimed in part at helping others follow Robinson’s path. Standing amid the tinsel and the crosses, the activist proclaimed that “something great” is happening in Britain. “I’ve seen it at each one of our Unite the Kingdom events as I saw the cross start playing prevalence, as I saw ‘Jesus is king’ [banners], and I felt something happening and I felt it again today,” he told the crowd.

Not every Christian in attendance was willing to take this change of heart at face value, however. As I watched a series of Bible readings on stage, I was approached by two young men, one German and one English, from a non-denominational church in London. “Tommy is not really a Christian,” said the German. “He doesn’t follow the Bible.” While he could not know the contents of Robinson’s heart, he said, he did not believe he had truly renounced sin.

The duo were at the protest to evangelize to those who believed in God but were not yet practicing Christians. The faith, the Englishmen said, had saved his life. With the Union Flag pulled over his shoulders, he launched into a denunciation of the nation’s spiritual values. All men in this country care about, he said, is chasing women and going to the pub and doing bumps of coke. If he had not found Christ, he would still be doing the same, he added.

The vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Tooting, who coincidentally is called Angela Rayner, was handing out leaflets with an AI image of the nativity featuring black people, Muslim women and three white men wearing Union Jack T-shirts gazing at baby Jesus in his crib. Only one in 10 people at most would take a Christian flyer outside a train station, she told me. Here, almost everyone was willing to accept them. She hoped she might be able to convince fans of Robinson that everyone was welcome in the Church of England.

Suggested reading

Tommy Robinson is a cynical Christian

By Giles Fraser

Earlier that day, another group of Christians had gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral to counter Robinson’s message. I watched as they staged a nativity scene in which two people playing Joseph and Mary sat in a small rubber dinghy. Behind them, about a dozen others in smart coats, woolly sweaters and hiking boots were singing hymns and holding banners that claimed Jesus as a refugee. “Love your neighbor,” read one, in red letters, with another below adding, in black spraypaint, “that includes the ones in hotels”.

Walking about in front of this display was Krish Kandiah, an evangelical leader and founder of The Sanctuary Foundation, a charity that supports refugees into work and housing. He is, I suggested to him, exactly the kind of Christian Robinson professes to revile. The former EDL leader had only recently become religious, though, Kandiah said. Robinson had clearly not yet developed a real understanding of Christianity.

“We need to help Tommy get to the heart of the faith,” he said. “The Bible is very clear that every human being had intrinsic value and worth.” While Kandiah accepts that some people fear immigration is out of control, he also believes that Britain has the capacity to help those in need. “We need to work out our responsibilities to them,” he said.

Kandiah said he was concerned that people were using the Christian message to gain followers for cynical reasons. “It is hard to understand how Christians of good faith can hate on people and promote division,” he said. The scale of the messaging operation coordinated over the past week by the Church of England and other mainstream Christian groups implies they are deeply concerned that Robinson’s position might catch on.

The feeling of resentment and suspicion is mutual. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Robinson retweeted a statement she had made backing the Black Lives Matter movement and wrote: “their churches will stay empty, a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine christiany is coming not this weak drivel.”

The idea that Christianity is experiencing a revival in Britain is one shared by many worshipers who both love and hate Robinson. A report published by the Bible Society earlier this year claimed that church attendance had surged since 2018, driven in particular by young men. “People are giving church a try, or something has drawn them back in again,” the Evangelization coordinator for the Diocese of Westminster, Teresa Carvalho, told The Guardian. Others have questioned the value of the society’s evidence, however. David Voas, an emeritus professor of social science at UCL, has pointed out that its report was based on unreliable opt-in surveys rather than probability sampling. The Church of England and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales record shrinking turnouts since the pandemic.

When I spoke to Doolan, the musician-turned-pastor, he said he had witnessed growing Christian faith. This was evidence, he argued, that I could expect to witness, in my lifetime, the arrival of the Antichrist, who will take control of a one-world government. The “masculine Christianity” advanced on Saturday, under which the Church’s move towards liberalism on borders, gender and sexuality would be reversed, may therefore be one element of a Christian revival, even its driving force.

After Robinson spoke on Whitehall, there was time for one last carol. Attendees held plastic candles with electric lights aloft and began to sing “Silent Night” amid a reverent quiet. For those in attendance, though vastly smaller in number than previous Unite the Kingdom rallies, this was the start of an epochal shift. Next year, Robinson said, he would host the same event again and, he claimed, he would pack out Trafalgar Square. Then the Church of England would really have something to worry about.

Just over a year ago, Mohamad, smartly turned out tonight in a brown wool blazer and flared trousers, ran Labour’s Wes Streeting to within 530 votes at the general election with a pitch heavy on his alleged complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza. The British-Palestinian campaigner was just 24 at the time. “There is a growing appetite to move away from this two-party system,” she told ITV afterwards. “We are not going away.”

In person, Mohamad radiates youthful sincerity. If there were a vibes-based spectrum of Britain’s pro-Palestine independents, it would stretch from Birmingham’s brash, Prada-wearing Akhmed Yakoob at one end to the warm and polite Mohamad at the other. When an elderly couple approach her to say they wished she had managed to win, she smiles broadly and commiserates with them. 

Thanks to these personal qualities — and Labour’s polling nosedive — Mohamad’s supporters remain convinced they can oust Streeting next time. For the Health Secretary, who has never concealed his ambition to become the Prime Minister one day, this is a problem. He insists publicly he will not make a chicken run to a safer seat. But the shifting demographic tides in Ilford that allowed him to seize this constituency from the Conservatives a decade ago now threaten to sink him.

On stage, Mohamad and Ali conduct a nuanced discussion of the British political scene to the right of the Tories, which is undergoing a process of ideological foment at least as turbulent as that taking place on the Left in Ilford. He clarifies the difference between Tommy Robinson, an Israel supporter, and Nick Griffin, an opponent. She explains that she would like to host events on Fridays, but won’t in order that Jewish supporters are able to attend.

When the conversation is opened up to the audience, however, it takes on a harsher tone. An elderly gentleman in a black baseball cap stands up to say he used to be a Labour councillor but that he could now kill Keir Starmer. A young man haltingly asks for advice on how he can avoid befriending extremists. Old men ramble on about Winston Churchill and the impending collapse of the West and how useful idiots are secretly being paid to attend far-Right protests. 

For many Muslims and others on the Left, Starmer’s timidity on Gaza has marked a turning point. Labour’s share of the Muslim vote fell by almost 20% at the last election. But with the failure of Your Party to seize on this momentum, it appears that at least for now the opposition will remain local. 

In Ilford — which sits within the London Borough of Redbridge — this has been driven by a remarkable demographic transition over the last 20 years. When the 2001 census was taken, a majority of its inhabitants were Christians and less than 12% were Muslim. Three quarters had been born in England and 64% were white. By 2021, however, Muslims were the single largest religious group and Asians had risen from a quarter to 47% of the population; 45% of residents had been born outside England. 

While many people I spoke to in Ilford said the area retained a strong sense of community, some older white inhabitants feel they have been left adrift. Standing at a junction near Streeting’s office, Martin, a retired loss adjuster who has lived in Ilford for decades, told me the transformation had been “massive and fast”. 

He is not racially prejudiced, he insisted unprompted, a woolen hat pulled down towards his eyes — but he is concerned that migrants and their descendants living in Redbridge have not integrated. “They keep themselves to themselves,” he said. “When I walk past women on the street they look down.” While at his GP’s practice recently, he had spoken to a young Muslim lady who told him her life was controlled by her father, who acted as if they were still living in Pakistan. Politicians just did not seem to understand what was happening to his community, he said.

Martin’s friends have gradually moved out into Essex to get away. Some are now in Ongar (95% white) and others are in Shenfield (88% white). He and his wife plan to stay, though. Their road remains ethnically mixed and their neighbors are friendly. But they are less comfortable than they used to be.

Fred, who also did not wish to provide his surname, said he thought Ilford was improving. They had at least got rid of the beggars. His voice shaking with age, he said he had once been homeless himself, but he had never begged. He just played music from a speaker and people tossed him coins. He didn’t ask for them. So when he sees beggars now, he does this to them, he said, shoving two fingers up at my face. And when he sees asylum seekers who have washed up on small boats getting housing it makes him angry with the politicians who never helped him.

The Asian families who sparked this demographic shift by moving to Ilford were following a well-worn groove. For decades, white British and Jewish eastenders made the same journey up the Central Line to secure gardens and larger houses. Today, Ilford North still bears the marks of an upwardly mobile suburb: pebbledash facades replaced by creamy render; windowsills and gutters accented black; flash cars hidden under gray sheeting. 

When Vaseem Ahmed’s parents moved to Britain from Pakistan in the Sixties, they settled in Walthamstow, where he was raised. But by the time his children were preparing for their GCSEs, he wanted to live somewhere with better schools, so he followed many of his friends and headed out to Ilford. Now, he told me over coffee in Naan Staap, a brightly decorated Indian street food cafe above the basement in which Mohamad’s supporters had met the month before, he could not afford to move back.

More from this author

The YouTubers shaping anti-migrant politics

By Felix Pope

Like his parents, Ahmed had always supported the Labour party. He knew Streeting well, he claimed, and had fought to get him elected in 2015. But in the wake of October 7, when Starmer said Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza, he rejected the party and helped to found the Redbridge Community Action Group (RCAG). It was this organisation that would later select Mohamad to stand against Streeting. 

Ahmed, who has neat salt and pepper hair and a beard, is now the leader of the party that may end up running his council after next year’s local elections: Redbridge & Ilford Independents. Gaza was, he said, the “oomph” that pushed them to act. But Muslim voters have been trending away from the Labour party for a long time. “Labour have been in power for a decade [on Redbridge Council] now and the area’s gone down, council taxes are going up,” he said. “People are fed up.”

Aside from Palestine, the focus is on local issues and, in that respect, the independents differ little from the revolts that bubble up in comparatively affluent suburbs anywhere in the country. The party would like to prevent the construction of new housing and fear that tower blocks will blight the area. They believe the council is wasting taxpayers’ money by building a lido in a local park. They resent flytippers and do not want Ilford to become a “ghetto” like Newham.

The Muslim community breaking with their traditional voting habits was less a sign of insularity, he said, than of growing engagement with their country. “People like my parents, when they first come over, they would have voted Labour regardless, yeah? It was the thing to do because they’re much more sympathetic when it comes to things like immigration.”

While his father was a bus driver, Ahmed is a recruitment consultant. His brother was a major in the British Army. Several of his siblings have degrees. “With education comes awareness as well… You’re a bit more clued-up and you think, ‘I’m not just gonna vote for the same people that my parents voted for, just because it’s Labour and because it’s red.’ You start then looking into things and you think, ‘Well, hold on. What’s the benefit for me, and my family, my community, of voting for these guys, yeah?’” His parents’ generation had built the first wave of infrastructure for the British Muslim community: halal butchers, mosques, Islamic schools. His contribution will be building a political party.

Suggested reading

Keir Starmer: last of the technocrats

By Aris Roussinos

For many voters in Ilford, such a development will come as a welcome step. Meera, out pushing her newborn baby on a bright December morning, said she felt embarrassed to have voted for Streeting at the last election. She had always supported Labour and wished to block the Tories from power, but was now disgusted with his stance on Palestine. Her local area, meanwhile, was beginning to deteriorate thanks to the cost-of-living crisis and years of austerity. “I wish we had an MP in the area we could respect,” she said. At the next election she will likely vote for Mohamad. 

In March, the Redbridge & Ilford Independents scored a major victory when they won a council by-election in Mayfield ward, formerly solidly Labour. The poll was called when Jas Athwal, the MP for Ilford South and a local party stalwart, resigned his council seat over revelations that he had been renting out flats with black mold and ant infestations.

Now, the seat is represented by Noor Jahan Begum, who was also selected by RCAG to stand against Athwal at the last general election. Almost as soon as she won, however, she was accused of impropriety. She had handed out leaflets that claimed Tanweer Khan, a Labour representative, did not wish to divest the council’s pension fund from Israel — a move that he was unable to carry out because of his fiduciary duties. Khan claimed that Begum had been part of a “targeted campaign” to “stalk, harass and endanger him as a sitting councillor”. Begum in turn claimed Khan had harassed her in the street, though an investigation found that her claims were malicious and intended to smear. 

Until recently, Khan told me, local politics in the area had never descended to this level. For the first time in his life he had started to feel “genuinely unsafe” in his own neighborhood. He told the investigation that it would be hard to get his daughters married if their father were branded a Zionist in the community. One point on which Begum and Khan both agreed in their testimony to the inquiry was that this might only be the start. They both feared that next year’s local elections could spark a further increase in hostility.

Despite these rising tensions, Streeting remains confident in public he can win. Speaking recently to the Spectator, he insisted he would not dash to a safer seat. Ilford North is his home. There is also no question that Streeting commands a level of personal support that is uncommon. A focus group conducted by Lord Ashcroft in Ilford last month found that several Labour voters felt an imperative to stick by him. One dubbed him a “really, really decent guy”.

When I spoke to a source close to the Health Secretary, they insisted there was still a path to victory, but they could not express much confidence about its chances of succeeding. If an independent candidate stood against him, they said, Left-wing voters might tack behind their MP to prevent a split that would let in Reform. This would mirror what Labour hopes people will do on a national level when faced with the prospect of a Nigel Farage-led government. 

What’s more, they said, there is a belief that Ilford North has more people opposed to the pro-Palestine independents than in support of them. Streeting has not given up on Reform-curious voters, either — and there is a hope that many on the Right will eventually consolidate behind him. When I related this theory to one local Tory voter, however, he simply laughed. He had no interest in saving Streeting. He knew the future was Leanne Mohamad. 

Over a decade ago, Robinson could attract crowds of maybe a few thousand. But swelling down Whitehall on Saturday, undeterred by the rain, were more than 100,000 people. Nominally a protest in support of freedom of speech, they had come to see the far-Right activist cap off a summer of asylum protests and surging nationalism.

Accompanying the flags was a strongly Christian vibe. Marchers held crosses and photos of the recently murdered Charlie Kirk as though they were devotional images of a saint. “This is the beginning of two revivals: political and cultural,” Bishop Ceirion Dewar told me. Christian ministers of many denominations had visited Robinson during his multiple stretches in prison, Dewar claimed. And over the past few years, faith has played an ever-greater role in Robinson’s campaigning. In part, this provides theological ballast and historical context to his opposition to Islam. But it also helps him solicit donations from America, where Christian nationalism is a rising force.

If the atmosphere among those bearing flags and wearing medieval helmets was electric, the lineup was singularly eccentric. The insurgent French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour — appealing to Britain and France’s shared history while declining to speak a word of English — was followed by Blocksy, a Luton mate of Robinson’s called up to sing “Sweet Caroline”. The crowd was then lectured by a 13-year-old who had been sent home from school for wearing a Union Jack dress.

On stage Robinson himself was a volatile presence, all rictus grin and jabbing limbs. He hugged, kissed, and leapt about. It was a physical manifestation of his role in the movement. For two decades, he has been the first to pick a fight and to throw a punch — an urge that has enabled him to rise far above any other figure within British politics to the right of Reform.

And if there is one reason for his surging popularity now, it is a sense that he has been vindicated by events. After 20 years of campaigning against Islam — Robinson led his first protest against the “Luton Taliban” back in 2004 — only now, he argues, is the rest of the country catching up. “When people say I’m guilty of things, yeah, I’m guilty of being a decade ahead,” he told the Triggernometry podcast last month.

Vindicated too are those core supporters who have followed him over the years, in and out of jail, and who were there on Saturday. At the back of the stage was Guramit Singh Kalirai, a former EDL member sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison in 2013 for threatening to slash a shop worker’s throat during an attempted robbery. At the front of the stage, as the event’s compere, was Liam Tuffs, a podcaster and security firm boss, whose father, Peter Gillett, was described by gangster Reggie Kray as his “adopted son”.

Also present was Ezra Levant, the Canadian founder of guerrilla broadcaster Rebel Media, which promoted Robinson early on and continues to run online fundraisers for the activist. But some of this funding has dried up. When I contacted one American donor earlier this week, he told me his organization had cut all ties with Robinson. While they supported his work campaigning against Islam, they were horrified by his conviction for libelling a Syrian schoolboy and had found him to be deeply unscrupulous. “He’s a son of a bitch and I want nothing to do with him,” the American said. “I’d be happy if I never had to speak to him again in my life.”

Even so, Robinson’s influence has far from faded. Over this summer, protests against asylum seeker accommodation across Britain have borne his imprimatur, if not his presence. In July, when I asked a young man demonstrating outside a London hotel why he had turned out he immediately referred to Robinson. In Epping, when demonstrations first pitched into violence, men attempting to tear the Bell Hotel’s sign from its foundations chanted “Tommy Robinson” over and over.

More from this author

The YouTubers shaping anti-migrant politics

By Felix Pope

The question now is whether Robinson can channel this amorphous rebellion into political influence. Britain’s mainstream parties have always maintained that he is beyond the pale. Gawain Towler, a long-time Nigel Farage aide, told me he found him to be a “quite articulate and bright young man”. But, he added: “there’s a peripheral aspect of what Tommy does that is unsavory and the history of some of his key supporters is unsavory. We cannot afford to be associated with something like that. It would be a boon to the haters.”

One man with no such scruples is Ben Habib, a former Brexit Party MEP who broke from Reform to launch Advance UK because Farage would not at that time back “mass deportations”. Habib’s party now counts Robinson among its 32,000 members. As Habib arrived at Saturday’s rally, which he co-sponsored, demonstrators stretched out to shake his hand and thrust baseball caps for him to sign. Someone held a handwritten “Ben for Number 10” sign aloft. Standing at the side of the stage, he told me he was keen to win votes from any constituency available. “Why would any politician turn down the opportunity to speak to the British people?” he asked.

Did he not share the concerns of other politicians about Robinson’s criminal convictions and hard-Right allies? “What Farage and others are trying to do is to vilify the British people,” he replied. “They’ve said they don’t want to engage with [Robinson’s supporters]. What kind of democratic politician eschews the votes that he would otherwise get? It’s an incredibly high-handed approach to democracy.”

In America, there have been fewer scruples. After buying X in 2022, Elon Musk laid the critical plank for Robinson’s return to prominence when he restored his account the following year — a step multiple speakers acknowledged on Saturday. And then, from the man himself, an open call to arms. “If this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice,” Musk told the crowd via video link. “You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.”

One critical American was missing, however. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, has long expressed his desire to create a “nationalist international” of politicians critical of liberalism and is a strong supporter of Robinson. But even without him, the appearance of Zemmour, Alternative für Deutschland’s Petr Bystron, Romania’s George Simion and others of similar political stripe from around the continent meant that the outlines of a new global order could be glimpsed.

More from this author

Will the Epping protests spread?

By Felix Pope

Many among them expressed straightforwardly far-Right arguments. “Islam is our real enemy,” claimed Filip Dewinter, a Flemish nationalist and long-time Robinson ally. “We have to get Islam out of Europe.” Wearing a GENERATION REMIGRATION t-shirt, the Dutch Eva Vlaaringerbroek railed against the “great replacement” of white Europeans. Brian Tamaki, a Maori preacher from New Zealand who has been accused of running a cult, called for all mosques and temples to be shut down in Christian countries.

Valentina Gomez, a Congressional candidate who has filmed herself burning the Quran and attacking gay people as “faggots” is also a full-throated supporter. Speaking on Saturday after flying in from Texas, she attacked “rapist Muslims”. I found her taking photographs with her English fans. A young man whose Horatio Nelson t-shirt was struggling to contain his vast belly lent in to tell her breathlessly that he loved her videos, but that she would probably be arrested for them in Britain. “Keep fighting for your country,” she said. “Christ is King.” When I asked Gomez where she felt this international movement was really headed, she was unequivocal. “Tommy Robinson is the present and the future.”

Robinson had struck a similarly triumphant tone himself earlier this week when speaking to Britain First leader Paul Golding. “It’s a cultural revolution — it’s happening, it’s actually happening,” he said. “Something’s burst. The dam’s broke.”

In reality, however, Robinson’s relationship with the minor revolt sweeping Britain is more complex than he might like to acknowledge. At the height of the EDL’s popularity, marches were marked by alcohol and casual violence. In 2011, two members were convicted of attempting to burn down a mosque in Stoke-on-Trent. In 2015, 50 people were sentenced for violence committed at a Birmingham protest. The public at large was aghast. But the asylum hotel protests are different. They have mobilized mainstream local residents, including large numbers of women, where the EDL appalled them. Acknowledging that he is liable to do more harm than good to this cause, Robinson decided to stay away from Epping, even after announcing that he would organize a march.

The former hooligan from Luton might remain an ideological lodestar for many, but he still alienates others. As a result, the emergent wave of nationalism is far more amorphous than Robinson might have liked. The movement has power in part because it has no leaders that can be discredited or imprisoned.

The London rally, then, with its parade of international politicians and gaudy production, felt in some respects like a retreat from the real battleground. Supporters had come from around the country for inspiration and ideological support. But whether Robinson can lead them further remains an open question.

The law would not deliver her justice, Brewer thought, and the mainstream media would not report the truth. When she did decide to tell her story, she spoke not to the police or the BBC but to Laudits, a sandy-haired YouTuber in his mid-thirties, clutching a GoPro and a mobile phone that livestreamed her words to hundreds of online viewers.

“She had black shorts and a crop top on but she should be allowed to wear what she wants,” said Brewer, standing with her granddaughter at the edge of a protest mustered on Portsmouth’s beachfront. “Without people from a different culture making you feel like that,” said Laudits, finishing her sentence. “What a horrifying story,” he reflected to his viewers after the interview. “But it’s not a surprise to us. It happens too often up and down the country.”

Laudits is one of many YouTubers attempting to make a career out of interviewing asylum seekers and filming migration protests. Clad in designer gear and tall enough to loom above many of his interview subjects, he has become a familiar figure at anti-migrant hotel demonstrations across Britain this summer.

Amateur filmmakers such as Laudits are knitting together anger throughout Britain, agglomerating local grievances into a national crusade — one which scored its first major victory on Tuesday after a High Court judge ruled that asylum seekers could no longer be housed at The Bell Hotel in Epping. On social media, they promote lists of demonstrations; on the ground, they provide outlets for the public’s fury. With trust in mainstream media at an all-time low, people are drawn to the rough authenticity of their videos. Laudits has 29,000 followers on YouTube; some of his peers have hundreds of thousands.

More from this author

Test article

By Felix Pope

The style of broadcasting these filmmakers have pioneered captures something of the national mood: angry, confrontational and occasionally paranoid. Its growing influence can be glimpsed in the social media clips recorded by shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, in which he chases and berates fare-dodgers on the London Underground or migrants in northern France.

Laudits, who refused to tell me his real name for fear of the consequences his family might suffer, grew up on a council estate in Wales, and later worked in finance and recruitment. He had been publishing videos on a variety of topics for years when he came across the channel of DJ Audits — one of many YouTubers conducting freelance “audits” of businesses around Britain. Their videos follow a set pattern: first, begin filming the exterior of some location with your handheld camera and drone. It could be a chemical plant or a warehouse on an industrial estate — the more sensitive the better. If you’re lucky, this will trigger the emergence of an irate security guard in high-vis clothing to inform you that what you’re doing is illegal and that you can sling your hook. The art of the auditor is to remain just within the bounds of the law, driving your target to apoplexy by calling their bluff and refusing to stop recording. The more heated the confrontation, the more views it will get.

At their best, auditing videos offer their viewers the sweet pleasure of watching the humiliation of petty officials. Much of the time, all they reveal is how easy it is to wind up security guards. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has even issued guidance on how workers might resist “potentially embarrassing reactions” that can be monetized online.

Laudits was soon hooked. In May 2024, he launched his own channel and started traveling around Britain to film the exteriors of businesses and football grounds. Then, he changed track. In the wake of the Southport attack, he filmed the protests that mushroomed in response. This proved hugely popular: before then, not one of his videos had surpassed 11,000 views. Now, he has over nine million views in total. “I think it was a pulse on society at the time really,” he told me. “And as a YouTuber, there’s always the commercial element. I’m not going to shy away from that. I need to pay my bills. So I thought, ‘let’s go and investigate this’.”

It was around this time that the auditors’ slickly produced but largely apolitical videos began to cross-fertilize with a different genre — migrant hunting. From about 2021, activists had been filming the arrival of small boats on the shores of Kent and hassling asylum seekers at accommodation sites around the country. The clips they produced were typically low budget and sometimes rabidly offensive. Many of the hotels they filmed would become targets of demonstrations in the summer of 2024.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Standing outside Epping’s Bell Hotel last month as a protest began to build, Bryan Stovell told me he had lost count of the number of migrant hotels he’s visited across Britain. Wearing a flat cap with a walking stick tucked into his backpack, the pensioner’s shaky videography and strident politics are emblematic of this older school. “Nobody wants to see the Islamification of this country,” he said. “Islam is culturally opposed to Christianity. The majority of Muslims do not assimilate.”

Stovell, who has “WHITE” tattooed across the knuckles of one hand and “BLACK” across the other, is mixed race. He is also a supporter of the British Democrats. Formed in 2013 when a hardcore fringe split from the BNP, the party believes that ethnic minorities should be encouraged to leave Britain en masse. That he might be campaigning for his own deportation does not trouble Stovell. “You can only allow so many people of color into this country before you get detrimental effects,” he said, pulling a party badge from his pocket to show me proudly.

Auditing videos featuring the Right-wing politics and confrontational style of the migrant hunters has proved hugely popular. For Laudits, who seems a polite and amiable character, this has presented an issue. Due to his more reserved manner, his videos sometimes lack the drama that generates real attention online. To combat this, he has collaborated with Ay Audits, a YouTuber who tends to conceal his face in the pair’s videos and who has the breezy confidence to trespass into hotels and barrack their staff relentlessly. “Everyone calls us the comedy double act, because we’re like chalk and cheese,” said Laudits.

In one typical recent video titled “4 meals a day for the migrants”, Ay walks into a hotel in Peterborough housing asylum seekers and starts to film them eating lunch. When he refuses to leave, an awkward stand-off begins with a security guard and a housing officer. The men are initially confused by his presence and then unsure of how to get rid of him. “Mate I don’t know how you do your job without a conscience to be honest with you if I’m totally real,” Ay tells the officer, who is English, after they walk outside. “When they harm British children and they rape British women that’s on your conscience because you’re facilitating it.”

According to The Times, Ay is likely to have earned at least £2,000 in the past month from YouTube. His channel, which has over 100,000 subscribers, received 8.7 million views in one month following the resurgence of anti-migrant protests this year — a fourfold increase on the month before.

At any given asylum hotel protest in Britain, Laudits or Ay or one of their peers can now be found streaming live footage to thousands watching online. Some hold only their mobile phone in the air, while others have a professional set-up with lighting equipment and high-definition cameras. Their livestream videos can be monotonous, but they offer a sense of realism: unlike a television broadcast, they have not been edited after the fact.

For Dylan Parry, this movement is the future of media. Standing by Canary Wharf’s Britannia Hotel at a demonstration last month, the Welsh YouTuber broadcast live to 3,500 viewers on his channel Ex British Army Paz49. “Streaming is the way forward now,” he said. “People don’t trust the mainstream media.” As we spoke, a flood of comments picking apart our conversation in real time moved across Parry’s phone screen. “He’s CID [Criminal Investigation Department],” one viewer wrote. “He’s police,” added others in an attempt to stop him from talking to me.

Laudits believes the demand for his work is fueled by a widespread lack of understanding of why asylum seekers have been allowed to enter Britain and what they might do now they’re here. “We’re curious,” said his friend Helen, who regularly attends hotel protests. “I think the only reason we’re like this as well is because the government aren’t open and honest. So in the end it leads to speculation.”

In this void, darker theories have flourished. Many of Laudits’ viewers are convinced that asylum seekers are soldiers biding their time before they can conquer Britain. Sometimes viewers demand that he look inside containers outside asylum hotels because they believe they contain weapons. “I don’t find any substance to [that idea],” Laudits said. “I’ve met quite a lot of them and they couldn’t fight a cold.”

But he admitted it was a delicate business. “I appreciate how careful I’ve got to be with certain things now as well given how a slip up here could cause a lot of issues,” he said haltingly. “When I release a video I say what’s in it, like fact-based, not try to use inflammatory words.”

The Britain of auditing videos can be a bleak place. It is a country of jobsworths and petty tyrants in which people argue endlessly about who is allowed to enter where and what can be filmed. Their work provides a vision of a nation seemingly dominated by social strife and on the verge of breakdown. Laudits himself has come to believe that the Britain he now spends his time documenting is a bit broken. “I always knew there were problems,” he said, “but I didn’t realize how deep they went until I started doing this.”

Now, however, the town may become the latest flashpoint in the anti-migrant protests sweeping Britain. Last week, Ahmad Mulakhil, an Afghan asylum seeker, was charged with raping a 12-year-old girl on one of its suburban roads. Mohammad Kabir, also an Afghan asylum seeker, has been charged with aiding and abetting rape, strangulation and kidnap. Both men had entered Britain by crossing the Channel.

According to sources who spoke to the Mail on Sunday, local authorities fear that violent disorder might follow. Warwickshire Police, they claim, advised local councillors and officials not to reveal that the rape suspects were asylum seekers for fear of “inflaming community tensions”. “They’re hushing it up because they don’t want an Epping situation on their hands,” one local is reported to have said. A protest has already been planned for next Saturday.

Heightening the stakes is the fact that Nuneaton’s asylum seekers — including Mulakhil and Kabir until their arrests — are not housed in hotels but HMOs in residential areas. While the former have provided a focal point for demonstrations, they are also easily defended by lines of riot police. When spread out in residential streets, it is harder for the state to control or to protect small boat migrants.

Steven Elliot has lived on Cheverel Street, where the rape is alleged to have been committed, for the past 40 years. Taking a break from pulling up weeds from the curb outside his home, he pointed down the road to show me the house a few doors away that is set to become another HMO, and then the other properties further away that have already been converted.

Thanks to the transient population moving in, he now feels that the area is becoming increasingly unsafe. Several months ago, eight young men were moved into the compact terraced house next to his. “I’m not happy,” he said. “I have a 12-year-old granddaughter myself.”

More from this author

Old hatreds return to the Isle of Dogs

By Felix Pope

His wife, Nuala, told me she has looked inside the nearby house that is being converted and thinks it is a bodge job thrown together by a rogue landlord. “Living in between two [HMOs] is not fair. A lot of strange ones are about. I think there are unofficial, illegal ones as well.”

Following the alleged rape, she feels that anxiety is rising among the area’s settled population. “Tensions were uneasy for a while, but now they’re through the roof,” she said. “We’re only at the first stages. It was a lovely quiet area before.” At one point, Nuala considered putting up a sign that simply read: “No.” The Elliots also said, however, that they had not experienced any trouble from their new neighbors. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Steven added.

The decision to ramp up the use of HMOs to house asylum seekers was taken by Labour after entering office last year. Mass accommodation sites in former military barracks and on the Bibby Stockholm barge had proven expensive and inhumane. In what was dubbed “Operation Scatter” the government planned to distribute migrants more evenly across Britain. Speaking last June, Angela Rayner said every borough had “an obligation to take their fair share”.

Alongside former care homes and student accommodation, HMOs, or houses in multiple occupation, provide a cheap solution. Typically converted from what was previously a single-family dwelling, they allow several people who do not know each other to live in separate bedrooms but with a shared bathroom, kitchen and living space. While this can provide a convenient setup for students and young professionals, they are also used to house those freshly released from prison and drug addicts. For many people living in areas like Cheverel Street they herald the imposition of disorder and the disruption of a tight-knit community.

With more than 25,000 migrants having crossed the Channel via small boat in 2025 so far, the state has rushed to keep up with demand. Earlier this year, Serco — which houses asylum seekers in the North West, the Midlands and the east of England — invited landlords to an event at a hotel in the Malvern Hills. The firm was looking, it said, for properties that could be leased for five years. “We are confident that our lease provision offers an attractive and competitive proposition within the industry,” the invitation added. On its website, Serco claims that it currently houses 30,000 asylum seekers in an “ever growing” portfolio of more than 7,000 properties. (Serco did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Suggested reading

The Ulsterisation of English politics

By Aris Roussinos

In Nuneaton, both Mulakhil and Kabir were housed in HMOs leased by the company. It was a scenario those living on Cheverel Street had resisted. One British-Asian man living on the road, who declined to give his name, told me dozens of local residents had written to Nuneaton and Bedworth District Council to oppose the introduction of eight-bed HMOs to the area. While a property can typically be converted into a six-bed HMO without planning permission, those housing more people must be signed off by the local authority.

“The council doesn’t give a shit monkey,” he said. He worried for his twin daughters, one of whom now lives next door to an HMO with the other just meters away. The asylum seekers he had seen seemed okay, though. “They have a lovely life,” he laughed. “The Government pays for everything.” For him, the imposition of migrants upon his community was just the latest sign of the area’s decline. Leading me around the corner, he pointed out a fly-tipped mattress and sofa. The council will come and take away rubbish, he said, but they could not seem to stop people from dumping more in its place.

Though he wished the HMOs would leave, he added, he was now also worried about demonstrators travelling to Nuneaton because of the alleged assault. “People from outside will come in and see me and see my daughters with dark skin,” he said. “Protesters don’t care that we contribute to society — my daughter is a nurse, she looks after everyone, whether they’re white, brown, black or green. White extremists won’t see that and put us all in the same barrel.”

Clare Golby, a Conservative former deputy leader of Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council who herself lives close to Cheverel Street, said she was sure locals would turn out to protest next weekend. It worries her, however, that her town will become a magnet for trouble makers on both sides of the debate.

In office, Golby claimed, she had always tried to prevent asylum seekers from being housed in the area. “The fact is Serco can and does do exactly what they want. They could come in and rent or buy up entire streets if they choose to and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. I would not facilitate them in this. My argument was always that I had families in temporary accommodation and 3,000 people on a housing waiting list and I refused to prioritize non-UK nationals beyond that.”

Many residents of Nuneaton are furious at the degradation of their community, she added. “Our rental market is out of control, Serco are certainly having an impact on this by hoovering up tenancies, leading to more homelessness and extra financial pressure on local councils, who then pass this on to the council tax payer.”

Inside the Coton Sports and Social Club at the end of Cheverel Street, several punters had not yet heard about the alleged rape. They were united in their disdain for the Government, however. Duncan Clark, standing at the bar in a purple polo shirt, insisted that the prime minister had been soft on crimes committed by Muslims. “Starmer and Reeves are the biggest wankers ever to run this country,” he said with a grin.

His friend, wearing a pink polo shirt, agreed. “This fucking country is on it’s arse,” he said. “If the Government was run properly people like that wouldn’t be here. If I had my way we’d hang, draw and quarter them. They’ll get a slap on the wrist, six months.” Asked if he would attend the protest, Clark said he was too old. “But,” he added: “I’ve got a feeling that this country will go ballistic.”

When I knocked at the door of one of the HMOs on Cheverel Street, one asylum seeker from Guinea and another from Kuwait answered. Unable to speak English, they knocked in turn for Ali, an Iranian, who they hoped might be able to translate for them. After he emerged blinking and groggy from his bedroom, all three said they had crossed the Channel on small boats in the last few months.

The young men were polite, and seemingly eager to chat to a visitor, even if our conversation was stilted and conducted entirely through Google Translate. They had not heard that anyone had allegedly been raped on their street, they said. They liked the HMO, though, and thought Nuneaton seemed nice. They were glad to be in England. Had they had issues with their neighbors? No, they agreed. There had been no issues at all.

Having accepted a council house where few others were willing to move, the newlyweds discovered a friendly working-class community living on estates built following the Second World War. When Margaret Thatcher kickstarted the peninsula’s redevelopment in 1988, Bob found work as a builder. Standing at the base of a 39-story tower on Wednesday afternoon, he points to the roads and drains which mark out his contribution to the global financial center now stretching out around his home.

Then, the area began to decline. “It used to be lovely,” says Nina. “It’s been going downhill for 10 years. The police never come. If we owned our house, we’d move. There is no community here anymore.”

Instead, at night, they see young men inhaling nitrous oxide balloons behind the wheels of their cars. A local gang recently attacked the house next door to them, smashing in its windows and setting fire to a vehicle outside. The police took an hour to arrive. If they were quoted in the press, they tell me, they would face “reprisals”. Bob and Nina are not their real names.

On Wednesday, however, the police did come to the Isle of Dogs. They lined up on either side of the street outside the Britannia Hotel. The Home Office were requisitioning the building to house asylum seekers, and the previous day a group of protesters had gathered. Many believed the immigrants would be moved in from Epping, where the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a man at the Bell Hotel has sparked weeks of protest.

Suggested reading

Reform is coming for Dagenham

By Fred Sculthorp

For Bob and Nina, this marked a final betrayal. Their son had been forced to move away from the Island, as locals still refer to it, by soaring property prices. If he were to request a council house as his parents once had, there would be 1,500 people ahead of him in the queue. For now, he lives in a one-bedroom flat in Bow with six-month-old twins and a five-year-old. “They’re unvetted,” says Bob, “…and they get houses straight away.”

While the Government’s use of three-star hotels to house asylum seekers has proved controversial for years, recent protests in Epping, whipped up by various actors, have galvanized a wider movement. In Diss, Norfolk, a demonstration was held outside the Park Hotel following news this week that it would no longer house families but single men. Further rallies are planned there, as well as at the Brook Hotel in Bowthorpe, near Norwich, and in Waterlooville, Hampshire, where asylum seekers will be housed in a vacant high street shop.

Peter Golds, a Conservative councillor who represents the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, fears the requisitioning of the Britannia Hotel will spark community tensions. He maintains the Island is diverse and happy — he lives there himself — but worries about the increasingly feverish anger of locals. He shows me messages on his phone from constituents which display a raw fury.

“It’s a government catastrophe,” Golds claims. “Would the French put them in a hotel with a sauna, chandeliers and a swimming pool? Would Meloni put them in central Rome? We’re mad.” On the nearby Barkentine Estate, he says, homes are desperately overcrowded; teens are sharing bunkbeds and “suddenly they’re seeing people getting off a boat and going into a hotel”.

Others are angrier still. Alf, a young man in an England shirt with a patchy beard, butts in to tell us that small boat migrants should be shot on sight. You would end up with small children drowning in the Channel if you did that, pleads the councillor. He can see his happy community slipping away in front of him.

For Alf, only a government led by Nigel Farage can fix Britain now. He lives just a few streets away from the Britannia, and can remember when the area was alive with dozens of pubs and local businesses. A perfume salesman by training, he used to work in Harrods until he squeezed a female colleague’s bicep (at, he insists, her instigation) and was fired for sexual harassment. For the past 15 years he tells me he has been warning his friends about Muslims, who he insists are taught to rape and kill Christians and Jews. “I’m not Tommy Robinson,” he says. “I’m quite a shy person. I don’t like trouble, but when I see something not right I have to stand up.”

Like him, most of the protesters are locals. “The Isle of Dogs is a tight-knit community,” says Mary, as she hands out homemade signs that read, “Stop calling us far right. Protect our women and children.” Over the school summer holidays, kids will be out playing in the streets, says a man standing next to her. He believes they will not be safe if asylum seekers are moved into the hotel.

More from this author

Will the Epping protests spread?

By Felix Pope

While many here are working class, others come from a very different world. One Polish man gestures to the flat he plans to buy in Wardian London, an ultra-luxury development next door to the hotel where 70% of the properties are priced at over $1.5 million. If asylum seekers are moved in, he says, he will have to reconsider.

There’s a Bangladeshi community too. They moved to the Island after the Second World War to work on its docks and fill its cheap housing. A group loiters nearby. Rocky, who grew up here, remembers the Eighties as a dangerous time. “This area used to be a no-go zone for us, we got chased out of here,” he says. When he was around seven, he wandered into the wrong neighborhood and a group of white men in their 20s stabbed his football with a knife before holding its blade to his face.

Now, he says, different communities get along. He worries that the arrival of asylum seekers might change that. “It can cause a division and more racism.” The younger men in his group agree. “Thousands of them are arriving every day,” Rocky says of the small boat migrants. “They’re not educated, they don’t know the law. If you’re going to stick them here, it will cause an uproar. You’ll have single men harassing young girls. I can foresee migrants hanging around outside causing no good.” All of the British-born Muslims in his neighborhood are opposed to the hotel being requisitioned, he claims. “We may be bilingual but we’re British in here,” he adds, pointing at his temple.

It was the third night of protests in a single week. Epping is a quiet market town where Greater London shades into Essex. It is not normally a tinder box. But it is now the most visible site of discontent with Britain’s asylum system, which has deposited thousands of unvetted migrants into smalltown Britain.

The protests began last Sunday, after Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia, was charged with trying to kiss a schoolgirl on the town’s high street. He had been in Britain for just eight days. Housed inside the Bell Hotel until his arrest, Kebatu had been living alongside an unknown number of other asylum seekers.

Then, on Thursday, the protests increased in pitch. Hundreds gathered outside the Bell Hotel. The protest was initially peaceful, but took a violent turn. Police officers were assaulted and their vehicles damaged. Three people have now been arrested and politicians have condemned the violence.

This means that the country’s eyes remain on Epping. With hundreds of asylum hotels in operation across Britain, can we expect more protests like these? If so — how best to understand the people who attend them?

By the time night fell on Thursday, protesters had charged the anti-racist counter-demonstrators, kicked in a police van and thrown themselves at a wall of riot shields until the front teeth of a man had been smashed from his mouth. Then what? There was nothing left to do but loiter and argue about who was to blame. Their faces glowed with the light from their phones as they streamed their debates for thousands to watch live online.

Rubber-neckers gathered around Ed Matthews, a TikTok star with a wideboy Essex persona. Young men began pushing towards his camera and shouting over each other. “This country is a pressure cooker and you know what happens to pressure cookers — they explode,” one track-suited teenager shouted. “2025, watch out. It’s going to be a civil war.”

More from this author

Postcode gangs are terrorising Bristol

By Felix Pope

For years, the hotel had proved a bone of contention for local residents. Initially requisitioned by the Home Office during the pandemic, it was used to house asylum-seeking families amid a shortage of temporary accommodation. Julian Leppert, then a local councillor representing For Britain, a now-defunct party with BNP links, told The Observer, “We don’t want a Tower Hamlets out in Essex.” Locals insisted petty crime had increased; Essex Police said it had not.

The Government stopped using the site, and then, with no consultation with local authorities, started again earlier this year. This time the inhabitants were entirely male. “The Home Office told us when it reopened. It was like, ‘This is happening’,” said Holly Whitbread, the ward councillor. “Local residents are very frustrated. The vast, vast majority don’t want it.” In March, the Phoenix Hotel, which is located on the other side of Epping and also houses asylum seekers, was burnt down. A week later, the Bell was set on fire. Rawand Abdulrih, 36, a resident, was charged with arson with intent to endanger life.

Holly’s father, Chris Whitbread, the leader of Epping Forest District Council, has since launched a petition calling for both hotels to be closed immediately. “Our community feels ignored and let down,” it claims. “Epping Forest has been forced to carry an unfair burden in the ongoing illegal immigration crisis.”

Massing outside the Bell on Thursday, furious locals echoed his demands. “Protect our women. Protect our children,” read one sign held aloft. “Stop housing illegal un-checked immigrants. Stop the boats, deport sexual predators. Close the borders.” In keeping with the town’s demographics, the crowd was very white, though a few black protesters were present throughout the day. Anger was directed primarily at the asylum hotel in their town, then illegal migrants more broadly, and, when probed, sometimes also Muslims, “lefties”, and immigrants in general.

A former teacher, there with her teenage grandson, told me she was concerned because the hotel was just 10 minutes’ walk from a school. “I’m mainly worried because they’re Islamic. Islam says you have to conquer,” she said. “This is the UN army. Look up Agenda 30. It’s what the 1% elite want to do.” When a man in a passing car lent from his window to shout “burn it down” her grandson displayed his braces in a toothy grin.

Suggested reading

Why Ballymena is burning

By Aris Roussinos

One mile away, a counter-demonstration organized by Stand Up To Racism was gathering at Epping train station. A small group from the Left-wing campaign had been outside the hotel on Sunday, when a scuffle had broken out and one of their number received a cut above his eye. Following a national call out, they planned to return in greater numbers.

“I’m here because of racism,” one young black woman with a walking stick and a sunflower lanyard, which indicates a hidden disability, told me as she waited on a bench for her comrades to arrive. “No matter what town or city it happens in, it affects me. All people are welcome in this country.” Others had come in from east London, they said. There were pensioners and young communists brandishing copies of Socialist Appeal. They were wholly unprepared for the serious violence to follow.

By the time they began marching through Epping, a large and volatile crowd had assembled outside the Bell. When the anti-racists came within a few hundred meters, protesters surged forward to confront them. The gathering outside the hotel had been diverse, with many local women and older people among it, but the mob running forward now was made up overwhelmingly of young men. “Paedo protectors,” they shouted. The police, taken aback by the speed of their advance, retreated, before discharging canisters of pepper spray and halting the charge.

Forced back into Epping proper, the counter-protesters found themselves penned into a semi-circle between the police and a brick wall. A strangely English game ensued. Locals hurled eggs at the Left-wingers, who smiled as they batted them out of the air with “Refugees Welcome” signs. “I don’t understand why they’ve come,” a woman standing beside me said. She did not condone the violence, but was glad to see a real protest against the asylum seekers. Her elderly mother had been flashed by one recently, she claimed, and was now too scared to walk the dog.

Among those living closest to the Bell, opinion is more conflicted. For Jane Harvey, their presence has left her fearful, anxious and angry. She led me through her grey hallway, past her mother smoking silently by the backdoor, and out onto a patio from which the hotel could be seen just one garden over.

“I probably would not be feeling this way if they were genuine asylum seekers,” she said. “Real asylum seekers are families and women. I would hope the nation would help.” Harvey is not, she was keen to emphasize, a racist. She grew up in inner-city London. She made sure to send her children to a multicultural school, not one in leafy Epping. But at night she now sees strange groups of men and cars loitering outside, she claims. Her son has been pelted with stones while training for a marathon. Standing in her garden, Harvey said that despite the warm weather she will not leave her back door open while home alone anymore.

An elderly couple in a neat yellow house, by contrast, said they had no complaints about their asylum-seeking neighbors. “Up until now there have been no problems,” the husband said. “Me, I let them get on with it. I don’t want to get involved.” When the hotel was still a hotel, he added, drunken guests would stumble out onto the grass at 4am and make a ruckus. The asylum seekers have never done that.

As the day dragged on, with the Left-wing protesters penned in and unable to put up a fight, anger among the crowd began to switch to the police. Men started ramming into their lines and then barracking them furiously once pushed away. “I’m 57 years old,” shouted one at a young and rather timid looking officer. “This used to be a nice country; the police used to be good.”

When several vanloads of reinforcements arrived, the anger went up another gear. Demonstrators surged forward and kicked out at them wildly. As the law retreated, notepads and equipment lay strewn on the ground. A boy wearing a ski mask put on a policeman’s helmet.

The mood was febrile. Following last year’s race riots, this is the scenario that British elites have feared: a spark that could ignite mass ethnic violence. A Whitehall briefing note, revealed last week, shows that ministers feared that disorder might break out should the public discover the secret Afghan resettlement scheme. As the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, recently told The New Statesman, she believes that northern England is so tense it could “go up in flames” at any time.

The rage pulsating through the country remains amorphous, however. In Epping, as throughout the north during last year’s riots, there were no real leaders. The protesters were left to deliberate among themselves, unsure as to whether they should stay in town to hassle the Left-wingers or head back to the hotel and target the asylum seekers.

The radical Right in Britain is meanwhile in a post-organizational phase. There is clearly a social base for a more extreme anti-migrant politics, but no predominant leader or unifying party to build it. Within this void, political entrepreneurs moved throughout the protest trying to win support for their banner.

Jaymey McIvor, a local Reform councilor dressed nattily in pinstriped trousers, loafers and a turquoise “MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN” cap, said he was there to stand up for women. “This is happening across the country,” he said. “We need to stop the wholesale importation of Afghans. The only way to stop this from happening is to vote Reform.” As protesters attacked police lines after dark, others chanted the name of Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League. “Tommy was right,” bellowed one man over and over again.

Another leading chants of “Send them back” was Callum Barker, a clean-cut young local who has attempted to position himself at the front of the protests. “I’d say that there’s no particular kind of leader or anything like this,” he said. “I’m just a bloke who’s picked up a megaphone.”

Barker is also a member of the Homeland Party, which has extensive neo-Nazi ties. Until now, he told me, he has avoided mentioning his allegiance at the demonstrations. He insists he only wants to stand up for Epping residents. When I asked whether he accepted that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust, he refused to answer.

After a final, bruising attempt to rush the line of riot police guarding the Bell, the crowd began to quiet down. Locals insisted they would not give up in the coming weeks, though. “If this was Northern Ireland that hotel would be on fire by now,” shouted one.

Outside a pub on the high street a man with a skull and crossbones tattooed on the back of his head told a small crowd the Government would never listen to them. Instead, action like this would be repeated across the country. As Britain sinks into a long, hot summer, its leaders will be desperately hoping he is not correct.

When the drone reached its target, however, it dropped not a bomb but a bottle of water. The men were not soldiers but civilians, part of a national effort to prepare for a Russian invasion they hope will never come.

As America attempts to enforce a ceasefire and eventual peace in Ukraine, leaders in the Baltics are worried about where Vladimir Putin’s battle-hardened forces might turn next. When the Russian army has no war left to fight to their south and no grinding battles slowing down the rate at which their manpower can be replenished, these small nations, so they warn, will become Europe’s new frontline.

Lithuania — nestled snugly between Kaliningrad, a Russian outpost, and Belarus, a vassal — is preparing rapidly to defend against its eastern neighbor. Last month, Vilnius authorities published wartime evacuation plans. The government is building “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank fortifications along its borders. Speaking last year, then defense minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas said he hoped his country might become a “Lithuanian hedgehog” that could deter the “much stronger Russian bear.”

Increasingly central to these efforts is the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, a state-backed paramilitary that has seen its numbers double to 17,000 since 2022. Around 11,000 members are adults, with the remainder composed of teenagers who go hiking, help the elderly and study warfare in preparation for future service in either the armed forces or the militia. Lithuania, with a population of just under three million, does not have a professional army capable of effective defense on its own. So, as they did in the Forties against the Soviets, its civilians are preparing to fight.

In the event of a war, the Riflemen will be called on to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure and defend its interior while the military battles Russian troops. If Lithuania is occupied, they will remain as stay-behind forces and conduct armed resistance.

Over several bright spring days earlier this month, teams of Riflemen gathered from across the country in Telšiai, a picturesque town that slopes down to the shores of a lake. There they competed against each other in a series of tasks designed to prove their readiness for combat: shooting drills, crossing a fake minefield, and crawling through rotting animal carcasses to simulate the sensory horrors of war.

Small groups of young men and a few women could be spotted taking a break — with painted faces, listening to heavy metal on portable speakers, cigarettes between their teeth.

Watching an inexperienced team as they attempted to steer a first-person view (FPV) drone, 41-year-old Andrius struggled to contain his disappointment. “These drones are not hard to fly,” he said. “There are clips on YouTube where a chimpanzee flies one.” Spending most of his time administering Linux servers in Vilnius, he had the distinct look of a man more comfortable in an office than on the battlefield.

Long a hobbyist who lived for drone racing “from dusk till dawn,” Andrius first realized the military significance of his passion when he saw FPV footage from Ukraine in late 2022. “I remember only Ukrainian shouting like, ‘that target is behind the blue door’,” he said. “They were looking from the drone and flying trying to catch the enemy around the building.” Now, he said, nobody can hide.

As a part-time volunteer force, the Union’s great advantage is that it can draw from the expertise of professionals across Lithuanian society. Members have been called on to teach the army how to hide from, deploy and fight drones. Other Riflemen are using their expertise in tactical combat casualty care to help hospitals practice wartime treatment. “When I joined the Riflemen it was an organization for children and pensioners,” one 20-year veteran told me. “Now we are a real military force.”

Since he signed up with the militia following the invasion of Ukraine, Andrius has traveled to Kyiv to learn how his counterparts are holding the line against the odds. In 2022, civilian volunteers proved essential to defending the Ukrainian capital from advancing columns of Russian tanks. Lithuanian military planners believe the same will likely prove the case for them.

Overseeing the Telšiai exercise was Lieutenant Colonel Linas Idzelis, a former military officer elected to lead the Riflemen in 2023. When we met in a field outside the city, he told me he had been reading The Home Guard Companion, a training manual given to British civilians during the Second World War.

Discussing Russia he began to fizz with anger. They are Asian, not European, he insisted: the Mongol Yoke turned them into savages; in the 17th century they cut one third of Lithuanians into pieces. “If they go into Europe,” he argued, “there will be no civilians anymore.” For Idzelis, there is no debate as to whether Russia will attack the Baltics. “If you read all the assessments which are provided now by the intelligence organizations, this is just a matter of time,” he said.

When the Soviet Union began to fall apart at the end of the Eighties, Idzelis was a long-haired teenage metalhead attending school in Vilnius. Once protests began against Moscow’s rule, he attended with his parents, brandishing a Lithuanian flag and helping to construct barricades.

In 1990, the country became the first member state of the Soviet Union to declare its independence. Gorbachev responded by declaring an economic blockade and then, when Vilnius refused to back down, sending forces from the army and the KGB to launch a coup. When civilians rushed to the capital to defend their newfound independence, 14 were killed as soldiers began firing on the crowd.

“When one of the buildings was assaulted, I was standing like five meters away from the colonel who was shooting into our guys who had defended the building,” Idzelis remembered. Ignas Šimulionis and Darius Gerbutavičius, two fellow heavy metal fans who had studied with him before joining the Riflemen, were killed.

Over 30 years later, the lieutenant colonel is clear about the threat facing his country. “The understanding is that for us no one really wants to go to Siberia,” he said. “It’s better to die in a trench than to chop trees somewhere in Siberia.”

The torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers was not a shock to Lithuanians, he said. “Maybe for you this is, ‘Oh, fuck, shit’. But we experienced it many times. We know what we can expect. In the United Kingdom you cannot expect such kinds of things.”

Europe will never reach a war footing until its citizens witness Russia attacking a NATO power, Idzelis believes. The continent’s latent military industrial capacity has handicapped his preparations for combat. “In the Western world, I think in the future we’ll be lacking manpower,” he said. “Here, we have manpower but no equipment.”

The Riflemen’s Union has paid a Swedish defense firm for a shipment of grenade launchers but will not see them for another three years. An order of tanks will not be ready for between five and eight. In response, the militia is building its own FPV drones, ready to follow the Ukrainian lead and inflict mass casualties at little cost.

Until relatively recently, NATO military planners believed there was little chance that the Baltics could hold off a Russian invasion. They also feared that expanding into eastern Europe might antagonize Putin. In 2017, however, their mindset shifted in response to the invasion of Crimea and battle groups were sent east.

The numbers involved have been largely symbolic, however. These forces were intended to act as tripwires rather than to fight a real war. Under a defense-in-depth model, the alliance expected to throw reinforcements forward following an attack and only retake territory from Russia after it had been occupied. Since 2022, with the horrors of Bucha and the resilience of Putin’s forces in holding territory, thinking has changed.

Four months after the invasion of Ukraine, NATO leaders meeting in Madrid declared that they would now defend “every inch” of allied territory. Last month, Germany formally launched the deployment of a 5,000 strong armored brigade to Lithuania — its first permanent foreign troop deployment since the Second World War.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, however, some have grown jittery at the thought that America’s commitment to the alliance is waning. Speaking anonymously, one military commander told me that if the US were to quit NATO then, “the first step, we will shit ourselves, and then think of the next step.”

So far, American troops remain stationed in Lithuania. Trump has recently dubbed Putin “CRAZY” and threatened fresh sanctions on Russia. Vilnius, which is slashing budgets elsewhere to spend 5.5% of GDP on defense while boosting purchases of American liquid national gas, is bullish about its chances of convincing his administration it is pulling its weight.

According to Linas Kojala, who runs the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, a Vilnius think tank, it is unlikely in any case that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of the country. “What we also want to create is a feeling in the Kremlin that they would never be able to take Lithuania over,” he said. “They might control us militarily but they would not take Lithuania over in terms of having society obliging to the occupational forces.”

It is more likely that Putin would either launch a limited invasion of the Baltics and dare NATO to respond, or simply place large troop numbers on the border and attempt to restrict their independence. “This is not an all-out attack on us, but still a very threatening scenario to consider,” Kojala said.

Over several days across several cities in Lithuania, not one person told me they feared war. Conflict with Russia is the natural state of affairs in this corner of Europe. Concerns that NATO might buckle under Trump’s influence are rising, however. As he watched the Riflemen complete their exercise in Telšiai’s town square on an unseasonably warm morning, Henrikas, who grew up under Soviet occupation, told me he believed it was “impossible” to defend Lithuania without the alliance.

Romena, a curator in the town’s Jewish museum, knows the cost of defeat better than most. Until the Soviet and then Nazi occupations, Telšiai was a center of Torah study. Then, in 1941, German troops and local collaborators eradicated its Jewish population forever over the course of a few short months.

The historian, who works to educate locals about the area’s history of mass killing, previously considered the threat of war to be “absurd”. Now, she said, she knows people gathering cash and documents to flee an invasion. “I am preparing too but I am not going crazy,” she said with a half smile.

Others are getting ready to fight. “Lots of people are going to self-defense courses to get their gun licenses,” Lorenas, a young man hawking semi-automatic weapons to Riflemen on behalf of Vollit, a Lithuanian arms dealer, claimed. “Not specifically because of Russia but they are a bit more conscious of the need to defend their families.” After getting started a few years ago, he now owns eight guns himself.

For Idzelis, how to deter Russia is clear. “Plan maximum is to kill them all, the minimum is [what is] within our means and capabilities,” he said. Having outsourced its defense to America for decades, however, it is not clear when the continent will be ready to fight. Putin could launch a regional war in the Baltics within two years, Danish intelligence predicted in February. They claim he could wage a fresh local conflict within six months.

Darius, a 19-year-old Rifleman, exhausted and giddy after completing the training exercise, told me his friends are split between those who just want to get on with their lives and those who are preparing for war. “I do still trust NATO,” Darius added, “but it won’t do well on its own. We need to be strong to be ready.” As western Europe slowly begins to emerge from its post-war stasis, some along the continent’s eastern borderlands are steely-eyed.

But Kodi, who was just 16, stayed inside and called his older brother, Bailey, instead. Raised by a neglectful mother after the death of their father, the Westcott boys had shared an intensely deprived childhood on south Bristol’s Hartcliffe estate. Built in the Fifties to house those displaced from the inner-city by slum clearances and the Luftwaffe, its neat rows of houses stretch out for miles.

In drill tracks recorded together under the names G-Boy and Young G-Boy, Bailey and Kodi would flash blue bandanas, brag about ditching school to sell drugs, and rep the “13s” — a gang, or loose affiliation of friends, depending on your perspective, named for their postcode.

“On the 4’s block we lurk and attack; anything red gets shot or stabbed,” a balaclaved brother raps on one song, in reference to the group’s rivals: residents of the adjacent estate of Knowle West. Built several decades before Hartcliffe, it has been renowned for social dysfunction almost since its creation. Writing in the Forties, sociologists described residents who had moved out because it was hard to bring up children decently while those of their neighbors had “often unmentionable standards of behavior and language.”

These two areas, BS4 and BS13, have for decades maintained a simmering rivalry despite the many residents who count friends and family members on both sides. “Westers” who spend all week threatening to attack those in Hartcliffe will often find themselves scrapping alongside them at a Bristol City game come the weekend, one youth worker told me. Only in recent years has the division descended into more serious violence.

On the January evening last year when Kodi’s house was attacked, therefore, it was clear to the Westcotts where they had to seek revenge. Bailey, 22, summoned his friend Anthony Snook, a local 45-year-old man, who appeared with a car.

With Snook driving, Kodi, his friend Riley Tolliver and two other boys, who remain unnamed due to their age, headed to Knowle West. In an attack that lasted 33 seconds, they leapt from the vehicle and used large knives and a baseball bat to inflict catastrophic injuries to Max Dixon and Mason Rist, two entirely innocent teenage boys who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Across Britain, extreme youth violence is rising. In recent months, children have been stabbed in schools, on buses and in the streets around their homes. The victims and perpetrators seem to grow younger; their weapons more extreme. Over the past 10 years, the number of teenagers killed with a knife or sharp object has increased by 240%. Across the same period, adult knife homicides have seen just a 30% rise.

The government has responded to the horror with a technocratic focus on regulating the implements used to kill. Machetes, zombie knives and ninja swords are being banned, while Amazon is blamed for selling them in the first place. But what drives children to kill remains murkier.

Suggested reading

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

Outside London, Avon and Somerset saw the greatest rise in knife crime over the last year relative to population, according to police data published in January. From 2023 to 2024, Bristol alone saw 400 extra offenses involving blades. Following the killing of Max and Mason and then, the following month, the stabbing of 16-year-old Darrian Williams by two younger children, the city has been undergoing a period of reflection.

Serena Wiebe was already grieving her brother’s suicide when her friend was fatally stabbed. “We kind of all grew up together,” she says. “So it was kind of like, ‘wow, I’ve lost two people that I saw as like family.’” The 21-year-old was raised in east Bristol, around Easton and St Pauls, ethnically diverse areas long blighted by drug violence which in recent years have been dubbed some of the world’s coolest neighborhoods by Time Out, with rising property prices to match.

Here, and further east, gangs from the BS16 and the BS2 postcodes are locked in an internecine conflict. When Williams’ killers approached him, they shouted, “Is that Darrian? Are you 16?” At their trial, his mother held up a green bandana and yelled, “you killed my son for this… is it worth it?” until police officers asked her to sit down.

“They’ll just stab anything at this point,” says Serena. “I’ve noticed now that if you’re in problems with someone, the culture is you have to do something about it. Or there’s people in your ear saying, ‘you need to do something about it’.”

At a low-rise gym close to the roundabout where Easton meets St Pauls, I speak to Serena and other young people working with Empire Fighting Chance, which provides a mix of boxing training and psychological intervention to steer young people away from violence.

Those at the charity are witnesses to knife crime spreading beyond its traditional boundaries. Mariella, 19, had a close friend stabbed to death by her best friend’s boyfriend when she was 14. “I’ve seen kids that have come from relatively good homes,” she says. “Obviously they’ve experienced a few traumatic things, but they’re in situations where they’re safe, they don’t have to carry a knife. And the only reason they’re doing it is because they’re seeing it on social media.”

Both women agree that the competition for social status online is crucial. When Serena recently took her 11-year-old relative’s phone and started browsing Snapchat, the first three stories that appeared were of people holding knives. “If you’re seeing it from that young age automatically you’re desensitized to what’s going on,” she says. “I’ve had to have conversations with him being like, ‘this isn’t normal’.”

When she was that age, Mariella says, there were gangs and some had knives but they were carried covertly. “Now it’s almost like having a designer bag, having a big knife in your hand in a picture.”

Both also agree that those from Bristol’s deprived inner-city and outer-rim estates feel locked out of the city’s growing prosperity. “There isn’t hope for young people,” says Serena. “I remember when I was in school all we’d be talking about is how none of us will probably ever be able to own a house because of how expensive it is. A lot of young people are like, ‘what’s the point? I’m not going to be able to have what my parents had.’ If you’re in that situation, you’re going to live with your parents forever. Where is the hope?”

Amid such despondence, postcode gangs provide an alternative form of attachment. “It’s sort of spread everywhere,” says Mariella. “There’s 10s, which is my area, Southmead. Every postcode is now grouping together and becoming like a gang within itself. It is a sense of belonging, I think.”

Since 2013, Desmond Brown has worked to break children from across Bristol out of such a cycle. I meet him in St Pauls, where his charity, Growing Futures, helps young people dealing with school exclusions, violence, and child criminal and sexual exploitation. He believes a “death cult” has developed among some children: those from stable homes are carrying and using knives because of the culture, not necessity.

Brown fields phone calls from parents who have found stashes of knives in the local park or their child’s bedroom, but do not know what to do and, often, are too scared to confront them. If they suspect their children are carrying, Brown tells them, they must search them every time they enter and leave the house. But they are the responsible ones. In other homes, he says, it is parents who supply their children with weapons.

And while family units disintegrate, the traditional structure of organized crime also erodes. Children can find accounts on Snapchat that teach them how to cook crack, take over and “cuckoo” the house of a vulnerable person, establishing their own county line. Youths need only to find a dealer and they can set themselves up as an ultra-violent entrepreneur. They fan out from Bristol into Wales and the southwest of England.

Amid violent crime and a culture of knife carrying, children are consumed by fear. Many wear balaclavas, Brown claims, because they wish to disappear, rather than intimidate. They brandish longer and longer knives so they can keep a gap from those who seek to harm them. Sitting in his office, he mimes an outlandish swordfight to me, waving his arm erratically at great distance from his body.

Suggested reading

The private police patrolling London

By Fred Sculthorp

Officials, who are predominantly white and middle class, meanwhile have little understanding of what drives violence, he claims. Children who feel unsafe are going to arm themselves. “No matter what we say about ‘put down knives’, if you’re going to school and you live in Fishponds and you come into City Academy, you’re driving through ops [rival] territory where people will get on the bus and tell you to run your pockets, ask you who you’re repping, where you’re from, and if you say the wrong thing, you could get stabbed.”

When Kodi was sentenced last December, the judge was clear the teenager was likely to have lived in a state of “hyper-vigilance, keyed up all the time”. He had been targeted by rival gangs because of Bailey’s affiliations, because he is from Hartcliffe and because he is mixed race, said Justice May. Amid postcode hostility, carrying knives had been normalized by the adults around him. He likely regarded it as necessary for his safety.

When I speak to Mike Vass, Avon and Somerset Police’s strategic knife crime lead, he is keen to show me a densely patterned diagram detailing the influences which lead children to violence. Is their mother struggling with multiple children and a chaotic lifestyle? Who’s their male role model? Are they being sexually abused?

To combat such factors, primary schools in his patch have begun teaching their pupils not to carry knives when they grow up. “My children, their children and beyond is what we are influencing now,” Vass says with an air of fatalism. “What we’re influencing now is not for the most part going to change in a short period of time.”

Reversing the effects of decades of cuts to frontline services will take 30 years, Vass claims. His parents used to worry that he might smoke and drink; he worries that his two sons will be stabbed.

Revelations from the report prepared on Kodi Westcott by the Youth Justice Service make bleak reading on the influences that shaped him. He missed most of his schooling. His educational level was between seven and 10 years old. His childhood, said May, was one of “scarcely believable neglect and deprivation”.

After his arrest, by contrast, Kodi behaved well. Youth justice workers who examined him said that had he received more nurture his crime might have been prevented. He expressed sorrow for his actions, and May told the court she believed him.

When I visit Hartcliffe, I walk south past children zipping around on souped-up dirt bikes, and head into a large Morrisons on the outskirts of town. At the newspaper display, I see Kodi’s face staring up from the cover of the Bristol Post.

Now sentenced to at least 23 years for murder and detained in a secure children’s home, he has somehow obtained a phone, created an Instagram account, and begun posting mocking references to the 33 seconds it took him to kill and his victims “up in his coffin”.

“Love to everyone showing love to my ting,” he has written to his followers. “This is only the start trust me.”

Who is that someone? Who will Make Rochdale Great Again?

Since storming to victory in February’s by-election, George Galloway has vowed to tackle Labour’s “corruption”, restore a maternity ward to the local hospital, and, as part of his “lasting legacy”, coax Primark to open a new store in the town. With the help of a Grand Alliance between his hard-Left Workers Party and other local candidates, he has also pledged to destroy Rochdale’s Labour Party in Thursday’s local elections.

One man hoping he’ll succeed is Billy Howarth. The flat-capped, plain-talking local attacked Galloway as “divisive” while running against him as an independent in Rochdale’s by-election but is now standing as a candidate for the Workers Party. “I thought his election would be a stepping-stone for the international stuff [Israel-Gaza], but actually he’s gone totally the opposite way,” he says. “Yes, he’s still speaking about the international stuff, but he’s speaking about Rochdale, and what Rochdale needs and he’s willing to fight for it.”

Howarth’s life has been deeply scarred by Rochdale’s depredations. Growing up on the sprawling Kirkholt Estate, built in the Forties by German prisoners of war, he was groomed and abused by a local paedophile, George Crawford, from the age of eight. “He was an animal of a man,” Howarth says now. “He was notorious. Never got convicted of it, but he was supposed to have raped over 200 boys.”

Widespread sexual abuse is still taking place in Rochdale, Howarth tells me, but he believes he has at least had some measure of justice. In 2000, Crawford, by then in his 60s and nearly blind, was charged with the sexual abuse of 10 boys during the Seventies and Eighties. A year later, while the trial was still ongoing, his wife found his body slumped against their living room door. He had been beaten to death by a local man with an ornamental lamp. At the killer’s trial, the prosecution said Crawford’s murder had been motivated at least in part by reports of his abuse spreading through the local area.

“I wouldn’t join any mainstream party,” Howarth says. “I hold all three of them accountable for Rochdale’s children being abused. It’s the poverty; it’s a class thing. I don’t believe it’s racial. There’s white guys involved in this too. They target girls from children’s homes and girls from dysfunctional families. They’re easy targets.”

More from this author

The betrayal of Borisland

By Felix Pope

Out on the doorstep, he claims that people are warming to the Workers Party. “I don’t have Palestine conversations on the door. It’s not my field.” Instead, Howarth claims, voters care more about the poor quality of housing in the region. Few have forgotten the death four years ago of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who suffered from respiratory problems caused by the mould growing throughout his parents’ housing association flat. The tragedy led news bulletins, but little was done to make Rochdale’s houses safer.

Walking through a predominantly Asian part of Rochdale — where Palestinian flags flutter from buildings and a newsagent displays an advert for Salaam Cola, the BDS-approved alternative to Coke — support for the Workers Party seems widespread. Posters in shop windows feature Galloway shaking hands with local candidate Minaam Ellahi, a clean-cut young man who hopes to unseat the “pro-genocide Labour Party”. Standing on a nearby street, Muhammed, a bearded young man, tells me how Galloway won him over. “He’s trying to get a Primark in the town, he’s working on the market. Primark is a big deal for the town. We need to give him time. What have Labour done for Rochdale? At least Galloway is trying.” Waiting in a barbers’ shop, another man tells me he voted for Galloway because of Palestine, but thinks he is doing a lot for the town too. “Keir has failed to help Gaza,” he says bluntly. “I would never vote Labour again. Most Muslim voters will vote for the Workers Party, not Labour.”

In Rochdale, this is significant. While the town itself is 19% Muslim, that figure rises to 31% for the parliamentary constituency. And crucially, support among the community, long taken for granted by Labour, is faltering amid the fall-out from the Israel-Gaza war, with just 60% of Muslim voters who backed the party in 2019 willing to do so at the next election. This recalibration, the Labour Muslim Network said, revealed a “crisis point” that could prove irreparable.

And yet, when I ask the barber about the Workers Party poster in his window, he shrugs. “Someone came in and asked me to put it up.” A few doors down the road, Amhed, a butcher, seems equally perplexed at the Workers Party poster in his window. “I’m not supporting Galloway,” he tells me. “I was a Tory voter last time. Tories support businesses. They helped us during Covid.”

He is, however, the exception. Walking around the town, most Muslim voters praise Galloway’s character, while many non-Muslims condemn him as a fraud. He is a “showman” who is “all lip”, observes one retiree who is struggling to pay her rent on a basic pension.

Chris, walking two whippets and missing several teeth, tells me that he did not vote in the by-election on principle. “It was a farce. Galloway is a chancer — he’s not really seen in Rochdale now.” Labour, who control three quarters of council seats, have been in power here since 2011 and, Chris thinks, they will do well at the local elections. But, he adds: “They’re out for their egos — you never see any changes.”

In the shadow of Rochdale’s soaring Gothic town hall (so impressive, a local rumour goes, that Hitler had planned to ship it to Germany brick-by-brick were he to invade England), I speak to Jules, a middle-aged man who wastes no time tearing into his town’s new representative. Galloway, he insists, is a “disgrace”. “Anyone who hosts a show on RT should not be an MP,” he says. “He just wants a platform for supporting Russia in parliament.” People will be sick of Galloway soon, he believes, and his support will collapse.

A local Labour insider is similarly confident. “Voters seem to be making the distinction between the by-election and the local election,” he says. “That’s working for us. The council has a pretty good record. It’s not financially distressed.” Accusations of corruption have swirled around the local party, however. In 2018, a recording of former council leader Allen Brett surfaced in which he suggested he “might” withhold road funding from wards that declined to vote for his party. After being reprimanded for breaching the local authority’s code of conduct, he insisted his comments were just “banter”.

Suggested reading

When Gaza came to Rochdale

By MIchael Crick

Aware that the Labour vote is counted rather than weighed in Rochdale, where the Liberal Democrats have always held significant support, the local party has been out on the doorstep since the first morning after their election loss. And Labour have reason to be more confident this time. Galloway, after all, has always failed to convert his by-election wins into political momentum. In Bethnal Green, he stepped down; in Bradford, he lost; in Rochdale, Labour are confident the same will happen.

As for the local elections, while Muslims voters may be furious with Starmer over Palestine, the Labour insider claims, they also understand that their council cannot save Gaza. Galloway leans heavily on endorsements from community leaders, but that model of campaigning for ethnic-minority votes is outdated, they insist. “There are canny heads among south Asian voters who say: ‘are we being used as political pawns?’ I think they’re wise enough to realise that.”

But if this is true, I failed to meet any. Rather, the Muslim voters I spoke to gave the impression that a more decisive break had taken place. Palestine was just the most painful expression of a longstanding alienation between the party and its electoral base. For many, supporting the Workers Party stemmed less from a desire to empower Galloway than to give Starmer a kick in the teeth.

In the meantime, Galloway’s much-trumpeted Grand Alliance has struggled to cohere. Several Liberal Democrats and independent candidates offered his “personal endorsement” have angrily refused the support. Dave Tully, a popular local businessman who came second in the by-election, has accused Galloway of “manipulating the situation” after the MP claimed his backing. The coalition is, Galloway admitted on X earlier this month, “not as grand as we’d have liked”. When I visited Rochdale, he was not available to be interviewed, having left town for a Gaza solidarity rally elsewhere.

Back on the high street, the pair of florists insist they will not be voting for Labour or the Workers Party. “I think Galloway looks a bit like a pervert to me,” says one. “I only know him from when he dressed up like a cat on Big Brother.” Around the corner, another resident articulates the town’s lingering sense of pessimism with more clarity. She hopes Labour will win, but that little will change. “Rochdale can’t get any worse,” she adds wryly.

Worksop is the largest town in Bassetlaw — the constituency that saw the greatest Labour-to-Conservative migration at the last general election. It’s the heart of Borisland. And now, exactly one year on from his ignominious resignation, many people here remain steadfastly loyal to their populist tribune. This was where the Boris majority was won: where miners, pensioners, Brexiteers and lifelong Labour voters united to stick it to their old party. Other than the brief blip of Malcolm MacDonald (son of the first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald) defecting to National Labour in 1929, Labour had held the town since 1929. Brendan Clarke-Smith is the MP who, in 2019, smashed that red record with a stonking 18.4% swing, the greatest, he later assures me, at any general election since the Second World War. (“I think it’s on Wikipedia.”)

When Johnson took the seat, it heralded a new era of Tory politics. A new coalition, forged from the fires of Brexit, stretched from Hampshire to Hartlepool. Like Columbus, he seemed to have landed upon virgin territory ripe for the taking. Labour — cosmopolitan, effete and out of touch — looked sunk. But four years on, the shaggy conqueror is gone, and a string of by-elections threatens to chip away at his majority he built. In Selby, Uxbridge, Mid Bedfordshire, Somerton and now Chris Pincher’s seat of Tamworth, the prognosis is gloomy. So far, the bookies believe every single one will be lost. And Bassetlaw itself, the clearest expression of that much-heralded post-Brexit realignment, is now a harbinger of doom. In March, one poll suggested it, and all the other 44 Red Wall seats won from Labour, will be lost at next year’s general election. What went wrong?

“He’s still hugely popular,” Clarke-Smith tells me. “A lot of people voted for Boris. It wasn’t the only thing — it had been trending our way anyway — but those Brexit Party voters and so on came across, and he was a big part of that.” The big man, he says, has an “aura” about him that helped draw in converts. “You still get voters saying: ‘Oh, I voted for Boris…’”

When I meet the MP, he is wearing a checked suit and has a small ketchup stain at the corner of his mouth. A self-described “libertarian Thatcherite”, he was raised on a Nottingham council estate, trained as a teacher, and worked at a school in Romania before entering politics. He is also, on the day I visit, on the cover of the Worksop Guardian, delivering a sly grin alongside the headline: “MP slammed for ‘vile’ Twitter attack.” It is the outcome of Clarke-Smith’s engagement in the culture wars — he is at the fore of a group of working-class Tories keen to give as good as they get online. A member of the New Conservatives, a collective currently lobbying for tougher action on immigration, he is also part of the Common Sense Group, which has attacked “the woke agenda”.

He says this posture is what the Red Wall wants. “Apart from the obvious stuff about the economy and NHS, what would you guess the main issue is here?” he asks me. “The number one thing I get emailed about, more than Dominic Cummings, more than anything, is small boats. There is very little immigration here — but it’s the number one issue because they linked it to taking back control.”

Suggested reading

The Red Wall firebrand is a myth

By John Oxley

If true, this harks back to the political energy Boris personified, and which this squad of Red Wall MPs were elected to enact. The highest-profile member of the Nottinghamshire Tory contingent is Lee Anderson, the spiky-haired former miner and ex-Labour councillor who now serves as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In a recent segment on his GB News show, which captured much of the banal absurdity of politics in 2023, Anderson fed Clarke-Smith baked beans in a blind taste test to prove that bargain hunting is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis. “Here comes the aeroplane,” he said as he raised the spoon, firmly back in single-dad mode.

It’s perhaps not the most traditionalist-Tory publicity stunt. But, “we’re not in London — there’s no liberal elite here”, his campaign manager assures me. In Bassetlaw now, “the bigger the house and the bigger the gravel driveway, the less chance there is they’ll vote for us”, Clarke-Smith boasts. They claim the realignment is still working.

Worse-off voters were crucial to the Tory success in 2019. In that election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Labour lost nearly one in three low-income voters who had turned out to vote for them in 2017, while the Conservatives retained 90%. In the Red Wall now, however, the picture is shifting. The same March polling that foresees the Tories losing 45 seats in the North and Midlands shows the party behind in all social groups, from managers to unskilled manual labourers. That 19th-century notion of “working-class Toryism” has proven more elusive than first claimed.

And, away from the bustling high street, signs of discontent lurk. The cabbie who drove me from Retford, the handsome market town that makes up Bassetlaw’s other major population centre, tells me Boris was popular among his clientele in 2019. Now passengers young and old tell him they want a change of government. “My grandad was a well-known cab driver around Retford — he died during Covid. My gran couldn’t get out of her care home to attend the funeral.” It was, he adds dryly, “a bit crap”. He now works part time at Rampton Hospital, on a secure ward, where he helps transport imprisoned psychopaths. “There are cutbacks just like the rest of the NHS,” he says. “It’s much harder to transport patients now we have less staff.”

In Worksop itself, Wallace’s gleaming pate is plastered across town to advertise the food festival. I watch him deliver his own populist punchlines while cooking, laying into “clickbait” news and telling his audience not to trust headlines in the papers. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures the distrustful mood. Lindsay Martin, a Retford resident manning a friend’s market stall nearby, tells me she never fell for Johnson’s charm offensive. “Boris made a lot of false promises that were never delivered on. The country got worse under his leadership.” Asked about levelling-up, that chimera of social transformation, she merely laughs.

This region has always been sceptical of received opinion. The local council’s website grandly claims that “many regard Bassetlaw as the birthplace of the United States of America”. And, while that “many” is doing some heavy lifting, a sizeable chunk of the separatist-nonconformists who could no longer stand the Church of England did hail from the flat fields around here. At the local museum, a study resembling that of Plymouth Colony leader William Brewster is now preserved in aspic. And political dissidence, including to the benefit of the Right, is part of its history, too. During the miners’ strike, Nottinghamshire stuck out when the majority of its miners kept working and thus helped Margaret Thatcher’s government survive the winter of 1984.

Today, though, like much of the rest of the country, dissent has sublimated into a kind of jaded desolation. Others walking up and down the high street are less cynical. Janet, a pensioner in a purple windbreaker, tells me she voted Conservative for the first time in her life because of Boris. “It was his principles,” she says. “He got stuff done. Then he was brought down by other people.” What about the parties? Didn’t he break Covid rules? “It wasn’t his fault,” she tells me, without elaborating. “Rishi turned on him.” She will vote Tory again at the next election.

A middle-aged couple tell me that they, too, voted Conservative for the first time because of Johnson. “I liked Boris at the time,” says the wife. “The slur against him now smells a little of a smear campaign.” Her husband agrees: “I think I’d vote for the Tories again if Boris returned as leader.” “Cameron” will “sell us out” with Europe, he claims, before his wife hurriedly reminds him that the Labour leader is called Keir.

More from this author

Will Starmer recapture Nuneaton?

By Felix Pope

As the food festival winds down, the high street becomes deserted. I walk past Clarke-Smith’s high street office where one window has taken a hit but remains just about intact, bearing a spiralling network of cracks. Retford is similarly quiet. People aren’t interested in talking: a densely bearded man bringing down the shutters on his vape shop tells me he “doesn’t do politics”. I pass the empty headquarters of Jo White, Labour’s chosen candidate and the wife of John Mann, the constituency’s former MP. A sign proclaims that she supports “Traditional Values in a Modern Bassetlaw”. I do not quite understand what this means, but when I email her campaign to ask I do not receive a response.

Johnson, meanwhile, has got his trotters up in Oxfordshire. Throughout his career, the former PM cultivated a set of allies before discarding them and Clark-Smith now faces a potential suspension from Parliament after falling foul of the privileges committee — was it worth it to defend Johnson? “Part of me thinks I owe my position as a member of parliament to Boris,” he says. “Winning that election, and getting Brexit done and everything else. I thought he was doing a good job in difficult circumstances. It wasn’t just loyalty — I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do.”

His words are laced with unwitting irony. Four years ago, victory here seemed to herald the start of a new age. Levelling-up money might reverse economic decline; an end to Brexit psychodrama might let old wounds heal. Perhaps it was hope more than expectation when Bassetlaw, the Red Wall and Brendan Clarke-Smith all tied their fortunes to a New-York-born columnist with a history of disappointing those who trusted him. While some still keep the faith, that realignment seems to have delivered little change to their lives in return. And, beyond tribal loyalties, that was the promise of 2019, broken utterly when Boris resigned last year.

I asked Boris-loyalist Janet if the town had got any better since the election, and I received a simple answer: “No.”

After the pipers comes a succession of American cop cars. One is from Los Angeles; another is playing KRS-One’s “Sound of Da Police”. Next are the floats, soliciting charitable donations, and then the local worthies. The scouts, a youth farming group, naval cadets, and a topless child manning a machine gun mounted on a truck are all present.

This is Nuneaton Carnival, an annual fair launched in 1930 to raise money for the local hospital that has been a fixture ever since. Today, following a four-year Covid-enforced break, the market town is out to party. It is Middle England as conjured by the fever dreams of Paul Dacre, a provincial part of Warwickshire where one might once have spotted old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist.

If Nuneaton lives at all in the public imagination today, it is as the place where George Eliot was born and Ed Miliband died. In 2015, it was viewed as the ultimate bellwether constituency: had Miliband won Nuneaton he would have been prime minister. But it wasn’t to be. David Cameron would later crow it was at 1.53am, when the town declared, that he knew he had won the general election outright.

Being 37th on Labour’s list of targets, the Warwickshire market town ought to have flipped that night. Other than at Thatcher’s pomp, in 1983 and 1987, the constituency had been red from 1930 to 2010. Brexity, deprived, struggling with the cost-of-living crisis and convinced that immigration is too high, it is the exact type of seat that Sir Keir Starmer is straining to win at next year’s general election. Since 2010, it has been held by Marcus Jones, a stolid Midlands solicitor who has lived in Nuneaton all his life, and whose lead over his Labour rival yawned to a 30-point gap at the last election.

Arriving at the town by train, the first sight is of Hell. On platform 1, a mural — about eight feet high and 20ft across — seems to depict the town alight: long tongues of flame wrap themselves around buildings, bridges and trees, consuming all. This Guernica of the West Midlands — On the Right Tracks by Joanne Bannister — was commissioned by Nuneaton & Bedworth In Bloom. I try to find someone to ask about it, but the ticket office is shut, and no staff can be found.

Across town in Gala Field, rows of gazebos mark the spot where the carnival procession is to begin and end. Amid the food trucks and tombola stalls, I meet Martin Parrack, who has pitched up to run a PR drive on behalf of the Warwickshire Freemasons.

“I’m here to dispel the myth that we’re in the Illuminati,” he tells me in a flat Brummie accent. “The principles of the Masons are to be good to your neighbours and your family.” Between the secret handshakes and cloak-and-dagger ceremonies, I suggest, you must talk to a lot of different people. How do you think the town is doing right now?

“The membership of the Masonic temple in Nuneaton is growing,” he says. “Young people who can’t afford to buy houses in Coventry or Birmingham are moving to the town. They’re moving to areas that wouldn’t have been so… desirable in the past.”

Suggested reading

In defence of Little England

By Tom McTague

But the region, he adds, is not in a good place. “Tamworth is struggling, Nuneaton is the same. I recently walked from Birmingham to Nuneaton, then from Nuneaton to Atherstone, to raise money for charity. If you walk through Nuneaton town centre, you can see a marked decline in footfall. Today is a Sunday, but that was midweek. It’s not vibrant.”

A few stalls down, two local women soliciting donations for a disability charity share much the same story. “We’re still at the tail end of Covid, feeling its after-effects,” the younger woman, who is in charge, tells me. “Society has changed. People are less sociable. The community spirit has petered out a bit.”

Her older colleague chimes in. “Covid was the final nail in the coffin,” she says. “The high street is declining. People are counting their pennies.”

Nuneaton has been on a slow decline for some time. Once an epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, the flat land around here was pockmarked with coal mines sunk deep into the earth. Just a decade ago, the Daw Mill colliery — just a 20-minute drive away — was one of the largest in Europe still operating.

Suggested reading

The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

Then, in February 2013, a fire broke out 740 metres below ground. Sparked seemingly from nothing, it spread quickly to a ventilation unit and 100 miners had to be evacuated. Fourteen stayed behind to contain the blaze, but to no avail. A few years earlier, employees had been making £70,000 a year, with dozens chasing every vacancy. Now, out of nowhere, the mine was forced to close; 650 men lost their jobs.

Today, at Nuneaton Museum, a small exhibition featuring a spread of historical curios are all that remains of the industry. A woman working behind the desk tells me the closure of the pits was a blow to the town.

“We ran an event where we invited people in to discuss their memories of mining,” she says. “There is definitely a big sense of sadness at the loss of the industry. There was a fondness for coal. It was a real part of the town. It was in the bones of Nuneaton.” Can the area be revived? “There are a lot of plans in place to regenerate the town and to bring it out of what’s perceived as a slump,” she insists.

As for who they’ll vote for, she says locals are “sick” of the Tories. “The choice to vote for the Conservatives was made in desperation,” she explains. “Labour used to be popular, but there was a loss of faith in the party.”

Lianne Parry, a volunteer busy talking to the few guests who wander in, agrees that Starmer could win the seat. “The faith in Labour could come back,” she claims. Nuneatonians voted for Brexit, but they didn’t understand what it was or what it would do. “After it happened, they wondered why things were so difficult, but they voted for it without asking questions.”

I walk from the museum up into town, towards the high street. When the 18th-century non-conformist historian William Hutton visited Nuneaton, he described it as being “in the domain of sleep”. Some 250 years later, little has changed. Nuneaton Beds and Sofas is having a closing-down sale; the Myton Hospice a clearance sale; Debenhams is boarded up; a sign in the window of Gattsbys solid oak furniture specialists declares: “Sorry — closed.” The high street is largely deserted. The first man I try to talk to rides away at speed on his mobility scooter, insisting he does not live in Nuneaton.

I stop in at Lord Hop, a microbrewery set up in a shop that was once a former beauty salon. Its landlord, who was born in Nuneaton but now lives outside, says the footfall is so low, he often closes at 7pm during the week. Despite that, he insists, “the town is coming back”, with a new cinema and restaurant set to open. “It’s natural to be optimistic,” he tells me. “We never fully recovered from Covid. Covid chucked everything out of sync.”

In response, the Government “chucked money at the town”, he adds — but the £4 million from the levelling-up fund was not enough. It failed to tackle the real causes of decline — inchoate talk of council “corruption” and big business getting away with something, as well as a broader sense that the area hasn’t taken advantage of Brexit. Online, equally vague rumours about municipal corruption have been raised, with little substance behind them. “Where is all the money going?” ask Nuneaton and Bedworth Community Association on a website that also features a video suggesting the World Economic Forum “runs the world”.

The first crack in Labour’s local base of power came in 2008, when the Conservatives took control of the borough council for the first time since it was established in 1974. The “last fortress of socialism in Warwickshire” had fallen, the Coventry Telegraph reported. On a flying visit to the town, David Cameron congratulated then councillor Marcus Jones, the future agent of Miliband’s doom.

Could Jeremy Corbyn do any better? It was at a Labour leadership hustings in Nuneaton, after all, that the oddball backbencher drew such great applause that both Owen Jones and Toby Young foresaw his eventual victory. Held just a month after Miliband failed to win over the town, the occasion was designed to excise the spirits of defeat, but — as if the party’s new leadership had been built upon a burial ground — it would only come back to haunt them. In 2019, the Tory margin of victory stretched to 13,000.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson should destroy the Tories

By Aris Roussinos

“They’re all the same, all the politicians are the same,” says Nick, a regular nursing a pint of porter. “Corbyn was very Left-wing. He wasn’t interested in improving the town, he was interested in his own agenda. He believed in God knows what.” Nor was Corbyn strong enough, says the landlord — not strong enough to take on the capitalists, not strong enough to reverse decline, not strong enough to represent them.

Starmer, meanwhile, is too posh and too remote. Bill Olner, the Labour MP who represented Nuneaton from 1992 until 2010, was different, they say. Nick adds: “He mixed with the locals. He was a working man all his life until he was elected to parliament.” After his defeat, Olner, a former electrician and union shop steward, joined the local council and served until he contracted Covid and died in the local hospital.

Yet if it was Nuneaton where Labour’s crack-up began, and Nuneaton where their entry into the wilderness was confirmed, it may yet be the origin of their revival. A recently watered-down green energy plan from the party would mean investment for a new electric battery factory in the region. Locals remain confident things can change, while sceptical of the ability of politicians to help. Or, as Harry Ghale, one of the town’s many retired gurkhas told me as he helped set up a community barbecue: “Nuneaton is okay. I’m not bothered about who wins the next election.”