In a sense, that’s unsurprising. It may have been the brainchild of former prime minister Liz Truss, but the Conservative Political Action Conference is a fundamentally American import, and this week’s gathering in central London borrowed its presentation and language from MAGA and the US Christian Right. Thursday morning began with a prayer session led by Judd Saul, introduced over tannoy as “the founder of persecuted.com”, who bellowed at attendees still bleary-eyed from the previous night’s World Cup heartbreak that “the West has turned away from God.”

Subsequent speakers entered to booming beach-club music and flashing overhead lights. Former Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin started his speech by thanking Donald Trump and JD Vance “for calling out what is really happening in this country”. Jack Posobiec, an American Right-wing activist, claimed from the stage that “God has a plan for Donald Trump”, exhorting supporters to “restore God to the very core of Western civilization”. While “GB” might have been tacked on to the end, this was, in spirit if not in scale, CPAC for an American crowd. Attendees were as likely to have come from Palm Beach as Paddington, with US lobbyists enthusiastically discussing how they’d save Britain from destruction.

Amid it all was Truss herself who, having lost her seat at the general election two years ago, has reinvented herself as an American-style culture warrior, appearing at CPACs from Maryland to Texas. Yet whatever her own enthusiasms — she recently claimed Trump was “right about everything” — it’s safe to say that the former PM doesn’t command Don-level support. Among most Britons on the Right, she inspires not adulation but a kind of morbid curiosity, like a Victorian circus act which, in place of physical contortions, finds novel ways to blame the “deep state”.

At CPAC GB, Truss giddily addressed near-empty rooms in a hotel next to the O2 Arena, taking aim at the “socialists, Marxists, communists, whatever you want to call them, [who] want to destroy our country”. “It used to be honorable to love your country,” she continued. “Now it’s honorable to love illegal migrants.” Never quite shaking off her much-clipped 2014 “pork markets” speech, Truss still has a habit of shouting the wrong parts of her sentences and grinning at otherwise serious moments. After the “illegal migrants” quip, she took a moment to let the joke land, with the audience remaining largely uncooperative.

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That indifference is partly a function of how quickly politics now moves. Truss had already been replaced twice in Downing Street, and with a third new prime minister arriving on Monday, CPAC felt more and more like a sideshow, whatever her claims that Andy Burnham would be turfed out of office before 2029, another victim of “40 years of massive state failure”.

Of course, for 25 of those 40 failed years, including Truss’s 50-day tenure, the UK has been governed by the Conservative Party. This isn’t a chink in her argument but a central part of it. The party of which Truss is still a member has, she claimed, been “ideologically captured” by “DEI”. Other speakers agreed. According to CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp — the husband of the gloriously-named Mercedes Schlapp, a one-time Trump official who also spoke at the conference — the party “doesn’t deserve the label of ‘conservative’”. Given all this, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith appeared hopelessly out of place when he spoke about “post-Brexit regulatory reform”, his earnest suggestions mere filler before the juicy stuff on radical Leftist takeovers.

The Conservatives, then, had no place at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In fact, contempt for the Tories stretched almost as far as hatred of Keir Starmer, and warmer receptions were reserved for Reform UK politicians including Goodwin and Suella Braverman. Kemi Badenoch’s platform, in this telling, is part of the “uniparty”; Nigel Farage and crew are the insurgents who can reverse Britain’s decline. If there was one dominant theme of CPAC GB, it was the pitting of the Right against the liberal-progressive establishment.

This antagonism extended beyond the established political parties to the mainstream press. Truss described the BBC as “basically state-controlled media, churning out propaganda 24/7”. She called for a “parallel media” to battle the institutions, given that “a lot of the truth about what’s going on in Britain is suppressed.” Anyone liable to be brainwashed by Adolescence should instead “go on X” and “watch independent podcasts”. Truss suggested, cadging a phrase from the identitarian Left, that “they need to educate themselves.”

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In the event, her media enemies were largely absent. Reporters from national papers were in short supply, and the BBC nowhere to be seen. In their place was a new class of correspondent, the “citizen journalist” or “newsfluencer” — young, enterprising content creators on the political Right with names like BasednBougie. They stood a few feet apart from one another in a foyer outside the auditorium, armed with selfie sticks and mini tripod stands and portable lights, speaking into their phones as the remnants of a dying trade looked on. Young Bob, a rising online activist who turned 18 earlier this week, observed that the CPAC attendees “are quite old, and they’re the same old people who would consume anything the Right-wing gives.” He described himself not as an influencer but as “a random geezer on the internet”. The parallel media envisioned by Truss has already arrived.

Yet if CPAC GB is so in tune with this new information landscape, the question remained: where was everyone? In a conference room with roughly 500 seats, most sessions were well under half-full. Pricey tickets might have been a factor — the priciest ran at £10,000 —  giving proceedings the feel of a corporate function rather than a grassroots rally. Ditto the fact that the bulk of the conference took place during the working week. One attendee complained that it “felt more like an elitist Westminster networking event with flashing lights” and “very few ‘normal’ people”. A faultlessly polite American man in his twenties handed me a magazine whose cover piece was titled “Conspiracy for global control”. Other articles intriguingly pointed to the “Deep state behind the deep state” and “The conspiracy against God”.

There’s also the possibility that British conservatives are simply spoiled for choice on the jamboree front. CPAC is just one of a constellation of Right-leaning, acronymed conferences to emerge in Britain in recent years, from NatCon to PopCon to ARC — or, with its own blend of deafening entrance tracks and high camp, there’s always Reform’s annual party conference.

As the event progressed, Farage increasingly felt like the ghost of CPAC future. Each speaker, including ex-Cabinet ministers and former European presidents, felt small compared to him. Truss, too, seemed less stateswoman than compere, engaging foreign delegates in the intricacies of the Westminster swamp. As for attendees, they seemed bound by admiration for the man they universally called “Nigel”. He was booked to appear at 4:30 on Friday afternoon, almost exactly coinciding with the closure for nominations in next month’s Clacton by-election.

When the British Trump finally arrived, the auditorium, sparsely populated until that point, filled almost to capacity. Around two dozen Reform staffers patrolled the edges of the room, as mainstream journalists who’d studiously avoided covering the rest of Truss’s festival descended on Greenwich. An announcer welcomed the man who found himself on the wrong end of “a kangaroo court in Parliament” to a standing ovation several times the volume of anything Truss received.

Scrutiny over his finances has already produced a darker Nigel than the chirpy showman we’re used to; during a tense confrontation earlier this month, he accused Sky News of “harassing” his family, later posting online that its reporters were “liars”. Just as Truss did at CPAC, Farage has drawn a dividing line between the political establishment and pliant press on one side, and his own populist revolt on the other. Tensions have risen further following the killing of Reform spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe last week, with some CPAC speakers preparing for battle in response. “This,” Truss stated bluntly, “is a war”.

And, to an extent, Farage’s speech echoed the uncompromising tone that preceded him. Rather than a call for unity on the Right, or a broader celebration of conservative values, Farage delivered what could fairly be described as a Reform party political broadcast. “We are the dominant force on the Right of British politics,” he announced. “I don’t believe the last Conservative government can ever be forgiven.” More cheers from the crowd. Farage’s speech also came with a New World twang. Comparing his recent financial travails to the US President’s treatment by his political opponents, he claimed he had been “demonized” by the British establishment.

Yet where Truss and the visiting Americans had positioned the coming fight as rooted in Christianity and “Western values”, Farage’s focus was ultimately on Britain itself. He was angry that the UK was “a decade away from turning into a third-world country”, and insisted that “we are engaged in a battle for the very soul of our nation.” Burnham, for his part, was “utterly vacuous” — the “great chameleon of British politics”. Tonally, too, Farage was different. After two days of MAGA playacting, his speech was serious and statesmanlike. He set out a clearer vision of British conservative values than any of the America-brained attempts that came before, praising those “who actually believe in family, community and country, and decency and democracy and free speech, and putting the national interest first”. The rapturous response only drew greater contrast between his popularity and Truss’s.

When I emerged from the scrum which followed Farage’s speech, I saw representatives from the Conservative Party and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain in the crowd, as well as Ukip leader Nick Tenconi. The British Right had stayed away for most of CPAC GB, only to gather together for the leader whose celebrity has blocked out all other ideological challengers.

The foyer was almost deserted the next morning, the exhibition stalls for Christian charities and interventionist think tanks untroubled by visitors. We sat through more of Judd Saul’s prayers, and a fireside chat with the Schlapps — in which Mercedes said she’d cut her daughters out of her will if they “become crazy Leftists” — before Truss closed off the show. “Our country has been taken over by the progressive Blob,” she declared, in case we’d missed it. “And we’re only going to be able to fight back by building a movement.” The hall, though, remained largely empty, the real movement on the British Right having left with its leader the previous night. The British fightback may have begun, but Truss’s conservatism is stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Montenegro, a country of just 650,000, is unfamiliar to many Britons. Yet it’s an obvious choice for get-rich-quick and money-laundering schemes. I was once driven along the casino-studded Adriatic coastline by a former Montenegrin MP on his way to do penance at a monastery for his involvement in unspecified acts of immorality: he made no bones about describing his country, one of Europe’s poorest, as a “narco-state”. Since gaining independence from Serbia in 2006, the country has similarly been designated a “mafia state” and the “weak underbelly” of Europe, a loosely-policed entrepôt where luxury yachts ply the same coastline as smuggled cigarettes and shipments of cocaine stuffed in banana boxes.

The Balkans have long held a broader political fascination for the rising global Right. This relationship dates to the Nineties, when the region was wracked by what the radical Right perceived as civilizational clashes between Christians and Muslims. Today, a more populist Right is seeking to foster relationships across these sectarian divides, linking regional governments into a truly globalized network of crypto-fueled authoritarian strongmen.

Posh George himself moved to Montenegro after his release from US federal prison, having served eight months on major money-laundering charges. He was already the UKIP deputy treasurer after his arrest on his way back from attending the 2016 Republican National Convention alongside Farage, where the then-UKIP chief had spoken in support of Donald Trump. As we now know, Cottrell went on to funnel hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations and undeclared benefits to the man he calls “Daddy”.

Meanwhile, Posh George was also putting down roots on the Adriatic coast. As excellent investigative reporting has shown, Cottrell used his move to Montenegro to establish a network of companies and crypto projects registered in Tivat, a luxury holiday destination where super-yachts tower over terracotta houses along the Bay of Kotor. What’s more, Cottrell is only one of a number of Reform-linked figures to have links to Montenegro. According to the same investigation, Tivat hosts businesses belonging not only to Christopher Harborne — a crypto billionaire and source of a controversial £5 million ‘gift’ to Farage — but also several key figures in Farage’s former Brexit Party: Gawain Towler, Mehrtash A’zami, and Samee Bhatti.

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Though the issue is domestically contentious, successive Montenegrin administrations — both anti- and pro-EU — have sought to establish their country as a crypto haven, attracting figures such as the founder of leading crypto-currency Ethereum and the man behind a $40 billion ‘crypto crash’. Crypto also has a wide base of appeal throughout the Western Balkans, a region known for low trust in traditional finance, high bank fees, and endemic money-laundering. I’ve even met locals dreaming of establishing a crypto-fueled libertarian micro-nation in unclaimed ‘terra nullia’ left behind as the region was carved up following the collapse of Yugoslavia, an unrealized dream which speaks to the ideological linkage between crypto and the radical neo-Right.

There’s an obvious parallel to be drawn here with Trump’s relationship to Nayib Bukele, the El Salvadorian ruler who sought to turn the Central American country into a Bitcoin hub — while cracking down on domestic opposition and housing people deported from Trump’s US. It’s possible to imagine a similar relationship developing between pro-crypto Montenegrin premier Milojko Spajić and a future Farage-run Britain, with Montenegro perhaps offering to host deported asylum-seekers after the pattern of other Balkan countries seeking closer ties with their European partners. After all, Cottrell and his associates have been accused of illegally lending support to Spajić’s electoral campaign by providing political campaigning and strategy advice, an accusation he firmly denies.

Yet the British and global Right’s interest in the Balkans dates back beyond the crypto boom. With the collapse of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation, local strongmen colluded with foreign backers in both East and West to establish a fragmented mosaic of half-a-dozen ethnostates. These wars came to define the modern term “ethnic cleansing”, and culminated in the massacre of Muslim Bosniaks by ethnic Serbs at Srebrenica, Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War.

The Muslim Bosniak forces became a focal point for global Islamist networks, as thousands of mujahideen flocked to the fight and linked up with networks that would later bring militants from around the world to join other holy wars in Iraq and Syria. On the other side of the line, institutional and radical Right-wing figures back their Christian opponents across Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, similarly establishing networks that would underpin a generation of hard-Right militancy. One good example is John Kennedy, a Tory-turned-Brexit Party candidate who developed close links with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb politician convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Kennedy became a familiar face on TV, enthusiastically lobbying against the Muslim cause and disseminating what Bosnia’s de facto governor Paddy Ashdown frankly termed “bullshit”.

Though the days of open warfare are over, the fringe Right continues to view the Balkans as a training-ground and ideological frontline between Christendom and the Muslim hordes beyond. Jim Dowson, Britain’s “most influential” far-Right activist, has been implicated in providing financial, practical and media support to anti-Muslim groups in Serbia, the region’s largest Christian nation and which retains close ties to its smaller Montenegrin cousin. While the far-Right uses Serbian nationalism as a vehicle for its fantasies of race war, the populist Right movement developed more substantial links with neighboring Hungary under Viktor Orbán, on the basis of similar narratives of civilizational struggle at the frontiers of Christian Europe.

Not that the situation is so simple as a binary split between evil, Christian, Right-nationalist countries on the one hand, and liberal, pro-Western Muslim nations on the other. Rather, the region remains a battleground, one where Putin’s Russia and the European Union compete for influence, as when Russian intelligence officers allegedly attempted to carry out a pro-Moscow coup in Montenegro back in 2016. Canny local politicians profit from this fragile peace, keeping inter-ethnic tensions alive while presenting themselves as the only figures tough enough to keep the region’s criminality, ethnic conflicts and illegal migration under control — a phenomenon known as “stabilitocracy”.

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These figures can style themselves as nationalists or socialists, and be pro- or anti-Western, or more often a complex combination of the two. Montenegro is a case in point. Spajić’s centrist Europe Now! Movement (PES) heads an exceptionally broad coalition encompassing both pro-European and pro-Russian parties, even as it seeks to push ahead long-stalled EU accession processes while retaining his country’s historically close ties with Serbia, long seen as the bête noire of Brussels liberalism. And it’s this very pro-European party which is allegedly being backed not just by Cottrell, but also a number of other figures with links to the Brexit Party, with figures like Towler and Chris Bruni-Lowe allegedly devising PES’s electoral slogan and offering other advice.

The same seemingly contradictory dynamics are at play throughout the region. For example, another political controversy is boiling in traditionally pro-Western Albania, where the government has greenlit a Trump and Jared Kushner-backed mega-development set to concrete over a nature reserve, sparking the country’s largest protest movement for decades. Yet Kushner’s Affinity Partners firm also backed an equally controversial development in the Serbian capital Belgrade: in that case, building a luxury hotel on a site memorializing Nato attacks on the city. Here, then, are two governments at ideological and political loggerheads — yet happy to establish relationships with the global Right. In both cases, too, the powers-that-be were met with fierce domestic opposition, with locals tired of being shunted aside to make room for the mega-rich global Right.

The migration factor is also telling here. Farage has clashed with Albanian premier Edi Rama over illegal migration from the impoverished, Muslim-majority country, with the latter accusing Farage of touting false statistics over Albanian criminals in the UK and bizarrely sharing an AI-generated image of the two men wrapped in their national flags and sipping wine on an Albanian beach. Yet Rama has also colluded with Giorgia Meloni to tout his country as a potential holding pen for migrants deported from Italy. Forget Farage: even Keir Starmer sought similar arrangements, hoping to outsource Britain’s deportation centers to Albania, Serbia or Kosovo. At any rate, regional ethnic and political divides don’t neatly map onto global divisions. Rather, self-serving politicians of all stripes are united in their pursuit of lucrative relationships with the rising global Right.

In another light, then, the Right’s vision for Britain might offer a distorted reflection of the long-term prospects for Montenegro and its fellow Balkan nations. Like Montenegro, Britain will remain practically reliant on trade and migration flows with Europe to survive, even as it engages in its own hostile tussles with Brussels. But elites in both countries, each in their way at the edge of Europe, will also seek new relationships with the crypto-funded, globalized Right. Tightly-patrolled borders will combine with unregulated investment opportunities, as luxury developments jostle for space with offshore migration detention centers. From the Adriatic to Clacton-on-Sea, an international coterie of flashy Right-wingers will grow richer by the day, without offering local populations any substantial return on their promises of an alternative European order.

It was 2013, her first ever march. A few months before, she’d discovered Tommy Robinson on Facebook. A few months before that, Islamists had murdered Lee Rigby outside his barracks in Woolwich — and something happened to mum. An anger exploded, a flashpoint I couldn’t get my head round. Where did it come from? How did she go from a shy Cumbrian farm girl to a 60-year old gran marching with an EDL splinter group too Right-wing even for Robinson? “Sandy,” their leader Paul Pitt once told her at a protest in Rotherham, “You’ve got more balls than most men.” I mean, the man had a point. Sandra Wilding was feisty. She cared. She had always cared.

Mum had been a carer for over four decades. She’s cared for the elderly, for dementia sufferers and adults with complex needs. She’d been attacked; kicked, bitten, punched; had her hair yanked out, a sink thrown at her head. But she loved her clients and her clients loved her, clung to her warm, no-nonsense practicality as their own lives unraveled. They all knew if it came down to it, she’d have their backs. When an elderly client died, mum would gently wash and dress them in their favorite outfits, pick a flower from the garden and press it into their folded hands. “The least a body deserves,” she told me once.

People deserved dignity and respect, she believed. You didn’t abandon them. That word there — abandonment — was the key to understanding mum’s anger. It didn’t explode overnight. It took decades. Mum was one of eight, brought up on a farm in the Eden Valley in Cumbria, a lush agricultural valley that sits between the backbone of the Pennines and the messy jumble of the Lake District fells. Grandad was a farm laborer, on the bottom rung of the rural ladder. It was a hard life and the burden of eight kids and rural poverty eventually took its toll. Nana kept running away, leaving mum and grandad to hold the farm and the family together.

Rural poverty breeds a hard self-reliance, a sort of bootstrap fatalism where the political solidarity fostered in urban industrial England can feel like a world away. What use is collective bargaining against bad weather? The seasons don’t give a shit about solidarity. You survived alone against forces bigger than yourself. Winter was kept out with blankets stuffed under doors and draped across sofas. There was never enough money for food, but there was milk from the house cow, eggs from the chickens and always potatoes. When the flour ran out, mum would use animal feed from the mealhouse to make pastry. All that beef in the byre but none for the table. But you made do.

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Mum wasn’t political. Not at first. She spent much of the Seventies on the dole, bringing me up in and out of stormy marriages while working-class power crumbled under Thatcher. In 1985, she bought our council house through Right to Buy, but when we fell behind on payments, loan sharks circled and mum escaped by marrying a soldier who promised stability and security.

That’s when things started getting political. In 1993, mum and my siblings were posted to Lisanelly barracks in Omagh, while I stayed in England for university. One day outside the barracks, a group of men spotted mum’s British number plate as she was returning to camp. They started shouting abuse. She jumped out of her car to confront them as soldiers roared at her to get back inside. That was the moment she quickly realized she couldn’t come here and mind her own business. Her very existence was political.

Inside camp, she ran the barracks pub, watching young working-class lads coming back from close ops patrols with haunted, hunted looks. 1993 was one of the bloodiest years in the Troubles. Mum felt a maternal protectiveness and a defensive, brittle pride. It pulled everything into focus at once: her class, her Protestantism, her Britishness.

Twenty years later, when mum learned of Lee Rigby’s murder outside the gates of his barracks, it felt personal. Memories of Northern Ireland. Another young lad abandoned by the state he had served. But this time, to be hated in your own country. When Tommy Robinson said they’ll come for your daughters with grooming gangs and your sons with meat cleavers, it sent her marching over Tower Bridge singing “I am England till I die”.

London was just the start. Mum traveled to demos across the country: Rochdale, Luton, Bradford. Her fellow marchers wore “FCK ISIS” t-shirts and called each other patriots. She went to Rotherham twice, protesting the state’s handling of the grooming gangs and its abandonment of vulnerable white girls. But on her third visit to Rotherham, in 2015, she never made it into the town center. Police shut down the road until mum’s minibus was the only vehicle on it, boxed in by police cars. Every time her bus neared a slip road, another police car shot ahead to block them. “It was all a bit Benny Hill,” mum laughed. The whole operation had cost the police £750,000. “Don’t you think,” mum asked me later, that “money wasted on escorting a minibus of pensioners could have been better spent?”

At the time, I watched her drift into far-Right protest groups with a kind of shocked bemusement. I was a documentary TV producer, telling other people’s stories, while mum was out there on the streets. I watched her rage harden, her worldview reinforced with every news headline, every anti-fascist screaming in her face. Things got sticky when she started with the “Defund the BBC” posts. “Mum,” I asked her, “do you want me to be jobless?”

I also asked if sharing Facebook posts about Muslims was racist. “Islam isn’t a race!” she snapped back. When white supremacists chanted the notorious “14 words” under the white cliffs, at a protest she attended in Dover, I asked if she really believed it all. “Not everything,” she replied, losing the courage of her convictions. “But I do believe we will be a minority one day.”

A protest in 2016 helped me finally understand her sense of loss. Howe Barracks, on the edge of Canterbury, had been my family’s home in the Nineties, the first place mum and my siblings finally put down roots. It was a safe, close-knit community, filled with quiet cul-de-sacs and pretty gold-brick houses and cherry trees. Then came the cuts. The barracks was abandoned and left to rot. Now it would house London’s most vulnerable — migrant families — while locals missed out because social housing operated in a weird market economy where the richest councils could outbid for homes anywhere. So mum pinned her Union Jack on the chain-link fence outside her abandoned home, and raised her fingers in a “V for victory” salute at the local-news photographer. At the time, I was making a film about the housing crisis, and it felt like our universes had aligned. A few months later Brexit happened, much to half the country’s surprise. Not mine though. I knew mum.

Then, three years after that, Covid. I begged mum to quit her care job, to shield. She had a bad heart. But she refused.“I’ll die in harness, standing up,” she laughed. But care workers were twice as likely to die from Covid as the rest of the population. Social care, once run by local councils, was now almost fully privatized: a system built on a shaky structure of debt and faceless offshore companies exploiting minimum-wage workers like mum. I didn’t trust those companies to protect her or the people in her care.

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One Thursday, a few weeks into lockdown, mum left the house to start her night shift. She lived on an ex-council estate. Others were coming out of their houses too, and gathering on the overgrown green, abandoned after the council stopped maintaining it. People smiled at each other over the tatty wasteland and started clapping. They were clapping for carers and they were clapping for themselves because they were the ones keeping it all going.

They were the low-paid and unskilled, the gig-economy grafters, the left-behinds, the precariat: an atomized working class who had built the country, only to watch their inheritance —  power, security, a stake in the national story — sold off. Mum felt the tears welling. It wasn’t so long ago that people were calling her fascist scum on the street. Now, for a few minutes, the country stood and clapped for people like her. And for those few minutes, she stood still and felt it and just let the stupid tears come; hot tears not of anger, now, but of pride. But it didn’t last. Britain clapped on Thursday and forgot on Friday. And, 10 years on from Brexit, that sense of abandonment hasn’t gone away.

Whatever happens in Clacton, the rise of Farage and Reform shouldn’t surprise us, not really. People like mum are still looking for someone to speak to them in the language of loyalty and belonging, to pull them back into our fraying national story. Someone to tell them they are not far-Right for feeling discarded. And if Reform finally wins? Chances are commentators will probably treat it as something sudden, like an earthquake. But for families like mine, the ground has been shaking for decades: in abandoned farms and barracks, privatized care homes, hollowed out communities, the slow erosion of the dignity and security that work once promised.

I wish I could tell you mum voted Reform in the recent elections. Not because of my own political leanings — but because it would mean she would still be here. But we lost her to cancer and a broken NHS a year and a half ago. She was a proud, passionate, loyal woman trying to muddle her way through the mess of modern Britain. She died at home with all us around her. My sisters dressed her in her favorite summery dress and denim jacket. I placed a flower in her folded hands.

***

These Wild English: A family, a class, a country on fire is published by Profile Books.

This was never part of the joke. Harvey has stood against each incumbent prime minister and London mayor since 2017. Like the licensed fool of old, Binface existed to puncture pretension from the safety of the margins, his purpose corrective rather than competitive. Yet in Clacton, the fool finds himself inheriting the responsibilities of a ruling class missing in action. Binface is the establishment. Après Binface: le déluge.

The popular misconception is that the character belongs to that all-too-familiar, dreary, disillusioned British genus of affectionate political nihilism. The nation has a talent for converting disappointment into panel-show persiflage, stretching from That Was the Week That Was to Have I Got News for You. But Harvey is a more interesting figure than that. He is a stand-up and writer with background in television comedy, and credits that include the Westminster satire The Thick of It. But he is, at heart, a defender of democracy; he has spent two decades anatomizing political absurdity without ever surrendering to the fashionable conviction that politics itself is absurd. Astonishingly, he remains a radical. 

Comedy, by Harvey’s own account, was first an escape from a difficult childhood with a bibulous, domineering father, then a way of surviving the sudden death of his diabetic, morbidly obese brother. His memoir, A Fan for All Seasons, chronicles a painful year spent wandering from sporting event to sporting event after discovering Dan’s body in his London flat, searching in the rituals of spectatorship for a way of making grief publicly bearable. One begins to understand why someone so preoccupied with civic ritual should eventually end up standing in elections dressed as a piece of municipal infrastructure.

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It was only after this sporting odyssey that Harvey emerged in the political arena, confronting Theresa May in Maidenhead in 2019. (He initially adopted the “Lord Buckethead” persona which had previously been wheeled out by a rotating cast of performers.) He later recalled: “Thursday night I was in a sports hall in Maidenhead. Sunday morning, I was flown first class to New York to appear on John Oliver. It was the weirdest experience of my life.” It would have been an excellent point at which to become a professional ironist. Harvey chose a more curious vocation instead. 

The easiest posture in our age of institutional exhaustion is cynicism. But it has its costs. As David Foster Wallace observed, “irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage”. Harvey’s bin cosplay has resisted that temptation. And for every daft Binface pledge — nationalize Adele; make Piers Morgan emission-free by 2030, etc — there is an decent one. It’s hard to maintain that British life would not be improved if we were indeed to ban the use of speakerphones on public transport. At one hustings, Harvey remembers a voter saying: “I can’t believe Binface is making the most sense of all the candidates.”  

His gloriously absurd manifestos conceal beneath their delirious surface an unexpectedly coherent political disposition: abolish the House of Lords; clean up Britain’s rivers; build houses; invest in public transport; return the Parthenon Marbles; tie ministers’ salaries to nurses’ pay; house the homeless before the royal family acquires its seventh palace; make Thames Water executives swim in their own excrement-encumbered effluent. Much of this is of course indistinguishable from old fashioned municipal socialism. 

His jokes may be bait. But the politics are earnest. When Harvey promises to build “at least one affordable home”, the punchline is not the number but the implied accusation that every supposedly serious politician’s housing pledge has become less believable than his own. The target is never democracy but bad government. 

But most revealing of all is Harvey’s attitude to elections themselves. Asked by the Big Issue why people should vote, he scarcely mentions Count Binface: “I’m more interested in the idea that people vote at all because democracy is a very precious thing.” Every Brit, he argues, should treasure the right to stand for election, “no matter how idiotic the get-up”. The campaigns raise money for Shelter. Eradicating homelessness is repeatedly described as one of the manifesto’s “key tenets”. The publicity is only a means to that end. This is an almost embarrassingly unfashionable creed. Strip away the “intergalactic space warrior” mythology and what remains is recognizably social-democratic — not revolutionary in the Marxian sense, certainly, but possessed of that civic egalitarianism of a Cromwellian vintage which assumes the commonwealth ought to be run in the interests of its citizens rather than, say, Bangkok-based crypto speculators or someone called “Posh George”.

Confronted with the possibility of becoming Farage’s principal opponent by default, Harvey’s first instinct was not triumphalism but disbelief. He told the Guardian he had been preparing for a relaxing return to his supposed home planet, Sigma IX, before Farage “self-detonated”, forcing “a swift intergalactic handbrake turn”. Asked what he would do if Clacton actually elected him, he merely replied that he would “do my very best to represent them”. He came close to campaigning for the removal of Clacton pier before somebody pointed out that it was by the sea, not in the House of Lords. 

The striking thing here, though, is that Count Binface risks being the the last social democrat standing. Britain’s Overton window, never a particularly capacious aperture by continental standards, has in recent years contracted still further. Labour has shown the Corbynites to the door with the brisk efficiency of a club steward removing a spivvy guest, while the Conservatives have hurriedly buried whatever bizarre ideological enthusiasm it was that briefly animated the Truss interlude.

The dispiriting upshot has been the better part of a decade governed, if not by a formal coalition, then by something rather more insidious: a pensée unique so pervasive that party labels increasingly resemble matters of branding rather than belief. In 2023, the Economist christened its heroine “Ms Heeves”, a composite stitched together from the managerial instincts of Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt, much as an earlier generation spoke of “Butskellism” to describe the comfortable convergence of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. 

These days, it might be appropriate to speak of Starmenoch or even Burnoch. But the invidious comparison flatters the present settlement. Butskellism at least presided over an argument about the distribution of prosperity; today’s orthodoxy contents itself with administering degrowth more competently than the other chap. SW1 remains as theatrically adversarial as ever — PMQs still proceed with all the decorum of a boxing match — but the ideological chasm between the front benches has narrowed to the width of the despatch box itself.

One may quarrel indefinitely over fiscal rules, denouncing a tax-to-GDP ratio of 35% as Bolshevism and 32% as neoliberalism; or over the precise degree of performative cruelty to be directed at asylum seekers. But anything touching the larger architecture of Britain’s political economy — the distribution of wealth; the ownership of land and capital; the country’s constitutional settlement; even the purpose of the state itself — is ruled out of order.

Increasingly, the electorate has declined to play along. Brexit was one expression of the new peasants’ revolt; Reform is another. Equally eloquent is the subtler protest of abstention. Turnout, a stately 84% in 1950, settled into the high 60s through the 2010s before slumping to barely 60% at the election that carried Starmer into Downing Street. 

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Seen in one light, the Clacton caper is proof of the point that Farage has been making all along — namely that British politics is controlled by an Establishment cartel that is now engaged in an all-out coordinated war against both him and his politics. Farage resigned his Commons seat after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened investigations into his failure to declare a £5 million personal gift from his sugar daddy, the crypto-Croesus Christopher Harborne. Rather than await the slow ecclesiastical processes of Westminster discipline, which might eventually have ended in suspension and a recall petition, Farage leapt ahead, testing himself against the people of Clacton instead. He also reminded them that: “I could go out and try and make some real big money. I could go to the USA, where I’ve got plenty of offers”, which will no doubt go down extremely well on the Essex seafront. 

The open question is whether the response of Britain’s sensible parties in declining to stand against him is the tactical masterstroke that their press cheerleaders seem to think. Kemi Badenoch dismissed the contest as a “fake” election, while Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens unanimously refused to lend legitimacy to Farage’s stunt. And yet together the exnominated parties have conspired to prove Farage’s core point — that they are indeed “all the same” and will do anything to preserve the status quo. Labour in particular has form here. When Farage first descended upon Clacton in 2024, Labour HQ set about stripping resources from its own local campaign, dispatching its characterful candidate, Jovan Owusu-Nepaul — who was “getting more retweets than Keir Starmer”, according to a party source (shocker) — to more electorally profitable territory in the West Midlands and leaving local activists aghast that the party appeared content to grant Farage an unobstructed run. Even then, the instinct was less to defeat Reform but to contain it.

One hesitates to improve upon an opponent’s script so generously. For years Farage has insisted that Westminster is not a genuine arena of political disagreement but a single interchangeable establishment, united less by ideology than by its instinct for cartel behavior whenever an insurgent threatens the settlement. One might have expected his centrist adversaries to resist the caricature. Instead, they have enacted it with touching fidelity. Against the dismal backdrop of this de haut en bas consensus, Harvey’s intervention becomes easier to understand. He is doing what the establishment doesn’t dare to do, which is actually to participate in democracy.

Meanwhile, he offers a critique of political celebrity. At precisely the historical moment when every ambitious politician has become the curator of an increasingly elaborate personal brand — Farage himself used the word “influencer” in his Clapton speech — Harvey performs the opposite maneuver. He abolishes the individual altogether. The bin is an anti-charisma machine. It is commonplace and probably entirely accurate to note that Farage is the 21st century’s canniest political operator as well as its most recognizable figure — and without Farage, Reform would be nowhere. Against all this, the bin performs an act of almost monastic self-abnegation. 

It asks a question almost indecent in its simplicity: if a proposal sounds perfectly sensible when uttered by a man dressed as a bin, why has Westminster spent so many years insisting that it was impossible?

Where Starmer seemed perplexed by Labour politics, Burnham is Mr Labour, and now hegemonic in its structures. MPs have kissed the ring, and crowded for their selfie; once-hostile factions find themselves in strange, unprecedented agreement: “Andy” is their last hope, and the soft-Left, hard-Left and Blue Labourites are, for now, jostling behind an inchoate vision of “the productive state”, and other vague Labour things.

But Burnham must soon govern the country, not just his party. And he’ll find that compared to the unwieldy beasts of city-regional governance or the NHS, the pressures of No. 10 are of an entirely different order of magnitude even at the best of times. And these are not the best of times. We’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century fragmentation of the two-party system, while smartphones cheerily obliterate our collective sense of what reality even means. Add two decades of wage repression and a collapsing public realm; meanwhile, the tax and debt burden only ever seem to rise, and international gilt traders circle like sharks.

This, then, is Burnham’s unenviable inheritance. Which is why, if he wants to survive beyond 2029, the PM-in-waiting should call an early election.

Whether he likes it or not, Burnham’s strengths lie not in his policy platform, which is a confused set of woolly principles, but in his charisma — both within Labour and among the public. He should exploit that, during his Mr Labour honeymoon period, while he still is their unassailable king, before the cultural-political projections of his putative “Manchesterism” have been sullied by time and close reading. And he should hew close to the image that the public holds of him, with a manifesto stuffed with radical constitutional reforms: the replacement of the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Regions; maximum devolution to municipalities and city-regions; proportional representation for the Commons.

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The latter would lock in center-left coalition governance for a generation. Labour’s existing record of incremental Leftward shifts could meanwhile be repackaged as the start of a genuine project of national renewal: encompassing nationalized rail, a public energy firm, a sovereign wealth fund, and a higher minimum wage. In addition to these nods to a more “pro-investment” political economy with greater public ownership — now painted in proudly progressive colors — a reforming constitutional package would allow for additional radicalism at a time of fiscal constraint.

Taken together, then, a Burnham manifesto could be framed as “taking back control”, as rebuilding Britain while giving power back to the forgotten places, the provincial Britain ignored by distant elites. Burnham’s task in all this would be to articulate a broad, positive vision for the country, one that adapts what the cultural theorist John Clarke has pejoratively called the “vernacular ventriloquism” of populist tendencies. For Clarke, this ventriloquism involves claiming to speak for England — for “The People” — while in practice pushing an agenda that blends turbo-Thatcherism with mass deportations (or at least their promise).

Against this, Burnham must set out a new paradigm for British politics: he’ll have to triangulate between a Right-wing populism on the march and the Left-wing instincts of many of his voters and supporters. In this space, he can root his normie populism, reassuring voters nostalgic for the imagined community of secure, social-democratic Britain, while also seeming positive and forward-looking. But he’ll have to unite discrete political positions into a coherent whole: seeming both patriotic and inclusive; both radical and insurgent, yet with operational competence; both comfortable with multiethnic diversity, but alert to the mess of a broken asylum system and the disordered chaos of a low-waged, low-productivity Deliveroo economy dependent on cheap foreign labor.

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Could Mr Labour really pull it off? The vibes are currently in his favor. One Labour MP tells me that “Manchesterism” has the power to “take out the toxic component of nationalism” just like “the civic nationalisms of Scotland and Wales”. “Andy” they say, “has the potential to do that for England.” The “place-first politics”, the Northern identity, the soft-disruptor vibes, the unthreatening, mum-friendly pneuma — all of it can appeal to that sweet spot in the electorate which both despises the political classes yet remains largely anti-Reform. We saw a hint of this strategy in his invocation of “HMO Britain” during his next-day victory rally in Makerfield: this was as close to a dog-whistle as is safe to blow in Labour circles, shifting blame onto negligent landlords but also hinting at asylum seekers. In a similar vein, the return of utilities and natural monopolies to public ownership satisfies voters across the spectrum, initiating a kind of economic patriotism that leans Left but pleases many on the Right.

And, for now, the public is willing to buy into the story of Burnham-as-outsider. That might be ridiculous — given his New Labour pedigree — but his easy manner makes him the very opposite of Starmer. Which is why it’s only downhill from here. To be sure, More in Common has positive polling on the incoming Prime Minister, and focus group and survey data suggest he could give his party a second chance. But as Lenin said, politics is about “who does what to whom”. The moment Burnham enters Downing Street, he’ll learn that governing involves picking losers as well as winners, and that someone will always be alienated. Better, then, to snatch his mandate now, and attempt to secure a full term he can call his own, rather than run in 2029 and fail as a paid-up member of the dreaded Establishment.

That’s especially true when, at the moment, a mandate is so obviously lacking. Old tweets are already resurfacing from Labour MPs — including Burnham himself — demanding that new Conservative prime ministers go to the country rather than serving the rest of a parliamentary term. The longer he waits, the louder cries of hypocrisy from Britain’s hostile media will become, especially when Nigel Farage is cheering them on. The fact is that outrage sells, and the national atmosphere turns fast. At low ebbs, and during the inevitable crises that beset any government, the noise will become deafening: get “the squatter” out, the public must have their say. Indeed, Burnham can seek to appear magnanimous as he reintroduces himself to a public that already leans towards thinking that an election should be called. Any kind of radical program, either a new path on the political economy or major constitutional reforms, will anyway need public consent.

The counter to all this, of course, is that we live in a parliamentary democracy, whereby the legislature can oust prime ministers at a whim. Yet it would be wrong to ignore the smuggling of presidential norms into our unwritten constitution. MPs have the right to change their party allegiance as often as they like. But this in-built malleability masks the fact that when most voters enter the polling booths to back a party, they’re in effect stating their preference for an institution represented and embodied by the leader-as-godhead, the personification of the party’s current values and political direction. Recall, if nothing else, that Labour’s abysmal showing at the recent local elections — the ultimate trigger for Starmer’s resignation — was largely to do with its association with the leader himself.

The mandate of a prime minister, then, is deeply personal. And not only with the electorate at large. Even before he’s officially prime minister, cracks are beginning to show (or reappear?) in Burnham’s strange parliamentary coalition. One Left-wing Burnham-supporting MP has complaints about the centrality of Josh Simons in Burnham’s operation: the former Makerfield member, who stood down to give the future PM his by-election, is “toxic, and it won’t end well”, they tell me. “I think,” they add, “he’s an Achilles heel.” The PLP as a whole isn’t much better. “There’s so many groups,” my source tells me, “so many factions.” The point of leadership, though, is to bind colleagues together by setting out a clear direction of travel, crafting a common project that each of Labour’s weird strata can, roughly speaking, get behind. “The fights have started”, according to the MP, but there’s still plenty of goodwill. “On the Left generally, the feeling is that we would have given our left testicle to be in this position six months ago.” Why, then, not take the plunge, trusting that a successful campaign — even with a reduced majority — would strengthen Burnham’s position in the PLP yet further?

Not every new leader triumphs after rushing to the voters. Theresa May’s doomed effort to “crush the saboteurs” is remembered as an instructive blunder, after which Corbyn’s Labour Party made up a large polling deficit to deny her the supermajority she needed to push through a Brexit deal. But on the other side of the ledger, we have Gordon Brown, who hesitated and eventually failed to call an early election in 2007, only to see his popularity plummet thereafter. Jim Callaghan, too, plowed on after Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976. By the time election day came round three years later, the Winter of Discontent was fresh in the memory, ensuring the avuncular, well-liked Callaghan, who easily out-polled the grocer’s daughter on his personal ratings, was beaten regardless.

In other words, an election would be a gamble. Many Labour MPs would doubtless be out of a job. The party has a dismal reputation after two years of hopeless, directionless dither. But there is unlikely to be a better time for Burnham: before too many difficult decisions have to be made, too many Labour tribes disappointed, too much of the general public frustrated by the slow untangling of Britain’s countless problems. Burnham has restored Labour’s hope and, at least in Makerfield, made his party normal again. His best chance to do the same across the country is now.

Andy Burnham is an oppressive presence in Makerfield: he hovers. Posters of the current mayor of Manchester, who will parlay a win here into a bid for party leadership, fill the streets. They block the windows of a derelict pub in Ashton. He looks like a New Yorker byline cartoon, and I wonder if AI made the image; he is buffed and smoothed. His election leaflet comes in the shape of a vinyl single: a 45, for those who dread the future, which is everyone here. It says: “Keep the Faith”. Few have.

Ashton is a town of amazing intensity — and bleakness. It used to be a coal town with a famous hinge factory. Now there is a KFC, a job centre, a betting shop and a wedding dress shop, which looks faintly aggrieved: between them, people traipse like furious ghosts. This is a by-election for the raging and the indifferent (half will not vote) and, in tribute to Makerfield’s temporary importance, the council have dug up the road. My taxi driver, once a lawyer in Pakistan, says white boys throw stones at his car. He shows me the cracks in the window. He blames Elon Musk and says things have never been so bad. I have never met voters — or non-voters — who talk so much about social media. They ask me if I am from YouTube.

This could have been another Runcorn and Helsby, which Reform took from Labour by six votes last year. But all by-elections are different; they are fables of resentment, and the most thrilling narrative usually wins. In Makerfield, that is Burnham’s: his promise to topple Starmer if elected makes him, not Reform, the insurgent here. Burnham also benefits from the growth of the disconnect, at least this time. Reform, which usually manifests that disconnect, is threatened by its dissident ex-MP Rupert Lowe, who has founded Restore. The disconnect disconnected. Restore’s branch in Norfolk, Great Yarmouth First, won the 10 seats it contested in the local elections on a promise to ban the burka, defund the BBC, begin mass deportations and have a referendum on the death penalty. Restore will welcome Tommy Robinson if he chooses to join, though Reform will not. The revolution eats its children.

Burnham HQ is a sports hall filled with activists from all over Britain: it is like a Liberal Democrat campaign. They exude the excitement and the entitlement of the day-tripper. I see a southern Labour MP in a bright Range Rover, which reminds me of Boris Johnson’s motorcade in Hartlepool in 2021, when Labour lost, because its ownership of the North had gone. I also see John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, drinking in the bar: a sign that Burnham, if he wins, will take the party to the Left.

Some talk about this election in terms of legend: Labour’s last stand and, in Burnham, the only chance to beat Reform in the next general election. “The future of the country is at stake,” I am told by a young activist. “I think Andy is probably the only person who could make a real difference. He’s got the mentality of an insurgent. We live in a populist world, and we’ve got to fight fire with fire”. Or they say that Starmer is not relatable. “He doesn’t connect well with people,” says a woman from Devon, who is here because she loved Corbyn, and she thinks she sees some of him in Burnham. Or, from a young woman in Manchester: “You could look at him [Starmer] and his style and think that’s just another Tory.” They report that former Reform voters are returning to Labour because of Burnham: because he is from the North.

Outside, in real Makerfield, politics is mostly taboo: people are not only afraid of what is happening, they are afraid to talk about it. They are afraid of speech: their own, and others’, and I think this is new. The political meeting organised by Ed Gemmell, leader of the Climate Party — it exists to fill the gap the Greens left when they swapped climate anxiety for Gaza — is attended by only two residents, and one of them is drunk. The undrunk one left Ashton as a teenager and recently returned. He doesn’t like to talk about politics due to, “self-preservation. If you go into Wetherspoons, you hear some awful stuff. I don’t want to make my political views known.” When he was a child, he says, “Ashton was a village. If you wanted meat, you went to the butcher. If you wanted fish, you went to the market. Everyone looked after each other.” They never locked their doors.

“The people are still as friendly as they always were,” he says, “but they don’t smile as much. People are more divided. They talk about rugby, football, but nothing in depth or with any real content, people seem to be worried about talking about it for being judged or ridiculed. It’s a shame. I love this area, but you come back and you think, ‘why do I love it? It’s falling apart’”. The politics follows it.

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Burnham won't quell England's revolt

By Aris Roussinos

I follow the politics down the Wigan Road to a grand house behind a gate. It has a fantastical garden with a single black garden gnome and an enormous Reform flag on an enormous flagpole. It would be Donald Trump’s house if he lived on the Wigan Road in Ashton. They are delighted to speak to me, which is unusual, but I knew they would be when I saw the size of the flagpole. They are Reform because a car hit their boundary wall and, they say, the police refused to charge the Muslim driver because it was Ramadan, and he was hungry.  She shows me a picture of the wall in pieces and complains about HMOs. They don’t get to meet their neighbours. But, as ever with the prosperous Reform voter, their anxiety seems more existential than material; more dreamt that real. She still thinks Josh Simons, the Labour MP who stood aside for Burnham, is charming.

The narrative in Makerfield is not Burnham-saves-Labour: that is an imposition from the activists coming from outside. (Though the less bewitched Labour activists say it is closer than the polls suggest.) It’s the same as it is at every by-election I have covered in the North: people won’t allow themselves that much hope.

Like ghosts at the feast, Reform voters gather at what was once the Labour Club. They speak about Starmer with hatred. “I mean,” says one man, “he’s supported kiddie fiddlers and things like that. Jimmy Savile, you know. Some of the locals said they’d rather vote Jimmy Savile than him.” Can they mean it? A video circulates of a man tearing up Andy Burnham’s signs: they laugh at this. “Labour is dead in the water,” says another. “Everybody in this club at one time would have voted Labour, and now I don’t think there’s anybody in this club that will vote Labour. They’re a spent force.”

These voters no longer feel important; they feel of passing use. That’s the key, and it is societal as well as personal. “I can’t phone Andy Burnham and talk to him”; “He reckons he’s a local lad, but he’s never done anything for here”; “there are coloured faces everywhere you go”. When Josh Simons visited, they still felt cheated. “He was telling me, ‘I used to come in here and have a pint’ and in the next breath he asked me where the toilets were’”. And contempt whistles through his teeth.

For them, their candidate, Robert Kenyon, has been unfairly treated by the press. He replied to a social media post in 2021 that talked about touching Carol Vorderman’s arse. Kenyon gave the post a thumbs up, and wrote, “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.” Here, they feel the same. “They hung Bob out to dry,” a man says. “All he did was give the thumbs up”.

There are few exceptions to the resentment. By the bus stop a teenager says gaily: “Listen to me. Is this going on a podcast? Andy Hurdham [sic] is a good man. He’s got good intentions. Reform — it’s all immigration. They want to get rid of immigration. We need immigration: NHS, we’ve got a lot of immigrated jobs in this society and we need it. Reform wants to get rid of that. They want the old Britain. I want the new Britain.” He grins at me, a loved child with faith in Andy Hurdham. “I like the new Britain. End of.” Then he calls me back to say: “You want to vote for the people with the best intentions.”

Restore are hardly that, but they gather at the Bay Horse to prepare for canvassing. The men are large and angry, the women beautiful and mournful. They are ardent but pallid – angrier than Reform, but with the self-conscious gravity and slow movements of those who know they are the only ones who would save their country. Their canvassing maps — streets surrounded by pen bubbles — look like lines around a corpse. They tell me I can canvass with them, then change their minds after the largest and angriest man makes a telephone call. This is the Restore Paradox, one of many: they claim they don’t get media coverage, then send journalists away. I eavesdrop instead.

“We need a supermajority,” says one. “You get support, then more support and the more support you have the more support you get. If you have 450 seats you can out-vote the opposition who will obfuscate”. “If he [Burnham] wins [Makerfield] the [Manchester] mayoralty is up for grabs,” says another. “It’s kind of win-win. We are soaring in the polls. We know we are [on] 20%”. “We need at least 35% to win this seat.” This is dreamland, though they might make 10%. Restore can only thwart Reform to let Burnham through here, but they don’t care, because only their anger is real to them.

“I am quite passionate about his [Lowe’s] beliefs,” says a woman with mermaid’s hair. (Restore’s women are glossy.) “I like how he’s doing it for us, the people of this country. Nigel Farage is a great disturber, but I don’t think he’s serious enough to be prime minister. Rupert Lowe seems to be genuine.” Her father was a factory worker. “He always voted Labour. He’d be devastated now if he was alive, at what Labour represents, because they say they’re for the working man, but they’re not. They are for anyone but us.” This is the Reform song in a louder pitch: the elites, which now include Nigel Farage, will destroy us.

Like Labour activists, the Reformers speak of a last stand in a coming war. One says he has had “an easy life. I shouldn’t be here. There shouldn’t be a need for this. We should have a decent country where people can just live together”. But “We live in a hostile environment. People aren’t safe.” Everyone native to Makerfield says this, except the boy at the bus stop, and he is young.

The man remembers, “the first black child coming into our school. He was a nice lad, Rastafarian, and then you could see other people coming in, and every little thing was named Mohammed, and they all stuck together”. He is here to “make things a bit better. I don’t know what else you can do. I’m not for going out and fighting on the streets.” If Starmer — or Burnham — cannot fix the problems of the state, others will fight on the street on the man’s behalf.

If Makerfield slouches towards the polls fearfully, there are some with more to lose than most. I meet an elderly Pakistani immigrant, grave and formally dressed, campaigning for Burnham. When I ask if his community is frightened, he says, “Inflammatory language concerns me and residents of my community”. In his restraint, he sounds more British than anyone.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 forces Europe to face facts

By Edward Luttwak

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.

The city, he said, could return to that former glory. A second “Big Bang” is possible, but some changes are needed. Playing a central part, he promised the crowd, would be crypto.

The Reform leader has been wooing the blockchain industry lately. Crypto might seem like an odd bedfellow for Reform given some of the party’s more nostalgic inclinations, but in Farage’s hands the industry becomes a throwback. Seemingly reminding him of his rip-roaring days on the floor of the London Metals Exchange, crypto allows him to talk about a sparkling vision of Britain as a financial hub once again.

This is not a jam and Jerusalem brand of nostalgia, but one of big hair and big phones and lunch at Sweetings. Crucially, this is a pre-Blair vision.

Farage has criticized the autonomy New Labour gave to both the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England. Shifting power to those bodies, he argues, has allowed politicians to distance themselves from the regulations that put more burdens onto business. “We have to go back to the more old-fashioned way,” he told the crypto crowd last month. That is, elected officials must make the decisions and face the consequences directly.

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By Aris Roussinos

For anyone familiar with the über-libertarian origins of crypto, increasing the involvement of central government may not sound particularly, well, punk. What you have to understand is that crypto is no longer the reserve of cypherpunks and Twitter anons; it is a thriving niche of the financial industry that employs just as many policy consultants and business development people as it does cracked hackers.

While there is certainly still an anarchic undercurrent, it is the “white collar crypto” contingent — both traditional finance firms adopting blockchain and crypto-native companies trying to stay on the straight and narrow — that would like to see politicians taking the sector more seriously.

Exact figures on the size of the UK’s crypto sector are hard to come by, and slightly depend on how you define the umbrella: everything from institutional investing in tokenized gold to Web3 gaming startups could be part of it. What we do know is that London has a leg-up on the rest of Europe, still just about benefiting from its reputation as the region’s financial center. A report from K33 Research found that there were around 13,000 people employed by the sector in the UK back in 2023, triple that of closest competitor Germany.

Farage has therefore spotted crypto as a small but potentially influential area in which he can own the conversation. He has little competition. Politicians from other parties seem unable to talk about crypto, perhaps terrified of its less salubrious associations with fraud and speculation.

This was not always the case. While they were still in power, some of the more technologically literate Conservatives made steps towards embracing the crypto sector. As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak embraced a series of since-abandoned projects (sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who remembers the shelved Royal Mint NFT) and made noises about making Britain a crypto hub. Matt Hancock was a blockchain advocate while he was a junior minister in DSIT and continued to be so long after it was fashionable. Bim Afolami made inroads with the industry during his brief stint as City Minister before being booted both out of government and out of his Hertfordshire seat last year.

The problem was that not much happened. At one point crypto was seen as a potential area in which the UK could have asserted its newfound independence from the EU, but instead it fell behind: the bloc became the first territory to pass legislation that was specifically designed for cryptocurrency, rather than regulating it under existing laws, in 2023. That regulatory certainty has threatened London’s position as the leading crypto location in the region, as companies plot expansion plans in the EU.

By last year’s election, crypto was fully off the agenda, and although the FCA is now finally plodding towards a regulatory regime for the sector, the new government has not staked out much ground here. That may partly be because it is already onto its third City Minister. In fairness Lucy Rigby, appointed in September, has already been out and about talking about tokenization and meeting the founder of crypto leader OXK in recent weeks, but we are yet to see a shift in government policy.

Farage, meanwhile, gets to claim he was an early advocate for crypto. In fact he has been known to say he was the first politician to back it — something I imagine several Tories would dispute if any of them were still in public life.

Some of Farage’s earliest statements on crypto were made while he was working with Southbank Investment Trust. Back in 2020, he helped launch their investment newsletter, contributing his thoughts on investment opportunities, including crypto.

But what really seems to have bolstered both his conviction about the crypto space and his position within it was that whole kerfuffle with Coutts. When Farage publicly challenged the closure of his account with the Natwest subsidiary in 2023, he faced sneers and skepticism. Yet the conclusion of the whole affair proved he had been justified, allowing him to fashion himself as a kind of martyr to debanking. The experience has given him some common ground with crypto bros.

Debanking is a major issue for founders, employees and even customers of crypto companies. In the UK, half of firms in crypto and Web3 have either been rejected from opening an account or had one closed. Banks often put these decisions down to their anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your customer (KYC) obligations. But some think the approach is heavy-handed, likely to catch those with a legitimate connection to crypto, or even those with only a passing association.

While Farage’s experience was different, debanking still gives him a common cause. Several crypto-adjacent issues also fit into Reform’s wider approach to civil liberties. The party has begun incorporating online freedoms into its platform, pledging to repeal the Online Safety Act and criticizing the police response to social media posts. A natural extension of that approach would be online financial freedom, allowing investors to put their money in whichever assets they please. Recent proposed limits on how much individuals can hold in stablecoins have provided a useful political wedge issue there.

Resistance to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) also goes hand in hand with the party’s opposition to digital ID. Issued and controlled by monetary authorities, CBDCs are unsurprisingly not always popular with crypto advocates. Farage even said at the Web3 conference that he would go to prison rather than be forced to use a CBDC. A brave stand, no doubt, though slightly undercut by the fact that the Bank of England has been cooling on plans for a digital pound and doesn’t look likely to introduce one anytime soon.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. Anyone who has followed the way Donald Trump has interacted with crypto will see a possible model for Farage. The crypto-rich became a lucrative source of donations to the campaign, and more recently to the White House’s new ballroom. Reform certainly seems conscious of a similar opportunity, having dedicated a page on its website pointing donors towards how to make a contribution using crypto.

Since taking office, Trump has continued to signal his favor for the industry. In March, for example, he issued an executive order to establish a Bitcoin federal reserve. Farage, for his part, says he has urged both the Bank of England and the Chancellor to use Bitcoin seized as part of criminal investigations to begin such a fund, saying it would help “further legitimize this space”.

Trump’s relationship with crypto, though, has raised eyebrows, not least when it comes to the dealings of his family’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Farage will need to tread carefully to avoid similar suspicion — speaking at crypto events has already become part of his portfolio of side hustles. Whether he actually owns any crypto-assets himself though is unclear — there is no obligation, currently, for MPs to declare their crypto holdings in the same way they might for shares. Then there’s his association with crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who previously donated to the Brexit Party and more recently paid for two of Farage’s trips to the States.

Whether you think Farage is a true Bitcoin believer or an opportunist though, he demonstrates a deeper understanding of crypto than the US President, a former skeptic who seems guided by his sons in his crypto endeavors. In shaping a political narrative around the industry, too, the two men have very different approaches. While both might connect this new technology to their reminiscences about a financial heyday, Farage recognizes the frustration of the industry and positions himself as an underdog alongside them, a martyr to the cause. In his telling, it’s more Passion of the Christ than Art of the Deal: just a way to make Britain a richer place, by bringing more well-paid jobs to London — if only Reeves would let them.

What exactly would that entail? Probably reining in the powers of both the Bank of England and FCA. But those expecting a bonfire of red tape and quangos may be disappointed. Farage isn’t totally anti-regulation, recognizing that it can help stimulate investment when the rules are clear. In a world where he wins the next election, the FCA’s new regime will likely already be in place. Barring any major objections, it seems unlikely he would change it, preferring stability and clarity for businesses.

Where he might look at changes would be on the consumer side. Regulation can be bad when it “protects idiots from themselves”, Farage said at the conference. Regulators often have to find a balance between allowing people freedom to do what they will with their money and preventing them from coming to harm. That has led in some situations to rather tight rules for ordinary investors: up until October, only professionals were permitted to invest in crypto-based exchange-traded notes (ETNS). It would not be surprising if a Farage administration tipped the scales in favor of consumer freedom rather than risk aversion.

The right approach to that depends on whether you think crypto should be seen as analogous to stocks and shares or more like a wager on the horses. Finding a way to legitimize some of the trading going on in grey zones could be beneficial, not least for the Treasury’s coffers: the FCA reckons some 12% of adults own some kind of crypto asset. But it could come at a cost of consumer protection if firms are not held to the same standards as other financial institutions.

None of this, though, is necessarily a game changer when it comes to elections. Crypto can be a way of opening conversations about individual liberties, or over-regulation, or business investment. But it doesn’t tend to be a primary issue for voters, nor was it the magic bullet for reaching male voters in the US elections that some thought it might be.

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Where it might make a difference is more broadly in the City’s buy-in to the Reform agenda. When I worked on a financial newspaper in 2017, it would have been hard to imagine Farage winning anyone round, so soon after Brexit. Now, he’s making speeches at Banking Hall and promising to appoint people with business experience as ministers, while bankers take meetings with his team behind closed doors. Crypto is just one item on an allegedly pro-business, pro-entrepreneur agenda, and also fits neatly into Farage’s stated desire to reward risk-takers.

People in the industry like to say that the crash that came after the collapse of FTX was actually a good thing, washing many of the bad actors and speculators out of the space. This is both true to some extent and difficult to take seriously, since those who have left always seem to be replaced by others. The excesses of the NFT boom have been exchanged for memecoins. Scams and hacks are still an everyday feature of the cryptosphere.

In this context, Farage’s retro-futuristic vision of a crypto-enabled “Big Bang” sounds risky. But it’s a calculated risk. Despite some of crypto’s crazier corners, the white-collar portion of the blockchain industry is increasingly professionalizing, having been embraced by a once-skeptical Wall Street. Major firms take pains to show that they are compliant with local laws and are preparing for massive IPOs. Respected technology and finance firms are incorporating stablecoins into their plans for the future.

Much as Farage might think of himself as a maverick, he is following a path that global regulators and governments have already cut. As crypto sells itself as a legitimate, wealth-generating sector, countries around the world are figuring out how to give it room to grow. In fact, the UK is already working to align its approach with the US on digital assets and other financial innovations. His pitch, then, is far more psychological, symbolic even. It’s about recognizing a group that has at times felt ignored or dismissed. Whether it’s based on fact or not, that can be a very effective message.

The tectonic plates are shifting in British politics, and the two-party system is edging towards disaster. As Reform’s momentum seems irresistible — until recently anyway — we may well be witnessing the belated emergence in the UK of something akin to the authoritarian national populism snaking across Europe, the final “Pasokification” of Labour and the emergence of a hegemonic Right-populism in Britain akin to Meloni, Le Pen or Orbán. Reform, then, are on course to be their British heirs.

Yet for all the discourse about the Red Wall and Labour losing the working class, Reform is not strictly a working-class revolt. Like all Right populist movements across Europe, Farage’s outfit is in reality a complex class coalition. To be sure, they undoubtedly do have a very strong base in the old skilled or “respectable” working-class (think: skilled tradesmen). But they also draw support from right across the social spectrum, with a lower-middle class core (think: policemen or shopkeepers) as well as sections of the professional classes (think: lawyers, bankers or managers).

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Like Thatcherism, Reform’s ideological centre of gravity, its weltanschauung, is therefore not the working-class — but the frenzied fear of falling from the lower-middle class. This is certainly class politics and class anger, but it is not the collectivism or solidarity of communities during the miners’ strike. A better example is Hans Fallada’s “little man” in interwar Germany: squeezed and pushed around until he snaps, his isolated, uncollectivised rage fizzing everywhere like a firework let off indoors. In other words, then, Reform faces both ways. It’s both anti-elite and anti-underclass, taking aim at those on welfare as well as politicians and the rich. The hard working majority, the people, are being mugged off, by lazy freeloaders, whether migrants or students, bankers or politicians. Reform’s manifesto is a homage to this worldview: back small businesses; help small landlords and farmers; defend the nuclear family; attack state bureaucracy and the nanny state.

There are remarkable parallels today with the mood of the late Seventies, captured by Stuart Hall in his famous Policing the Crisis, written as the UK stood on the precipice of a new political-economic paradigm. Then, he argued, economic crisis fed popular, racialised fears of crime and disorder, which was in turn absorbed and entrenched by Thatcherism. Today’s popular rage, insecurity and fear of crime is coalescing around migration, an issue which has become a proxy for the huge divide between the people and the elite, a catch-all upon which ideas of powerlessness and glaring, jarring decline are projected. Vox pops of protesters on recent anti-migration marches didn’t even mention immigrants that much. What they did say was that the place has gone to shit; there used to be pubs here now it’s full of litter.

As Hall noted in 1978, a generalised culture of hysteria over immigration and crime drowns out key questions regarding deeper, structural causes for societal malaise — where have all the good jobs gone; why we don’t have any social housing; why the NHS is broken and we can’t see a doctor; why pubs are closing down; why councils don’t collect rubbish; why the police can’t respond to crime; the actual relationship between immigration, wages and public services. Yet answering them honestly would, of course, necessarily implicate many of the politicians and media figures currently pushing simple solutions to Britain’s problems, which doesn’t seem likely these days.

There’s a broader point here too. One of the most compelling criticisms of Hall’s work came from so-called “Left-realist” criminologists, who argued that his focus on the “moral panic” around crime obscured the reality that mugging was happening, crime was rising, and it was mainly affecting working-class communities. Today, while people’s fears and anxieties are undoubtedly being stoked by a sensationalist press, their fears and anxiety are real. Crime is high. Streets are dirty. The migration system is broken. The system is rigged against hard-working people. Social cohesion and trust have tanked. Society is fucked. Across the world the middle-class is being squeezed: it has felt the pinch more than all other sections of the population in recent years, with wages falling, debt soaring, and professionals under ever-more pressure to keep up appearances in their rotting Hackney terraces. This fear of falling and sense of unfairness is stoked by an increasingly visible underclass which hoovers up scarce public resources.

Rachel Reeves was right in her “securonomics” speech that we are at an “inflection point”. The UK is desperate for a new political-economic paradigm. It is not just the physical fabric of society that needs to be repaired, but the mental and civil. Ours is a country that has been driven mad by the twin strains of austerity and precarity, punctured by hyper-individualism and isolation. We need political leaders to articulate new ideas of shared citizenship, a new social contract. The welfare state was underpinned by an emotional articulation of values and citizenship rooted in shared suffering, contribution and fairness. While Thatcher attacked this consensus, she nonetheless simultaneously articulated a distinct, positive vision of the good life and the aspirational citizen-capitalist, liberated by property ownership.

Labour’s problem is not merely that they are straitjacketed by their commitment to spending limits and state intervention. It is that their technocratic approach to politics is incapable of articulating a new emotional common sense, so anathema is this idea to the bloodless managerialism in their hearts. Labour’s strategy is, therefore, just more managed decline, to tell us that things will never get better. Even more outrageously, some Labour politicians have claimed with a straight face that the economy is fine, that people must simply be imagining that they’re broke and let down.

Much as the lower-middle classes found their savior in Thatcher’s fusion of penal populism, nationalism and individual economic liberty, today the frustration of the “hard working majority” finds its perfect outlet in Reform. Farage, an enthusiastic Thatcherite, seems to be the only person in British politics to grasp this worldview, the lack of faith in politics, or indeed the desperation for change. As during Brexit, Farage is seemingly the only politician capable of saying that the system is broken in an engaging way, and skilled enough to articulate a new positive vision.

In other words, then, there is a positive element of Faragism: a blokeish, nostalgic utopianism which pledges to break with the consensus and reset the social contract for decent, hard-working people. Because migration has become a proxy for societal decline and unfairness, the simple act of securing the borders and cutting migration contains a promise for rejuvenation and fairness: the high streets back to how they were; cleaner pavements; lower crime and higher wages. Thatcher had the scrounger as the foil for her positive vision. Farage, for his part, has migrants. Starmer, too, is currently attempting his own Thatcher tribute act with his recent attack on the benefit system. Yet Thatcher’s very raison d’être, like that of her class, was anti-statism, a visceral hatred of the nanny state and the bureaucrats who administer it. This stuff doesn’t work when you personify the very nanny state you’re meant to dismantle.

In the end, though, voters exhausted with the two-party consensus may be disappointed in the insurgents. First, there’s Farage himself, who is both Reform’s biggest asset and its biggest liability. Reform is dangerously over-reliant on the Brexit hero, a reluctant parliamentarian who is always on the look-out for the next lucrative opportunity on American television, and with a long history of falling out with former allies. The current public feud between Farage and Rupert Lowe comes as little surprise to anyone who has followed Farage’s career.

This clash of personalities equally speaks to Reform’s internal contradictions. As a committed Thatcherite, Farage (like all of Reform’s top brass) ironically backed the economic paradigm that has caused British decline to start with. Now, with an eye on power, Reform are cobbling together an eclectic economic strategy which, like other European Right populists, borrows aspects of welfare redistribution: their manifesto wants to part-nationalize utilities. Yet though Lowe apparently called for the creation of a Reform policy unit, Farage proved reluctant.

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There are a myriad of possible reasons for this feud. It could be that Lowe was trying, perhaps naively, to professionalize Reform and turn it into a party ready for government, whereas Farage simply has zero interest in the responsibilities of actually taking power. Meanwhile, Farage supporters suggest that Lowe’s enthusiasm for mass deportations and Tommy Robinson risks scaring the horses and becoming an electoral liability, threatening Reform’s appeal to more moderate, respectable conservatives. Either way, beneath the bravado, Reform is fragile.

And even if Farage turned into a policy fiend overnight, he’d be incapable of solving Britain’s basic problems. Unlike Thatcher, current economic circumstances mean that he would be unable to provide any material concessions to his base: beyond cutting migration anyway. There will be no cut-price council houses and no discount stock options. Right populists in power will face similar issues to the current government.

It all speaks to the sheer depth of our crisis. The UK’s economy is painfully imbalanced and focused on the City of London, crippled by parasitic rentierism, by cynical capitalists who prioritize short-term extraction of wealth over stable investment. Low productivity, low investment, low growth, low wages, poor infrastructure — the UK is Canary Wharf with a country attached, overseen by a bloated political elite that never leaves the M25. Successive attempts to rebalance the economy and build a viable industrial strategy have failed. Recent headlines that the UK is now a poor country is news only to those within the bubble. And, all the while, any departure from the status quo is strangled by the vested interests, from the civil service to asset managers, that control the British state. Compared with all that, Reform’s bickering suddenly feels trifling.

Between the riots of last summer and record migration rates of 900,000 in 2023, a broader feeling of discontent has been supercharged by the return to the headlines of Asian rape gangs — in particular, the apparent failures and cover-ups by establishment politicians. Farage’s softer nationalism, as well as his online spat with Elon Musk over support for the activist Tommy Robinson, has presented parties to the Right of Reform UK with an opportunity. Reflecting a resurgent brand of impassioned ethnonationalism, they feel like their moment has come.

At heart, the ethnonationalist believes that nationhood — and the resultant social and political benefits — can only truly be shared by those with a common race. Their movement is fueled by the sense of a coming threat, the idea that a racial identity dating back over a thousand years could be wiped out. The flood of immigration in recent years and the ensuing change to Britain’s ethnic make-up has given succor to ethnonationalist arguments, and these are growing louder on the political fringes.

The far-Right in the UK was once dominated by the British National Party, led in its heyday by Nick Griffin. The BNP reached its peak in 2009 when it secured two MEPs and a little under a million votes in European Parliament elections — spurred on by migration figures that had reached around 200,000. Later that year, the party received further notoriety when Griffin appeared on the BBC’s Question Time, during which he managed to refer to the Ku Klux Klan as “almost totally non-violent” and claimed that “a lot of people find the sight of two grown men kissing in public really creepy”.

But the 2010 general election, in which the BNP failed to win any seats, marked the beginning of the end for Griffin. He stood down as leader in July 2014, before being expelled later that year for allegedly harassing BNP staff. The party has now been essentially inactive for the past half-decade. Tommy Robinson may be the poster boy of the English far-Right, yet the English Defence League he co-founded has effectively been defunct for years too. Just as many on the ethnonationalist Right judge Farage to be a liberal in populist clothing, Robinson is also widely dismissed in those circles as a self-promoter who isn’t serious about building a coherent and lasting movement. That work is being done further below the surface.

For it is the personalities involved in Griffin’s fall a decade ago — a chain of events encompassing power struggles, ideological splits and murder threats — who are furthering the cause of Britain’s ethnonationalist Right, threatening to spill its grievances on to the streets.

One key figure is Mark Collett, who leads Britain’s largest and most proactive explicitly white nationalist group. Called Patriotic Alternative (PA), by its own count the organization has over 16,000 supporters. Collett starred in the 2002 Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi and Proud, produced when he was leader of the BNP’s youth wing. The film describes him as one of the party’s “best and brightest”, while a proud Griffin refers to him as a potential successor as leader.

But after admiringly claiming in the documentary that “Hitler will live on forever” and admitting that he was a “Nazi sympathizer”, at a time when Griffin was attempting to detoxify the BNP brand, Collett was temporarily expelled from the party. He returned, rose to become publicity director, and again positioned himself as an heir to Griffin. This progress was undone in 2010, a matter of weeks before the general election, when Collett was accused of plotting a BNP palace coup before being arrested for allegedly threatening to kill his leader.

His new organization is similarly controversial. PA has been linked to National Action, a proscribed terrorist organization, and it was namechecked last year in Parliament in relation to the new Government definition of extremism, accused of promoting neo-Nazi ideology. Unsurprisingly, Collett’s hard-Right group has thus far been unsuccessful in registering as a political party, its applications rejected at least four times by the Electoral Commission. With both the group and Collett himself banned from Twitter for, among other things, celebrating a 2023 riot outside a Merseyside hotel housing refugees, online operations have largely moved to the messaging app Telegram, where the PA leader has over 20,000 followers.

There, he argues that immigration initiatives are “all part of a concerted effort to destroy the country”, and following the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen he posted a tribute praising the National Front founder’s “pro-White ideas”. The obituary concludes: “Le Pen’s memory today urges us to continue struggling unapologetically for our worldview, which is neither right nor left, but White.”

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By Julian Jackson

Central to Collett’s belief system is the idea of “remigration”. The euphemistic term for forced mass repatriation of immigrants is one well-used on the Right, and increasingly heard in the mainstream. The view was adopted by the far-Right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) which came first in last year’s national election, and invoked again at the weekend by Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), who called for “repatriations on a large scale”. When US President-elect Donald Trump proposed remigration in America, the policy was compared in the press to ethnic cleansing. The term disgusts even Marine Le Pen, who split with the AfD over proposals to “remigrate” Germany’s foreign population.

Remigration is also vital to the platform of another burgeoning force on Britain’s nationalist Right: the Homeland Party, which was established in 2023 by former PA officials who had lost patience with Collett’s messianic brand of leadership. Unlike PA, Homeland managed to register as a political party at the start of 2024, though a Home Office official had previously expressed concern that the group would try to force a successful application “by stealth”, using different names or applicants with no far-Right background. Several of Homeland’s activists have been revealed as former members of neo-Nazi groups, and have engaged in Holocaust denial. Party chairman Kenny Smith, who led the breakaway, is alleged to have recruited armed members and in 2022 pled guilty to firearms offenses.

Perhaps in an attempt to counter these optics, Homeland’s website has endeavored to convey a political platform that reaches beyond immigration concerns, addressing proportional representation, fixing road infrastructure, and preserving the green belt. Homeland will fix your potholes. Indeed, in leaked audio from the group’s first meeting, as reported in The Times, Smith, another BNP alumnus, told activists: “The organization needs a focused approach to winning power, taking control of budgets and policymaking in places. Ultimately we want local authority, and then who knows beyond that.”

But its shiny website can’t conceal the uglier views aired online. Consider its posts on TikTik, including a clip criticizing the England national football team for featuring “Africans” such as Bukayo Saka and complaining that “we have to pretend that David Lammy and Olakemi Olafonteu Adeoke [sic] are both British or English”. The latter is otherwise known as Kemi Badenoch, and Homeland accounts consistently refer to the Tory leader using her full Nigerian birth name. Smith has posted that she “needs to return to Nigeria”.

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This is arguably feeding the rising anti-immigration tendency among the young. As Paul Jackson, an expert on Britain’s far-Right, tells me, “social media has transformed far-Right politics and allows for the easy sharing of quite extremist positions.” He adds: “youthfulness and rebellion are core tropes of the far-Right, and in recent years the online space has become filled with far- and extreme-Right messages designed to appeal to these sentiments.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, around 70% of its 700-odd members are aged under 30.

But if Homeland has attempted to hide its extremist elements beneath a reasonable-sounding policy platform, other groups aren’t so cautious. Collett argues that electoral politics is “a waste of time, money and resources”, with PA instead turning to initiatives such as raising money to support the families of convicted rioters.

If anything, these hard-Right groups seem to thrive on national chaos. Another of the groups which emerged from the ashes of the BNP, Britain First, is similarly described by its leader Paul Golding as a “street defense organization”. Golding himself has multiple convictions for offenses, including acts of terrorism and religiously aggravated harassment, while former members have claimed that the organization routinely plotted violent attacks on British Muslims and harassed asylum seekers. “I want this country to become a shithole,” Golding told an undercover reporter for a Channel 4 documentary last year. “I want this country to descend into a fucking nightmare, because that’s the only thing that’s going to get people off their backsides.”

The danger here is that as Farage softens his offer, he pushes his more radical supporters towards more extreme organizations. Homeland knows this. As one of its more presentable activists, Pete North, formerly of Ukip, wrote last month, “Farage should note that while he takes the credit for killing off the BNP, he could just as easily revive it” by disavowing Robinson’s supporters and “softening his line on immigration”. North claimed that “for every new voter [Farage] attracts as he moves his party to the center, the more the grassroots right may conclude that another party better represents their interests.” Meanwhile, Patriotic Alternative has claimed Starmer’s comments about the Tories’ “open-border experiment” as a victory for the “great replacement” theory.

How, then, does mainstream politics respond to this threat? Labour cannot assume that popular anger over immigration will be confined to the comparatively benign Reform UK. Indeed, Jackson predicts that, in the next couple of decades, an openly ethnonationalist party could exceed the level of support the “amateurish” BNP commanded at its height.

As the resurfacing of the grooming gangs scandal and last summer’s riots have proved, the main parties are ill-equipped to deal with such growing resentment. And with powerful figures such as Elon Musk fanning the flames, Nick Griffin’s protégés are poised to capitalize. The sense of febrility and fury is growing; the violent unrest which tore through England’s capillary towns and cities last summer was just a taste. As Starmer’s tenure is increasingly undermined, ravaged by social unrest and economic sclerosis, the nightmare of which Golding speaks may yet lie on the horizon.