And so, yet another failed leader has been sacrificed as an offering to the British public, as Labour carries out an internal coup to stave off an electoral revolution. But even as the Lancastrian usurper secures his hold on Westminster, disbursing sinecures to his faithful retainers, there is no particular reason to believe he will be any more successful in office than Starmer. After all, many of those today celebrating his successful coup were just as feverishly exultant, two years ago, over the coming Starmerite golden age. If they were better judges of the country’s mood, we would not be here today.

Like an incoming headmaster turning around a failing school, Burnham told us Westminster is “broken” in his landmark devolution speech, using language apparently no longer the preserve of Right-wing populists. But will future historians characterize him as a continuity figure, carrying out necessary reforms to save a failing system from itself, or as an agent of total change? His manifesto-by-proxy, The Productive State, which aims to flesh out his much-invoked but nebulous Manchesterism as a program for governance, claims him for the latter role. As it states, the public “ask now for only what is obvious: major, even fundamental changes in British society” to cast off “the meanness and frustration of long years of stagnation and decline”, unabashedly adopting a “declinist” framework still mocked as a Right-wing fantasy by backwards-looking elements of the Labour Left. Indeed, the paper notes, “Labour have hitherto not delivered on that demand. If that feeling does not change, the electoral consequences will be severe and lasting.” That much is true. Yet what is perhaps more interesting than the structural economic reforms the paper suggests, is that its writers frame their socialist ends in postliberal terms, quoting Polanyi and appealing to national sovereignty and state resilience to make arguments postliberals were condemned for a decade ago.

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How to save postliberalism

By David Goodhart

As the foreign policy writer Lily Lynch recently observed, “Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus.” The same may be said of the domestic political and economic order so drastically reshaped to fit the vanished dreamworld of globalized liberal capitalism. And so, The Productive State observes, “in an era of weaponized interdependence — where access to energy, critical minerals, and essential supply chains has become a tool of geopolitical pressure”, the question of ownership of vital infrastructure “is a strategic one, which cuts to the heart of live debates about sovereignty in an increasingly geopolitically unstable world”. National sovereignty, state capacity and resilience in a world of global competition rather than co-operation, in which Westminster failure “wears down the basic democratic expectation that public institutions can identify the needs of the public they govern and act to meet them”, eroding the state’s legitimacy: these are Lexiteer arguments of a decade ago, now championed, perhaps too late, by those who would in 2016 have scorned them.

For in economic terms, there is very little, in The Productive State’s condemnation of neoliberalism as the agent of national decline, that could not be said, or has not already been, by Reform’s planner-in-chief and prominent postliberal intellectual, Danny Kruger. That there is such an overlap between The Productive State and postliberal arguments is hardly surprising, given British postliberalism’s intellectual descent from socialism. Even still, it is of note that Burnham’s only open challenger, so far, is the Blue Labour-endorsed candidate Al Carns, standing on a platform of industrial renewal through sensible energy policy in the service of national security. Even if Farage has shied away, recently, from his tentative support of nationalization for key infrastructure, postliberalism already appears to dominate the economic argument, ahead of the next election.

But the arguments for national sovereignty, domestic reindustrialization, energy security and a strengthened state have been won by the deteriorating security environment rather than the esoteric pronouncements of post-liberal commentators: both the former Thatcherite Farage and the Labour soft-left now converge on them for the credibility to advance their own projects. Reform’s Zia Yusuf publicly threatens the prime beneficiary of actually existing British neoliberalism, the outsourcing giant SERCO, for its insufficient zeal in carrying out future mass deportations. The postliberal Labour MP Jonathan Hinder declares, “Put cheap energy before clean energy. Drill for our own oil and gas in the North Sea. Back British industry, by scrapping self-harming Net Zero policies. Seriously start to rebalance our economy away from London. Stop the boats.” The next election will be fought on firmly postliberal territory, quite divorced from the ineffective theorizing of the movement’s intellectuals.

For we live, now, in the unmanaged postliberal order brought about by liberal hubris. A decade ago, Brexit offered Westminster the breathing space to break with liberal nostrums in a controlled and sober way, listening and acceding to the democratically-expressed demands of the electorate. Instead, the Brexit vote was treated as the mindless revolt of unlettered proles, manipulated by social media algorithms and a malign network of populist demagogues. Back in the heady days of Brexit discourse — and I have cause to remember this well — to argue that liberal fantasies of enlightened cosmopolitan governance had seen the capacity and legitimacy of individual states dangerously weakened, threatening the basic political order itself, was reviled as something akin to fascism by those who have only latterly awakened to reality.

Again too late, the very same commentators who, only a year ago, mocked the inter-ethnic violence predicted to result from mass immigration as the product of rightwing fever dreams, introducing the “nightmare” prospect of “hardened borders,” now panickingly declare that “we cannot simply dismiss the violence as just another outburst of a hardened racist few… because to do so would seem to leave us destined to regular summer bouts of pogromist violence”. This crisis is apparently no longer a hard-Right fantasy: through gritted teeth, the writer comes to the conclusion, presented as novel, that “the sight of unvetted young men landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a glaring signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it”. A year is, evidently, a long time in British political commentary. We cannot, perhaps, ever expect Britain’s liberal Left commentariat to admit that they were wrong, even as they belatedly adopt positions their social standing once rested upon condemning. But Burnham’s ideological malleability — delicately phrased — is such that he can easily adopt much of Reform’s message of a broken, dysfunctional Britain in renewing an establishment consensus he affects to despise.

One obvious danger for Reform is that Burnham, not shy of exaggerated displays of cultural Northernness, will cast them as the party of arrogant, spoiled Southeast England. Early trial versions of this approach, such as moving part of his Prime Ministerial court to Manchester, seem designed more to inspire a kneejerk reaction from his foes than to tangibly improve British governance. But it is difficult to extrapolate too much from his Makerfield win: Burnham is genuinely popular in the Northwest, and simply presented the fastest route to ousting Starmer. Hanging a general halfway through a war is rarely a sign of impending victory; even still, for Reform, the path ahead is uncertain. Running a prominent national-populist intellectual failed in Gorton and Denton; but so did running a no-nonsense local plumber in Makerfield, where a strategic section of the Red Wall has been found electorally wanting. Should Reform now lean into its end-of-pier, ITV1 Red Wall aesthetic, or attempt to woo the middle classes, among whom it has rapidly become the default party of the Right?

It is perhaps in pursuit of a newly radicalized middle-class audience that Farage has begun to write on Substack, focusing on territory simply untouchable to Labour. The Burnhamite manifesto declares that “Reactionary politics… is fundamentally a politics of shrinkage and exclusion: drawing the circle of belonging tighter, withdrawing provision from those deemed undeserving, turning scarcity into a weapon that disciplines and divides,” positing instead a program of mass abundance rolled out by a revitalized British state. Farage’s message is simpler and clearer. As he asserts, the effect of current social housing policy “has been to redistribute the nation’s stock of social housing away from the White British populations who originally inhabited these areas”. Indeed, as he writes, extending Reform’s critique of mass immigration further back in time than has lately been deemed acceptable, “When Labour and Conservative politicians opened Britain’s borders after the war, it would have been simple to maintain a basic principle: the British people paid for these homes, should be housed in them, and newcomers will have to be patient as they earn their way in.” Perhaps addressed at a downwardly mobile, younger middle class, the dangled prospect of redistributing prime urban real estate may yet outweigh fashionable moral poses.

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Burnham won't quell England's revolt

By Aris Roussinos

Here, on the once-perilous ground of immigration, is the obvious dividing line at the next election, between parties with otherwise converging economic worldviews. As Burnham’s first headache, the spat between his future ministers over Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) reforms, shows, immigration is a source of internal conflict within Labour, caught between an awareness of the public will and its own internal morality, while it is Reform’s very reason for being. To win over his party, Burnham may, as he has hinted, be inclined to abandon Starmer and Mahmood’s ILR reforms, intended to quietly disperse what even the BBC now calls the Boriswave. Yet as clear-eyed, Blue Labour-adjacent commentators like the Labour Realists observe, “the Labour Party cannot transfer the costs of a Conservative mistake on immigration policy onto the British people and win the next election”. It is, simply, in Reform’s greatest interest for the Boriswave to become, as soon as possible in the public’s eyes, the Burnhamwave. Reform’s pitch on the Boriswave, already the Party’s prime line of attack against Burnham, is clear, as Zia Yusuf writes: “If Burnham tries to make the Boriswave permanent, we will reverse it: abolishing ILR, rescinding residence rights of those dependent on the state, and reforming the immigration system so that no Government can ever behave so recklessly again.”

The logic for Reform in the coming election — which we may now expect at any date from Burnham’s formal coronation — is therefore to go further, and harder, on immigration than would have been imaginable even two years ago. There is little ground on which Burnham can fight — on housing, on the NHS, on crime — in which his party’s near-religious sympathy for mass immigration has not poisoned the well. Every new social housing development Burnham promises can, and will, be presented as a source of local danger. The future of British politics, long-delayed, is finally upon us.

For Labour, there will never be a better time for an election than now — but for Reform the attractions are less clear. The Party’s declarations of the urgency of new elections do not fully convince, given its recent electoral setbacks and still nebulous program for government. Yet for both the calculation will be the same: the longer the country has to experience the operation of a Labour government, the more attractive a Faragian reformation will seem. With both parties deploring the dysfunctional brokenness of Westminster politics, victory will come to whoever can more convincingly capture the revolutionary mood. Burnham wants a decade to complete his project: but so did Starmer. Like the violent storms attending Starmer’s downfall, Britain’s decade-long, suffocating political climate now seems ready for dramatic resolution, clearing the air for years to come. The heavens are opening up over Westminster: even in his Manchester fiefdom, Burnham is unlikely to escape the flood.

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

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

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

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

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

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How to end the Brexit shitshow

By Dominic Cummings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It means we should now be asking the question: what if the UK reaches Net Zero immigration before the next election? This seemingly outlandish suggestion could well dictate the future of British politics. The Boriswave is over; might the political ripples it caused (including the meteoric rise of Reform) now lose their momentum?

The Right-leaning media’s reaction to the ONS report, somewhat ironically since their paramount complaint is that immigration is too high, was to downplay the reduction and instead focus on a new panic about the higher levels of emigration of British nationals. Isn’t it time to cut through the “cope” and examine the facts?

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Britain doesn't want to go to war

By Freddie Sayers

This alleged “exodus” of British nationals certainly merits closer inspection. The Telegraph in their splash, claimed that the ONS data revealed young British workers were fleeing Labour’s high-tax regime. These youngsters, they speculated, have been “flocking to Australia” and to the “Middle East, where remote working is allowed”. For their part, the online Right asserted that the data laid bare the ongoing replacement of highly skilled white British workers with low-skilled foreigners from incompatible, faraway cultures.

Both narratives are precarious, to put it politely. There is no doubt that some skilled professionals are leaving — wealthy lawyers and bankers are constantly tempted by Abu Dhabi; ambitious entrepreneurs will obviously want to take their startup to the US, if it is doing well; and our junior doctors have long been swapping the grinding NHS for a better-paid stint in Australia. The competitiveness of our economy is a serious cause for concern; but these professional emigrants do not amount to hundreds of thousands in a year. Let’s be serious: 18-year-olds  from post-industrial British towns aren’t leaving in their droves for Abu Dhabi to become digital nomads.

The ONS emigration statistics are, to be frank, pretty sketchy. Emigration is far harder to measure accurately than immigration — mainly because British passport-holders don’t need a visa to leave. In years gone by, the ONS would have used something called the “International Passenger Survey” to account for those departing the country, but it was notoriously unreliable. So now instead they scan the population for people who have gone dark and ceased to have any contact with the state — if, after a year, there is still no sign of them, the presumption is that they have emigrated. Since this new methodology was introduced in 2021, there actually hasn’t been much fluctuation in numbers: there has been no sudden surge in emigrating Britons. Complicating accurate measurements are the ‘Neets” who have simply disappeared from the states radar. It can be hard to tell the difference between them and those people who have actually left and as a result all sorts of guessed adjustments come into play: some of these presumed emigrants may just be people lost to the system; others will be young people going abroad to study, and who will return.

Most significantly, though, what everyone does seem to have ignored is the fact that many of the emigrating “British Nationals” will be immigrants or children of immigrants who have acquired British citizenship but have decided to return home. We know the main reason emigration numbers are so high in 2025 is that a chunk of the Boriswave migrants are choosing not to stay — 286,000 immigrants from outside Europe permanently left the UK in the past year alone — and, in addition, Europeans who settled in the UK pre-Brexit are still leaving in large numbers. If an immigrant has acquired citizenship and then chooses to go back to their country of origin, they are still counted as one of The Telegraph’s “exodus of young British workers”.

While the ONS does not provide details of what portion of the emigrating Britons are naturalized citizens or children of immigrants, thankfully there is another migration dataset we can look at, compiled every four years at enormous expense by the United Nations. If you look at their 2024 Global Migration Database and compare that census of British migrants around the world with the 2020 figures, you can see more clearly what is happening: 72,000 more British nationals have settled in Poland (an increase of nearly 40%) and 23,000 more British nationals have settled in Romania since 2020. It seems quite reasonable to conclude that these are Polish and Romanian immigrants to the UK who have returned home along with a British passport and in some cases a British family. The next big hotspot for emigrating Britons is… Bangladesh! Nearly 13,000 Brits have moved there in the past four years. Unless young Billy from Kent has decided, along with thousands of his friends, that Bangladesh is the new land of economic opportunity, these emigrants will be naturalized British citizens with Bangladeshi ties. By contrast, only 3,259 more Brits are living in the UAE than four years ago, and the numbers moving to America are up by only 1%.

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Blue Labour has come too late

By David Littlefair

The reality is: not all immigrants want to stay in Britain forever. Last week’s report from the ONS made that clearer than ever. And this underlying level of emigration will continue to affect net immigration numbers in the coming years right through 2029. It is hard to think of a single metric that could be more important at the next election.

Political pressure will persist, even with net migration at this lower level. Right-wing commentators are correct to observe that 900,000 arrivals in a year, notwithstanding 700,000 departures, is still much too high for most voters to bear. It was partly anxiety about a roughly similar level of immigration that led to the Brexit result in 2016. A figure of 200,000 net still means an additional one million people every five years — and our current mix of immigrants is now dominated by those from outside Europe, whereas pre-Brexit it was mainly Europeans. Asylum seekers are also at an all-time high of over 100,000 (nearly half of whom arrived on small boats) and are still hard to expel once they’re here. Anxieties about assimilation are well-founded. So, for now, there is still plenty for Reform UK to campaign on. But if the downward trend were to continue, things might start to look very different.

Reducing immigration is like fixing a roof with multiple leaks: each entrypoint is a distinct challenge, and the biggest entry-points are the legal ones. It was, after all, Boris Johnson’s relaxing of rules around care home workers and international students bringing over family members that led to the huge rise in numbers in 2022-2024, and credit for addressing this should go, unfashionably enough, to Rishi Sunak. His government’s changes to the rules concerning care workers, in October 2023, and international students, in January 2024, are the single biggest reasons for the end of the Boriswave. Further restrictions introduced in March and April 2024 are now having an effect: the key long-term visa grants in the latest quarter are down more than 50% since Q1 2024. Consider it Sunak’s parting gift to Keir Starmer.

The Labour government has continued the tightening, raising the minimum skills and salary thresholds for skilled worker visas — and this also is having an effect. Home Office data show that applications for skilled-worker and health-and-care visas are down to a new low. In October 2025, there were only 600 health-and-care visa applications, compared with a high of 18,300 in February 2022. In January 2026, there will be a further tightening, paired with a much longer 10-year wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), which is expected to further discourage applications.

Data analyst James Bowes, from the University of Warwick, now forecasts that these shifts, combined with the long-tail effects of earlier waves of immigrants now leaving, could push the UK into overall net negative immigration by as early as this time next year. Madeline Sumption, director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, is more skeptical, and tends to think that the net figure is more likely to rise gently as the boomerang from the Boriswave settles down. In any case, if Keir Starmer has any desire for a surprise comeback, he should be obsessed with this goal — and be fully supportive of his Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

Many things could yet derail this trend — chief among them a panic lurch to the Left by Labour after the May elections— but it is clear what the game-changer now looks like. For Nigel Farage and Reform UK there is now the chilling possibility of another Pyrrhic victory — just like the Brexit campaign before it — in which the change to national policy they campaigned for so effectively takes place, and that success removes the principal reason for their existence.

You see, Mahmood isn’t just Home Secretary: as she was so keen to remind conference-goers, she’s a Labour home secretary. Twice during her speech she put special emphasis on her party’s name, lest anyone close their eyes and think they were listening to Theresa May or Suella Braverman. And, by the standards of a senior Labour politician, this was a surprising speech. 

The main focus was the Government’s changes to “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) rules for migrants, the qualifying period for which will now be increased from five years to 10. Earlier this month, Reform UK pledged, if elected, to scrap ILR entirely, forcing migrants to re-apply for visas every five years. The radicalism of this proposal allowed Keir Starmer — himself compared to Enoch Powell by portions of the British Left — to cast Farage as “racist” and “immoral”. During a separate fringe event last night, Mahmood referred to the policy as “much worse than racism”. Indeed, Reform’s announcement was in some ways a gift to the Home Secretary, who could outline a Labour policy which is certainly robust, but which nonetheless takes a more humane approach to questions of migration.

“Open, tolerant, generous”: that was the Home Secretary’s pitch for what the UK has to offer newcomers, and that is only possible if stronger policies are introduced for protecting the country’s borders. Thanks to Conservative policies, she said, “the scale and the speed of change as well as the nature of [immigration] has frayed trust and eroded public confidence”. She added: “We need a system that is fair to people who are already here. That means cracking down on illegal working that undercuts British workers.”

But this outwardly nationalist rhetoric had its limits. If she fails in her task to stop the boats and bring down net migration, Mahmood’s Liverpool address may come to be remembered as the “Little England” speech. Surveying the crowd, she expressed her “belief in a greater Britain, not a littler England”, a line which received the heartiest round of applause of the whole speech. That response from the audience — which also cheered Mahmood’s references to her second-generation immigrant background, as well her drive-by attacks on the open-borders maniacs of the last Tory ministry — showed an enthusiasm for immigration hawkishness only if it was tempered by liberal caveats. The crowd held its collective breath when she began to criticize migrant hotels, then exhaled when she described them as “that totem of the Tory legacy”. Clearly, Labour’s conference-goers may not be ready for full-fat Mahmood. 

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By Jonny Ball

Labour insiders had tipped Mahmood for the Home Office for several months before her elevation was hastened by Angela Rayner’s resignation from the Deputy Leadership. That reshuffle, early in September, gave Starmer an opportunity to bring in a tough minister to bring down both legal and illegal immigration — a task which successive governments have made seem impossible. Mahmood doesn’t deal in half measures. Last summer, in the wake of rioting across Britain, the then-Justice Secretary warned that “thugs and hooligans” would “feel the full force of the law”. A fortnight ago, she made the very same threat to Unite the Kingdom protestors who used violence against police officers. Speaking yesterday, she vowed to go after shoplifters in a vaguely Bolshevik-sounding “winter of action”.  And after she oversaw, as justice secretary, the early release of thousands of prisoners, which might have led to the resignation of a less capable minister, she turned it into an opportunity to abolish shorter sentences.

In doing so, she aimed to strengthen Labour’s appeal to the voters who are deserting the party. British electoral politics, across the spectrum, typically functions as a quest to win over swing voters who are in parts economically Left-wing, socially conservative, patriotic, and tough on crime. In its pithiest form, this worldview is summarized as: “Hang the paedos, fund the NHS.” Many of the Britons occupying this sweet spot would once have voted for Labour, but are now drawn to a Reform UK message which is tailored towards the disaffected working class. Mahmood, who settled for merely chemically castrating sex offenders during her time in the Justice Department, is viewed by prominent figures within Labour as the party’s best answer to this conundrum. Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour and an influence on Government strategists including Morgan McSweeney, has labeled Mahmood as “clearly the leader of our part of the party”.

Conscious of her role in the fight against Reform, Mahmood argued in her Liverpool speech that “working people will turn away from us — the party that for over a hundred years has been their party — and seek solace in the false promises of Farage”. The Right-wingers in teal aren’t even the most serious threat to national stability, in her eyes: at the beginning of her address she highlighted that when 150,000 people marched through London earlier this month, “they did so under the banner of a convicted criminal and a former BNP member”. In other words, this wasn’t an attempt to “unite the Kingdom” but the desperate howl of the Little Englander. 

There was once a time, as recently as the mid-20th century, when to be a “Little Englander” was not a sign of xenophobic small-mindedness but instead of progressive opposition to the British Empire. That it is now a universal term of derision is reflective of how thoroughly more middle-class, metropolitan sections of the center-left have come to dominate the Labour Party. In her speech, Mahmood stated that hers is “a patriotism that speaks but does not feel the need to shout”. That may well be true of many Britons of all political stripes, but the fact remains that Labour is now well behind in the polls to an insurgent movement which is only too happy to shout its patriotism from the rafters. 

Rather than drawing distinctions between its national plan and the pitfalls of being a Little Englander, Starmer’s party should do more to appeal to this group, which is still resolutely insular. Mahmood said in Liverpool that “where a nation is fearful, it turns inwards. When we feel safe, we can look outwards” — yet her speech was still given with one eye firmly on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), whose range of views on immigration tends to be narrower than that of voters. In response, a Reform press release stated that “her speechwriters may have toughened her rhetoric, but the Home Secretary’s speech won’t wash with the public”.

There are other issues where the position of Labour MPs and members is out of kilter with the public as a whole. Though a small majority of Britons support remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), there are more who think that the treaty should be reformed (35%) than left as it is (28%). Yet while the Home Secretary has made positive noises about reforming the ECHR, Attorney General Richard Hermer has suggested that any such move would amount to a “political trick”. Wanting to leave it altogether is a positively fringe position among MPs, and this summer’s welfare bill debacle demonstrates how hard it can be to get legislation past intransigent members of the PLP. Be that as it may, drastic legal changes may be the only way to actually remove failed asylum seekers in considerable numbers, as the steady stream of disrupted deportations implies. 

For all her strong rhetoric, then, Mahmood still needs to convince a party which, since the time of Tony Blair, has wedded itself to the cult of human rights, not to mention a Prime Minister who has become an emblem of this legalistic mindset. And the Prime Minister is likely to remain in situ. Andy Burnham Autumn has now run its course after barely a week, with the Greater Manchester Mayor telling a fringe event in Liverpool on Monday that he would not be challenging Starmer for the leadership. With the internal threat defused, the Prime Minister can focus his efforts on the Faragist menace, while Mahmood can worry less about trying to win over the Left of the party.

Despite the best efforts of Rachel Reeves, Labour is still trusted more than Reform when it comes to managing the economy. Its immigration policy, however, is a tougher sell, not least if the Chancellor pushes through a migration deal for young EU workers to boost public finances. And though Mahmood used her speech to praise the “one in, one out” deal negotiated with France by her predecessor Yvette Cooper, doubts remain about whether this ratio will hold firm in practice — and whether, more fundamentally, Starmer and his parliamentary colleagues have any desire to undertake the legal reforms that would enable Mahmood to do her job effectively. 

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“The story of who we are is contested,” Mahmood claimed in Liverpool yesterday. She was talking about Britain, and about the new class of ethnonationalists who have seized the previously unifying language of patriotism and twisted it into something darker. Yet she could just as easily have been describing her own party. As Labour’s conference moves towards its conclusion, Starmer’s assertions that he has planted his flag and made clear what he stands for are hardly convincing. Mahmood has put forward a more persuasive assertion of her personal beliefs. But she won’t win over any Reform voters by accusing their leader of racism, while Left-wingers, many of whom are presently beguiled by Jeremy Corbyn or the Greens, may be put off by her self-presentation as “a patriot, proudly so”. This Gordian Knot applies to pretty much everything Starmer does on domestic policy, and his home secretary should prepare to have her hands tied just as often. 

This hints at an even broader problem for Labour. Whatever the glamour of the conference, the fact remains that neither Starmer nor his Cabinet is currently guiding British public opinion. The Overton window is moving markedly to the Right, evidenced by the very real prospect of a governing party at the end of this decade with a plan for mass deportations. Given all this, even relative radicals like Mahmood risk being stranded as the liberal consensus folds and a political revolution rages around them. But at least she’s trying. Jonathan Rutherford, a political adviser who is another influential Blue Labour figure, has — somewhat grandiosely — hailed Mahmood as “perhaps the most astute and able politician of her generation”. She isn’t, but she may still be Labour’s best hope of stopping the more likely holder of that title from capturing Number 10 in 2029. If, that is, her party can hold its nose.

The chattering-class reaction was swift and withering. The Guardian sneered that “No one should have been made to endure this”, and “Once seen it can never be unseen.” But this misunderstands the true import of Jenkyns’ jumpsuit, as an escalation in Middle England’s mutiny against the Everywhere political class. This has been simmering since before Brexit — but now, the mutiny is aesthetic as well as political. And most significantly, Reform’s ebullient, spangly new vibe signals the party’s blossoming relation to a demographic for whom commentators long assumed Farage was radioactive: women.

Contra received opinion on the internet Right, Reform has understood one of Britain’s deep truths: the ladies of this land are not, in fact, “naturally” Left-wing. Stats nerds may point to women’s overall 2024 electoral preference for Left-wing parties, and to the increasingly gendered political polarization of the young, in which young women veer Left while their male peers sidle Right. But more women than men voted Tory in 2024, and the British daily newspaper with the largest female audience has long been the Mail. Ordinary British women, especially mothers, are not precisely conservative, if by this you mean abstract stuff about markets or Edmund Burke. But they are fiercely so, if by this you mean animated by a desire to protect their own. The confusion arises because if you view politics from this angle, it’s less about ideology than embracing whichever political offer seems best calibrated to help you do so.

For much of recent history, this was plausibly the Labour Party. Under Blair, New Labour both turbocharged funding for public goods, such as Sure Start and the NHS, and cracked down on public ills such as street crime: in aggregate, a decent offer from the perspective of looking after your own. But it doesn’t follow from this that more than a minority of mums are ideologically “left-wing”, where such an ideology runs counter to this aim.

Especially since the Boriswave, the sheer level and ubiquity of demographic churn has now transformed this calculus. For one of the crucial background factors that makes the difference between life as a mum being pleasant or stressful is the safeness and familiarity of your everyday environment: for example, how likely you feel to be physically threatened or robbed, or encounter random hostility, or worry about your children going out alone. This sense of safety is both intangible and immeasurably valuable.

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Rapid demographic change disrupts this sense of safety, for reasons that have less to do with prejudice than simple familiarity. As big cities demonstrate, it’s possible to live almost entirely without these goods, in an environment that’s both crowded and high-turnover. But most mothers don’t want to. Families that leave London to raise kids will usually gesture at house prices, but scratch the surface and you’ll find most are also looking for a safer and more stable atmosphere. For while one can manage without, doing so is both stressful and expensive. The costly burglar alarms, gated compounds, and private security patrols that compensate for eroded public trust and safety in effect transform an intangible common good into a luxury for the rich. 

This makes the loss of an existing atmosphere of safety a far graver threat to those of modest means — not to mention one that, for reasons that should be obvious, lands especially heavily on women. So we shouldn’t be surprised if women are beginning to protest, especially as the side-effects of recent, rapid immigration extend palpably beyond big cities into provincial Britain, while the ongoing small boats crisis brings matters to a head. Of course some population turnover is normal, and plenty of newcomers just want to fit in; in the ordinary course of things, such individuals tend to be absorbed in short order. But this is not always the case, and becomes more noticeable as the volume increases.

As things stand, my own small town feels tranquil and familiar enough that primary-age children of both sexes play outdoors unaccompanied. But Reform’s swelling membership stands as testament to the radicalization of Middle England, which is happening in no small part as mothers in similar towns up and down the country fear, or as in Epping simply experience, the rapid erosion of their treasured safety and familiarity. Some women might deride this as “bigoted”, especially if sufficiently rich or inured to big-city social norms to be puzzled by such distress. But far more are motivated not by ideology so much as looking after their own. And these women are on the warpath.

In her sparkly jumpsuit, Jenkyns has offered herself as their warrior queen. No wonder the Mail, house journal of Middle England’s women, hailed her conference appearance as a “ROCKSTAR ENTRANCE”. The same outlet reports sympathetically on this group’s loss of felt safety, recently quoting Carly, 38, on the asylum hotel opened near her tiny Somerset village: “I don’t go out running any more because some of the men hang around in groups and they used to shout things out when I ran past them,” she said. “I found it very intimidating.” Why, such women might be forgiven for asking, should we give up our freedom to exercise outdoors alone? What, indeed, gives the Home Office the right to take away our teenage daughters’ confidence-building freedom to go out un-chaperoned? Accordingly, women now feature front and center in asylum protests. And those in towns that still feel safe think: “This could be me next”. As they face this prospect, Middle England’s middle-aged mums are growing increasingly militant.

In honor of Jenkyns’ conference outfit, if not of her comparatively drab speech, we might describe the resulting mood as less the semi-ironic Right-wing meme of “pantsuit deportations” than its glammed-up provincial cousin, Sparkly Jumpsuit Deportations. It’s a far cry from the performatively macho sensibility that’s come to be associated with the e-Right, which often owes more to the thrusting Top Gun vibe of American conservatism than the England that made smash hits of Terry Wogan’s Floral Dance and the Military Wives’ Choir. The London-based e-Right policy channel Pimlico Journal was duly sniffy, describing Reform’s conference atmosphere as “generally cringe”, and “like I was spending time with an elderly relative and being forced to watch their favorite daytime television programme”.

But while the sequins might put off the boys who lift and post Lee Kuan Yew memes, winning votes is about numbers and these boys aren’t, numerically speaking, a lot of people. By contrast, the normie mums of Middle England really are. This group is also the country’s cultural backbone; and they are, not unreasonably, growing tired not just of having their sense of street safety eroded by “human rights” and government paralysis, but also of being told that this isn’t happening because their culture either does not exist, or — if it does — is “too white” and in need of more halal cafes.

For, just like the sense of small-town safety that allows my primary-age daughter a degree of outdoor freedom now unthinkable in (say) Epping, that culture does exist. It’s just not what the artisan-cheese classes (or indeed anonymous contributors to Pimlico Journal) would like it to be. As a gestalt it resists easy encapsulation, least of all in something as reductive as a foodstuff or institution; but its overall sensibility is, like Strictly, participatory, sentimental and sometimes a bit naff. It is also, despite the Hollywood stereotype of Brits as effete, ironic poshos, upbeat, demotic, and welcoming to whoever shows up and pitches in. Its modern-day avatar is perhaps the barrow-boy turned entrepreneur and influencer Thomas Skinner, a ruddy-faced giant who produces social media motivational messages at the crack of dawn every weekday, while devouring enormous helpings of hearty food. Fittingly, Skinner was recently announced as Strictly’s tenth celebrity contestant; in a sign of the turning political tides, he is also increasingly Reform-adjacent.

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In this he reflects those ordinary Britons, men and women, for whom he has become a kind of living emblem. Luke Tryl of More In Common observed recently that, in sharp contrast to Starmer’s Labour Party, polling suggests that demographically speaking Reform voters simply “look like the average Briton”. The New Statesman concurs, describing this group’s “straight, numbing, cheddar cheese normality”. Reform now lead “among people who, this summer, were looking forward to holidaying abroad, watching the women’s rugby, having a barbecue and sitting in a pub garden.”

When city-dwellers haughtily inform provincial fellow-Britons of this kind that there’s no such thing as English culture, because St George was Turkish or whatever, what they actually mean is that this culture – the culture of Middle England – doesn’t contain anything they value. In more prosperous times, having their “cheddar cheese normality” erased or condescended to in this way didn’t bother Middle Englanders much: this group is generally more interested in local life than the national kind, and takes a “live-and-let-live” approach to those outside their orbit. But it’s grown clear in recent years that the “English culture doesn’t exist” crowd are not going to return the favor, perhaps because Middle England provides too robust a body of sparkly, sentimental, small-c conservative counter-argument to this claim.

In this context, what one commentator described as Reform’s “glorious naffness” is a mutiny that began politically, but has now signaled its burgeoning confidence by rebelling aesthetically too. The mutiny is directed straight at the lanyard class, in their Farrow and Balled period homes in safe and still-homogeneous neighborhoods, self-righteously bestowing asylum hotels on the Mail-reading denizens of provincial towns and chiding their inferiors for worrying about the effect on street safety and their tax bill. For the locally-minded, family-oriented mums of Middle England, this is a bridge too far. It would be a mistake to imagine that the resulting political shift is a testament to Farage personally, except insofar as he now represents, for a growing proportion of Middle England, the last best hope of looking after their own. The resulting mood may be channeled through him, but it does not originate there, and will find a more effective figurehead if he fails. 

For now, though, it’s Sparkly Jumpsuit Deportations. This vibe may horrify the cultural and political mainstream, and make the e-Right wince, but Jenkyns’ weaponization of light entertainment should serve as a reminder to our feckless, faltering regime that Middle England’s public-spiritedness is the engine of grassroots social organizing. And the flip-side of sugary sentimentalism is a vengeful mob. So Starmer and Farage alike should be grateful that the country’s normie mums are still just about willing to trust the political process. Should that trust be disappointed, as it has been so often before, the sequins may be swapped for something more steely.

But what’s the alternative? Robert Jenrick, who was runner-up to Badenoch in last year’s Tory leadership election, is busy on social media, sometimes even — gasp — with policy ideas. Recently he added his voice to those urging Badenoch to get a move on with developing her own. The suspicion lingers, though, that he’d actually rather she got a move on out of the LOTO role altogether, so he can have a bash.

Jenrick could hardly be worse than Badenoch. Under her lackluster leadership, the Tories have slid to a humiliating fourth place, behind Labour, Reform, and the Lib Dems, leading anonymous knife-sharpeners to float the most preposterous idea of all: bringing back Boris Johnson.

But this absurdity is surely emblematic of the Conservative Party’s, well, conservatism, in the small-c sense of preferring to stick to known quantities. The same goes for Badenoch. It’s just that the worldview she represents has purchase only with an obviously rapidly shrinking subset of the British electorate. And the fact that a high proportion of this subset happens to be Tory members able to vote in leadership contests is, under the circumstances, unfortunate for the party’s long-term viability.

So are the Tories doomed? It’s worse than that. The danger is that it’s not just our oldest political party which is stumbling toward irrelevance, but the entire system of government within which it formed and flourished.

The Tory Party coalesced during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, shortly after the Civil War and Restoration, and while England was still an absolute monarchy. Originally the party of the landed interest, in opposition to the mercantilist Whigs, in the 19th century came to embrace mercantilism themselves after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Later still, these Tories found a new opponent: Labour, the party of the industrial working class.

A century on, Britain is no longer an empire, and is largely de-industrialized. Most elites are not so much landed as post-geographic, enjoying rarefied existences as ultra-mobile transnational tax-exiles. The Blair era saw Labour, too, devoured by Whiggery. And now the postwar welfare system — premised on an ever-rising working-age population and perpetual economic growth — is staring down the barrel of demographic collapse, as its dwindling working-age tax base grows ever more overburdened and resentful.

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And regardless of which party forms a government, we find the same policy is both keeping the fiscal show on the road, and greasing the national slide toward crisis: indeed, according to a recent report from David Betz, Professor of War Studies at King’s College, perhaps even civil conflict. This policy is the core of Reform’s challenge to Badenoch, and to the policy of every government of the past quarter-century: the Gordian knot the Tories spent 13 years pretending to pick at, before giving up and just making it bigger. That is, replenishing Britain’s declining workforce through large-scale inward migration.

The problem is an existential one for our settlement. Britain is a democracy; the voting public likes the welfare state, and doesn’t like immigration; but people aren’t having enough kids to keep the population stable, let alone growing. This has resulted in a wicked problem to which there’s no obvious solution that would both be effective and sufficiently popular to win a democratic majority. You can’t rebalance the books without welfare cuts so brutal you will immiserate millions, most of them voters, or tax rises that kill prosperity and enrage the better-off. And you can’t grow the workforce in the short term without importing workers; but while Britain is by any sane measure, one of the least racist places in the world, mass immigration is now so unpopular with those already here that even Keir Starmer is trying to sound like he wants to reduce it.

But no one expects him to deliver, any more than Boris did. For despite the electorate asking for lower immigration for literally decades, every government that gets voted in having pledged to deliver this has promptly seen the Gordian knot and sheepishly reverse-ferreted. After a quarter of a century of “talking Right and governing Left” on this issue, both main parties have forfeited the public trust.

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The age of nihilism is over

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As politicians flail fruitlessly around the “moderate” Overton window in search of a solution, a mood of angry despair has taken hold of the country. Everything is interpreted as yet another emblem of the same paralysis. Signs of social fraying are everywhere you look. Birmingham’s bin strike has now been ongoing for 11 weeks and counting. Petty crime has risen everywhere, especially in urban public spaces, including robbery and sexual harassment. Just 3% of Britain’s roads received any kind of maintenance last year. And this has all happened as the cost of living has continued to climb, and the mood to sour.

How far you believe any of the issues above is directly caused by immigration will depend on your political priors. Bin collection and road maintenance may seem a reach, but trust me: you can find disaffected Brits making the link — in the case of potholes, Farage himself. Others, meanwhile, grumble about foreigners accessing — implicitly, undeservedly — the British welfare state, especially desirable London social housing. The discourse makes little distinction between legal and illegal migration: Channel migrants have become a visually potent symbol for this mood of defensive scarcity, and corresponding anger at the seeming inability of governments to respond to rising scarcity by prioritizing their own citizens.

Notwithstanding the pleas of center-right “moderates”, Reform’s insurgent rise demonstrates the appeal of this harder-edged scarcity Right. Beyond the Tory party base, it’s already largely displaced the civic-nationalist Cameroon worldview. As the IPPR recently warned, it also threatens the Left. The shift is structural: and wherever you stand on these issues, their widening salience reflects the way immigration has become an explosive proxy for more general dissatisfaction with the current settlement.

So what to do? The problem is especially acute for the Tories, because their only remaining charismatic figure — Boris — is irreparably tainted by failure to untie the central Gordian knot: a betrayal so egregious it bears his name, the so-called “Boriswave”. Meanwhile, Badenoch embodies the very civic-nationalist Right now rapidly losing ground to the insurgent scarcity kind.

All of this was supposed to have been resolved in the great Borisquake of 2019, in which he promised to “get Brexit done” — along with, or so voters hoped, a corresponding drop in low-skilled immigration. He made (empty, as it turned out) gestures at “leveling up” poorer bits of the UK, moving left on economics and right on culture, and breaking us out of the stale double-liberal consensus everyone agreed was driving polarization across the country. And yet, six whole years on, the same stale double-liberal consensus has the country in a tighter stranglehold than ever. It’s just that now, thanks to Boris’ lockdowns and subsequent attempt to jump-start the economy with mass immigration, this comes with a burgeoning and unpleasant side order of ethnopolitics; and — because the jump-start didn’t work — also looming fiscal crisis. And the only way to keep a lid on this volatile mix seems, increasingly, to be repressive controls on speech.

This, then, has been the medium-term consequence of so-called “moderate” governance. So no one should be surprised to see Reform sailing urbanely into the socially conservative, economically Left political territory that sat there, empty and unloved, the whole time Boris was supposed to be claiming it for the Tories. Promising to protect social welfare while radically slowing immigration is consistently popular. And yet neither the Tories nor Labour have claimed this open political goal for their teams.

Why? Competing economic interests is one factor: today’s post-geographic elites usually stand to gain more, economically speaking, from keeping the borders open. And as the “collapsologist” Peter Turchin has argued, where the wishes of elites and the masses diverge, even in a democracy, it’s always the elites who get their way.

But it’s also possible that no one has seriously tried this policy offer because there’s no way to deliver it with a shrinking native tax base. Farage is now promising the impossible: generous welfare and zero immigration. Trying to square this circle with a declining native population has scuppered both the other parties, and it’s not clear how Farage will succeed where all before him failed. At least, not short of radically altering the frame itself. For, as Turchin also notes, when elites turn away from the interests of the polity as a whole, in favor of simply diverting resources toward themselves, historically the resulting is eventually serious political unrest: the unhappy prognosis of Professor Betz.

Turchin suggests the best-case scenario under such conditions is takeover by a counter-elite more willing to accommodate the broader public interest. He notes the remarkable stability of Britain, relative to other European polities, in meeting and resolving moments of crisis such as the Corn Law riots, with an adjusted settlement. So who knows: perhaps Reform, or some version of the Tory Party that has had a complete personnel, personality, and history transplant, might be that counter-elite. Stranger things have happened.

But absent radical change, the Gordian knot would still be uncut. And if Boris taught us anything, it’s that simply saying “Why not both?” won’t do. Cakeism has been comprehensively discredited. Johnson, is in fact, not just the wrong answer but the answer to the wrong question. What’s needed isn’t just a more appealing leader to deliver the existing formula, but a different formula. Or, perhaps, an even more profound change. It’s not impossible that eventually some sufficiently radical counter-elite will conclude that giving the American public what they need will require sharply limiting the same public’s ability to have a say in what they want.

The last time we were shaken by political questions as profound as today’s, the turmoil produced civil war, then Tories and Whigs, and, eventually, parliamentary democracy to mediate between public desires and political power. Now, a long way down that arc, that public wants two irreconcilable things — and keeps destroying parties that fail to deliver one or the other.

The only way this can change is either via a shift in public sentiment radical enough to permit the necessary trade-offs — or, alternatively, the unhappy outcome predicted by Professor Betz. That is: political chaos on the level of the era just before the Tory Party formed, out of which some new settlement is able to emerge. Perhaps, even, so transformative a change as that earlier one from absolute to constitutional monarchy. So-called “moderates” might reflect that, however slender Reform’s chance of success, in this context Farage is the conservative choice.