Then, on 25 September, residents along 50 miles of that coastline found that their beaches had become a charnel house. Thousands of dead and dying shellfish, their bodies twitching and convulsing, were piled thick on the sand. It was the first of several “die-offs” that left these seas barren and annihilated a centuries-old fishing industry. “Ecosystem wipeout,” Rennie calls it. 

To this day, despite two government inquiries, there is no official explanation for what caused this marine apocalypse. Finlay’s documentary, currently on release in selected cinemas, follows the region’s fishermen as they come to terms with their loss. This tragedy, it turns out, is about much more than crustaceans and lost livelihoods. It is intertwined with themes which have haunted Britain for a decade: the legacy of deindustrialization, the anger of the country’s left behind, and the false hopes offered by the political class. The North East has more neighborhoods classed as highly deprived than any other region in England, with Hartlepool and Middlesbrough ranking among the three most deprived local authorities in the country. 

Hartlepool sits by the mouth of the River Tees, an area that was until the Eighties one of Britain’s industrial heartlands. Teesside had a vast steelmaking industry, as well as power stations, chemical plants and shipbuilding facilities. Steel alone employed 40,000 workers. The rusted hulks of those factories loomed along the coastline where Rennie caught shellfish, painfully obvious symbols of a community in decline. 

Then, in 2021, the demolitions began. The Conservative government had earmarked the Tees estuary for a major redevelopment, to be overseen by the newly created Tees Valley Combined Authority and its Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen. It was to be the country’s first “Freeport”, a launchpad for Brexit Britain that would attract global investors with preferential tax and customs arrangements. By 2023, the government had committed more than £250 million of public funds for the redevelopment. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seeking to appeal to traditional Labour voters who had supported Brexit and then swung behind the Tories to deliver it. In the 2016 referendum, Leave won every borough in Teesside with at least 60% of the vote, and three years later, first-time Conservative voters (including Rennie, his wife and his daughter) had delivered Johnson half of the six Teesside seats.

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The plan was to clear Teesmouth, Europe’s largest brownfield site, to make way for the new development. The board responsible boasted that 10 years’ worth of clean-up work would take place in just two to three years. What the prospectus did not mention was that the old industries had for decades dumped their poisonous by-products into the landscape and the river itself. This symbol of regional rebirth was being built on something akin to the edge of a volcano. 

Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of Finlay’s film. The first government inquiry into the crustacean die-off suggested that the culprit was an algal bloom, an explanation that the fishermen regarded as absurd. They had their own ideas about what caused the disaster. In the days preceding it, a dredging vessel clearing up after a landslip had removed 150,000 tonnes of sediment from the riverbed at Teesmouth, depositing it three miles out at sea. The river estuary is regularly dredged — albeit not on this scale — and the ports authority maintains that the landslip was not caused by the demolitions then taking place. Nonetheless, the fishermen were convinced that dredged material had poisoned the waters, and raised funds to hire their own scientific researchers. 

According to these researchers, the evidence pointed toward pyridine, a chemical which had historically been used by industry at Teesside. They claimed that crabs exposed to pyridine respond similarly to those observed on the beaches; that samples collected by the Environment Agency contained high levels of the substance; and that computer simulations showed a spillage from Teesmouth spreading down the coast much as the die-off had. 

To the fishermen who suddenly found themselves unable to support their families, and the locals whose dogs became sick after walking along the beaches, it appeared that the truth behind their ordeal was being suppressed. Nothing could stand in the way of the totemic Teesside regeneration, a project that would, after all, involve a lot more dredging. Suspicions mounted throughout 2022 as a stench of malfeasance gathered around Houchen’s scheme. Reporting by Richard Brooks at Private Eye and local newspapers pointed to financial irregularities, misuse of public funds, and extraordinary benefits granted to a coterie of private developers around the mayor. In time, these would become allegations of staggering duplicity and graft, leaving the development corporation heavily indebted.

The resentment toward a distant establishment which the Brexit project had harnessed so effectively was now turned against it. “Anywhere else in the country, the government would’ve thrown every resource at this,” Rennie says. “Because we’re the North East, the back hole of the country, we’re just forgotten about.”

The remarkable thing, though, is that while the fishermen’s sense of abandonment is understandable, they were not forgotten about at all. They became an emblem of the government’s betrayal of the people it claimed to represent, eagerly seized upon by critics of Johnson and Brexit. The populists had become the establishment, so their opponents could become populists in turn. In June 2022, the Guardian’s George Monbiot wrote that “with every passing week, it looks more like a cover-up”. He condemned the government inquiry for failing to publish its data and promoted the pyridine hypothesis. Channel 4 took the same course. That autumn, parliament’s environment select committee invited Rennie and the researchers working with the fishermen to make their case. The committee demanded a second, independent inquiry to address the conflicting accounts, but that too was called into question before it had even reported its findings. Critics noted that it was appointed and overseen by government advisors, that some of its members were kept anonymous — to protect their independence — and that it refused to cooperate with the scientists behind the pyridine hypothesis. 

The experts assembled by that second government inquiry later complained that the idea that they — “politically independent scientists from universities, research laboratories and consultancies” — had “colluded on a fictitious report” was “preposterous”. This narrative was, they suggested, being fed by “mistrust in government” and “inaccurate media coverage”. Unfortunately, their reasons for rejecting the pyridine hypothesis were never likely to cut through this atmosphere of suspicion, as they involved technical issues such as the validity of the samples and methods used for testing, and the chemical properties of the pyridine molecule itself. Likewise, though they dismissed the first inquiry’s theory about the algal bloom, their own preferred explanation — that a novel and unique pathogen had killed the crustaceans — did not satisfy anyone as it was entirely hypothetical. 

There are still many question marks around the government’s response to the die-offs, and plenty of reason to think that, as Rennie puts it: “They don’t want to find the truth. They want to do the Freeport the cheapest option they can.” Despite the persistence of the shellfish deaths, the work at Teesmouth was not paused nor were proper samples taken of the riverbed. The government consistently hid behind a lack of evidence without making much effort to gather it. After the second inquiry, Conservative environment minister Thérèse Coffey announced that no further investigation would take place concerning the pathogen mooted as the possible cause. She also insisted that government agencies had received no further reports of die-offs following the initial incident in 2021, which came as news to the Teesside locals who had been submitting such reports regularly.

Nonetheless, the pyridine hypothesis is, in effect, a conspiracy theory. Its popularity probably tells us less about the cause of the disaster than about the paranoia that has penetrated to the heart of British politics in the decade since the Brexit vote. This is the most revealing aspect of All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea: try as you might to keep an open mind about the facts of the case, you cannot escape the conviction that these fishermen have been wronged, that they are victims of a system which cares nothing for them. This impression stems from their brutal lack of political agency. Even as the machinery of democracy swings into action behind them, carrying them into parliament itself, their status seems to be little better than that of feudal subjects bringing a petition to their lord’s manor. They cannot navigate the state’s bureaucratic defenses, pause the Teesmouth development, or prevent Houchen being re-elected. They are hostages to historical and ecological forces beyond their control, and ultimately become just another set of protesters waving their placards. 

The image of paralyzed crabs washing ashore symbolizes the impotence of these communities, and their impotence, in turn, has become emblematic of a whole nation’s frustration that nothing, and least of all government, seems to work as it should. Hence the strange situation whereby these left-behind places have, on account of their powerlessness, become the most powerful source of moral legitimacy in British politics. Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Andy Burnham have all presented themselves as answers to the anger of Stan Rennie’s Britain — and their opponents have attacked them, above all, for betraying it. 

Teesside gives a sense of why the promises of politicians have so often turned to disappointment. Burnham’s big idea is to devolve power to local areas, but he is not the first to try this; the Tees Valley Combined Authority was created by the Tories in 2016. The allegations surrounding Houchen’s regime — prompting the government to announce a statutory investigation this month — suggest that far from bringing accountable authority closer to communities, devolution creates opportunities for charismatic local figures to indulge in cronyism far from the spotlight of the Westminster-centric media. None are better placed to play on local grievances than local politicians who can blame their failures on others, as when Houchen claimed that opposition to dredging in the Tees came from “local activists and Labour politicians” attempting a “stitch-up”, because “they’d rather see the area fail than us succeed”.

The crustacean die-offs also raise awkward questions for those who say that the key to British prosperity lies in less regulation and greater executive powers to force through developments opposed by pesky locals. Teesmouth offers a glimpse of what a more Chinese approach to “delivering” actually looks like: even when there is an unexplained ecological catastrophe unfolding, developers will simply plow ahead and vilify critics as the enemies of progress. Much criticism of excessive regulation is justified, but we must acknowledge that Britain’s ecosystems are in a state of extreme fragility and depletion, not least thanks to the effects of historic pollution and mismanagement like that seen at Teesmouth. Putting aside the pyridine hypothesis, the government inquiries into the disaster revealed that numerous toxic substances are entering the sea in alarming quantities. A tragic subplot of Finlay’s film concerns a local seal colony that is sick and emaciated, its pups dying in droves, due to a contaminated food chain. 

Environmentalists are always trying to demonstrate our dependence on the natural world, but nothing I have seen conveys the message more powerfully than the image of fishermen forlornly pulling up one empty net after another. “The pots are barren,” Rennie announces in disgust, wishing they were still full of “all the bonnie stuff we should be seeing all our lives”. Suffering from heart problems and non-alcoholic liver disease, he continues working for the sake of physical activity, burning through his savings in the process. The other fishermen are struggling to sell their boats and telling their sons to find a different trade. More than half of the Hartlepool fleet has gone since 2021.

The existence of this film offers some small consolation for the fishermen’s plight; Finlay says they feel “a huge relief in being seen”. For all the promises directed at places like Teesside in the last decade and more, it seems that this remains a rare feeling.

Badenoch is right to imply that the rise of the local beautician is remarkable. According to a report just out, beauty salons and shops now make up almost a third of leisure sites across the UK, with a particularly strong presence in provincial towns and villages. In the small place from which I now write, for instance — total population 11,251 at the last census — there are 11 beauty salons, 12 women’s hairdressers, three nail bars and two tanning studios.

The town in question is Montrose in Angus, which is situated on the weather-beaten North Sea coast, halfway between Aberdeen and Dundee. I grew up there, and knowing it as I do, the sheer number of aesthetics-related ventures initially seemed a bit baffling. The average Montrosian isn’t particularly high maintenance, and even veers towards the strictly functional; yet on the strength of the current offering, you’d predict Kardashian levels of feminine allure. Thanks to a busy port and a chemical manufacturing plant, the overall economy is relatively buoyant, but there’s significant deprivation here too. The south of the town has much higher economic inactivity than the national average. And yet there is apparently a positive craze for luxurious grooming, and not just for humans. Just as improbably, there are eight dog grooming businesses listed in the area too.

Though suspicion would be understandable, the companies in question don’t appear to be shells for dodgy financial transactions. They all have convincingly enthusiastic web presences, take digital payments, and have local owners, some of whose names I recognize from school. Then there are the shop names: puns are a big thing in Montrose commercial life, in a way that seems incompatible with fraudulent intentions. Take the hairdressers: could a business called “Hairborne”, “Doo or Dye”, “The Mane Place”, or “Eclips” really be a sinister criminal front? And what about a dog groomer called “For Fluff’s Sake”?

The explanation for the glamour explosion is probably much more mundane. Social media has amped up demand, making various before-and-after glow-ups and product placements go viral; and memetic trends ripple even faster through smaller, more tight-knit places. Once you have a customer, she is likely to keep coming back, since most treatments are usefully temporary in their effects. And it’s fun to feel pampered, and catch up on the gossip; the traditional joys of such places haven’t changed.

On the supply side, the lack of regulation makes it easy to provide more exotic cosmetic interventions as the market develops — basically, injecting various rigidifying substances into someone’s precious face, then telling them they look fabulous — though both Scottish and English governments are trying to iron this rather alarming issue out. You don’t need a massive amount of kit to get started, and you can offer appointments rather than walk-ins, making it easier to fit round family life. And the profit margins can be big.

It is also relevant to note what isn’t there anymore. Generally, the dominance of online shopping means that physical objects have melted away from the high street, and the cultivation of ephemeral moments is what we get instead. In Montrose, this has meant the demise of many a nostalgic retail temple, including John Menzies, where we used to buy our Smash Hits magazines and school stationery, and Woolworths, that treasure trove of pick ’n’ mix and cheap plastic tat. These days there are only the dollar shops left for such things, and they too look threatened. God knows where future schoolkids will do their shoplifting if this carries on.

So, as is the case everywhere, several premises on Montrose High Street lie empty; a depressing state of affairs for the widest and grandest commercial street in Scotland, built in the 12th century under King David I. Those businesses still in operation tend to focus on providing things that are not easy for the internet to replicate, which typically means offering the customer a lovely time.

A big commercial theme these days is known as “affordable luxury” or “little treat culture”: people distracting themselves from doom-laden rumination about the future by moderately splurging on high-end consumables in the present. In London, impecunious young people are consoling themselves about the housing market with spectacularly laminated croissants and single estate coffees, and Montrose’s entrepreneurs seem to have noticed the fad. Take a stroll around the town center here, and you’ll pass from ice cream parlor to handmade chocolate studio to vape shop to derelict building, all within a few disorienting strides.

On the upside, the demise of traditional brands seems to have cleared room for riotous self-expression, as independent sellers try their hand at wacky new ideas and silly names. Along with all the cosmetic stuff, there is a coffee shop run by a bona fide pop star, named after one of her own hits; a company that does readymade seafood and fish dishes, called “The Plaice”; an independent bookshop with a Narnia-style wardrobe entrance into the children’s reading area; and a New Age store full of skulls and pentagram paraphernalia. There is also something described by its owners as a takeout vinegar bar, and an indoor operation called “The Snuffle Spot”, offering “A Unique Sensory Experience for Dogs”.

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There is probably a heartwarming sitcom to be written about all this mad creativity, complete with imagined fierce and violent rivalries between tanning salons. In the real world, Montrose traders are helped by an admirably vigorous community organization called ProMo, dedicated to keeping them on their feet. But there is no doubt it faces an uphill battle. The Scottish government already offers substantial business rate relief to smaller companies, but it is the rent and utility bills shopkeepers complain about, combined with lessening foot traffic and a lack of decent parking. Down South, Healey say he plans to support beauticians and other sole traders by raising business rate thresholds; but assuming that rents go up after business rates reduce, it probably won’t make a big difference overall.

The sad truth is that the fate of high streets across the British Isles is now ineluctably tied to whatever the internet is teaching us to covet; and if it can do it cheaper and faster than real shops, it will. For the moment, the beauticians and hairdressers are a surging force, and you can’t possibly blame entrepreneurial types for capitalizing on the trend. Indeed, we should be grateful, given the dismal alternative. At least people still talk to each other in salons, with no screens involved. But there are still questions to be asked about current beauty obsessions, and the dopamine-chasing culture in which they are embedded, given that so many of us seem to be obsessed with shallow nonsense, forgotten almost as soon as it ends.

Never mind the effects on your bank balance; what about the effects on your mind, compulsively anesthetizing yourself from life’s minor blows by fetishizing a facial massage or a frozen yogurt? It is common practice for such experiences to be described as part of “wellness”, but the whole point of luxury is that it is supposed to be magnificently superfluous to daily living, and something you could easily survive without. The occasional presence of a treat in your life is supposed to make you unreasonably happy. It is not just there to drown out the pain, or nudge you toward some pedestrian baseline of health. Though luxury is now badged by advertisers as an essential act of self-care, in fact it cannot be both: chasing unusual highs is not the same thing as avoiding habitual lows.

There is also a lot of rubbish talked about the value of experiences, whether commercially produced or otherwise: vivid little portions of remembered time, with a beginning, middle and end. You are supposed to always prefer good experiences to bad ones, even if you might have learned something new from the latter. You are supposed to have a certain number of canonical good experiences before you die, and the web is full of off-the-peg bucket lists to help. Sometimes there is even a vague suggestion of moral superiority, as if having experiences were an environmentally friendly alternative to owning possessions. I have misgivings about all of that. Still: if you insist on chasing your next experiential high, may I recommend taking a train to Montrose High Street — not necessarily for what it can sell you, but for all the fun it offers you for free.

Maybe they’d head out on their bikes, maybe they’d take a soccer ball, maybe they’d find a stone that became a gem that became a pet and have the kind of free-ranging adventures that I had when I was growing up. There would be injuries, definitely, and at least a couple of arguments. But still, I fantasize, as I intercept a row between my own kids over Netflix, they would be playing, without me having to organize or pay for it.

Iona Opie, the folklorist who spent decades closely observing British children at play, wrote that the peaks of a child’s experience were not trips to the cinema or even family outings to the seaside, but moments when they escaped “into places that are disused and overgrown and silent”. For Opie, the important word here is escaped. Children’s play was something that happened beyond the adult gaze: in streets, wastelands, playgrounds and patches of ground whose very lack of purpose made them attractive.

Yet we have spent decades making it increasingly difficult for kids to exercise this basic autonomy — and meanwhile wonder why rates of anxiety and depression have soared along with obesity rates; why so many children seem unable to sit still in class; why medication is being prescribed at record-breaking levels. Of course, play alone won’t solve the ADHD crisis or halt childhood obesity. But providing children with more time and space to play might at the very least help.

According to a survey by Save the Children, only 27% of kids now regularly play outside their homes, compared to 80% of children in the recent past. England’s first and only National Play Strategy was launched by the last Labour government in 2008 — an Andy Burnham initiative, backed by £235 million of investment. It was scrapped under George Osborne’s austerity program in 2010, and there has been no national play strategy since.

The right of a child to have a patch of grass on which to kick a ball — let alone a swing or a basketball hoop — might seem like a luxury, particularly when set against more measurable areas of childhood. Yet alongside gains in academic scores, a recent University of Exeter study found that those who played outdoors more frequently between the ages of two and four were less likely to have emotional and behavioral difficulties through age eight. This is not evidence that a lack of outdoor play causes anxiety. But it is a useful reminder of how strange our priorities have become, increasingly concerned with the measurable problems of childhood — but not the things that make childhood childhood.

Screens are another big barrier to play. In British Summertime Begins, her oral history of British childhood, the writer Ysenda Maxtone-Graham dates the “end” of the free-range childhoods she and her contemporaries enjoyed to 1980, when TV and then video games took hold of children’s attention. These now seem like quaint concerns compared to smartphones and tablets. As Ofcom found, children between the ages of eight and 14 spend an average of three hours a day online.

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There is another, more practical, obstacle to children playing outside: traffic. In 2025, 2,432 under-16s were killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads. It is true that child road deaths have fallen dramatically: in 1986, 450 children were killed; in 2025, that figure was 45. But there is another way of reading this success. Between 1971 and 1990, the proportion of seven- and eight-year-olds allowed to get to school without an adult fell from 80% to just 9%. In other words, roads became safer partly because children were no longer on them.

All this is shadowed by a broader change in the basic culture of play. According to that Save the Children survey, one-in-four children had been told to stop playing outside by an adult, while 30% had been told to stop making noise while they did so. No less striking, campaigners recently found 7,000 “no ball games” signs in public spaces across London; there’s one of them on the grassy patch next to my neighborhood’s sole playground.

The gradual enclosure of childhood is taking place within schools too. Key Stage One children, aged between five and seven, have on average 23 minutes less per day than they did in 1995. It’s also not unusual for children from the very youngest to have their lunchtimes curtailed further for “intervention”. A euphemism for “work”, this is often mandated because a child has been identified as needing help keeping up with some benchmark or other. At some schools, playtimes are shorter for crowd-control purposes: individual classes go out at staggered points during the afternoon, so that they have more room to play.

Space has been at a premium since Margaret Thatcher’s government permitted local authorities to sell off school grounds — 10,000 playing fields were lost between 1979-97. Tony Blair’s Labour government vowed to stop this, but, by 2008, a further 187 had been sold. The Conservatives then removed regulations that stipulated that schools with 600 pupils had to have 35,000 square meters of playing fields. There are now no statutory guidelines for school playgrounds.

Play by its nature should be egalitarian — but it’s working-class children who often miss out the most. Wealthier kids are more likely to have private gardens; more likely to live in the leafiest areas; more likely to have parents with the money to pay for add-ons and the capacity to act as a taxi service. In the summer term of the last academic year, I found myself paying for nine extracurricular clubs. How, I wondered, had I reached this level of expenditure and insanity? In part, because I live in North London, so the booming extracurricular market has convinced me that I can give my child a more enriching life, if only I pay a bit here and there.

But actually, I just want them to have something to do. To have exercise, yes, to get away from the screens too — yet also to have something that challenges them and shows them their capabilities in a way that math or phonics can’t.

But aside from the obvious unfairness of turning play into a middle-class luxury, is it even a substitute for what we might call free play? No, says Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, who has spent decades studying the evolutionary importance of play and self-directed learning. “It should be no surprise that natural selection endowed our children with an incredibly powerful drive to play with other children,” he tells me. For Gray, the crucial quality of play is that it is self-chosen: children decide what to play, how to play it, and when to stop. As Gray puts it: “That’s where the enjoyment of play comes from.” There is only so much of this that adults can engineer.

Children also need periods beyond direct adult supervision, Gray argues, in which they learn that they can manage their own lives; without it, it’s hard to develop what psychologists call an “internal locus of control” — the sense that “I can manage things. I can control my own life.” Children need opportunities to discover that they are capable of making decisions, resolving conflicts and dealing with the world without an adult standing behind them.

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One Reception teacher I speak to agrees. “You can teach a child about emotions,” says Lydia Lopez, “but it’s a very abstract concept until they’ve gone through it and understood how to deal with it themselves.” The best way to do that, she adds, “is through interacting with other children, through play.” Lopez says the play-based approach was highly valued by the early years team at her school: but they had to fight for it. The marketization of the childcare and education landscape means that a school’s optics — how it looks — can take priority over how it serves its pupils. In this case, the headteacher was worried that when prospective parents toured the school, it may not be immediately obvious to them that the youngest pupils were learning anything.

Given Andy Burnham was a driving force behind the only play strategy any British government has ever attempted, Play England wrote him an open letter when he became Prime Minister, asking him to finish what he started: develop a play strategy once more; create play sufficiency legislation; and pledge £125 million a year.

There has been no official answer yet — but there have been other inroads. For instance, the National Planning Policy Framework now protects both formal and informal play spaces. Parliament debated whether to make play a statutory part of the Key Stage One curriculum. There has been no official follow up, but murmurings seem positive.

The point is not that children need to be sent back to some imagined golden age. The streets of the Seventies were dangerous; schools cannot simply ignore safeguarding; and parents have good reasons to worry about what happens when they let their children out of their sight. Nor is play a magic cure for anxiety, obesity or ADHD. But there ought to be some part of childhood that is not being optimized, assessed, supervised or sold back to us as enrichment. All they need is some time, some space and a few friends.

But neither does Kemi Badenoch, whose most striking conference speech contributions lay in casting Reform as a party of dangerous ethnonationalists, and observing, correctly enough, that “there are separatists running not just Scotland, but Wales and Northern Ireland”. That both Burnham and Badenoch feel it necessary to cast themselves as the most fervent defenders of the Union does not bode well for its future.

Indeed, Badenoch’s claim that “our Prime Minister clumsily opened the door to a second Scottish referendum, while his leader in Scotland actively supports one” glosses over the broader likelihood that the transformation of British politics into a multiparty contest — especially when coupled with Burnham’s promise, or threat, of electoral reform — will force a reliance on such unstable and unwieldy coalitions. If Britain’s malaise is unique in its specifics, it is also merely our version of similar dynamics across the Western world. British politics is now increasingly European in its composition, even if its electoral system is not geared to recognizing this fact. Rather than producing strong executive governments, the effects of first-past-the-post voting in a country with multiparty politics have been to consolidate permanent political crisis, further destabilizing the Westminster system, and weakening the central state. Looking at our closest comparable European neighbors, France, Germany and Spain, we are offered a selection of possible British political futures, none of them particularly appetizing.

In France, the ongoing riots seem certain to strengthen the National Rally’s chances of victory in next year’s election. Yet they are also merely an amuse bouche before the rioting and mass protests that an NR victory would bring. The cordon sanitaire of the center parties has now apparently shifted from blocking cooperation with RN to isolating the Left-populist La France Insoumise, a rather more full-throated version of the brand of politics driving Polanski’s version of the Green Party, from power. The political center is perhaps stronger in Britain than in France: as it stands, there seems little likelihood of Reform winning an outright electoral victory on the scale the polls predict for Le Pen’s party.

In Germany, meanwhile, the center-right CDU’s historic electoral collapse at the hands of the AfD has found the party reaching a historical nadir of around 20% national support: a figure comparable to that which the Conservatives currently achieve as part of what her outriders insist on calling, with little supporting evidence, the “Kemi bounce”. In Germany, the objective electoral logic is for a consolidated Right-wing coalition government. But given the taboos around the radical Right most fervently held by Germany’s political class — and gifted, by Germany’s historical experience, to the rest of the Western world — the more likely outcome is either the CDU’s total collapse or the absorption of its surviving rump into yet another unwieldy and unstable coalition, there merely to keep the AfD from power. It is not fanciful to see such an ungainly political chimera assembling itself in Westminster, too, in a Great British Brandmauer against Reform which may well block the party from power for another electoral cycle, but will accelerate the cynicism and disaffection increasingly felt by Britain’s voters for their political system.

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But perhaps the closest near-future analogy is to be found with Spain, where the governing Left party, propped up by peripheral separatists, has been forced to call an early election following its loss of support over widespread corruption and a willful mismanagement of migration represented as a principled moral stance. If the Ceuta incursion showed how impatient other European leaders now are with Madrid’s attitude to migration, it is the Spanish electorate who are set to deliver the final blow.

Judging by the polls, the most likely outcome is some form of coalition government between the center-right Partido Popular (PP) and the radical-Right Vox: a nationwide extension of the ruling coalition in devolved Andalucia, once a stronghold of Left-wing political organization, but whose governance has been carved up between Vox and the PP since 2018. As it stands, Britain’s party of government commands a similar level of popular support as Spain’s governing PSOE, though neither party of the Right approaches that of the PP. No party in Britain approaches the popularity of either the National Rally or the AfD. The CDU’s polling nadir, a historic disaster for them, is vaunted as a triumph of Badenoch’s leadership by her lobby outriders, when the same level of support is achieved by the Conservative Party. The options available to the European center-right thus vary according to circumstances: in France, where it is subordinate to the National Rally, some form of tacit coalition; in Spain, where the PP is dominant but not strong enough for majority government, an overt coalition with Vox; and in Germany, where both continuing the firewall against the AfD and coalition with it invites electoral disaster, merely further collapse.

Let us apply the lessons of European multiparty politics to Britain’s new multi-party system. If the most obvious barrier to a Reform government is a coalition of Labour and the broader liberal and Leftist center, then the most obvious prospect of a Right-wing government lies in an electoral coalition between Reform and the Conservatives. That this does not seem possible seems to derive more from the personal antipathies between the rather histrionic personalities involved (as shown by Badenoch’s conference speech contempt for the “drama queens” who abandoned her party for Reform) than it does from any real questions of political principle. In terms of immigration and border security — the central issue destabilizing British politics, and indeed the rest of Europe — there is very little to distinguish between the policies of the two major parties of the Right. Zia Yusuf’s rhetoric may be more intemperate, but both Reform and the Tories now stand on the principle that the asylum system, in its current iteration as a costly and wildly unpopular form of welfarism for the entire world, is dead. Unpalatable though it may be to either party, or to either party’s voter base, the electoral mathematics of turning this from rhetoric into law currently lies in coalition. It is odd, then, that Badenoch devoted such energy in her speech, so rapturously received by her loyal commentariat, to erecting a new moral firewall against cooperation with Reform on the basis of the contentious and seemingly willfully misunderstood topic of ethnicity — which has now become, to no-one’s benefit, a staple topic of British political discourse.

Unlike Question Time panellists or lobby journalists who performatively claim not to understand the meaning of ethnicity, we at least know that Badenoch does, because she has made explicit reference to her own Yoruba ethnicity, and its distinction from her (as of last year renounced) Nigerian national identity. “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian,” she explained to The Spectator. “I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people.” The Hausa and Fulani of northern Nigeria may well be Badenoch’s “ethnic enemies” simply because she has inherited an ethnic identity, which she asserts has given her a “very strong identity about who you are, where you come from, traditions and so on”, and from which she derives both moral and political meaning. The national identity she inherited — Nigerian — was essentially an artificial construct of the British state, and being less meaningful, has since been abandoned. The principles at operation here are the same, in essence, as those in the ongoing debate over Englishness, and perhaps listening to her explain them so frankly might clarify more immediate questions for her fanbase in the lobby.

Indeed, the principles in operation are the same as in her conference-speech claim that the Green Party, by declaring that “Zionism is Racism”, is “seeking to erase Jewish identity”. Evidently Badenoch subscribes to the basic principles of Zionism, which are that the Jewish people are a people distinct from others in the world by virtue of ancestry; that they deserve their own state as a result; and that that home should be in their ancestral land of Israel. Is this racism in the Israeli case? Clearly, Badenoch does not believe so. Would, then, the same principles apply in the British or English case? Here, the answer is less clear. It is notable that, after rebuking Suella Braverman for waving away any claims to ethnic Englishness, Badenoch does not claim herself to be English, instead declaring herself proud to be black and British. Yet Badenoch’s British nationality, through being born in England, was via an avenue shut off by Thatcher’s British Nationality Act in 1981, the very year after her birth. Explaining her motivation, Thatcher told ITV’s World in Action in 1978 that “by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here”, which “is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. Indeed, in such a situation, Thatcher claimed, “people are going to react and be rather hostile to people coming in”. Obviously Thatcher did not foresee that four million people would enter Britain just within the term of the last Conservative government, a turn of events characterized by Badenoch as a regrettable but understandable oversight, and whose unrepentant architects remain in frontline Tory politics.

Even given Thatcher’s own opinions, reading the Hansard debate on the 1981 bill, one is still struck by the forthright language on the matter: the past, even the near past, really was another country. The Right-wing Conservative MP John Stokes remarked, in terms Reform would shy from today, that “where immigration has occurred, the immigrant penetration is against the clear wishes of the indigenous population. The ordinary Englishman still clings obstinately to his Englishness and to the old, known ways. He knows only too well that if immigration continues at the present rate the indigenous population will in time be supplanted by aliens and British people will gradually disappear from these islands. It has already started to happen in certain areas.” Given the Conservative party’s present day Cargo Cult devotion to the Iron Lady —  evident even down to the Thatcher-themed trinkets and gewgaws offered for sale at Conference — it is worth asking if Badenoch would consider her political role model, and the government she led, racist? Was Thatcher more or less racist than Braverman or Zia Yusuf? Was she, indeed, an ethnonationalist?

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The English Question

By Aris Roussinos

Thatcher did, after all, note that the recapture of the Falkland Islands was undertaken partly because the Islanders are “British in stock and tradition”, as well as owing allegiance to the Crown. This is a direct appeal to ethnic kinship, but is it now beyond the pale for Thatcher’s most slavish modern devotees? These are interesting questions, to which we should not expect any answers from the Westminster commentariat: expediency, as always in British politics, takes precedence over any coherent intellectual principle. Perhaps the more relevant observation is that, proud of their Britishness while seeking to close off such status to current arrivals, there is really little difference between Badenoch or Braverman or even Yusuf in terms of policy: they are all rather more liberal on the questions of race and identity than the governing Conservative Party of the Eighties. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if a more strident British Unionism might not become the default stance of non-white minorities discomfited by the increasingly purist definitions of Englishness rising on the Right. This would, by definition, place the separatist parties of the Celtic Fringe, whose political success forces the English Question into sharper relief, as their political foes. In any case, the current intemperate rhetoric, politically tempting for both parties of the Right, shuts off the avenues for cooperation the electoral logic currently demands. The result is that rather than stable governance of any kind, Britain seems doomed to descend further into political turbulence and the erosion of state legitimacy.

Even the richest, most stable and well-governed country, luxuriating in a climate of benign international security, can ill afford its politics to be subsumed into such anxious, and increasingly poisonous questions of identity. For modern Britain, which can claim none of the above, the risks are markedly greater. On the Garvaghy Road and Drumcree in Portadown the other week, I was struck by how many riot police I spoke to had “mainland” accents: the erosion of the PSNI’s capacity to manage large-scale disorder, apparent in the race riots of past summers, has led to an increasing reliance on support from British police forces, even at a time that Britain itself faces, for the first time, the endemic risk of widespread disorder, as new groups of ski-masked men daily announce their paramilitary cosplay. England’s South Coast, perhaps not territory for which Burnham has an instinctive understanding, threatens to become his own Southport: but even his home territory of Manchester is now seeing the widespread vandalizing of migrant HMOs, while Glasgow, scene of increasing anti-migrant mobilization with apparent links to Ulster Loyalists, looks like an explosion waiting to happen. Can the British state manage simultaneous summer disorder in, say, Belfast, Glasgow and Gosport? It would seem doubtful in the extreme. Perhaps the best that can be said for the United Kingdom’s unity is that widespread political disaffection and the looming threat of violent disorder has now become a truly national concern.

That all of this is taking place in a climate of extreme international turbulence, with our political leaders urging the electorate to prepare itself for war while themselves doing nothing that would enable Britain to win one; where state capacity is weaker than it has ever been, the fruit of decades of misgovernance by both parties; and where the economy is so palpably weak — none of this restores faith in Westminster’s capacity to pull Britain out of this dangerous spiral. Britain’s already-existing multiparty politics, the unintended consequence of voter disaffection, has not been met among party leaders by the tolerance for coalition government necessary in such a system. Instead, they all chase the fleeting high of a majority government, which has swiftly turned to ashes for every one of our many prime ministers over the past decade.

But if their solutions are unconvincing, at least the somber national mood was apparent in both Burnham and Badenoch’s speeches. It is, after all, the kind of political scenario a country would wish on its bitterest geopolitical enemy. Dwindling state capacity, eroding state legitimacy, rising ethnonationalism among the state’s core population and ascendant nationalist separatism on the peripheries: such is the shared diagnosis of the Prime Minister and his notional counterpart in opposition. Each party leader presents themself as the only solution to a period of long-term political instability: but the structural forces seem to suggest only further rancor and destabilization. Conference season may have provided the Westminster lobby with its customary annual thrill, but for the country’s far less enthusiastic voters, it gave just another glimpse of late-Soviet Britain.

On 28th October, another Healey delivers his first Budget. The latest estimates suggest higher bond yields have cut his fiscal headroom in half, from £23.6bn at the Spring Statement to about £11bn. By the Budget, I suspect, it could be close to zero.

As someone who has spent nearly 25 years in the City, I know full well that markets can force a government’s hand long before politics does. Governments can choose to ignore economists, opposition parties and sometimes even their own fiscal rules. What they cannot ignore for long is the bond market. 

I’ve said publicly that it will probably take a crisis to wake British politicians up. I’ve now reached a harsher conclusion. Britain needs a bond crisis! This is because a crisis can break the political deadlock that prevents reform in normal times. Measures that are thought politically impossible suddenly become unavoidable once the decision is made for you.

We remember 1976 as a humiliation, a reminder that if you spend years mismanaging the economy and ignoring hard choices on the budget, outsiders can force even tougher ones later. But it was also the only time since the War that a British government did what was needed at the speed required. The $3.9bn stand-by arrangement, then the largest the IMF had ever made to a member, came with punishing conditions: fiscal, monetary and incomes policy imposed all at once.

The public sector borrowing requirement had to fall from around 9% of GDP to 6% within a year. Domestic credit expansion was cut by about a third. Real take-home pay was expected to drop by around 7.5% by mid-1977. It was really a moment of capitulation forced on politicians that had delayed and obfuscated until somebody else made the hard choices for them.

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The great Net Zero showdown

By John Rapley

That October, while the Treasury was still negotiating with the Fund, the Conservatives published The Right Approach, the document that laid the ground for Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. Politicians knew what to do, but it needed the market to force them to act after years of delay. The crisis broke the deadlock, and what followed was a decisive shift towards sounder money, lower taxes and a more competitive economy. Sadly, such political weakness is still familiar today.

This pattern of delay and avoidance by politicians has been studied, and economists even have a name for why politicians kept avoiding the tough choices they eventually had to make during the IMF crisis. In 1977, Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, who later won the Nobel prize in economics, showed that a policymaker who keeps re-optimizing will rationally abandon the plan that’s best in the long run, because the temptation to deviate today never goes away. They called it “time inconsistency”. Politicians often promise a long-term plan but end up changing it for short-term political convenience. Politicians lose the capacity for pre-emptive reform, because the political cost is immediate and the potential payoff can take decades.

Mancur Olson explained in The Rise and Decline of Nations why reform gets harder with time. Mature democracies build up “distributional coalitions” — organized interests whose purpose is to defend the status quo. The Blob, if you like. Layer enough of them together and the state becomes almost impossible to shrink. Alberto Alesina and Allan Drazen described what follows as a war of attrition, in which every group refuses to carry the cost, delaying stabilization until the cost of waiting becomes unbearable. In 1993, Drazen and Vittorio Grilli wrote a paper called, rather fittingly, “The Benefits of Crises for Economic Reforms”. Their conclusion was that making a crisis less painful can actually prolong it. Without pain, the pressure to fix the policy failure weakens considerably.

We fixed this problem for monetary policy in 1997, when Gordon Brown handed operational independence for interest rates to the Bank of England. Nobody has ever done the same for tax and spending.

That is why politicians resent the bond market so much, seeing it as a referee blowing the whistle on their spending plans. Andy Burnham once said Britain had to get beyond being “in hock to the bond markets”. Paula Barker, one of his MPs, went further, saying the markets would have to fall into line and telling the Commons that people were fed up with bond markets dabbling in the democracy of the country. But nobody forced ministers to borrow nearly £123bn last year. That was a political choice about what to spend and how much to tax. The gilt market simply took a view on the risk and quoted them a price, and if ministers are unhappy with that price, they have the option to adjust how much they borrow.

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The next financial crash: a scenario

By Wolfgang Münchau

Back in 1993, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist, said he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market because then he could intimidate everybody. He was complaining, because the market had just forced a newly elected Democratic president into cutting the deficit. What he was actually describing was the one institution in public life you can’t lobby or fob off. Our own political class would do well to remember that, and soon.

Last week in Liverpool, Burnham used his first conference as Prime Minister to admit that his generation of politicians had been too cowardly to fix social care. But within minutes of saying someone had to “rip the plaster off”, he confirmed the triple lock would remain untouched for the rest of this Parliament, with a slight tweak delayed until April 2030 — safely beyond the next election. It was a perfect demonstration of Kydland and Prescott’s point. 

Burnham also promised to repeal the Thatcher-era ban on public ownership of water companies. He wants to set up a publicly owned Great British Grid, and bring energy, water, and housing back under what he calls stronger public control. When he ran through Labour’s great moments, he named 1945, 1964 and 1997. He conveniently skipped 1974 to 1979, the government that ended up at the IMF.

For decades, successive governments have avoided enacting spending restraint by borrowing or taxing more: so much so that both routes are now at breaking point. Last week the 30-year gilt smashed through 6% for the first time since 1998, reaching an intraday high of 6.07%, and the 10-year hit 5.51%, its highest since 2007. That matters for the government’s debt-interest bill. In the year to March 2026, central government spent nearly £100bn on debt interest alone, nearly 80% per cent of the £123bn it borrowed. Andrew Griffith put the problem bluntly at Conservative conference this week: Britain has “a debt problem, a tax problem and a growth problem”. Any gilt investor should find that frightening, because it means we are mostly borrowing to pay the interest on what we’ve already borrowed. 

Taxation, too, is running out of road. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s March forecast had the tax take rising to 38.5% by 2030-31 — in other words, the state would be taking nearly 39 pence in tax for every £1 generated across the economy. This is the highest tax has been since the Second World War, and businesses are already reacting. After the rise in employer National Insurance, the Bank of England found that 44% of the firms it surveyed had reduced staff relative to what they would have done otherwise.

What used to be a managed decline has become a thunderous one, with shops closing and pay packets shrinking in real terms. Plenty of voters no longer expect any government to make the reforms to spending, tax and incentives that would materially improve their own living standards. Instead, they want it for their children and grandchildren, who may once have believed the old British promise that each generation does better than the last and are instead set to inherit the debt and the stagnation.

But the next crisis won’t be a rerun of the 2022 mini-Budget. That episode was a combination of unfortunate known and unknown events and suspect timings. The Bank of England confirmed active gilt sales the day before the mini-Budget, excessively leveraged pension funds didn’t hold enough collateral, and regulators failed to reform liability-driven investment strategies that matched long-term liabilities with long-dated bonds. The mini-Budget fiasco saw the 30-year yield rise by more than a percentage point in a few days. Sterling hit an all-time low against the dollar, and the Bank was forced to intervene to calm markets. Mortgage rates jumped, deals were pulled, buyers saw what they could afford collapse almost overnight, and the housing market froze. Within weeks the Chancellor and the Prime Minister were both gone.

Westminster took the wrong lesson from the debacle and decided that radical economic policy is dangerous. The real lesson was that tax cuts without credible control of spending won’t convince the market.

The former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, was right when he once said the country relies on the kindness of strangers. Britain is exposed to what economist Guillermo Calvo popularized as a “sudden stop”: a sharp withdrawal of foreign capital. Investors may suddenly refuse to buy our government debt leading to a failed gilt auction, or quickly sell off what they already hold. If that happens, gilts and sterling are likely to fall together.

A crisis would begin in the primary market with a weak or failed gilt auction, then another. In this scenario, dealers are left holding more gilts, prices fall and the move spills over into the secondary market. Collateral calls get triggered. Sterling weakens and foreign investors demand an even larger risk premium. The government is forced to refinance maturing and new debt issuance at substantially higher rates. Debt interest costs jump, and the sell-off becomes self-reinforcing. A gilt sell-off would push up mortgage rates for millions of households already under a cost-of-living crisis, valuations would collapse, borrowing costs for businesses would rise, and sterling would collapse hard. The consequences would hit more than the gilt market. Equities would sell off too, especially housebuilders, banks, and heavily indebted domestic companies.

And we would now reach an inflection point. Milton Friedman wrote in 1982 to the preface to Capitalism and Freedom, that only a crisis produces real change, but that what happens next depends on the ideas lying around. I have seen none of value from this, or indeed, the last government.

So what is the case for a crisis? It is not that pain is desirable. It is that we need a trigger to clear away some of the distortions built up over fifteen years of near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, a borrow-and-spend mentality within government, and political reluctance to change. Such an outcome would force a repricing of the state itself.

It is still theoretically possible to avoid the crisis. Labour would need to make the requisite changes before the country is forced to. The pain would be acute, but it would be temporary. The reward could be years of stronger investment, higher productivity and rising living standards as capital and labor move back towards productive uses. Spending and the tax burden have to come down. The triple lock and working-age welfare need radical reform in this Parliament, not tweaks in the next one. Energy has to get cheaper, and planning needs genuine liberalization.

John Healey has three weeks before the markets could force the issue. He could put welfare on a falling path and cut the public-sector paybill, and do voluntarily what his namesake was made to do in 1976. But nothing in fifty years of British politics, nor in the Prime Minister’s speech last week, suggests he will, and I’m not expecting much in the way of radical change on 28th October. 

Then the decision passes to investors who have no seats in the Commons and no interest in the electoral cycle — only adequate compensation for lending to a highly indebted borrower. They may decide to keep selling gilts until the government is forced to act. I’d rather Britain were spared that. History, however, tells me the cowardice of politicians will not allow it. And so the least-bad realistic outcome, painful though it would be, is a bond crisis.

Macron would never do anything so crass as to present his bill before rendering a service, but he’s well aware that the traditional Saudi recompense for military support is a very large order for combat aircraft. The French desperately need such a sale to save their once-thriving Dassault firm, which has fallen on hard times because of its current offering — the non-stealthy and non-advanced Rafale fighter that nobody wants.

Back in 1985, it was British aircraft manufacturing that was in freefall. It was saved by the fabulous Al Yamamah contract, which supplied £40 billion of Saudi cash to both the British aviation industry for its mostly unwanted aircraft, and to an entire tribe of intermediaries. The latter successfully avoided scrutiny for decades, until Scotland Yard’s Serious Fraud Office belatedly launched an investigation so successful that it had to be shut down on national security ground by a remarkably unembarrassed Tony Blair in 2006.

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Will the Gulf war claim another victim?

By Malise Ruthven

Now, once again, the British aviation industry is trying to survive with a jet fighter programme that nobody wants. It has a temporary partnership with the Italians, whose air-force will never be sent into combat, and who see their participation as the only possible way of keeping their engineers and manufacturing workers employed; and with the Japanese, who see the tripartite deal as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with America’s Lockheed monopoly for Tokyo’s next fighter.

The fact that Saudi Arabia turned to the weakened French and the bashful maidens of the Labour Party for military support is a sharp reminder of one of the few constants in the ever-changing Middle East: the inability of the Saudi monarchy to defend itself. That requires some explanation because Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are both well armed and also very large as compared to the country’s native-born population of 18.8 million. There is a total of 280,000 active-duty career personnel in land, air and naval forces and another roughly 75,000 in the paramilitary national guard, which has evolved from a come-as-you-are Bedouin levy into an orderly paramilitary force like Italy’s Carabinieri, so that the Kingdom has a total of 350,000 in its armed forces. By way of comparison, Turkey’s population is more than four times as large as Saudi Arabia’s, but its military and paramilitary total of 680,000 is only twice as large. Moreover, Saudi forces have well-built bases, impressive headquarters, modern weapons, and have received excellent training from American, British, and other military instructors at all levels, including newly retired US generals.

But the one thing they cannot do is fight Saudi Arabia’s enemies, including the currently very dangerous Houthi rebels, most of whose combat personnel consists of visibly unwashed men in skirts and sandals toting old AK-47s, but which also include teams trained by Iranian experts capable of launching ballistic missiles and anti-ship drones smuggled in by Iran. Wielding the latter, they have attacked Mecca and are now seriously impeding Saudi oil exports from the Red Sea terminal at Yambu.

Yet even now, there is still no sign of a Saudi offensive into Yemen to engage the Houthis in full force. The reason is that, for the Kingdom’s ruling family, the most deadly danger has long been a military coup d’état — such as the one which ended Iraq’s monarchy and killed every single member of its Husseini ruling family on 14 July 1958. On that day of explosive savagery across the centre of Baghdad, none of the monarchy’s supposed friends and allies were of any help, and local British diplomats, who had until recently ruled the country via interposed Iraqi officials, barely made it out alive.

Against that danger, the successive heads of the Saudi ruling family have implemented the most effective remedy possible: divide and rule, not against foreign enemies, but within their own armed forces. For that reason, the different combat elements of the armed forces are geographically separated in the country’s vast territory, and commanded by different princes in charge of various parts of the ministry of defence, all of which are subordinate to the minister himself, Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud. (Prince Khalid is the grandson of the House of Saud’s patriarch, King Abdulaziz, and a younger brother of the crown prince, prime minister, and real power in the land: Mohammed bin Salman.)

Even with all those royals in there to secure the House of Saud’s control, the ministry of defence is denied a monopoly of force in Riyadh and other urban centres, because the country’s cities are also garrisoned by the entirely separate Saudi Arabian National Guard which has more than 150,000 men, and is ultimately commanded by yet another grandson of the kingdom’s founding monarch. The smaller Border Guard with roughly 15,000 men plays a crucial role in emergencies because it strictly controls who enters and leaves the country by air or sea. The Border Guard is also controlled by a grandson of King Abdulaziz, as is the most closely watched and carefully controlled of all the kingdom’s forces: the Royal Guard, which protects Mohammed bin Salman. Finally, there is the elite Saudi Arabian Emergency Force, of some 35,000 men, which is under the control of yet another separate body.

In theory, there is nothing to prevent a combined offensive of all these different forces against the Houthis. For all the competing lineages of their chiefs, they are all Sunni Muslims of the vehemently anti-Shi’a Wahhabi creed. The Houthis, for their part, are not the much-loathed Twelver Shi’a of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, but the distinctly more heterodox “Fivers”.

In practice, however, the careful differentiation of Saudi Arabia’s military and security forces that is meant to prevent them from ganging up to overthrow their rulers — the Royal family as a whole — has deprived them of an overall sense of cohesion, the most important of all attributes in facing enemies in combat. Military strength is total force multiplied by cohesion: if there is no cohesion, there is no strength.

Within the different armed forces there is a further impediment to cohesion because some of their officers are Royal family “inheritors”. This means they receive a stipend automatically as well as their salaries. Others, however, only have their salaries, which can be much lower than the royal family stipends, yet they are all supposed to serve and fight to protect their country.

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Why America is running out of missiles

By Edward Luttwak

The Saudi fear is that if they ever order some of their F-15s into action to bomb the Houthis, or indeed any other enemy, non-inheritor pilots might choose to attack one of the kingdom’s princely palaces instead as a prelude to an all-out military revolt. It would be an aerial version of the military insurrections that destroyed the Egyptian and Iraqi monarchies.

Because of this not illogical fear, the Saudis have long relied on the Americans to protect them, supplemented at times by the British and French. In recent years, they have even called on the Turks and Pakistanis, who have so far refused to send any troops to fight the Houthis, the most urgent threat faced by Saudi Arabia. That refusal suggests that they are even less likely to send forces to confront Iran’s much larger threat.

The Saudis’ Emirati neighbours have not given up on the Americans either, even if they have enlisted Israeli weapons to defend them — some of them operated by Israeli troops, at least initially. The Saudis might do something similar in the low-key manner of an industrial investment, to obtain anti-missile capabilities they can learn to operate for themselves. Ultimately, though, the inheritors must learn to share Saudi Arabia’s vast flow of oil revenues with everybody else, or else risk losing more than just their wealth.

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

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

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

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

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

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Europe isn’t ready for Russia

By Wolfgang Munchau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officials, meanwhile, look on them all with scorn. In the Foreign Office, politicians are considered movable — and discardable — pieces of furniture. In a memorable scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey and the Cabinet Secretary discuss reshuffles, complacently agreeing that “power goes with permanence. Impermanence is impotence. And rotation is castration.”

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, nine defense secretaries, and 11 foreign secretaries. Our elected leaders are rotated so often that no one has the balls left to introduce new ideas. The result? Britain has a monomaniacal, single-issue foreign policy: backing Ukraine in its war against Russia, something it pursues at the expense of practically everything else.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham described how he was “acutely conscious” of being Britain’s seventh PM in a decade. To correct that record, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game”. But here, he faces a considerable challenge. The bureaucrats will have already assumed that he will be replaced in the next three years, and their respective ministers probably sooner.

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By Ian Proud

Meanwhile, even when they’re in office, our elected leaders appear to have little influence over the direction of policy, canceled out by civil servants who spend most of their time gossiping about them. There is always a creative tension between the inertia of the permanent staff and the energy of elected officials. But the merry-go-round over the past decade has shifted the balance of power decisively towards the gray suits.

In his first statement as Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to end the war in Iran, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. This is exactly what his predecessors would have been told to say by their officials — just keep on fighting to the last Ukrainian in a country which has seen its population halve since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ministers used to arrive loaded with their own ideas. I worked in the Foreign Office for 24 years, and William Hague is the last foreign secretary I recall capable of bending the bureaucratic machine to his will during his four-year tenure. He did this by having a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, but also by retaining a studied (if aloof) courtesy when working with permanent staff and by deploying well-liked junior ministers like Alastair Burt to help him deliver. I organized the London Conference on Libya for him at five-days notice in 2011, and his showpiece Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012, just 12 days ahead of time.

Hague also opened 50 new diplomatic missions around the world and boosted the Foreign Office budget by grabbing £140 million of  overseas development funding, recruiting the help of Andrew Mitchell, minister at the now-dissolved Department for International Development. Hague re-opened a foreign language school closed under New Labour, and launched a Diplomatic Academy. Altogether, then, he seized back some control over Foreign Policy from No. 10, following its capture by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the aftermath of 9/11.

During those years, the Foreign Office had a renewed sense of purpose; Hague was secure enough in his job to whip the bureaucracy into action, despite efforts by Sir Simon Fraser, then the permanent secretary, to water down his efforts and do things on the cheap. The Foreign Office multi-year budget settlement doesn’t assume the arrival of new ideas; Fraser thought the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative was a wasteful diversion of effort. Having forked out for a gleaming new language center, he set up the Diplomatic Academy on a shoestring. I had to beg and borrow money from other government departments to pay £70 million on the 2013 G8 Summit.

Unfortunately, even Hague was castrated in the end, with Foreign Office officials ensuring that Britain was shut out of the French-led Normandy peace process for Ukraine in June 2014. Britain had played a leading role in imposing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea but while David Cameron hoped that sanctions against Russia would be a temporary measure, officials saw them as the main effort. Now, Cameron had become obsessed with the obviously pointless task of blocking Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European Commission President, sucking up most of Britain’s diplomatic bandwidth in this failed endeavor.

The French President Hollande had managed to get Presidents Putin and Poroshenko around the table with Chancellor Merkel in order to hammer out a process to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, but the Foreign Office dismissed its importance. Its Russia experts said: “Well, the Americans aren’t touching Hollande’s peace initiative so why should we?”

Britain has shut itself out of efforts at peace in Ukraine ever since. Phillip Hammond simply refused to engage with the Russians directly in diplomacy and the habit of not talking to the Russians stuck, while the Ukraine crisis slowly got worse. with officials coolly in control. During his tenure at King Charles Street, Boris Johnson was quickly dismissed as “not up to the job”, while his successors as foreign secretary have been rated by the extent to which they followed the policy scripts drafted by their officials.

As for Britain’s latest prime minister, a senior Labour insider told me recently that Andy Burnham is “absolutely not a warmonger”. Still, he has since handed over blueprints for British-made components for long-range missiles to Kyiv, even though Zelensky is in deep trouble domestically following a spate of corruption scandals among his inner circle, alongside growing internal repression. Burnham has also backed further deep strikes by Kyiv into Russian territory, even as Ukraine faces the prospects of having its energy infrastructure obliterated over another cold winter, with insufficient air defense to prevent the inevitable. All the while, Burnham has offered to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at a cost of £4.5 billion per year to British taxpayers.

To his credit, Miliband has now shifted UK foreign policy to take a tougher position towards Israel, starting with his recent sanctioning of trade with West Bank settlers. But I have seen no evidence of any change of tack on the war in Ukraine which, by conservative estimates, has killed or injured over two million people on both sides since 2022.

It is clear to me, then, that Burnham and his government have been given the usual script by his officials — and decided it’s too difficult to change.  To understand why you must understand how the Foreign Office works. That begins with Whitehall’s vast Russia blob. A large cross-Whitehall Russia Unit sits in the Foreign Office in King Charles Street yet, remarkably, it appears unable to come up with new ideas beyond continuing to back Ukraine — then crossing its fingers and hoping for some miraculous breakthrough against Putin.

There are several reasons for this. The main one is that, since 2015, leadership of the Russia Unit has been shared by the Foreign Office and the intelligence community. This followed the creation of a £1.5 billion Joint Security Fund to increase coordination across departmental lines. Of course, our spies conduct vitally important work for this country — but they should be a tool of foreign policy, not its author. Putting them in charge of Britain’s Russia policy has inevitably indulged their self-serving instincts. No enemy means no budget. It’s no coincidence that the 2018 post-Salisbury reflection retreat was held with great hospitality at MI6’s training center at Fort Monckton.

Second, a vast increase in staffing quantity doesn’t equate to quality. When I visited GCHQ in 2017, some of the new staff I met didn’t obviously appear to have any background knowledge or experience on Russia, instead just representing seats to be filled. The same is true in the Foreign Office. New people are shipped in, listen with great admiration to the old sweats in the Eastern Research Group, then quickly toe the party line. There is no critical challenge function.

Added to that, the British press, which is stock full of ex-military and intelligence types, snuffs out any suggestion of engagement with Russia to end the war, which is shouted down as “appeasement”. People who express an alternative view are called out as Kremlin stooges.

Yet, diplomacy isn’t about friendship but rather talking to those with whom you most disagree — ideally before shots are fired but especially when the missile are flying.

Of course, diplomacy is only one arm of foreign policy, alongside warfare and espionage. Yet while the UK has pumped billions into the spying, it has disinvested in diplomats. Hague’s dream of driving up country-specific expertise has long withered on the vine, and there is now a dearth of officers with Russia knowledge. The Foreign Office continues to have a woeful track record in foreign language attainment, including Russian. Speaking foreign languages is increasingly seen as an optional extra, especially at a time when British universities are shutting down foreign-language degree programs. As with country-specific knowledge, so too with diplomatic skills. When I left King Charles Street in 2023, there was still no systematic program of diplomatic skills training.

As I quickly learned from my own time in Moscow, you simply cannot operate effectively out of the British embassy there unless you speak Russian and have some basic skills in talking to people who violently disagree with you. When the Russians  do agree to meetings, their officials will only talk in their native language, even if they are fluent in English. I recall one chap who would batter me with machine-gun Russian, then turn up at residence receptions speaking better English than me. Having kicked out so many of our embassy staff, the Russian state knows full well that any new folk who turn up from London are, more often than not, ill-equipped to do their jobs.

Diplomats also need to get out of their grand embassy building, meet ordinary people, and have tough conversations at the ministries. I often had slanging matches with Russian contacts over vodka yet ended on good terms. Many Brits get disgruntled with disagreement; Russians get disgruntled at dissembling — and suspect you are up to something behind their backs.

There’s a broader point here too. The Russians don’t care if we don’t talk to them or not. Yet out of a sense of self-righteous indignation, and a vastly over-inflated sense of our place in the world, we remain snootily aloof, even as we reduce ourselves to a diplomatic nonentity. I can’t remember a time when Britain has appeared so irrelevant.

The policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia has now been been set in stone since July 2014, an aversion to dialog that has now infected all the major states in Europe, such that no one can see the value in pursuing an end to a war in Ukraine, which is costing us billions and making us less safe. But amid all this, the basic facts remain the same. Heavily indebted and de-industrialized, Britain’s army is at its smallest for 200 years. Burnham can’t even commit to increasing defense spending because the country is skint. More than that, Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. The state is bankrupt and operates on the basis of payday loans from its European sponsors. Little wonder Zelensky has just asked for another $27 billion from Europe: his ministry of defense has already spent money earmarked for the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, despite the seizure of $300 billion of its foreign exchange reserves in February 2022, Russia has rode high oil prices and now has an additional $420 billion at its disposal, most of that in gold. Its debt is 20% of GDP. Certainly, Russia has suffered petrol shortages following Ukrainian deep strikes, yet it continues to export vast amounts of unrefined crude oil around the world at a time of constrained supply. Ukraine and Europe are both energy dependent, leaving them at the mercy of high prices, shuttering factories from the Midlands to the Ruhr.

At the same time, Russia has built up a formidable industrial base, one that consistently outperforms the US, Britain and Europe combined in munitions production. Britain, of course, has spent decades outsourcing defense production to fat-cat contractors who fleece us and consistently deliver kit that arrives late and often doesn’t work. Graft in Ukraine hardly helps either. Western allies have tipped $350 billion into Ukraine in the hopes of beating Russia, some of which has been stolen by Zelensky’s cronies.

I visited Kyiv several times while stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow and corruption was the issue that ordinary people wanted most to be tackled. Western “support” has not helped Ukraine discover the peace and independence its rapidly shrinking pool of citizens deserve. Two thirds now wanting the war to end, a reversal from demands for the total defeat of Russia four years ago.

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Since we don’t want peace — but are too weak to actually fight Russia directly — economic sanctions have become our principal lever to affect Putin’s thinking. But here, again, British policy simply hasn’t worked. Before anyone accuses me of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, I’d point out that I personally authorized around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after the war broke out in 2022. At the time, their stated purpose was to encourage “Russia to cease actions destabilizing Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”. That manifestly hasn’t happened.

To be sure, sanctions have changed the structure of Russia’s economy since 2014. But the moment of peak pressure was between 2014 and 2016, when Russia was hit by the double whammy of sanctions and low energy prices. Since then, Russia has completely reoriented its monetary and industrial policy to embrace a weak ruble as an article of faith, managing inflation while piling up its reserves and prioritizing its state-owned energy and defense monopolies.

Russia’s fortress economy — a mix of monetary austerity and military Keynesianism — means that it can keep on fighting with little risk of running out of money. Its large population also means that Ukraine will run out of men before it does, even as both countries have already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Engaging with Putin to broker peace in Ukraine therefore isn’t weakness: but necessity. Diplomacy isn’t about friendship, it’s about conflict resolution.

The Foreign Office has produced no new ideas to resolve the Ukraine conflict since 2014. If Andy Burnham really wants to pass the “Makerfield test” — ensuring that every government policy helps working people — he might come up with his own ideas on foreign policy: rather than reading the standard script he is given by the Foreign Office mandarins. It’s time for Burnham to grow some foreign policy balls or, even better, ask Ed Miliband to do so.

Just over a century later, Labour — as it is still quaintly known — has begun to rediscover the concept of social class that was once the foremost reason for its existence. Earlier this week, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, announced the creation of a new “class unit” within the Office for Equality and Opportunity. “We have been squeamish about class for too long,” said Phillipson. Reporters were quick to identify the unit’s purpose as “improving outcomes for white working-class people”. The government clarified, bashfully, that the class unit would examine disparities across all ethnic groups.

Things do seem to be changing from the era when identity, rather than class, seemed to rule the Left’s moral calculus. In August, the American Democratic politician Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez admitted on ABC’s This Week that perhaps some of the new socially radical politicking that had overtaken the institutions of the Left for a generation hadn’t landed quite as intended. “Woke One was crazy!”, she said.

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In truth, it was never really clear what so-called wokeness had to offer a majority of working-class people in Britain. As Woke 1.0 spread from the USA to our shores, it brought with it a moral diagnosis that resonated in America, where some states had struggled to move on from the Reconstruction era, but bore a smaller relevance to the malaise in much of the post-industrial Britain of the modern era. Prosperity and opportunity had begun to centralize in cities and vanish from Britain’s much less diverse towns and coastal regions. Social attitudes had seen huge progress. Race wasn’t the immovable roadblock in life that it once was.

My generation came to political maturity riding a wave that crested alongside Woke 1.0. We began walking into institutions equipped with a politics shaped by the 2008 banking crisis, the expansion of the EU’s migration covenant and the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. It was an era where the moral leadership of the Left, once the de facto voice of working-class people, became dominated by people for whom “the white working class” were a distant species.

The former industrial communities of Britain’s regions were something modern politicians left behind en-route to a career in London after Oxbridge — and why wouldn’t the aspirational leave? Margaret Thatcher’s decade long war on local council democracy had left millions with little power at the ballot box. Everything meaningful was now decided in the capital.

Otherwise, the white working class were a group many of the Left had never actually met. They were to be spoken on behalf of in student meetings — the way a primatologist might talk about what was best for the gorillas in their charge at a zoo. Rather than considering the diminishing life chances and outcomes of millions of people on lower incomes as a central part of their politics, my generation were encouraged to adopt a series of niche causes under the doctrine of “intersectionality”. It was as though working-class life was a solved problem and not something collapsing around us.

For this more bourgeois iteration of the Left, the emotional pull of Woke 1.0, and maybe, dare I say it, a bit of traditional liberal guilt atonement, held an appeal that was easy to ratify just by looking out of the front door. We lived in big cities and in Britain’s most metropolitan boroughs, there really are still notable gaps between people’s prosperity that can be predicted based on their skin color. Those who might object to making these concerns the most prominent pillar of our politics could easily be presumed to only do so because of prejudice. In reality, the gaps on the doorstep weren’t nearly as wide as those between metropolitan Britain and everywhere else.

The country we maligned for its supposed backward social attitudes was quietly becoming the most regionally unequal major economy in the developed world. Large swaths of Britain had been torn to shreds by austerity not with a bang but a whimper. Traditional Labour politicians like Ellen Wilkinson or even Ramsay MacDonald would have marched the breadth of the country to do battle on issues like unemployment and closing factories. By the mid-2010s, this was an unsexy, even faintly embarrassing cause — largely forgotten, maybe a bit nostalgic. The odd episode of Benefits Street would present the collapse of working-class communities as something with a cosmic justice to it: they were always lazy, weren’t they? John Harris would conduct a Guardian-sponsored safari around the shuttered high streets of provincial England, furrowing his brow in befuddlement as people told him they were planning to vote to leave the EU, but couldn’t say exactly why.

Working-class institutions, like trade unions, had been collapsing for years. Deindustrialization, something the Left had largely given up trying to stop, had robbed unions of anyone to represent and deprived millions of working-class people of a decent job to go to after school. Culturally, the white working class were becoming unmentionable. They had been absorbed into the wider and varied “white” group by the Equality Act, their life outcomes masked by this sleight of hand.

Those who did mention the white working class — the last few political figures that had lived similar lives, like Angela Rayner, who left school, pregnant, aged 16 to become a care worker — were shushed. As education secretary Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys being “pushed down the food chain” due to the focus on ethnic minorities and women, but was pilloried for her trespass. Even to mention the group seemed to risk resurrecting the ghost of Enoch Powell, like a monster from an Eighties horror movie coming back to life. It was a faux pas to mention the white working class. It could only be assumed that the speaker didn’t realize that working-class people now came in all colors.

None of this handwringing stopped the least well off white working class kids’ educational attainment utterly collapsing. White British kids on free school meals have the lowest higher education participation rate in Britain. They are less likely to spend age 19 in further education than Roma Gypsies.

As rolling the dice on higher education has become the only accepted way of creating social mobility in Britain, it isn’t hard to understand why people in these communities feel a profound loss of hope. The Social Mobility Commission — which will apparently become surplus to requirements following the creation of the Class Unit — places the least diverse former industrial and mining areas, such as the North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as the places least likely to allow someone to make generational progress. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index shows a yawning gap in educational attainment between London and places like the North East and Cornwall.

Swaths of Britain being completely left behind has been a quietly accepted part of our national story for more than a decade. The story briefly came to a head during Brexit, only to be quickly dismissed by the political Left. The fact that the old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit in spite of what sensible people in London were telling them to do was seen simply as an inconvenience that their betters would need to muddle through. It was the spasm of a palliative patient whose bedside vigil often gave them cause to yawn and glance at their watch — a victory for the far-Right that any right-thinking person would reject.

Nevertheless, the broader political re-alignment that Brexit represented refuses to go away. In the recent Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany, the Alternative Für Deutschland [AfD] party dominated the votes of a community that looks like a facsimile of left-behind Britain: shuttered industries, a low rate of higher education, too disillusioned to bother much with politics. The AfD’s platform hoovered up and sent to the polls exactly the kind of working-class voters that have fallen off Britain’s electoral rolls over a generation of hopeless disengagement. Saxony-Anhalt was an election infused with a sense of the injustice of regional inequality too: 73% of voters there believed that East Germans are second-class citizens. The result is that Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, ex-Stasi officers and Putin apologists are now more trusted to run a swath of Germany than the old parties of the working class.

Labour’s answer to the British version of this disengagement suggests that some within the party are at last waking up to the anger present in swathes of working-class Britain. However, the tools it has unveiled look much like those that have already produced unremarkable results.

For many years the moral component of modern social justice has amounted to a kind of human flower arranging. How many protected characteristics can you gather and display in your vase to prove that Britain is a caring society?

The creed of modern social justice was that Britain’s growing prosperity would be accompanied by the assurance that more of the beneficiaries would have a certain color skin, or a certain preference for other’s genitalia, or a certain bodily or mental difficulty. Now the working class will be included in this bouquet of virtue.

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It isn’t yet clear exactly how big a change this could be. Perhaps new positive discrimination access schemes of the kind that have become common (and commonly gamed by middle-class climbers) will be developed. Now Britain’s social justice engineers will be encouraged to say: “Look, we have a black person, a disabled person, a gay person AND a poor person.” Where previously an applicant being white and poor only gained one virtue point, now perhaps it could gain two.

The expanding prosperity that undergirded the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is evaporating. It hasn’t existed in parts of Britain for a long, long time. DEI politics has shown that it can take the ever-more centralized wealth of Britain and divvy it up among a more diverse fortunate few. It hasn’t shown any ability to provide for the parts of Britain clinging on by their fingertips.

In 2024, the Institute for Public Policy Research published its report, “State of the North”, detailing for the umpteenth time how the Britain that was remade by industry closure during the neoliberal turn was full of sicker people with shorter lives. It showed that wealth inequality was set to grow in spite of a Labour government: there will be an average gap of £228,800 per head between the wealth of those in the South-East and the North by 2030. The authors proposed  “Germany-style levels” of investment — nearly £8 billion a year for 15 years — to start closing the gap, referencing Germany’s history of “solidarity taxes” between West and East since reunification. IPPR proposed that this would be achieved by wealth taxes that mostly land on the South. But then, even that level of investment hasn’t worked to keep faith in the political system of Germany, as downward mobility leaves people hyper-vigilant, hoarding, worried about losing or being forced to share what little is theirs.

Andy Burnham came into No. 10 promising to be a prime minister for “The North”. But his previous economic advisor and Goldman Sachs chief economist Lord Jim O’Neill has already come out strongly against taxing the wealthy regions. His argument: London will need even more investment if any growth is to reach the rest of Britain. The money markets seem to agree that borrowing to restore prosperity to the once proud working-class areas of Britain should come at a punishing cost. A cost it isn’t clear anyone is willing to pay.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning.

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognized as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialized Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think this is true. Yes, the fairies are harder to see. But if you’re paying attention, even industrial, tarmac-ribboned, electrified modern England still has plenty of “thin places”: spots where the air is different, and the uncanny is just at the edge of awareness.

Dunwich, on England’s Suffolk coast, is one of these places. But now it is in cinders after a four-day blaze. Amid this summer’s arid, weeks-long drought and successive heatwaves, all of England is tinder-dry. In windy, flammable coastal conditions, all it took was one spark — a glint through broken glass, a careless cigarette, or abandoned barbecue.

The Dunwich fire, though now hemmed in by local fire crews, consumed 150 hectares of heath and woodland, forcing the evacuation of local villages, holiday parks, and other establishments. Conservationists are calling it a disaster from which local ecologies will take 25 years to recover. Oh, my England! But perhaps this can stand as a reminder that even this green and pleasant land, so long inhabited and so deeply over-written and sculpted by successive histories and people, still has its own elemental power; its own quiet but overwhelming force. Its own spirits, not displaced by industrialization at all, that answer to none of us, but only themselves.

If you’ve encountered one of England’s thin places, you’ll know what I’m referring to: an eerie, liminal sense of things just out of eyeshot, of eyes watching you from the grass. This tends to be more associated with Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland: the uplands and borderlands less thoroughly rationalized, mapped, and subdued. But the rich tradition of artists, writers, composers and eccentrics who have fled (and still flee) to Suffolk’s big skies attests to the distinctive way this region’s own special landscape is still thick with fairies.

Think of the estuaries, where sea and sky, fresh and salt, blend imperceptibly into one another. The long cry of the curlew. Half-rotted wood, sunk in mud, clung with limpets and moss. These are English thin places that sing to something just as liminal in the English, as a people: a paradoxical love of home, but also of longing for the open sea. This is a people that looks out beyond the estuaries, the salt tang, and sucking mud — but also back at cottages, cozy pubs, and warm firesides. Suffolk captures that restless yearning for the horizon, long ground into the seafaring English psyche, and the same people’s island-dwelling love of home.

Much more than any twee nonsense about Paddington, or tea, or manners, the paradoxical, slightly melancholy experience of desiring both these things at the same time is at the heart of what it means to be English. And Dunwich is, in this sense, especially liminal and melancholy, because even before this summer’s fire most of it was already lost.

During the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman invasion, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. A thriving port covering an area similar in scale to, though smaller in population than, medieval London, it was listed in the Domesday Book as having three churches. Historians estimate its population at that time as around 3,000. In the 13th century, a Franciscan friary was built on the nearby headland. But then climate disaster struck.

A storm surge in the late 13th century repeatedly battered the region, flooding the port and gnawing at the coastline. The harbor silted up. The shore changed shape. And, importantly, the river that was the town’s raison d’être moved. Dunwich was suddenly no longer a sheltered harbor, sitting at the meeting-point of the river and the sea. Now the river was more than a mile away, winding through a different estuarial flat. The town lost its purpose. Further floods swept more homes into the sea. No one rebuilt them; people moved on.

Now, Dunwich is a tiny coastal village, home to around 200 people, a chip shop, and (temporarily, once a year) a lot of London cyclists. They gather every summer (the last event was a couple of weeks ago) to ride overnight from London Fields to Dunwich Beach, in the cult-like “Dunwich Dynamo” bike ride, known by the nutters who participate as the “Dun Run”.

The first time I visited Dunwich I was in the heady early stages of falling in love. We arrived there and were caught as instantly by the otherworldly atmosphere, as by the sea breeze. It was a bright day; we sat on the shingle watching the North Sea roll in, blue and brown, as passing dogs leaped in and out of the waves.

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We built towers from the smooth rocks on the beach, dozed, dreamed amid the whisper and roar of wind and water. Hours slipped by. Time works differently there. The fairy denizens of Dunwich may not be those of green cliffs and woodland, of the kind you might still sense in (say) north Wales, or Cornwall. But they’re there. Dunwich attracts a stream of visitors so dedicated that despite its tiny population, its beachside and chip shop do a roaring trade. This isn’t just mad London cyclists. It’s that people come to be, for a little while, at the edge of everything.

A popular local legend has it that on foggy nights, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the water, from the town that fell into the sea. I’ve never experienced this, but it feels profoundly true, in the sense that Dunwich is thronged with shades. The ruins of its friary can still be seen, and visited, on the headland — and here, too, many report strange happenings: weird lights bobbing about the ruins at night, said by some to be the mysterious Hobby Lanterns or jack-o’-lanterns, unexplained lights reported to lead travelers toward cliff-edges or other dangers. Others report seeing ghostly monks pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.

Since that first visit I’ve returned as often as I can just to sit at that eastern edge of England, between sea and sky. The coastline itself feels ethereal: its very history attests to how little faith we really can place on the ground staying solid beneath us. But perhaps this summer’s blazes are less a departure from that ancient Dunwich story, than a continuation of it.

This is a part of England that’s always been thin, elemental, and only tenuously mastered by its inhabitants. War history aficionados sometimes visit Dunwich to explore the concrete bunkers that still stand along that coast, half-eroded by salt and wind, from wartime preparations for a seaborne invasion that, mercifully, never came. Its still earlier ruins were left following an invasion not borne by sea, but by the sea itself.

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All those centuries ago, the devouring sea, and changing coastline, shrugged off an entire habitation. This time, it was a fire that drove its human inhabitants away. I dare say they’ll be back; but perhaps we should heed the warning. We’ve grown used to an England so domesticated, industrialized, controlled and controllable as to render this kind of abrupt eviction by the landscape itself all but unimaginable. We tend simply to take for granted the belief we’ve mastered all those elemental forces, permanently, such that worrying about fire, or flood, or erosion is merely a thing of our more primitive past, or something that happens to people in other countries.

Even contemporary responses to climate change don’t really depart from this complacency. Manmade climate change is real. But wherever some kind of coordinated policy effort emerges, to respond to it, in practice this only ever seems to produce more and different technological efforts: more solar farms, different cars, a thicket of new rules.

What if the response we actually need is to think differently? Periodically some bushy-bearded Merlin type will bob to the surface of the mediasphere to warn that what we should be doing is not building more or different stuff, but attending more closely to the thin places, and what they have to tell us. No one ever listens, or if they do, somehow the product is only ever more or different stuff.

I could respond to the fire in Dunwich with a threnody for a landscape that has shaped my summers, and my imagination of England, for my whole adult life. A place I love deeply, caught as it is between land and water, singing so evocatively of both salt air, deep England, and all our accumulated centuries of ghosts. But I find that instead I read this as a wake-up call from the still deeper England, the land that was there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and will still be there long after we — and whoever comes after us — are gone.

However mild and generous that land is, for the most part, now and then it too can still shrug, as though scratching an itch — and, in doing so, dislodge whoever or whatever was there at that moment. Anyone who claims the right to call this land home would do well to listen. To spend time in its thin places, hear what they have to tell us, and mend our lives accordingly.

Although Argentina wasn’t part of the British Empire, there have long been strong ties between the countries. British investment in the second half of the 19th century largely drove the Argentine economy as it became a major global player, with most of the infrastructure — banking, railways, shipping — British-owned, and a third of its exports going to the UK. 

Culturally, it was seen as a rugged but reliable place, more akin to South Africa or Australia than to the weird, primitive mysteries of the Amazon. If you came across a minor character in a novel by P. G. Wodehouse or John Buchan whose income came from Argentine shares, he was intended as a steady kind of chap, rather than a wild speculator. If it was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent. It took to football and rugby, even cricket — up to a point — and was on the side of the Allies in the Second World War, albeit for just five months after belatedly entering the conflict in March 1945.

By then, though, the close economic links were dissolving, damaged by Britain’s policy in the Thirties of imposing tariffs on goods coming into the Empire, and by the nationalizing of public services under Juan Perón in the Forties. But there was still a vague sense of kinship, as seen in the friendly football relations that were established. Argentina played England at Wembley in 1951, and in Buenos Aires two years later, the latter attracting a then-record crowd for the country of 91,000 spectators.

The friendliness didn’t last. The two countries met again in 1966 in a World Cup quarter-final match that was dubbed “the Battle of Wembley” in England, and “the theft of the century” in Argentina. The issue, as England saw it, was the physical aggression of the South Americans. This, said the England manager Alf Ramsey, explained a lackluster performance: “Our best football will come against the team who come out to play football and not act as animals.” Argentina, meanwhile, was raging against what it saw as a biased referee, who sent off its captain and permitted the only goal of the game — scored by Geoff Hurst — to stand, despite a suspicion of offside.

Most of the world seemed to support the Argentine position. There was talk of a South American split from FIFA, and newspapers from Italy and Czechoslovakia to Mexico and Brazil denounced “favoritism for the English team”. In Buenos Aires, the mass-circulation paper Crónica had a cartoon of the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, dressed as a pirate, and complained that “just as the English pirates stole the Malvinas, they made a deal with the referee to sell us out”.

And there was the rub, the great stumbling block in Anglo-Argentine relations. Las Malvinas — the Falkland Islands, as Britain called them — lay some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, and there was a long-running dispute over their ownership. They had never been inhabited by Argentinians, Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833 and, even as the Empire was being dismantled, the couple of thousand inhabitants unanimously wished to remain British. Argentina, however, had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and had never given up its demand that it be handed over. 

This meant something in Buenos Aires, though most Britons were unaware of the islands’ existence, let alone that there was any controversy. Insofar as they were known, it was probably through Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). At the end of the book, when the dissident Bernard Marx is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands. Thereafter, we assume, he will never be heard of again.

When the central American state of Belize became independent in 1981, the Daily Mirror provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British Empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands. It forgot even to mention the Falklands. 

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There was, therefore, genuine surprise when Britain woke up on an April morning in 1982 to hear the news that Argentine troops had invaded the islands and seized control. There was even more surprise when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, announced that a military force would be sent to evict the occupiers, should diplomatic means fail. Such resolute determination was not what the British people had come to expect of its post-imperial governments, but Thatcher saw it as a question of principle. “The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,” she told the Commons. “They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.”

Moreover, Argentina was then a military dictatorship, following a coup the previous year, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. As Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, put it, when some of his MPs expressed reservations about the military operation: “I know a fascist when I see one.”

Ten weeks later, the Argentine forces on the island surrendered, following a successful counter-invasion. Some 900 were killed on both sides in the conflict, with a further 2,400 wounded, but Britain’s objective was achieved. At a time when public services were renowned for inefficiency, it turned out that the armed forces could still be relied upon. “We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,” said Thatcher in the aftermath. 

There were some dissenting voices, but that view was widely shared. In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses, an expatriate South Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: “The stench of defeat’s everywhere,” he says. “The old place has got no guts anymore.” And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: “Somebody else said that a little while ago. A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.”

It was also in 1986 that England and Argentina met again in the quarter-final of the World Cup, this time in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. It was a difficult time for English football, the very nadir of the hooligan era. The previous year, 39 fans had been killed in the Heysel Stadium disaster in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, and English clubs had been banned from European competition as a result. That, combined with the legacy of the Falklands War, ensured that the build-up to the match was dominated by trepidation. 

The crowd was largely Mexican, with only around 10,000 fans of the two competing countries expected to be in attendance, but it was announced that there would be 20,000 police in the stadium, including armed plainclothes officers on the terraces. On one side there were banners proclaiming “Malvinas — always Argentine”, on the other a new chant: “Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?” The press did their bit. The Sun’s front page headline on the day of the match was “It’s War Senor!”, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media. It was left to the footballers to try to keep some sense of perspective. “We are not taking guns onto the field,” protested Argentina’s star player, Diego Maradona, “we are not going to shoot anyone. We are going to play football.”

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Maradona turned out to be the story of the match with two contrasting goals in the space of five minutes. The first was a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century — countered only by a late consolation strike from Gary Lineker. “Malvinas 2, England 1,” exulted the Argentine press, adding “We blasted the English pirates”, a reference back to the 1966 match, and to the Falklands, when a Buenos Aires paper had depicted Thatcher with an eye-patch.

All this, of course, is ancient history now. Except that it’s not really. Argentina continues to lay claim to the Falkland Islands, and this week its foreign minister wrote of the “illegitimate occupation”, renewing the country’s demands for sovereignty talks. More significant, perhaps, were reports in April that Donald Trump — angered by Keir Starmer’s lack of cooperation in the war against Iran — might withdraw American support for British ownership of the islands. The British government’s response was a reassertion of the Falklanders’ right to self-determination; memories of the war loom too large for any sensible prime minister to say anything else.

Meanwhile, that first goal in the Azteca — scored, as Maradona himself said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — has passed into English footballing folklore. “Same old Argies — always cheating.” Today’s game, the latest chapter in the saga, sees more at stake than ever: this time it’s a semi-final rather than a quarter-final. But for 60 years this has been about more than sport, and it still is, even if the mood is nowhere near as volatile as it was in 1986.

The rivalry lives on. From a British perspective, there’s something a little reassuring about it. All these years after the Empire collapsed, Britain is still seen as important enough to be denounced as imperialist aggressors. There’s not even any hint of post-colonial guilt — there was no native population on the Falklands to be slaughtered or oppressed. The lives that were lost were the consequence of invasion by a dictatorship.

Following its Falklands humiliation, Argentina reverted to democracy, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored. The long, shared history of the two countries was soured by the episode, but it hasn’t been lost. Alongside the mutual suspicion, there’s also a mutual respect. Maradona was cast by English fans as a pantomime villain, but his genius was never doubted. His successor, Lionel Messi, is even more gifted and, lacking the street-tough aggression, inspires affection as well as admiration in Britain. At heart, it remains a family dispute.

The “old maid” social archetype used to be well-known: the doughty Church Lady or — more colloquially — the Battleaxe. But was Major right about their endurance? The year he made this claim, one of the last of this species left the Anglican Church for Roman Catholicism: the late Ann Widdecombe. And if the sight of the archetypal Church Lady leaving Anglicanism for Rome wasn’t enough to cast doubt on the eternity of that image of the country, the manner of Ann Widdecombe’s recent death must surely do so.

Last week, 33 years on from Major’s invocation of Eternal Britain, Ann Widdecombe was murdered in her Devon home, a bungalow in a small community at the edge of Dartmoor National Park. Just the kind of place, in fact, where Orwell might have pictured old maids hiking to Communion through the mist: and the last on earth where, you’d imagine, something so horrifying might happen (outside an Agatha Christie novel, at least). A few days later, a man was arrested in Rotherham. Subsequent statements from police have been contradictory and confusing: after local bobbies initially played down any suspicion of political motives, today Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that counter-terrorism police were taking over the investigation.

Is anyone particularly surprised? Ann Widdecombe never shied away from controversy. She was a staunch social conservative, and public in other ways, too, as an unlikely, late-blooming TV celebrity. Latterly, having abandoned the Tories, she threw her weight first behind the Brexit Party and finally Reform. Her death is shocking, not just for its brutality or for Widdecombe’s symbolic loss, as the last of kind of Englishwoman that used to run Britain. But also because her murder highlights how much better, kinder, and more trusting a country Ann Widdecombe believed Britain to be, than the place we actually live in.

The Britain Ann Widdecombe seems to have trusted still, somehow, to endure – the Britain of Major’s 1993 statement – has in fact been dying for some decades. It was finally extinguished by her murder. But once upon a time, its civil society was run by people like her. The daughter of a military man, raised between ever-changing military postings and a convent boarding-school in Bath, she embodied a stoical “buck up” attitude that was pervasive in imperial-age Britain, and lingered well into my childhood and youth: one in which private suffering was simply something to be borne. During the Major years she was caricatured as the worst kind of Tory meanie, earning her the nickname “Doris Karloff” for defending the idea that female prisoners might remain manacled while giving birth.

She was also that rarest of things, a conviction politician in the Tory Party. Progressives never quit haranguing her for her views on sex, abortion, and gay marriage; and her indifference to being considered “nice” could rub colleagues up the wrong way, too. She was one of the few Tories who spoke against fox-hunting, and her successful 1988 campaign to lower the abortion term limit from 28 weeks to 24 was a nuisance to liberals on her own side.

Most famously, she quarrelled with then-Home Secretary, Michael Howard, in 1995, over the sacking of then-Director of HM Prisons, Derek Lewis. Her revenge came two years later, as the Tories surveyed the wreckage of their party following New Labour’s landslide win. Widdecombe’s speech opposing Howard’s leadership bid described him as having “something of the night about him”: an instantly memorable line credited with sinking his prospects.

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All of 19th-century British civic life was dominated by women of Widdecombe’s stripe, from the National Union of Women Workers, the Mothers’ Union, and the Women’s Institute, to church groups, Sunday school classes, schools, charities, and social reform bodies. Unkindly satirized even in her heyday as “Mrs Grundy”, the Battleaxe dedicated her life to improving, organizing, cleaning, educating, and uplifting the world around her, whether or not it wanted to be improved.

But the Britain they ran is no longer the one in which we live. The reasons for its demise are complex, though the end of the British Empire, the arrival of TV and radio, the sexual revolution and, latterly, de-industrialization and the internet all contributed. The inflection-point was also the year that wiped out Ann Widdecombe’s Tories: 1997. That August, Diana, Princess of Wales died, triggering an outpouring of public emotion which marked a watershed in British culture. For millions, Diana stood for something difficult to express in the abstract: a freeing-up of sentiment, and a new permission to feel and, importantly, to show it. Tony Blair, then just entering his pomp, rose to the occasion. She was, he famously declared, the “People’s Princess”.

If she’d been losing out since the war, the British Battleaxe was eclipsed by the death of Diana. As a public figure, she held on in the Tories in the person of Ann Widdecombe, until David Cameron — the man who arguably Dianafied the Tories — forced her disgusted departure, with her calling him “big-headed” and “dismissive of everything that had gone before”. After this, Widdecombe stood more or less alone: the last British Battleaxe in a world grown simpering, sentimental, and mandatorily progressive.

She could have slid quietly off into retirement at that point. Instead, she turned herself into a meme, before anyone else could, with an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010. There, she earned the audience’s affection by merrily sending up her own performances, and reached the semi-final as a fan-favorite despite dances Widdecombe herself described, with some justice, as “elephantine”. She became a regular on the airwaves, known for her sharp wit and self-deprecating humor: the People’s Battleaxe. But just because she could send herself up as a pantomime dame, that didn’t mean the political views were all pretend. In 2019 her convictions drove her back into politics – this time as MEP for the Brexit Party and then as Reform’s spokesperson on immigration.

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In keeping with her status as the People’s Battleaxe, as well as conviction politician, her murder has prompted an outpouring of memories. Friends and sparring-partners alike all recall her as funny, warm, and courteous even to those with whom she disagreed. This is all in keeping with the culture of pre-Diana Britain: one that saw public service as a duty, and private life and conscience as inviolably private. But this outlook has grown less common. Especially among 21st-century progressives, it has come to seem just as self-evident that private conscience ought always to conform to public duty, while the presence of any boundary between the two is cause for suspicion.

In tandem, Britain itself has grown more fractured, skint, alienated, and online. And it’s grown increasingly common for parasocial fixations on public figures to turn sour, and translate into real-world harassment or even violence. BBC Scotland presenter Ann McAlpine, Loose Women star Denise Welch, and broadcaster Myleene Klass have all been plagued by stalkers. But political figures are particularly vulnerable. JK Rowling had her home address leaked by trans activists, following her support for women’s rights. The far-Left group Just Stop Oil has advocated picketing MPs at their homes. Nigel Farage has been attacked with eggs, milkshakes, and other weaponry. MPs Jo Cox and David Amess were both murdered by extremists self-radicalized online.

This is a very different Britain from the one in which Widdecombe was born. Her comparatively homogeneous, less hyper-mediated Britain broadly assumed that private conscience and private lives were to be respected. The Britain in which she was murdered is one where this distinction has collapsed. In Diana’s image, refracted through innumerable screens, we’ve grown both more alienated and more lachrymose, volatile, and entranced by our own suffering. The perpetual, watery-eyed therapeutic emanations of Diana’s son Harry are only one of the many cases in point.

But it’s not just about blubbing in TV interviews, or on the Labour front bench, or when resigning as Prime Minister like Keir Starmer. In this inside-out culture, everything must be surfaced, posted, externalized, or it isn’t real. And the corollary is that “private” no longer exists — which means that public figures are now treated as public, even when they’re at home.

Five days before her death, her home was featured on TV, in an episode of Celebrity Yorkshire Auction House filmed in 2022. This is the kind of personal information that more savvy or internet-poisoned public figures tend to keep very much out of the public domain – because you never know who is going to see it, online. But Widdecombe clearly didn’t consider opening her home to TV cameras a safety risk.

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Perhaps she still believed John Major was right, and the place of long shadows, warm beer, dog-lovers, and Holy Communion was still Britain’s basic reality. She spent a long career publicly espousing challenging views, while trusting that other Britons would continue to respect her private life. But John Major was wrong. This supposedly eternal England was already dying in 1993 — aided, indeed, in some respects, by the Tories themselves. And even as our ever more frenzied media has turned politicians into divisive parasocial celebrities, it’s collapsed the distance between sleepy Devon villages and far more disaffected corners of the country.

Large parts of the country are now utterly foreign to Major’s sepia-tinged tableau. What will replace his vanishing version of Britain, and its battleaxes? That’s still uncertain, and will grow more bitterly contested as time goes on. Meanwhile, whether you agreed with her worldview or not, no one should remain under the illusion that we know what kind of country Britain really is, at all, any more.

Miliband, of course, occupies a uniquely hated position in the imagination of the British Right, akin to that held by Nigel Farage for the Left. But that is in large part because Miliband has been the most radical and effective minister in Keir Starmer’s otherwise pallid regime. And chances are, if Burnham’s government stands any chance of being as transformative as he has promised, Miliband will be the driving force behind it.

Over the past two years, Miliband has been unmatched in terms of political will and competence at working the levers of power. On two occasions, he fended off efforts by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s powerful chief of staff, to have him reshuffled to another department. Miliband not only persuaded the PM to soak up the criticism of his policies, but extracted large sums from a cautious Treasury to implement his energy revolution. He has overseen hundreds of thousands of solar energy installations, and commissioned hundreds of new wind turbines; he has loaded households and businesses with the costs of rapidly upgrading the electricity grid, and held open the door for Chinese EVs to flood the British market; he has subsidized new nuclear power and sunk money into developing carbon capture technology. It seems the notoriously difficult machinery of Whitehall poses few problems for Miliband.

Now he is reportedly helping Burnham’s team prepare for power. Though Burnham yesterday tried to dampen speculation about his pick for chancellor, his speech illustrated why Miliband is regarded as the favorite. Burnham’s stated goals of a massive social housing buildout, bringing down the costs of essential utilities, bringing those utilities under greater state management, and striving for “equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain” are all consonant with Miliband’s politics. As for welfare reform, Miliband is likely the only candidate with the legitimacy among Labour MPs and the broader Left to see it through.

Above all, though, there is a yawning gap between Burnham’s pledge of “the biggest change in our lifetimes in the way the country is run” and the very broad, thin brushstrokes of his own political vision. The erstwhile Manchester mayor has so far relied in an almost Trumpian fashion on his supporters to project intellectual coherence onto his own intuitive style of politics. Only Miliband, it would appear, has the temperament, competence and ideas to actually deliver such an epochal shift to the Left.

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Regarding a Miliband chancellorship, a treasury official has warned Burnham that “you might as well be handing your premiership to him”. That may sound emasculating, but it is far from clear that it would be politically damaging. For if Miliband is feared by conservatives, he is also very much admired by progressives. That he struggles to connect with Middle England was made clear by his electoral failure as Labour leader in 2015; but that is where Burnham comes in. Between them, they stand a good chance of making Labour the first choice for voters who are primarily motivated by keeping out Reform UK, something Burnham has already managed in Makerfield. Given the country’s chaotic new electoral landscape, this could be Labour’s surest path to keeping power.

Whatever one thinks of Miliband’s politics — and as Badenoch’s recent comments suggest, his enemies have never quite been able to grasp him, portraying him as both sinister and ridiculous — he evidently has virtues as a politician. They include conviction and tenacity, the traits our current prime minister so conspicuously lacks, as well as a capacity for hard work and attention to detail. He first entered the Treasury in 1997, aged just 27, as an advisor to then-chancellor Gordon Brown. In 2008, when Miliband took charge of the newly formed Department of Energy and Climate Change, he set an eye-wateringly ambitious carbon target after just 13 days in the post, announcing that by midcentury Britain would reduce its emissions by 80% of their 1990 levels. (His elder brother David, the heir-apparent to New Labour who he would infamously deprive of the party leadership in 2010, had previously set a slightly more modest target of 60%.)

In 2009, when prime minister Brown decided to back a third runway at Heathrow, Miliband resisted fiercely, prompting Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood to ask, “why is this new minister holding up the wheels of government like this?” As the baffled Heywood later remarked, when Miliband managed to extract various climate-related concessions from Brown, “this just isn’t supposed to happen”. During his first stint as energy secretary, Miliband created the framework in which policy has developed ever since, including under the Tories. It was Theresa May, after all, who would set the still more ambitious goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050. Add to this the authority of experience which Miliband can claim today, and it’s small wonder that Starmer so often appeared to be in his thrall.

Then there is that most revered of political qualities — ruthlessness. In the grueling 2010 leadership contest, Miliband outmaneuvered not only his brother, the candidate of the party establishment, but also the domineering Ed Balls. (In fourth place out of five was a certain MP for Leigh, Andy Burnham.) For someone who learned his trade in proximity to Gordon Brown’s bitter, years-long struggle to wrestle the leadership from Tony Blair, the unseating of Starmer must have been a tea party.

Needless to say, Miliband also has flaws. Chief among them is a weakness for the feel-good politics of progressive activists and NGOs, which he has been immersed in since he first served as Climate Change secretary and, before that, as minister for the Third Sector. This is a comfort zone of blue-sky thinking and moral crusades, where idealistic academics imagine that the right combination of clever policies and exciting comms will induce the public to hold hands and strive for social justice. This dimension of Miliband’s thinking led to perhaps the most undignified moment of his career: the decision to prostrate himself before Russell Brand on the eve of the 2015 election, hoping that an endorsement from the comedian, then absurdly considered some kind of thought leader, would unlock a mythical youth vote.

Clearly though, Miliband’s ideas are not all vacuous, since much of his 2015 manifesto was subsequently implemented by the Tories, including an energy price cap, a higher minimum wage, stricter regulation of junk food and mandatory gender pay-gap reporting. The fact is that, beneath the Left-wing clichés and wonkish talk of “predistribution”, Miliband has a core insight which has proved basically correct: since the 2008 financial crisis, people have wanted a more active state to shield them from the effects of a globalized market economy. He is just unequipped to sell this message beyond a core of voters on the Left, something which Burnham might prove better at.

If Miliband does indeed become chancellor next month, his vision will probably include a strong element of “mutualism”, giving “ordinary” people a greater role in the running of companies, public services and local government. This has been a longstanding Miliband theme, present in his contributions to the 2010 manifesto through to his 2021 book Go Big, which championed policies like company wage boards and citizens’ assemblies. It is also where Miliband’s thought intersects with Burnham’s flagship idea of devolution. Mutualism has another proponent in Miatta Fahnbulleh, the MP for Peckham who worked with Miliband in the energy department, and who has allegedly become influential in Burnham circles.

But Miliband does, of course, come with big risks. Britain already has a high-regulation, low-growth economy — partly thanks to the kinds of policies that Miliband prefers — with much less financial breathing space than it had a decade ago. Like Rachel Reeves, Miliband would make a big show of committing to fiscal rules and stimulating growth through productive investment. But this may not be enough to placate the debt markets on which the state’s finances depend, and which are already suspicious of Miliband. Growth from capital investment in infrastructure and housing will take time to arrive, especially with Net Zero continuing to bear down on business through high energy costs, and with the further tax increases that will almost certainly be necessary. Financial constraints may end up trapping Miliband in an electoral no-man’s land, unable to deliver the radical policies that voters on the Left crave, while angering everyone else with regulation, taxes and unemployment.

Miliband will also face a dilemma in terms of Britain’s international orientation. The strongest case for his aggressive Net Zero drive is not an environmental one — as critics never cease to point out, Britain accounts for less than 1% of global carbon emissions — but a security one. Renewable energy, along with the electrification of the economy, will hopefully make Britain less vulnerable to the fossil-fuel price shocks that countries such as Russia and Iran have inflicted in recent years. It will reduce the tendency of energy prices to be set by the most expensive producers of natural gas, while ensuring that Britain has a stake in the technologies of the future. The Telegraph’s economics commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, hardly a raging Jacobin, is among those arguing that renewables will see Britain becoming an electricity exporter in a matter of years. But Milibandism has major vulnerabilities of its own.

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The most obvious is defense. Where, among all the spending commitments that would accompany his chancellorship, should Britain find the money to prevent its Armed Forces from sliding further into ruin? Britain’s energy security would be purely notional if its allies no longer considered it worth cooperating with, and if its infrastructure open to attack by hostile states. No less important, Miliband’s economic vision is highly dependent on China, whose cheap exports to Britain, including both Net Zero technologies and other products, are preventing prices from rising as much as they otherwise would. Yet China’s goal is to use its exports to prevent Europe from rebuilding its own industrial base; that is why the EU is increasingly building tariff walls.

This is perhaps the biggest source of potential tension between Miliband and Burnham. The latter has insisted that reindustrializing Britain is crucial for providing good jobs and broad-based growth, and has strongly hinted that protectionism will be necessary to achieve it. That would require Miliband to fundamentally change his strategy, or Burnham to choose a different chancellor.

Who else could it be, though? The fact remains that, if Burnham wants to deliver on his rhetoric of national transformation, his best option is to gamble on Miliband’s experience and determination. For better or worse, a Miliband chancellorship could produce an economic and social shift on a scale comparable to the Thatcherite revolution — and especially if it manages to consolidate the nascent anti-Reform bloc of voters, thereby securing a further five years of power. But the stakes are high, and the implications far-reaching. Labour can only hope that, beneath his platitudinous exterior, Burnham has grasped these realities.

When thunder does hit — as it did spectacularly this week — it’s seen in mythology as being the gods complaining. From a Greek point of view, all this storming and lightning is what happens when Zeus protests to Helios, god of the sun. Even Olympus gets rattled sometimes.

I’m currently picking my way from London to the hills of Italy, where I’ll be following St Francis, a rather more reasonable fellow. But under the terrible glare of the sun, I’m rattled too. I peer up, thinking about our mythic relationship with that coppery beast hovering above our heads.

The sun is pretty much the first thing we started to tell stories about. On the summer solstice, well-meaning folk gather at Stonehenge and chant, dance and praise the sunrise. It’s easy to sneer at such archaic behavior, but I think it’s more instinctual than we may like to admit. It’s a sensual experience rather than a conceptual one: there’s no knotty theological issue to bend your head around. A First Nations friend of mine was once mocked by an evangelical for praising the sun in ceremony. “At least we can actually see it,” he grinned, as the pink-faced fellow jabbed his finger and ranted. My friend had a point. We are warm-blooded creatures and we love to look at beautiful things.

In Christianity, though, there’s an awareness of the difference between worshipping the creator and worshipping the created. Still, there’s a sense of a divine current that moves through this world. Whether beholding a heron lifting from the Dart river, or watching the dawn rise after an all-night rave in Shepherds Bush, it’s something to be alive to. And where I live, on Dartmoor, the old name for the sun is Belus. If you forget to praise Belus with a song or story once in a while your sheep may turn to stone.

In Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, we find an England still teeming with giants, sprites, luminous moons and rugged suns. Part of his play’s mesmeric hold is that it speaks to something we still bashfully recognize. It’s all still around if we pay attention: an earth that seeks our admiration. It’s a William Blake way of seeing, something quietly present beneath the hubbub of the World Cup and geopolitics. I walk the boundaries of my village most nights to sink into that sumptuous reality. I watch the sun come up and go down, then a pint in the Bay Horse. It’s almost too much.

Within myth, the sun in full beam is symbolic of fortune. Only last week I was in Dublin in a newsagent. I had a little time, so I let a lad in the queue before me. He looked as if he might not even have had a bank account. He promptly bought a scratch card and won half a million euros. As they say, “the sun comes out for him”. The whole shop shimmered at that moment.

That’s often the role of the sun in mythology: a life-giver. Think of characters like Helios, Greek god of the sun, who brings light to humans and gods by leathering his golden chariot across the sky. We have the Egyptian Ra, associated with the sun at noon, when heat is reaching its absolute fullness. Ra is out there encouraging things to grow, coaxing warmth from chill, sailing around the heavens in a celestial barge before heading down into the darkness to tackle serpents and demons after nightfall. The kind of thing we like our gods doing.

But that’s only one side of the picture. The Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli required nothing less than human sacrifice to keep distributing his rays. If he wasn’t charging about the heavens then he was down in the gunk and blood of battle, possessing Aztec warriors. His worshippers would take live captives so that they could sacrifice them afterwards.

It might not have been Huitzilopochtli’s doing, but a few weeks ago, Arthur’s Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh, caught fire. It was an apocalyptic sight. Were Arthur and his men about to erupt out of the turf and bring our squabbling nation to some kind of equilibrium? In truth, characters associated with the sun are rarely known for sagacity. They are usually hotheads.

Take Samson, whose name means Son of the Sun. He’s a judge — think a chief rather than a fellow with wig and gavel — of Israel at a moment when they have almost entirely lost touch with the best of themselves. In many ways, he represents the profundity of their lostness. He’s best known for his huge bursts of strength and his huge erotic appetite. He has a little of the Trickster about him, sometimes dispensing odd riddles before his next massacre, or making the odd quip as he holds aloft the donkey jawbone with which he slew 1,000 Philistines.

As a sun-associated figure, Samson doesn’t have a lot of obvious nuance. You probably remember Delilah, the woman who coaxed from him the secret of his strength: his long hair. Long hair has been perceived the world over as connected to both strength and the sun. The seven locks that are cut from Samson in the encounter with Delilah are often read as the seven rays of the sun.

The sun at midday, particularly today, reminds me of Samson: unrelenting. It’s a kind of strength that can incinerate but is also of tremendous power. Samson seems to arise from the lineage of the Sumerian wild man Gilgamesh, and there was a burst of comparative mythological work on him as a kind of solar deity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The village Beth Shemesh, which is referred to frequently in Samson’s story, owes its name to a “temple of the sun”. Like Heracles, Samson slew a lion with his bare hands, tore down the gates of a city, and was betrayed by a woman. It’s been argued that Delilah is Hebrew wordplay on “Layla”, which means night. With his capture, and his subsequent blinding, she functions as night.

In Christian thought there’s a distinction given between gifts from the Spirit and fruit of the Spirit. The gift is Samson’s tremendous strength, the fruit is what he does with it. Sun characters often have great charisma in stories, but there’s a lack of charity in what may grow from such talent.

As so often in myth, this apparent excess is part of a wider balance. In fairy tales, for example, there’s attention to three colors, red, black, and white. Think of the black of Snow White’s hair, the red of her lips, the white of her cheek. In the past decades both anthropologists and mythologists have made comparisons to the colors representing life stages.

The Red is the oomph of youth, individuation, getting ahead, being visible. It brings heat. It’s about success and causing the appropriate stir to get there. It’s dashing, heated and all about display. At its best, it’s inspirational, and at its worst it is crude and rather ruthless.

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The Black is associated with midlife, with decline rather than endless success. The Black is about knowledge of roads not traveled. It means the insight of failure and the educative power of limitation. In mythology, real cultures are defined not by endless growth but a capacity to make a covenant with limit when needed. And the White is eldership. It’s the largesse that enables you to make decisions that benefit your wider community, not just your own ends. It doesn’t abandon the drive of Red and the sobriety of Black, but instead integrates them into something approaching wise choices.

When there’s too much sun, we tend to make overheated decisions. It’s worth looking at our own leaders this week and getting a sense of what color they are speaking from. Do they need more black, or the expansiveness of the white? Maybe the drive of the red is what’s needed. But too much red leads to burnout, rashness and general chaos. Too much red is endlessly bragging, all hat and no cattle, all sizzle and no steak.

In the old stories, when things start to heat up excessively, you need to get the cool of the black into the mix, or the even-handedness of the white. Heat like this works on the irrational side of our nature, gets us muttering into our beer about the end times. As it happens, “apocalypse”, a Greek word, literally means “to uncover”, a revealing of some sort. And today, as our fractious country smolders, it feels like the curtains are being ripped down. As a mythologist I’ll be keeping a close eye on the simmering of Arthur’s Seat as well as the hills of St Francis. I’ll hope for the saint’s patient sense of wonder rather than Samson’s jagged flare-ups. When things get hot, cleave to the cool.

Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism. Many Leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent. When push came to shove, an economic hit seemed, to those who thought about it at all, to be a price worth paying for autonomy. “Take Back Control” proved to be a winning formula. Ten years on, we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us. Control and autonomy are legal and constitutional concepts, but their value depends on political realities. In a world of huge nations like the United States and China, it is in the interest of smaller nations to join together in powerful multinational blocs like the European Union (EU). Its members have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own ability to exercise “control” over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the EU.

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The arguments about Britain’s relationship with Europe need to be considered in the light of our long-standing international priorities and current geopolitical position. These show a remarkable consistency. Britain is a European country, sharing the political, economic and intellectual culture of Europe in spite of important institutional differences. Engagement with Europe has been a strategic necessity for Britain for centuries. Ever since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it has been a consistent theme of British foreign policy to maintain a balance of power on the European continent and to resist the domination of the continent by any single power. This has been driven by a desire to influence the political priorities of European nations and to shape their policies in Britain’s own interest, something that is difficult to do if the continent is dominated by a single hegemonic power. 

Britain’s single-minded pursuit of this objective has involved the patient cultivation of European allies. Queen Elizabeth I landed armies in France and the Netherlands to contain the hegemony of Spain. In the 18th century, when France was the great European hegemon, British governments intervened to resist it with the support of powerful European allies. Britain was the only European power to challenge revolutionary and Napoleonic France throughout the period from 1794 to 1815, at a time when France occupied much of Europe. Britain’s long stand-off with 19th-century Russia, at a time when Russia occupied Poland and had ambitions in the Balkans, European Turkey and Central Asia, was guided by the same instincts.

The rapid expansion of a newly united Germany in the final decades of the 19th century presented Britain with a new challenge. In a famous memorandum of 1907, the Foreign Office mandarin Sir Eyre Crowe described Britain’s pursuit of a balance of power in Europe as “almost a law of nature”. His point was that now that the dominant European power was Germany, Britain must follow its traditional policy and contain it. In two world wars, Britain intervened to fight the Kaiser’s Germany and then Hitler’s.

For centuries, the bulwark of Britain was not the Channel, but the Rhine or the Oder. The concern was always that, faced with a dominant European power across the Channel, Britain would lose control over its own destiny. The policy was not simply strategic, but also cultural and economic. It was cultural because the long conflicts with, successively, Napoleonic France, Tsarist Russia and Imperial and Nazi Germany were seen as ways of confronting powerful despotisms and preventing the extinction of a liberal world order. It was economic because a Europe dominated by a single power would be in a position to disrupt British trade and finance as Napoleon’s continental system had sought to do. Historically, these instincts have served Britain well.

There has always been a contrary strand of British strategic thinking which rejected this approach. It can loosely be called Atlanticism, although the expression is geographically inaccurate, for it was based on a far wider view of Britain’s world than just the Atlantic. It stood for a policy of disengagement from the problems of the European continent and concentration on the wide oceans. It presented empire and the Navy as alternatives to Europe and the army. It has generally been associated with prominent figures in the Tory party. In his influential tract The Patriot King (1738), the Tory philosopher Henry Bolingbroke, who had been Queen Anne’s chief minister, articulated this view. He urged Britain to avoid getting involved in continental affairs. “The water is more properly our element,” he wrote, “and in it we find our greatest security.” William Pitt the Elder, although not a Tory, had once taken the same view. The Tory romantic Benjamin Disraeli said something very similar in 1866, and Churchill, a liberal at the time but a romantic Tory at heart, said it again in 1901. It was an unwise policy even then, and all three statesmen discarded it when they achieved power. 

Britain has rarely adopted a policy of “splendid isolation”, and when it has done, for example in the 1770s and 1780s or at the end of the 19th century, it has paid a high diplomatic and military price and has soon reversed course. European crises invariably become English ones. Reality dawns on statesmen when they find themselves having to grapple with the problems of international relations. Political disengagement from Europe has often been a slogan, but rarely a viable policy.

Atlanticism received a boost from the experience of the two world wars of the 20th century, which still have a dominant place in Britain’s conception of itself. Even before the United States joined the First World War, it contributed substantially to the funding of the British war effort and was a major supplier of munitions. Its contribution to Britain’s survival and eventual victory in the Second World War was decisive. The British Empire, and especially India and the old dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, made a critical contribution in both wars. The world wars boosted a certain idea of British exceptionalism. Winston Churchill, who believed in the political unification of Europe but without Britain, encapsulated the idea in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in four volumes between 1956 and 1958. This strongly romanticized account presented Britain’s relations with the “old” empire and the United States as a natural brotherhood distinct from its relations with continental Europe. It stood for the notion, common across the political spectrum in the Fifties, that Britain might act as the godfather of European union, but its own destinies were separate, maritime and global. 

Yet, if Atlanticism were ever a serious policy option, it was only so at a time when Britain could deal with the United States, if not as an equal, then at least as a comparable power. That depended on Britain’s status as a world power, the ruler of a global empire and a dominant economic force on the trade routes of the world. In the Fifties, when the European Economic Community was born, these conditions were ceasing to apply.

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The creation of the European Economic Community and its subsequent transformation into the EU revived all the old geopolitical dilemmas of Britain, but presented them in a new light. British policy after the Second World War was dominated by an obsessive but ambivalent attitude to Germany. At the Anglo-American conference in Quebec in September 1944, the two countries agreed upon a policy of deindustrializing Germany so as to convert it into an economy that would be “principally agricultural and pastoral”. The allied occupation authorities drastically limited Germany’s mining and steelmaking capacity, dismantled its industrial plant, suppressed its industrial patents and destroyed the financial relationships between German banks which had been a major factor in Germany’s industrial strength. Britain encouraged the post-war reconstruction of France so as to serve as its bulwark against a reborn Germany. 

This policy of industrial containment was progressively abandoned from 1947, as the USSR, which was in the process of converting the states of Eastern and Central Europe into satellites, emerged as the principal threat to European peace. In the Fifties, however, the old fear of Germany returned as a result of the spectacular speed of German economic reconstruction. In the course of the decade, West German industrial production increased by a factor of two and a half. Measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per head, West Germany overtook Britain.

The European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951. The Messina Conference of 1955 decided in principle to create a Common Market of the six states of the West European continent. The Treaty of Rome gave effect to that decision in 1957. Britain and France both feared a revival of German power, but took precisely opposed views about the implications of these decisions. France regarded European integration as a means of binding an economically powerful Germany into a European bloc which they were confident that they could dominate. France also believed that only an integrated European bloc would be able to stand up to the United States. Britain, on the other hand, accepted the dominant role of the United States in the post-war world order, but believed that the objectives of the six founding members of the Common Market necessarily implied an eventual move to a European federal state dominated by Germany. The prospect rang all the alarm bells that had terrified British statesmen for 500 years. In a memorandum of February 1956, Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that the Messina proposals “will mean Western Europe dominated in fact by Germany and used as an instrument for the revival of power through economic means. It is really giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent.”

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Although the prospect of a dominant Germany was a particularly sensitive point, the problem would have been the same whether Germany dominated the new group or not. A supranational state comprising the whole of Western Europe would inevitably marginalize Britain. The only solution would be to join it, a possibility which was rejected out of hand. It was rejected partly because Britain was unwilling to subsume its own sovereignty in a new proto-state and partly because of its preferential trading arrangements with the Commonwealth and the British Empire. Instead, the government tried to persuade Germany and France to abandon their plans and urged the United States to withdraw its support for them. It failed in all three cases. In 1956, Harold Macmillan regarded European integration as a recipe for the division of the world into three spheres of influence, American, Soviet and European. This was a profoundly unwelcome development for Britain, because British attachment to sovereignty would inevitably result in Britain’s exclusion, with dire results for its international influence. Two years later Macmillan, now Prime Minister, told de Gaulle that he was convinced that the Common Market would turn into the modern equivalent of Napoleon’s continental system, an economic and political weapon targeted against Britain.

***

These debates foreshadowed British arguments for and against Europe for the next 60 years. When Britain eventually did join the Common Market at the third attempt in 1973, there was none of the idealism which had motivated the continental founders of the European Economic Community (EEC). It was seen by the politicians as damage limitation and by the public as a mere trading arrangement. There were many factors involved in the decision to join, including the lackluster performance of the British economy in the Fifties and the growing dynamism of the European market. But the main geopolitical factor, especially in the eyes of Macmillan, was the desire to influence the development of Europe in Britain’s interest and to maintain Britain’s historic role in European affairs. As a result, fears about the loss of sovereignty on the one hand and exclusion from a dominant European bloc on the other continued to guide British policy under both Conservative and Labour governments.

For a time the dilemma was evaded. In the referendum on EU membership held in 1975, the case made for membership was entirely about trade, and not about political integration. The political leaders who made the case for EU membership fell into two groups. There were those who believed that the European aspiration to ever closer union was just rhetoric, and that it would never happen. This group has proved to be mistaken. And there were those like Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who negotiated British entry, who understood the direction in which the EU was bound to move, but believed that it would happen gradually, and that over the years a new European identity would be created which the British would accept. This group has proved to be over-optimistic.

In the late Eighties, all the old ghosts came back to haunt the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. There was, first of all, the advent of Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission. Delors was a French socialist who presided over a rapid expansion of the competences of the EU. Under his influence, it moved into areas of social policy in ways which were extremely unwelcome to the Conservative governments of these years. Then came German reunification, which revived the old fears of German domination of Europe. France and Britain divided along the same lines as they had done at the foundation of the EEC. Thatcher was intensely suspicious and publicly fearful. President François Mitterand of France, after some initial hesitation, stuck to the traditional French policy of trying to neuter Germany by binding it into European political structures traditionally dominated by France. Finally, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 provided for a single European currency. Monetary union was in effect a German concession to France’s integrationist agenda in return for French support for German unification. In Britain, the old geopolitical dilemmas now had to be confronted.

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The Labour government which took office in 1997 set out to mend fences with Europe after the years of abrasive relations under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, articulated the classic doctrine of British foreign policy. Citing four centuries of history, he declared that Britain’s destiny had always been to “help shape Europe”. “The fact is,” he said, “that Europe is today the only route through which Britain can exercise power and influence.” Enlargement of the EU was the one way in which Britain’s age-old pursuit of a balance of power could be continued. The Labour government continued the policy of its Conservative predecessors of supporting the expansion of the EU to the east, in the hope that this would create informal alliances with aspirant countries in Central and Eastern Europe and dilute French and German influence. The policy of enlargement was successful in one sense. The EU grew to 28 members by 2007, bringing the whole of the west and center of the European continent into its orbit with the exception of Switzerland and Norway (which accepted EU laws by treaty but declined full membership), and the Balkan states (all of which have current applications to join and are adopting policies converging with those of the EU). Yet, in another sense, the policy of expansion failed. The new members turned out not to have the diluting effect that Britain had anticipated. They quickly signed up to the integrationist agenda of the European Commission, except in the case of Hungary and, briefly, Poland. The solidarity of the enlarged community was spectacularly demonstrated by Britain’s inability to fragment the bloc when it came to negotiating the terms of its exit after 2016.

Britain’s dilemmas were encapsulated in the argument within the Labour government about the euro. John Major’s government had negotiated an opt-out from the single currency, but that resolved only part of the problem. The Eurozone would inevitably become a center of European economic decision-making in which Britain, as a non-euro country, would have little influence. Tony Blair wanted to join the euro for political rather than economic reasons. He believed that it would increase British influence in Europe and that it would help to create a European identity in Britain. As a political judgment, that was plainly right. It also reflected the long-standing traditions of British foreign policy. Economically, however, monetary union made little sense. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, supported by senior Treasury officials, believed that the issue should turn on Britain’s domestic economic interest and not on her classic pursuit of political influence in Europe. He considered that the UK should not adopt the euro unless certain exacting economic tests of economic convergence were satisfied. As an economic judgment, that was right too, and it was the view which prevailed. It was a seminal moment.

***

Britain’s traditional policy had been to maximize its influence in Europe in order to protect its own economic and strategic interests. By the end of the 20th century, the emergence of the EU as the dominant continental bloc meant that this could only be done from the inside. Viewed in this light, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in 2020 marked the abandonment of five centuries of intelligent British statesmanship. Without Britain, the EU’s consolidation into a single political bloc, which Britain had always taken the lead in resisting, was likely to accelerate. At the same time, Brexit marginalized Britain, ensuring that it would have no voice and very little influence over the developing economic superpower. 

There is also a more general sense in which Britain’s departure from the EU was a misfortune not just for Britain, but also for Europe. It detached Britain from one of the most imaginative and fertile projects in the continent’s history. The institutions of the EU are unappealing: remote, undemocratic, bureaucratic and foreign. But the EU has transformed the continent’s economic fortunes. It has brought to states on its geographical periphery, such as Ireland, Poland and Slovenia, a large measure of convergence with the historically more prosperous countries of Western Europe. It has eased the emergence of Eastern Europe from dependence on the controlling hand of Russia, and helped to restore and sustain liberal democracy in the countries which disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in 1945. It has contributed to the maintenance of the longest period of peace in Europe’s history. 

British Cassandras have been consistently wrong in their forecasts, tinged with hope, that the EU would collapse under its own weight. They were wrong when they dismissed the project as utopian at its foundation in the Fifties. They were wrong when they said that it would be destroyed by the euro crisis after 2009. They have always underrated the political will to sustain it.

Inevitably, the consolidation of continental Europe has marginalized Britain and reduced its ability to control its own destiny. Announcing the terms of departure agreed with the EU in December 2020, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that at 11pm on 31 December Britain would, among other things, “take back control of our trade policy”, “take back control of our waters, with this treaty affirming British sovereignty over our vast marine wealth” and “take back control of our laws”. These sentiments exhibit a rather primitive attitude to national sovereignty and the ways in which it may be used for national advantage. Entering into a multilateral treaty such as the treaties constituting the EU was not a surrender of national sovereignty. It was an exercise of national sovereignty, involving a partial surrender of autonomy, and therefore of control, in order to obtain advantages which the participants could not have achieved on their own: greater geopolitical weight and friction-free access to a market 10 times the size of their domestic market.

Take, by way of illustration, the emotive subject of fisheries, which is presumably what Boris Johnson had in mind when he spoke of “our vast marine wealth”. In theory, Britain could restrict all fishing in British waters to British vessels. It now has the legal right to do that. But practical realities are against it. About 40% of fish caught by British vessels are landed in the EU, and well over half of fish landed in Britain are exported, mostly to the EU. Moreover, most fish species migrate between British and EU waters. Collaborative arrangements with the EU are therefore required in order to manage fish stocks in the interest of both sides. Fisheries are an interesting example. Because of the high proportion of European fishing stocks located in British waters, it is one of the few issues on which Britain and the EU have comparable bargaining power. Yet this has proved to be of very little practical value.

Looking more broadly at Britain’s relations with Europe, the economic balance is even less favorable. The EU is Britain’s biggest as well as its closest trading partner. It takes about 40% of British exports, whereas Britain takes only about 10% of EU exports, substantially less than the United States or China. As became clear during the Brexit negotiations, Britain depends much more on the EU than the other way round. The political weight of the EU, the size of its market and the asymmetric nature of Britain’s relationship with it means that Britain is bound to be dominated by it whether it is a member or not. The EU sets standards and imposes rules with which Britain is economically bound to comply, even though it is legally a free agent. This has not changed since Brexit. The difference is that Britain now has no say in the standards and rules that the EU applies. A legal dependence has simply been replaced by a practical one. Influence has been traded away for nothing.

The idea that Britain can compensate for this by reorienting its trade towards other markets through trade agreements was much canvassed during the referendum campaign, but it has proved to be an illusion. Almost all the trade deals negotiated by Britain since 2020 have simply replicated the deals that Britain previously enjoyed through the EU. The rest (with Australia and India) are with geographically distant countries and are widely thought to have been dearly bought. The reasons are not hard to find. The move towards global free trade, which seemed so promising a generation ago, has stalled and in many areas has been reversed. Most other markets are at least as protectionist as the EU, and Britain has fewer levers to open them up. International bargaining in this field depends on economic weight.

In any trade negotiation, Britain can offer access to about 70 million consumers, whereas the EU can offer access to some 450 million, more than six times as many. We would have been better off negotiating as part of a coalition of 520 million consumers. The one exception concerns Donald Trump’s tariff wars of 2025. Britain was able to negotiate more favorable reliefs from the United States than the EU, mainly because of Trump’s political antagonism to the EU. How much of an advantage that is remains to be seen. Trump is an impulsive and wayward force in world politics, who will observe US treaty obligations for as long as it suits him and not a moment longer. In the short run, Britain cannot allow its economic fortunes to depend on a partner as erratic and unreliable as the United States has recently proved to be. In the long run, the United States is likely to revert to its traditional support for European consolidation, with an agenda in which Britain will have limited weight.

Trade flows are not everything. However, the trade-off between autonomy and collaboration raises dilemmas which affect British policy-making across the board. An ever expanding range of issues, both economic and non-economic, call for international cooperation, in which political weight counts. The EU’s member states have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own relative position is likely to weaken in the next few years, as powerful pressures push the EU towards further European integration and ultimately towards the creation of a federal superstate. This is because Europe’s ambitions will be impossible to achieve without developing common political institutions superseding national governments in major policy areas. Obvious areas for consolidation include capital markets, fiscal policy, debt issuance, defense procurement and aerospace. There will be more technological joint ventures on a European scale, such as the Galileo Project for a European GPS system, to which Britain contributed both financially and technically before Brexit but from which it has now been excluded. There will be determined attempts to achieve European autonomy in financial markets, from which Britain’s financial services industries (currently accounting for 12% of its GDP) will be excluded.

***

This brings one to the critical question of the relations of Europe and Britain with the United States and China, the world’s current economic superpowers. Donald Trump is likely to add to the pressure for European consolidation. The foreign policy of the United States has passed into the hands of a man who is determined to use the economic and military power of the United States to demand of America’s traditional friends a relationship based on subservience and clientage rather than alliance and shared interests. Europe is unlikely to accept such a relationship, but, outside the EU, Britain may have no alternative. The end of Trump’s presidency in January 2029 can be expected to bring an end to his highly personal and eccentric style of government, but not necessarily to America’s belligerent outlook on the rest of the world. Insularity in foreign relations has deep roots in American politics. Trump himself made no secret of his plans during the presidential election campaign. It must therefore be assumed that a majority of the American electorate welcomed his destructive instincts. The same voters will be around in 2028. Those bidding for Trump’s mantle can be expected to offer them more of the same. The Democratic Party will no doubt offer a less confrontational style of government, but is unlikely to risk its electoral chances by promising to reverse what Trump has done. The ultimate result will be the disintegration of the current web of international alliances centered on the United States, and its replacement by new networks based on other centers of power.

In Asia, the alternative center of power is likely to be China. Seventy years ago, China’s GDP was smaller than Belgium’s. Today it has the second-largest economy in the world, with a combination of relatively cheap labor, plentiful natural resources and impressive industrial and technological skills that enable it to undercut other advanced economies. Under Xi Jinping, it has immeasurably expanded its geopolitical ambitions in the Asia–Pacific region and its economic reach worldwide. Xi’s China, like Trump’s America, looks for relations with other countries based on political clientage. This can descend, in China’s case as in America’s, into crude bullying. Its Pacific neighbors, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan, and its African clients, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Angola, Djibouti, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, have learned this lesson to their cost. In Europe, meetings with the Dalai Lama, protests against China’s persecution of the Uyghurs or of democracy activists in Hong Kong, or official dealings with Taiwan are met with trade sanctions.

Integrated political and economic blocs such as the EU have a better prospect of defending themselves against the suffocating embrace of the United States and China. The EU has proved to be too fragmented to stand up effectively to the United States in the tariff wars of 2025 as China has successfully done. This was cruelly exposed when the EU’s program of countermeasures was undermined by ideological differences among member states, by the economic vulnerability of some of them and by their common dependence on the United States for the defense of Ukraine against Russia. Europe is likely to pay dearly for that weakness. Trump will come back for more. It is difficult to believe that subservience will remain the EU’s policy for long.

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In dealing with China, the EU has not faced the same difficulties and has been much more robust. Lithuania, for example, has been able to stand up to persistent Chinese bullying and trade sanctions provoked by its decision to allow Taiwan to open a representative office in Vilnius. This is because, although Lithuania is a tiny country, it is a member of the EU, which can hit back hard and has done so. The EU is China’s largest trading partner, with a volume of trade in 2024 eight times larger than the UK’s. Britain is not as well placed to resist Chinese pressure over, for example, China’s demand for a super-embassy on Tower Hill, the presence in Britain of Hong Kong dissidents or its universities’ freedom to study China’s human rights record.

The UK has traditionally made the American alliance the cornerstone of its foreign policy and has opted out of the political structure of the European Community. Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States has proved to be both a blessing and a curse. It was critical in the Second World War and in the Cold War. It still is critical to Britain’s security in the fields of nuclear weaponry and intelligence. But it has come at the price of distorting Britain’s view of itself and its place in the world. It has allowed the UK too often to turn away from the reality of being a regional European power some 20 miles off the French coast, with a European history, culture and sensibility. 

It has also encouraged Britain to forget that the United States is some 3,000 miles away and has a hard-nosed view of its own national interest. The special relationship helped lull Britain into taking a more detached view of moves towards European integration in the Fifties and Sixties than was in its national interest. It also offered the Brexiters an opening to argue in 2016 that Britain’s links with Washington might provide an alternative to its participation in an integrated Europe. By promising a quick bilateral trade deal (which never materialized), they suggested that Britain could abandon the EU with equanimity on the hardest of terms. Britain has now discovered that the American comfort blanket is threadbare. As a result, its subservience to the United States seems likely to be more complete and longer lasting than that of the EU.

***

It is of course possible that national ambitions among the countries of Europe will prise Europe apart again and prevent the economic and political consolidation that the continent needs. But Britain has too often counted on this happening, while “ever closer union” slowly became a reality. History has borne out Jean Monnet’s prediction that “Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. 

Barring a major crisis in Britain’s own affairs, it is unrealistic to expect Britain to rejoin the EU. What is more likely is a succession of ad hoc agreements for cooperation with the EU in defined areas including economic regulation, international trade, migration, defense procurement and foreign policy. Europe will be in a position to dictate its terms. Some of these agreements will involve substantial British contributions to European budgets. Some will involve accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in specific areas. The red lines of the past are likely to fade. In this untidy fashion, Britain will obtain a modest degree of influence over European policy decisions, but it will be substantially less than the control that we might have exercised as members.

***

Extracted from The Brexit Effect, 2016–2026, published by Cambridge University Press. 

Perhaps the robotic tone was because he’s not actually all that proud of his record. Starmer’s denunciation of the previous regime as “morally bankrupt” is difficult to dispute, but can a man widely referred to as “two-tier Kier”, for his palpably asymmetric approach to public order, really boast of “decency”? Can a man whose legacy will be full-term abortion, censorship, digital surveillance, and the abolition of trial by jury really claim to have rescued Britain from the moral abyss? Can a man who gave us soaring youth unemployment, who shrugged at farm suicides, who thinks nothing of bankrupting schools for disabled children and religious minorities, really boast of returning to Britain a sense of pride?

Who cares? Not the Westminster court press, which reports on it all excitedly, as though this now wearily familiar Downing Street bloodshed is nothing more than a soap opera. And perhaps they’re right to ignore the substantive issues, and treat it as spectacle. This is, after all, arguably, a sober assessment of the relationship between any given prime minister and the machinery of governance.

Exactly 10 years ago, the country went to the polls to vote on whether or not we should remain in the EU. I voted Leave, as (narrowly) did the country. Overall, the desire was twofold: in the words of Vote Leave, to “Take Back Control”: that is, to restore democratically accountable national government, from its dissolution into the opaque Brussels machinery. And, relatedly, to end an inflow of immigration that, thanks to Brussels, we were powerless to control.

The deeper issue at the time, to my eye, was not just transnational treaties but state capacity. We couldn’t long maintain a reserve of competent civil servants, politicos, and mandarins, while also outsourcing to Brussels much of the policy you’d expect such experts to devise and implement. Just as muscles atrophy when you don’t use them, my fear was that eventually we’d lose our capacity to do joined-up policy, as an independent state. Civil servants would relax into the inertia of EU autopilot, and assume the totality of their job was implementing procedures and strictures devised elsewhere.

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But the hour was already late. The regime’s inflexibility began causing real frustration with the global financial crash. A post-political regime that hummed along (it seemed) nicely in the boom years began to show its downside in the bust, in a now-manifest indifference to national populations, an insatiable appetite for human quantitative easing, and all with minimal accountability. Even so, after the crash, public faith in the settlement didn’t falter straight away. A hung Parliament in 2010 attested, even then, to the deep divide over how Britain’s future ought to unfold, but Cameron, as coalition leader, served a full term and was re-elected. Back then, more people than not at least somewhat trusted the British government.

So did I, by and large. In 2016, I thought matters might still be salvaged: that state capacity might be retrieved, and that it was worth trying. Over the past decade, though, I’ve come to wonder if I was wrong. This time a decade ago, the British people voted for change, and to take back control. But 52/48 is almost a hung Parliament, and the Remainer resistance was immense and well-connected. The ensuing trench warfare took years, claimed two prime ministers, and gravely damaged what trust the public still held in the idea that British governments answered to the British people. So did it work? Well, the monkey’s paw curled, and we have since enjoyed incessant change — of prime ministers. But we don’t seem to have taken back control of anything that actually matters.

This sense, that the democratic steering mechanisms on the machinery of state are purely decorative, was ultimately what prompted the Brexit vote. But even Brexit doesn’t seem to have produced the desired increase in responsiveness. All it has done, in fact, is increase the speed at which frustrated electorates cycle through prime ministers, hoping each time that this will be the one whose efforts connect with the machine, and who can show an ability to drive it.

Again and again, since Cameron, we’ve elected a new leader, who then governs for an eyeblink, and sees their approval rating plummet. Again and again, they come up against the same problem, that the Leave vote was supposed to remedy: the machinery of government won’t be steered. And no matter how many times we yank out the steering wheel and replace it with a different one, the machine just keeps trundling along.

This is surely why Starmer’s list of vaunted achievements is so paltry he had to read it out, at the resignation podium, in his bad-faith robot voice. The contrast was all the starker because so swiftly followed an emotional expression of gratitude to his family, that — unlike his rubbish “achievements” — he obviously did feel able to deliver with his whole chest. But for all the time I’ve spent ragging on Keith-GPT, he was ultimately a victim of the same problem as all the others.

By December 2024, barely six months and a single rioting season into his premiership, he was rubbing civil servants up the wrong way by complaining that nothing he wanted to do seemed achievable, because so much of the bureaucracy seemed comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. The mandarins were miffed. But Starmer wasn’t saying anything Dominic Cummings hadn’t already said during the Coalition years — and which hadn’t, in fact, long animated Cummings’s rationale for bringing Britain out of the EU. Cummings is still saying it, arguing recently that we’re stuck with stagnant growth, lagging technology, and dysfunctional public services, because the governing class is hell-bent on preventing change. Instead, their priority is preserving the interests of their own caste.

So if, after scant months in office, a proceduralists’ proceduralist like Starmer was sounding off about the Blob in terms scarcely distinguishable from Dominic Cummings, the reasonable conclusion is that there’s probably something to the critique. But Starmer didn’t grip any of these structural issues. Instead, under his premiership we have enjoyed two years of interconnected and ramifying screwups, as assorted forms of entrenched dysfunction interact in ever more complex and unhappy ways. This background of fractal ineptitude, vividly set off both by the regime’s perceived bias against white Britons, at best ambivalent resolve on tackling mass migration, then provided a backdrop to assorted Labour factions who, sensing Starmer’s core ideological emptiness, have seized the opportunity to advance crank hobby-horses such as legalizing suicide.

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I see no evidence anywhere else in Labour (except from the Dark Lord himself, Tony Blair) of concrete thought on these structural issues. Starmer has evidently decided not to make it easy, and has announced a leadership contest. But it’ll be Burnham in the end, and my unhappy suspicion is that that come September, he will rock up at No. 10 with his boxes of Jamie Oliver cookbooks and suitcase of Professional Northerner regalia only to find that he, too, can’t get the machinery of government to respond.

Will he be steely enough to get under the hood and change how the engine works? I don’t know. But a recent profile by a Manchester journalist, who has covered his mayoralty for years, depicted Burnham as a gifted unifier and genuinely popular, but weaker on joined-up governance. For example, a flagship homelessness scheme he launched in Manchester ended up, in practice, operating at cross purposes with other housing services. Meanwhile, the rest of the Labour bench are overwhelmingly more aligned with the architectures of business as usual — with the quangos, the mandarins, the judges, the human rights, the entitlements, and all the suffocating rest of it — to have any interest in letting him tinker. And Labour’s ungainly post-industrial coalition pulls in so many contradictory directions that the party remains, for now, woefully paralyzed.

So unless Burnham is keeping his cards very close to his chest, once we’re through the latest round of court soap opera the almost inevitable prospect is more of the same. Another round of flashy, headline-grabbing schemes; another round of the permanent bureaucracy limply going through the motions, then resuming whatever it was doing before. More mass immigration, more Net Zero, more decline. More unrest. And, in due course, more Downing Street blood-letting.

But who knows, perhaps this is the least worst outcome. Last time we had a Labour government with a substantive plan for revolution, we ended up with Tony Blair’s constitutional vandalism. We are still living in his world today. That’s why voters are so frustrated, why the system won’t do anything else, and why every prime minister ends up hated. Ending the bloodshed requires not revolution, but counter-revolution.

This of course raises the grimmer and deeper question of whether Britain even retains the state capacity to make a success of such a counter-revolution, or could muster enough aligned operatives to replace those who would inevitably try and obstruct it. But evidently I haven’t learned anything from Brexit, after all, because I think it’s worth trying. If nothing else, just because it would make such a pleasant change to get through a full Parliamentary term, without having to hose another prime minister off the pavement.

The Isle of Man’s Tourist Trophy (TT) is the most dangerous motor competition in the world. It has killed more than 270 of its competitors and crippled many more; since the birth of the TT, only two years have gone without fatalities. Formula 1 drivers race upon purpose-built circuits, places provided with run off zones, safety barriers, and specialized road surfaces; the TT has none of these. Reaching top speeds of more than 200 mph, competitors hurtle through country roads, villages, towns, and up a mountain.

They must pass walls, trees, houses, and horses; spectators, furniture, telephone poles and iron railings. They must negotiate more than 200 bends and kinks to the course; blind turnings and hairpin corners; airborne jumps and fearsome plunges; corners so tight that their knees hang centimeters above the tarmac — and they do all of this knowing that if they get it wrong, if they miscalculate an angle or a turning or a bump in the road, they may die. It is a competition almost entirely run and raced by amateurs, mechanics, builders, farmers, plumbers. None do it for money; winners can expect to receive a mere £26,250. They are doing it instead for something else: the thrill of speed, of risk, and of victory; the regard of other racers, and the call of tradition.

Now finishing its 114th year, the TT is an arena of danger and glory, the subject of films, documentaries, and songs. The central event of an entire industry, it is also a testing ground and product exhibition. Generations of motorcycle builders used the TT as a benchmark, a standard against which to measure the performance of their models; companies have lived and died based upon how their vehicles performed on the track. Through the TT, we can tell a story not only of courage, meaning, and myth, but also a story of manufacturing — of Britain’s long reign as workshop to the world, and its precipitate collapse to foreign competition.

The TT was born in exception. In 1903, the British government banned motor vehicles from traveling at more than 20 mph; speed enthusiasts were obliged to look elsewhere. Possessed of its own legal system, and pleased to accept financial incentives, the Isle of Man was the perfect place in which to stage the races and trials so earnestly sought by the motor industry. The first TT was held in 1907 and — wars and pandemics aside — it has been going strong ever since. It dominates the island’s annual calendar, and is the backbone of its tourist industry. On average, 40,000 fans and 10,000 motorcycles visit the island. There are many more visitors than hotel beds; residents rent out their homes, guest bedrooms, and even their fields, charging tourists for a spot to pitch their tent. To accommodate the racing, schools have a two-week summer half term. The course itself transforms; spectator stands are erected, barriers put up, livestock fencing inspected, the road itself repaired and swept.

What is it that drives the contestants up onto the mountain? A lonely impulse of delight; a tumult on the roads. Stuart Barker, interviewing TT riders for his 2022 book Ragged Edge, found that they spoke of the thrill, the buzz, adrenaline; the feeling, as 1950 winner Geoff Duke put it, of “elation and absolute wonder of going down Bray Hill for the first time”. For some, the risk is the point; as observed by TT racer Guy Martin, “You have to take the risk to get the buzz.” For others, it is a matter of history and tradition, with brother following brother and sons following their fathers. Beside tradition, besides the thrill and the adrenaline, riders are also attracted by the magnitude and prestige of the TT, the “pure kudos” of the event, its status as the “ultimate” challenge.

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To win in the TT is to participate in a century-long tradition, and to rank with and among the legends of the course. The TT’s great contests are the stuff of legend: the 1967 Senior race between Mike Hailwood and Giacomo Agostini, say, or Hailwood’s comeback some 11 years later. So too are they emblems of endurance and will. Consider the determination of Robert Dunlop, who arrived for the 1998 TT on crutches. Right arm and right leg crippled from a TT crash four years earlier, he had broken his collarbone and re-broken his leg only three weeks before the event. Not only did he join the Ultralightweight race, but he won it; victorious, he cast his crutches into the crowd. Or else there’s Conor Cummins. Thrown from his bike and sent tumbling down the mountain, he sustained a broken back, arm, pelvis, and torn ligaments, yet returned and, 12 years later, took second place in the 2022 Superstock race.

The most successful riders ascend into myth. In pubs across the Isle of Man, hanging on a wall someplace behind the bar, sit the icons of a votive cult — portraits of Joey Dunlop. The victor of 26 TT races, Dunlop, who was Northern Irish, dominated the track for a quarter century. A statue of him can be seen on the TT course, overlooking the Bungalow Bend; last year, 25 years after his death in Estonia, TT organizers arranged a tribute lap in his honor. This week, his life-sized image decorated the walls of the grandstand bar, along with other TT greats, figures like John McGuinness, Michael Dunlop, Dave Molyneaux. So too are they etched into the route itself; each of these men has a corner of course named after them. Through competition, meaning is inscribed into the landscape.

TT races end where they begin: in the shadow of the grave. Directly opposite from the TT grandstand is the Douglas borough cemetery. Yards from the dead, winners are brought to the podium, there to be adorned in a giant laurel wreath, one so large it must be slung across the chest and under the shoulder. In some respects, the TT is not an event in history — it is an event before history, an extrusion of premodern values within a risk-averse, money-centric liberal order. By joining the TT, ordinary men and women, the vast majority of whom are amateurs, trade the risk of death for the thrill of life, and for the chance of glory.

“I don’t want to grow old and regret things I didn’t do. What do you do in life? Do you sit around wishing you’d done stuff, or do you get out there and do it?” These words were said by James Hillier, a TT competitor in our own era; said in a different register, their message is still older. In the Iliad, the hero’s existence is defined by the choice between a long and obscure life and a short, glorious one. Sitting in his camp, Achilles must choose between the pleasures of home, and the immortality of renown; it is a choice between death, and between life. The Trojan hero Sarpedon puts it a different way; were it possible to go on ageless and immortal, he would not go on fighting. “But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them, let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.” Risking their lives, embracing the thrill of risk, the danger of injury, and the glory of competition, TT racers affirm, in their own startling way, the existential choices all of us face.

The TT is one of the great cultural events of British life. Despite this, it is oddly underappreciated in mainstream British culture. Too Northern, perhaps; too working class. A festival for mechanics and motorheads, taking place far from the power centers of the South East. In a sense, this too has a heritage. From the earliest days of the industry, British motorcycling had clear class connotations, seen as the domain of young men, of factory workers and laborers, embracing the freedom of the open road. For British manufacturers this was the industry’s strength — a clearly defined market — and also its curse.

Throughout its long life, the TT has tracked the improvement of technology — the relentless improvement of the internal combustion engine, of frames, suspension, tires, brakes, fuels, metallurgy, lubrication, aerodynamics, engine configuration, reliability, and electronics. As the machines improved, so too did the lap times. The first 60 mph lap was reached in 1924; the first 80-mph lap in 1930. The first 100-mph lap was achieved in 1957; 120 in 1989; the current high, achieved by Peter Hickman in 2023, is just over 136 mph. Driving this has been competition: the competition of individuals, and the competition of companies and nations.

“One is apt to think of the TT as a sporting event that the trade happens to find worthwhile to patronize. But it is more accurate to consider it a trade event that happens to be of a sporting character… The ultimate purpose of the meeting is to sell motorcycles.” Writing in 1951, motor journalist Francis Jones was clear on the role of the TT. The course was used to sell bikes, and to test them, a way of examining performance and reliability under the most severe of conditions. Bikes that succeeded in the TT would succeed with the sports-driven, risk-oriented, male customers that the industry identified as its core market. It was a mindset built up over decades, decades within which British bikes stood supreme across global markets. Right up until the Sixties, the TT was a showplace of British manufacturing prowess. Matchless motorbikes dominated the years before the First World War, and between 1926 and 1939, at least one Solihull-made Norton finished in the top three places of the Isle of Man TT.

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Alongside the commercial ties were those of passion, for many of the UK’s leading firms were owned and operated by motorcycle hobbyists. Harry Collier, the son of the Matchless founder and later an MD of the company, raced semi-professionally and had a distinguished TT career. Across the industry, senior management would be almost obliged to make the annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Man. Employees also participated: at the AMC factory in Woolwich, employment preference was given to motorbike riders, TT results were broadcast over the public address system, and, on at least one occasion, the company gave leave to 200 staff so that they could travel to the TT.

This strength did not last. In 1939, a BMW won the Senior TT. Accompanied by billowing swastikas, it was an important prewar propaganda for victory for the Nazi state. In 1947, an Italian machine won the Lightweight TT race. British dominance in the Senior and Junior categories lasted into the mid Fifties, when the Italian Gilera and Moto Guzzi teams started to win prizes. From 1956, Norton and AMC announced they would no longer run official race teams. Honda won its first race in 1961; within a few years, Japanese bikes dominated Honda alone has since won over 250 TT races, followed by Yamaha and Kawasaki. By 1992, when first asked to ride upon a British-made Norton, Steve Hislop laughed; no-one had won on a British bike in 30 years. In the end, he did win — but that remains the last time a British bike triumphed in the TT’s biggest competition.

The British motorcycling industry failed for three reasons. Believing in craftsmanship, postwar managers failed to adopt new assembly line technology, thus damaging their ability to scale, and to maintain quality control. Focused on sport, and upon a masculine ethos of competition, they missed the female market. Above all, British firms failed adequately to recognize and meet demand for “economy” bikes: cheap, stylish, easy to use vehicles for the non-technical commuter. By doing so, they laid the ground for their eventual failure in sport as well.

British motorcycling is a case study of “segment retreat”. Category by category, Britain’s postwar motorcycle manufacturers withdrew before the advance of their Italian and Japanese rivals. First, they sacrificed the home market, focusing instead on exports of motorbikes to North America. Focused on heavy bikes, they then sacrificed the economy, light, and medium-weight sectors; by 1975, the British industry produced nothing smaller than machines in the 500cc displacement class. Backed by a superior manufacturing base, better factories, the revenues and the scale they gained in other segments, Japanese firms soon beat them there as well. With nowhere left to retreat, the British industry collapsed; its decades-long position as the world leader had vanished. The TT rewarded courage and mechanical brilliance, but the postwar motorcycle market increasingly rewarded a different kind of genius: the ability to make motorcycling ordinary and scalable.

For motorcycling, we can read Britain as a whole. For decades, our story has been one of retreat. Retreat from empire, retreat from ship-building, from steel and energy production; retreat from textiles, railways, and electronics, from aerospace, car-building, and telecoms. Retreat too, if blind complacency has its way, from the existence of the United Kingdom itself. At each stage, British elites have trusted in something to rescue us: the global service economy, the European Community, the transatlantic alliance, the prestige of our laws, the global nature of our language. None of these can be trusted to endure. In a darkening world, Britain now stands exposed, adrift, and with nowhere left to retreat.

The question is what we do next. Unlike the Italians, Germans and Japanese of the postwar era, Britain’s elite still do not know they have been defeated, and so presume things can continue as they are. We must embrace both the TT spirit, its culture of risk-taking and victory against the odds, but at the same time we must embrace the humility of defeat. The defeated Axis power won the development of the postwar industry through discipline, creativity, and an emphasis on achieving scale; so too must the contemporary UK. Decline is a choice — a choice to retreat, a choice no longer to strive, a choice to abandon ambition. Above all, we must remember this truth: those who risk nothing, do nothing, achieve nothing, become nothing.

I searched all afternoon for a punter who was enthusiastic about the Mayor’s vision of Englishness, but found none. The small crowd in the square consisted almost entirely of tourists who happened to be wandering by, and friends and family of the performers. As for those who had come to celebrate England and St George, they were hoping for something quite different. “We’re surprised there’s not more English here,” said one disappointed woman who had traveled with her husband from Crawley. She remarked that the day before, when a Sikh celebration had taken place in the square, it was “absolutely mobbed”. They wanted a strong turnout to make a statement of resurgent English pride, especially as, on a previous trip to London, they had bumped into a Palestine march where one of the demonstrators had allegedly told them “you’re not welcome here” after seeing the husband’s Union Jack phone cover. This struck a nerve, since he had, in fact, been born on the Old Kent Road. He pointed dramatically to the bronze lions around Nelson’s Column: “May 7th. Those lions are gonna roar again,” he said in reference to the local elections next month. 

Another man, a street sweeper who lives in Bow, gave me a similar account. “These wars, you know, Iran, Israel-Palestine, they’re protesting here every week, for no reason. This is a day for the British, for the English.” When I asked him about his 43 years living in the capital, he sucked his teeth. “It’s changed a lot, for the worse. Believe me.” He explained: “When I first got here it was very friendly, polite. You knew everyone, knew your neighbors. You don’t know your neighbors now. If you get on a bus or a train, you don’t know if someone’s going to pull out a knife and stab you.” Politicians, he said, “are only working for themselves”. Then he leaned in: “I think it’s time for the British to fight back.” 

This peculiar non-event in Trafalgar Square, and the discontent at its margins, illustrate some important realities. The first is that London is not in any meaningful sense an English city. It is the capital of a multinational state, the United Kingdom, whose hopes of surviving intact are at odds with England having a strong identity. But principally, the city is best understood as an island within an island, a place unto itself, or as the Victorians had it, “not a town but a country covered with houses”. When Khan calls it a “global city” he is mostly correct. Its economy has long been built on trade with the rest of the world, not England (although it does pay for England). In the 13 years that the capital was my home, most of the people I lived, worked or socialized with had either arrived as adults from overseas, or had moved there to escape England. Needless to say, the latter would have called themselves British. Two exceptions proved the rule: international football tournaments, when everyone became honorary Englishmen and women, and the cockneys I knew in Bethnal Green, remnants of an English-identifying community which has largely decamped to Essex. 

In Khan’s short video addressing the question “What does it mean to be English?”, he does of course imply that the capital is part of England. But on closer inspection, his idea of Englishness is defined by London rather than vice-versa. After nodding to the usual clichés — “fish and chips and a Sunday roast… our love of queuing, our incessant apologizing”— he moves onto “a tapestry made up of different cultures, faiths, histories and ideas, woven together to tell one story”. He concludes that being English means “we stand up for what we believe in” (at which point the video shows a “Refugees Welcome” sign). The event in Trafalgar Square suggests that he views Englishness like any other identity in his scheme of managed diversity, whereby the authorities, like a nursery teacher negotiating with tired toddlers, ensure that every group gets its moment at the center of attention, flying its flags and performing its rituals in public space. 

None of this is entirely unique to Khan; it reflects the social realities of the city. In 2009, Conservative mayor Boris Johnson called for a “unifying” idea of Englishness, fit for a city that is “proud to showcase” its “many cultures and communities”. He also referred to St George as “a Cappadocian merchant who sold bacon to the Roman army”. Though Khan has gone further than his predecessors in building his personal brand on multiculturalism, no leader in London can ignore it. 

But the other point hinted at by Sunday’s event is that, even among those who are eager to celebrate it, English identity still seems to have little political content beyond protest. The small sample of unhappy patriots I met all came from deprived backgrounds; one of them said he had “lost the lottery of life” (a strange reversal of Cecil Rhodes’ claim that “to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life”). They wanted to push back against other groups they saw as taking over public space in the city, and they shared a feeling of injustice at the Government’s failure to control migration, as well as a more general impression that the city was sliding into chaos. As one man told me — a Scot, as it happens — “It’s not English anymore, that’s the truth. It’s been taken over. The system’s allowed it… The whole system’s failed. The courts, the police, probation, the prisons, the NHS. It’s all gone.” But as for any sense of what it means to be English, it was clear that they all saw Englishness not only as a subset of Britishness, but as inseparable from it. 

This seems consistent with the broader circumstances in which the rhetoric and symbols of Englishness have barged into the public realm over the past year. English flags have appeared, often alongside Union Jacks, at demonstrations outside asylum hotels, and of course as part of the last summer’s spasm of defiance, which saw flags going up on lampposts and motorway bridges across the country (variously interpreted as expressions of patriotism and attempts to intimidate minorities, both of which are probably true). In these cases, the St George’s Cross seems to draw more of its charge from the breaking of a taboo, the flag still being somewhat tarred by association with Right-wing extremism, than from any shared understanding of English identity. 

Even on those parts of the Right which are now espousing ethnic nationalism, there is no positive vision of English society beyond one that is governed and largely inhabited by people of English ancestry. There is not even much reckoning with the blatant contradiction that this favored group includes most of those who despise Englishness as a political identity, while excluding many non-ethnically English who would welcome opportunities for patriotism. Such complexities tend to be drowned out by the almost pornographic narratives of British decline that circulate online, often focused on London’s alleged collapse into anarchy. As the people I met at Trafalgar Square testified, this vision is disturbingly familiar to some of the city’s poorer inhabitants; but its purpose is clearly to galvanize a nationalism with more anger than plausible answers.

Englishness is trapped in these volatile and divisive modes because efforts to reimagine it have been feeble; the uneasiness of public figures such as Khan and Johnson on the subject, insisting that the flag must be “reclaimed” for everyone but struggling to show much enthusiasm for it, only confirms its subversive appeal. But the deeper reason is simply that a former English consciousness fell by the wayside. Look back to the 19th century, and much of the 20th, and English patriotism appears to blaze proudly. “England expects that every man will do his duty,” said Nelson at Trafalgar. “Speak for England, Arthur!” was the backbench cry that signaled Parliament’s resolve to confront Hitler. But in these and many other evocative examples, “England” was a synonym for Britain, as it remains in many foreign languages today. As Englishness blended into the wider British state in which it predominated, and then into that state’s global empire (“the empire of England”, as Benjamin Disraeli called it), it inevitably lost much of its particularity, paving the way for a reversal that has resulted in many English now thinking of themselves as British. 

Another peculiarity is that, as Robert Tombs notes in The English and their History, the country never had a particularly deep attachment to its folk traditions. To be sure, modern England has always been deeply invested in its past as an aesthetic matter: see, for instance, the much-mocked “Tudorbethan” facades of Thirties suburbs, and the sentimental love for the “green and pleasant land” of the English countryside. But in the crucial period when European countries saw their pre-modern heritage vanishing with the onset of industrialization — the period when cities like London bulged into mega-cities — the English, Tombs writes, were a “commercial and cosmopolitan” culture, which saw “no urgent need to discover their roots or throw off foreign influences, and were happy to buy in the good and the fashionable wherever it came from”. As a result, “English manifestations of ‘folk culture’ were pallid compared with the ebullient and assertive popular nationalism of Hungarian, Czech, Finnish, and Russian art and music”. The consequences of this are still evident on St George’s Day, when, in my experience, people pressed to think of English folk traditions can name only Morris Dancing. 

This curtailed history has left Englishness with a mysterious, forlorn depth which has proven fertile for artistic expression, but which cannot be easily translated into politics. The poetry of Thomas Hardy and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams contain a rich sense of England’s landscapes and rhythms of life as treasures to be recovered only in dreams. A century later, a ghostly vision of England as something lost to history and myth can still be found in Jez Butterworth’s 2009 play Jerusalem, or in PJ Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake. There are jaundiced accounts of England too — Philip Larkin and John Betjeman come to mind — but even here, there is a certain irony and regret which seems to defy political expression. Perhaps the setting which most people instinctively recognize to be English is the countryside, where it is still possible to see past the fund managers’ mansions and newbuild estates and to imagine an innocent world of pubs and churches, hedgerows and lanes. It was only when I left London and formed a connection with the Sussex landscape that I felt, viscerally and unexpectedly, like I had found England. 

That this silent Englishness of culture and memory manages to exist apart from the St George’s Cross is surely something to be grateful for. A refuge from politics is not such a bad thing for a national identity to provide. But there is a more material problem, which pertains, again, to London. A more developed political Englishness would be valuable if it allowed different parts of the country to recognize their common cause in challenging the dominance of the capital, where too much power of every kind is concentrated.

During the 20th century, and especially since the Second World War, England’s impressive traditions of local government were sapped away by Westminster and Whitehall. The war effort, followed by the establishment of the NHS, the centralization of the planning and education systems, and the nationalization of industry, made for a stronger Britain at the expense of a weaker England. In the ensuing decades, as the country deindustrialized and globalized, London emerged as the overwhelming force in a service economy that relegated England’s other cities and regions to shadows of their former selves. The capital and the South East of England are the only parts of Britain that raise more revenue for the state than they receive. But they also enjoy favorable treatment. The data specialist and blogger Tom Forth has spent years arguing that Northern cities consistently lose out to London when it comes to investment in key areas such as transport, research and development and public institutions, even when they have the better economic case.  

Meanwhile, Britain remains far more centralized than its European peers, even as its state has increasingly proven unfit for the responsibility it hoards. So we find ourselves in a destructive situation whereby England must blame London, as a political center, for all of its problems, from hospitals and schools to energy bills and river pollution, while also relying on the metropolis for fiscal support. And London, of course, is where the country’s financial and cultural elites overwhelmingly cluster, appearing in the provinces only in the resented but sorely needed guise of tourists and second-home owners. There is arguably already a latent English identity in this shared ambivalence towards the capital; jokes about London and Londoners are current across the country. But they are not enough to bridge the local identities of the different counties, cities and regions, which must therefore struggle to claw back power from the center separately.

It is difficult to imagine how these differences could be bridged without a dedicated forum for English politics. But the Scottish and Welsh experience suggests that layering new capitals on top of London, while it can sustain devolved political cultures, also encourages further antagonism and the fudging of accountability. So England must somehow fight the center without a center of its own. That is the country’s tragedy: London occupies the place where its capital should be.

Downing Street this week has essentially confirmed this assessment. The recurring nightmare of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal cannot be banished with a backroom reshuffle alone. In an effort to rescue Starmer’s zombie premiership, the current line is, in essence: the Prime Minister did nothing. He knew nothing. He was not told, he did not ask, and he could not have reasonably been expected to do so. Nobody told him and so the man deemed responsible, Sir Olly Robbins, has been fired.

So we’re back to an unedifying ministerial dance of defending the least bad of two options. The first is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed “our man in Washington”, despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, and with the Prime Minister ignoring his inability to pass the vetting process. The second option — and this is the official position of the Government — is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed US ambassador despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, but with the Prime Minister unaware that he had failed his deep security vetting. While the first implies that Starmer has misled Parliament and the public repeatedly, the second merely signals utter incompetence.

For a Prime Minister who lacks the ability to define his own politics and communicate a moral purpose for his government, either account is terminal. In contrast with the ideological crusading of Brexit, Corbynism, and Liz Truss’s doomed Reaganite experiment, the Prime Minister promised to tone down the big ideas, dial down the politics and lock in. He based his appeal on personal probity and his supposed abilities as an administrator. To that end, he said, “there’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.

But this “post-ideological” offer is ironically rooted in a premise that is, in fact, deeply ideological: if we strip back the partisanship, steering the ship of state is a technical problem to be solved by getting to grips with the details. Certainly, it explains Starmer’s embrace of our system of rule-by-committee. The relevant stakeholders shall be consulted.

But politics is not the equivalent of watchmaking, tinkering with the nuts and bolts of a complex machine until it ticks soundly. Rather, it is a never-ending process of managing and choosing between conflicting interests. There are (or were) people around Starmer who clearly understand this. Morgan McSweeney, for one, was fully plugged into the weird Matrix of Labour factionalism, with all its competing visions of Britain and the world. Here’s another irony, as Starmer’s aides pushed hard for Mandelson as an appointee. Whatever the Prime Minister’s own commitments to post-ideological technocracy, the people around him knew Mandelson represented a kind of politics that they themselves were invested in — the world of Cool Britannia, liberal globalization, and the transatlantic alliance.

Those two currents — the stakeholder state and the hard-nosed politicking — have long been in tension. On the one hand, after all, New Labour created for itself a kind of diffuse parallel state of arms-length bodies, expert appointees and independent regulators, neutral in theory but which nonetheless reshaped the constitution. The “old Labour” view of meddling, top-down governance would give way to a new understanding of power. “New public management theory” introduced marketization and competition into the public sector. New committees and modern bureaucracies proliferated to oversee the shift. But while ministerial authority was dispersed across this new quangocracy, Blair himself attempted to circumvent the unwieldy machine with his adoption of “sofa government”. He ceded power with one hand, and tried to grab it back with the other.

Starmer has fallen into the same trap. His instinctive legalism holds international law and an activist judiciary as superior to every state on Earth; the law must protect the individual from the unseemly power of the demos. It’s notable, here, that the Prime Minister’s whole professional life — he entered No. 10 at 61 — was spent defending the victims of government overreach. The professional-managerial classes that he represents so vividly are the very administrators of the contemporary, post-Blairite public sector, the very civil servants that may have waved Mandelson through and ruined Starmer for good.

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One of Starmer’s supposed selling points was his experience running public prosecutions at the head of a major public body. This was the serious Roundhead to Boris Johnson’s clownish Cavalier. And yet his grip on power is as elusive as everyone since Blair. The Prime Minister is unable to live up to his promise of delivering easy efficiency through the Whitehall networks. “Mission Units” have been set up, then scrapped. Every new season seems to come with a relaunch focused on a “delivery phase” that never quite arrives.

Here, again, is another irony. For it was the PM himself who last year told the Liaison Committee of his frustration that “every time I go to pull a lever”, the machinery of government is so clogged and sclerotic that “the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”. This is an interpretation of the British state’s cumbersome, bloated nature that’s equivalent to the common spectacle of Conservatives bemoaning the dire state of public services — as if they themselves weren’t responsible.

Even so, even after almost three decades of the quangocracy, these latest revelations have the power to amaze. Defenders of Robbins have emerged to say that it is routine for ministers not to be told of the outcome of deep vetting. Permanent secretaries — the most senior civil servants — can, apparently, overrule vetting advice without the knowledge of secretaries of state or MPs. This suggests a level of dysfunction in the relationship between elected politicians and the deep state that’ll shock most Britons, giving life to Dominic Cummings’s oft-repeated claim: the Government does not run the country.

Next week, meanwhile, Robbins may address the Foreign Affairs Committee investigating the scandal. In other words, this chapter is by no means closed. Bad news, of course, for Starmer — but also his successor. For prime ministers will continue to be hoisted by their own administrative petards until they tackle a central issue of our time: the diffusion of state capacity across the bureaucracy. The spectacle of political leaders claiming impotence in the face of the state apparatus is deadly to democracy, and reversing the trend requires a reassertion of real executive and ministerial authority, to say nothing of a fundamental change in the mindset of a political class that would likely interpret such a development as an authoritarian power grab. On the contrary, it would constitute a return of the political to domains that have for too long remained in a technocratic abyss.

That’s for the future. For now, Labour MPs watch on in grim resignation. Yet there is no alternative: a Blairite health secretary with an ultra-thin majority representing clean-shaven Davos Labour, tainted both by Mandelson and by the fact that he’s disliked by the membership; a more plausible King of the North, but stuck sulking outside of Parliament; a less plausible Angela Rayner, who struggles to convince colleagues that she wouldn’t represent a serious liability in the highest of offices.

And so the Starmer era totters on. Perhaps until May, when a local election disaster awaits his hollowed-out party, or until the clamor from senior ministers reaches a crescendo, as MPs recall their fragile majorities. Until then, Starmer lurches from scandal to scandal, less the hapless child at the front of the DLR and more the passenger on a ghost train, careering wildly across the broken railroads of the British state.

In the wake of Brexit/Trump a wave of influencers (including me) theorized the end of liberalism, a retrenchment of globalization, and an insurgent, resurgent Right. With populist parties on the rise and rise across Europe and in the USA, and Orbán seemingly unstoppable in Hungary alongside (at that point) Poland’s conservative PiS government, all the cultural energy was bubbling up from this corner. It felt as though the pendulum had swung as far Left as it could, and was beginning its inexorable “RETVRN”.

Now, though, Orbán is out. Trump, meanwhile, has abandoned his campaign promise to end US interventionism in the Middle East. Forever wars are back; Hungary is “normalizing” relations with the EU. Is it over, then? Are we back in the End of History? Where does this leave the movement in which Orbán and Trump seemed such symbolic keystones? And where, in turn, does this leave Britain’s own would-be national populist insurgency?

The end of Orbán’s reign suggests there’s nothing inevitable about the ideological Right as it was envisaged by both proponents and opponents after Trump 1.0. But while Hillary Clinton is already gloating, this may be premature. I don’t think it follows from Orbán’s defeat that it’s just progressivism all the way now. Rather, the Hungarian turn against Orbán underlines the fact that structural factors driving so-called “national populism” have not gone away. And it underlines the fact that anyone who pledges to address those grievances, and fails to do so, will in time face the same anger. These things remain unchanged; what has altered, though, is something that should not elicit any gloating from the likes of Hillary. It does indicate a shift in for European populist movements: but less away from the Right, than away from America.

The picture was very different within the New Right that emerged following 2016. There, Orbánism served as a Rorschach test. His program rested on rejecting mass migration and LGBT activism in the teeth of pressure from Brussels and the international NGO class, all while seeking to incentivize pro-Christian Hungarian culture and family formation. The efficacy of the program itself was a mixed bag, but merely by pursuing it for 16 years Hungary came to occupy a dual role: both as a real place, with its own history, language, and local politics, and also an imaginary “place” in (heavily America-inflected) online political discourse.

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Viewed in meme terms, Orbánist Hungary symbolized, among Anglophone progressives and their Eurocrat friends, the threat of authoritarian nationalist backsliding. For their opponents, it was as a pocket of resistance to woke totalitarianism, like the Right-wing equivalent of Asterix’s village holding out against the Romans. In practical terms, Orbán cultivated the latter image as a source of soft power, often in English, via a network of publications, think-tanks and other institutions funded by the Fidesz party, that enabled Hungary to punch some way above its weight in New Right intellectual circles.

The vision on offer was of a kind of nationalist Internationale, envisaged as a mutually respectful world of center-right sovereign nations, with strong borders and greater space for ideological pluralism: a “Europe of nations” as fellow national populist Marine Le Pen put it. In tandem, the geographic Budapest became, especially during the Biden years, a kind of Casablanca for disaffected Right-wing intellectuals. This Anglophone community of conservative expats comprised, in a sense, the real-world manifestation of the Right-wing meme Hungary, superimposed on and only lightly embedded in Magyar-speaking Budapest and its domestic politics.

The first sign that the memes might not be realized with the force of historical inevitability came in 2023, with the electoral downfall of the “based” Visegrad regime in Poland, at the hands of a coalition led by Teflon Eurocrat Donald Tusk. But then came the re-election of Trump to the White House in 2024, celebrated at an inauguration attended by numerous international Right-wing leaders including Giorgia Meloni, Marion Maréchal, and Javier Milei.

JD Vance castigated European states at Munich last February, for too much immigration and not enough defense spending: in other words, not being nationally sovereign enough. In November, a new American National Security Strategy (NSS) stated that Trump’s USA would support a vision of Europe as “a group of aligned sovereign nations”: the very vision promoted by Europopulists such as France’s Rassemblement National and Germany’s AfD. Had the hour of the nationalist Internationale come, at last?

Well. If Trump’s friends overseas hoped for a less globalizing America, and a US foreign policy keen to foster a Europe of nations, what they got was the monkey’s paw curling. Trump 2.0 has, to date, comprised such disorienting moves as punitive tariffs aimed — he says — at improving America’s relative position, but imposed every which way including upon putative allies. It’s included demands to annex Greenland from fellow Nato member Denmark, accompanied by some startlingly abrasive rhetoric. Latterly it’s included bombing Iran, in a joint operation with Israel, a move that has spiked energy costs in Europe, and been condemned by numerous European states, not to mention the Vatican.

Taken together, the impression is definitely of a less multilateralist USA. But if it’s increased European enthusiasm for more defense spending and sovereignty, it’s also scuppered the cozy vision of a nationalist Internationale — especially one led by a Trumpist USA. Indeed, Trump’s actions to date have rendered him so wildly unpopular across Europe that the surest way for the USA to lend support to a European populist party now would probably be encouraging King Don to say rude things about them on Truth Social.

These parties seem, themselves, to have recognized this, and are taking steps to disavow any electorally toxic association with Trump. RN and AfD have both spoken out recently against him. Even Nigel Farage, grinningly photographed in 2016 in the gilded Trump Tower elevator, has begun to distance himself, as have other supporters of Brexit.

But none of this tells us anything about the structural issues that drove those populist movements in the first place: immigration, living standards, and energy policy. This trifecta of wicked problems is so intertwined that it can appear as though solving any one of them will make another one worse. Some variant or other of this three-legged stool of populist disaffection can be seen across Europe, and none of these challenges have gone away just because Viktor Orbán became too firmly linked in Hungarian voters’ minds with crony capitalism and a pedophile cover-up.

Indeed Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, is hardly a squashy progressive. Himself a former Fidesz member, his campaign promises on immigration were even more restrictionist than Orbán’s. Meanwhile, Europe overall may be coming round to a more Hungarian stance on borders: recently it transpired that Brussels is exploring “Rwanda-style” offshore processing for asylum claims. So it may turn out, in the end, that Orbánism wasn’t so much defeated by the EU as assimilated into its program.

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What is perhaps changing, though, is the perception among European Right-wingers of America’s role in these dramas. There’s long been a tradition on the European hard Right of hostility to the USA. For example, The American Malady, the “Nouvelle Droite” theorist Alain de Benoist paints America not as the savior of European civilization, as the NSS would have it, but rather as the force threatening it with extinction. Back in the heady days of Trump 1.0, arguments such as de Benoist’s seemed mad. Now, though, the transatlantic relationship is — if not exactly hostile — certainly warier. Shortly before the election in Hungary, Vance traveled to Budapest to address a rally there, in support of Orbán’s re-election. But it’s far from clear whether, at this point, an American endorsement would have been any kind of help.

What, if anything, can Britain’s insurgent Right-wingers learn from these developments? Well, first of all that the nationalist Internationale was perhaps always a contradiction in terms. Trump’s erratic second term has comprehensively and (I suspect) permanently shattered what remained of international faith in American global leadership. This includes the Hillary/USAID version, yes, but it also extends to the New Right version that imagined the USA “preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity to foster aligned conservative regimes internationally”.

My sense is that this is what Péter Magyar is responding to, in Hungary: a cold assessment that Hungary, historically a small state trapped between competing empires, needs to adjust its alignment. Whether or not it’s what he ends up delivering, what he offered voters was broadly the same conservative program as Orbán, but with less cronyism. And, importantly, more deliberate distance from a USA that appears to have set aside any aspiration to serve as moral exemplar, and is now, like China, simply a superpower pursuing its own interests.

Any national-populist government coming to power in Britain will need to make a similar assessment: taking cold-eyed stock of our country’s actual clout, and interests, and re-learning the art of statecraft based on these factors, rather than on sentiment or ideology. But any government offering solutions will also need to be frank about the trade-offs. Anyone who promises everything but fails to deliver, or just delivers more of the same plus some dank memes, will eventually face the kind of electoral anger that eventually turned on Orbán, and may turn on Trump.

As it stands, the hour for us is late. Britain hovers increasingly uncomfortably between the EU, the USA, and the Commonwealth, all of which now ask competing things of us. Our renewable energy aspirations, meanwhile, are unnervingly dependent on China. Our energy prices are some of the highest in the developed world. The cost of living is soaring yet again, thanks to Trump’s Iran war. Our welfare spending is unsustainable, our military is laughable, and despite all this Labour is putting asylum housing contracts out to tender that reach into the 2030s.

Sorry, Hillary: populism isn’t going away, because the problems causing it aren’t going away. What might be going away, though, is the short-lived dream of an America-led solution.

There are complications of course. Starmer has framed the visit as a careful balancing act, insisting there are “opportunities” for economic benefit, but that this “does not mean compromising on national security”. The third, unstated element in the equation is that any new arrangements with China must not offend Britain’s primary patron, the thin-skinned and capricious President of the United States. Donald Trump recently threatened Canada with swingeing tariffs after its own prime minister, Mark Carney, declared a “strategic partnership” with China. A similar reaction would be unwelcome for Starmer, who unlike Carney has staked his authority on his ability to appease Trump.

The Chinese leadership will no doubt reward Starmer’s deference with a token pledge of investment, perhaps a greater one than the paltry £600 million which Chancellor Rachel Reeves secured on her trip last year. But China neither wants nor needs British goods and services on any meaningful scale. It has two basic goals in Britain, and they are to ensure a growing market for its enormous surplus of manufactured goods, and to leverage its economic power to disrupt the American-led Western alliance system. It is on its way to achieving both aims without needing to offer any special inducements.

A country like Britain can only negotiate with China if it can plausibly threaten to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains and technology. Instead, under successive governments but especially under this one, Britain has shut down its industrial base and pursued policies which have pushed up the cost of living, stoking demand for cheap imports. China cannot prise Britain away from the United States, which is still the guarantor of British security, but it can slowly raise the cost of supporting the US where Chinese interests are at stake, and in a crisis, threaten to cripple the British economy. What is more, Starmer remains idealistically committed to a system of international law which Beijing is slowly bending towards its own ends. Even if Britain is the last nation to abandon America’s old global order, it can become a member of China’s new one long before that. The two are already overlapping.

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None of this means that Starmer is wrong to reboot relations with China. The diplomatic “deep freeze” of recent years was the result of contingent circumstances which the march of history has already left behind. Starting in 2015, David Cameron and George Osborne launched an ill-timed strategy to deepen ties with China, touting the City of London as a putative gateway to the Western financial system. That plan was complicated by Brexit and the realization that Chinese tech posed a threat to critical infrastructure. As American antagonism towards China hardened, Britain’s leaders prioritized fealty to the US. Then came Hong Kong, Covid, and Ukraine. During the Johnson and Sunak years, as the extent of Chinese espionage efforts in Britain became more difficult to ignore, the government’s China policy seemed to be largely dictated by a desire not to appear weak in front of hawkish backbenchers.

The problem is that, despite the British media’s strange habit of equating diplomacy with surrender, the country does not gain anything by keeping these channels closed. None of Britain’s key partners in security and intelligence have cut themselves off from Beijing to the same extent. Not Australia, despite its bitter disputes with China; and not even the US, which, for all the rhetoric of decoupling, remains firmly integrated with the Chinese economy at every level, from major tech companies like Apple and Tesla to the financial managers at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, China continues to assume an increasingly dominant position in the global economy. As Kyle Chan has written, the era when China needed technology transfers from the West is over, and the flow of knowledge is now going into reverse. Western companies are buying access to China’s expertise in everything from electric vehicles and robotics to pharmaceuticals and even artificial intelligence; Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta recently acquired the Chinese AI startup Manus. China maintains a firm grip on the raw materials which underpin advanced technologies, as it demonstrated last year by using its chokehold on critical minerals to repulse Trump’s tariffs. Many British companies manufacture their products in Chinese factories, and the two countries have a strong partnership in scientific research.

Britain’s economic prospects therefore depend on its commercial relations with China as much as with the United States. Indeed, I’ve heard from businesspeople who much prefer working with Chinese counterparts than American ones that the former are more inclined to seek long-term relationships based on mutual benefit, while the latter, much like their property developer President, tend to see business as a zero-sum contest.

The problem, then, is not that Britain is engaging with China, but that it is doing so from a position of weakness and apparent desperation. Bowing to Chinese demands for a strategically located London embassy, and undermining the prosecution of two alleged spies, were the acts of an auditioning vassal rather than a sovereign partner. More importantly, a reliance on Chinese imports is increasingly baked into Britain’s economic model. Whereas most comparable countries are wary of China’s aggressive trade practices, Britain embraces them.

Since 2020, the Chinese leadership has pursued a strategy of dual circulation, meaning that it seeks maximum self-reliance in meeting its domestic needs, while also producing an enormous surplus of goods to export overseas. This is partly an expression of China’s own weaknesses: its society is submerged in debt, its once mighty property sector is bust, and its state does not want to undergo the painful readjustment that is required before its own consumers can grow the economy through spending. So it needs the world to continue buying its products in ever-larger quantities. But this model also serves to enhance China’s political power over other nations. Just as it uses investment and loans to gain influence over poor countries, it uses cheap exports, which are subsidized by the state, to undercut producers in richer ones, leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Labour’s agenda has made Britain a willing accomplice in this strategy. A combination of wage increases and taxes on business has kept inflation high, putting upward pressure on both the cost of living and interest rates. This is a politically toxic situation for the government, and Chinese imports are an obvious solution, as a Bank of England official recently stated. Another Labour priority, Ed Miliband’s rush to bring down British carbon emissions, has similar implications. Not only does it rely on Chinese solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries; it is also accelerating the demise of British industry through high energy costs and regulations. Much of that production will relocate to China. Hence Britain’s imports from China grew by 6% last year; the roads are filling with “Temu Range Rovers” — as the Jaecoo 7 SUV is sometimes called — while Britain’s domestic car production has fallen to its lowest level since the Fifties; and David Lammy has celebrated a British company investing £800 million in a new plastics plant in Zhejiang, even as Britain’s own chemicals industry is collapsing.

Britain may be one of China’s more accommodating trade partners, but the EU, for all its clout on paper, faces a similar dilemma. Visiting China in December, French president Emmanuel Macron said of the trade relationship that “these imbalances are becoming unbearable”. The EU has tried to use tariffs to resist a glut of Chinese electric vehicles entering its market, but China has retaliated by targeting European agriculture and luxury goods, and it still has the ability to withhold critical resources from Europe as it did from the US. Germany is now hemorrhaging industrial capacity to China, and cannot intervene because it also needs access to the Chinese market. As in Britain, European governments presiding over febrile societies will not risk an inflationary shock caused by a disruption of trade with China.

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There is an argument that Britain should simply write off the loss of its remaining industrial base and free itself to gorge on Chinese imports, thereby helping to raise its living standards. In fact, to a large extent this is already happening. But the lesson of China’s rise is that, while such tradeoffs can be beneficial in the short term, they will, in time, become dependencies to be exploited. The much vaunted rules-based order that Trump is now dismantling was not only a framework of American hegemony; it was a scaffolding that China ascended by treating every economic relationship as a vehicle for its political objectives. For the most part, Beijing’s coercive trade tactics have been much more subtle than Trump’s tariff blitzes, but not always. Mongolia, Australia and Lithuania have all suffered naked blackmail from China, due to their stances on the Dalai Lama, the origins of Covid, and Taiwan, respectively. The anti-coercion measures that the EU is now threatening to use against Trump were developed in response to China’s treatment of Lithuania.

The same instrumental approach can be seen in Beijing’s new Global Governance Initiative, announced in September, which advances a Chinese-led world order in the guise of a more democratic and equitable “global community” adhering to international law. This continues a longstanding Chinese campaign to expand its influence over international institutions. It is an unfortunate irony for Britain that Starmer, who would in many ways be at home in the Chinese Communist Party, given his preference for technocratic solutions and skill at operating his party’s machinery against his rivals, does not show the same ruthless nous in the international domain. Instead, he cleaves with an almost touching faith to the sanctity of rules and procedures, apparently blind to the agendas they might serve.

There is a possible future in which some of the nations trapped between the US and China finally make good their fantasies of “strategic autonomy”, radically changing their spending priorities and building up a degree of independence in technology, industry and defense. This would probably be a world where Britain cooperates more closely with its European neighbors, as well as other allies such as Australia and Japan. It is far more likely, however, that Europe’s “middle powers” will become a complicated space where American and Chinese influence mingles and collides. Both superpowers will exercise control over Britain’s infrastructure and economy in different ways, and both will impose their own limits on British sovereignty. If that is the case, an important question for the country’s future will be whether the United States and China can coexist peacefully in contested lands like this.

But this is about more than internet virality. The displacement of “traditional” Left and Right politics by this louder, more polemical register reflects a reality no one wants to confront head-on: one that self-identified “Greens” used to talk about a great deal but have, under Yookay Mamdani, largely discarded. Namely: the prospect that never-ending growth might, one day, come to an end.

From the radicals of Deep Green Resistance to the less extremist small-farm advocacy of Chris Smaje, the post-growth economics of Tim Jackson or the “collapsonomics” of Dark Mountain, less optimistic environmental advocates always pointed the finger at growth itself, as the real villain of the story. For “degrowthers”, the natural order imposes its own, inherent limits — and these cannot, in the end, be evaded.

But at least, in Britain, degrowth isn’t a vague future threat. It’s a reality, some years in the rear-view mirror. In this unhappy context, Reform and the Greens are insurgent because they embody, respectively, Right- and Left-coded versions of the politics of scarcity. And if the erstwhile environmentalist party seems to be pivoting away from anything hitherto recognizable as environmentalism, this is for the same reason. The actual implications of degrowth are so horrible that even the erstwhile “green” party will do anything it can to keep the lights on a little longer, up to and including cannibalizing everything that’s still remotely green, or indeed pleasant, about the British Isles.

Much has been made of Reform snapping at Starmer’s heels, from the Right. Farage’s party’s membership now outstrips Labour’s: 268,000 to a plummeting Labour membership, now below 250,000. But if Labour are hated by the Right for over-taxing ordinary Brits while failing to protect the borders, They’re also hated from the Left for not taxing enough, and being too fashy about foreigners. Now, especially since the failure of Corbyn’s “Your Party”, Polanski is mopping up those who embrace this view: he’s taken his party membership from 123,000 to 180,000 members since October. News broke on Monday that five Labour councillors in Brent, a Labour heartland, have defected to the Green Party. His thing is working.

How, and why, are these populisms now so, well, popular? Internet virality is a factor: poor Keith-GPT just doesn’t have what it takes to cut through. For viral engagement, in an attention economy, you need something of the carnival barker. You have to be box office. But at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s also the economy, stupid.

As Johnny Ball recently noted, in Britain the economy has been flatlining for almost two decades. After the crash QE bailed out the banks and inflated the price of assets, while Osbornomics deliberately let real-terms wages stagnate. Living standards for normal people haven’t really grown since the crash. For many they have palpably declined. Over the same period, as angry young people often point out, the once-negligible earnings gap between Britain and America has grown into a chasm. The Poles who flocked here to arbitrage the wage differential between our country and theirs in the 00s are all flooding the other way, as their economy booms and ours circles the drain.

This is a problem. For everything from Britain’s housing market to the NHS is predicated on growth. What, then, happens when the music stops? Perhaps the most prescient allegory for this was the 1973 dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green. Set in the year 2022, it depicted a world where environmental catastrophe has wrecked the food supply; then, a new source of nutrition is created and distributed, called “Soylent Green”.

Over the course of the movie, the protagonist discovers that Soylent Green is produced by processing the corpses of humans killed via medically assisted suicide, into food for those still alive. It’s a potent metaphor for a society that no longer produces a surplus, and has resorted to maintaining the illusion of vitality by cannibalizing itself.

In Britain, this is already at least figuratively true. (If “Skeletor” Leadbeater gets her way, perhaps it might yet be literally so, as well.) Years of Osbornomic synthetic growth, juiced with financial QE, have been further eked out through what has recently been dubbed “human quantitative easing”: that is, wage suppression via mass low-skilled migration. This was, tacitly, embraced as bipartisan orthodoxy: after Brexit forced Johnson’s Tories to close the EU route for human QE, Johnson averted a painful correction by opening the Commonwealth spigot in its place.

Whatever you think of this decision, it was pragmatic. Britain is so addicted to the high-migration model that short of painful structural change, keeping the Ponzi scheme afloat means Britain really does, as the patrician Left is fond of asserting, “need migrants”. Never mind the sociocultural side-effects or long-term fiscal consequences: these are managed through censorship and two-tier policing, or are simply a problem for some unfortunate future PM.

We should understand Farage’s Reform, and Polanski’s Green Party, as respectively Right-and Left-coded responses to the resulting national tinderbox. I hardly need rehash the obvious link between economic decline, mass migration, and nativism, in driving support for Reform. But it’s perhaps less obvious that Polanski’s call both for increased inward migration and also higher public spending is a response to the same politics of scarcity.

Polanski gestures toward the same observable stagnation, in tirades against the British wealth gap. But he suggests it’s not migrants we should resent, but “the billionaires” who hoover up wealth and leave nothing for the rest. It’s a mistake to blame migrants for our economic woes, he declaimed to rapturous applause at the recent Green Party conference. What’s needed, instead, is what he calls a “politics of hope”.

That seems to mean increased legal pathways for inward migration, allowing asylum-seekers to work immediately, and a fiscal program shaped by modern monetary theory. This unorthodox banking theory argues that currency issuers (of which Britain is one) can’t default on government debt. Opponents retort that this approach creates asset bubbles, while any semblance of government control over inflation is illusory. But for MMT believers, the constraint isn’t debt but national productivity, and governments can and should spend more in order to stimulate productivity.

Put it all together, and you have a response to scarcity that’s coherent, on its own terms — but in a radically different way to that proposed by Farage. Reform’s politics of scarcity promises to save the day by stopping the boats, ending human QE, and restricting benefit entitlements to natives so we can afford to be generous to “our own”. However workable it is in practice, as a program it implies that we can sustain solidarity by narrowing its scope. By contrast, the Green politics of scarcity rests on the hope that we can increase the size of the pie without any need to set boundaries, variously through taking more money from the hated super-rich, plus assorted forms of jiggery-pokery including opening the borders and printing lots more money.

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Both the green and the turquoise versions of this politics of scarcity, in turn, appeal to different public sensibilities; in the vibes-based domain of online politics as self-expression, the Greens are now fittingly identified with “Santa” and Reform with “Scrooge”. But in different ways both gloss over inconvenient demographic challenges. Reform’s program proposes to address demographic change by narrowing the scope of welfare entitlement — but is, at best, hopeful on native population decline. An initiative to bring back British babies is, to say the least, not a short-term solution to a dwindling tax base, and welfare commitments heavily tilted toward pensioners. Conversely, the inflate-everything approach by the Greens has little to say about the already-palpable rise in inter-ethnic hostilities as a consequence of mass migration, save bromides about “hate”, “division”, and those naughty Billionaires.

Nor is this Green program particularly environmentalist. In a recent interview, Polanski remarked blithely that a mere 5% of Britain is built on and hence we can take loads more migrants. Lovers of British biodiversity may wish to look elsewhere for a party likely to represent ecological conservation. For Polanski’s Soylent Green Party, biodiversity is fair game for obliteration, if it keeps growth looking growthy.

The same goes for the issue that’s been the most visceral flashpoint between the old, limits-to-growth Green sensibility and the new Soylent Green one: gender ideology. Trans activism has, in recent years, driven the expulsion from the party of swathes of older Green stalwarts. And this makes sense, when you consider that this cohort was, and often still is, more likely to remember a time when environmentalists believed the core ecocidal issue is a refusal to countenance natural limits.

Greens of this subtype tend to be skeptical of gender ideology, viewing human sex dimorphism as an instance of such limits. By contrast, trans activism is premised on a categorical denial that such limits exist: it is, at heart, a Promethean vision, in which humans can literally be anything we want, given enough technology. The same attitude at scale dismisses the notion of ecological limits; allied to climate concern, it produces “ecomodernists” who see the solution to ecological crisis as pursuing more and better technology.

For this faction, the way forward might be geoengineering, or gene-editing humans, or feeding an ever-growing urban high-rise population with mold grown in vats. Should all else fail and temperatures go on rising, we can jam the whole planetary population into the world’s temperate zones, and somehow persuade everyone not to dissolve into tribal warfare.

This is the “green” paradigm that has now claimed Polanski’s Green Party. It rejects the critique of growth, in favor of every imaginable kind of quantitative easing, and assumes we can solve any problems which arise through more and better technology. Given the party’s authoritarian internal approach to the trans debate, we may reasonably wonder if “technology” would simply mean authoritarian crushing of dissent. If so, that would make Polanski’s Greens everything the Faragist end of the electorate already loathes about Starmer’s Labour party, but on globalist steroids and intentionally without any limiting Principle.

Is there any way out of the self-cannibalizing predicament that produces two such unappealing political programs? I do not know. But if we fail to find one, our choice will be one or the other of these approaches to scarcity: deflationary nativism plus authoritarianism at the borders, or inflationary borderlessness plus authoritarian management of the resulting tribal conflicts.

It is, in other words, a contest over which bit of the dead status quo becomes our Soylent Green. Do we husband scarce resources by grinding up our memories of a Britain that was generous, internationally through foreign aid and domestically through welfare? Or do we pursue growth by shoving the country’s demographic makeup in the blender? Either way, sustaining the social contract means destroying the social contract.

Perhaps it’s for the best, then, that all the anti-growth green doomers were marginalized, by the insurgent Soylent Green Party. No one wants to think about the possibility that they might have been right, about the end of growth. Not even as all of politics is consumed by the question of how — or if — we can live together in its aftermath.

You might think, then, that the best place for a writer to be is as far inside the language he is using as possible. But that’s not really true. The writer needs to feel language like a second skin, but if he pushes this too far, it will end up feeling more like a set of old clothes — too familiar to engage attention. If he’s too much on the outside of a language, by contrast, he will know its grammar and vocabulary, but not its rhythms, tones and textures. And so writers must be constantly engaged in a double act — they must pay attention to language, but also to the world it registers.

The playwright Tom Stoppard occupied that most privileged of vantage-points, being simultaneously inside and outside of a language. He inhabited English more fully and deeply than almost any of his artistic compatriots, partly because he came to it as an émigré. For the expatriate, language can never be taken for granted and Stoppard never lost a sense of its freshness and strangeness. He occupied this inside/outside position in his life as well as his art: lionized by the Establishment but never quite at home there. Those on the outside can sometimes see more than the insiders, and often in a satirical light, but as Oscar Wilde discovered, they may have to pay a high price for doing so.

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Wilde could never quite decide whether he wanted to join the English aristocracy or to put a bomb beneath the lot of them. Stoppard, who dined with Margaret Thatcher and rode to hounds, seems to have been plagued by no such dual alliance. But it does invade the language of his drama, as language is at once a taken-for-granted medium and an object on which loving care is to be lavished. Much English theater is marked by this ambivalence. One of the nation’s best-loved comedies, for example, is Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, which concerns the trouble which ensues when a couple of gallants mistake a private house for an inn. In a sense, Goldsmith himself was similarly confused, treating the public space of Britain as though it were his home, which it wasn’t (he came from County Kildare and studied in Dublin). And there were times when Samuel Johnson’s group, of which Goldsmith was a member, made his alien status abundantly clear to him. It’s hard, though, to see how “English” stage comedy would have survived without Irish immigrants: Richard Steele, Thomas Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan… All of these men lived at the conjuncture between two cultures, allowing one to show up the strangeness of the other — and something of the same can be said to a limited extent of Stoppard.

The outsider or semi-outsider is always tempted to outdo the insiders at their own game, which is no doubt one reason why Tom Stoppard enjoyed a spot of grouse-shooting. This simultaneous baiting and imitating of the insiders was also true of Wilde, who was an English aristocrat in the way that only a non-English non-aristocrat can be. For him, imitation was both flattery and mockery. He acted himself far better than anyone else could have done, and, like Stoppard, frequented many a country house party, even though he believed that Ireland should rule over Britain and not vice versa. Joseph Conrad fled from revolutionary upheaval in his native Poland, rather as Stoppard was the child of parents in flight from the Nazis, and ended up as a sailor in the British merchant navy. One consequence of this transition was to remold him as a highly conservative pseudo-Englishman, patriotic and patriarchal, plus Anglais que les Anglais.

The same was true of TS Eliot, who was born in Missouri and became a Tory Anglo-Catholic in England. Eliot remarked of his fellow American, Henry James, that he was a European in the way that only a non-European could be, which also applies to Eliot. All these writers brought to a highly insular United Kingdom a range of experience to which it had been largely closed, and went on to produce major art on this basis. It’s one of the few forms of immigration of which the British have approved, though there are doubtless those among them who regret the fact that we outsourced our art to a bunch of foreigners for whom free verse is perilously close to free love. Other outsiders, notably James Joyce, passed disdainfully over the UK and headed straight for Paris. Authors such as Stoppard, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul belong to the tail-end of this tradition. If you hail from somewhere beyond Britain yet make a significant contribution to its cultural life, you’re as much in line for a knighthood as an MP who has served his time on all the right committees.

Tom Stoppard was no Anglo-Catholic Tory, though, but a mainstream, middle-class liberal. This was the social world in which he moved, which makes for a tedium far removed from the flair and brio of his plays. It was where he was most utterly unoriginal. He cherished the usual middle-class liberal pieties and was much exercised by the issue of freedom and censorship, though not conspicuously by such questions as poverty, unemployment and exploitation. There’s always something a little self-serving about artists championing freedom of speech. It’s a vastly important matter, to be sure, but one might be rather more persuaded of the fact if some of those who advocate it also turned their attention to political questions less bound up with their own lives. Stoppard had some urgent comments to make about political freedom, but none which we hadn’t heard before.

There’s one way, however, in which he flouted liberal pieties without anyone really noticing. He first came to fame with the magnificent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which one of the jokes is that the eponymous characters are impossible to tell apart. This isn’t supposed to happen in British theater, preoccupied as it is by “character”. You have to have rich, complex, well-rounded, highly individuated characters if you’re to end up outside Buckingham Palace shyly displaying your gong. Aristotle, however, didn’t agree. In his view, what mattered in the theater was the dramatic action, on which, so he claims, character is a kind of “coloring”. No gong for him, then. He can even, he tells us, imagine a drama without any characters at all, a fantasy which Samuel Beckett would later put into practice.

Stoppard also transgressed the conventions of British theater with his passionate interest in ideas. The British don’t much care for ideas, which like cheese and wine are largely the product of freedom-loving foreigners — and which might encourage people to think in ways which end up endangering the stock market. They enjoy biography instead, since it’s more “human” to hear about what a great sculptor had for breakfast than to indulge in a lot of fancy aesthetic talk about their art. Stoppard’s Arcadia pushes against this prejudice as obstinately as it can — though I’ve seen members of the audience shaking their heads in bemusement. There are also times, however, when the humor and wordplay defuse the power of the ideas, rendering them more consumable. Like all good liberals, Stoppard knew when not to go too far.

Stoppard’s work is celebrated for its wit — a form of humor which it seems you don’t have to work at, and which is, therefore, more appropriate to the English gentleman than the honest bourgeoise. It can be a form of frivolity, but one that redeems itself from the merely vacuous by its agility of mind. It can be funny and coruscatingly intelligent; it can convert the serious into the sportive, but it can also be stinging, rapier-like, combining style and poise with a devious form of aggression. The gag, by contrast, is more impersonal, more capable of being passed from hand to hand and less expressive of a unique individual. We relish witticisms partly because they jolt us into thought, but also because they seem apposite, spot-on, hitting off a truth at a single casual stroke. Wit is the enemy of sentiment and empathy, laced with a hard-boiled quality which puts it a long way from the tear and the twinkle. Gags or jokes are sporadic events — but the wit or dandy is never off-duty. Their permanent mild amusement is possessed by those remote from the grind and rigor of this world, an everyday form of art admired for its well-crafted form as well as for its scintillating insight.

Aristotle speaks of the “great-spirited man”, by which he means not a hero but an individual whose life has gone supremely well. Virtue for Aristotle is a kind of success — not just success in the way Jack Nicolson might understand it (though Aristotle thought it included getting one’s hands on the best theater tickets), but also in the sense of having enjoyably fulfilled one’s powers and capacities. From the outside, this would seem true of Tom Stoppard. Yet all authentic achievement probably draws at some deep level on damage, anxiety and failure, so it’s fitting that the final work of this superbly accomplished artist should be Leopoldstadt, in which he poignantly explores his own Jewish origins. Not to know for sure whether you are a Jew — it is a hesitation between identity and non-identity which today’s so-called identity politics surely needs to confront.

While Putin has not yet achieved the fast-moving operational breakthrough that has eluded him since the war’s first hours, the acceleration of Ukraine’s territorial losses on the eastern and southern sectors of its frontline paint a grim picture of the coming months. Now the situation is such that, as America’s army secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly told his Ukrainian counterparts last week, Kyiv’s military position can only worsen, and Moscow’s can only improve. America’s skepticism of Ukraine’s chances is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: in these circumstances, it is hard to argue against Driscoll’s reported warning to Kyiv that “you are losing… and you need to accept the deal”.

The war’s outcome will now be decided by Russia and the United States, over the heads of both Ukraine and Europe. If this is a defeat for the European Atlanticists who are most determinedly hawkish against Moscow, it is also the end result of the worldview they embody. So enmeshed are European nations within America’s defense structures, that it is impossible for Europe to sustain a major war without US support: and which only a fool could now believe is guaranteed. The Ukraine war was an opportunity for Europe’s leaders to radically transform our continent’s security framework towards a vision of strategic autonomy — in which, by taking responsibility for our own defense, we Europeans could assert our own interests and shape our own futures. Yet as the Russia analyst Jade McGlynn, a Ukraine hawk, observes: Europe “has chosen paralysis while others determine the fate of our continent” — a fate which is “the product of decisions not taken, responsibilities avoided, and illusions clung to for too long”, not least the “bizarre teleological liberalism that sees liberal democracy as somehow feted to win out according to the laws of history”.

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Putin is facing his Waterloo

By Aris Roussinos

As the war’s early days revealed, Putin is no strategic genius. But with Europe’s current leadership, he does not need to be. If it is Emmanuel Macron’s tragedy to be a great man of history, trapped in the role of a 21st-century European leader, it is our far greater misfortune to be ruled by his peers. Europe failed at the historic task with which it was presented, settling back into its comfort zone of demanding a satisfactory outcome to the war it is not in a position to impose. Veering between a hawkishness that it cannot sustain — see Kaja Kallas this week demanding Russia’s demilitarization — and humiliating tributary missions to our Washington overlord which reflect our true situation, Europe’s bellicose rhetoric on the Ukraine war has become increasingly detached from reality.

The simple facts of the matter are that the United States, on whom Europe’s defense depends, is keener to end the war than Russia, which scents total military victory. Ukraine’s overriding interest, in preserving the Kyiv government’s independence from Moscow, increasingly diverges from Europe’s, which is for the Ukrainian armed forces to distract and degrade Russia’s military power long enough for Europe to effectively re-arm, or for some, so far unknown, deus ex machina appear to resolve the situation in a satisfactory manner. From its earlier heady expectations of total victory, and resultant disastrous overreach, Kyiv must now find a path to negotiating the least painful defeat the circumstances offer: Europe’s political discourse is yet to catch up with this harsh reality.

Yet even still, for Britain, losing a proxy war is a better outcome than losing a war in which we are ourselves engaged. Due to the Army’s prolonged mismanagement, Britain cannot field artillery or air defense to speak of. Nor can it cobble together the armored brigade that is its Nato responsibility, nor sustain the munitions expenditure of a high-intensity war for more than a few days. The next prime minister will find themself at the helm of a country that has simultaneously enmeshed itself to an alarming degree in a losing war while bulldozing, through sheer incompetence, its own ability to field an army. Having entirely failed to rebuild its deterrent power in the nearly four years since the beginning of the greatest land war in Europe since 1945, it would take great optimism in Whitehall’s wisdom and ability to assume that matters would suddenly improve if Britain were itself forced to fight. This is not a reassuring position to be in, and Washington enforcing a peace settlement that extracts us from this worrying bind should be accepted, even if its terms are no cause for celebration.

Yet dragging Britain’s political class to hard reality is not an easy task. Though no doubt well-meaning, the pundit hawkishness that undermined previous attempts at peace negotiations has not served Ukraine well. It would have been better for Ukraine, and Europe, to have negotiated peace from a position of relative advantage, as the country possessed in 2022 or 2023. Yet those chances were squandered, with those urging negotiations condemned as Putinist appeasers by a commentariat which apparently believed that Ukraine was destined to liberate Crimea, topple Putin, and carve Russia into a constellation of weak ethnic statelets. Discounting the possibility of Zack Polanski hypnotizing Putin into shrinking his munitions stockpiles, we are perhaps fortunate that the likeliest next prime minister will be either Nigel Farage, leading a Reform government with a mandate for total change, or an intervening Labour reformer. Shabana Mahmood has already set out her stall as a purveyor of uncomfortable truths and hard-nosed realism, while another likely contender for a Labour coup, the defence secretary John Healey, possesses the credibility to recalibrate Britain’s rhetoric to its diminished capability.

Britain’s next leader will be forced by events to construct a new and cautious vision for British security managing four separate poles: the United States, whose will and ability to defend Europe is clearly waning; Europe itself, which has proved itself disunited and incapable of sustained and concerted action; Russia, whose assertive foreign policy will have been bloodily vindicated by the war’s conclusion; and the greatest industrial power in world history, China.

In our current circumstances of military and economic weakness, and near-revolutionary domestic political discontent, a continuation of Britain’s hawkish stance on world affairs is simply not viable. Even if an interventionist foreign policy were wise — which it is not — or electorally popular — which it is not — it is simply now beyond our ability. It is unfortunate, then, that in his choice of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society’s Alan Mendoza as foreign policy adviser, Farage has settled on an advocate of total, ideological war against rivals great and small at which even Washington balks. It is, indeed, worryingly plausible that the domestic demands of neutering claims that he is a Russian asset, a Brexit-era liberal fantasy entirely downstream of the Clinton campaign’s Russiagate conspiracy theory, will force Farage into reckless hawkishness to win the approval of the commentariat which will never come.

If Ukraine manages to retain its functional independence from Russia, obtain meaningful security guarantees from the United States, and join the European Union, then the cession of territory it currently does not hold and will not soon recapture is hardly the worst outcome. Certainly, it is a better than the looming loss of territory currently in its possession, and an even worse peace deal in the future. The Trump administration, proposing lucrative joint economic projects with Moscow, openly covets a stable future diplomatic relationship with Russia. Whether this is feasible may be doubtful, but so is Europe’s current stance of simultaneous subordination to the former and hostility just short of open war with the latter.

Like Ukraine, Europe and Britain are forced by military and political disadvantage to take their orders from their imperial patron: America has decided that the war must end, and is now persuading Russia to agree. If this damages European pride, then it should: the continent will now pay the price for the weakness our leaders chose for us. Absorbing a bruised and shell-shocked postwar Ukraine, whose economy has been wrecked, a quarter of whose population has already fled to the EU into European political structures will be a generational challenge in itself. So, too, will be stemming the illicit westward flow of weapons, once the shooting stops.

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Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for a peace deal has already passed. If the war is over by Christmas, it will be a miracle. Yet its likely unsatisfactory conclusion, and the narrow escape it may grant us from a far worse outcome, require a measure of sober reflection alien to Westminster’s political culture. The Ukrainians, rightly, now place little faith in Europe’s empty assurances. As Zelensky this week warned his nation, “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter.” If only our own leaders were so frank with us. Britain’s rivals are growing in power, and our allies are demonstrably unreliable: yet as the Commons Defense Select Committee warned this week, Britain’s ability to defend even the homeland itself is doubtful in the extreme. Farage is perhaps fortunate that the burden of defeat will fall on a Labour prime minister, and that Reform’s foreign policy is so far little more than an empty page on a website: with his current foreign policy adviser, it is better that this is remains so. Losing a war is, historically, one of the greatest spurs to serious projects of national reform. In preparing for government, Farage must make use of what may only be a lull in hostilities to chart a swift and viable path towards guaranteeing the nation’s basic security, and ensuring that Britain is never again left so dangerously exposed between its commitments and its capabilities.

Zarah Sultana, co-founder alongside Jeremy Corbyn of Your Party, seems to have taken this history to heart. A “fascist” threat, she says, is “growling at the door”. But the real venom is reserved for enemies and rivals on the Left, with the Green Party coming in for particular ire. The traditional standard-bearers for environmental politics are not sufficiently “anti-Zionist”, says the Coventry South MP: they support boycotts and sanctions against Israel, but not, as Sultana does, a complete cut of diplomatic ties. What’s more, she adds, they’re not a “class-based” socialist party.

It’s difficult to know whether Sultana is aware that her own “class base” is an incredibly niche subset of post-graduate activists, plus an ageing cohort of hard-Left retirees who still define their politics according to categories dreamt up in Bolshevik Russia around the death of Lenin. Indeed, to bolster her already-weak position in a party struggling even before its founding conference plumps on a name, Sultana is actively courting the extremities of British Trotskyism, adopting a series of maximalist positions couched in Marxian language. Forget Israel — we should also leave Nato. Nor is nationalising a few industries enough; true socialism would require “the fucking lot”, the whole “means of production” tout court. Sultana has also emphasised her rhetorical commitment to a “member-led democracy”, which would allow all manner of malcontents to exercise their influence over Your Party. Despite the ultra-democratic promises to leave policy to members, she has been content to pre-define Your Party’s politics on the hoof, recently chucking “climate reparations” for Jamaica into the mix. This, she contends, is just the start of a “10, 20, 30-year project” to “run government”.

As a result of these statements, a coterie of bizarre political groupings has flocked to Sultana’s embattled wing of Your Party: the Socialist Worker Party; the Socialist Party; the Revolutionary Communist Party; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21). Each presents their own idiosyncratic and fantastical vision of leading a proletarian revolution. This is all while a real revolution of the actually-existing working class takes place in provincial, post-industrial Britain, where “C2DE” voters flock to Nigel Farage. In this context, the inter-party warfare that has broken out on the Left, and indeed the conflicts inside Your Party between Corbyn and Sultana, feel like fiddling while progressive Britain burns.

Sultana entered parliament at the 2019 election, at the age of 26, and was immediately spoken of as a future standard bearer of the Left, just as Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott approached their twilight years. She has been encouraged in this view by her husband, Craig Lloyd, a former trade-union official who, according to several sources I spoke to, has taken to telling anyone who’ll listen that he’ll eventually become general secretary of Your Party, storming the complacent establishment alongside his co-leader wife. This is in spite of Lloyd having no senior management experience in any of his previous professional positions. No matter: the pair are modelling themselves as the Left’s new power couple — British socialism’s answer to the Clintons.

After Corbynism as an organised political force was swept away by Boris Johnson’s brief experiment with Brexity, big-tent Tory populism, the recriminations began almost immediately, with the defeated Left soon resembling rats in a sack. Within the simple “Corbynite” masthead sat a messy mixture of competing ideological strands: old-school trade unionists grappled for dominance with the traditional hard-Left, while a younger crowd of Millennial socialists, steeped in the language of online progressivism, attempted to build something they called a “social movement” — pointedly not a traditional political party — from below. Sultana, a young, dynamic, non-white woman, exhibiting all the radical, aggressive certainty of any good student union-dweller, was perhaps the best-placed talisman of that latter tendency. Rather than the antiquated politics of 20th-century socialism, all brass bands and closed factories, this youthful contingent would push for Green New Deals, Universal Basic Income, four-day weeks and “fully-automated luxury communism”.

In the early 2020s, that crowd became synonymous with the increasingly dogmatic and pernickety assertions of identity politics and cancel culture, earning them a reputation for political pedantry and humourlessness on an epic scale. A case in point is Sultana’s broadsides against a cartoonist for depicting her on a box of raisins (the same newspaper spent years depicting David Cameron as a human condom and George Osborne as his pliant gimp).

This particular brand of progressivism was a departure from the Old Left’s, but, under Labour’s ossified structures, a semblance of unity between the more orthodox and more experimental groupings was possible. Now that these structures have gone, Corbyn himself has demonstrated neither the communicative abilities nor the political dexterity to join these competing factions together.

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Keir Starmer’s authoritarian approach to party management has therefore birthed a monster, his wave of suspensions and expulsions repeatedly splitting Labour’s formerly broad church. Like a North London Stalin, he has enforced an iron discipline on the emasculated Corbynite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, removing the whip for the most minor of infractions. When it became clear that Sultana was unlikely to be readmitted after her suspension for voting against the two-child benefit cap, rumours of the founding of an alternative picked up pace. For readers unfamiliar with Sultana’s role in Your Party’s chaotic foundation, and indeed with the surreal, schismatic culture of the British hard-Left in general, the story of internecine factionalism hits first as tragedy then as farce.

In an attempt to bounce the perennially dithering Corbyn into announcing her in a leadership role, Sultana announced the party’s launch without the agreement of her fellow organisers. She then did something similar for Your Party’s membership portal. This second action triggered civil war within Your Party, as well as legal squabbling over the future of the substantial monies collected on Sultana’s watch. A truce, of sorts, has now been tentatively agreed.

Either way, Your Party’s descent into Leftist self-parody has destroyed Sultana’s reputation, confirming her as a serious liability. The general public sees Your Party as po-faced, hectoring, lacking in self-awareness and obsessed with arcane minutiae; Sultana certainly seems determined to prove them right. And yet despite repeated setbacks, she retains the confident air of someone convinced that her substantial social-media following, shadowed by that growing Trotskyist fan club, will be enough to retain the backing of comrades eyeing Zack Polanski’s Greens with envy.

There’s an extent to which our cynical, fractious politics might suit the abrasive invective of tubthumpers like Sultana. But that righteous anger needs to be accompanied by a positive emollience, a self-deprecation, a relatability — none of which are present in the beleaguered parliamentarian. There’s an ironic air to a figure like Lee Anderson or even Farage himself. Everything is said with a nudge and a wink; they’re their own best satirists, inviting you to laugh alongside them. In contrast, the Left’s default tone is bitter rage and oblique, holier-than-thou screeds against anyone and everyone. With honourable expectations, they exude ideological zealotry.

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“The revolution”, said a condemned Georges Danton in revolutionary France, will “like Saturn, devour its children”. And so it goes again. Sultana will likely lose Your Party’s ongoing factional struggle — unlike Corbyn, she lacks a solid base in her constituency, and unlike the pro-Gaza independents, she lacks the grassroots voter networks, built through local mosques and community groups, that propelled four MPs to the Commons last year. Her TikTok game won’t be enough to defeat the phalanx of battle-hardened, former trade-union organisers stacked up behind her prime rival.

If she is ousted from the upper echelons of Your Party’s structures, Sultana might be tempted to try her luck with the Greens. But would Polanski ever give prominence to someone who has demonstrated only an aptitude for scorched-earth politics, and who has shown repeatedly that being queen of the Leftist graveyard will always take precedence over the collective reputation of the labour movement? Indeed if Sultana’s uncompromising approach to politics has to an extent proved useful in making a name for herself — notwithstanding her attacks against her own colleagues for their views on transgenderism — it’s increasingly clear that it’s little help when it comes to the painstaking but necessary work of coalition-building. Even critics who may otherwise back Sultana, but increasingly feel that broad Left unity is required to combat Reform, are condemned for “middle-class entitlement” and using “angry/irrational brown woman tropes”.

When the Comintern eventually abandoned their “class-against-class” line in 1933, they performed a speedy about-turn, calling for “Popular Fronts” with liberals and social democrats to defeat fascism. Hitler had assumed the Chancellery. Rearmament was underway. It was too late. The damage had been done by years of over-enthusiastic sectarianism. Despite Sultana’s protestations, Reform are not a “fascist” threat. But the fragmentation on a Left obliviously revelling in its own demise will presage Britain’s own shift to the Right. As ever, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

The oligarch was on the run from British justice after being accused of one of the biggest frauds in history. He had fled Kazakhstan in 2009 after being accused of embezzling £3.2 billion from the BTA bank. The loot was hidden in an estimated 1,000 offshore companies and bank accounts of which he was a beneficiary. He arrived in London and spent the money on PR consultants, lawyers, lobbyists, and properties. He bought a nine-bedroom, £17-million mansion on Bishops Avenue, Hampstead, which included a Turkish bath with room for 12, as well as an apartment in Albert Court, Kensington, and a 100-acre estate on the edge of Windsor Great Park.

Eventually the law enforcement authorities caught up with him. He was convicted in 2012 in Britain’s High Court of lying under oath about his assets, forging documents and in contempt of court. “It is difficult to imagine a party to commercial litigation who has acted with more cynicism, opportunism and deviousness towards court orders than Mr Ablyazov,” declared Lord Justice Kay. His contempt offenses were “so serious that nothing less than a prison sentence is appropriate”, said Mr Justice Teare.

An arrest warrant was issued in Britain against Ablyazov, who was sentenced to 22 months in jail. But for the past 13 years he has evaded British justice and been hiding in plain sight in France, where he moves between rented chateaux in Aix-en-Provence and seafront villas in Nice. And yet the UK has refused to extradite him.

The case against Ablyazov remains the biggest civil fraud case in British legal history. It is a cautionary tale about how the UK remains a haven for foreign tycoons, dictators and oligarchs who exploit our compliant judiciary and complacent police and crown prosecution service. While the UK has sanctioned 1,807 individuals in response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, foreign kleptocrats remain unscathed and hide in London knowing the authorities are a soft touch. The UK is their destination of choice to stash their cash and manage their assets. Secret files leaked from the US Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network named more UK companies facilitating the laundering of dirty money than any other country in the world.

In exile in France, Ablyazov portrays himself as a dissident unfairly pursued by the authoritarian Kazakh regime. But behind his carefully crafted mask lies a calculating oligarch who has exploited the supine French judiciary and the gullibility of the European Parliament.

In 2013, French police arrested Ablyazov on the French Riviera, after he was traced there by private detectives working for the company Diligence. The arrest started a 10-year campaign to extradite the oligarch so he would face justice.

Eventually, in October 2020, Ablyazov was charged in Paris with money laundering and embezzling $7.5 billion. Three years later, the court ordered him to leave France within one month. However, Ablyazov’s lawyers appealed every court ruling and the oligarch was allowed to remain in France.

Only one French politician, Senator Nathalie Goulet, spoke up. In April 2024, she asked for the treaty for mutual legal assistance on criminal cases between France and Kazakhstan to be ratified. This would mean extradition requests like Ablyazov’s case would be implemented. But nothing occurred and, earlier this year, the Paris Court of Appeal annulled the embezzlement charges against Ablyazov and ruled that French courts lacked jurisdiction to enforce extradition. It was a legal victory for the oligarch. This ruling turned on a single legal point: the proceedings against Ablyazov were deemed driven by a political motive, disguised as criminal charges.

Today, Ablyazov is no longer under judicial supervision. The money-laundering charges have been dropped and he remains at liberty. Senator Goulet is outraged. “How can a convicted fraudster stripped of his refugee status still reside on French soil?” she declared.

Why has France protected the oligarch for so long? And why has the UK not sought his extradition? One reason is his use of the European Parliament to launder his reputation; another is the lack of cooperation between the UK and European law enforcement agencies.

Ablyazov has assiduously courted European politicians to promote his defense that the fraud allegations are politically motivated because he was an opponent of the Kazakhstan regime. One of his most active supporters was the MEP Antonio Panzeri, who was recently jailed for corruption, and who worked closely with the Brussels-based Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), an NGO which campaigns against human rights abuses. The MEP hosted events and acted as a de facto lobbyist for Ablyazov. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Ablyazov, the NGO remains a staunch supporter of the oligarch. “ODF has included Ablyazov within our advocacy of defending thousands of victims of political persecution in Kazakhstan,” a spokesperson told UnHerd.

Ablyazov claims the fraud allegations are “the culmination of the campaign by former President Nazarbayev and his allies to wrest ownership and control of BTA bank” from himself. “In Kazakhstan the assets of wealthy individuals such as myself are subject to the threat of unlawful seizure by the authorities,” he said in a witness statement. “This leads to an almost universal practice among high-net-worth Kazakhs of holding our assets through nominees, both corporate and individual.” But BTA bank say they obtained evidence that revealed how billions of pounds were transferred to thousands of offshore companies of which Ablyazov was the beneficiary.

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Ablyazov’s lawyers say he fled London because of “a death threat” and was “constantly in fear of his life” due to the presence of Kazakh intelligence agents. These claims are uncannily similar to the protests of the late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who also fled to London after being accused of fraud. Interestingly, UnHerd can reveal, Ablyazov and Berezovsky met secretly in London between 2009 and 2012.

There is no doubt Ablyazov has been under surveillance by private investigators hired by the Kazakh government. When he lived on Bishops Avenue, operatives were positioned at both ends of the street. “We followed him from his house to his office in the City and at night to casinos,” said one driver. In response the oligarch hired his own counter-surveillance team. “I saw the spies around me and so I hired a group to counter what the spies were doing,” he said.

In 2013, investigators were authorized by the Kazakh authorities to raid a house in Rome inhabited by Ablyazov and his family. The oligarch was in France but his wife and six-year-old daughter were escorted by Kazakh diplomats onto a private plane and flown to Kazakhstan. The Italian authorities were outraged. A criminal case for kidnapping was filed and the Kazakhs were forced to fly the pair back to Italy where they were granted asylum.

Today, political factors continue to influence the courts in France. A source close to BTA Bank told UnHerd that Russia had successfully applied for Ablyazov to be extradited to Moscow because he had hidden assets at Vitino port near Murmansk and a property near Moscow station. The French judges agreed and ratified the application. But then French politicians intervened and stopped the extradition.

The UK remains just as complacent. Despite Ablyazov’s conviction for contempt of court, the prosecuting authorities have been remarkably negligent. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) reviewed the evidence and refused to act. In 2019, after the second arrest warrant was issued, the UK National Crime Agency had access to all the files but declined to investigate because of “insufficient resources”.

The following year lawyers from Hogan Lovells, representing BTA Bank, held several private meetings with CPS officials. They lobbied for the convicted fraudster to be extradited. But the CPS responded the oligarch was protected by a legal loophole: in France it is not a criminal offense to lie to the courts and so he could not be extradited back to London. The CPS declined to comment on why the UK has not extradited Ablyazov. “Our policy is we neither confirm or deny proceedings relating to extradition,” said one spokesperson.

Today, Ablyazov’s name is on a watch list at airports and ports in the UK. But without political and diplomatic will in the UK, it is unlikely that one of the biggest fraudsters of all time will ever be extradited back to London and brought to justice.

From Downton to Bridgerton to Saltburn, aristos continue to hog our screens, big and small. But as a class they have been in visible decline. The Whigs — those original wokes — delivered the early blows, repealing the Corn Laws and widening the franchise. Then came the fin-de-siècle pounding: Harcourt’s death duties of 1894, which were the first serious taxes on the rich; by 1946, they had reached a respectable 75%

The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed à la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks.

By the Seventies, their kind were truly on the back foot. The V&A’s doleful 1974 exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House”, invited the public to mourn the plight of the poor aristos. It opened in December, just two months after miners had kicked out Edward Heath, the only instance in postwar European history where working-class muscle toppled a ruling party.

To be sure, there were holdouts. American nouveaux riches came galloping to the rescue of cash-strapped British anciens pauvres through canny marriages. The aristocracy itself was padded out with parvenus: the infamous “beerage” of nouveau peers who had merely brewed enough pints or befriended the PM to warrant their elevation.

Some piles these days host festivals. Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, for instance, was until recently the unlikely home of the psychedelic trance festival Noisily. Then we have the aristocratic rhotacists who stwuggle with their Rs flogging themselves on YouTube, the likes of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who scrape a living from posting lifestyle videos for the gawping pleasure of the lower orders.

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The contemporary trend is less marriage than outright sale. Highland acres have been snapped up wholesale by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish fashion billionaire who is now Scotland’s largest landowner. Meanwhile a great many native landlords, far from being wellie-wearing custodians of tradition, have abandoned their home. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, sniggered at English girls as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne” before decamping to France for a dissipated life. Many of his peers now live off private wealth management funds on the Riviera.

But for most aristos, the decline has been grim. Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, a modern history of the aristocracy, is a surprisingly candid and stylish peek into that well-heeled world; surprising because her acknowledgements brim with such reassuringly posh names as Lady Celestria Hales, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Thomas van Straubenzee, not to mention her throwaway reassurance that she has one foot firmly anchored in the clubs of St James’s. Still, she lapses into a certain breathlessness at times, succumbing to titular gewgaws: “Though we are friends on Facebook, I cannot help but always call him Lord Derby.” But then, this is the sort of book where Stuart Hall denotes not the founder of the New Left Review but a country pile of that name in County Tyrone.

Doughty parades before us the symptoms of decline: braces of yachts sold, Van Dyck rooms denuded of Van Dycks, visiting grandees of yore replaced by wide-eyed day-trippers with lanyards. One architectural historian noted a Lazarus-like lady of the house who, unable to afford maids, “exuded a sour smell of unwashed clothes” — a mephitic reversal of the old order, where aristocrats wrinkled their noses at the poor.

Worse than the stench, it seems, is their boorishness. Freed from pecuniary cares, one might have expected these families to take up learning or cultivate a little sprezzatura. Instead, they plodded into finance, ignorant of their own collections. Henry Somerset, showing guests his Canalettos, could only remark they were “very like the house”. The decimation of foxes was the only pursuit that quickened his pulse.

The decline in servants worsened things. The half century on either side of the First World War coincided with rising wages. Thousands of footmen and scullery maids took city jobs, leaving aristocrats to fend for themselves. Suddenly Job was less the Old Testament character than a métier one might be forced into. The Earl of Arundel became an insurance salesman after a stint as a Formula 3 driver, Baron Milne a chair-caner, Baron Kenilworth a horticulturist, and the son of the second Viscount Monckton — what else? — a monk. Baron Teviot found a job behind the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s before becoming a bus driver. Baron Feversham, for his sins, made porn flicks.

Contact with commoners no doubt proved salutary for these men. For, by and large, the non-working aristocracy has remained insulated from shifts in social attitudes. Indeed, they have effectively sat out the 20th century as if in a time-warp, clinging to arch-conservatism even as the lower orders have embraced progressive ideas. It is no accident, then, that the Lords has always lagged a generation behind the Commons. Women peers only arrived in 1958, amid spluttering opposition from the 28-year-old Earl Ferrers, who moaned: “Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to ‘the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor?’ I find that a horrifying thought.”

On divorce, too, they trailed behind popular sentiment, sneering long after the rest of the country had stopped caring. There were, it is true, emancipated outliers. Mollie Buccleuch, known as “Midnight Moll”, maintained a sprightly reputation for seduction well into senescence. The 7th Marquess of Bath lived as a polyamorist with 74 “wifelets” while remaining married. But such figures were the exception, not the rule.

Throughout the 20th century, many made a show of ordinariness — roast beef on Sundays, cottage pie on Mondays — in stabs of working-class cosplay that conveniently ignored their own preference for endogamy. Eton in the Seventies could still field classes with two earls and a viscount; another student recalled classmates named Guinness, Charrington, Whitbread, and Worthington: “it made me drunk just to look at them.”

To be fair, there were aristos like Tony Benn, who disclaimed his title, and the red toff Wogan Philipps, the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to sit in the Lords. But such class traitors were rare. The majority clung to their exclusivity. At their most accommodating, the Bolshie levellers among them go no further than insisting their tenants address them by their Christian names.

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Britain's new Class War

By Terry Eagleton

Aristocratic decline has been good for us proles. Many of its ranks happily disposed of their white elephants to the National Trust, which has done noble work rescuing crumbling porticos and pergolas — though its deferential tone still grates on the average republican who visits such establishments for reasons of architectural interest rather than to admire aristocratic twee. Much of the art was absorbed by our national collections, with Kenneth Clark, the soi-disant socialist director of the National Gallery, astutely scooping up treasures for the people. Back in 1873, a land survey revealed that 710 people owned 80% of this isle. This vampiric monopoly, the statesman John Bright complained in 1871, had “divorced the English from the soil”. It is no bad thing that the monopoly was smashed, clearing space for hoi polloi. Home ownership increased from 10 to 70% in the 20th century.

And yet, for all the decline, the aristocracy persists. Doughty reminds us there are still 796 families with hereditary titles. They hold some 3.2 million acres — three-quarters the size of Wales — and remain, as the great political theorist Tom Nairn insisted, not so much a quaint relic as an active abetter of our “national backwardness”, impeding our progress toward a truly classless society. Even Ken Livingstone, that tribune of municipal socialism, Nairn lamented, was prone to going moist-eyed before the queen in his lime-green hat sporting wobbling baubles — making him resemble “some form of royal bird-scarer”, as The Times conjectured.

Pace Bagehot, Nairn argued, Britain is not a “disguised republic” with its real rulers the modernizing commoners and the ancient nobodies merely for show. Republics are built upon equality among the orders. This has never been the case in Britain. As Nairn puts it: “No amount of fulmination about the immorality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: the aristocracy is an expression of mass conservatism… People enjoy the monarchical twaddle, and show very little sign of being robotized or brainwashed.” The upshot is continued deference to nobs. The sort of people who fly into a rage when a lumpenproletarian type jumps a Tube turnstile will in the same breath wax rhapsodic about Elizabeth Windsor: yes ma’am; thank you for your service; three bags full, ma’am.

This rings true. The British working classes have never despised the aristocrats as their continental counterparts did. Here, as in sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent, deference to bigwigs remains the default mode. Britain’s peculiar solidarity is inverted: high and low are united in despising the middle — with its associations of thrift and moderation, education and culture, museums and literature, its self-preening moral seriousness and pseudo-high-mindedness, dedication to an assortment of causes, disdain for such vices as whoring and heroin. As the working-class comedian Billy Connolly put it: “The serious upper class, the proper bigshots, they’re all nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts as well and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.”

It’s fun to épater la bourgeoisie, no doubt, but the worldview has consequences. Britain today suffers the highest homelessness rates in the Western world, the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and a public realm in visible decrepitude — drafty homes, leaky plumbing, collapsing trains, a health service on life support. We tolerate this partly because our culture still whispers that some are born to better things. The cult of the aristocracy, and its royal apex, supplies the nation with a pensée unique: a defense of hierarchy, inequality, and indeed decline.

With our love of twee, pomp, and ceremony, we are an anachronistic society, much like the fictional Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As Nairn puts it, we live in Ukania — a broken, fractured society held together only by the weak glue of monarchic attachment. Britain’s regions and nations are bound with a royal tint of Ruritanian nostalgia, its protocols and etiquette: misty-eyed guff about past glory, Second World War memorabilia, and endless “yes, ma’ams”. Nations are usually built on a sense of comradeship. Not so in Britain, where a surrogate nationalism has formed around the enchantments of the aristocracy and the Crown — around the “glamour of backwardness”. The Windsor-worshipping queues during Truss’s brief tenure made this plain. It is hard to escape the conclusion that our fascination with the aristocracy has reduced us to a nation of groveling gimps.

A strong case could be made that children’s literature, which by virtue of its audience often sheds the self-consciousness affecting many British writers, fits the bill perfectly: for what is childhood other than a lost and half-remembered homeland? An inward-looking British nationalism would owe more to the world of Brambly Hedge than the Lusiads or Kalevela: yet even Tolkien’s modern-day national epic, a conscious imitation of European nationalist myths, was explicitly written for children. Even the Edwardian high-summer whimsy of The Wind in the Willows is suddenly interrupted, in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” sequence, by a mystical, neo-pagan reverence for the spirits of the land. Tapping into the deeper wellsprings of cultural consciousness, children’s writing perhaps reveals hidden potentialities for such a project.

If we accept this thesis, then a suitable candidate, I would suggest, for such nationalist myth-making would be the postwar writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels, most of them ostensibly written for children, on Roman Britain and its violent collapse. For as Sutcliff remarked to an American audience, gathered to celebrate her work, “Children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes, which they can receive and make use of better than most adults can.” Last year’s 70th anniversary of her most famous novel, that staple of the pre-Blair primary school library The Eagle of the Ninth, saw a modest flurry of appreciative retrospectives. Yet The Eagle, though her breakout book, is not representative of her mature body of work (which, by the way, offers passages of fine writing, particularly terse and beautiful nature-writing, far beyond that currently marketed towards adults). The Eagle is, essentially, a Kipling novel, directly influenced by her literary Sussex neighbor in space, if not time: indeed Puck of Pook’s Hill was Sutcliff’s childhood favorite.

The Eagle’s lead character, a young Roman officer, disguises himself as a native in a Boy’s Own adventure of self-discovery, leading him across the rainy Northwest Frontier to live among Pictland’s untamed frontier tribes, in their smoky mountain huts bedecked in the savage brilliance of “colorful native rugs”. The native tribes, driven to fury by “their holy men” to wage war against “the unbelievers” are, with great difficulty, outwitted by the decent, sensible young Roman subaltern, who then retires, like a good servant of the Raj, to live the quiet life of a Sussex country gentleman on his army pension. An obvious post-imperial novel, though perhaps not fully consciously, The Eagle is most interesting in establishing the mythic framework, and much of the anthropological quality, of her later, more morally and politically complex novels set within the context of the great Saxon migration — we might call it the Vortigernwave — that would carve an England from the land of the unwilling Britons.

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Ultimately, though, Sutcliff’s reputation ought to rest on her great adult Arthurian novel, Sword at Sunset, written in a period of what she described as trancelike “possession”. With the medieval Matter of Britain as her subject, Sutcliff imagines a world where a society that once seemed enduring crumbles into disrepair. Yet the love of Britain, and its strange and ancient insular civilization, drives its hero to a fierce, if doomed, rearguard defense, “that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark”. Half-Roman and half-Briton — his battle cry is Yr Wydffa, the Welsh name for Snowdon whose official re-adoption is now resented by some Anglophones — her Artorius is torn between two worlds, that of Roman rationality and straight lines, and of native Celtic mysticism and curved and sinuous pattern-making.

This is a theme running throughout her books, in which the decent, sensible if officious Roman is an obvious stand-in for the modern Englishman, in a world where the Englishman’s actual ancestors are the wild invading barbarians. As she notes in the introduction to her children’s retelling of the Irish Ulster Cycle, “The Cuchulain Saga belongs to the Celts, the people of Ireland and Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, just as the story of Beowulf belongs to the Anglo-Saxons; that is very broadly speaking, to the English, and the Scottish Lowlanders. And neither Celt nor Saxon could have bred the other one’s story, for they belong to two quite different ways of thinking.” Fully adopting Matthew Arnold’s 19th-century distinction between the stolid, dependable Saxon, and the creative but erratic Celt, Sutcliff continues:

“However wild the happenings in the Saxon story, its feet remain firmly on the ground; and Beowulf and his companions are recognizably human beings grown to hero-size. But the Celtic tale leaps off into a world completely of the imagination, and the Red Branch Heroes have the blood of the Gods and the Fairy Kind (almost the same thing in Irish legend) running fiery in their veins. It is worth noticing this difference when reading either story, and remembering that in the main the people of Cuchulain and the people of Beowulf separately or mixed together are the stock that we in Britain are sprung from.”

A children’s writer today would not comfortably write the same thing, in the same way, yet a glance at Puffin novels of the Sixties and Seventies shows a world where the mythology of the British Isles, so bafflingly neglected today, was a common theme in postwar children’s writing. In other circumstances, we would term this, too, a kind of cultural nationalism: the creation of a shared corpus of myth spanning the British Isles, in which the Atlantic Archipelago, though at war with itself, is nevertheless a shared cultural unit.

For however distinct the Britons, or Picts, or Irish are in her novels, the Saxons or Romans are more different still: all the Celtic characters in her novels share a common religious and cultural worldview, and speak an apparently mutually intelligible language. Indeed, across her novels, Sutcliff creates her own pan-Isles vocabulary, gathered together from across dialects and eras with a brisk disregard for accuracy: a world of burns and bairns and kalegarths, where her British Celts say Sláinte as they down their anachronistic “fiery barley spirit”. Hibernicisms, of words and syntax, abound in her writing, whether justified by context or not: Sutcliff observed in her autobiography that her mother, of pure West Country extraction, would adopt a baffling Hiberno-English accent at moments of high emotion, “becoming Irish of the Irish. My father just used to wait patiently for the black mood to depart.”

From her Wessex mother, too, from a family devoted to the Raj and imperial service, Sutcliff claimed to derive a “residual trace of the second sight”. A believer in reincarnation, the increasingly physically disabled author, who chose to spend her life in the deep English countryside, overlaid her love for the land itself, for its “pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling”, with an awe-filled sense of its ancient, only partly buried power. Sutcliff’s Britain is an ancient, magical land, from which, at certain times and in certain remote places, great reserves of power can be summoned and drawn from. Magic may or may not be real — her rational, Romanized characters are ambivalent on the question — but, at times, it feels real enough to serve a political purpose.

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In just such a way, in Sword at Sunset, her Artorius, acclaimed as emperor within a circle of standing stones, “felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth…” Britain is, to Sutcliff as many others, an ancient insular civilization unto itself: few other writers capture so succinctly both the natural beauty and the sheer strangeness of Britain, the enchanted weirdness of it, waiting to be drawn upon in time of need.

Though bred in the threatened softness of southern England, Sutcliff’s Late Roman heroes retreat to the upland peripheries of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, and the bleak moorlands of today’s northern England in search of personal and national renewal. Behind them they leave the great cities of Rome’s once-glorious British civilization, falling into ruin and squalor as the invading Saxons settle them, now “half derelict, the frescoed plaster falling from the walls, the fine Purbeck marble cracked and damp-stained, the gilding blackened”. It is the world, returned to again and again in her novels, of the Saxon poem, “The Ruin”, though told from the perspective of the Romano-British refugee fleeing to the safety of the western hills, and not the squatting interloper. Abandoning the cities, now falling into danger and disrepair, her characters lament the transience of the world that bred them, even as they seek to make their final stand in Deep Britain.

This is precisely the process described by the scholar of cultural nationalism John Hutchinson when he observed that one product of nationalist revivalism, when viewed as a comparative type, “was the unexpected ‘discovery’ of remote areas of natural beauty, or of great cultural significance, that because of their ‘wildness’ and ‘hidden’ quality became mysterious reservoirs of the national spirit.” These wild and untouched peripheries, whether Finland’s lakes and forests or the bleak expanses of Connemara, “became ramparts of the nation to which groups, especially alienated urban educated middle classes, could turn to escape assimilation into foreign values and experience moral regeneration, thereby embedding themselves in the land. The defense of these regions from foreign cultural or political threat galvanized powerful nationalist movements.”

Sutcliff’s heroes, objectively British nationalists, represent one iteration of this ideological current. In today’s nascent British nationalist movement, if the oft-discussed “MythoYookay” X account represents Britain’s current, fallen state, then its counterbalancing ideological colleague is the MythoBritannia account, which centers on Britain’s dramatic landscapes, with an emphasis on the mystical and otherworldly — Glastonbury Tor, holy wells, the last surviving rainforests. The gentle downs and fields of southern England are less often invoked than the bleak and dramatic peaks and valleys of Britain’s highland peripheries: these are wild, untouched landscapes, which through their careful curation speak to a Britain older and more magical than England alone. Consciously in MythoBritannia’s case, and perhaps unconsciously in Sutcliff’s, this retreat to the peripheries represents a reservoir of cultural Britishness, directly analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th century, from which modern-day political strength can be drawn. Both invoke the spirits of a nation not dead but merely sleeping, ready to be summoned, like Arthur and his knights, in the trials ahead.

Sutcliff’s characters are victims of a once-proud imperial state that can no longer protect them, or their ancient way of life, in their own homeland. All is transience, and irreparable change, the unwanted result of political failure, experienced as a catastrophic loss. “When you thought about it, you realized that you were living in a world that might fall to pieces at any moment,” observes a character in The Lantern Bearers. “Rome is hollow rotten at the heart,” says the British warlord Carausius in The Silver Branch, “and one day she will come crashing down. A hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this was for ever; a hundred years hence — only the gods know… If I can make this one province strong — strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness.”

What did Sutcliff, with her claimed second sight, feverishly writing while “possessed” by something greater than herself, mean by returning again and again to this threatened, collapsing civilization, while writing in the very different circumstances of immediate postwar Britain? As she would herself say of Sword at Sunset’s Artorius to a later interviewer, “for me in a way he stands for Britain” at a time when “we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur ‘lights up’ the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.” Sutcliff’s late Roman world, in our increasingly contested transition from one kind of nation to quite another, is perhaps better suited to a 21st century adult audience than a postwar children’s one. Morally complex, startlingly violent, both elegiac and cynical, Sutcliff’s own writing represents a lost land in itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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