Having fled her home in western Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Iryna recalls the warm welcome received at first. Locals offered food, homes, and clothing to the more than 1.5 million refugees who poured over its border. “We were treated very kindly,” she says. Yet just in the last months, the mood has shifted alarmingly.

Iryna is far from alone in her anxieties. Several other women I met at a UNITERS Foundation center, a charity in the Polish capital offering support to Ukrainians, spoke of similar fears. One pensioner from war-torn Zaporizhzhia was even pepper-sprayed outside an optician’s. “Now I try not to speak Ukrainian on the streets. If there are gatherings of Poles, my son recommends I stay away and watch out for myself.”

Hostility is surging. The center’s windows have been smashed several times, and state funding has now been terminated. In Przemyśl, a rail hub by Ukraine’s border, the mayor removed the blue and yellow scarf from a big teddy bear in the Christmas market after an outcry. In the Baltic coast region, a school teacher called his Ukrainian teenager pupils “scum”, while other youngsters spat on and beat the refugees so badly that one was left with a broken nose. One pupil also reportedly played recordings of bombs falling on Ukraine while yelling “time to hide” at his victims.

Poland is far from unique in seeing rising resentment to refugees. But these are people fleeing a neighboring country riven by war, not some distant land with an alien culture. Moreover, Poland too is a country that suffered from Moscow’s repression for decades — it shares Ukraine’s loathing of Russia and helped lead Europe’s initial response to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Kyiv. But attitudes have changed and show how bitter political struggles over the future, often entwined with unresolved perceptions of the past, are erupting across the West. Sensitive historical fissures underlie this transformation, combining with an all too familiar catalog of modern issues — disinformation, migration, populism, security, technology and trade battles — to create a highly combustible political environment.

“This is not yet a catastrophe but it is a new challenge for us,” says Miroslaw Skorka, chairman of the Association of Ukrainians in Poland. “For Poland, the story about victory over the Ukrainians was very important for post-war communist identity. So even during that explosion of support in 2022, a part of the population stayed silent. Now there is a schizophrenia: we need Ukrainians in the labor force to work and help grow our economy, but immigrants get scapegoated in schools and on the streets.”

Living on our island nation, with borders that have been fixed for centuries, British people often forget the turbulence endured by those living in the regions that historian Timothy Snyder has called the “bloodlands” of central and eastern Europe. Thousands of ethnic Poles were murdered in the Second World War by nationalists seeking to create an independent Ukraine, then many Ukrainians were in turn killed in savage retaliatory violence. In 1947, after the communist takeover, about 140,000 Ukrainians — including Skorka’s family — were forcibly moved in Operation Vistula from their homes in south-eastern regions to western areas taken from Germany in order to break up their community and curb support for insurgents, resulting in much hardship.

This left lingering historical sores on both sides — and these have been inflamed by resurgent nationalism, divisive politicians and the Kremlin’s adroit abuse of social media to spread discord in democracies. The sharp decline in sympathy for Kyiv is highly significant in a country that spent years warning complacent politicians in the West about Moscow’s expansionism, and that moved rapidly to bulk up its own armed forces in response to Putin’s aggression. Recent surveys of Poles have indicated that the majority oppose their neighbor joining either Nato or the European Union, and almost half want to reduce military support.

According to Marta Prochwicz, deputy head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw, the nation remains united over its core approach to Russia. “Poland is as anti-Russian as Ukraine — it’s practically impossible to find pro-Russian attitudes in Poland. At the start of the war, the public mood was very supportive. Because of the common threat, the automatic, knee-jerk reaction of the party in power was to give military equipment to Ukraine straight away.”

When Vladimir Putin attacked Kyiv, the ruling party of Poland was the conservative Law and Justice (PiS). It had governed since 2015 and presided over a period of controversial judicial reforms, an abortion ban and the harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric. Yet faced with a looming election and the strong threat from the rival liberal party, led by former EU president Donald Tusk, PiS tried to fire up voters with populist policies and stunts. They unsuccessfully demanded Second World War reparations from Germany, backed farmers protesting against cheap grain flooding the market under an EU deal designed to help Kyiv, and urged Zelensky to apologize for wartime massacres by nationalists 80 years earlier.

Despite Tusk’s party winning the subsequent election, the stirring up of those issues had lasting effects. Farmers protesting at the border, and the increased talk of exhuming graves of massacre victims, started to turn the mood against Ukrainians. Donald Trump’s return to the White House accelerated these changes.

This year’s bitter, hard-fought presidential contest also saw the unexpected victory of populist historian Karol Nawrocki, an independent backed by PiS. Nawrocki opposed Kyiv’s accession to the EU or Nato until “important civilizational issues” for Poland were resolved — referring to the wartime massacres by Ukrainian nationalists — while proposing to give Poles priority access to benefits, doctors and schools.

This has led to tussles with Tusk over extending support to refugees, although the prime minister — weakened by his party’s failure to win the presidency — has ruled out sending troops to back a ceasefire in Ukraine. Last month, Nawrocki agreed for “the last time” to extend legal status for Ukrainians until March, leaving their future uncertain. This is despite studies suggesting that more Ukrainians work in Poland than in any other European nation and that they generated 2.7% of the country’s GDP in the last year. Meanwhile, sabotage attacks and September’s drone incursion into Polish airspace rattled many citizens — especially after two Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence were identified last month as suspects behind some rail blasts.

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The flood of people over the border highlights how Poland — with its fast-growing economy and rapid post-Soviet modernization — has transitioned from a nation of emigration to one that offers alluring prospects as well as sanctuary. After Russia’s invasion, the million Ukrainians who came to Poland, joining the 1.3 million already there, were typically from more middle-class backgrounds than the earlier waves of “invisible migrants” working in low-paid jobs in fields and factories. Yet as one screenwriter with three university degrees tells me, she decided it was better to return home and endure Putin’s bombs than to be repeatedly offered cleaning jobs. “It is not a problem to clean some toilets — but it is a problem if I have to do this for the rest of my life.”

Now a new influx of men aged between 18 and 22 is further fueling concerns, given reports that at least 100,000 men have reportedly left Ukraine after the ban on adult males going abroad was lifted in August. Among them is Roman Melnyk, 22, an English teacher from Kyiv I met at Warsaw station. “This is my first day abroad in my whole life,” he says, explaining that even his soldier father had urged him to leave their war-torn country. Yet these refugees have been less warmly received than predecessors. “We should not allow Ukrainians of military age into Poland,” was the response of the far-Right Confederation party. “Poland cannot continue to be a haven for thousands of men who should be defending their country, yet burden the Polish taxpayer with the cost of their own desertion.”

In contrast with the war’s early days — when the Polish president received a standing ovation in parliament for declaring that Ukrainians were not refugees but guests — polling now shows that opposition to accepting Ukrainian refugees is at its highest (at 45%) since responses started being recorded following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. And most Poles now believe too much assistance is being offered, saying benefits and health care should only be offered to refugees working and paying taxes.

Research has also shown that the words most associated with Ukrainians on social media are “demanding” and “cunning”. One analysis found that 94,000 anti-Ukrainian posts appeared on X in just over four months this year, often linking Ukrainians to sabotage attacks in Poland or anti-Polish atrocities in the Second World War. Pro-Russian accounts have also blamed Ukraine for the recent drone incursions. And these stories feed neatly into Russian disinformation narratives, which the army has described as a key part of Russia’s strategy of “cognitive warfare”.

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Putin’s disinformation tricks have undoubtedly intensified the political divisions and hostility toward refugees. During the presidential campaign, for instance, seven cities received fake emails supposedly from Ukrainian House, a leading cultural and support center, seeking consent for demonstrations in support of Nawrocki’s main rival. It emerged later they included a word left untranslated from Russian. “How can you be a Polish nationalist and repeat divisive narratives that obviously have their roots in the Kremlin?,” asked Ben Cope, the NGO’s director of programs.

Yet Olena Babakova, an academic, journalist and migration researcher who moved from Kyiv 17 years ago, believes it is wrong to overestimate the Kremlin influence. “I often attend meetings with Polish politicians and when I ask why relations are poor, they blame Russian propaganda. And it was the winning presidential candidate who said the Polish NHS should develop an algorithm to automatically move Ukrainians to the end of the line for doctors so Poles could be first. If that is not racist, what is?”

She argues that refugees get scapegoated for wider economic and political failures. These are all familiar issues being discussed from Washington and Westminster through to Warsaw. Yet toward the end of our conversation, Babakova unwittingly echoes the British-Hungarian writer Gitta Sereny, who wrote about the complicity of a similarly passive society that refused to confront uncomfortable truths in darkening times.

“I have friends who tell me they limit their public presence in cafes, supermarkets or on the street in order not to be insulted,” Babakova says. “It is not that all Poles are anti-Ukrainian but the voices of a hostile minority, perhaps about 20%, have become so loud while the majority stays silent. Ukrainians who tell me they have experienced hate speech and violence always say the biggest problem is not that they were assaulted — but that everyone around them was silent.”

This uniquely English parochial cosmopolitanism courses through the recent, flourishing discourse on political Englishness. As the Economist’s Duncan Robinson has correctly observed, English nationalism is the dog that refuses to bark: there are no meaningful popular campaigns for an English parliament, secession from the UK is a position of the extreme fringe, and even Boris Johnson’s scrapping of the modest constitutional reform of English Votes for English Laws was met with mass apathy. If the English are, as Chesterton claimed, “the secret people… that never have spoken yet”, it can only be assumed that that is because they prefer silence.

And yet, as a consequence of devolution, there has been an explosion in recent years of political commentary on that mythical dragon, English nationalism. What is perhaps most remarkable is that this discourse is entirely driven by the Left: in so far as English nationalism exists in Britain it is a product of centre-left think-tank panels in Westminster. As nationalisms go, it is thin gruel, but then it’s explicitly meant to be. For what is most striking about this SW1-endorsed Englishness is how it is inevitably framed in terms of “reclaiming Englishness from the radical Right”, despite the fact such a thing does not meaningfully exist in England and shows no appreciable sign of coming into being.

English nationalism, indeed, often appears like a culture-bound syndrome of Celtic nationalists, a foil for them to rage against, or a danger to be guarded from, even as England continues on its course with amiable indifference. Bearers of strong ethnic identities themselves, Celtic nationalists perceive their equivalent potential in England, even if the English themselves prefer not to. From the Ukania hypothesis of British dysfunction and disintegration put forward by the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn and Anglo-Irish grandee Perry Anderson, to the musings of the recently-deceased Labour MP-turned-Welsh-nationalist David Marquand, England is a problem to be urgently solved, by granting the English a sensible, Scandinavian-style social democracy before the English belatedly adopt something harder-edged for themselves.

It is explicitly within this vein of thought that the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has published her new book, Another England, written to fend off the risk that “politicians and others… will use this latent tension for their own ends, stirring up emotions, provoking confrontations, and hoping to ride the same kind of nativist rage that took Donald Trump to the White House”. There is much to admire in Lucas’ book: her love of England’s natural beauty, so poorly served by Conservatives who profess guardianship of the land; her appreciation of the genuine diversity of dialect, vernacular architecture and sentiment packed into such a small area; her sensitive reading of English Literature, drawing on her PhD research. Many of her suggestions — for an English Parliament, civic autonomy, a land value tax, nationalisation of common goods, and expansion of the right to roam — are sensible and good: all are sentiments that are, in their way, fundamentally conservative, at least when compared to the radical liberalism of the Conservative Party. 

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Yet the remarkable thing about her book — perhaps the most English thing about it — is its squeamishness in framing Englishness as a national identity like other national identities, the cultural heritage of a specific people in a specific place over historical time: just like the Japanese, or the Palestinians, or the Kurds (whose lack of national self-determination in their ancient homeland Lucas takes the time to lament). Remarkably, hers is a book about fending off English ethnonationalism in which her object of inquiry, the English as an ethnic group, does not appear. 

The reasoning is swiftly apparent. She opens with a lament over Brexit having cut our island off from European politics — but though she alludes once to Europe’s rising wave of Right-wing populism, she strenuously avoids addressing the cause. But look at our closest, most impeccably liberal and social-democratic European neighbours: in Germany, the most popular party among the young is the AfD; in Denmark, the Social Democratic government aims for “Net Zero Migration”; in Sweden, the radical Right is buoyant, and in the Netherlands it is the largest political force. Even Ireland, now that it is belatedly undergoing a parallel demographic transformation to the UK, seems to be developing a significantly more volatile reaction (to the discomfort of Irish liberals, who have begun claiming that Irish populism is somehow a British plot).

If anything is remarkable about England, however, it is the near-total absence of such a political current. This is despite the fact that England, far more than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, is currently undergoing the greatest wave of demographic change since the historic folk migration that carved an England out of Brythonic-speaking Britain in the first place. Lucas herself is relaxed about such a historic shift, even as she observes the academic consensus, like Europe’s observable political reality, is towards it driving political disorder. “On current trends,” she notes, “the white British will become a minority (though still by far the largest minority) at some point in the 2070s… and academic thinking has come from different directions — demography, politics, sociology — to identify this phenomenon as a decisive driver in political populism. But it doesn’t have to be.” 

Yet anyone anticipating a groundbreaking rebuttal of the social-scientific literature finds only the assertion that: “For one thing, we can be confident that a more diverse population is a strength.” In any case, she reassures us, “I won’t be around in the 2070s to see an England where… [future generations] do not see a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as something to fear”. It must be said that the English have taken to such a historically transformative, high-stakes experiment with a rare degree of equanimity. 

Whether or not she is correct, Lucas’s serene detachment is, ironically enough, an unreflexive example of the English Exceptionalism she lays at the door of the Eton and Oxford rotters at the top. Other less enlightened nations may turn to angry reaction as an inevitable result, but such things simply aren’t British… sorry, English. And perhaps she’s right: England really does appear to be an outlier, certainly within Europe. While the majority, in increasing numbers, believe migration, especially under the Conservatives, has been too high — even Lucas states that “in the short to medium term at least, some rules on immigration are also necessary” — there is admirably little hostility to migrants themselves. There are, after all, few if any other nations so solicitous of minorities as to wish to become one: perhaps the English really are the most liberal and tolerant nation on earth. 

Even still, it is impossible to read this book without sensing Lucas recapitulating all the outward-looking, world-beating, boosterish exceptionalism she mocks in the British ruling class, and squeezing it into England’s smaller container. In a book ostensibly aimed at carving out an English political imagination from the constraints of the British state, she spends a chapter lamenting the British Empire, including for its “essentially racist notion that the ‘white man’ had a moral duty to care for… ‘less fortunate peoples’” (no doubt this is different to her own desire to host the less affluent of the Earth). Brexit itself, and the ongoing culture wars over the past, Lucas reads as a top-down displacement activity launched by Westminster elites to stifle progressive change — rather than, as the academic literature predicts, a displacement proxy conflict fought by the dwindling ethnic majority against demographic change, no different to Ulster Protestant fears over the Irish language and Irish Republican symbolism. 

Like the English themselves, the very reason she is writing this book in the first place can only be addressed obliquely, like some malign folk spirit whose naming grants it power. Even as the liberal order is shaken by ethnic conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, today’s liberals cannot bring themselves, as their predecessors in the Nineties were able to, to address their long-described dynamics frankly, retreating to their comfort zones of Americanised race discourse and elite-driven conspiracies.

It is fascinating, then, that the precipitating factor for Lucas’s call for Englishness is her sympathy for the separatist Celtic nationalisms, which she understands as perfectly natural historical developments. Though she does not address this point, these are of course ethnic nationalisms: the Scottish and Welsh and Irish are nations by virtue not just of their inherent “cultural stuff” (in the anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s phrase), but of the amicable but real ethnic boundaries demarcating the Welsh and Scottish from the English, and the Irish from the British peoples. It is not, after all, through racism that Welsh nationalists resent English homeowners moving into their country or weakening the vitality of their language, but ethnic consciousness and fear of the cultural change English migration brings. 

The fact that these ethnic boundaries are permeable — that Gerry Adams possesses a solidly English surname, and Arlene Foster was born with a good native Irish one — does not mean they do not exist. When, in Lucas’s telling, the Welsh and Scots set off in pursuit of their historical destiny by leaving the United Kingdom, and the Northern Irish (due to shifts in political power wrought by demographic change, though Lucas does not address this dynamic) join the Republic, then the English will find themselves, like the Austrians and Russians before them, heirs to a shrunken state, and at risk of all manner of unprogressive political malignities. It is the work of Westminster liberals, in this reading, to shape political Englishness before the English find it thrust upon them, and Nigel Farage finds his inner Atatürk. Whether the proportional representation Lucas advocates would neuter such an eventuality, as she imagines, or accelerate it, as European politics suggests, remains unclear.

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But the assumption, made by Celtic nationalists as well as the English liberal Left, that the English are inherently prone to an aggressively exclusionary ethnic nationalism, which requires constant diverting in a healthily multicultural direction, is so far not borne out by the evidence. When Scotland and Wales, which possess the homogeneous demographics of mid-20th century England, reach the same stage — if they ever do — their nationalist critiques of English intolerance may be worth listening to. As we have seen, it is the precise contrary that is most remarkable, a situation that is poorly explained other than by that unfashionable thing, national temperament. Perhaps that will change, perhaps not: one way or another we will find out, even if Lucas won’t. 

As the writer Paul Kingsnorth (who Lucas incidentally cites in her acknowledgements, without engaging with intellectually) remarked in his own St George’s Day missive, perhaps England’s new non-English majority will choose to become English over time, as immigrant Irish and Jews did before them; or perhaps “England is simply coming to an end, as all nations ultimately do.” But for now, the English seem uniquely happy, or resigned, or apathetic about merging their nation into a new and determinedly bloodless civic identity, a European Canada or Australia. 

In waiting for the English to begin to hate, England’s powerless radical Right, like its dominant equivalents on the liberal Left, have been left waiting a very long time. Here is the irony of Lucas’s position: lamenting an English exceptionalism her worldview depends upon, and yearning for political unity with a Europe whose politics she detests. Perhaps Westminster politicians like Lucas, so keen to ward off the dark potential of English ethnonationalism, can cut the English nation a little slack: if the fearful dragon ever existed, it seems to have died long before our time.

My first impression of Simone and Malcolm is that they have walked straight out of Pattern Recognition. Two slender, voluble, dark-haired, medium-height thirty-somethings, they have slicked-back hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and quirky dark clothing. Their children, Torsten, Octavian, and Titan Invictus, are all IVF-conceived, some gene-selected for traits such as IQ or happiness. Simone is pregnant again, she tells me merrily, with Industry Americus Collins, due in April.

The original “‘elite’ couple breeding to save mankind” of countless memes, I sought them out on a recent London visit in the hope of inducing them to say controversial things about biotech. They’re famous (or notorious if you prefer) for their enthusiastic endorsement of a high-tech Bay Area “pro-natalism” that embraces every available reproductive technology. From IVF, through surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, to potentially gene-editing future offspring, they are what they call “the most talkative iteration” of a “technophilic” movement dedicated to saving the human species from population crash.

There are plenty of conservatives to whom all such technologies are prima facie off-limits. And I have grave concerns about anything that promises to free us from organismic limits — only to demand, in exchange, new kinds of servitude. I’m far from certain whether technophiles are friends or enemies. But what I heard was a message most relevant to the people currently keenest to dismiss them as “terminally online Redditors” or “hipster eugenicists”, or to link them with the far-Right: that the fertility crash is coming, soonest and hardest and most brutally, for liberals. And the Collinses are, in fact, liberals too: just unusually unfiltered and clear-sighted ones.

The Collinses earn a living in financial services, but their passion is education (they run an Institute for the Gifted) and promoting natalist culture. They use email and WhatsApp accounts seemingly interchangeably, and offer opinions as if they’re two interfaces of the same voluble, intelligent and eccentric hive mind. Malcolm proposed marriage to Simone on Reddit. They plan to have seven children.

In the end, we didn’t discuss gene-editing and fertility tech much at all: we converged, instead, on a deeper and arguably more insoluble fear. That is, that the contours of the fertility crisis mean people like the Collinses — subcultures that value intelligence, openness, and technological sophistication — are a critically endangered species.

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In the Collins worldview, what they call the “global monoculture” is the chief antagonist. They mean the largely homogeneous high-tech norms that have emerged in every major developed city in the modern world: Starbucks, tiny families or solo apartments, long working hours. And everywhere this “monoculture” appears, fertility is falling. Human birth rates are now below replacement almost everywhere in the world.

This global monoculture “believes it has a right to other people’s children, because its fertility rates are so low that the only way it can replenish itself is by just taking the children of nearby healthy cultural groups”. In Simone and Malcolm’s view, this dynamic represents “an existential threat to our species”. And as they see it, the motley coalition of interest groups making up the current “conservative movement” is united by hostility to this urban monoculture, and sometimes little else.

And while the Collinses are meticulously Californian in their aversion to offer explicit moral judgement, it would seem that however existential a threat this monoculture is overall, it’s a clear and present danger to people like them. For it poses a long-term threat to intellectual and cultural openness. Malcolm has, Simone tells me, analysed data on the demographic profiles of people having lots of kids — and it turns out that the deciding factor isn’t religiosity at all. It’s the mirror inverse of the high openness exhibited by “terminally online Redditors” and Silicon Valley rationalists.

According to their own studies, Simone tells me, the high-fertility profile comes with “xenophobia and fascism”. That is: people who have lots of kids are authoritarian, hostile to out-groups, and reluctant to consider other viewpoints as valid. And while they assure me, with the typically extravagant tolerance of difference typical of the Bay Area, that they’re “not even antagonistic” to bigotry “so long as they don’t interfere with their neighbours” tacitly the judgement is clear. After all, a defining characteristic of authoritarian outlooks is precisely interfering with your neighbours. Having evidently considered the prognosis for their own way of life, in a future dominated by such cultures, the Collinses show pragmatism and clear-sightedness in doing whatever they can to avert the prospect.

But it’s not just pluralism and openness on the chopping-block if demographic forces continue to select in favour of bigots. It’s also cognitive ability, cultures that value education, and cultures knowledgeable of and engaged with technologies. All these traits are, the Collinses remind me, correlated with low fertility; not that I need reminding, as a bookish, overeducated, and extremely online mother of only one.

Meanwhile, Malcolm continues, the people still having kids are the ones making less money, and wielding less cultural and economic power in the world. In turn, this makes such groups “less good at defending themselves from aggressive forces and less viable as power players on the world stage”. Rather than embracing marginalisation as a condition for survival, the Collinses want to “find and nourish groups that are able to be global economic and technological players while still being high fertility, because that is so rare”.

What’s left unspoken here is that they think failing to support “global economic and technological players” would have very bad effects overall — for it would mean shrugging while the culture selects against clever, bookish, and technologically adept people. They are, in other words, quietly worried that current civilisation is shrinking the future pool of what a Bay Area rationalist is bound to see as the keystone of our genetic heritage: IQ.

They tread carefully around the topic, no doubt mindful of its radioactive connotations. But Malcolm comes close to spelling out the implications when he tells me that, based on research he’s read, “we may see about a one standard deviation drop in IQ in the developed world in the next 75 years, due to genetic reasons”. That is: the smartest people are deleting themselves from the gene pool.

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The Collinses clearly accept that whatever form of human culture makes it to the other side of the current demographic pinch-point will be a brutal survival of the fittest — where “fit” doesn’t necessarily accord with their preferred values. But though they studiously route round any explicit moral statement that might impose coercive obligations on someone else, it’s clear that the Collinses would prefer at least some of the winning demographic subcultures to be high-IQ people with technological capabilities, and a willingness to tolerate different viewpoints. They emphasise that they are firmly against eugenics, where this represents any top-down value-statement about or intervention in the gene pool. But it’s also clear that, albeit in an opt-in, you-do-you Bay Area way, they think there are better and worse ways that gene pool could develop in the future.

To this end, they’re more than happy to collaborate with any group — even those far more authoritarian or anti-tech than they are — if the common goal is reversing what they perceive as the current negative trend. In their view, it’s not for some time — Malcolm suggests, “in 300 or 400 years” — that this coalition might fall to infighting, as pluralistic and technophilic factions such as theirs battle “religious, fundamentalist, xenophobic groups that believe that there can only be one religious group and one ethnic group in the world”. In such a scenario, they accept, “a lot of the conservative pronatalist groups will come into conflict because some are more pluralistic than others”.

In the meantime, though, they see what they’re doing as salvage work, preserving as much of a dying culture as they can. “We have seen this before in the Roman Empire,” they say, “this collapse scenario. Anyone who doesn’t think that we are entering a dark age right now is delusional. We need to begin to round the wagons, to defend as much of our civilisation as we can, so that we can use it going forwards.”

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It’s possible, I put to them, that the rationalistic, high-tech culture they are trying to preserve is too deeply implicated in the “global monoculture” they deplore to be disaggregated — indeed, that it may be driving the problem. Malcolm shrugs. It’s possible, he tells me. But the Collinses are content nonetheless to pursue their bet, and to see who turns out to be right.

Despite our differences on reproductive technologies, I suspect the Collinses and I are more aligned than not — on, if nothing else, devotion to reading the cultural tea-leaves, and extrapolating from the patterns we recognise. Some who do this, such as William Gibson, set out what they see via the written word to sometimes near-prophetic effect. Others, such as the Collinses, work as hard as they can in the real world, to turn the direction of events toward or away from patterns they see on the horizon.

But whatever the longer-term impact of the Collinses’ interventions will be, they’re right to see their beloved culture of logical, rationalistic, high-openness risk-takers as endangered. And there’s a lesson there for liberals of both Right and Left, even a long way from Silicon Valley. For if the traits most immediately at risk are openness, high cognitive ability, and an appreciation for education: those, in a word, commonest in liberals. If the Collinses’ read is right on the larger patterns, and I think it is, those who value intelligence and openness need to be a great deal more deliberate about “rounding the wagons” to protect the values and cultural practices they cherish – including via efforts to inculcate these traits and cultures in the next generation, or indeed to produce a next generation at all.

If this doesn’t happen, all those clever, tolerant, bookish types, many of whom currently leap to denounce voices like the Collinses as at least “far-right” adjacent, may wake up in a generation or so, to find they missed the chance to hand on their own genetic and cultural legacy. And that instead, in a fit of short-sighted self-righteousness, they gifted the world to the only people still having children: their enemies.

A few days earlier, my wife and I had met her Ukrainian family at 4am, 24 hours after they fled their home in Kyiv. We had flown out to meet her mother, two brothers (aged 8 and 15), and female cousin (16). Just like thousands of other refugees, we were crammed into a small, rented flat on the border of the old town.

We had little idea how the UK government would handle their visa applications, but I feared the process would be like everything else involving the Home Office: slow, inflexible, and infused with suspicion. My wife and I experienced this first-hand when applying for her own visa. Compared to the digitised registry office in Kyiv where we had married two years ago, the Home Office proved incapable of executing its most basic functions, hamstrung by a combination of bureaucracy and xenophobia.

Back then, none of her family could have imagined that they would be forced to flee their homes amid artillery strikes and rumours that Putin’s mercenaries were roaming the streets. But after enduring a day of bombings, they had little choice. Their initial plan was to drive to the city of Lutsk near the Polish border, where they had family. But Lutsk had also been bombed, the roads heading West were blocked, and there were reports that Belarusian forces were poised to sweep in from the North.

So they drove south, leaving behind everything they couldn’t carry. Trying to avoid the main roads, they travelled for 16 hours, stopping finally at Khmelnytskyi. The following morning, as the situation became clearer — and as the scale of Ukraine’s heroic military resistance became obvious — they eventually decided to risk heading to Lutsk. After much agonising, the family collected a cousin, said goodbye to their father (who, like all men aged between 18 and 60, had to remain behind and be ready to be called up to fight).

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Back at the visa centre, Home Office staff — some of whom had been flown in overnight — rushed from one group to the next, trying to explain what little information they knew to those who spoke little or no English. They were dealing with a WiFi network that kept crashing, laptops that had no chargers, and IT systems that stubbornly refused to accept their login details. At one point, someone copied my family’s passport numbers onto a piece of paper and handed it to someone else, who immediately copied the numbers onto another piece of paper, which was passed to a third person — who promptly put the slip of paper in the bin.

It took about a week for their visas to be issued, even though it was clear that many at the Home Office and visa centres were working throughout the night. The government has now announced a 48-hour target for processing applications, but it remains to be seen whether this is anything other than wishful thinking: I suspect my family won’t be the last to flee Ukraine with little more than the clothes on their back, only to shell out for a hotel while they wait for the wheels of Britain’s Rolls-Royce bureaucracy to turn.

The government insists that detailed security checks are vital to stop spies and people traffickers, while ignoring the lumbering clunkiness that defines its system as a whole. First, the Home Office in London sets the rules, and applications are conducted on the GOV.UK website. Then, an outsourced company called TLS Connect collects documents and biometrics at visa centres across the world (the one in Warsaw uses temporary offices inside a hotel). Applications are then sent back to Home Office centres across the UK. Here, staff reportedly use three completely different and incompatible systems, some of which are 20 years old, to check documents and run background checks. The applications, if successful, are then sent back to TLS Connect to distribute the visas and stamped passports. Once in the UK, this paper visa is then used to collect an ID permit.

Of course, my Ukrainian family are grateful for the sanctuary they can find in the UK: their visas grant them rights to work, study, and claim state support. The alternative — remaining in Kyiv — doesn’t bear thinking about.

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But the uncomfortable truth is that no visa can solve the more serious problems they face. While Kyiv is neither Mariupol nor Kharkiv, it is hard to predict what, if anything, my family will have to return to. The small restaurant they own lies in a village on the city’s outskirts that has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the area. Tales from their employees of looting Russian soldiers using the business as a base provide some warning of what to expect, but the revelations at Bucha still leave us numb. Yet still they remain certain they want to go back.

What will they do in the meantime? Well, it all depends on whether they manage to escape the complex web of Britain’s bureaucratic state. For instance, everyone in the UK knows the reams of paperwork involved in registering for a GP. Yet even I couldn’t help but laugh when my eight-year-old brother-in-law was told to fill out three forms about his alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, in an effort to register them for under-16 Oyster cards, I have become trapped between several different Transport for London systems, none of which will read their passports to verify their ages. At one point, I was invited to go to a TfL office which had been closed for several years.

Contrast this with the response of friends, neighbours and strangers, and it’s hard not to feel anything but exasperation. Since returning, we have been overwhelmed by spontaneous acts of generosity: donations of clothes, toys, and electronics; invitations to join sports clubs and visit museums; offers of after-school lessons from teachers who are happy to put in a word to get the kids registered at schools. One neighbour, out of the blue, announced he had tickets for a Spurs game, collected the elder brother, and handed him a white replica shirt (the boy, at least until now, preferred Manchester City, home of the Ukrainian defender Oleksandr Zinchenko — but we don’t tell our neighbour).

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And this spirit is being channelled across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. There is a widespread, almost populist, demand that Britain do more to help. Yet at every turn, the Home Office seems intent on making the system for registering for the scheme impossible to negotiate.

It is hard to imagine those fleeing the Blitz being found homes in the countryside under today’s conditions. Only yesterday, for example, it was reported that councils have denied applications from volunteers whose houses have plug sockets “that endangered children because they were placed too low in the walls”. Elsewhere, hosts have been rejected “because ponds in gardens needed to be drained before child refugees could move in”.

This, then, is my overwhelming impression of these strange few weeks: the enormous, perhaps unexpected, generosity of the British people, contrasted with the suffocating bureaucracy of the British state. It is only through the fresh eyes of my family that I realise how resigned to this shameful state we have become. We, not to mention those fleeing war, deserve better.

That’s not to say that the League’s xenophobia is insincere or negligible. In 2000, its activists herded a dozen pigs into the field where a Muslim community planned to build a mosque, for example, and three years later its founder – Umberto Bossi, then minister for institutional reform – advocated using artillery against boats carrying migrants to Italy’s coasts. After the third warning, he said, “I want to hear the roar of cannons”.

Salvini’s recent policies against NGO rescue operations seem mild in comparison. But these aren’t especially deeply felt: they are tactics employed to muster support from the majority of voters whose interests, meanwhile, are being damaged by the League’s real priorities. Indeed, its rhetoric has changed in tune with the anxieties and opportunities of the period.

Before immigration rose in the 1990s, its scapegoat (when it was exclusively a party of the North) was southerners, whom it denounced as lazy welfare recipients; before it was nationalist, the party was federalist and fleetingly secessionist; before it was fervently Catholic, it staged elaborate rituals to honour the river that crosses the peninsula’s northern plain, the Po.

The only constants are the scapegoating and its relentless effort to cast itself as at one with the man in the street.

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This serves a strategy whose main pillar is keeping the rule of law weak. Karla Hoff and Joseph Stiglitz defined this notion as “what stops the few from stealing from the many”; the League uses demagogy to distract the many while the few steal from them. And this is the real danger the party poses.

In Italy, average real incomes are roughly at the level they were in 1995 – in France, Germany and Spain they are about 25% higher – and political discontent is intense and widespread. The primary cause of this malaise is not the euro but stagnant productivity growth, which began to decline well before the establishment of the common currency.

Italy’s large public debt is itself a manifestation of that problem. Its roots lie in a politico-economic equilibrium that hinders innovation, competition and creative destruction, which are crucial drivers of productivity growth and prosperity. Low political accountability and a weak rule of law are the main traits; clientelism and illegality its clearest manifestations. Tax evasion is between two and three times higher than in France, Germany, or Spain, for example, and corruption is at levels typical of the Balkans.

Italy is an open democracy, served by an economy – which has Europe’s second largest manufacturing sector – that reliably produces healthy current account surpluses. But its social order is markedly less efficient and fair than its peers’: to protect the country’s elites, it constrains the opportunities of ordinary citizens and firms, raises inequality, and dampens the country’s potential.

In order to shore up this unbalanced system, Italy’s governments acquired the consensus of elements of society by granting them certain political and economic privileges. These particularistic policies accumulated over decades, may have made the social order more inclusive. But they reduced the efficiency of public expenditure and prevented the development of a genuinely universal welfare system, which economies based on competition and innovation require.

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This equilibrium and the political establishment that presided over it were shaken in 1992–4, mightily, by a currency crisis and vast corruption investigations. The equilibrium stabilised, thanks to greater budget discipline; but the political establishment collapsed and rapidly dissolved.

The League flourished then, as the fiercest opponent of that establishment – which it described, correctly, as corrupt, collusive, and unaccountable. It gained almost 9% of the vote in 1992, an extraordinary result in Italy’s ossified 1948–92 party system. Yet, in 1991, the party had opposed a referendum that sought precisely to increase political accountability, and a few weeks after its electoral success it approached one of Italy’s largest firms, which was illegally financing the establishment parties, and duly received its own undisclosed contribution.

Its 1992 manifesto – mixing hostility to Rome and the South with threats of tax revolt and secession – was a direct response to the rising tax burden. It argued that the North should keep its own money, and found support among those regions’ professionals, self-employed workers, small entrepreneurs, and their employees. This became the League’s core electorate, and that manifesto barely changed until the 2010s.

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In 1994, the League allied with Silvio Berlusconi, who inherited the priorities and electorate of the old establishment. It supported each of his cabinets – 1994, 2001–6, 2008–11 – and each of their worst policies, including repeated amnesties for tax evasion and a long line of laws whose main aim or effect was to increase impunity for corruption.

Italy’s politico-economic equilibrium was to become less stable because the fiscal space for lifting growth through public spending, to compensate stagnating productivity, and for securing consensus, had been severely reduced. Indeed, Berlusconi’s last government was felled by the European sovereign debt crisis (which threatened the survival of the Eurozone).

Mario Monti’s 2011–13 ‘technocratic’ cabinet, which implemented emergency austerity measures, relied on Berlusconi’s and the centre-Left’s support. The League, alone in opposition, benefited from the fact that those harsh policies, which had contributed to avoiding a catastrophe, soon became unpopular. Under a weak and confused leadership, however, crushed by grave corruption scandals, the League suffered a stiff electoral defeat in 2013.

Salvini inherited a party in ruins. But he could capitalise on its opposition to austerity, to recast the party as an anti-establishment one, and nimbly discarded separatism in favour of nationalism, to expand its support beyond the North. The 2013–18 centre-Left governments did little to either raise growth or make it more inclusive, and Five Star and the League won the 2018 elections by promising cultural and economic protection to those left behind by globalisation.

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In office, however, the League pushed policies that went directly against their interests. It granted a special pension scheme to certain cohorts of workers; it obtained a tax cut for professionals and small entrepreneurs, and demands a yet more generous one; it won a tax-evasion amnesty, wants another one, and proposes to abolish all limits to the use of cash, which will further ease tax evasion; and it defended tooth and nail two junior ministers accused of corruption and embezzlement.

The League is now the main – though not the sole – guarantor of Italy’s equilibrium. It picked up from Berlusconi the standard of favouring vested interests and tolerance for illegality, and inherited much of his electorate. What changed, compared with the period of Berlusconi’s dominance, is that xenophobia is more readily turning from rhetoric into deeds.

This mix worked remarkably well at the European elections in May. It resembles what happened in Hungary, and in other regimes characterised by the combination of corruption and demagogic nationalism (which could be better described as multi-party kleptocracies than illiberal democracies, as Branko Milanović has argued).

In Italy’s better-governed democracy, however, that combination generates greater tensions, which are a permanent source of instability. It’s why the more predatory the League’s policies are, the louder its rhetoric must be. But the xenophobia is a distraction. That’s why those who wish to oppose the League will be ineffective if they simply decry the xenophobia without mentioning the perversion of the rule of law.

Andrea Lorenzo Capussela is the author of ‘The Political Economy of Italy’s Decline’ (Oxford University Press, 2018)