In his article, Trump told the story of how he had built one of the “greatest” golf courses in the world, 10 miles north of Aberdeen. In the early days, Trump wrote, people “laughed when they saw what I had planned” — but eventually he convinced them. “Scotland has already been won,” Trump concluded. “And so will the United States.”

But had Scotland truly been won?

Last year, when I visited the Aberdeen branch of Trump International Golf Links — which lies just outside of the village of Balmedie (population: 2,500) — I discovered a very different story from the one Trump tells.

For almost two decades, a small band of Scots has resisted The Trump Organization’s efforts to turn their land into a playground for the super-rich. First he tried to buy them out, and then he tried to intimidate them — but they refused to uproot themselves for the sake of a billionaire’s bank account. This weekend, as Trump returns to Scotland to visit his beloved golf courses, the rebels will still be there — refusing to budge.

***

As so often with Trump, the story starts in Trump Tower. It was 2005. On one side of the room sat Trump and his advisers, including two of his children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka. On the other was a former officer in the Scots Guards, an elite unit in the British Army, delivering the most important pitch of his life.

Neil Hobday was used to mixing with the rich and powerful but, Hobday told me, he was still nervous. Trump could be a fierce interrogator.

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The plan, Hobday told Trump, was ambitious but simple. North of Aberdeen, near a small village called Balmedie, sat Scotland’s Sahara: an expanse of rolling sand dunes that tumbled down to the beach. The Scottish government had designated the dunes a Site of Special Scientific Interest — which meant that they couldn’t be developed. But for the right amount of foreign investment, both the government and the main landowner were willing to sacrifice their protected status.

Just imagine, Hobday suggested, if they were turned into a golf course?

Trump loved the idea and Scotland’s charm offensive began. In October 2005, first minister Jack McConnell flew to New York to try and win him over. The golf course, he hoped, would provide the greatest economic boom to Scotland since its oil and gas discoveries.

Within five months, a deal was secured. And so, without Trump even visiting Scotland, his Organization announced its intention to buy “an 800-acre stretch of stunning sand dunes” at the Menie Estate in Aberdeenshire. Along with thousands of jobs and £1 billion of investment, he promised two golf courses, a hotel, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 other dwellings. Sean Connery, he claimed, would hit the first ball. His membership number would be 007.

But all of this was predicated on local approval — and while Scotland’s national government had been seduced by Trump’s promise of foreign investment, the Aberdeenshire council still wasn’t convinced. Normal, rural people would be uprooted by construction, it warned, and the sand dunes irreparably destroyed. The proposal was rejected.

But local opposition was never going to stop Holyrood. And a week later, it stepped in, announcing that it had “called in” the proposal — a euphemistic way of saying that they, not the council, would have the final say.

In the year that followed, representatives of the Scottish Parliament flew back and forth to New York, where they dined with Trump and feasted on his vision. Chief among them was the future head of the Scottish government, Alex Salmond, then the representative for Aberdeenshire. Whatever was discussed, it wasn’t made public, though in March 2008 an official inquiry into the deal described Salmond’s behaviour as “cavalier”, and a sign of “exceptionally poor judgment”.

Nevertheless, later that year, on 16 December, a well-fed coterie of Scottish ministers granted The Trump Organization its planning approval. And in October 2009, construction at Trump International Golf Links began.

***

High above the 18th hole of Trump International, on a ridge that stretches into the sea, sits a decommissioned coast-guard station. David Milne, 60, the one-time cowboy actor, first bought the home with its quarter acre of land in 1992, and lives there with his wife.

For him, the story starts towards the end of 2005, a couple of months after Hobday’s trip to Trump Tower, when Milne received a phone call from a man called Peter Whyte. Whyte described how, after going shooting nearby, he had fallen in love with the area and wanted to buy a holiday home. Would Milne consider an offer?

Milne politely declined, and forgot about the incident until, in February the following year, Whyte turned up at his door and repeated his request. Milne declined again.

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Only later, after a suspicious neighbour decided to look up Whyte’s number, did it become clear that he didn’t exist. It was an alias used by Hobday.

The deception, Hobday told me, was deemed necessary to avoid residents asking Trump to pay more than market value. When I asked him to clarify who made the decision to use such tactics, Hobday claimed it was the result of a conference call with “people in Trump’s office”. (The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.)

Michael Forbes’s outbuilding. (Credit: Jacob Furedi)

After the plans for the golf course became public, The Trump Organization openly tried to persuade the residents to sell their homes. In 2007, Milne was issued a formal offer of $230,000 for his property, which he rejected. Some of his neighbours caved, with half of the 10 or so households accepting offers on their properties, while the others held out.

At this point, the local media was on Trump’s side, with The Press and Journal lobbying hard in favour of the project. When the council voted against the course, the Evening Express attacked council members under the front-page headline: “You traitors.”

The fact that Sarah Malone, the Scot who served as executive vice president of the development, would later marry the editor of The Press and Journal, wasn’t lost on Milne. “It sort of explains why the local media wasn’t playing fair,” he said.

And so, the course was going to be constructed — even if it had to be built around the resisting households on the Menie Estate. When the diggers finally arrived in July 2010, Milne said, they assembled two-story mounds around each of the resisting properties. The sunlight was blocked from their homes. Sand leaked into their windows.

“At one point, they came in and ripped out the original coast-guard fence and replaced it with a new one,” said Milne. “And then they sent me a bill asking me to pay half for it.”

In the early days of construction, Donald Trump Jr. was a regular fixture in Aberdeenshire, knocking on residents’ doors every few weeks to see if they’d changed their minds about selling their properties. Meanwhile, Milne was offered a lifetime membership to the golf course, and the opportunity to buy one of the new houses, provided he sold his home for an increased offer of $300,000. He claims the second offer was less than half the value of his house. But even if it had been double, he said he wouldn’t have accepted.

Trump’s son grew increasingly frustrated. According to Milne, on one occasion he said: “The golf course is going to happen. You’re getting in the way. We’ll just bulldoze you like we do with the earth.”

But Milne would not be moved: “As I told him at the time, the only way I intend to leave is horizontally in a box.”

***

The first time Trump met Michael Forbes, he offered the fisherman a job on his golf course. Trump then offered to buy his home and build him another one. “I sussed him out in about two seconds,” Michael says.

To the untrained eye, the Mill of Menie may seem like every other farm on Scotland’s windswept eastern coast. The house is pebbledash, the yard dotted with chickens and rusty tractors. When the sky is clear in spring, you can see skylarks and linnets. Summers, though, are ruled by the Haar, the all-consuming fog that climbs out of the North Sea. Yet even through the Haar, you can see the graffiti on Michael’s outbuilding. “No more Trump lies,” it reads. “No golf course.”

When he first heard of Trump’s plan, Forbes lived here with his wife, Sheila, and his mother, Molly, who was in her early eighties — and, he tells me, she was even more outraged by the destruction of their community than he was. “She loved this place,” Forbes told me, showing me the annex she used to live in. “She called it ‘Paradise,’ ” he said, pointing to the sign hanging next to the door.

Despite Trump’s offer, the Forbes family refused to sell their land. And as the golf course began taking shape, various authorities turned up at the family’s doorstep, investigating reports that he kept an unlicensed gun, or hoarded flammable liquids. None was true, and Forbes said he’s confident he knows who made the initial reports. “They were trying everything to kick me out,” he added. (Neither the police nor the Scottish Environment Protection Agency responded to a request for comment.)

The Trump Organization was perfectly open about its desire to bulldoze the locals. It would later lobby Aberdeenshire Council to use its compulsory purchase powers to force out the residents. The threat still hangs over the community. “It has never been formally withdrawn,” Milne told me.

Faced with partisan local media and an impotent local council, the Trump resistance — which consisted of the endangered residents and a few local supporters — started to hold meetings at Milne’s house. In July 2009, they set up a website, and started sending bulletins to the national press. The campaign was called “Tripping Up Trump”, and within months, Scotland’s people had begun to rally behind them.

Protests were organised on the dunes; anti-Trump badges and pens were sold; Mickey Foote, the late producer of The Clash who lived nearby, was particularly outspoken. By 2010, a group of individuals — including Lord David Puttnam, the filmmaker who produced Chariots of Fire — supported the mass purchase of a parcel of Forbes’s land, to protect it from compulsory purchase.

Trump was infuriated. Forbes, he told the press, was “dirty, sloppy, and unkempt”. His house, Trump added, was “slumlike” and “disgusting”; Forbes “lived like a pig”. Forbes still laughs at this final barb: “Pigs are very clean animals.”

Molly Forbes’s ‘Paradise’ (Credit: Jacob Furedi)

And, he points out, if his family was unkempt, The Trump Organization was partly to blame. In July 2010, when his mother Molly, then 86, turned on one of Paradise’s taps, it let loose a trickle of sludge. The Trump Organization acknowledged that its workers had unintentionally broken a pipe that connected the Forbes’s home to the nearby well, depriving the family of clean water. But it claimed to have fixed it within 24 hours. Forbes disputes this, saying that the water remained contaminated.

Over the next five years, Molly would often have to walk 50 metres to a nearby stream and fill up a wheelbarrow with water when she needed to wash. Forbes claims that the pipe was only properly mended when he trespassed on Trump’s property to fix it himself, after rejecting the organisation’s offer to connect it to the main water supply rather than the well.

By this point, Forbes was a national hero. In 2012, he was voted “Top Scot” joining the ranks of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and tennis champion Andy Murray. When Trump got wind of it, he Tweeted that the poll was rigged; calling it an “embarrassment”, he banned Glenfiddich, the event’s sponsor, from all of his properties.

By then the course was finished. The first ball was hit at Trump International Golf Links in July 2012. Sean Connery was nowhere to be seen.

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After the course opened, the resistance continued to engage in guerrilla tactics. In June 2016, Milne and Forbes hoisted Mexican flags above their properties — to show solidarity with “everyone else who Trump has derided, insulted, and intimidated”. Within days, messages of support arrived from Mexico — as well as more flags.

But for Forbes, this was a Pyrrhic victory. That year, during the height of the pandemic, both his mother Molly and wife Sheila died. Molly was 96; Sheila was in her sixties. Forbes is adamant that The Trump Organization’s campaign of harassment contributed to their deaths. “Of course it had an affect on their health,” he told me. The lack of fresh water; the sense of menace; the inevitable press attention — all, Forbes claims, took their toll.

Security is high at Trump’s golf courses this weekend. (Credit: Andy Buchanan/Getty)

This weekend, as an elaborately expensive security operation ramps up, Trump will open his second 18-hole golf course in Scotland. He will doubtless repeat his assertion that “it’s great to be home”. Starmer meanwhile will genuflect for the sake of tariffs and Scottish First Minister, John Swinney, thinks it is “in Scotland’s interest” for him to meet Trump.

But the majority of Scots would disagree. There is widespread anger at his politics, protests are planned and signs reading “Twinned with Epstein Island” are sprouting outside the links. Meanwhile, the small band of local resistors is bruised but undefeated and David Milne is still in place: “I’m going to sit up here with a beer and watch the circus,” he told reporters this week.

The circus, though, is a costly one. And not simply because of the security operation. None of Trump’s golf-course promises has come to pass. The resort has never made a profit; it lost more than $16 million over its first 11 years. It was supposed to provide “thousands” of jobs; today, there are fewer than 100 people employed there. A glistening mega-hotel was promised, but it is yet to materialise. Meanwhile, a number of Scotland’s leading cheerleaders for the golf course are showing signs of regret. Alex Salmond has publicly acknowledged Trump’s failure to deliver on his plan, while Hobday talked earlier this year of Scotland being “hoodwinked” by the American’s promise to invest $1 billion in the project.

But the locals weren’t hoodwinked. Mention the President’s Scottish heritage to any of them, and they start to bristle. The fact that the latest edition to his Scottish golf legacy is dedicated to his late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, is particularly irksome. Almost everyone I spoke to mentioned the fact that, during his 2008 trip to his mother’s birthplace, 200 miles northwest of Aberdeen, he spent just 97 seconds in the home she grew up in.

“The whole Scottish thing is a joke,” said Milne, who points out that, before he decided to build a golf course in Scotland, Trump rarely visited the country. Few, however, are as disdainful as Forbes. “He didn’t give a shit about his mother,” he fired when I mentioned Mary MacLeod. “He doesn’t give a shit about nobody but himself.”

Another Trump legend says that, when Donald was just 12 years old, his mother Mary asked: “What kind of son have I created?” History didn’t record the response. Perhaps there’s an echo of an answer in the clubhouse’s gift shop where every last item carries Trump’s coat of arms: a lion clasping a spear. But where Scottish clans display their heraldic arms to commemorate centuries of lineage, Trump had a different approach. He stole his from a former owner of Mar-a-Lago — and made a single alteration.

Once its motto read “integritas”. Now, it just says “Trump”.

***

This is an edited version of a piece originally published in The Free Press.

Jacob Furedi is editor of Dispatch.

Blanketed in two inches of snow, Keighley is a feast of pretty houses. Residents shuffle through its icy backstreets. Children throw snowballs. Deep in the Pennine moors of Brontë Country, Keighley once boasted a proud history: the birthplace of Yorkshire’s first cotton mill, a heritage steam railway, and Timothy Taylor beer.

But in 2002, it became the birthplace of Britain’s “grooming gangs” shame. It was in Keighley that Ann Cryer, the town’s Labour MP, became the first politician to expose how groups of Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls — drugging them, abusing them, raping them. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

Yet over the following decades, the town’s victims — some not even in their teens — were gradually forgotten. Attention was drawn, instead, to Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, each suffering predatory horrors of their own. Of the 10 inquiries and reports that have since been held into the scandal, none focuses on Keighley. It has been much the same over the past fortnight. Spurred on by the wild tweets of an American billionaire, the subject of grooming gangs has again been turned into a game of political football — with Keighley again ignored.

In recent years, in fact, only one national newspaper has done any significant reporting on the town: The New York Times sent a reporter to write a soft feature about the Keighley Cougars, a Rugby League team with a new kit designed to match the colours of the trans flag. Before their first match, a drag queen performed “It’s Raining Men”. Today, the stadium’s gates are named after Captain Tom Moore, another child of Keighley.

One man shuffling along the ice is Martin Thompson, who has lived here for 50 years. He dismisses the past fortnight’s feverish debate. “Elon Musk is just jumping on the bandwagon,” he says. “This will die down and he’ll move on to the next thing.” An unenthusiastic Labour voter in last year’s election — Keighley and Ilkey is a rare bellwether that remained Conservative — he has little time for Nigel Farage or “hateful” Tommy Robinson. “None of them really care about us,” he says.

***

Keighley’s exorcism began in 2002, when seven distressed mothers appeared one morning at Cryer’s constituency office on Devonshire Street. They didn’t know where else to turn. Their daughters, they explained, were being befriended by older men from Keighley’s Pakistani community, who make up roughly half of the town’s central ward. The girls were then taken to parties, plied with drugs, and sexually abused. The mothers handed Cryer a list of the names and addresses of 65 men they believed were implicated. They had made similar complaints to the police and social services — but had been ignored. They were desperate.

After Cryer was also stonewalled by the police, she spoke out publicly: about the girls, some as young as 11, who were being abused, and about the ethnicity of their attackers. Less publicly, Cryer tried to meet with religious leaders in the Pakistani community, after she learnt that the News of the World had offered the victims’ mothers £1,000 to tell their story. She feared the damage that a media paroxysm would inflict on the town. “We could have race riots,” she later warned. But when she approached elders at one of Keighley’s mosques with a smaller list of 35 alleged perpetrators, Cryer was told it had nothing to do with them. Members of her own party disowned her as a racist. After receiving threats to her life, she was advised to install a panic alarm at home.

Race riots didn’t follow, but tensions started to simmer. The following year, in November 2003, after the police finally launched an investigation, Delwar Hussein, a 24-year-old youth worker who groomed and had sex with a 13-year-old girl, became the first man on Cryer’s list to be convicted. It should have represented a grim act of closure for the girl and her family. Instead, the case was seized on by the British National Party, who used it to blame the local Labour council.

By May 2004, with a local election looming, the BNP were confident they could win. Three weeks before polling day, Channel 4 pulled a documentary about the area’s grooming gangs after anti-fascist campaigners and the police warned it could play into the hands of the far-Right. “A lot of them have a way with words to make you feel you’re gorgeous,” said one 14-year-old girl in the programme of her groomers. “He told me he loved me and how beautiful I was. I thought I loved him.”

Yet the BNP parlayed the censorship to their advantage, claiming that only they could protect Keighley’s girls. Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, held a rally at the town’s Reservoir Tavern, in which he described Islam as “a wicked vicious faith” and railed against the Muslims turning Britain into a “multiracial hellhole”. His rhetoric found purchase, and the BNP won the ward of Keighley West.

Their victory, however, was temporary, and the BNP were evicted almost as quickly as they arrived. In the 2005 general election, Nick Griffin was beaten into fourth place. The following year, after a by-election was held, Keighley West was won by Angela Sinfield, a mother of one of the grooming victims who had joined the Labour Party the year before. As she said at the time: “The BNP used [the scandal] for their own ends without ever doing anything concrete about it — and for me that is unforgivable.”

***

Jean Gee was there at the start with Ann Cryer. Now 77, the former social worker helped to introduce the MP to the victims’ mothers in 2002. “I used to work with kids who were excluded from school,” she tells me. “And I’d see first-hand how they were picked up by men in their taxis.” At the time, Jean didn’t know that one of the girls would be a close family member.

Amber* was raped just over a decade ago by a man she believed was a friend of her father’s. Unlike a number of the town’s victims, who have left, fearful that their attackers still walk its streets, Amber still lives in Keighley. Every day is a reminder of her trauma. She suffers from a severe eating disorder that has left her unable to have children. Her body is skeletal, her arms tattooed. “It marks a girl for life,” Jean says.

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Around the same time as Amber was being groomed, a gang of 12 men were targeting a 13-year-old girl, Autumn*. The torment she would endure — over 13 months between 2011 and 2012 — would become Keighley’s darkest chapter. During one incident, she was gang-raped by five men; during another, she was raped in an underground car park next to a wall brazenly graffitied with the names of some of her attackers.

In 2016, Autumn’s 12 attackers were convicted — and the judge found she’d been failed by police and social workers. After one attack, officers dismissed her as a prostitute; after another, they failed to progress a medical assessment. As for her abusers, the judge concluded that “they saw her as a pathetic figure who… served no purpose than to be an object that they could sexually misuse and cast aside”. In their mugshots, two of her attackers are smiling.

Autumn’s younger brother, Adam*, now in his early 20s, believes the past fortnight’s debate over grooming gangs is fuelled by hypocrisy. “Politicians of all stripes colluded with the police to engage in a cover-up,” he tells me. He blames the Conservative Party for “failing to act on this issue despite so many cases occurring under them”. And he blames Labour, whose leader this week suggested it was a “far-Right” issue, despite the “most impacted areas being run by that party”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform — which registered 10% of the vote in Keighley in last year’s general election, well below its national average — is also trying to make political hay. “At least the SDP here have always prioritised the issue of grooming gangs,” he says. As for Elon Musk, who described Labour MP Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and called for Tommy Robinson to be released from prison, Adam views him as “clearly unstable” but welcomes his intervention. “Anything that brings attention to this issue is good,” he says.

Back in town, though, most are oblivious to this week’s political mudslinging, which culminated on Wednesday in a failed Conservative vote to force a new inquiry. Few of those I speak to — Pakistani and white, young and old — are aware of Musk’s recent comments. “If Tommy Robinson came to Keighley, he’d get beaten up,” says one white woman in her early-20s. “When will [Pretoria-born] Musk start tweeting about South Africa’s race problems?” jokes one bemused madrasah teacher.

There’s a similar lack of consensus over calls for a new inquiry into West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs. This is partly because people doubt its sincerity; neither the Conservatives nor Reform mentioned an inquiry in last year’s manifestos. But it’s mostly because few believe another investigation will be acted upon. “What would the value be?” says Gee, who voted Conservative last year. “How likely is it that something will happen? It’s not as if we have the money to change anything. Just look at our housing and social care system.”

Even Adam has his reservations. “What comes after? We need to deal with the source and not just address the past.” Typical was one stallholder in Keighley’s indoor market. “I know I’d feel different if my daughter was one of the victims,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a priority now.” Keighley, she points out, may be pretty — but it isn’t thriving. In some neighbourhoods, 40% of households are classified as deprived.

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Still, there are attempts to learn from the past. After school, youth workers patrol the shopping centre and adjoining bus station where many of the town’s victims were once ensnared. “There are still creeps around,” says one teenage girl. “But they’re not just Pakistani. To be honest, they’re more likely to be a 60-year-old white guy.”

There are those, however, who remain concerned that former groomers have gone unpunished. After all, if Cryer and those seven mothers were correct, and there were at least 35 offenders in the town, not all have been caught. “Membership of these gangs is informal and often it’s hard to pin down members,” says Adam, who still believes the abusers walk the town’s streets. “You also can’t blame girls who haven’t come forward given the police’s previous failures.” Jean agrees, though also believes many “grooming gangs” have been replaced by county lines gangs, whose members are both Pakistani and white. Just this month, more than 50 members of one such gang in Keighley — peddling heroin and crack cocaine — were arrested by police.

But such developments don’t fit into the narrative of Britain’s national debate — a binary war, fought mostly online, between those uncomfortable with highlighting the ethnicity of West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs and those who seek to exploit it. Meanwhile, the affected communities are viewed as collateral. As one fed up local told me: “We’ve got enough wars going on without your Tommy Robinsons starting another.”

In Keighley, few are worried about the return of the far-Right. Their Conservative MP, Robbie Moore, has been outspoken about the need for another inquiry, neutralising movements further to the Right. In 2017, the EDL tried to hold a protest in the town and were outnumbered by police. But there’s still disquiet. In 2022, three members of a neo-Nazi cell in Keighley were jailed after being caught buying a 3D printer to make a gun. The following year, a teenager was jailed after he planned to attack one of the town’s mosques while disguised as an armed police officer.

Nor has faith in its institutions been restored. Last November, the town was left horrified when a local police officer was jailed for having sex with a vulnerable domestic abuse victim whose complaints he had been tasked with investigating. When I asked West Yorkshire Police how it hopes to regain Keighley’s trust after decades of neglect, I was told the officer’s “offending was not connected to grooming gangs” and redirected to an old press release.

But it feels connected, feeding into a pattern of betrayal. Despite the best efforts of a noble MP, Keighley remains a case study in exploitation — first by a terrified establishment who ignored the abuse of the town’s young girls, and then by a far-Right menace who sought to capitalise on their cowardice. And now, as attempts are made to reheat their trauma, Keighley’s residents might be forgiven for their ambivalence. They’ve seen this before, and know how it ends. The fires of our digital ecosystem will consume its subjects. But in Keighley, cold resignation preserves them.

*Names have been changed

The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.

“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”

***

Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.

On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”

That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?

As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.

Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.

***

Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.

Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.

At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.

True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.

But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.

Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.

Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.

“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”

Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.

“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”

***

At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.

On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.

Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”

The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.

“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.

Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”

But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.

Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.

The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.

Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.

“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.

Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.

George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.

Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.

When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”

***

Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”

Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.

The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.

The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)

But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.

“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”

Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”

Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”

This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.

Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.

When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.

***

Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.

But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.

When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.

Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.

Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.

When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?

“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”

When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.

To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.

“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.

“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.

A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.

“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.

No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.

“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”

I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.

“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”

***

This article was first published on 4 November, 2024.

The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.

“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”

***

Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.

On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”

That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?

As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.

Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.

***

Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.

Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.

At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.

True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.

But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.

Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.

Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.

“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”

Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.

“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”

***

At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.

On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.

Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”

The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.

“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.

Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”

But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.

Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.

The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.

Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.

“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.

Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.

George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.

Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.

When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”

***

Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”

Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.

The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.

The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)

But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.

“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”

Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”

Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”

This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.

Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.

When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.

***

Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.

But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.

When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.

Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.

Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.

When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?

“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”

When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.

To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.

“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.

“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.

A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.

“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.

No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.

“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”

I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.

“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”

The first time I visit Cookson Street, it is Saturday morning and, despite its reputation, there are no red lights: just a string of boarded-up shops and a building site at the end of the road. A new “Civil Service Hub” for 3,000 relocated government workers is nearing completion. Around the corner, a Royal British Legion club stands opposite a gay sauna. Which, I wonder, will the civil servants prefer?

Only one brothel is open and a car loiters outside. The driver leans over a baby in a car seat, watching the door. Is he waiting to go in, or for someone to come out? He drives off before I can ask.

The second time I visit Cookson Street, the groan of revellers near the North Pier lingers on the wind. Natalie’s is flanked by darkness; her LED lights in neon contrast with the squalid buildings on either side. Fluorescent blue picks out her pink door. I press the buzzer.

A lingeried woman, perhaps in her late-20s, appears at the door. She smiles vacantly, and guides me into a waiting room. The walls are crimson; the leather sofa is black; a vending machine vibrates in the corner, selling chocolate bars and crisps. “We do not tolerate harassment,” reads a poster, provided by the police. A CCTV camera flashes. There is a faint scent of hand sanitiser.

“Have you been here before?” the woman asks, before reeling off her prices. “It’s £40 for hand relief: £50 for topless hand relief; £60 for oral or sex; or it’s £70 for all three. And that’s for half an hour.” She summons two younger women from a backroom. They shuffle in nervously, introduce themselves in Lancashire accents, and ask me to choose.

I decline and explain I want to talk about their business, the punters, and whether the brothel — technically illegal in the UK — had been approved by the police. “NO,” a woman shouts from the backroom. “He needs to ask Joanne.” The two younger women quickly disappear; the third passes me a phone number.

Joanne Andrew has run a brothel out of 27 Cookson Street since at least 2010, when she was caught advertising it as a “beauty salon” on the local council’s website. As punishment, the council removed the listing, but the punters kept returning. For six years, they came and went — until a police raid discovered a 16-year-old runaway from Manchester hiding half-naked under a blanket. Pulled up in court and facing a closure order, Andrew apologised for not knowing the girl’s age: it was a “one-off mistake”, she told a judge. It wouldn’t happen again. She claimed she had a mortgage to pay, and worried what would happen to her “girls” if the brothel closed. This satisfied the judge who allowed Natalie’s to remain open. Since then, the police have carried out regular inspections, the most recent taking place earlier this year.

When I asked Lancashire Police about this visit, they — like Andrews — refused to comment. And who can blame them? Far easier to stay quiet — to accept that Blackpool’s vice and politics are too entwined to untangle. Far easier to pretend the underworld doesn’t exist.

Last year, it was revealed that 105 serving police officers were under investigation for corruption; this year, it was the turn of Blackpool’s representatives in Westminster. In Blackpool North, the MP stands accused of misusing taxpayers’ money, while his colleague in Fylde allegedly paid a teenage escort for sex and later used campaign funds to pay off “bad people” who had locked him in a flat. For now at least, neither has fallen as far as the MP for Blackpool South: in March, Scott Benton was forced to stand down after agreeing to lobby ministers in return for money from journalists posing as gambling industry investors.

There’s a by-election next month, but few believe change will follow: every year or so, political betrayal washes up on Blackpool’s shores, and lies there ignored. Three decades ago, Tony Blair chose the resort’s Winter Gardens as the demolition site of Clause IV, his party’s commitment to socialism, and in return promised to build an opulent supercasino; but the project was moved to Manchester, and finally binned. Then, 15 years later, Boris Johnson came to town and promised to Level It Up. The Government claims the resort has received more than £100 million of funding since 2019. But how did they spend it?

Today, eight of the country’s 10 most deprived council wards are in Blackpool. And on all counts, the southern ward of Bloomfield tops the list: 40% of children live in poverty here, 25% of adults are on out-of-work benefits, and nearly 20% suffer from GP-diagnosed depression. It is a petri dish for political negligence. There are no by-election placards; just the resigned and despairing.

Jimmy, David and Dylan are no exception. Perched outside a crumbling house on a crumbling street, a 10-minute walk from Blackpool’s South Pier, the trio of oversized urchins are smoking a “biff”.

“Do you want to see the seedy drug side or the seedy sex side?” Jimmy asks. He’s the eldest of the three, probably in his early-30s, and boasts that he knows all the “rough places”. He tells me, too, that “nobody messes” with his brother, while his nephew is on the run in Dubai and “looking at 30 years”.

Jimmy’s eyes flicker as he describes his own predicament. “I’ve got a problem with this bloke, Robert,” he says. “And I’m going to have to have it with him.” But Robert won’t fight “man-to-man” with his fists. “He’s driving about on one of those electric bikes with a bottle of acid for me. Do you know why he wants to do that?” Jimmy answers his own question. “Because he’s a soft cunt.”

On cue, a car screeches wildly down the road and skids to a halt on the pavement next to us. Jimmy’s smile has disappeared; his torso has tensed. He looks terrified.

“Look here you maggot,” the driver is livid. “What have you been saying about me?” Jimmy tries to dart around the car but is cut off. “You’ve been saying to people that you’re going to kill me,” the driver yells, reaching to get out. But Jimmy has disappeared down an alleyway — and the man can only fire off insults: “You’re a MUPPET. You’re a fucking muppet.” He turns to a teenager who has emerged from a nearby house. “Tell me where he lives,” he demands, speeding off as soon as the boy replies.

With Jimmy gone, the younger pair open up. David is 20; Dylan is 18. Both deal drugs and both are homeless. They have black rings around their eyes, filth under their fingernails, and the wispy moustaches of young men unable to grow a full beard. Occasionally, they admit, they rob tourists at knife-point.

David was “kicked out of care” when he was 18, and had nowhere to go. He worked as a roofer for a bit, living on-site, but then the jobs dried up. “I’m selling weed right now to get some p’s on the table.” On a good day, he’ll make around £70 — enough to pay for a twin room in a mouldering backstreet hotel. On a bad day, the pair spend the night wandering the streets, bitter gusts off the Irish Sea making sleep impossible.

Dylan was 16 when he was kicked out by his mother, and doesn’t know why. He lived on a friend’s sofa for a few months, and was passed between family-members. But eventually they tired of him, and he knew couldn’t go home. “My brother is a paedo,” he says matter-of-factly. “He’s been done for it… If I go near that gaff, that’ll be me done. I know I’ll just go for him.”

When they’re not dealing, the boys — they’re still boys — hang out on the resort’s Central Pier, where a security guard brings them food and lets them charge their phones. Sometimes they smoke a “biff”; other times they glare at tourists. Both claim to have girlfriends who don’t know they’re homeless. “They just think we sell a bit of weed,” Dylan says. David starts to tell me about his last girlfriend who had two miscarriages, before catching himself. “It’s just one of those things,” he shrugs.

By contrast, they seem to feed giddily off the violence they see. “A few months ago, I saw someone get run over, stabbed, and then run over again,” Dylan says. David interrupts: “I’ve seen someone with their intestines hanging out.” He then pulls up his jacket to reveal scars down his arms. He first got stabbed when he was in care, he explains. Not to be outdone, Dylan lifts his shirt proudly: his pale stomach is pockmarked by knife wounds.

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“We’ve all seen shit,” Dylan adds. “We’ve all been forced to live through it… I watched one of my friends kill himself.” The friend, inconsolable after an argument with his mother, was on FaceTime to Dylan when he pulled out a knife and plunged it into his chest. Dylan sprinted to his house, but arrived too late. A coroner blamed “unmanaged ADHD”. The boy was 15.

A few hundred metres away, up towards the promenade, Martin is sitting in his toy shop. Surrounded by puzzles and dolls and brightly coloured beach balls, he is unforgiving of Blackpool’s young criminals. Just three weeks after the store opened, a group of teenagers smashed through its windows and ran off with its contents. Every now and then, one will return. Today, the shop is empty. It’s been a slow start to the year, he explains.

Martin dismisses those who claim it’s hard to find a job in Blackpool. “If you want work, you just need to ask around,” he says. “There’s always a job somewhere.” The problem, according to everyone I speak to, is that crime has anchored itself in Blackpool — and few can escape it. Martin describes how a nearby flat was colonised by dealers and turned into a drug den. Just a few weeks ago, somebody was killed around the corner: he says a heroin addict went to attack her boyfriend with a knife, who then took it off her and stabbed her 18 times.

A few doors down from where the attack took place, Jenny is having a cigarette on her porch. She claims a prying neighbour spotted a wall caked in blood, but isn’t sure she believes it: “Surely it would’ve been reported in the papers?”

Born in Huddersfield and now in her 50s, Jenny has worked behind almost every bar in Blackpool, but is currently unemployed. She suffers from spinal degeneration, pulmonary disease, bipolar disorder and anxiety. “There’s nothing rare about that here,” she adds. “Everyone has a story behind it though.”

And hers? “My dad was a Glaswegian gangster and one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners, and my step-dad beat the seven bells out of me.” She breezily describes her father’s downfall: “He killed a child molester and then they put him in a prison full of child molesters. So he went ahead and killed a few more…”

For Jenny, moving to Blackpool provided an escape and a livelihood for her and her children. But it was a limited one. She points to Central Drive to chart the resort’s decline. It used to be the proud backbone of Blackpool. Today, it is an assortment of derelict buildings, its main attraction — a joke shop from the Seventies — finally collapsing in December.

Eastern European gangs now operate out of the creaking houses, selling drugs and trafficked women on soiled mattresses. A Romanian newsagent stands accused of trying to solicit schoolgirls. Jenny tells me how a bunch of local lads went down to “kick the shit out of them”.

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When I visit at night, lights flicker behind torn blackout curtains. A few young men skulk up the street and into a disintegrating building. Just the sort of place where a 16-year-old runaway could be hidden; or a young man stabbed; or an MP held ransom. A patrol car turns on to the road, and then off again. “Everyone knows about what’s going on,” a neighbour says. “But the police do nothing.” Some residents blame their councillors, others their MP. All are resigned to the fact that nobody will step in. “It feels like they’re letting the Romanies and Romanians take over,” says one woman.

Back on the promenade, a Romany disagrees. Jade claims to read hundreds of palms each week, but, like every business owner here, has to contend with thieving gangs and delinquents. They descend in balaclavas during the day, many as young as 11. “You can’t do anything because they’re underage,” she adds.

Vice is written into Blackpool’s stars, Jade says. And then dragged down to earth: to the brothels and backrooms, to the drug dens and open streets. For decades, politicians offered platitudes and promises — and look at what they delivered: a party town thrown into the abyss. “People just don’t have enough money,” she sighs. “Businesses are closing and there’s more homeless on the streets. It all adds to this restless atmosphere.”

She’ll always have her regulars, though. Even in turmoil, people want to have their palms read; to be told that they matter, that they have a future. As if to prove her point, a woman sticks her head through the curtain and demands a reading. “Just don’t tell me if I’m going to die,” she pleads.

The fortune-teller laughs. “But of course you are.”

***

Some names have been changed.

On Saturday night, as police patrolled and harassed residents, Exodus, a local collective, put out the message that a rave was taking place outside of town, hoping to lure the rioters out of Marsh Farm. “It looked like Vietnam,” one of the organisers tells me, “and we wanted to fix that”. And, by and large, they did. Just before sunrise on Sunday, he received a call to say that Marsh Farm had gone silent, but for the birdsong and the shuffling of riot police on empty streets.

“It was beautiful,” he says. The ecstasy of the rave had soothed the disorder. Marsh Farm had been saved. But after the party, the comedown.

By the time Andrew Tate moved to Marsh Farm from Chicago aged 11, it was the “worst area of the worst town” in England. He has spoken about his “brokie days” on the estate: about growing up on welfare with his newly divorced mother and two younger siblings; and about defying the odds to become a millionaire kickboxing champion and “the most Googled man on the planet” (he’s eighth). If Andrew Tate has an origin story, it starts here.

Today, the self-styled “King of Toxic Masculinity” is in Romania on house arrest, charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. To many, he is the man who said that women should bear responsibility for being raped. To his legions of young, male fans, though, he is a Nietzschean superman whose journey — and success — is the ultimate lesson: understand his self-discipline, drive and ambition, and learn how you, too, can become like him. For them, his biography is gospel.

“English people are the most violent people in the world,” Tate said in a video last year. And Marsh Farm lends itself to violence. Tucked away on the margins of Luton town, the sprawling estate, now home to around 10,000 people, is dominated by three 15-storey tower blocks, their residents watching over a disproportionately deprived and unemployed warren that stretches for almost a mile.

“Crime was just an everyday occurrence,” someone who grew up on Marsh Farm at the same time as Tate tells me. You had no choice but to accept it. “If the other residents thought you were a grass or too nosy, you would be burnt out. Your car would be burnt. Your property would be burnt. You would have paint put on your house saying ‘grass’.” I’m told it was completely normal for petrol to be poured through someone’s letterbox and lit with a match.

Marsh Farm’s Lea Manor High School offered little respite. When Tate arrived there in 1997, the school was in special measures and due to be closed.“It was mayhem,” says one of his former classmates. In one incident, a boy stabbed another with a pair of scissors; during another, pupils set fire to the art department. If their behaviour was brazen, that’s because they knew they could get away with it. “Students would drive to school in stolen cars — and then drive on to the sports fields and start doing handbrake turns during school hours.”

Where was Tate during all this? “Andrew,” the friend explains, “would be a part of the crowd that was the furthest away and closest to the exit.” He was, as he adapted to life on Marsh Farm, a shy, unassured child: “He was quiet”; “he wasn’t like he was now”; “I wouldn’t call Andrew a geek, but he wasn’t in the cool group.” Back then, he found comfort on the fringes, content with playing with his Pokémon cards and keeping away from the chaos for as long as possible, which wasn’t very long.

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“He had this American accent,” the friend continues. “And everyone would take the absolute piss out of him all the time. He always used to say ‘Oh my god!’ in a really strong accent and everyone would go for him.” Then, after a few months, a boy started to tease Tate in science class — and he flipped. “I remember Andrew giving him a few punches to the face,” the friend tells me. “Everyone was like ‘Fucking hell! Andrew has lost it!’ After that, Andrew started to behave like a different person. He became a rebel and that made a bit of a cred for him.” Another classmate describes how he remembers Tate swearing at a teacher. “He knew that was how you get respected,” he says. “That’s when the change started. If you can talk the talk and walk the walk, that’s when success comes.”

So Tate learned to swagger. He often describes how, when his family moved to England, he became the “man of the house”. Clinging on to the high of that first fight, he decided what kind of “man” he wanted to be: one who gets what he wants. His friends describe how, at around this time, they used to wistfully watch other residents driving through Marsh Farm in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, desperate to join their ranks. “However, as we got older”, one explains, “we found out it was bullshit. It was just people renting the cars for weddings and whatever else.”

Unlike the others, though, Tate clung on to that dream, partying hard but also working hard to drag himself up. He worked on a fish stall; he sold windows and solar panels; he even returned to Lea Manor High, working as an IT technician before being fired after having sex with the Head Girl.

He thrived, meanwhile, in Luton’s kickboxing rings, a sport he’d taken up in 2005. There, he was King Cobra, who within four years was ranked number one in his division in Europe. But success in the ring wasn’t enough — unless it was garlanded with some sort of status symbol, it was meaningless. “I still remember the day when he bought his Aston Martin DB9,” a friend says, after Tate won £10,000 in a fight. “That was when we started to call him ‘Top G [Top Gangster]’. Because here was a Marsh Farm guy who was renting a one-bedroom flat with his brother — and now he was driving an Aston Martin. He was just starting his businesses and he wasn’t doing fantastic, but he wanted that look. And that is exactly what he got.”

For many, this is where Tate’s first chapter ends and the next begins. And if the first was about aspiration, the next was about escape. He launched a lucrative cam-girl business; he became a four-time kickboxing world champion. When he appeared on Big Brother in 2016, his biography said: “Andrew believes that a man should be able to sleep with as many women as he wants to, but that does not apply to women.”

He then moved to Romania, a place where “corruption is far more accessible” and the #MeToo era has not “destroyed the safety of men”. There, in a warehouse outside of Bucharest, he built a palace and filled it with women, supercars and dumbbells — a monument to his belief that, regardless of where you come from, self-belief and conviction can make you a God. Tate founded an online university where he preached his message. “You are either a disciplined individual or undisciplined individual,” as he would say. “You’re a G when you suffer.” That is the gospel, according to TikTok.

But is it true? What about those boys left behind in Luton? Well, many of them suffered but few became Gs. Tate was “one of the lucky ones”, his childhood friend admits when I ask about the rest of their class. He wasn’t drawn into petty crime. He left. And the unlucky ones? Some are unemployed; others sell drugs for a living. Others were snared by the sordid Carson Grimes.

“Everyone knew about that guy,” Tate’s classmate tells me. “He didn’t actually live in Marsh Farm, but he was the man you went to with stolen goods.” Theft was the least of it. What a handful of local boys knew then, and everyone knows now, is that Grimes was also a modern-day Fagin; a serial abuser, groomer and rapist.

The majority of Grimes’s victims were boys aged between 10 and 14, already lured from broken homes into the peripheries of Luton’s underworld. From there, Grimes drew them into his vortex, promising gifts of money, food and a home that was safe. They were given alcohol and cannabis, and then crack and heroin — it was intended to make them weak; to numb them. Like Tate, these boys were trying to escape. Perhaps, for a moment, they thought they had.

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“Andrew and I were in year seven or eight, and it was mainly happening with the year 11 lot,” the friend says. Whether they knew it or not, they would have known at least one of Grimes’s victims; one schoolmate at Lea Manor who remembers Tate only recently told his family that he had been abused. Twenty years later, he is an alcoholic and suffers from severe depression.

Grimes was at his most predatory in the early 2000s, yet was only arrested in 2018. He was jailed in 2021, convicted of 36 offences against nine children: “class-based stereotypes and prejudice” had “deprived his survivors of justice for many years”, said a detective on the case. Their murky pasts — addictions, criminal records, spells in prison — made them unreliable. Would a jury believe them? And so the authorities looked at their bruises and looked away. Since Grimes’s conviction, at least 11 more victims have come forward. Few doubt that there will be more.

Today, Grimes still haunts Marsh Farm: in both the lives of his victims and the malign current that crackles through any defiled community. Yet when I ask residents if they remember him and his house of horrors, they often look confused: “Which one was he?” One man starts telling me about the paedophile living a few roads away. Another mentions a man who stares at children on buses.

“Women and children can’t walk through the woods at night because of all the stuff that goes on,” says a mother waiting to pick up her 10-year-old daughter from school. “A woman got attacked by two men near here a couple of months ago.” One of the teachers tells me she is hoping to leave the area: “I don’t want my child growing up around here.”

It’s not just that the estate is unsafe, she says, but that there is no sense of community. “People are no longer organised together,” one resident tells me. Even in the Nineties, another explains, “if a woman was being attacked, every man would beat up that person”. Today, “the first thing someone would do would be to pull out their phone and film it”. And this sense of societal breakdown is now built into Marsh Farm. Five years ago, the only pub on the estate was replaced with more council housing; a small shopping centre and market were also knocked down, while almost every parent I speak to bemoans the absence of a community centre for their children.

Amid such fragmentation, criminal activity on Marsh Farm has become more atomised, too. Gangs still operate, but mainly fight with rivals on other estates. Occasionally, Marsh Farm is targeted: cars are still burnt and gang shootings still take place in broad daylight — the most recent in April this year. Unlike in the Nineties, though, the daily outbursts of violence have been replaced by the anomie of low-level crime; adults offering you drugs; children offering you drugs; someone who has just injected themselves with drugs. Their pain is self-inflicted and aimless. A world of rioting has become one of withdrawal.

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On Marsh Farm, this is the comedown that followed the rave. Little has been done to remedy it. In 2011, an old microwave factory on the estate was turned into a police station, but there is no front desk for people to report crime. Residents complain it is just for show, and almost everyone points out the miserly police presence on the streets. One shopkeeper across the road from the station tells me that, after his shop was robbed during the middle of the day, it took three days for the police to arrive. When I visit the terraced house where Tate grew up, and where his mother Eileen still lives, the road is empty, apart from a topless young man speeding a dirt bike up and down the cul-de-sac. “He’s always doing that,” a neighbour grumbles.

I later knock on Eileen’s door, though she doesn’t answer. Instead, her neighbour thrusts her head out of a window and demands that I leave. She tells me that Eileen doesn’t want to speak to journalists who “twist” the truth about her sons, so I post a note with my phone number on it. A few days later, a representative for Tate gets in touch to explain that he doesn’t want to comment.

Should we be surprised? Why challenge the gospel when it’s already been handed down? Andrew Tate escaped Marsh Farm; that’s all you need to know. His story is about how to escape — not those who can’t: those former schoolmates, the victims of a paedophile, or the five lost boys I find skulking around one of the estate’s parks. 

The youngest of them looked 13; at least one was high. When I ask them about Tate, they laugh uncontrollably, almost competitively. “Top Geeeeeee,” croaks one. “He’s just saying it how it is,” says another. “He’s just doing his own thing,” adds the croaker, before trying to sell me some drugs.

What does Tate’s gospel have to teach them? These lads spend their day staggering around Marsh Farm, looking for trouble and occasionally finding it. But that’s about it. Not a single Lamborghini or Ferrari drives past — and if one did? Like most of those boys before, they would gawp and croak, and then go back to doing nothing. There is no ambition. There is no hope. They are would-be rioters turned into zombies.

It is hard to imagine them being radicalised by Tate, let alone following him out of their estate. He is not their Pied Piper and they are not his rats — just boys paralysed by neglect. A lost generation, perhaps, but one that has no interest in being found. If Marsh Farm is where Tate’s gospel started, it is also where it ends.

This piece was first published in July, 2023.

The Redoubt is both a prophecy and a movement: a pre-emptive response to the anarchy on the horizon. Economic meltdown, nuclear war, the lawlessness that will follow the total defunding of the police — all, its followers warn, could bring an end to American civilisation. And so they have started to prepare. First, by relocating to easily defensible ranches in the wilderness; and second, by stocking up on food, firearms and fuel. While their country teeters on the brink of bedlam, they are building a fortress.

If the Redoubt has a Messiah, it is James Wesley, Rawles. (The comma is an affectation.) A former US Army intelligence officer, Rawles has spent decades preaching about America’s imminent implosion to thousands of Christian conservatives, and the importance of them retreating to the mountains. They first flocked to him in 1998, after his book Patriots, both a survivalist manifesto and a novel about the country’s descent into disorder, became a surprise bestseller. The Daily Beast called it “the most dangerous novel in America”; others claimed it “could one day mean the difference between life and death”. Such hyperbole only widened his appeal.

Every Redoubter has read Rawles — yet few have ever seen him in person. He disguises himself when he needs to emerge from his secret ranch to get supplies. Otherwise, he communicates through his blog to 320,000 readers a week. It’s a peculiar assortment of survivalist tips and Christian precepts: recent posts consider the benefits of stun guns, the southern border crisis, and a recipe for potato soup.

It was in 2011 that Rawles issued his definitive call to arms, informing his readers that America’s death spiral had reached its climax. Following a news report about a couple in Florida who were unable to pay for a road toll using cash, he decided the time had come for “good men to take action”— to “move to the mountains” and join the Redoubt.

Rawles’s inspiration was the Schweizer Reduit of the late-19th century, when the Swiss Government, faced with the increasing likelihood of a German invasion, proposed the construction of Alpine fortifications from where its army could make a final stand. This time, however, as Rawles explained in a clarion essay, the threats were far more profound. For decades, he wrote, secular capitalism had defiled the Christian-conservative values on which America had been built. Just as in Europe before the First World War, the forces of modernity could no longer be tamed. Instead, civilisation had become a “thin veneer”. The centre was not holding, and the United States of America was degenerating into a state of nature.

If it sounded like a programme for religious separatism, that’s because it was: “I am a separatist, but on religious lines, not racial ones,” Rawles wrote. The reason for his Christian criteria was as much pragmatic as it was theological: “In calamitous times, with a few exceptions, it will only be the God-fearing who will continue to be law-abiding.”

With low-density populations and abundant hydro-electric power, Rawles decided Idaho, Montana and the eastern sectors of Oregon and Washington were the perfect places to retreat. Neighbouring North and South Dakota, he explained, would not be as easy to defend: their vast plains and steppes would provide ample room for large armies to manoeuvre.

Once the call went out, the great migration started. Dedicated estates agents sprung up, offering to find plots of land or existing ranches that are sufficiently remote and easy to defend. One claims to help 3,000 fleeing Americans each year. “We do not service liberals,” boasts another. By 2015, an estimated 10,000 people had moved to the area.

And yet, as far as “community” goes, the Redoubt is a limited one. There is no official membership, and residents often live miles from civilisation. For Rawles, a “constitutionalist libertarian”, this is intentional: he sees Redoubters as neither sheep nor predatory wolves, but sheepdogs who think independently and protect their family when necessary.

But in recent years, this lack of organisational structure has allowed more inflammatory characters to gain prominence. Today, one of the Redoubt’s most notorious supporters is Matt Shea, a disgraced former Washington lawmaker who has distributed a manifesto for biblical warfare that proposed killing all males who “do not yield”. There is also John Jacob Schmidt, the host of Radio Free Redoubt, who recently warned that the rest of the country is “lucky we’re peaceful”.

Yet the wider Redoubter population can seem similarly aggressive as they police local councils and schools, making sure they don’t overstep their federal remits. Redoubt News offers a flavour of their bêtes noirs: “woke violence”, Big Pharma and government tyranny. Viewed as an offensive, rather than a defensive structure, it’s not hard to see why the Redoubt, and the man behind it, have become a threat to liberal America.

***

“He’s a huge deal. He’s the Godfather.” Eric Craig’s eyes light up when I ask him about Rawles. Eric is one of a number of specialist estate agents for fleeing Redoubters. Seven years ago, he was one of them: fed up with California’s liberal approach to drugs — “you could smell pot everywhere!” — he upped sticks to conservative Idaho. We meet at a coffee shop in Sandpoint, a former railroad town on Lake Pend Oreille.

Eric sits with his back to the wall, monitoring each customer as they come in — he’s ex-military. But for the most part, he wears his defence training lightly. One minute, he’s joking goofily with the kids behind the counter; the next, he’s explaining why military-grade bunkers are overrated (you’re a sitting duck).

For Eric, business really boomed after the 2020 election. “During the transition, between November and January, I sold more homes than I can count.” The main reason, he says, is because people were terrified that a Biden presidency could accelerate America’s downfall. Next summer, he’s expecting a wave of Redoubters to arrive for similar reasons. “What happens if Biden becomes President again? Or Kamala Harris? Many people think they’re going to try and steal the election. Will the US allow that to stand?”

His clients have bigger concerns, too. “The threats they cite are like a flavour of the month. Sometimes it’s a nuclear strike, or the Chinese invading, or government overreach.” He describes one customer who believes the poles are about to shift, causing tidal waves more than a thousand feet high. “So he bought a house on the top of a mountain,” Eric says, half-rolling his eyes.

For the most part, though, Redoubter ranches are more modest affairs. Drive a mile down the private roads that disappear into Idaho’s forests, past the “NO ENTRY” signs, and you’re more likely to find a homestead flanked by giant solar panels. There, in its 20 acres of land, you’ll spot an off-grid generator, a purpose-built well, a few animals and a vegetable garden; inside, you’ll find a storage room lined with tins and a giant freezer filled to the brim. Everything, from the curved driveway to the sightlines through the trees, is designed with security in mind. “It’s best to bury your propane tanks underground,” Eric advises, so that an intruder can’t shoot them.

Yet he is keen to make clear that extreme isolation isn’t an absolute priority. “Less than 5% of Redoubters just want to be left the hell alone. People like and need to develop a community of neighbours and friends who can help them, especially when times get tough.”

Two of those friends are Brian Welch and Patrick Devine, who have separate ranches a few miles away near Athol. Both lived in Los Angeles when it was crippled by looting during the Rodney King riots in 1992. And both lived in the city when its social contract was fractured by a series of earthquakes in the same decade. Today, by contrast, the three of us are sitting outside a bar in Bayview, an empty village guarded by mountains on three sides and a lake on the other. The water doesn’t move, transfixed.

Brian, a devout Christian, describes himself as “a Redoubter before the Redoubt even started”, having escaped California with his family in 1993. He’s a God-fearing man whose life is centred on his ranch and family. “I’ve been married to the same woman for 40 years,” he says without me asking.

His journey to Idaho started in the high desert above Los Angeles. “I used to have to drive across the San Andreas fault line every day,” he says, describing his commute to work. “If another earthquake happened [as one did the following year], I could have been cut off from my family completely.” Los Angeles, he explains, was already a tinderbox. When the Rodney King riots erupted, Brian was caught in the city and surrounded by a gang of looters who only backed off after he pulled out his gun. He put his house for sale and waited for a sign from God — it came six days later, when someone bought it straightaway.

Why does he think so many have joined him? Brian quotes Rawles: “There is a very thin veneer of civilisation’, and its edges are starting to peel off. You can feel it.” Even in the Redoubt? Yes, he says, before describing a recent incident in nearby Coeur D’Alene, when a car thief attempted to run over its 74-year-old owner. Then comes the twist: “The owner jumped on the hood and shot him dead through the windshield!”

This would seem to be the Redoubter way of dealing with crime: to take matters into your own hands. He goes on to describe the tense months after George Floyd’s death, when it was rumoured that busloads of Antifa activists were travelling to Coeur D’Alene to hold a Black Lives Matter protest. In response, groups of vigilantes armed with semi-automatic weapons patrolled the streets on successive evenings. “If you guys are thinking of coming to Coeur D’Alene, to riot or loot, you’d better think again,” said one of those involved. “Because we ain’t having it in our town.” The Antifa threat never materialised.

Patrick knows all about such threats. As a former emergency medical technician in LA, he’s seen it all: three earthquakes, one well-known riot, and the heyday of the city’s gang wars in the Nineties. “We’d walk into the middle of full-on shootouts,” he says casually. “We were always getting shot at…” A marriage, a financial crash and a few attempts to relocate later, he discovered Rawles’s work and decided to get out of Dodge. “I never want to be a victim,” he adds.

Instead, Patrick now teaches emergency first aid and firearms skills to fellow Redoubters. One of the tasks he sets them is to shoot a cardboard assailant standing behind a hostage with a loved one’s face stuck on it. “So far, nobody has missed.”

He also regularly meets friends to train them with their firearms and coordinate strategies in case their ranches are attacked. “There’s not much police around here,” he explains. “Perhaps two officers covering 50 square miles.” And, he adds, “they’re pretty relaxed if you need to shoot someone to defend yourself”.

It’s not all about guns. Patrick, like many Redoubters, has several dogs who can be “somewhat aggressive”. He clarifies: “If you’re dumb enough to walk into my house, it’s going to be an ugly moment in your life. You might not get out alive.”

***

James Wesley, Rawles wouldn’t let me walk anywhere near his house: he doesn’t trust the media. His only previous face-to-face interview was with a friend who worked for a now-defunct electronics magazine. Since then, “any time that mainstream American journalists interview me or write about the American Redoubt movement, they try to mischaracterise me and the movement as racist”. He sends me a link to a blog post that makes it “abundantly clear that I reject racism”.

Sitting across from me in a diner off Route 95 somewhere between Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and the Canadian border, neither Rawles nor his wife Lily come across as far-Right Rambos: they have the air of geography teachers who have retired to their local church group. “Jim”, with a white wispy beard and a pair of hearing aids; and wide-eyed Lily, with a tanned, expressive face that dances gleefully from one eccentricity to another. She orders a burger patty; he drinks a glass of lemonade mixed with huckleberry syrup.

Rawles’s apocalyptic fears, he tells me, were born of a childhood spent in Livermore, California, home to the National Laboratory that designed atomic weapons during the Cold War. “I grew up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb,” he says. Unable to follow his father into the Air Force because of his poor eyesight, Rawles became a Military Intelligence Officer, where he served in Cold War Germany and saw “how fragile the world is, how close it is to systemic collapse”.

He arrived in Idaho in 1993 after resigning his commission on the day Clinton became President:“I didn’t like the idea of him as Commander-in-chief.” There he focused on writing his books and survivalist tips; it was his first, late wife, “the Memsahib”, who suggested in 2005 he start a blog.

And so his gospel was handed down via SurvivalBlog, the daily posts uninterrupted until one was published by the Memsahib in 2009. In it, she revealed she had two months to live and wanted to find “a new wife for my husband”, describing him as “extremely devoted”; “punctual and neat”; “a worrier”. She issued a checklist of qualifications: “Be a devout, church-going Christian”; “Willing to live at the Rawles Ranch”; “Willing to put up with Jim’s eccentricities”. Applicants were instructed to write in.

Of the six women who did, one was Lily, a widow and avid reader of the blog. Six months passed before Rawles replied. They spoke on the phone, hit it off, and Rawles travelled to meet her at her home “somewhere in New England”. Weeks later, they married and returned to Idaho with Lily’s daughters.

Ten years on, they run the ranch and the blog, breaking only for the Saturday Messianic Sabbath, when they attend a Bible study group. The whereabouts of their fastness — with its chickens, sheep, cows, horses and orchards — remains a closely guarded secret, to protect them when society eventually collapses and intruders seek them out. The only people they frequently meet belong to their Bible group or are neighbours with whom they semi-regularly trade produce: hay, meat and preserved goods. “Mostly we just want to be left alone by the Government,” says Lily. “We just want to take care of ourselves: to raise our families and enjoy them and be healthy.”

But the Redoubt isn’t just an idyll — it is also a militarised fortification to fall back on and defend. And it’s in discussing this that Rawles shows what the Memsahib called his “eccentricities”. When I ask about impending cataclysms, he describes how the microcircuits in all modern devices could be destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by a nuclear explosion in the earth’s atmosphere. It is a common fear among the Redoubters I meet; they invariably point to the nuclear capacity of Russia and China, as well as the US Government task force dedicated to preparing citizens for the inevitable EMP.

Rawles’s greatest concern, however, is economic collapse brought on by the size of America’s national debt — and the lawlessness that would follow. “My fear is that we’re just a few meals away from anarchy,” he says. “Inflation is massively underreported. People are not keeping up. Tent cities are appearing everywhere. I think that’s where we’re headed…”

And what of the Redoubt’s political and religious criteria? The flags and signs I saw on rural ranch paths — “Fuck Biden”; “Trump 2024: Fuck your feelings” — suggest it is little more than a sanctuary for disillusioned Christian nationalists, or a case of “Donald Trump voters building a new state”. Lily fiercely corrects me. While she voted for him in 2020, “Trump is now part of the whole system… Then there was the vaccine. He used to be against them, but now he’s not. He lied.” She looks away in disgust.

Rawles didn’t vote in the last election either; in fact, he hasn’t voted for 15 years “because of the privacy issues involved in registering”. He probably would have voted for Trump in 2020, but now doesn’t trust him. “I don’t like his associations and business connections.” “Epstein!” Lily clarifies. Neither will vote next year.

But many Redoubters clearly are embittered Trump supporters. Twenty miles up the road, a giant sign — “Welcome to Trump County” — watches over the highway, while Radio Free Redoubt dedicates its show on Tuesdays to praising America’s true “commander-in-chief”. And then there are those such as Matt Shea, who called for people to prepare for “total war” after the 2020 election was “stolen”.

“You can pick friends but not your family,” Rawles responds, not entirely convincingly. “I did worry about neo-Nazis when I started the movement… But the Redoubt is a philosophy, not a political party or a club. It is a form of leaderless resistance. All I did was wind up a toy and let it go…”

After lunch, Rawles suggests we drive into the mountains to see the amber-autumn splendour of Idaho’s tamarack trees up close. It’s another of his eccentricities; he giddily points them out as if they are magical creatures, his apocalyptic disquiet briefly forgotten.

But it’s impossible to shake it off completely: the oppressive sense of doom, and the pessimism that underscores his movement. On one level, the Redoubt appears to be little more than “political alienation with more forest and guns”. But its tragedy also runs deeper.

The idea of alienation carries the hope that one day the alienated will find a voice — that they are the product of circumstances that can be reversed. Rawles’s Redoubt, by contrast, seems an acceptance of defeat. After all, it is premised on the belief that America can’t be saved. That its people and their representatives are the cause, rather than the solution, to its very real crises. That the nation, along with its citizens, is Fallen.

When I raise this, Rawles is adamant. “God said we’re not of this world.” He pauses. “I’m not looking forward to things falling apart, but I’m ready for it when it happens.”

On Saturday night, as police patrolled and harassed residents, Exodus, a local collective, put out the message that a rave was taking place outside of town, hoping to lure the rioters out of Marsh Farm. “It looked like Vietnam,” one of the organisers tells me, “and we wanted to fix that.” And, by and large, they did. Just before sunrise on Sunday, he received a call to say that Marsh Farm had gone silent, but for the birdsong and the shuffling of riot police on empty streets.

“It was beautiful,” he says. The ecstasy of the rave had soothed the disorder. Marsh Farm had been saved. But after the party, the comedown.

By the time Andrew Tate moved to Marsh Farm from Chicago aged 11, it was the “worst area of the worst town” in England. He has spoken about his “brokie days” on the estate: about growing up on welfare with his newly divorced mother and two younger siblings; and about defying the odds to become a millionaire kickboxing champion and “the most Googled man on the planet” (he’s eighth). If Andrew Tate has an origin story, it starts here.

Today, the self-styled “King of Toxic Masculinity” is in Romania on house arrest, charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. To many, he is the man who said that women should bear responsibility for being raped. To his legions of young, male fans, though, he is a Nietzschean superman whose journey — and success — is the ultimate lesson: understand his self-discipline, drive and ambition, and learn how you, too, can become like him. For them, his biography is gospel.

“English people are the most violent people in the world,” Tate said in a video last year. And Marsh Farm lends itself to violence. Tucked away on the margins of Luton town, the sprawling estate, now home to around 10,000 people, is dominated by three 15-storey tower blocks, their residents watching over a disproportionately deprived and unemployed warren that stretches for almost a mile.

“Crime was just an everyday occurrence,” someone who grew up on Marsh Farm at the same time as Tate tells me. You had no choice but to accept it. “If the other residents thought you were a grass or too nosy, you would be burnt out. Your car would be burnt. Your property would be burnt. You would have paint put on your house saying ‘grass’.” I’m told it was completely normal for petrol to be poured through someone’s letterbox and lit with a match.

Marsh Farm’s Lea Manor High School offered little respite. When Tate arrived there in 1997, the school was in special measures and due to be closed.“It was mayhem,” says one of his former classmates. In one incident, a boy stabbed another with a pair of scissors; during another, pupils set fire to the art department. If their behaviour was brazen, that’s because they knew they could get away with it. “Students would drive to school in stolen cars — and then drive on to the sports fields and start doing handbrake turns during school hours.”

Where was Tate during all this? “Andrew,” the friend explains, “would be a part of the crowd that was the furthest away and closest to the exit.” He was, as he adapted to life on Marsh Farm, a shy, unassured child: “He was quiet”; “he wasn’t like he was now”; “I wouldn’t call Andrew a geek, but he wasn’t in the cool group.” Back then, he found comfort on the fringes, content with playing with his Pokémon cards and keeping away from the chaos for as long as possible, which wasn’t very long.

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“He had this American accent,” the friend continues. “And everyone would take the absolute piss out of him all the time. He always used to say ‘Oh my god!’ in a really strong accent and everyone would go for him.” Then, after a few months, a boy started to tease Tate in science class — and he flipped. “I remember Andrew giving him a few punches to the face,” the friend tells me. “Everyone was like ‘Fucking hell! Andrew has lost it!’ After that, Andrew started to behave like a different person. He became a rebel and that made a bit of a cred for him.” Another classmate describes how he remembers Tate swearing at a teacher. “He knew that was how you get respected,” he says. “That’s when the change started. If you can talk the talk and walk the walk, that’s when success comes.”

So Tate learned to swagger. He often describes how, when his family moved to England, he became the “man of the house”. Clinging on to the high of that first fight, he decided what kind of “man” he wanted to be: one who gets what he wants. His friends describe how, at around this time, they used to wistfully watch other residents driving through Marsh Farm in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, desperate to join their ranks. “However, as we got older,” one explains, “we found out it was bullshit. It was just people renting the cars for weddings and whatever else.”

Unlike the others, though, Tate clung on to that dream, partying hard but also working hard to drag himself up. He worked on a fish stall; he sold windows and solar panels; he even returned to Lea Manor High, working as an IT technician before being fired after having sex with the Head Girl.

He thrived, meanwhile, in Luton’s kickboxing rings, a sport he’d taken up in 2005. There, he was King Cobra, who within four years was ranked number one in his division in Europe. But success in the ring wasn’t enough — unless it was garlanded with some sort of status symbol, it was meaningless. “I still remember the day when he bought his Aston Martin DB9,” a friend says, after Tate won £10,000 in a fight. “That was when we started to call him ‘Top G’ [“Top Gangster”]. Because here was a Marsh Farm guy who was renting a one-bedroom flat with his brother — and now he was driving an Aston Martin. He was just starting his businesses and he wasn’t doing fantastic, but he wanted that look. And that is exactly what he got.”

For many, this is where Tate’s first chapter ends and the next begins. And if the first was about aspiration, the next was about escape. He launched a lucrative cam-girl business; he became a four-time kickboxing world champion. When he appeared on Big Brother in 2016, his biography said: “Andrew believes that a man should be able to sleep with as many women as he wants to, but that does not apply to women.”

He then moved to Romania, a place where “corruption is far more accessible” and the #MeToo era had not “destroyed the safety of men”. There, in a warehouse outside of Bucharest, he built a palace and filled it with women, supercars and dumbbells — a monument to his belief that, regardless of where you come from, self-belief and conviction can make you a God. Tate founded an online university where he preached his message. “You are either a disciplined individual or undisciplined individual,” as he would say. “You’re a G when you suffer.” That is the gospel, according to TikTok.

But is it true? What about those boys left behind in Luton? Well, many of them suffered but few became Gs. Tate was “one of the lucky ones”, his childhood friend admits when I ask about the rest of their class. He wasn’t drawn into petty crime. He left. And the unlucky ones? Some are unemployed; others sell drugs for a living. Others were snared by the sordid Carson Grimes.

“Everyone knew about that guy,” Tate’s classmate tells me. “He didn’t actually live in Marsh Farm, but he was the man you went to with stolen goods.” Theft was the least of it. What a handful of local boys knew then, and everyone knows now, is that Grimes was also a modern-day Fagin; a serial abuser, groomer and rapist.

The majority of Grimes’s victims were boys aged between 10 and 14, already lured from broken homes into the peripheries of Luton’s underworld. From there, Grimes drew them into his vortex, promising gifts of money, food and a home that was safe. They were given alcohol and cannabis, and then crack and heroin — it was intended to make them weak; to numb them. Like Tate, these boys were trying to escape. Perhaps, for a moment, they thought they had.

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“Andrew and I were in year seven or eight, and it was mainly happening with the year 11 lot,” the friend says. Whether they knew it or not, they would have known at least one of Grimes’s victims; one schoolmate at Lea Manor who remembers Tate only recently told his family that he had been abused. Twenty years later, he is an alcoholic and suffers from severe depression.

Grimes was at his most predatory in the early 2000s, yet was only arrested in 2018. He was jailed in 2021, convicted of 36 offences against nine children: “class-based stereotypes and prejudice” had “deprived his survivors of justice for many years”, said a detective on the case. Their murky pasts — addictions, criminal records, spells in prison — made them unreliable. Would a jury believe them? And so the authorities looked at their bruises and looked away. Since Grimes’s conviction, at least 11 more victims have come forward. Few doubt that there will be more.

Today, Grimes still haunts Marsh Farm: in both the lives of his victims and the malign current that crackles through any defiled community. Yet when I ask residents if they remember him and his house of horrors, they often look confused: “Which one was he?” One man starts telling me about the paedophile living a few roads away. Another mentions a man who stares at children on buses.

“Women and children can’t walk through the woods at night because of all the stuff that goes on,” says a mother waiting to pick up her 10-year-old daughter from school. “A woman got attacked by two men near here a couple of months ago.” One of the teachers tells me she is hoping to leave the area: “I don’t want my child growing up around here.”

It’s not just that the estate is unsafe, she says, but that there is no community. “People are no longer organised together,” one resident tells me. Even in the Nineties, another explains, “if a woman was being attacked, every man would beat up that person”. Today, “the first thing someone would do would be to pull out their phone and film it”. And this sense of societal breakdown is now built into Marsh Farm. Five years ago, the only pub on the estate was replaced with more council housing; a small shopping centre and market were also knocked down, while almost every parent I speak to bemoans the absence of a community centre for their children.

Amid such fragmentation, criminal activity on Marsh Farm has become more atomised, too. Gangs still operate, but mainly fight with rivals on other estates. Occasionally, Marsh Farm is targeted: cars are still burnt and gang shootings still take place in broad daylight — the most recent in April this year. Unlike in the Nineties, though, the daily outbursts of violence have been replaced by the anomie of low-level crime; adults offering you drugs; children offering you drugs; someone who has just injected themselves with drugs. Their pain is self-inflicted and aimless. A world of rioting has become one of withdrawal.

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On Marsh Farm, this is the comedown that followed the rave. Little has been done to remedy it. In 2011, an old microwave factory on the estate was turned into a police station, but there is no front desk for people to report crime. Residents complain it is just for show, and almost everyone points out the miserly police presence on the streets. One shopkeeper across the road from the station tells me that, after his shop was robbed during the middle of the day, it took three days for the police to arrive. When I visit the terraced house where Tate grew up, and where his mother Eileen still lives, the road is empty, apart from a topless young man speeding a dirt bike up and down the cul-de-sac. “He’s always doing that,” a neighbour grumbles.

I later knock on Eileen’s door, though she doesn’t answer. Instead, her neighbour thrusts her head out of a window and demands that I leave. She tells me that Eileen doesn’t want to speak to journalists who “twist” the truth about her sons, so I post a note with my phone number on it. A few days later, a representative for Tate gets in touch to explain that he doesn’t want to comment.

Should we be surprised? Why challenge the gospel when it’s already been handed down? Andrew Tate escaped Marsh Farm; that’s all you need to know. His story is about how to escape — not those who can’t: those former schoolmates, the victims of a paedophile, or the five lost boys I find skulking around one of the estate’s parks. 

The youngest of them looked 13; at least one was high. When I ask them about Tate, they laugh uncontrollably, almost competitively. “Top Geeeeeee,” croaks one. “He’s just saying it how it is,” says another. “He’s just doing his own thing,” adds the croaker, before trying to sell me some drugs.

What does Tate’s gospel have to teach them? These lads spend their day staggering around Marsh Farm, looking for trouble and occasionally finding it. But that’s about it. Not a single Lamborghini or Ferrari drives past — and if one did? Like most of those boys before, they would gawp and croak, and then go back to doing nothing. There is no ambition. There is no hope. They are would-be rioters turned into zombies.

It is hard to imagine them being radicalised by Tate, let alone following him out of their estate. He is not their Pied Piper and they are not his rats — just boys paralysed by neglect. A lost generation, perhaps, but one that has no interest in being found. If Marsh Farm is where Tate’s gospel started, it is also where it ends.

Jacob Furedi: Bret, you’ve spoken before about the struggle you had writing this book. You first tried in 1981, and then again a number of times in the decades since. What changed that meant you could write it now?

Bret Easton Ellis: I’m old. That’s really why I ended up writing this book. I was 16 or 17 when I started writing Less Than Zero. I was in high school at Buckley, Los Angeles, and something happened in my senior year. The writer in me suddenly got a little out of control. I started to embellish a lot. I started to make up things. I was a fabulist. I believed things were happening that really weren’t happening.

I had a girlfriend, one of the most popular girls in our senior class at Buckley, but I was gay, and only pretending to be a boyfriend. I was having a secret affair with a closeted football player, and that was a whole other drama. (Unfortunately, I told a good friend of mine about it, and he confronted the football player.) I made up stories about an English teacher. I was making up stories about my family. And everything kind of collapsed. Becoming a writer had spilled over into my real life. And it was like an origin story: how do you control this superpower? How do you make it work, and not wreck your life and wreck the lives of others?

This was in my senior year, in 1981 and 1982, and I realised I had to pull back. And that was the moment when I moved from being a teenager to being a man, when the corruption of adulthood happened and moved me into the world of adults.

I interrupted Less than Zero and I tried to write The Shards, but it was just too big, too complicated. There were too many characters, too many things that happened to me that I wanted to dramatise. So I forgot about The Shards, and went back to writing Less Than Zero, which was a vibe novel: parties, the beach, nightclubs. It wasn’t heavily plotted, there was very little characterisation. It seemed like the easier book to write. Decade after decade, I would go back to The Shards and try to figure out how to write it, but I never could.

Then the pandemic hit. And the Hollywood dream I had chased for 14 years — of directing the scripts that I had written — died with lockdown. We were all stuck in our apartments. And I found myself doing something that I never did, which was going on Facebook, thinking about classmates from that senior year — a lot of classmates that I had perhaps betrayed.

Jacob: What do you mean by “betrayed”?

Bret: Well, certainly, my girlfriend. And certainly the boy who was closeted. I had certainly made up stories about things I felt bad about. I started looking at these people who I hadn’t spoken to in decades. Some I couldn’t find. They didn’t have any social media presence. And that began to haunt me.

As with every book I’ve written, it starts with a feeling. I was confused about not finding those people. I was feeling nostalgic. I began to look for all the places that we hung out, the coffee shops, the malls, the movie theatres, the restaurants, the nightclubs — they were gone. All of them are gone. I started listening to the music from 1981 and 1982 — Icehouse, Kim Wilde, Blondie — and things began to swirl around me.

The novel just poured out of me, in a way that none of the fiction that I’ve ever written has, and it upsets me now to realise, at the age of 58, that I wasted those key, great years, your forties and your fifties, when a lot of American writers produce their masterpiece. They’re really at the height of their powers. And I had been in Hollywood chasing a mini-series, and trying to get movies made that had just died. This book should have been written 10 or 15 years earlier, and then I could have gone on a book tour and at least been appealing to groupies!

Jacob: So you think you’ve missed your opportunity to write a “masterpiece”?

Bret: I’m not immune to the idea of how people perceive me. I do read my reviews: I know there are a lot of five-star and one-star reviews on Amazon. Some even say DNF — Did not finish!

But at the same time, I’m not a career writer. Books are a hobby. I’m not that writer who works with an editor at a publishing house and says, “OK, I’m gonna have this book in 18 months, and you’re going to publish it.” I don’t really write for an audience. I dedicated my new novel, The Shards, to no one. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for myself. And it was a very emotional thing to write. That’s how every single novel I’ve written works.

Someone once asked me why I haven’t written a memoir, a proper memoir. But I have written my memoir, over nine volumes of them — my novels. All have a narrator of the same sort of age as I was, and they are all a reflection of whatever pain, confusion, distress I was going through at the time. And writing each novel helped me move through those problems.

Jacob: What was that catharsis in American Psycho? What did Bret Easton Ellis reveal about himself in that novel?

Bret: The catharsis was that I had moved into a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. I didn’t want to be a man, and I was becoming a man. I was out of college. I was living on my own in Manhattan. I was making money from my books and I wanted to fit into the world of adults. But I just hated the world that was being presented to me.

It was the end of the Reagan era: yuppies, Manhattan, Wall Street. What it meant to be a man, how masculinity was defined, was very different from what I aspired to be. And yet… I wanted to fit in.

I felt, in a lot of ways, like Patrick Bateman, because I don’t think Patrick Bateman is necessarily as insane as people perceive him… He wasn’t wrong about a lot of things that he noticed! There’s a truth to his criticism of the society that he was a part of, which comes out every now and then in the novel.

I was also interested in creating fiction, which is what Patrick Bateman does. Is Patrick Bateman fantasising about all of this? Is it real? Is it not? Is he creating these narratives because he’s so angry, so crazy, so upset about stuff? The only way he can feel anything is to have these insane violent fantasies.

I was also deeply impacted by growing up in California, in the late Seventies and into the Eighties, when it was home base for serial killers. They were everywhere: two or three operating at once. Cults, too — it was just part of the wallpaper. I was five or six when the Manson murders happened. I was talking to Quentin Tarantino about this as well. Because he grew up in California at the same time. And he said: “Man! The Manson murders just really freaked everyone out.” And it traumatised me too.

Jacob: Now you’re 58, do you feel more comfortable than you were when you wrote American Psycho?

Bret: I do feel somewhat embarrassed exhibiting myself now, in a way that I didn’t at 28 or 38. When I started doing book tours, I was the youngest person in the room. Now I’m the oldest. I do feel at 58 that it is kind of unbecoming: you’ve aged out of that notion of having fun on book tours, staying up all night, then doing interviews on Oprah the next day.

I did not do a book tour for The Shards in the United States. I refused to do one, although it was very problematic for my publisher there. But the media in the United States is insane. There’s no reason to try to deal with a fake media that’s really out to get you — and is far snarkier than in England.

But in England, I am also publishing my new novel in a very different way. I have left Picador, which had been my publisher since I was 21. They didn’t want The Shards, so I am publishing it with Swift instead.

I didn’t know anybody at Picador’s new regime. I don’t know why they didn’t want the novel. Maybe it’s because I am a white privileged male, writing a novel with no diversity or inclusivity. I think they wanted me to write more about the Nicaraguan maid that Bret [the character in The Shards] was with. I’m not really joking! I do think that there is something about the tenor of the times, and this book itself, that they didn’t want.

Jacob: While we’re on the subject of publishing, you must have heard about sensitivity readers. Can you imagine The Shards in the hands of a sensitivity reader? Or American Psycho?

Bret: Well, The Shards did get through my publishing house in America, which does employ sensitivity readers. And look, I know they exist. I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.

Maybe part of the reason The Shards got through is just because I’m old — I was grandfathered in. But still I heard the view that there was way too much sex in the novel, and that it was not a “positive” portrayal of homosexuality. I mean, what is a positive portrayal of homosexuality?

Jacob: Ok, but at the same time, if you look at Amazon UK, The Shards is currently sitting at number one… in the section for Gay Biography.

Bret: Did you have to tell me that? It’s not Gay Biography at all.

Jacob: There is a biographical element to it, though. And that seems to be quite common these days. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans — a lot of fantastic creators are going back to their pasts. By writing The Shards, were you trying to escape the present?

Bret: I think you hit an age where you want to go back into the past, and you want either to romanticise it, or to understand the shadow history of which you weren’t aware at the time. A lot of great film directors have done that. At a certain age, Federico Fellini made Amarcord about his childhood; Alfonso Cuarón made Roma; Woody Allen made Radio Days; Ingmar Bergman made Fanny and Alexander. I’m writing fiction that took place in 1981. I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it.

Jacob: But you still keep an eye on the present. Your last book, White (2019), was rooted in contemporary politics — on the state of liberalism and Trump.

Bret: It wasn’t about any of those things. It was about Generation X — a cultural examination of Gen X and their attitudes. It wasn’t a defence of Trump (which is what the crazy moment of 2019 thought the book was); it was about the reactions to Trump.

And as a member of Gen X, I was interested in why we had gotten into such a hysterical divide. I think part of the reason why Gen X is the most conservative of the generations — much more than boomers, much more than millennials — is that we had the most freedom. We looked to be shocked. We wanted to be offended. We loved dirty jokes. We loved music.

But today, the world has to be childproof. And you have to think like the better people. I didn’t experience that. So I think part of the reason why Gen X is 10 to 12 points more conservative in the polls in the US is precisely because of this reaction against this kind of authoritarian language. That’s what White was about. It was not a defence of Trump or an attack on liberalism. I was a liberal — what are you talking about? It just so happened that the culture had moved so far over to this other side that I guess I wasn’t anymore. So that’s what that was about and why it was written in a very heated moment in 2019.

I would never write that book now. I was asked recently whether I would write that last chapter again, where I was talking about working with Kanye West for five years on projects that never happened. Kanye is a bit crazy. But the Kanye now is really no different from the Kanye I met in 2013. He is the same person. He is outrageous. He is a provocateur. He is going way too far on the platform he is on now…

Jacob: Is he an antisemite?

Bret: I don’t believe he’s an antisemite. No, I do not believe that at all. I believe that he’s a destroying artist. And I believe that he’s at a point in his career, because I’ve been I’ve been there too…

Jacob: But you’ve never said anything that could be as construed as antisemitic as he as.

Bret: … I’ve had a lot of a Jewish boyfriends. But look, my Jewish boyfriend and I make antisemitic jokes all the time. What’s wrong with an antisemitic joke? But the problem is that with Kanye, he wants to live in a world that is completely free and… To not be able to say that you liked voting for someone or that you like this… And that there’s this entire industry that is trying to shut down free speech and label a lot of stuff hate speech… I think that’s what Kanye is reacting to. I don’t really know why he wants to die on this particular hill, but I kind of get it, knowing Kanye the way that I did. He just wants to say “fuck you” to everybody. “I can say whatever the fuck I want. If I want to say that I like fucking Adolf Hitler, what are you going to do about it?”

My boyfriend’s Jewish. And my stepfather is a Jew who lost his family in the Holocaust… I know, I know. Saying that is so stupid… And he fought in the Israeli war and everything. And he just shrugged and said “Kanye is a moron”. He didn’t turn it into some gigantic tornado of hysteria that the American press liked to do — and that corporate culture likes to now punish. But I would not rewrite that chapter about Kanye or add that into it because that took place in 2018. That chapter was a reflection of that moment, and where we were, and I thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of who Kanye was overall.

Jacob: I want to pick up on something you said earlier. You talked about that freedom that you and Gen X had, but also how conservative that generation has become. How did that happen? And does that mean you’ve become a conservative?

Bret: I don’t know how to answer that. That is such a millennial question! I don’t even know how to start answering that question.

Jacob: Try and answer it?

Bret: What was the first part of it again?

Jacob: I’ll rephrase it. Are you a conservative or a liberal?

Bret: I’m nothing. I’m not a conservative or a liberal. At least in the US, I can’t agree with either of them. I think they’re both completely bonkers. I don’t watch the news anymore. We have the Food Network on all of our TV screens, or video games. I’m done.

It’s very hard to follow it when it all seems like a simulacrum, a preordained narrative that is being fed to you. The mainstream press in the United States right now just seems so fucking fake.

Jacob: That seems the perfect place to go to the audience for questions.

*

Is anyone going to write the great millennial novel?

Bret: No. Last time I was here, everyone was telling me that Sally Rooney has written the great millennial novel. And I think: she’s fine. Whatever. But I just don’t know whether the novel is vital to millennials as a way of expression. There’s nothing bad or wrong about that — they just won’t write it.

I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.

I’m not saying that’s indicative of everyone, but it was telling in terms of what the novel meant to them. Thirty years ago, everyone had read the Pulitzer Prize winner of that year, even if you were not a writer. People then had a different relationship to novels from what they do now.

So how can there then be the great millennial novel? I hope I’m wrong. I’ve read novels by millennials, and some are good. But I just don’t think novels mean as much to their generation as they did to Gen X or Boomers.

*

America’s culture of violence has clearly influenced your novels. What do you see its role being?

Bret: Violence is tense, it’s gripping, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional. Tarantino once said that he uses violence in the way that people use the musical numbers in movies. They’re just there. They’re fun, they’re exciting. They lift the movie up into another tier and they’re integral to his vision of the world.

I feel the same way about my books. I don’t think that the violence is gratuitous, as people would argue about American Psycho. It’s not only part of my sensibility, but also part of the subjects that I write about. It would be inauthentic to write about a serial killer without certain details about the murders.

I never forgot when Jean-Luc Godard was taken to task for having bloody scenes in his movies. And he said: “That’s not violence, that’s red.” Violence is just part of my aesthetic, but then again, I can’t over-intellectualise it. It just seems like an authentic part of some of the books that I’ve written.

*

Sorry to bring this back to politics, but how are we going to get ourselves out of this mess?

Bret: I don’t know how we’re going to do it. In the last two American elections, there were tens of millions of people who thought they were fraudulent. They don’t believe in the process. There is a huge divide in that country. You would be shocked at the percentage of people who said 2020 was an illegitimate election. And then the other side said that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016, or that the Russians aided him or whatever.

I don’t want to blame the media because, when you look at TV ratings and newspaper circulation, you wonder: where are people getting their information? If CNN has, like, 300,000 people watching it, is CNN really the devil as the Right likes to say? The distrust of elections is out of control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I’m not the right person to ask this because I’ve veered away from politics. You can’t really have that kind of debate, or help people see things in a different light. Talking about America is now like talking into a mirror.

Will I vote? I guess it depends on who’s running. But I am in the majority of Americans who don’t vote. The majority of Americans don’t trust the political system, and they don’t like the people running. And so why would you vote, if you feel that way?

*

When I was in my mid-teens, I wanted to be a writer, and showed my dad something I’d written. He didn’t like it very much, and I’ve struggled to write since. You started at a very young age — did you ever have a moment like that? 

Bret: I’ve noticed that millennials have a huge sense of shame, which my generation simply didn’t have. I did not care what my parents thought about my books. I do know that my parents were not happy with some of my books. I found out after my father died that he described Less Than Zero to my mother as “that dirty little book that our son wrote”. My mother is proud of me, but I don’t think I write the kind of books that my mother particularly likes. That’s fine. They weren’t written for her.

Wanting to be liked was not part of Gen X. But I do think it’s a major — and crushing — part of my boyfriend [musician Todd Michael Schultz]’s millennial generation. He wants to be liked. He wants to be followed. He wants likes on Instagram, a lot of views on his YouTube video. He is exhibiting himself. He’s not a typical millennial — he is very critical of his generation, which might be one of the reasons why we’ve gotten along, and been together for as long as we have. But he wants to be accepted in ways that I just never did, and my generation never did.

A teacher reading something I wrote and slamming it made no difference to me. At college, my professor read one of the first stories I had turned in, and said, why all the brand names? Why are you mentioning the songs people are listening to, or what’s playing on TV? And my reaction was, well, this is part of the wallpaper, the background noise of their lives. That’s life. And he took me to task and said: “You’re going to end up on the ash heap of literature. If you keep writing books like this, you’re going to date yourself.” And I really didn’t care.

*

What are you reading at the moment?

Bret: A collection of essays by David Mamet, the playwright. He’s a big free speech advocate and these essays are a very interesting take: short, to the point. I’m also reading a collection of non-fiction pieces by Michel Houellebecq, which are just absolutely terrific. Mamet and Houellebecq understand our moment better than anybody; they see through the hypocrisy, what they call the “authoritarian liberalism” that has been infecting Europe as well as the United States. They locate it, they decimate it, and it’s pretty great. I’m also reading Great Expectations.

The last great book I read was The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, which I’d never read before, and it is absolutely amazing — with a spectacular ending, so terrifying. It’s just wonderful. I was also blown away by Lost Illusions by Balzac. I’m disappointed with a lot of contemporary fiction.

*

What would you have been if you had failed as a writer?

Jacob: That’s a great question. Because, Bret, when you were asked this before, you once answered that you would have been a porn star. Were you serious?

Bret: Well, I hope I would have been a successful porn star! But seriously… I don’t know. There are days when I think I am a failure.

As a writer, I’ve had a really strange career in terms of being equally liked and equally hated, never nominated for a prize. The American mainstream literary press thinks I’m a bit of a joke — they don’t really take me seriously. So I don’t wake up in my bed, clutching my Pulitzer Prize, my National Book Award, my framed great reviews in The New Yorker, whatever. I never had that kind of adulation. And I didn’t really care about any of that.

What I do care about are the tactile, tangible, pragmatic things that you have to deal with in your everyday life. You know, I have ageing parents. I have a boyfriend who went through major addiction issues two years ago. I’m really worried that this is the first time I’ve left him alone for two weeks… I’ve had major plumbing issues in my apartment for fucking ages. It’s been a Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to get the plumbing sorted and it’s so expensive. And I’ve been thinking about these things much more than I have about The Shards. That stuff really is the main part of my life and so… Failure? Success? I don’t know. I’m just a human being, with other concerns.

The Shards is published by Swift Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When that MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, was imprisoned last month for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, over a century had passed since wardens at HMP Wakefield coined the term “nonce”. Ahmad Khan defied political history by winning the seat in 2019; three years later, history took its revenge.

Wakefield had been Labour’s since 1932. In Mary Creagh, it had a reliable Labour MP whose popularity had shown no sign of waning since she was elected in 2005. But then two-thirds of Wakefield voted for Brexit, Creagh said she would be a Remainer until she dies, and the Tories spotted an open goal. Wakefield was theirs for the taking. It didn’t matter who was on the ballot. It didn’t matter that nobody in Wakefield knew who Ahmad Khan was. It didn’t even matter that, just days before the vote, party officials were warned that their man was a nonce.

“I’m ashamed that someone from Wakey was done for doing something like that,” Sharon Horncastle, 60, tells me. “I had two lads from Labour come knocking on my door to ask if I’d vote for their man. I just told them: ‘It depends if he’s a paedo or not.’”

Horncastle didn’t vote in 2019, because “they’re all shit”. But this time round, she feels she doesn’t have a choice. “I have to vote Labour. The Conservative here got done for being a paedophile. How could I vote for them?” Is that the only reason you’ll vote Labour? “There’s Boris’s lockdown parties, too. While he was doing that, my mum died of Covid. There’s five of us children but only one person could go and see her on her deathbed. But of course Keir Starmer was at it too. They’re just as bad as each other.”

But will voting Labour make her life better? “No,” she says immediately. “I work at Morrisons. I can see how everyone is now struggling. People can’t afford their shopping. We need an MP who’s going to make a difference. But what choice do I have?”

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In Wakefield city centre, the extent of that choice swiftly becomes clear. It is Market Day, and the political offering is meagre. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives can be bothered to campaign. They leave that to the lesser parties.

A gaggle of supporters from Reform UK, the Brexit Party’s disappointing second album, squawk about cutting taxes. Campaigners from the local Freedom Alliance party silently hand out leaflets, then watch them be discarded in the bin a few metres away. Over the road, a collection of photographers stare expectantly at the cathedral looming over the square. I ask which political Big Beast is about to emerge: Angela Rayner? David Davis? Liz Truss? “Oh no,” I’m told. “We’re not here for that. There’s a peregrine falcon nesting in the spire.”

A megaphone attached to a crawling black cab interrupts our conversation. Ukip have arrived. “Are you tired of Westminster?” its candidate booms from his… black cab. An hour later, the car returns to the city centre, this time blasting out Dusty Springfield. By lunchtime, the party has moved on to Adele. I spot the car again later parked outside Wetherspoon’s: one of its passengers is arguing with a Stand Up To Racism campaigner over who is more fascist.

The by-election circus is yet to arrive in Wakefield’s suburbs. “I’ve got my postal vote, but we’ve had no canvassers knocking on our door,” Deanne tells me on the city’s Peacock Estate, where a third of households live in fuel poverty. “We’ve had no leaflets either.” Deanne, an NHS worker, voted for Labour in 2019, but is yet to make her mind up. “The Labour candidate talks about buying his first house in Wakefield, but when the ballot paper came through, it turned out he lives in another constituency.” Is that enough to make her vote Tory? “I don’t think so. There’s all the nastiness with the last MP. And then there’s Boris — how is he still even around? If I’d done something like that, I’d be out the door.”

Anthea Ambleton, who lives around the corner from HMP Wakefield, doesn’t need a leaflet or canvasser to sway her vote. “The Partygate scandal is bad enough,” she tells me. “But I used to work in child protection, so I was absolutely furious with their last MP. I don’t know why the Tories let that git stand last time when there were all those rumours circulating about him.”

Yet the reason is depressingly straightforward: three weeks before Imran Ahmad Khan was elected, another “git” was lined up to be Wakefield’s next Tory MP. However, Antony Calvert’s campaign came crashing down at the last minute. Not because he was caught sneering at a working-class constituent for going to Costa. It was tweets that did for him — a cocktail of misogynistic remarks about Mary Creagh and racist jibes about Bradford.

And so the Conservatives parachuted in Amhad Khan from his mansion in the Lake District, along with an election agent who had once been hired by an American prison to teach staff how to execute people by hanging. It didn’t matter that Ahmad Khan was rumoured to have already applied to stand in Wakefield and not been selected for interview. The Tories could afford to be complacent: Labour still had Corbyn and Brexit was still infused with hope. Even a nonce and a hangman could get the job done.

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Three years later, even with Partygate, even with Ahmad Khan in jail, a whiff of that complacency lingers. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Wakefield (a paedophile) or Tiverton (penchant for tractor porn): the selection of unsuitable candidates has always been a symptom, not a product, of the Conservative Party’s nihilistic lack of direction. In Wakefield, it now takes the form of Nadeem Ahmed.

Ahmed is an improvement on his predecessors, though the bar is low. He is a local candidate (unlike Khan), and he is capable of restraining himself on Twitter (unlike Calvert). But politically, he is a failure: despite serving as the Conservative group leader of Wakefield Council since 2014, he was forced to quit last July after losing a vote of no confidence at a party meeting. Ahmed’s colleagues deemed him too incompetent to represent them on the council. Yet here he is: hoping to represent 70,000 people in Westminster.

Ahmed bristles when I ask why he thinks a failed council leader deserves to be Wakefield’s next MP. He deflects; he pretends he can’t hear me; he makes excuses. “I didn’t want to be group leader anymore”; “I always wanted to pass on the leadership”; “I wasn’t feeling well at the time”; “the story was spun by the Wakefield Express and Labour”.

So I ask directly: did he lose a vote of no confidence last July? There is silence. Is he going to lie? He is. “No,” he says. “There was no vote of confidence.” I tell him that I’ve spoken to a Tory councillor in the room at the time who watched him lose, but still he denies it. Perhaps he knows that it’s too late, that Boris Johnson has already “priced in” the fall of Wakefield, and that he has nothing to lose. Or perhaps he thinks it simply doesn’t matter. After all, at least he’s not a nonce.

The Labour candidate who will win Wakefield is Simon Lightwood, though it should have been someone else. During his campaign to become Labour leader, Keir Starmer called for the party’s selection process to be “more democratic”. Labour “should end NEC impositions of candidates”, he said, and “local party members should select their candidates”. But two years is a long time in Labour politics, and Starmer’s call for more democracy has given way to iron-clad bureaucracy.

When the by-election was announced, roughly 25 Labour candidates put their names forward. Only three lived in the constituency, including a popular local councillor who had already been through the party’s Future Candidate programme. “He didn’t even make it on to the shortlist of four,” a member of the local party told me. “Normally, the candidate is decided by a panel of five people — three from the local party, one from the NEC and one from the unions. But this time, Labour HQ put a stop to this.” There was only one local representative and three from the NEC, who effectively block-voted to whittle it down to two alternatives. “Neither of them were from the constituency and both were anti-Brexit. Lightwood doesn’t even live in the constituency. This is the fifth place he’s tried to be nominated.”

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Pushed aside by the party machine, the 16 members of the Wakefield constituency Labour party resigned. “After Corbyn, it’s control gone mad,” one of them told me. “We are having nothing to do with it. The local constituency party, many of them Labour councillors, are refusing to campaign. Look at Lightwood’s campaign photos and you’ll hardly see any locals in them. He’s having to ship in canvassers from London and MPs to knock on doors.” Will any of this affect the result? “Labour will win but it won’t be meaningful: if you can’t defeat a party whose last candidate is a convicted paedophile, then you’re really shit.”

Lightwood will win — though it seems unlikely he will match the 23,000 votes secured by Creagh in 2017, or the 21,000 by Ahmad Khan in 2019. That would require there to be enough people willing to vote for him, rather than simply against Johnson and Ahmad Khan. “I’ve seen them come and go,” Susan Albrighton, 70, tells me. “And nothing gets better. Even with Brexit, which I voted for, nothing has really changed. The leaders are all as bad as each other.” It’s hard to find anyone who has a good word to say about Starmer: “He’s just like the rest of them”; “he doesn’t stand for anything”; “he’s better than Corbyn, but that’s not saying much”.

This by-election, then, is a tale of political failure: of the Conservatives winning a Labour stronghold for the first time in 87 years and then handing it over to a paedophile; and of Labour losing Wakefield — once home to the man who introduced communism to Britain — in the first place, and then winning it back without needing to make amends. This isn’t a battle of politics, or of great ideas. It’s a procedural game, where the least-worst candidate wins and the voters always lose.

In 1967, Wakefield’s Mayor boasted of living in an “industrial city with much of the air of a country town”. Fifty-five years later, Wakefield’s industry has disappeared. It is now just a small city like any other in Britain: home to a boarded-up high street, a glistening centre on its periphery, a bus system that doesn’t work, and a population concerned they won’t be able to put food on the table. As Rob Morris, 61, told me: “I don’t care who wins. I’m past caring now. I can’t afford to.”

This is the consequence of systemic negligence: a city in stasis; its residents resigned to the fact that nothing will get better. Both parties had an opportunity to give Wakefield a voice — and squandered it. Labour handed the city to a disdainful Remainer; the Tories chose a paedophile. It’s hardly surprising that Wakefield is past caring now. Labour will win. Nothing will change. At least he’s not a nonce.

Michael Leonard, Joseph’s cousin, was shot dead by Royal Ulster Constabulary police officers on 17 May 1973. The day before we meet, 40 of Michael’s friends and family had gathered at the spot. Flowers were laid. A small cross was erected. There was wistful talk about a criminal investigation.

“That’s it just there,” Joseph says quietly, half-motioning for me to pull over. For the past 30 seconds he has been anxiously clenching and unclenching his fists. “Michael was alone when he died,” Joseph says. “His mother had sent him out from their home in Pettigo to fetch dinner from the shop on the other side of the border.”

Michael’s crime was to drive without a licence. The police later claimed he had refused to stop at a checkpoint that, it later turned out, didn’t exist. And so they pursued him until, 200 metres from the border, an officer leant out of his Land Rover and fired his gun. Michael was 24-years old. He was due to get married that summer. After that: a family and a career as a cattle dealer.

“Michael’s death was a tragedy,” Joseph says. “But it’s just one tragedy in hundreds. There are too many to be forgotten. Everyone here knows someone who was attacked.”

***

Carelessly sitting astride the Termon River, Pettigo remains shy about being the only village on the island of Ireland to be divided between the North and the Republic. There is no painted line on the two bridges that connect Counties Fermanagh and Donegal. There is no gift shop. Just a ramshackle Customs Post, its shamrock paint turned to rust, and a statue dedicated to the memory of the four young men who died “fighting against British forces in 1922”.

“Like rats in a trap!” was the verdict of one British newspaper after the Battle of Pettigo and Belleek. Pettigo had been partitioned for just over a year when the IRA moved in, a hundred years ago this week. The British responded with artillery shells, machine guns, trenches and bayonets; they recaptured Pettigo after 12 days. It was once again split in two, doomed to become a front in Ireland’s internal conflict — and a plaything for politicians who view a “hard border” as an acceptable means to end it. Today, you can buy an envelope with euros in the village shop on the Donegal side, cross the river, and post it with a stamp bought from the Post Office with sterling.

Mervyn Johnston’s garage is perched on the Fermanagh side of the river. It was a theatre for the IRA’s season of bombings in 1972. A former part-time soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he was a walking target. Now 83, he knows he’s lucky to have survived. “We had two major bombs and three or four incendiaries,” he tells me. “Oh, and I’ve been shot at.”

Mervyn was sitting on the far side of the workshop when a man came to the door with a box, shouted that it was a bomb and demanded everyone leave. “I was having a cup of tea and thought it was all a joke. But then another chap came in with a gun and took us outside and lined us up against the wall.” The gunman started to ask for names. “Now, I had two lads working for me at the time who were also called Johnston, and I was second in the line and knew that if I gave a wrong name and these lads don’t, one of them is going to get shot.”

So Mervyn told the truth. “The next thing I know there’s a gun pressed to my forehead — a .45 revolver.” When the trigger was about to be pulled, Mervyn quickly ducked; the bullet missed him, ricocheted off the wall and hit one of his apprentices, though not fatally. “Before they could react, I ran off and they fired a few more shots after me. They’re just lucky I didn’t have a weapon on me.”

Did you have one nearby? “Oh yes. I went round and got my SMG [submachine gun] and fired a few rounds at them while they were driving off.” I ask him if, after all the attacks, he still feels the need to look over his shoulder. “The thing is, back then, there was never any problem here with the locals. The attackers came from a long distance away. Even after everything, I would still go across the river to have a drink in the pub.”

***

At Britton’s Bar that evening, Rangers are about to lose the Europa League final on penalties but no one is watching. We are talking about the explosions that pummelled Mervyn’s garage in 1972 when Triona Britton, the landlady, describes how she was almost killed during an attack that July. She disappears upstairs and reemerges clutching newspaper reports from the days after the attack. “Pettigo Baby Narrow Escape,” reads one headline. “I was fast asleep in my cot when the bomb exploded,” she explains. Slabs of concrete and slivers of steel from the car carrying the bomb fizzed through the air. “One piece of shrapnel ripped through the venetian blind and lodged itself in the wall right next to where I was sleeping,” Triona says.

Three men start to discuss their memories of 1972. “It’s a generational thing,” Frank, 39, says. “Speak to the older men and women, and their memories will be of the bombings. But it’s different for those of us who came after. They had the bombs; we didn’t. I was the first generation to be given the chance to go to an integrated school.”

Is this why younger people, more distanced from the horrors of 1972, are less concerned with the current debate over scrapping the Irish Protocol? “Many people here don’t care about the Protocol,” he replies. “There are more important things for them to worry about.”

***

To understand these worries, go to Belleek. A 20-minute drive away from Pettigo, the border village prides itself on the ceramics produced by its pottery: you can buy a hand-crafted ice bucket for £4,200. Seven weeks ago, a food bank opened.

“We were asked to come by the district council,” its organiser, John, tells me. “Things have definitely got worse in the past few months. The price of everything has gone up. The only thing that comes down is the rain.”

Northern Ireland, like the rest of the UK, is staggering through a cost-of-living crisis. But while Westminster, Holyrood, and the Senedd make a pretence of trying to fix theirs, Stormont remains silent. It’s been over a fortnight since Sinn Fein took control of the Northern Ireland Assembly. But what do they have to show for it? A handful of photos from victory night; a few half-hearted appeals for a border poll. And that’s it. Northern Ireland’s latest political revolution hasn’t even made it out of its wrapping paper.

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With the DUP refusing to elect a Speaker to the national assembly until the Protocol is scrapped, the region faces months — perhaps even years — without a functioning executive. Until that changes, close to £500 million that could be spent on easing the ongoing crisis cannot be touched. In a county such as Fermanagh where the average wage is £23,000 — 12% lower than the average for Northern Ireland — that absence stings. This time last year, a quarter of children here were living in poverty. Nobody doubts that figure has increased.

“You look at our politicians and feel despair,” John says. “Hardworking people are being forced to go hungry, while their politicians don’t turn up to work and still take home their wage.” He tells me to head to Newtownbutler to see local poverty at its worst. “Since the start of April, we’ve had 18 different families start using the food bank there. And that number is only going to go up…”

***

On 19 August 2019, the Troubles returned to Newtownbutler. Police and soldiers patrolled the fields surrounding the village; surveillance aircraft hovered in the grey sky. A local newspaper had been tipped-off about a bomb being planted. The device was found and turned out to be a hoax, but a second explosive was hidden nearby. When it detonated, nobody was injured. Politicians in both Sinn Fein and the DUP condemned the attack. Then they looked away.

The Lanesbourough Arms Hotel, with its two-story bar, guards the crossroads at the centre of Newtownbutler. It opened in 1820 but now, like almost half the buildings slumped on either side, it is decomposing. Its windows have been smashed in; paint flakes off the walls. Peer through the broken glass and plates are still stacked neatly in the kitchen; an old telephone gathers dust on a shelf; a plastic Christmas tree is garlanded with baubles and dust. Nobody has pulled a pint there since 2004.

Maureen Murray shuffles past the Lanesborough whenever she can afford to buy food. “Everything is getting more expensive by the minute,” she says. “But what can we do? We’re all living on the breadline now. Everybody here worries about whether they’ll have enough food on the table next week.” Then she points to her walking stick: “I’m a bomb victim. I’ve always had to struggle.”

It was an October evening in 1972 when the car containing three men drove slowly into Annaghmore, on the border between Fermanagh and Monaghan. Maureen, then 21, looked on with her two siblings as one of the occupants threw a device through the village shop’s window. Unaware it was a bomb, Maureen and Raymond ran towards the building to make sure its owner hadn’t been injured. When the device exploded, Maureen was thrown into the air. Blinded in one eye and with a shattered leg, she has been unable to walk without a stick since. “My brother died by my feet,” she says. He was 24, the same age as Michael Leonard.

“I’m supposed to be receiving some extra money because I’m a bomb victim, but that doesn’t look like happening.” She explains how everything’s been held up by Stormont. “People are talking about that Protocol, but why does that matter if we’re struggling to feed ourselves? Everyone round here uses the food bank. It has become a fact of life.”

Around the corner, Elizabeth and Vincent have picked up their two-year-old daughter. She sleeps in her pram, oblivious to her parents’ anxiety. It is Thursday, and they are dreading the weekend: “By the time it comes, we often have nothing,” says Elizabeth. “It’s normal for us to have a fiver or tenner to spend between us and the three kids [aged between two and seven]. The foodbank is really helpful, but it doesn’t solve everything. When our kids ask for more food, we have to tell them to leave some for tomorrow or the next day.”

Vincent reels off the realities of inflation. “The prices of milk, nappies and wipes have gone up by 10p in no time,” he says. “Then there’s the price of fuel: it’s £1.79 for diesel over here. We can’t even afford to drive to the supermarket anymore.” Elizabeth stops rolling her pram back and forth. “The food, the petrol… Fucking everything is going up.”

And what if that doesn’t change? Silence. “I don’t want to think about it,” Elizabeth eventually says. “We’re just about keeping our heads above the water as it is.” Vincent grimaces. “Our politicians are doing fuck all at the moment to help us.”

In a region without a functioning government, where every politician seems to care more about a Protocol passed by accident than whether a family can feed itself, it’s hard not to conclude the same. In England, the politicians are useless. In Brussels, they’re intransigent. In Stormont, they don’t exist.

But this isn’t a story about the Protocol, or Brexit, or the prospect of a united Ireland. It is a story about politics — and what happens when it’s turned into a vacuum; when indifference becomes institutionalised and ordinary people are left to pick up the pieces. During the height of the Troubles, the authorities betrayed you by shooting you in the back as you drove down a country lane. Today, they just let you starve.