Let us take a moment to remember who Charlie Kirk was. Kirk was 31 when he was shot in the neck in front of a crowd of thousands of students at Utah Valley University on 10 September 2025. In his short life, he built a vast conservative youth activist network, Turning Point USA, which boasts well over half a million lifetime members and a presence on more than 6,200 high school and university campuses. Kirk built a vast ground game operation in key swing states that helped President Trump win the 2024 election. TPUSA’s events are attended by thousands across America.

More importantly, Charlie Kirk was a voice for a generation. He inspired millions of young people, not just in his homeland but around the world. His social media reached over 100 million people every month, and his words touched millions more through his thousands of interviews on various TV networks and radio stations. He espoused a popular conservative message, and he did it with eloquence and a smile. Charlie’s debates were his most popular content; he believed in engaging with his political foes as the way to bridge political divides and cultivate the republican civic virtue on which American democracy rests. For that, they shot him in the neck, a man with a wife and two small children, so that he could no longer speak, organise, fundraise or debate.

When President Kennedy was killed in 1963 by a communist-sympathising lonely young man, the American Left passed a series of radical reforms that changed the country forever. The Machiavellian Lyndon Johnson used his predecessor’s murder and the political capital it generated to pass sweeping legislation. Five days after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Johnson told Congress: ‘No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.’ The following year, he passed the Civil Rights Act, creating what Christopher Caldwell has called a ‘rival constitution’ that paved the way for the bureaucratic entrenchment of systemic discrimination against white Americans throughout the state and across society in general. He did not stop there: in 1965, he oversaw the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which threw open America’s borders to mass immigration. In the same year, he enacted vast expansions of the welfare state through his Great Society programs, including the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid.

In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the collective drawing in of breath from the American left could be heard around the world. The second Trump Administration had proven that the Republican Party was not quite the herbivorous creature it had been in decades prior, coming into office just nine months beforehand and taking unprecedented steps to change policy and dismantle aspects of the federal bureaucracy. Trump’s actions until that point, however, had largely danced around the edges, yet to strike at his opponents directly. Projecting their own shark instincts onto their opponents, the left assumed that Kirk’s death would provide the impetus and the justification for precisely that.

They were wrong. Despite some initial noises, not a single law was passed to defend freedom of speech on university campuses, let alone crack down on left-wing terrorist networks such as Antifa, their allies, and their donors. Even after multiple attempts on President Trump’s life and organised Left-wing violence against deportation agents, Republicans have failed to seize on the issue or rally behind a serious legislative response. Nor was the moment deployed in support of broader political priorities. The Republicans’ flagship SAVE Act, which would require Americans to prove their citizenship before registering to vote in federal elections, remains stalled in Congress, with little prospect of becoming law in the next two years.

Right-wing podcasters instead chose to go to war over the issue of Israel, indulging in deranged conspiracies around Kirk’s murder. Candace Owens, Kirk’s former colleague at Turning Point, has claimed that Israel and the French Foreign Legion were involved in his shooting, while accusing figures within TPUSA of covering up the circumstances of his death. She has specifically accused Erika Kirk of being a liar, and, to give you a flavour of Owens’ clickbait crusade, one of her many videos on Charlie’s widow is entitled ‘Here’s Why It’s Time For The Police To Question Erika Kirk’. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican Congresswoman, amplified suspicions surrounding Israel’s role in Kirk’s death, while podcast host Tucker Carlson said Kirk was ‘most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel’.

These conspiracy theories have consumed thousands of hours of discussion in the United States. Just three weeks ago, Candace Owens sat down with conservative commentator Andrew Wilson to debate the circumstances around Kirk’s murder in a three-hour YouTube video. Well over six million people watched it. Those indulging in these theories have not only wasted the chance to make something meaningful with Kirk’s memory; they have allowed the left to literally get away with murder by placing the blame elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the left responded to Charlie’s assassination with glee. Thousands posted messages online celebrating his gruesome murder. Far-left streamer Hasan Piker just last month mocked his death in front of a live audience, scornfully singing a song written in tribute to the late conservative activist. Kirk has become a meme; AI videos of him as a resurrected robot gain millions of views on social media platforms. Nobody has paid any cost for this. In fact, they have learnt an important lesson: violence works, and they can get away with it.

I knew Charlie Kirk, a little bit. I first met him in London in 2018, when he was setting up the British version of Turning Point USA, and was later able to interview him myself. He was a deeply charismatic and impressive young man, full of vitality and vision. He did not deserve to die, and no political response could possibly lessen or justify the tragedy of his passing. But Charlie dedicated his life to politics for a reason, and this horrific moment could have provided an unprecedented opportunity to advance the causes in service of which he died. Instead, his murder has deprived the American Right of a rising star, and plunged the conservative movement into moronic rabbit holes and irrelevant debates. RIP Charlie Kirk — we will never see his like again.

This article was written by Steven Edginton, a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist. You can find more of his work on his Substack. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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But every year there is a conversation about its place in our country and its events calendar — is it worth the funding? Is it worth the disorder? Is it actually valuable at all?

Mariana Mazzucato — the left-wing ‘Rockstar Economist’ — makes a great point, asking, ‘What if we treated Notting Hill Carnival not simply as an event to be funded, but as infrastructure to be invested in?’ In her Carnival Economics project and New Statesman article, she argued that the standard economic models fail to measure the true value of the festival.

The event’s value is undercounted in several ways, Mazzucato suggests. As an institution, the Carnival brings together musicians, technicians, hospitality and media, all training and preparing for this three-day event, and this surely has value for the country, outside of the one weekend. Rio de Janeiro, of course, has a year-round ecosystem surrounding Carnaval, and thus presents a model to emulate. Most of the people who engage with ‘Carni’ are not formally employed by it — so even the economic activity it generates is perhaps undercounted. Cultural participation is also a form of hidden economic activity: it lowers the risk of depression, and associated health and productivity gains could be valued as high as £8bn.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it ‘creates immense public value by strengthening the conditions for change, builds collective capabilities and pride’ — and in the words of the president of Rio’s João Goulart Foundation, “Carnaval is hard power”. Mazzucato could also have mentioned its value in education and training, crowd management, governance, policing, and city infrastructure management. Presumably it brings in money through tourism. What’s not to like?

Curious to investigate the immense economic and public value described in Carnival Economics — I took to Ladbroke Grove to explore a sorely needed, untapped source of growth for the country myself.

Carni: a brief history

If you have ever wondered about the awkward significance and legal leeway granted to Carni, you will be comforted to know that, as with many other good British institutions, it has its origins in an act of minority honour restoration. The British Nationality Act (BNO) 1948 granted rights of settlement and status as a British subject to the new citizens of the Commonwealth. With the country facing post-war labour shortages, the ensuing immigrant influx came largely from the West Indies, alongside South Asians, Africans and peoples from across the Empire. HMT Windrush, and the ensuing ‘Windrush Generation’ are of course now a part of a mythologised narrative of the ‘building modern Britain’. The Jamaican-born RAF Ground Crewman, Sam Beaver King, was one of the West Indians brought to Britain on the Windrush, who went on to be a co-founder of the Carnival, the first black Mayor of Southwark, and to receive an MBE in 1998.

This happy account of history has been contested, including on the pages of this Journal. Britain had already been through successive racial fracas surrounding the presence of foreign seamen in port cities, particularly after the First World War. From 1920, the state was forced to respond to public hostility and developed administrative mechanisms, such as granting powers to port officials to prevent foreign seamen from landing, or mandating their registration as aliens to restrict the rights of non-white foreigners to migration and permanent settlement in Britain.

Though the Attlee government had, in BNO 1948, committed itself to a policy of defining British subjecthood with a link to Commonwealth citizenship, it was not blind to the deep popular opposition to former colonial (versus white dominion) migration. Following the Windrush and the immediate concerns of MPs in the face of this backlash, the Cabinet investigated de jure restrictions against ‘coloured’ immigration. In the end, the British government resolved to continue the subtle ways to minimise non-white migration — maintaining administrative screening at ports and introducing the European Volunteer Workers scheme to bring roughly 100,000 white Europeans displaced by the war as an easier way to plug labour shortages. By 1951, 76,400 Commonwealth immigrants had come to Britain.

Windrushers mostly rushed to South and East London, but of the around 150,000 total new entrants to London, Notting Hill became home to 5,000–10,000 of them. North Kensington, the area in which Notting Hill is situated, already had high rates of poverty, crime and violence and was also subject to soapboxing from Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and Colin Jordan’s White Defence League with a clear anti-black immigrant message. Things between the locals and the newcomers came to a head in 1958, resulting in what has been termed a race riot claimed to have been perpetuated by ‘The Teddy Boys’.

If you read articles about the Notting Hill Riot, it often appears as though ‘The Teddy Boys’ were a specifically White Nationalist gang that based itself in the area. In reality, Teddy Boys were a post-war sub-culture, much like the better-known ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’ that appeared only a few years later. They were known for their Edwardian-inspired dress and rock-n-roll music. The Teddy Boys were generally working class, and indeed more rough-and-tumble than the later movements — some formed gangs and were identified as the perpetrators of other racially motivated attacks. Some at the time made claims that Teddy Boys were used as the Union Movement’s street muscle.

The Notting Hill riot was instigated when a group of Teddy Boys witnessed an argument between a mixed-race couple, the Swedish Majbritt Morrison and Jamaican husband Raymond Morrison, and intervened, resulting in a fight and the Swede receiving comments such as “Black man’s trollop”. The next day, mobs moved through the streets, looking for black victims to harass, intimidate and attack, shouting “Keep Britain White”, the exact slogan of the White Defence League. Police logs report weapons such as petrol bombs, iron bars, butcher’s knives and weighted leather belts. Caribbean men fought back, and the violence escalated into a five-day riot. Of the 108 people who were charged with offences, 72 were white, and 36 were ‘coloured’. PC Richard Bedford said he had seen a mob of 300 to 400 white people in Bramley Road shouting:

“We will kill all black bastards. Why don’t you send them home?” PC Ian McQueen said he was told: “Mind your own business, coppers. Keep out of it. We will settle these niggers our way. We’ll murder the bastards.”

The inaugural Carnival was in response to these riots. On 30 January 1959 at St Pancras Town Hall, Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette organised an indoor Caribbean Carnival, featuring steelband with Boscoe Holder and Russ Henderson, Calypso, other folk dances and beauty pageantry, as a celebration of Caribbean culture. Ticket sales profits were used to pay legal defence fees and fines for the black youths arrested following the 1958 riots. The BBC filmed and broadcast parts of it to the nation, who, largely, had never seen Caribbean culture or even Caribbean people in their lives. This event occurred yearly until Claudia Jones’ death, meaning a 1965 event did not take place. But in 1966, local activist Rhaune Laslett organised an outdoor community fair, inviting Russ Henderson’s steelband and reviving the carnival. As their set finished, Russ Henderson and his steelpan band carried on playing as they walked up Portobello Road, taking the crowd with them and, as such, a neighbourhood party became a street procession.

Notting Hill Carnival, however, has never been a wholesome family day out. In fact, there have been stabbings in every single year of the occasion since the late 70s. Its entire history has also been characterised by struggle with the law and local authorities. In 1976, the police expected hostility due to previous trouble; they stationed 1600 officers with stop-and-search rights, then known as the ‘Sus’ (suspicion) laws. In this episode, the crowd attempted to intervene in a police attempt to arrest a suspected pickpocket. The situation quickly degenerated into a full-scale riot, against which the police were forced to take a heavy-handed response. 1600 officers broke up the carnival, leading to the arrest of 60 people and injuries to more than 300 policemen. As a result, local borough councils, police and national politicians demanded that the Carnival be cancelled or moved away from residential streets, with alternative proposals to hold the event in White City Stadium or Hyde Park. This did not work — the Carnival community refused and took to the usual streets. The 1977 Carnival drew an estimated 250,000 people, for which the Met agreed to keep a lower profile during the event, but was nonetheless forced to divert 6000 officers to the event with newly issued riot gear.

Similarly, following the 1989 Carnival and several years of high arrest numbers, the Met presented plans to house the event in Hyde Park, enabling them to install fencing, metal detectors and bag searches (and thereby ease demands on police presence, visibility and resources). Again, a collective boycott by the Sound System Collective and bands forced the authorities to keep the Carnival on Ladbroke Grove — though the organisers did kindly agree to implement standardised route timings and earlier sound curfews in the end.

The history of Carnival follows a repeated pattern. Every time attempts have been made to adapt or control the event, the community and organisers have pushed back, and cemented the festival as an act of self-determination. Only COVID was enough to pause the celebrations momentarily.

My visit

With this checkered history, and Mazzucato’s promises of economic jet fuel in mind, what is it actually like on the ground?

I attended the Monday procession — the full fat, director’s cut, unlike the previous two days, which are reserved as more (but not entirely) wholesome family days. Here is the mass of gyrating hips, tongues out of mouths and women dressed in little but feathers and tattoos that are witnessed by most through the lens of the FYP page on X. The dancing on display seems biomechanically impossible to replicate. A deep voice on the loudspeaker tells all to ‘mash up da place’. The Turkish kebab shop grills meat, and smoke fills the air. A four-foot-nine ginger-haired, alabaster woman rolls on through the crowd. An Arab guy stands and shamelessly records a black woman twerking. Two mixed-race guys with blinding veneers smugly chat up heavy-set blondes in garish makeup. The loudspeaker voice instructs the guy at the back of the procession to stop harassing women.

It immediately became obvious just how much official photoshoots of Carnival contrive to hide the graffiti, rubbish and drug use. Of course, as a part of Britain’s multicultural universe, the 2017 carnival observed a minute of silence for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, with many festival-goers wearing ‘green for Grenfell’.

In public image and the right-wing press, the carnival increasingly takes on the identity of a minority festival with overtly anti-white motivations. Whatever they may be, it does still attract some native Brits, of two kinds: the first, the rougher and more unashamed; the second type is almost always at the periphery of the crowd — performatively bohemian posh girls in Woodstock vibe, flourishing their cans of Red Stripe. This fact apparently baffles many low-ranking influencers in the Restore Britain orbit. The Carnival ultimately remains a predominantly Caribbean affair. Barring the addition of Afrobeats and Jollof influenced by the newer African demographic, it doesn’t seem recent immigration has had much effect.

Over 7000 police are deployed in full force to stand guard and facilitate the event. Some are equipped with tasers and batons. Jobs include, naturally, ignoring the smell of cannabis, acting like this is a normal day, pretending to vibe with the tunes and staring at gangs of masked boys openly inhaling Noss while pretending they’re not too scared to approach them. Nitrous oxide was made a Class C drug in 2023. Having previously only been illegal to produce, supply, import or export for its psychoactive effect, it is now also illegal to possess. Illegal and very obvious when in possession. These guys stand around with big pumps with ‘Super Nos 3000’ on them, surrounded by a graveyard of little chrome casings on the floor. Nor are six blokes in all black holding up balloons particularly inconspicuous. But it is ignored by the police in full sight of them using it. Drug dealers and users are sidelined for the big fry: weapon wielders.

I can see that this year, the police do seem to have been given the ‘go-ahead’ on this count. Walking down the street, possibly every 20 metres or so, the police have another young black man against the wall being searched. Something might fall out of a pocket and clang on the ground; ‘Knife!’ the policeman might exclaim triumphantly. I witnessed a commotion roiling — police swarming a group of black lads just on the outskirts of the festival crowd proper. But, outmanned, the police were pushed back very quickly. When more help arrived, the Met was able to push back the crowd and isolate one of the gang, who still fought as he went down. ‘Eyyy’, ‘oh shit’, ‘oooh’ — the crowd showed no moral outrage for either side and were simply impressed with the drama. Some of his friends appealed to the police directly, holding up hands by their chests like footballers pleading with a referee’s red card.

The whole area is like this. The policing operation at Carnival is that the force is mobilised as well-equipped chaperones for a district-wide piss up: prevent stabbings, confiscate weapons, stop fights, and remain a jovial guardian while turning a blind eye to the otherwise dystopian scenes. To these goals, commendations must be made for the efficacy of the tech now on display.

Last year, the police finally managed to introduce cameras for facial recognition, metal detectors and perimeter checks, and this has worked pretty well. In 2026, the arrest count was 636 versus 2025’s 528 and 2024’s 353. Much of this came from arrests outside of the perimeter by facial recognition. Arrests made on wanted persons and bail breachers rose from 49 in 2024, 95 in 2025 and 121 in 2026. Partly due to these measures, there were only two knife assaults this year. Violent assaults meanwhile, were up to 72 from 53 the year before, albeit from 98 prior to rolling out the new tech. Theft and drug arrests have remained unaffected by the police’s new measures. Much of the rhetoric from the Met is that these new controls are to reduce sexual assault, but this has also remained the same over the years, still around 40 offences since 2022.

The ‘social value’ of Carnival

Overall, the number of criminal charges at the carnival has been going up since 2022, most likely due to increased police presence. If we return to our original question — ‘what value could this event offer us?’ — this factor introduces some interesting possibilities. The per capita arrest rate at Reading and Leeds festivals, still predominantly frequented by Bristol types (etc) who love the afters and a good sesh, is twice as high as Notting Hill Carnival. Out of context, this would be cause for celebration for a smug journo posting on Twitter.

Around 80% of arrests at the aforementioned festivals, however, are for drug-related charges — fewer than 10 weapons were seized at each of the almost entirely native events. Over the three days of Notting Hill Carnival, 68 weapons were seized. Though the Met has not yet published a full breakdown of arrests, the drug-related percentage in 2024 was a mere 31.5%, with the rest falling into the categories of weapon possession, violence against emergency workers, sexual offences, violence of other kinds, theft and robbery. This matches my experience witnessing the relatively harmless crimes being ignored.

What this demonstrates is that there is a cohort of criminals who are so dumb that they will walk through metal detectors with knives, or otherwise engage in crimes of a less-forgivable nature in full sight of police officers. Perhaps Carnival could be useful as a simple way to drive criminal types into a cordoned-off and highly policed area for efficient arrests? Having them congregate, ramping up police presence further and perhaps even tightening the screws on drug offences would reduce the externalities on others if similar events were held year-round. The cost of policing last weekend, however, totalled some £14 million, and kept 22.4% of the entire Met police officer staff busy in the North Kensington area.

If this isn’t the great win for the community of ordinary Brits that Mazzucato investigated in Carnival Economics, surely the commercial balance sheet paints a rosier picture. Sadiq Khan said this year:

‘On its 60th anniversary, Notting Hill carnival proved itself to be bigger, bolder and more vibrant than ever. It’s now the world’s second-largest street festival, attracting people from around the globe and generating a whopping £400m for our economy each year’

Four hundred million pounds is a big claim. Unfortunately, a report by the London Development Agency, commissioned by the then mayor, Ken Livingstone, on the 2002 Carnival estimated that the event contributed around £93 million to the London and UK economy. In 2003, the Carnival was run by a limited company, the Notting Hill Carnival Trust Ltd, so we have some reliable figures for running costs that turn out to be less than £1mn. We must also add an approximately £1mn cleanup cost, taken on by councils and TfL.

The £400 million figure comes from a 2024 James Williams study, commissioned by The Voice, ‘Britain’s Favourite Black Newspaper’, which presumably had no incentive to overstate Carnival’s economic value. It claimed total public cost is estimated at £16mn to £22mn and that over £100mn is generated through ‘tourism’, with at least £25mn direct spending on the ground, comprised of food and drink, public transport, hotels, nightclubs and retail. That £100mn figure, though, is of course London’s gross benefit over those days — but the customers are largely from other parts of the nation rather than from overseas; much of that spending would likely have occurred anyway, and London residents are very likely to have found another way to spend their time and money on the bank holiday weekend. Overseas tourist spending makes up closer to 25% of this total figure, as they are around 10% of the crowd but spend more money, given they are tourists and considering their need for hotels.

So, perhaps not £400 million, but conceivably up to £50 million, which isn’t so bad. But similarly unaccounted for is the cost to local residents in boarding up their homes, and possibly leaving the city for the weekend — with all of the events and meetings needing to be postponed or have extra considerations. What about the homes left unboarded with smashed windows, and vandalised cars? One Portobello Road resident said at the time: ‘We have the choice to either go away for the entire weekend or be prisoners.’

What is the value-for-money case for this particular investment — a PA system on a float and a hyper-efficient clean-up crew overnight? £50 million in a weekend isn’t terrible, but the income is received by the local traders, off-licences and hotels while costs are borne by the taxpayer. The London Marathon brings in £100mn, and summer tennis competitions bring in almost £400mn, and they fund themselves. If we must have bread and circuses for the nation, I’d rather just have more sporting events. Nice ones, with strawberries and cream and champagne.

The author of Carnival Economics might not even be wrong about the hidden value of cultural participation. Perhaps its commensurate value to society isn’t reflected in economic figures. We have had festivals and carnivals for centuries, replete with song and dance, vulgar acts, drinking, and much worse. They allowed people a release and an outlet to vent political frustrations, exactly as the Rockstar Economist insinuates about Carnival. But the elephant in the room is Mazzucato’s claim that the events around Ladbroke Grove ‘create[s] immense public value by strengthening the conditions for change, builds collective capabilities and pride’.

You do not need to go to Notting Hill to know she is not referring to your pride, or building the collective capabilities or conditions for change that might benefit you or empower your community. To most Brits, Carnival is both ridiculous and utterly alien. Families join in together, with mother, daughter and grandma all in strange burlesque-esque attire with entire behinds showing. Aunties and grannies shake their arse and grind with male family members and/or strangers. Others congregate on street corners, forty of them outside of my residence for that night. They vandalised cars, nossed and smoked weed.

We do in fact live in a multicultural country, and our neighbours are not like us. We might not like the same things, and don’t want the same things. And maybe that’s ok — as one Pimlico Journal editor said before sending me on my way, ‘Jerk chicken is pretty good though’, and sure, I get myself down to some Dub from time to time. It might be nice to give the communities that have bequeathed these cultural gifts upon us a couple of days a year to let off some steam. Maybe we can invest in Carnival and reap some compounding reward from deep stimulation of human capital, institutions and networks? I have answered none of these questions — but do you want your money and your state to direct its resources and energies towards something that will never be yours?

This article was written by Frederic Draper, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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What a ridiculous university, you might think. What is the point of Cambridge University? Genuine scholarship, should it collide with doctrinal stipulations, risks endangering the livelihood of those pursuing it. Asking this question, you may be surprised that only 160 years ago, Cambridge was in a similar position.

During the eighteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge’s purpose was to promote Anglicanism, for which attendees had to be confessing Anglicans. Though it had a strong record of schooling in mathematics and natural philosophy, by the nineteenth century scholarship remained embedded within a clerical and classical conception of a liberal education, narrowing the social and intellectual constituency of the universities, precisely at the moment modern science was becoming a specialised and international profession.

Fast forward to 2015 – the University of Warwick introduced its own confessional requirements. In the aftermath of a students’ group chat scandal, the University was forced by its own institutional actors to adopt the ‘Dignity at Warwick’ policy, which mandated that attendees signing on to the university and academic staff alike would have to sign a document pledging commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion policies. Policies of this kind were replicated across the Higher Education sector.

Oxford and Cambridge have, in fact, been relative outliers, at least in their strictly ‘confessional’ basis, and haven’t to date imposed a mandatory pledge acknowledging DEI principles for their student intake. Will Cambridge make active confession of Woke part of the student onboarding process in the aftermath of the Arday saga?

In my book The Past Is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, I discussed the idea that universities go through a ‘priestly cycle’. In England, geniuses with outlier high intelligence and autistic traits that render them utterly focused on the truth founded the great universities. They became prestigious, which attracted those of normal-range high intelligence who were motivated by status and tended to be socially conformist. They understood the social benefits of conforming to the dominant or soon-to-be dominant ideology, convinced themselves to believe it, and then competitively signalled their adherence to it.

The universities became decreasingly academic. Geniuses moved elsewhere; the universities declined. Eventually they reformed, began nurturing new geniuses, and the process repeated itself. Hence you see Homerton College, Cambridge . . . a Dissenting Academy absorbed, after religious requirements were dropped in 1871, into Cambridge University.

This describes universities in England between the Middle Ages and the late 19th century. Scholastics who strongly focused on logic and truth founded Oxford and Cambridge. They were called to understand God’s creation, so to lie would be blasphemous. However, in the mid-17th century, the Church of England controlled both. They were allowed to monopolise degree-granting as long as they upheld the state ideology. This is another means by which the ideology can take over universities, by offering money and monopoly in exchange for doctrinal conformity. This was vital because so many Protestant heretics, for example, had emerged from the universities and especially from Cambridge.

Innovative research increasingly took place outside the universities by gentleman scholars, including Charles Darwin (1809-1882), scholar-rectors like Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and power loom inventor Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823); enthusiastic amateurs such as the Aberdeenshire shoemaker and scientist Thomas Edward (1814-1886).

The most intelligent students increasingly went abroad to universities in Scotland or the Netherlands, where real thinking was allowed, and the latest science was explored. A number of 18th- and 19th-century British Prime Ministers were educated at Scottish, Dutch or German universities, often after the rite of passage of Oxbridge. The Earl of Bute, regarded as very scholarly, exclusively went to Dutch universities.

For Dissenters such as Unitarians and Methodists who could not afford a university abroad, about 100 dissenting academies proliferated across England between 1750 and 1850. They could not grant degrees, a right limited to Oxbridge, but they could provide higher education. They ranged enormously in size and standard, from one tutor with access to a library to multiple tutors in different subjects.

Some were simply dissenting versions of Oxford or Cambridge, focused on training ministers and on doctrinal conformity. But others, especially Warrington Academy and Hackney New College, were important centres of learning. With a brilliant reputation for teaching science and for preparing young men for business and legal careers, Warrington, which became Manchester Academy, was probably the most prestigious. One of Warrington’s tutors, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), an eminent chemist, discovered oxygen. Some of the academies were considered so superb that even Anglicans, such as Thomas Malthus and Benjamin Disraeli, attended them.

By the mid-19th century, Oxbridge was under serious pressure. Responding to a public mood of religious tolerance, the government permitted the secular University College London to grant degrees. The ancient universities were compelled by the state to reform or die. They begrudgingly, and slowly, chose the former. Competition against the German research universities, whose specialised research structures made academic freedom more central to the function of the institution, continued to wear away at the prestige of the universities – and in 1871 the state finally explicitly prohibited the imposition of religious tests for any degree (other than in divinity) at Oxford, Cambridge or Durham. The dissenting academies closed down or, in some cases, became Oxford or Cambridge colleges.

We should not be surprised, therefore, by similar developments today. With universities becoming Woke madrassas out of lockstep and besieged by the thrust of public opinion and prevailing political trends, we see more and more independent scholars, especially in ‘controversial’ areas. We also might see scholars flee to non-Western universities. Demands from the public have long been growing for the country’s premier establishments of learning and research to be cracked out of their institutional-ideological bubbles.

Especially with the rise of the Internet, some are beginning to seek an education in unrecognised online ‘universities’ with non-Woke syllabuses. Could this lead to a hi-tech version of the dissenting academies – with all of the variation in quality that was also suggested in the past? As AI, the academic competency crisis and credential inflation all degrade the value of the existing international accreditation system, it is not inconceivable that real alternatives become available. But perhaps the most interesting question remains – when will the state impose tolerance?

Of course, the Priestly Cycle, and the state’s ability to manipulate it, are not the only reasons for what has happened at Cambridge and elsewhere. The universities today are perhaps more insular and doctrinally self-reinforcing than at any other time before us. Universities have grown into massive bureaucracies, which entrench rule-following and consensus that is antithetical to the ever-questioning genius and minimisation of risk. Unlike in the nineteenth century, women are in the leading role in universities and across numerous social institutions. Compared to men as a group, they are highly socially conformist, conflict-averse and risk-averse, turning universities into nursery schools and pushing out the anti-social types that dare to question things and, so, upset people. This sociological transition is increasingly recognised in mainstream political debate — such as by Helen Andrews in her ‘Great Feminization’ thesis. In the universities, this all helps to contribute to an environment in which ideology, not rocking the boat and simply ‘feelings’, are more important than truth. In this muddle, the rise of Jason Arday was just as predictable as his fall and ultimate suicide.

The question is, will this be so humiliating for Cambridge, that Cambridge – the home of Isaac Newton and Watson and Crick - will begin to reform, let the serious scholars back in, and focus on original scholarship once more? If it does not do so on its own, what kind of intervention by the state will be necessary to set the university right?

This article was written by Prof. Edward Dutton, a writer, YouTuber, and evolutionary anthropologist. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Unlike the Kaiserreich, a hotbed of experimentation in progressive and revolutionary politics of every kind, the new Germany was to be conservative. Whereas the Soviets had occupied Prussia and Saxony, in which the workers’ movement was traditionally strong, the Federal Republic’s territory overlapped with those areas that had been the bedrock of the Catholic Centre Party and its localist affiliates. These tendencies to mercantile internationalism in foreign policy and an internal resistance to change have shaped the Federal Republic, a kind of Saudi Arabia of mid-century liberal Catholicism, down to the present day.

What, then, of Germanies one and two? The post-war settlement decisively removed Austria from the equation while leaving the problem of Prussia open. The Basic Law was meant to be a provisional document (hence why it is called ‘Basic Law’ and not ‘Constitution’); the majority opinion among its framers was that the German Reich continued to exist, and that adopting a new constitution would require a sovereign decision by the German people as a whole, to be taken once civil authority was restored over the entire German territory. This option, having been passed up at reunification in 1990 (when the Federal Republic permanently relinquished its territorial claims east of the Oder-Neisse line), still remains available under the Basic Law’s controversial yet unambiguous Article 146 — that it was not taken was partly due to considerations of realpolitik (every schoolchild in Germany will doubtless have heard the phrase ‘Kohl’s historic window of time’ a thousand times before), but also because 45 years of constitutional limbo had given the Wessies a smug pride in ‘the achievements of our Basic Law’, which was believed sufficient to ‘socialise’ the easterners into good, democratic citizens.

This was an error. The transposition of Rhenish institutions was widely felt as an imposition in the East, a grievance made more salient by the fact that those same institutions gave maximal political expression to regional particularities. Prussia’s barren, sandy fields had never produced a politically charged regionalism in the way that the Rhineland, Bavaria, or Hannover had (for these had invariably been directed against the Prussian central authority). Saxon protest had traditionally been social democratic and only secondarily regionalist, while four decades of separation had only hardened the these regions’ German nationalist orientation (Saxony is a somewhat more complex story, having since produced a small but moderately popular separatist movement). Thus, from early on, Prussia braced itself for a role it had played before: a redoubt for various radical currents to gather the strength from which to conquer the rest of the country. In the thirty six years since reunification, eastern dissent from the Federal Republic has taken the form of nationally oriented political parties: the Left (an amalgamation of the old ruling Socialist Unity Party and dissident elements of the western Social Democrats) and the Alternative for Germany, the latter of which appears poised to form government for the first time in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Saxony-Anhalt is an afterthought for most Germans. The country’s major transport arteries largely pass it by, while the monotony of its landscape means few even notice when they’re there. Germany’s federal states usually possess some historical, cultural, or geographical coherence that provides them a ready-made local identity; Saxony-Anhalt is a wholly artificial construct, cobbled together after 1945 from the old Prussian Province of Saxony (itself a post-Napoleonic amalgamation of older Prussian territories and annexations from the Saxon Kingdom) and the independent Duchy of Anhalt. Largely rural, and with no larger cities to speak of than Magdeburg and Halle, it encompasses a varied terrain from the Harz Mountains in the south, the fertile soil of the Magdeburger Börde in the centre, and the arid Altmark in the north. These were the leftover screws and bolts that wouldn’t fit anywhere else when Germany was put together from the flatpack, and combined with the featurelessness of the terrain and the severity of the state’s post-1990 depopulation (which has seen it lose a quarter of its communist-era inhabitants, mostly younger workers), this gives the world here a feeling of deracination deeper and more disorientating than the shiniest Chinese train station waiting hall.

Nevertheless, the separate lands that today make up Saxony-Anhalt have a rich history intimately linked with the development of the German state. The Elbe and the Saale, which converge just south of the capital at Magdeburg, formed the medieval boundary between Germanic and Slavic areas of settlement, which can still be seen today in the region’s toponyms. More than once in its medieval history this region would be the staging point for German eastwards expansion, whether as military conquest or as a diffusion of institutions, such as the ‘Magdeburg Law’ widely adopted throughout Eastern Europe. The Altmark or ‘Old March’ which lies north of Magdeburg and whose name hints at its old colonial function, was the oldest part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, which, under the Hohenzollern dynasty, was merged with Prussia and eventually birthed the Kaiserreich. As everyone knows, the man responsible for this piece of statecraft was the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, born in Schönhausen in the Altmark — other local luminaries include Luther, Nietzsche, Bach, Catherine the Great of Russia, Winckelmann, and many others whom it would take up too much space here to list. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s leader in the state, is another Altmark native, and there is something apt, if not downright romantic, in this bastion of Prussiandom once again discharging its old role as the vanguard of the German nation.

Of course, this illustrious history only goes so far to explain the AfD’s remarkable strength in Saxony-Anhalt. A cursory glance at the state’s political economy suffices to explain the potency of anti-establishment sentiment here. Saxony-Anhalt is already a poor state, its GDP per capita is the lowest in the country, but there was a time when things were otherwise. From the late 19th century onwards, the state’s so-called ‘Chemical Triangle’ (a small portion of which is located in the neighbouring state of Saxony) was a centre of the German chemical industry; though its output is modest in comparison with the great Rhine-Ruhr chemical conglomerates today, it still accounts for roughly 16% of German chemical production and ~7% of sectoral turnover. Production here is dominated by basic chemicals that require natural gas as an input: for this reason, the chemical sector has been harder hit by the cutting off of Russian pipeline gas than the rest of German industry, which itself has hardly dazzled since 2022. The German chemical giants have been forced to cut production, lay off personnel, and pause investments in Germany while announcing attention-grabbing new megaprojects in the United States and Asia — meanwhile representatives of the chemical industry association take to the airwaves to condemn the the AfD as a threat to a sector ostensibly reliant on migrant labour. East German Russophilia has many sources, not all of them rational, but Saxony-Anhalt’s acute structural dependence on Russian energy gives coherence to its inhabitants’ reluctance to participate in the great state project of rearmament for battle against Putin.

All this explains why conditions in Saxony-Anhalt are, even by the standards of a Germany in which everything seems to be falling apart, unusually favourable for an anti-establishment candidacy. Why has the AfD been able to monopolise this space? The reason is in large part the firewall, a device now so notorious abroad that it requires little explanation to a non-German readership, and which has furnished the party with an unassailable anti-establishment credibility. The firewall, reminiscent of the GDR’s popular front (which included such curiosities as an East German CDU), is particularly sour to the local palette. The coalition gymnastics performed by the other parties to enforce the firewall against an AfD that has achieved around ~30% at the last three eastern state elections, and which is well-established in local civil society, have discredited both the centre-right CDU, which has found itself reliant on the parliamentary support of the former GDR party of government to govern (as in Saxony and Thuringia, where it leads minority governments), but also the Left Party and an anti-war, moderately anti-migration splinter group, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The AfD, which in the East can draw on the one hand from right-wing, anti-migration, and anti-communist voters alienated by the CDU and on the other from disaffected left-wing voters who abhor the political bubble’s hawkish foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia, admire the AfD’s Burnhamite language on economic policy (regional grievance akin to that of the north is widespread in East Germany), and aren’t exactly thrilled about migration themselves, thus emerges as the sole alternative for Germans minded to seek one.

The AfD is first and foremost an anti-immigration party, and their zeal has been an important factor in their rise. Saxony-Anhalt has experienced very little immigration relative to the rest of the country, with a foreign-born population of around 8% compared to a nationwide ~17% (residents with ‘migration background’, which includes the previous group as well as dual citizenship holders and the Germany-born children of migrants, account for 12% and 31% of the respective populations). The majority of these (~55%) are Europeans, with Ukrainians making up the largest group, followed by Syrians and Poles. Despite these modest figures, the Saxon-Anhaltese experience with migration has not been a happy one in recent years. As those who have spent time in Britain’s pokier seaside towns will be aware, a few bad apples are enough to spoil the bunch. And the apples have been very rotten indeed: Magdeburg, a pleasant town but one of the most boring places on earth, would have been thought an unlikely place for a terrorist attack. Perhaps that fact, or perhaps the circulation of some unusually graphic videos on social media in the immediate aftermath, was what gave the 2024 Christmas market car attack there a far greater resonance than similar attacks in larger cities. Saxony-Anhalt’s dearth of migrants has made organising against migration all the easier: a large migrant population creates a migration lobby; there are businesses that profit from their cheap and precarious labour, bureaucrats who handle their various interactions with the state, church employees and social workers who earn their daily bread from their maintenance, and of course many of the migrants themselves are, ten years after the Merkelwave, citizens with the right to vote. This petty gentry of concentrated benefits barely exists in Saxony-Anhalt, leaving the great godly voice of dispersed costs to have its say.

What kind of party is the AfD? After over a decade of its existence this is a question that could fill an entire library, but the simple answer is that the AfD is a generic right-wing protest party of the kind that emerged everywhere in Europe in the 2010s and 20s in response to certain policies pursued across the continent, mainly but not exclusively mass immigration, lockdowns, and an economic malaise which has many causes, but whose central and most politically salient driver is high energy prices caused by decoupling from traditional sources, in part through Net Zero-type legislation like the Energiewende and the European Green Deal, but partly (and more pertinently in Germany than elsewhere) through the loss of access to cheap Russian pipeline gas. A strange doxa in Britain holds that the AfD is a Neo-Nazi party— in fact, there exists none of the institutional continuity to older right-wing groups that other European populist parties can trace (even if they have programmatically moved on from them), and there is an internal ban in place on members of the Identitarians or the genuinely Neo-Nazi Heimat taking out a party membership. In its aims, its worldview, and its social base, the AfD is the German branch of the organic and (mostly) uncoordinated European social movement to which Reform also belongs.

Like Reform, the AfD unites a broad social coalition that cuts across traditional milieus. While report of a right-wing youth revolt is generally overplayed, it performs unusually well amongst young people for a party of the right (which is to say, going off data from the last federal election, in line with its average across all age groups), but its core age group is the prime working years. The party’s post-lockdown expansion has largely been driven by male voters (25% of whom voted AfD compared to 17% of women), although this gender gap did not exist in prior elections. The ‘left behind’ (workers and unemployed) disproportionately vote AfD, but their performance among small business owners is also respectable, and, as elsewhere in the West, one might speak of a productive coalition against the dependents of the state. The one discrepancy with Reform is its poor performance amongst the elderly, who disproportionately tend to consume traditional media, which is woker and more vehement in its attacks against the party than even those in Britain, where, in anecdotal experience, a higher diversity of opinion is expected and the public takes a more sceptical attitude.

Like Reform, the AfD’s goal is to solve specific problems rather than to provide a permanent representation to standing interests. The latter is an entirely legitimate goal for a political party, and the distinction is drawn here less to praise the AfD than to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. It is salient because the heterogeneity of social milieux that have converged upon the AfD contributes to a corresponding heterogeneity of worldviews, which precipitates in a lively internal debate over which particular problems the AfD should give more weight to. There persist substantive and uneasily resolved disputes over foreign policy orientation (primarily towards Russia), the optimal mechanisms of economic policy, and the ends and legitimate goals of migration control. The federal party supports ‘remigration’, though officially this is taken to mean that existing deportation orders will be more rigorously carried out. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt takes a more robust line, pledging to use existing legal avenues to revoke citizenships and purge the state of ‘culturally alien’ elements. This is a familiar debate on the institutionalised European right, and here too the AfD is no exception to the norm.

German federalism has consequences for the AfD’s ideological profile that differentiate it from that of Reform, allowing more radical currents to have their day in the sun. Unlike the political parties in Britain, which are voluntary organisations mostly left to regulate their internal business, the parties in Germany are treated by law as public bodies ‘fulfilling a task made incumbent on them by the Basic Law’. The so-called Party Law (Parteiengesetz) dictates the parameters within which a party is to be organised; mandating a federal structure, internal democracy, and guaranteeing the party members certain rights vis-a-vis the party organs (disputes over the legality of a removal of party membership are a common back page item in German newspapers). Though the very detailed rules laid down in the Party Law are not so constricting as to wholly prevent the party’s central organs from regulating their internal business, it does afford the state-level organisations a certain autonomy from the centre and prevents the kind of top-down discipline that exists in Reform. Big, decisive, ‘Farage vs. Lowe’ style confrontations are thus rare; if a particular camp within the AfD cannot push through its agenda at national level, it has the option of retreating to a provincial base and biding its time for the mood to shift, as Björn Höcke for instance did in Thuringia. An unfortunate side effect here is to exacerbate regional differences and damper the AfD’s vote share in the West (where the party’s Russia-friendly stance and economic interventionism meets with incomprehension), though in practice this is not too different to the situation here, where, although Reform’s centralism means that it should be clear what its policy on any given issue, the message does not always cut through to the Great British Public so much as do the vibes.

The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is unusually conservative by the party’s standards. The culture war is hardly front and centre for the federal AfD, which is after all captained by a lesbian with a Sri Lankan wife, and whose approach follows the familiar, post-lockdown pattern of daring sallies against Wokeness, bread-and-butter proposals like abolishing the license fee, and a general feeling that the country should be ‘normal’ again. That culture and identity should play such a strong role in the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt is partly a quirk of German federalism, under which education and cultural policy are the most important briefs allotted to the states, but it has just as much to do with the importance that the state party’s leadership attaches to these topics. Though fronted by the charismatic yet vapid Ulrich Siegmund, a local businessman with an extraordinarily large TikTok following, the party’s intellectual mastermind and de facto leader is Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, once a promising young arabist at the University of Bayreuth who has sat for the AfD in the state parliament since 2016, and was among the first to recognise that this party of disgruntled economics professors had a future beyond the lecture hall.

Tillschneider, well-versed in the thought of the nouvelle droite, is no shadowy operator who keeps his cards close to his chest, but has played a public-facing role in the campaign and placed his own hobby horses at its centre. Tillschneider’s hand can be seen in promises in the party’s manifesto to reform the building code to prioritise traditional architecture; in the promise of a patriotic curriculum emphasising the sunnier parts of German history (‘Bismarck’); in plans to (in a shot across the bow against the West German boomers) promote the study of the Russian language; and in the detailed prescriptions for Tilllschneider’s old stomping grounds at the state’s faculties of Middle Eastern Studies. Somewhat worryingly, the manifesto opens with an Orbán-style pro-natal policy, although unlike in Hungary, where the policy mostly relied on tax credits, the manifesto suggests this will be conducted through fiscal transfers. This is ‘metapolitics’ conducted with 20th century methods, and whether it works in an age where a greasy-haired backwater businessman can simply bypass established mechanisms of cultural transmission and TikTok his way into the statehouse is anyone’s guess.

What else is on a future AfD government’s agenda? On migration policy, the options are limited: the federal states do not have control over who enters and exits their borders, and so much of the chapter on migration consists of declarations of things the AfD would propose or support in the Bundesrat (the upper parliamentary chamber made up of state representatives), where they would be only one small delegation among many and none of the others would vote for their proposals. There are promises to ramp up deportations, compel refugees to perform labour service, and instruct local authorities to use the discretion the law affords them in evaluating residence claims and citizenship applications to reject as many as they reasonably can. Since said applications are handled by the states themselves (and usually delegated to municipal or regional authorities, although the AfD plans to create a central state office for handling them uniformly), there is quite a bit an AfD government can do here, including the retroactive revocation of citizenship in cases where it can be proven that this was obtained fraudulently (since naturalisation involves demonstrating ‘a commitment to the free and democratic fundamental order’, in practice this may be a matter of digging up a few old social media comments).

The AfD will have to be careful, because the Federal Authority for the Protection of the Constitution, an internal intelligence agency equivalent to MI5, will be watching over their shoulder, and will use any zealotry as an excuse to press for a ban of the party wholesale. German federalism affords it the tools to fight back: the police, the public prosecution, and a State Office for the Protection of the Constitution are all in the state government’s hands. The first two are entirely under local control (to the point that the European Court of Justice has rejected the validity of European arrest warrants issued by German prosecutors on grounds of their lack of independence from the executive); the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s relationship to the equivalent local authority on the other hand is regulated by a federal law that can be altered by a majority in the Bundestag. This law empowers the federal authority to compel the state body to perform certain tasks on its behalf, although it of course cannot compel it to carry them out competently. Internal resistance to an AfD government within these organisations will leave the Messrs. Siegmund and Tillschneider in a bind: while bureaucratic disobedience and sabotage can paralyse a government, any attempt to use the legal mechanisms available to the government to impose order in their own house will be noted down and interpreted as Machtergreifung by a hostile intelligence community, judiciary, and media when the time comes to litigate a ban on the party before the Constitutional Court — an idea that has become increasingly popular amongst Germany’s political class, with a recent op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by the defence minister Boris Pistorius — the country’s most popular politician — and the Baden-Württemberg premier Cem Özdemir calling to shut down the party’s eastern state organisations.

Germany’s political establishment will do everything within its legal remit to prevent the AfD forming a government in Saxony-Anhalt, or at least it will try to give the impression of doing so. Quietly, I think they would like to see it happen. An AfD government in the state would have responsibility with very little power: it cannot remedy the state’s economic woes, which are structural rather than driven by the incumbent state government’s policy, and though its remigration incantations might be able to ward off new immigrants from the state, it will be unable to displace the existing population. Its patriotic curriculum will do little to instil a nationalist consciousness in the youth, while leftists outside of the state will furnish it as proof that the AfD intends to ‘falsify history’, and its policy of committing teachers to ‘political neutrality’ will allow the establishment to take the potent rhetorical weapon of ‘free speech’ out of the AfD’s hands.

The Saxony-Anhalt AfD’s declared intention to be a model for a federal AfD government will be taken seriously; every newspaper in the country will be laser-focused on the new government’s growing pains, and its culturally conservative orientation and eastern peculiarities will be interpreted as the national party’s ‘secret’ program, alienating it from a West German public which, after all, is content to have a lesbian with Sri Lankan girlfriend running the shop. This is not to say the German public is Woke; it is, by European standards, a relatively conservative society that reliably returns a centre-right majority and will weep few tears for a reversal of Merkel’s cultural revolution, but if it can be tricked into believing that the AfD has launched ‘an American-style culture war’ without delivering any of the demographic or economic benefits that even the best state government is in no position to deliver, it will sour on the AfD nationwide. The establishment’s more foresighted strategists will happily throw Saxony-Anhalt under the rails in order to stop the AfD train reaching Berlin.

How likely is the AfD to form government in Saxony-Anhalt? In Germany the polls are a reliable indicator of where the die roughly fall, and they have had party polling at just over 40% for around a year now. Whether this will suffice for a majority depends on who clears the 5% hurdle — the CDU and the Left are comfortably in the door, and at the time of writing, both the Greens and the SPD will narrowly make it, while the BSW won’t. Tactical voting could play a role, although these numbers will encourage complacency, so the final tally is anyone’s guess. In the event that the AfD falls short of a majority, a contentious coalition negotiation between this unwieldy mob of parties could lead to a few defections that nudge it over the line. While the potential for an arrangement with the Left to instantly split the CDU, as some commentators seem to think it will, is overplayed (the Christian Democrats already govern at the post-communists’ pleasure in Saxony and Thuringia, and Berlin’s unique mechanisms of socialisation facilitate a similar comity at the federal level), the parliamentary arithmetic could mean that very few floor crossings are needed (perhaps honeyed by the promise of a cabinet post), and this is more plausible than the entire party falling apart. Even if the party itself survives a CDU/Left pact, it will gut the CDU vote in the east — it is, after all, not the CDU’s voters, but its apparatchiks who fondle each other in Berlin’s fetish bars.

As cathartic as an AfD win would be, then, perhaps there is more to be gained at a national level from yet another frustration by an establishment whose increasingly poorly justified attempts to hold the levers of power just beyond the grasp of the popular revolt have done little but reveal the truth of its message — that in Germany, one is faced with a single choice: the status quo, or its alternative.

This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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However, as a good socialist once said, ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’: the central point in this narrative is of course the Ceuta invasion of over 70,000 people from Morocco, and the thousands who remain in Ceuta as Morocco refuses to take non-Moroccans back. Between twee stories about illegal immigrants cleaning the beach, there are also reports of children being sent to hospital as possible rape victims. At this point, Iberian anti-racists gleefully pointed out online that the victims were not Spanish but immigrants themselves. What could be more anti-racist than dismissing the potential victims of rape because they are foreign?

The effects of the Ceuta invasion and Sánchez´s actions in the aftermath have produced the reaction by EU states that most people desperately wanted to see — as to the situation in Spain, however, the situation remains bleak even if the faintest of silver linings are becoming visible in these last days of Sánchez.

The first relevant episode to recount was an unprecedented moment of political ecumenicalism in which both immigration maximalist parties, Podemos and Sumar, found themselves on the same side as the Spanish nationalist party Vox. What could bring together such a disparate grouping? A call for the government to demand that Morocco be excluded from hosting the 2030 World Cup, and for Spain to withdraw if they were not.

For parties such as Sumar and Podemos to openly announce that the Moroccan state is responsible for this crisis puts them directly in opposition to the Sánchez Government, which still maintains the fantasy that it was human traffickers and not the Moroccan dictatorship. This is a particularly significant development because Sumar still remains a member of the government and the crucial member of what is now a rapidly disintegrating coalition.

Sánchez´s PSOE did not win the last election in 2023. PSOE, in fact, came second, gaining a seat and an increased share of the vote by 3.68% — but with the right a few seats away from being able to form a government, the new electoral calculus produced a result that enabled Sánchez to form a ‘negative coalition’ with the regional nationalists intended to lock out PP-Vox. This was thanks to eating his own former coalition partners, Podemos, who were subsumed into Sumar (the infighting amongst left-wing minority parties itself worthy of a War and Peace-style tome). Since then, votes for the progressive left Sumar have plunged to such an extent that former Minister of Labour and party leader Yolanda Diaz announced in February that she would not contest the election in 2027. In short, the hollowed-out corpse of what people would term the radical left is largely a spent force. As human waves swam across to Spain from Morocco, Sanchez´s coalition partners understood the ship was now sinking. This is a world away from the confidence of Spain´s radical progressives in toppling PSOE in 2016 (when Podemos were just 1% behind PSOE on 21.2%), which has now become an exercise in mere survival in this new era.

However, the killer blow is likely to come not from those on his own flank but from Catalonia. Think back to the October 1st 2017 unofficial referendum in Catalonia, in which Junts per Catalunya Leader Carlos Puigdemont and a whole host of people within the Catalan independence movement found themselves on the run or awaiting prison charges. In the subsequent Catalan Regional election in December 2017, Junts formed a coalition with ERC (the left-wing Catalan Nationalists), with Puigdemont leading in exile.

Fast forward to 2026, and Catalan politics changed as PSOE became the largest party in Catalonia in the regional election of 2024, but this electoral success was largely bought at the price of a mass amnesty of Catalan politicians involved in the Referendum and UDI. Indeed, at the previous general election of 2023, Sanchez explicitly stated there would be no deal with Catalan nationalists committed to the separation of the Spanish state to stay in power. Once the electoral numbers came in and Sanchez knew he could only stay in power with such a deal, an amnesty law was passed in March 2024. This deception would have been more shocking if Spanish voters hadn´t already become so numb to it.

Still, gratitude expires with time, and the Junts Leader in the Spanish Parliament, Miriam Nogueras, has explicitly stated that Catalonia will not take any MENA´s (‘Underage’ immigrants) from Ceuta and any attempt to move them will have her bring down the government. Junts already split from the coalition government in 2025, meaning Spain has not passed a budget and retains a zombie government, surviving only to serve the vanity of a man who is despised at home and distrusted in Europe.

Why have Junts suddenly moved against Sánchez now? The cynical reason is that since they got their pound of flesh back in 2024, they have nothing to gain from continuing to prop up this farce; the other, less cynical reason is perhaps the most overlooked development in Spanish politics by outsiders — the dramatic rise of the hardline, massively anti immigration Catalan Nationalists of Aliança Catalana (Catalan Alliance).

Since entering the Catalan Parliament in 2024 with just two seats and 3% of the vote, they are predicted to become the second largest party in 2028 with 17% and 28 seats. Their voter base has come from the rural or peripheral areas of Catalonia that had long been Junts’ heartland, and the Catalan Alliance are eating from the very support base that Junts took for granted. The demographics of Catalonia have shifted massively in ten years, and now half of all people living in Catalonia between the ages of 30 and 40 are non-Spanish, let alone non-Catalan. Last year, data from Instituto de Estadística de Cataluña showed another 70,000 immigrants moved into Catalonia in 2025.

Catalan historians, such as Albert Balcells, have argued that the Franco regime deliberately encouraged Spanish immigration to the region in an effort to weaken Catalan identity. How Francoist policy became a left-wing ‘nationalist’ sacred cow in the first place is an indictment of the viral mutation of left-wing politics, completely detached from the groups it was founded to care about.

Catalonia has already shifted to the same immigration hostility as the rest of the Spanish Regions. The Regional Governments of Castilla y León, Aragón and Extremadura (once a PSOE heartland) have refused to attend a meeting this Wednesday with the Government on the MENA crisis. These governments are all now led by the Partido Popular (PP, which is a useful shorthand for the pensioners party that they are) and Vox. PSOE regionally after the last cycle have been annihilated everywhere bar Catalonia and Asturias.

Andalucía, for so long the bastion of PSOE, is now lost and the party only holds 23% of the vote. To provide some context for this collapse, PSOE has not increased its vote share in Andalucía since 2004, and every new election has brought it to historic new lows. This is a husk of a party. In 2023, PSOE were removed in Aragon, Valencia, and La Rioja, and in every regional election since, the haemorrhaging has continued. In 2025, PSOE lost 14% of the vote in Extremadura. It is only in the aforementioned Catalonia and Castilla–La Mancha that PSOE cling on. This raises the question: if PSOE are doing so badly, why haven’t they already axed Sánchez?

The answer to this problem is rather paradoxical — the worse PSOE does at the regional level, the stronger Sánchez’s internal position becomes. In Spanish politics, the leaders with institutional power to stand against Sánchez would come from Regional Governments. Now that the PSOE only hold three of the seventeen Autonomous Communities, the party has been completely hollowed out. Even worse, in all those subsequent regional elections Sanchez was able to appoint loyalists as the main candidates. For him this was a win-win in which — if by some miracle — PSOE reclaimed a regional government, its head could be a trusted ally, and if they lost (as they inevitably did), chances of internal opposition slimmed further. As the situation has worsened nationally and in Europe, the glorification of Sachez as the only hope has strengthened.

Despite all of this, recent polling shows PSOE nationally remains the second-largest party at 25% with PP at 34%. Data like this gives me no confidence for Spain. Both major political parties in Spain have gorged their ageing voters on inflation-proof pensions and waves of immigration to keep propping up the pyramid scheme instead of confronting reality. The winners of the transition who have only ever known an unearned entitlement are, as in most Western states, the dominating voter blocs. Spain´s democracy has mutated into a ‘jubiladora’, a dictatorship of pensioners. As Spain´s birth rate collapses to levels only comparable with the civil war and any of its young people who can flee the country, still the ungrateful generation will continue to be prioritised.

Vox, who are perhaps the harshest on immigration, do have the largest support amongst voters 18-29 in the latest poll from Spanish newspaper La Razon. But with an abstention rate of over 50%, even if PSOE are removed, it is almost impossible to see PP in the next Congress having the guts to course-correct the country. Vox would probably do well to avoid any formal coalition with PP and wait for the inevitable crisis when PP blink at the first time they need to choose between more immigrants and discriminating against foreign property buyers or cutting pensions.

In Europe, there may be some hope. The 22 signatures from all sides of the political spectrum to a letter which directly highlighted the legalisation of a million-plus people by Sanchez and Spain´s complete lack of preparedness to defend its borders (which are of course Europe´s borders) is a sign of things to come. I am old enough to remember when Polish PM Donald Tusk was still considered a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ here; his scathing comments and urging of Spain to take the same brutal defence of its borders as Poland is a sign that the window has shifted. Rhetoric is slowly catching up to reality. After 20 years of screeching racist at anyone for thinking open borders was a terrible idea, it is the immigration maximalists who are now rightly seen for the political extremists that they are.

Even Sanchez´s petty response to Italy in suspending Schengen for them (whilst still saying nothing about Morocco) is of massive use. For all his crocodile tears about how European states cannot unilaterally remove countries from Schengen (this being his primary criticism of Italy), the reality is that they can. So by his own actions, the precedent that countries can shut their borders and discriminate has now been established by PSOE. At no point now could a future PSOE leader legitimately (in the eyes of voters) criticise any Spanish government for closing the borders however they see fit. After all, PSOE already did it. Hopefully, Europe after Sanchez will at least be able to force any Spanish leader now to stop the importation of undesirable immigration and any future legalisations, or very swiftly remove them from the club.

Moreover, the Moroccan dictatorship may have realised that they have overplayed their hand, with statements now appearing in the Spanish press that they want to take back their underage immigrants. The mass protests in Ceuta and the proliferation of MENAs across Spain mean it´s highly unlikely any regional government or opposition party will be stopping there. If I had to bet, the race will be on across the entire political spectrum to also demand the deportation of Morocco MENA´s in the mainland. So for Europe, this may be the frog in the boiling water moment that it needed to realise that importing millions of people from countries and cultures that despise you is, shock horror, a bad idea.

So what of Sanchez? He has survived before, but this really does feel like the end. There is now no European support, there are no more radical left voters left to subsume, and there are no separatist parties left to beg. His only hope may be a snap election in Autumn and an attempt to turn the election into him versus Donald Trump (as seen in Canada and Australia); it seems unlikely that the old tunes will work. As much as Guardian readers want to believe that Europeans not wanting more immigrants assaulting them in the street or wondering if the next Christmas market will be the victim of yet another Islamist attack is some far-right American import, times have changed. People have simply become radicalised by reality.

When Sanchez came into power, he did so not via an election but by winning a no-confidence vote against former PP leader Rajoy in June 2018. In this moment, he promised to wash away the corruption of PP and lead Spain with dignity. After eight years of premiership, his ministers are in prison, and his only idea for economic growth has been the now completely discredited policy of importing waves of immigrants with cheap tourism to avoid reforming the country. He has hollowed out institution after institution, including his own party.

His legacy? Pedro Sanchez is the dead end of Europe´s open borders experiment. Let us pray that when he goes, he takes that corpse with him.

This article was written by MetinMadrid. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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The principal policy advocated in the original paper was ‘Street Votes’. It would have introduced the right for residents of any given street to adopt a design code endorsed by a supermajority of approximately 60%, and to rebuild their street at a higher density within the bounds of that code. The intention was that, having enacted this policy, the owners of suburban terraces would eagerly rebuild their cul-de-sacs as Georgian mansion blocks complete with fresh mansards, and sell them at great profit.

The motivation behind this policy was simple: everyone in government knew that more building would be required if Britain was to have any hope of returning to meaningful economic growth, yet every attempt at planning reform in recent decades had ended badly after pushback from homeowners who would suffer the direct costs of nearby building (including important costs such as pressure on public services, and really important costs such as tarnishing the view of local fields from their living room window). This Gordian knot could be cut, so the YIMBYs believed, by cutting homeowners in on the upside of development, aligning the rabid selfishness of the British Boomer with the public interest to neutralise NIMBYism for good.

Yet to call Street Votes a mere ‘policy’ is understating its importance. For the British YIMBY, it is the solution on which Britain’s future prosperity hinges and which, if implemented, would see all other problems — even those which are seemingly unrelated — resolve themselves naturally and without political confrontation. Like the Land Tax for the Georgists (or the tariffs for the Trumpists), Street Votes became the central article of the YIMBY faith — and they set to work seeking its passage.

YIMBYism from Gove to Starmer

There was, however, one unfortunate obstacle stubbornly squatting on the path to utopia. Somehow, a government — any government — would have to be converted to their newfound faith. As with all political agendas, several options presented themselves to the disciples of this oikodomophilic doctrine.

They could have sought the power to implement the policy themselves. There were two ways to do this. As self-proclaimed right-wingers, they could have either sought positions as conservative housing SPADs or even MPs. However, since this was 2017 and the Conservatives were committed to leaving the EU and reducing immigration, this would have meant these affirmed neoliberals would have to abandon their open borders liberalism for the vulgar populism of the day. Otherwise, they could have stirred the rabble and set up a grassroots YIMBY movement like in other countries, which politicians would have no choice but to pay attention to. However, for those used to working in think tanks, actual lobbying and public debate outside SW1, which came with public scrutiny and the risk of high-profile losses, seemed particularly unattractive to this cohort of sensible high-status people.

That left only one choice remaining: directly winning over those who already hold power, and persuading them to take up the cause. Thus, they adopted the strategy of framing YIMBYism in general and Street Votes in particular as a technocratic measure acceptable to the kind of sensible, centrist people who dominate establishment parties and the civil service.

Given that the Conservatives were in power from 2017 to 2024, this manifested in the publication of some variant of a ‘Street Votes solve everything’ report in every available centre-right or developmentalist think tank to draw the party’s attention: Policy Exchange, the Centre for Policy Studies, and Create Streets to name a few. These documents were adorned with attractive pictures of Georgian terraces and extensive lists of endorsements by C-list politicians and assorted urbanists, in an effort to make it seem as though the idea (which nobody outside of Westminster had ever heard of as they had not bothered to popularise it) was backed by a tremendous wave of popular support.

Eventually, this strategy paid off — catching the attention of Michael Gove, who was appointed housing secretary in 2021 and remained in position until the general election of 2024. Unbeknownst to our heroes, however, Gove had ulterior motives. He had been put in his position not to make building houses easier, but to reverse an earlier attempt at planning reform made by his predecessor (none other than Robert Jenrick), and in doing so to placate NIMBY Tory backbenchers. In 2020, an attempt to introduce a streamlined zoning system which would have reduced the ability of local planning authorities to block developments and thereby allow more housing to be built had met with opposition from MPs and voters alike, ultimately leading to the loss of the Chesham and Amersham by-election in 2021. Johnson backtracked, fired Jenrick, and replaced him with Gove under explicit instructions to jettison the reforms and appease reactionary backbenchers at all costs.

Endorsing Street Votes was an effective political strategy for Gove. He could obtain the endorsement of every centre-right policy wonk as a YIMBY hero while continuing to appease Conservative backbenchers by scrapping all attempts at conventional planning reform. For the YIMBYs, supporting the housing secretary and keeping silent about his complete capitulation to anti-housing interests was a price worth paying if he could implement Street Votes — which, after all, was the silver bullet that would solve the housing crisis.

Gove, to be fair, did take the first step towards Street Votes with his 2023 planning bill (which became the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act in October of that year), creating the legal framework through which such local referenda could be carried out. Yet, in what was either a clever manoeuvre to run out the clock or an unfortunate failure to overcome insurmountable scheduling challenges (you be the judge), Gove was ultimately unable to fulfil his side of the bargain. In a skilful act of bureaucratic time-wasting, he began a ‘consultation’ on implementation instead of actually implementing the policy before the 2024 general election. It should be noted, however, that Gove did find the time to pass and implement policies that severely damaged British housebuilding, including setting up the building safety regulator, which cratered what little housebuilding was left in London, and scrapping mandatory housing targets for Tory shires in the South of England. Deliberately or not, the result was that YIMBYs achieved nothing and got rug-pulled by a Tory party that was entirely uninterested in delivering their agenda.

Having passed a useless law gathering dust in Hansard and enabled the construction of a grand total of zero new houses, the YIMBYs moved on to lobbying the Labour party after their entry into government in the hopes that the new government might finally push their policy through. As with Gove, they saw what they wanted to see in the empty promises of Keir Starmer. Taking his vague indication of an intention to build more and his commitment to siding ‘with the builders, not the blockers’ as evidence, many went so far as to predict that Labour would be a more amenable partner than the Tories, at least some of whom harboured sympathies out of commitments to markets and deregulation. Hopes were apparently so high that some even declared victory soon after Starmer’s election, with supporters going as far as to host a podcast called ‘How the YIMBYs won’.

Back in the real world, however, the YIMBY movement faced a serious problem in their attempts to lobby the Labour party: namely that their leaders were all noted free-market neoliberals whom policymakers in Labour despised on ideological grounds. To overcome this issue, they would need to find members of the Labour party who could be convinced to lobby on their behalf. Unsurprisingly, this was a task easier said than done — as it turns out, a career in Thatcherite think-tanks turns one’s personal network rather blue, and they knew no one in the upper echelons of Labour’s inner circle.

After what must have been an exhaustive process of barrel-scraping, they were eventually able to track down David Lawrence, a Labour Party think-tanker who had to step down as a parliamentary candidate after he could not prove that a £500,000 donation from crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, which he had received, was not used for his political campaigning. He agreed to publish the inevitable ‘Progressive case for Street Votes’ from his new (and suspiciously well-funded) think tank.

This strategy of courting the Labour Party appears to have fallen flat given that no street has voted. This is not surprising given that the majority of Labour members, MPs and housing ministers do not believe in the central tenet of YIMBYism that planning regulations are bad and more private-sector housing is a good thing. The few pro-housing members of the Labour Party are marginalised and hated. The mainstream Labour view of the housing crisis is that it is primarily a shortage of council housing, and any policy that allows any more private housing, and god forbid allows anyone in the south of England to make any money, is suspect. What the Labour party is interested in is making more of the existing housing stock council housing and distributing it to their voters at the expense of the working population, rather than building anything. Whatever generic rhetoric any Labour leader deploys cannot change this basic fact.

Mansardism: YIMBYs on crack

Bereft of meaningful political contacts after the fall of the Conservative Party and increasingly replaced as figureheads by new kids on the block (perhaps most notably the Cummings-endorsed cross-party YIMBY campaign group Looking for Growth of Lawrence Newport), members of the YIMBY movement have retreated into increasingly bizarre theory rather than actual political lobbying.

Most notable among these efforts has been Southwood’s work in the new magazine he co-edits with Bowman, Works in Progress, in which he attempts to construct ‘a universal world history of Street Votes’, or ‘Mansardism’ for short. His story begins with the Glorious Revolution, the main benefit of which (according to his article ‘How smashing the NIMBYs created modern capitalism’) was not, as is commonly assumed, the foundation of Parliamentary government. It was instead that it enabled ye olde streete votes. This came in the form of land enclosure, which required a supermajority of landowners to proceed. Likewise, the construction of infrastructure required a majority vote in parliament, and thus can be described as a similar phenomenon. Reflected in these processes, the immortal Spirit of Street Votes provided the basis for modern capitalism and, by extension, all technological progress of the last quarter millennium.

Yet, somehow, Southwood suggests, we today have lost sight of the basic wisdom that all political problems can be solved by bribing a majority of the population to align them with the necessary outcome before offering a vote on the issue which is sure to be won. As a result, we are unable to pass Street Votes and solve the housing crisis. Why is this?

Southwood’s latest Substack post posits an answer: modern architecture. His case rests on the ideas of one Samuel Hughes, a ‘philosopher’ whom Southwood describes as ‘one of the most important thinkers in the world’, and to whom he has provided a regular platform in the pages of his magazine to develop his latest thinking in public. According to Hughes’ thesis, English society in the post-Glorious-Revolution era was comfortable with allowing aristocratic families to construct a ‘Gentle Density’ of attractive Georgian terraces with mansards (from which the term ‘Mansardism’ derives) because the buildings they were erecting were just so damn beautiful. In fact, the public was so enamoured with these beautiful buildings that they concluded society itself must be running smoothly, enabling unprecedented trust in the government, a relaxed attitude towards the turbulence of capitalism, and the foundation of a high-trust society.

Here enters the villain of Southwood’s story: modern architecture. This aesthetic aberration is so objectively ugly that its use from 1945 onwards has led to a breakdown in social order, the collapse of trust in institutions, and as such, the emergence of a rabid reactionary opposition to any construction whatsoever.

Of course, the immediate question if this is true is why anyone allowed modern architecture to proliferate in the first place, if its effects are so uniformly deleterious. Interestingly, Southwood and Hughes reject any economic imperative behind the transition. Instead, their main theory appears to be that modernists somehow convinced architects and urban planners that their innovations were high status, whilst traditional architecture was low status. As a result, nobody dared to pass legislation mandating attractive traditional styles, because that would be embarrassing, so instead they simply made redevelopment impossible to save face — despite the enormous economic cost of doing so.

In this history, Street Votes becomes something more than a neat policy trick, ascending to the status of a universal truth of both good urbanism and government, deliberately forgotten by all but a Petrarchan few. The failure of its advocates could therefore be described not as evidence of a flawed political strategy, but instead as the inevitable consequence of decades of brainwashing by nefarious ‘modernists’, and the failure of the planning and architecture establishments to see the objective truth that resulted. And thus, only by evangelising about the goodness of Street Votes can we return to constructing attractive buildings again and resurrect the economic prosperity and political stability that Europe and America enjoyed in the halcyon days of the 1930s, before modern architecture.

Conclusion

It is clear that the British YIMBY movement has reached a political and intellectual dead end. British YIMBYism failed because it was never a true movement. It had no mass appeal or membership, just one endlessly repackaged idea: that they could pass Street Votes and that this would completely solve the housing crisis. Constrained to only one half of the neoliberal lesson on democracy — strictly that of public choice theory, in which voters’ preferences are reducible to ‘self-interest’ — they were blindsided by the rational interests of political actors themselves. The rather icky business of developing a saleable platform, and worse yet, developing relationships with more open-minded, but ‘low-status’ alternatives to established actors is perhaps still verboten to the YIMBY 1.0.

With no mass support, they were reduced to trying to use existing politicians and parties to advance their aims. However much they wished to use politicians for their own gain, it was skilled politicians who instead used them. Gove manipulated them to secure the support of centre-right think tanks in exchange for endorsing a policy he failed to deliver. Meanwhile, the modern Labour Party was not interested in a ‘progressive case’ for a policy they were inherently suspicious of and which was designed by their opponents.

Ultimately, the lesson of this affair is that politics is not about how smart you think you are or how good your idea is. It is an extremely personal endeavour, built on trust and individual connections with those able to garner mass electoral support for a platform of different policies that includes, but is not limited to, what you want. Anyone advising any party on policy must be able to credibly show that they support the party and the coalition of voters that it mobilises. It is not a measure of using your intelligence and skills to convince politicians to adopt your extremely clever idea, but instead the hard graft of building a collection of policies that you, the party’s members, and its voter base can endorse. It is not easy, and sometimes involves compromise, but it is better than failing and writing fantasy literature about having discovered the secret of civilisational trust itself.

This article was written by John Thermidor, Contributing Editor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Through a combination of electoral defeat and political retirements, only 65 of the elected 129 MSPs returned to Holyrood had been members during the previous parliamentary session, and, with the replacement of Douglas Lumsden by Tory North East newbie James Adams following the Aberdeen South by-election, a majority of the chamber are now new to their roles. This changing of the guard saw the departure of some notable (or, perhaps more accurately, infamous) figures, such as former First Ministers Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, as well as several longstanding MSPs from across the established parties.

However, the most notable change following the 2026 Scottish Parliament election has undoubtedly been the arrival of Reform as a major force in Scotland’s devolved legislature. In 2021, the party secured just 5,793 (0.21%) votes in the regional lists, and did not even stand candidates in individual constituencies. Yet in 2026, the party came second in the regional lists with 383,425 (16.6%) votes, and won 361,994 (15.8%) constituency votes, third behind the SNP and Labour. The outcome of this was Reform winning 17 seats (all from the regional lists), making them the joint second-largest party alongside Labour and marking the arrival of a new right-of-centre impetus in Holyrood.

Reform’s arrival on the Scottish political landscape

It was long considered by many that Scotland was somehow uniquely immune to the appeal of populism that has grown in the rest of Britain, Europe and indeed the Western World over the past two decades. Of course, for anyone with the intellect and political understanding beyond that of an A-level politics student or Guardian columnist, it is very obvious that Scotland was in fact the first part of Britain to reject the two-party Tory-Labour duopoly and plump for populist nationalism, with anti-Westminster anger sweeping the SNP to power in 2007 and keeping them there ever since. Regardless, the Scottish and Westminster commentariats’ narrative that Scotland was immune to populism held firm in the wake of the heavy Remain vote north of the border in 2016.

There were already glimpses of success for Reform’s Farage-led predecessor parties pointing towards a path to political relevance in Scotland. The bizarre David Cockburn, UKIP Scotland’s leader from 2014 to 2018, was elected as an MEP in the 2014 European elections having polled a notable 10.4% of the vote, and were it not for leadership and organisational failings the party may well have had MSPs elected in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections (alas, their vote share ultimately slumped to 2%). Again, European elections proved fruitful for the Brexit Party, with the equally peculiar Louis Stedman-Bryce taking one of Scotland’s six MEP spots as the party received 233,006 votes or 14.8%, coming second in conditions of then-unprecedented Tory-Labour unpopularity. However, these electoral successes were confined to European elections, and any momentum was fatally undermined on both occasions by the fundamental unsuitability of both Cockburn and Stedman-Bryce to public life and the lack of any meaningful party organisation in Scotland.

With Nigel Farage on hiatus from front-line politics, Reform was founded in Scotland in early 2021 as a largely anti-lockdown party by a small group of people, most notably including current Reform Scotland director and key decision-maker Martyn Greene. The party was initially joined by former Tory MSP Michelle Ballantyne, giving the party its first taste of Holyrood representation for the remaining months leading up to the 2021 Scottish Parliament election. After their disappointing results in the 2021 election, the party appeared to lose salience, deciding not to stand in the 2022 local elections, and Ballantyne was last seen joining one of many fringe right-wing parties earlier this year, leaving Reform.

Like Reform nationally, the 2024 General Election showed the first stirrings of what was to come. Reform received 7.0% of the vote in Scotland, far exceeding UKIP’s General Election peak in Scotland of 1.5% in 2015 and showing there was political hay to be made beyond European elections. The party continued to pick up pace with council by-election results as 2024 progressed, notably winning 18.9% of the vote in a West Lothian count in August 2024, and many other results showing growing support for the party across Scotland.

If 2024 was the year first signalling change brewing in Scotland, 2025 was the breakout year for the party north of the border. The year began with then Tory Glasgow City councillor Thomas Kerr joining the party in January 2025, providing the party with a media-adept figurehead to build the party’s profile and ensure a trickle of defections from councillors elsewhere over the course of the year. Kerr has since gone on to be a key figure for the party as Deputy Leader and focal point for much of its parliamentary and media operations.

The moment that truly marked Reform’s arrival as a national political force in Scotland was the June 2025 Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse Scottish Parliament by-election following the death of incumbent MSP Christine McKelvie. In a by-election largely framed around the party’s rise, Reform candidate Ross Lambie won 26.1% of the vote, coming only 1500 votes from winning the seat.

This result showed that there was now a clear and substantial bloc of support for Reform in Scotland, and crucially that it wasn’t necessarily coming entirely from ex-Tory voters, with the Tory 2016 peak vote in the seat of 19.4%. As the Tory Party still won 6.0% of the vote in 2025, it was a clear sign of willingness among disgruntled former Labour and SNP voters to lend their support to the party. Notably, the by-election campaign also presaged the tactics that the Scottish political establishment would adopt towards the insurgent party nationally. On the back of a Reform advert quoting then Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s words regarding Pakistani representation in British politics, the party was attacked from across the Scottish political establishment in a display of unity which had the early makings of a cordon sanitaire in Scottish politics.

Alongside the defection of sitting Tory MSP Graham Simpson to the party in August 2025, these events helped give Reform a significant polling bounce in Scotland which coincided with a positive national picture for the party. Pulling into a clear second place in Holyrood polling from September, this growth in support was illustrated by the party topping the poll in the November Stranraer & the Rhins council by-election, eventually being pipped by the Tories through vote transfers under the STV system used, before outright winning the December Whitburn & 4Blackburn council by-election that provided the party its first electoral victory in Scotland.

With Reform seemingly now a force in Scottish politics, a serious question remained: who would be leading the party into the Holyrood elections in May 2026? Figures such as Thomas Kerr and Graham Simpson had acted as party figureheads for media and campaigning events, but it was clear an official leader would need to be put in place, particularly with ongoing uncertainty around the candidate selection process. Following discussions with the party and a soft launch with a handful of prospective candidates, former junior Tory junior minister Malcolm Offord, then a member of the House of Lords, was officially announced as the newest defector to the party alongside Nigel Farage at a party rally in Falkirk in early December, with confirmation of his intention to resign his Lords seat to take up the party leadership coming the next month.

The party formally launched its election campaign and confirmed candidates on 19 March; the campaign immediately came under scrutiny with criticism of a past joke made by Offord before he entered politics. Changes to the candidate lists and furore over a joke made years earlier by Offord provided some early turbulence, but, after these initial challenges, the campaign proved reasonably uneventful. Reform Scotland’s skeleton crew of full-time employees managed the campaign well, avoiding any significant missteps and delivering the party’s pitch effectively. The most notable moments included Offord’s unshy acknowledgement of his ‘six houses, six boats, and five cars’ in an attempt to argue for Scottish entrepreneurship and a running ding-dong between him and then Labour leader Anas Sarwar over the latter’s attempts to court Reform support as a tactical vote to oust the SNP.

As previously detailed, Reform won 17 MSPs — all elected through regional lists, with at least one member from every region and as many as three in their Southern & Central strongholds — tying them as the second largest party in Holyrood. Breakthrough as that was, the result was perhaps at the lower end of expectations for the party, as it missed out by a whisker in several individual constituencies. The SNP held onto its once-stronghold of Banffshire & Buchan Coast by just 264 votes, and Reform came within a handful of regional votes away from winning additional seats in Edinburgh & Lothians East and North East Scotland. Had the election been held eight months earlier, when the party’s support in Scotland was at a local maximum, they may have secured 20 or more MSPs.

Nevertheless, the result still marked a historic result for the non-Tory right in Scotland, and any underachievement was likely a reflection of tactical unionist voting in favourable areas for the Tory party such as South Scotland and the North East rather than anything to do with Reform itself. That is even more the case given the limitations of Reform’s ground game, necessarily weaker than other parties given its smaller membership north of the border — a disadvantage which is ebbing as the party grows and matures.

The current state of play in Holyrood

Since the 7 May Holyrood election, Reform has moved quickly to put together a central media and research team alongside teams for individual MSPs. This hiring process has been consciously expedited in an attempt to minimise the period of Reform’s disadvantage, given that all other parties already possess these functionalities. Contrary to the assumptions of some, the vast majority of those hired have not come from a Tory background, despite the glut of redundant staff with the Tory party having been reduced from an opposition party of 31 seats to a rump of just 12.

The central decision-making nexus of the party in Scotland has taken shape around the aforementioned Offord, Kerr and Greene alongside Offord’s former SpAd and Highlands and Islands MSP Max Bannerman (cousin of former UKIP Deputy Leader David Campbell Bannerman and a distant relation of former Liberal Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman), who has overseen the successful launch of the party’s parliamentary operation as well as holding crucial input into party strategy and policy. While Offord, Kerr and Bannerman come from a Scottish Tory background, the party has a distinct direction and identity from their former party, and there is little love lost between the three and many of the few remaining Tories in Holyrood. The party also retains a strong core of early Reform ‘long marchers’, with Greene alongside MSPs David Kirkwood and Mark Simpson having been heavily involved with the party since its early days.

As regards specific policy areas, a broad remit is being given to MSPs within their own portfolios, in a process expected to intensify in the coming months to produce detailed policy output across the full spectrum of issues. Broadly speaking, the party is emphasising the value of markets and enterprise (a topic Offord passionately leads on), as well as being vocal on social policy and, as could readily be assumed, ardently Unionist and Eurosceptic. The latter two of these three tendencies have been almost entirely absent from Scottish political discourse in recent decades, abandoned by the conspicuously liberal Scottish Tories and driven out of the SNP to the extent they were ever present.

The presence of unapologetic opposition to left-wing social politics and immigration policy has unsurprisingly rubbed the left-of-centre Holyrood political establishment up the wrong way. Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton went as far as to make a very original comparison to the ‘Third Reich’. In typical Lib Dem fashion, he went on to apologise if he had offended those he had likened to one of history’s most reviled regimes. Particular flashpoints have come after disturbances in Glasgow following the attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast by a Sudanese asylum seeker, with various political figures shamelessly accusing Reform of being vicariously liable for the ructions.

Indeed, there has been in part a broad effort to create a quasi-cordon sanitaire around the party in Holyrood. This came most notably with John Swinney’s post-election protestations against the insurgent party, vowing to ‘lock out’ the party from governance. This step was followed by various other parliamentary manoeuvres as all other parties from the Scottish Greens to the Tories sought to make life as difficult as possible for Reform. These gestures have largely backfired, and Reform has taken important committee convenorships for the Economy and Health; other parties now struggle to maintain a coherent and workable collective political strategy against the party.

Beyond the arrival of Reform en masse, the Scottish Parliament largely remains as Ed West recently described it: ‘The Wuhan lab of British Politics’. The comfortable re-election of an SNP minority government has done little to strengthen the position of long-time party apparatchik and current First Minister John Swinney, who is currently bogged down by the ongoing Peter Murrell embezzlement scandal which could eventually bring him down, particularly as further questions are raised around the finances of the pro-independence Yes Scotland group with which Murrell was also involved.

Further to the detriment of the First Minister has been the decamping of the able former SNP Westminster group leader Stephen Flynn to Holyrood, assuming the economy brief for the government. The likely power struggle for the leadership between Flynn and education secretary Màiri McAllan (of the Sturgeonite wing) will have significant consequences for the future of Scottish politics. Particular fault lines will be around oil and gas, with SNP figures in the North East like Flynn keen on better supporting the industry, and the much-discussed but still detail-scant ‘Public Service Reform’ led by former Kate Forbes supporter Ivan McKee, which is tasked with slashing billions of pounds from Scottish Government expenditure.

The much-reduced Tory rump party has, unsurprisingly, taken its May Holyrood drubbing acrimoniously and has put most of its parliamentary efforts into channelling it against the new Reform cohort, mirroring much of their election tactics in an attempt to discredit Reform and particularly their commitment to the Union. The party did go into the summer recess with some spring in its step following the aforementioned Aberdeen South Westminster by-election victory, possibly meaning that West Scotland MSP Russell Findlay will hang on as the party leader north of the border. The main successor touted to replace Findlay if a vacancy were to emerge is Dumfriesshire MSP Craig Hoy, which would be a particular gift for Reform’s prospects in Scotland, although perennial candidate Murdo Fraser would likely also put his hat into the ring of any contest, potentially amongst others.

The Scottish Labour Party, on the back of losing seats at a seventh consecutive Scottish Parliamentary election, finds itself in a particularly moribund mood. Devoid of ideas and purpose, differing little from the SNP establishment on much bar the constitution, the party finds itself at an existential crossroads with no easy options for electoral salvation. Anas Sarwar has unsurprisingly left the role of party leader, with Andy Burnham offering the Glasgow MSP a peerage for his double act of electoral failure. The ballot in the contest to replace him opens this Friday (28 August), and the result will be announced on 19 September. There are ostensibly differences between the two candidates (Michael Marra and Joe Fagan) — I have thus far been unable to identify them.

Both represent a ‘soft-left’ and vaguely Burnhamite turn that will likely produce similar results for the party in Scotland as it has in the rest of the country, which is to say very little. They remain better choices than the available alternatives (from Labour’s perspective at least). The prospect of Edinburgh liberal Daniel Johnson pontificating across the Holyrood debating chamber for the next five years would have surely been a great boon for Reform’s prospects in working-class Scotland, and Paul Sweeney’s softening position on the constitution may have moved a significant bloc of Unionist voters away from the party. The other possible candidate in this contest was Sarwar’s successor on the Glasgow regional list, former MSP and 2021 leadership candidate Monica Lennon, whose uninspiring candidacy fizzled out as she failed to secure the required nominations.

The Lib Dems will continue to fulfil their role, as they now do across Britain, of providing Potemkin opposition in theory whilst supporting every act of the government in practice. Having picked up a solid election showing with the party going from four to ten seats, including a number of impressive constituency victories, their role in parliament may gain more significance if the SNP approaches them instead of the Scottish Greens for budget support for the minority nationalist government.

The most extreme gain-of-function experiments in the Scottish Parliament are, however, carried out by the Scottish Green Party, a truly risible organisation. To the detriment of Scottish political discourse and the quality of our public life in general, the Greens have enjoyed representation in Holyrood ever since the first devolved elections in 1999, with their influence having steadily grown since, culminating in the infamous Bute House power sharing agreement of 2021-2024 between them and the SNP which saw Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater placed in ministerial positions for the first time.

Despite the sheer incompetence of Harvie and particularly Slater (readers would be wise to read about the disastrous and thankfully aborted Deposit Return Scheme) and the collapse of the agreement, the 2026 elections saw the Greens make significant advances. To the Greens’ credit, their strategy of focusing on maximising the regional list vote (standing only in six of 73 constituencies, two of which they won) did succeed, allowing the party to receive support from dissatisfied SNP voters without provoking fears of vote-splitting and handing them 15 seats in Holyrood, up from seven at the previous election. This makes the far-left group larger than both the Tory Party and the Lib Dems.

While the list of wacky policies advocated by this group of 15 is too extensive for this article, there are some moments to highlight. New Edinburgh & Lothians East regional MSP Kate Nevens drew significant attention during the campaign for advocating the abolition of Scotland’s prison system in comments which were not fully repudiated by the party. Nevens’ fellow Edinburgh & Lothians East representative Q Manivannan, a ‘nonbinary’ Indian national who had been studying for a doctorate in international relations at St Andrews, has provoked particular controversy not just for the ridiculousness of his queer pretensions but also on account of his visa status. Being on a student visa, it is possible that he could be asked to leave Britain two years into his five-year term, leaving him to serve out the rest of his time in office remotely from his native Tamil Nadu. Of course, even outside of this challenge, it is outrageous that a non-citizen is allowed to serve in elected office. But the most egregious part of the equation is that his very presence in Scotland is only possible at the expense of the British taxpayer, with his doctoral research project ‘Archiving and (Re)imagining Caregiving as Peacebuilding in Third World Social Movements’ being funded by the ESRC.

Unfortunately, these positions championed by the Greens have also significantly influenced SNP thinking, with SNP flagship election policy focusing on price controls for foodstuffs, despite there being no clear legal power through which the Scottish Government might enact such measures. The SNP is also looking to effectively abolish prison sentences for crimes requiring a sentence of less than five years, building on a legacy of reduced sentences for younger people which has led to their exploitation for criminal enterprises. This comes on the back of a pervasive crackdown on free speech that has enabled the state to prosecute Scots for private conversations in their own home, a perennial fixation with rent controls, and a hatred of second homes rooted equally in socialist resentment and anti-English xenophobia — all issues on which the Greens and the SNP are in lockstep, and that’s before both parties’ bizarre obsessions with transgenderism are discussed.

It will be increasingly important for Reform going forward to highlight these overlaps as they seek to wrench more support from the SNP — particularly in the deindustrialised central belt between Edinburgh and central Glasgow, which offers an opportunity-rich demographic environment for Reform similar to that of England’s north and midlands, and is yet to fully manifest that potential.

The future for Reform in Scotland

The most interesting aspect of Reform’s support in the May Holyrood elections, and in their recent electoral successes at large, has been the support they have received outside of traditional Tory voting areas — particularly, but not limited to, the Central Belt — bucking perceptions that Reform voters in Scotland are simply disgruntled former Tory voters.

This was already evident from the party’s strong showing in the June 2025 Hamilton by-election and the council victory in Whitburn & Blackburn in December of that year, but was further highlighted by Reform’s success in pushing Labour into third place on the regional list vote in Central Scotland & Lothians West — their traditional heartland in the country. Reform secured three MSPs for the region, a figure they matched only in South Scotland (a traditional Tory area, yes — but one in which Reform’s strongest showings were in traditionally non-Tory seats such as Carrick, Cumnock & Doon Valley, Clydesdale, and the aforementioned Hamilton. Even as the party may be underperforming its potential to win over ex-Tory voters due to the effectiveness of the Tory tactical voting message, their success elsewhere raises important questions and opportunities regarding its future direction.

This appeal in working-class, non-Tory, unionist communities was further underlined by the party’s victory in the Larkhall council by-election on 9 July, winning over 35% of first preference votes and securing a not insignificant number of Labour and some Tory transfer votes, ensuring the party was able to survive the STV vote transfer process to win the contest. Focus on those Labour voters in working-class areas willing to give Reform their second-preference votes may show an avenue for further electoral expansion, especially as Labour’s stance on the union weakens. Likewise, any move of the Tory party to a more liberal leader could squeeze some residual Tory vote — although that looks immediately unlikely for now.

Reform has also enjoyed meaningful support from former SNP voters and independence supporters. According to YouGov, the party won 13% of 2014 Yes voters on the regional list, only 2% away from being the second most popular party with independence supporters, and was the second most popular party with the demographic in constituency voting (although this is largely due to the Greens taking themselves out of the running). While only 38% of Scots voted for Brexit in 2016, this is still a significant voting bloc and a number of these voters will have also voted Yes in 2014 — indeed, this universally anti-establishment (and often broadly speaking ‘right wing’) voter has often been ignored in analysis of Scottish politics, but is becoming important now as they begin to shift towards Reform. Much of this group will have also been pushed into the independence camp due to their frustration with the Tory-Labour duopoly and could be sympathetic to Reform’s message of fundamental change within Britain. Balancing former Tories who have come to support the party while pursuing these growth opportunities with former Labour and SNP voters will be incredibly important for the growth of the party in Scotland.

Crucial to the fate of Reform, and indeed all Unionist parties in Scotland, will be the relationship between the SNP and Greens. At present, the cosy relationship between the two has allowed the SNP to largely monopolise the pro-independence vote despite their own failings, with the Greens only standing in a handful of seats. In return, the Greens have been able to benefit from significant split-ticket voting that has been seen by some to ‘game’ the D’Hondt system, has given them significant representation, and has ensured a sizeable pro-independence majority in parliament despite the two parties receiving only a little over 40% of the total vote share. If the SNP were to push away from their Sturgeonite recent history and pursue meaningful cuts as part of much-discussed ‘public service reforms’ whilst moving to support the oil and gas industry, this may push the Greens to reconsider their détente with the nationalists and reignite conflict between the two parties.

The next SNP leadership election will go some way towards indicating the line the party will take on these crucial issues, whenever that does occur. Another area that held the Greens back from standing in constituencies across the country was the upfront cost of deposits for the party. While the Greens would almost certainly have returned the vast majority, if not all, of their deposits, this financial commitment would have seriously dented campaign finances. The Lib Dem victory in Edinburgh Northern was an excellent example of the opportunities for Unionists if the pro-independence vote can be split. Despite a pro-independence vote share of over 40%, the Lib Dems were able to win the seat with 34.6% of the vote. While the Lib Dems are more likely to benefit from tactical support than any other Unionist party, this seat almost certainly would have been an SNP win had the Greens not stood. Unionist parties looking to decouple the nationalist vote would be wise to consider how they could make it more appealing for the Greens to stand by reducing the cost of deposits for parties with existing representation — a point the SNP and Greens would be unlikely to significantly push back on (or indeed oppose at all).

Paramount to Reform’s future success and presence in Scotland will be the building of local party infrastructure, a process that is already well under way. The opportunity to vote for a Reform candidate in every council ward across Scotland in May 2027 will cement the arrival of a truly national party, and the necessity of canvassing up and down the country will provide important and detailed data. The likely slew of councillors will help develop and mature a candidate and activist bank for future Westminster and Holyrood elections.

It is of course important to remember that, like any major Unionist party, the fortunes of Reform at the 2031 Holyrood election will be heavily influenced by the fate of the party at Westminster. No more clearly was this seen than with Labour’s dismal showing in May despite having made significant advances and topped the poll in Scotland in the 2024 General Election, their first such accomplishment since 2010. But so too can Scotland exert an influence on the country as a whole.

Many readers will be sceptical of the importance of Scottish politics, and hostile to the idea of devolution itself. That is a hostility which I share. Yet, just as Holyrood has served as a breeding ground for new ideas and approaches on the left, so too can it provide a window for Reform nationally into the challenges of government, as well as an opportunity to develop talent which can later be used in Westminster. A number of Scottish Reform politicians are already distinguishing themselves in that regard. More than anything, the next general election will be extremely tight whatever the result, making every seat all the more valuable. Reform’s successes thus far show that it would be a mistake to give up on Scotland, regardless of the challenges it brings.

This article was written by Andrew Osnard, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Thanks to YouGov polling conducted in 2016, shortly after the Referendum result, and again earlier this year, we can now measure how this opposition took place on a per-nationality basis and compare it with the numbers of people who came subsequently with a different demographic skew.

To make a fair comparison, we rebased the polls to exclude those who responded ‘don’t know’ to any given country — this enables us to look only at respondents who expressed an opinion about immigration from a particular country of origin.

The results demonstrate that the bulk of post-2016 flows were of nationalities that voters had explicitly said they wanted reduced. Using the Home Office’s Migrant Journey dataset, which tracks people as they move through the immigration system, we can proxy flows by nationality and match them against the opinions expressed in 2016. Four of the five nationalities with the largest number of Migrant Journey starts between 2017 and 2025 were among those towards which there had already been substantial public opposition.

In fact, around two-thirds of the covered journeys came from countries where a majority of respondents expressing an opinion wanted fewer or no immigrants in 2016. This represents 2.6m migrant flows. A further 885,000 journeys came from countries where between 45% and 49% wanted immigration reduced.

There is an obvious objection to using the Migrant Journey data alone. A ‘journey’ does not necessarily represent a unique long-term immigrant, and the same individual can begin more than one journey depending on their interaction with the immigration system.

Fortunately, the same broad pattern appears in the Office for National Statistics’ estimates of long-term immigration.

Looking at the nationalities for which the latest ONS figures allow a direct comparison, India is again by far the largest flow, followed by Nigeria and China, with Pakistan also substantial. The precise numbers differ because the Home Office and ONS datasets measure different things, but the nationality ranking is remarkably similar.

Whether we look at immigration-system journeys or estimated long-term immigration, the same underlying picture emerges: some of the largest flows were from nationalities towards which substantial public opposition had already been recorded.

This also makes it difficult to argue that the recent ‘Boriswave’ made immigration from these countries unpopular after the fact. For several of the largest nationalities, it was already unpopular before the larger flows took place.

In 2016, after excluding those who expressed no opinion, 64.5% wanted fewer or no Pakistani migrants and 66.2% said the same of Nigerian migrants. The equivalent figure was 52.7% for India and 48.6% for China.

By 2026, opposition to Indian immigration had risen to 56.4% among those expressing a view, Chinese immigration to 50.6%, and Pakistani immigration to 66.7%. Nigerian immigration was the exception, falling slightly to 63.2%, although remaining very high.

Other nationalities moved more dramatically. Russia and Israel, for example, experienced large increases in opposition, although comparatively few migrants from either country arrived in Britain over the period examined. Subsequent geopolitical events may well have influenced attitudes towards both.

It also turns out that Brits in 2016 did not want to replace European workers with Commonwealth migrants — rebased for ‘don’t knows’, Poles went from 45% favourable up to 66% in the decade since the Referendum result. Simply put, they wanted lower immigration from Poland, and were even more opposed to migration from India, Pakistan, Nigeria etc. This will be explored in closer detail in an upcoming Cambridge Circus Research paper.

There is another interesting feature in the polling. Among the countries with the largest subsequent flows, the share answering ‘don’t know’ generally fell while explicit opposition increased. For India, ‘don’t know’ fell from 26% to 22%, while the raw share wanting fewer or no Indian migrants rose from 39% to 44%. Similar movements occurred for China, Pakistan and the United States.

There is an important caveat. These are separate cross-sectional polls rather than a panel following the same individuals, so we cannot say that particular undecided voters moved into opposition. But at the aggregate level the movement is nevertheless suggestive: opinions became more defined, and for four of the five largest subsequent flows they became more restrictive.

The public had been asked about individual nationalities, and in many cases had expressed clear opposition. Yet some of the largest flows that followed came from precisely those countries.

Across the 17 comparable non-EU nationalities examined here, around two-thirds of covered post-2016 journeys came from countries where a majority of those expressing an opinion had already wanted immigration reduced in 2016. Almost 88% came from countries where that figure was at least 45%.

The verdict is clear. The British people were explicitly asked what kinds of immigration they wanted less of and answered clearly. What followed bore remarkably little relationship to those preferences. The information was there; it was simply ignored.

Any government that wants to restore public confidence in the immigration system will have to correct this grave error.

This article was written by Hugh Percy, a researcher at Cambridge Circus Research. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Although the protests were not connected to any political party or ideology, they constituted a spark of political awakening on the Brazilian right. The June 2013 journeys, as they became known, did not lead to any immediate change. President Dilma Roussef, in office at the time, was re-elected the following year. Nonetheless, this was the first sign that the democratic system established by the progressive 1988 Constitution (hereafter the ‘Regime of 1988’) was not delivering on its promises in the eyes of voters, and one which came as a huge surprise to the political and media establishment, the guardians of the Regime.

After the 2014 election, the Brazilian right was able to organise and capitalise on a failing government. The President’s fiscal indiscipline caused an economic crisis worse than that of COVID. From the end of 2014 to the end of 2016, there was a real per capita GDP contraction of 10% and a rise in unemployment from under 7% to 13%. Against this economic catastrophe, the endemic corruption of the government, and under very specific constitutional pretexts, the Brazilian right led mass protests to impeach the President. At the forefront of this movement was a group called Movimento Brasil Livre (literally Free Brazil Movement, or MBL). The impeachment succeeded, and Brazilians got rid of the leftist Workers' Party after 13 long years in power. It was natural to think that MBL would command the Brazilian right moving forward, capturing the spirit of the successful impeachment process, which was a genuinely right-wing movement, unlike the 2013 journeys.

It was not to be so. That political moment was subsequently captured by an obscure congressman with an unimpressive legislative record called Jair Bolsonaro. In 2018, he led a successful presidential campaign, uniting the different sects of the Brazilian right and a disillusioned middle class to vote for the only real novelty candidate in 20 years, who would go on to lead the first right-wing government in Brazil’s democratic period.

Today, Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest after an attempted coup, and his followers are rallying around his son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, for the presidential election this year. However, for the first time, the Bolsonaro family is facing credible opposition from the right — indeed, from MBL themselves — something that was previously unthinkable given the grip Bolsonaro had on his ideological camp.

To paint a picture of the current state of the Brazilian right, its divisions, and its potential, for an international audience, we must first explore its history and the ideas that have shaped its contours today.

A brief history of the Brazilian right: military juntas, Islamic traditionalists, and communism

The Brazilian right is a young movement. While there have been many variations of conservative and anti-leftist tendencies since the return of democracy in 1985, it was only during the 2016 impeachment process that it consolidated into a united political force. For three decades, Brazil did not have an organised right. From 1985 onwards, political control passed between various social and liberal democratic factions before its ultimate capture by the radical left at the dawn of the 21st century with the election of Lula da Silva in 2002. Whilst there was some contestation over the extent to which markets, on the one hand, and redistribution, on the other, constituted the best response to shared progressive concerns, the broad thrust of political objectives was near-universally agreed.

The reason for the great void on the right during this period is fairly obvious: Brazil’s transition to democracy was preceded by 21 years of a military dictatorship which was initially supported by Brazilian civilian right-wing groups, tainting the right by association for many years after. To be ‘right-wing’ in the 90s and 2000s was to be culpable for the repression of the previous regime, and nobody in polite company could countenance such connotations. Ironically, this was compounded by the actions of the junta itself, which viewed civilians with suspicion and as such suppressed the development of civil society on the right as well as the left, if with less violent fervour. When the military administration withdrew, there was no organic right-wing force to fill its position in Brazilian civic life.

This absence of a political right did not mean that there were no ideological disputes during the period. The Regime of 1988 has been defined by polarisation around the main left-wing party, the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores¸ abbreviated to PT). Its ideology is called the petismo, which contrasted against the antipetismo, primarily represented for many years by the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB), a liberal and social democratic party. While petismo can be defined narrowly as an ideological and rhetorical identification with PT, antipetismo is a broad rejection of this phenomenon. PSDB’s enduring dominance within antipetismo enabled their ability to hoover up the votes of most conservative or right-wing Brazilians for decades, despite offering little in relation to their political objectives.

Antipetismo takes on different characters and results from different motivations across various sections of Brazilian society. The business and financial sectors dislike the party’s economic program, especially the redistribution of income and socialisation of assets. Farmers and those in agri-business — the only industry that has actually grown in Brazil over the last thirty years — have felt themselves under constant attack by the party and its supporters, the sem terra (‘landless’), who have attempted to occupy and confiscate their land through force, intimidation, and violence. Conservative Christians view with suspicion the party’s more socially ‘progressive’ factions. The military and police forces have been infuriated by the leniency with which criminality is treated, and the way in which both have been demonised as forces of oppression by leftist intelligentsia associated with PT.

Finally, the middle class felt unrepresented by the party’s rhetoric, which never left any conceptual space to discuss those occupying a status between the much-derided ‘rich’ and those languishing in abject poverty. If the middle classes could have been convinced of PT’s merits, it was through their promise of improved public services, such as healthcare, education, and public safety. Yet once the party came into power in 2003, it defaulted (as is so often the case) to the easier task of redistribution, shying away from public service reform. A series of corruption scandals that plagued the party until 2016 alienated these voters all the more.

Unified only by a common antipathy towards PT, these groups remained separate and uncoordinated until the arrival onto the scene of Olavo de Carvalho, who first provided a coherent right-wing expression of antipetismo. Olavo was one of the most consequential figures in Brazil’s recent history, and certainly one of the most idiosyncratic. In his youth, he was a communist militant, later developing an interest in esotericism and becoming an astrologist, influenced by his reading of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon; he entered Schuon’s Islamic tariqa, Maryamiyya. The final stage in his eclectic intellectual life was as a Catholic Americanist who adopted both the political platform and conspiracy theories of the U.S. Tea Party, including a conviction that Barack Obama was not a legitimate U.S. Citizen and a belief that Pepsi manufactured its drinks using aborted foetuses.

Beyond these quirks of personality, Olavo was highly articulate (at least when he chose not to be straightforwardly rude instead). He was, at least apparently, very well read, introducing many different political thinkers and ideas to the Brazilian repertoire in the 90s and 00s, and was one of the few public personalities who accepted the label ‘right-wing’. A relatively well-respected figure in public discourse, he wrote for many major Brazilian newspapers and appeared on television regularly before moving to Virginia and starting an online philosophy course (from which no one ever graduated). He also started his own podcast, True Outspeak, where he would comment on current affairs alongside whatever else took his fancy — and it was here that I first came across his work.

Olavo had three big political ideas (brace yourself). The first was the conviction that the reconstruction of the Roman Empire, understood in its abstract sense as a katechontic universal state, is the ultimate telos of Western civilisation, and has been for the past 1500 years. The Catholic Church attempted this in the Middle Ages, then Britain, and now America, which has come closest to success — or so he argues. The second was that there exists a cosmic competition between three great power projects: the liberal-Western, the Russo-Chinese, and the Islamic.

The final, and most important, was that, since the Renaissance, there has existed what he called ‘the Revolutionary Movement’, which is a broad project to de-Christianise the West and establish a New World Order. Olavo frequently used ‘communism’ and ‘the revolutionary movement’ interchangeably, but confusingly also leant on a more specific definition of the former as the ultimate culmination of the latter on occasion. For Olavo, communism was more a culture than an economic system. The left became aware of this through Antonio Gramsci, he claimed, and had subsequently set about trying to infiltrate all major institutions to slowly enforce communism. Gay marriage, abortion, progressive taxation: all of this served the communist strategy.

Whilst Olavo may have treated some of these concepts a little more carefully in some of his texts, his average reader took them without nuance. For example, a large part of the Brazilian right, drawing inspiration from his work, supports Ukraine because they genuinely believe that Putin is a communist in disguise. In 2016, a small march for Donald Trump in Rio de Janeiro where protesters urged Trump to fight the ‘communist’ Hillary Clinton. Olavo’s followers and the broader Brazilian right influenced by his ideas consider Brazil an integral part of Western Civilisation, the ultimate synthesis of Judeo-Christian morals, Greek philosophy and Roman legal tradition. Hence, they suggest, Brazil should align itself tightly to the West’s leader, the United States, especially when it is under a Republican President, as well as Israel (although this particular peccadillo is also a consequence of Brazil’s evangelical element, more on which later), as did President Bolsonaro. Having consumed a lot of Olavo’s thought over the years, it was a shock for me, having moved to Denmark, to find that people here did not consider Brazilians Western at all.

While most of the establishment saw him as a fringe figure, Olavo did touch a nerve with the broader electorate. Some of his works, analysing the decadence of Brazilian culture and its elites, did become best sellers. By being one of the only public figures to speak in openly right-wing terms, and refusing to constrain his critique of the left to the economic realm or keep it within the bounds of political liberalism, he attracted admiration from all of the antipetista factions. He provided a cultural and religious argument against the left, indulged in libertarian economic views and characterised some of the major Brazilian problems, such as criminality and political corruption, as part of the leftist political project. That is what the Brazilian conservative wanted to hear, even if it came in rather confused packaging.

Perhaps most importantly, Olavo understood that politics is not conducted in the realm of ideas, but by people seeking power (and, in a democratic context, election). But frontline politics was not for him, and he needed an avatar to implement his project. That person was Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolso-Olavism

Former President Jair Bolsonaro is not a well-read man. He was a former army captain, jailed for insubordination, who mostly represented the corporatist interests of retired military men from Rio de Janeiro. His long term in Congress yielded minimal results, failing to pass a single piece of legislation. Most of his interventions on the floor were to hail the former military regime and criticise excessive welfarism by the left. When the social and liberal democrats were in power in the 90s, he also opposed the economic reforms that ended Brazil’s hyperinflation, such as privatisation of state-owned companies. Bolsonaro existed not to imagine a future for Brazil, nor even to defend its past in order to advance a certain position — his was the purely therapeutic politics of a man whose time had passed.

He only began to receive media attention after publicly coming out against a government educational initiative on LGBT issues, which came to be known as the ‘gay kit’. In a country which maintains a majority holding relatively conservative religious views (even if those views are seldom practised), it was odd that no respectable figure dared to criticise the project, afraid of being considered homophobic. Bolsonaro was not afraid, and called out what he described as an attack against ‘Brazilian values’. From then on, his following grew as he continued to express, brusquely, sentiments that many Brazilians shared. He said he did not want his children being exposed to ‘two moustached dudes kissing each other’. He said that criminals did not need re-education; they only needed to ‘get fucked’ or be ‘killed’, and that people should have guns to protect themselves. He said that welfare policies incentivised poor people to reproduce and promoted sterilisation as an alternative. Whatever the validity (or lack thereof) in these views, Bolsonaro began to channel popular sentiments without any structural solutions, much like the least promising populists elsewhere.

It is here that Olavo enters the picture once again. The two men’s audiences overlapped quite neatly, and eventually both camps got in contact and began working together. One assumes that Bolsonaro has not himself read much of Olavo’s work, but he frequently appeared on Olavo’s live shows as President, wielding one of the author’s best sellers: ‘O mínimo que você precisa saber para não ser um idiota’ (‘The minimum you need to know to not be stupid’); repeating the same vocabulary as Olavo on the need to save Brazil from communism. It was a book Bolsonaro sorely needed if he was to construct a coherent political project, and Olavo’s platform gave him the reach he needed just as much.

Olavo saw this alliance with clear eyes as well. He believed that a right-wing, explicitly Christian candidate would win an election as the voice of the silent majority, and he expected his ideas to be the animating force behind any resulting administration. He used Bolsonaro for his own political project, as Bolsonaro did with him, forging a synthesis that became known as Bolso-Olavism.

The rise and fall of Jair Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro came to power by uniting three broad groups of voters. First, there were the religious conservatives, mostly evangelicals, who represent a quarter of the Brazilian people, concentrated in the more populous urban areas of the country. They were not necessarily readers of Olavo, but they shared a common language. There is a conspiracist mentality in many neo-Pentecostal churches around the world, which was fertile soil for the idea that PT wanted to ‘impose communism’ to ban Christianity, close the churches and persecute Christians (even if PT’s roots as an outgrowth of the Basic Ecclesial Communities, groups organised by leftist militants within the Catholic Church, belie this suggestion). Bolsonaro was also quite fond of Israel, which holds a special place in Brazilian Evangelicals’ hearts, and was baptised in the Jordan River by an Evangelical pastor. Given Brazil’s vanishingly small Muslim community (less than 0.5% of the population) and the fact that the only supporters of Palestine in the country are leftist militants, this sympathy should not come as a surprise.

The second group were anti-corruption voters, including the lavajatistas, supporters of Operation Car Wash — one of the largest anti-corruption investigations in the world, which had uncovered a number of egregious scandals involving PT leadership. Up to 2013, international analysts were mesmerised by how passively Brazilians responded to corruption scandals, evident as their rampancy was to most, with no one ever punished as a result. All of that changed after 2014, when Brazilians saw for the first time politicians and businessmen going to jail for corruption offences. Bolsonaro, presenting as a law-and-order candidate and not having any known corruption allegations against himself, was able to capitalise on voters’ anti-corruption anger. After his victory, Bolsonaro even nominated the judge leading the operation, Sergio Moro, to become his Justice Minister (in Brazil’s unusual legal system, judges can co-ordinate police operations directly).

Finally, there were the economic liberals — the group of which I myself was part. Whilst many voters saw Bolsonaro as too extreme in his nostalgia for the military period and his ultra-conservative social views, a large part of the electorate was willing to overlook this in the hope that he might deliver an economic alternative to the failing socialist project. Bolsonaro himself was never an economic liberal, and was actually quite fond of state dirigisme, as this was the economic model of the military governments. However, he signalled that he would nominate Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago economist who advocated liberal shock therapy along the Chilean model (good Chicago boy that he was), to be his finance minister, softening the concerns that many business elites and middle-class voters had about his agenda.

These three groups of voters could unite around their expectations of a Bolsonaro presidency: promotion of conservative Christian values, a heavy crackdown on crime, and a Thatcher-style revitalisation of the economy. They expected an end to political corruption, the rejection of ‘woke’-inspired policies throughout public and quasi-public institutions, and technocratic management of the economy and public services.

They would be sorely disappointed.

The problems began before Bolsonaro even took office. Shortly after his election, during the transition period, it was reported that his son (Flávio Bolsonaro, who had just been elected to the Senate after 16 years as a state congressman) had committed fraud whilst serving as a representative. Rachadinha, as this type of crime is informally referred to, essentially involves embezzling taxpayer money by hiring staff to do fake jobs and taking a cut of their salaries in return. It is a relatively common practice in Brazil, especially among the more incompetent politicians who lack the nous and finesse to pull off more sophisticated, quieter schemes.

The reverberations of this scandal echoed throughout Bolsonaro’s term in government. The new President failed to advance any anti-corruption measures, aligning himself instead with various tainted figures among the corrupt establishment in order to protect his family.

Neither did he find the courage to tackle the abuses of the Supreme Court and the failures of Brazil’s criminal justice system. The Regime of 1988 was designed with extensive safeguards for citizens against abuses by the state, forged as it was in the trauma of the military junta’s persecutions. However, this has subsequently meant that the law is applied far too leniently, with extreme restrictions on police authority and criminals given multiple opportunities to escape jail on various grounds. This system gives the rich and powerful, who can often pull strings and can always afford expensive defence lawyers, a particular advantage in avoiding justice. Furthermore, it gives ideologically motivated judges plenty of constitutional excuses to release common criminals. Bolsonaro did nothing to fix these problems, and the situation remains as bleak as ever. Last year, for example, a judge released a young man with 87 entries in his police record, claiming that it ‘cannot be presumed that the accused will re-offend’. I presume he has already gone on to do precisely that.

The promise of economic shock therapy from Paulo Guedes also failed to materialise. The only significant steps forward were a set of reforms to the pension system, which the country had already been debating during the two-year interregnum between Rousseff’s impeachment and Bolsonaro’s victory, and central bank independence — which, whilst probably for the best in Brazil especially, is not exactly a motivating issue for voters without economics degrees. In fact, Bolsonaro’s government oversaw one of the greatest expansions in lazy welfarism Brazil has ever seen, with the introduction of what was effectively a minimum income guarantee during the pandemic, which was then preserved subsequently to drum up support among the lowest classes in society.

Bolsonaro’s government also had a habit of overpromoting particularly unpopular figures and especially toxic ideas emanating from the more ridiculous parts of its ideological hinterland (a tendency familiar to North American readers). Many of these people were recommended by Olavo himself. However, their influence never lasted long as their incompetencies and contradictions revealed themselves. Bolsonaro appointed two Education Ministers who were influenced by Olavo, the first a Colombian, Velez Rodriguez, who barely spoke Portuguese and lasted only four months in post, and the second, Abraham Weintraub, who — despite being Brazilian-born — regularly made basic grammatical errors in Portuguese written communications and was fired abruptly during the middle of the pandemic. Others lasted a little longer, including Dante Mantovani — head of the National Arts Foundation (FUNARTE) — who believed that communist agents had infiltrated the CIA during the 60s, and had intentionally distributed LSD at Woodstock to destroy the traditional family and, as a result, capitalism as a whole (it remains unclear precisely what the causal link here is, I’m sure as much to Mantovani as to the rest of us). He also made the case that the Beatles were secret students of the Frankfurt School, and that Elvis Presley had been a Soviet experiment designed to corrupt the minds of the youth.

Bolsonaro’s other son, Carlos, who technically held no position other than that of a mere city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, nonetheless exerted huge influence on the government, especially when it came to strategy and communications. Carlos was deeply sympathetic towards Olavo, and was believed by many (including some of Bolsonaro’s former associates) to be severely mentally ill. Carlos operated what was known as the ‘hate office’ (Gabinete do Ódio), co-ordinating online attacks and character assassinations against anyone who dared to disagree with his father, including fellow party members.

Much like elsewhere, COVID also proved revealing of the Bolsonaro government’s flaws. Whilst readers’ views may differ on this subject, what was most egregious about Brazil’s national response is that there was no national response. Bolsonaro himself thought it unnecessary to impose any measures to contain the spread of the disease, yet he left state governments free to step into the void of his inaction — leading to the imposition, in some places, of measures beyond what even Europe saw.

Yet, without a co-ordinated central government response, these measures presented as simultaneously onerous and futile, doing little to ameliorate the challenge of dealing with the virus. Bolsonaro took an equally hands-off approach to vaccinations, where the central government essentially released itself of any responsibility to manage the process. All of this was made worse by the rapid cycling of ministers in the Bolsonaro administration — by 2021, it was his fourth Health Minister (not) dealing with vaccination strategy. COVID split Bolsonaro’s coalition between the ideological wing, who viewed any government intervention as a Trojan horse for communism, and his more moderate supporters who had backed him looking simply for a functional government.

Thus, by the time that the 2022 general election came around, Bolsonaro had thoroughly disappointed a broad cross-section of his supporters. Olavo passed away early in the year after criticising the President (an act he had harshly admonished in others previously) heavily, suggesting that he had been nothing more than a poster boy for his own campaign (true, to a certain extent). Many of the ministers and staff that Olavo had nominated or that were under his influence had left the government by the time of his death, and some of them had begun to lay the groundwork to seize the baton of his movement from the failing Bolsonaro after the election. Former Education Minister Weintraub, for example, ran for governor of São Paulo, positioning himself as the representative of the ‘true right’ in contrast to candidates supported by the President who had sold out and joined the corrupt establishment.

These attempts essentially went nowhere for one simple reason: Bolsonaro continued to exercise full authority over the Brazilian right. Weintraub and others sought an accommodation, stating that they still supported the President (either as the only way to avoid the return of the left to power, or more optimistically as someone who would make an effective leader in his own right were he only freed from the influence of his dastardly advisors). Either way, the semi-Bolsonarist strategy failed as well, and those attempting it were eventually drowned by a sea of online fury driven by Carlos Bolsonaro. An alternative would only emerge from a complete dissociation with the Bolsonaro project: new faces who had never been involved in his government, bore no responsibility for its failures, and had no feudal relationships with the Bolsonaro family or its support base to carefully manage as they sought a new path.

It is here that MBL enters the picture once again.

From Milton Friedman to Curtis Yarvin

Between Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 and Bolsonaro’s defeat in 2022, MBL was relegated to the margins of the Brazilian right. Even though the group was responsible for co-ordinating the impeachment process and creating the institutional pressure for economic reforms under the caretaker government of Michel Temer, it was not able to capitalise on the moment to seize political victories for itself in the way that Bolsonaro was.

More than anywhere else, the Brazilian right began as an online phenomenon, and the language it speaks in is native to that environment. Whilst both MBL and Bolsonaro had sizeable online presences, the two followings had very different character — especially generationally. Bolsonaro’s military sympathies (an association which MBL always avoided) enabled him to exert influence on older voters and those who cared most about law and order. MBL’s liberal intellectual origins meant many of these voters felt they were insufficiently ‘Christian’. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, despite being a twice-divorced non-practising Catholic married to an Evangelical with all sorts of strange episodes in his personal history, received the blessings of various religious figures (and, more importantly, of Olavo) and was endorsed as the figurehead of the ‘truly Christian’ right. Moreover, MBL’s focus on the technical economic and legislative strategy work of securing Temer’s economic reforms, whilst necessary and valuable, meant that they spent less time appealing to voters — whilst Bolsonaro instead used public funds to travel around the country keeping his supporters engaged. This period in particular allowed Bolsonaro to outpace his competitors and seize control of the right in the lead-up to 2018.

In the 2018 elections, MBL candidates for the legislature did run mostly on an economically liberal and anti-corruption platform, viewing these as both the most important issues for Brazilian prosperity and the greatest failures of previous administrations. For the average voter, this pitch sounded very similar to what some of Bolsonaro’s candidates were saying. Both camps drank from the same liberal-libertarian cup, such as Mises and Friedman. However, Bolsonarists preferred to be directly associated with Bolsonaro and placed heavy emphasis on social and religious issues. MBL was not close to Bolsonaro in the election’s first round but did lend him their support in the run-off in order to avoid PT returning to power. Some of the great figures of MBL were elected without Bolsonaro’s support, like Kim Kataguiri to Congress and Arthur do Val to São Paulo’s State House, yet after the run-off, the Brazilian right came united into its first elected government.

Nonetheless, this détente on the right would not last long. MBL saw early on that Bolsonaro would not be able to pass their legislative agenda through Congress. Instead of doing actual political work, Bolsonaro preferred to convene protests against the legislature, which only further disturbed his political allies. Furthermore, Bolsonaro started nominating historical PT apparatchiks to key positions, such as Augusto Aras, who became Attorney General in the autumn of 2019. Aras was a federal prosecutor known for his lenient tendencies, finding every breach in the law to undermine Operation Car Wash and release those jailed by it. His term as Attorney General even drew praise from Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli, previously PT’s party lawyer and one of the party’s proxies on the Court. Bolsonaro was nominating outright leftists to run some of the country’s most important offices, and yet no Bolsonarist dared to criticise.

Aras’s nomination started an irreconcilable division between those who supported a firmer law-and-order approach and the Bolsonaro family, which wanted to stop any investigations that could lead to Flavio’s indictment. The final straw was when Sergio Moro abandoned the Justice Ministry in April 2020, alleging that the President did not want him to do his job. Moro was seen as a symbol of the government’s anti-corruption commitment, having led Operation Car Wash, and his resignation was one of the most serious crises of the Bolsonaro period. From that point on, MBL adopted an independent position on the right, which led to a massive online attack by Carlos’s bots and the group losing hundreds of thousands of followers. MBL’s leadership even suffered phoney accusations from Bolsonarist prosecutors, which the group eventually defeated in court.

It was clear to MBL that they needed to create an alternative to Bolsonaro on the right. The first thing to do was to provide a different right-wing narrative to that of Bolso-Olavism.

The dominant narrative within the Bolso-Olavist camp is that the alternation between various democratically elected governments within the Regime of 1988 is a sham — what Olavo called Lenin’s ‘scissor strategy’, in which only socialistic parties are given the opportunity to participate in democratic elections, providing the illusion of choice and change whilst ensuring the maintenance of a basic set of agreed principles of governance. In opposition to this came Bolsonaro, to liberate Brazilians from communism. He was defeated only because the challenge he took on was so great: the opposition provoked by speaking the truth was too terrible, the task of replacing leftist cadres within the bureaucratic apparatus too large. Yet, having learned the necessary lessons and built the necessary alliances, the second attempt will surely succeed where the first did not.

There are many problems with this narrative. Firstly, it gives the impression that Brazil did not have any major issues up to PT’s rise. Secondly, PT has been in power controlling the presidency 17 out of 41 years of democratic rule, and Brazil is not yet communist — in fact, cultural opposition to communism proper has never been higher. Third, it completely ignores the missed opportunities of Bolsonaro, and how his inexcusable failures have disillusioned those who once supported him.

MBL offers a more sophisticated reading of history. Brazil, they suggest, was already a miserable country before the rise of the left. Neither the ascension of PT nor the election of Bolsonaro led to any significant material changes in Brazilians’ quality of life, which has remained in a constantly poor state over time once global structural and technological changes are accounted for. The internet and the AI revolution may be improving things now, but that is despite the continuity in government, not the result of changes within it. In fact, Brazil’s development lags behind many competitors, with China being an obvious example of a country outpacing it in every way. Brazil then has existed only as a passive beneficiary of other countries’ advances.

The reason for this inertness is the capture of the Brazilian state by what is known in the country as the ‘Big Center’ (Centrão) — opportunistic machine politicians without real ideas. Big Center politicians provide support to every government. In exchange, they expect the national government to provide subsidies and investment for their electoral bases. However, the extent to which these Big Center politicians have established control over the machinery of state means that, in practice, much of this investment is siphoned towards the private benefit of the politicians themselves, leaving sufficient crumbs for voters to continue offering their support, but ensuring they are kept permanently in sub-human conditions, thereby remaining dependent on their patrons.

Big Center politicians usually do well with very poor and poorly educated voters in under-served areas. Immediately before an election, they will halt their corruption to provide some small relief, renovating a few streets (usually contracting a firm with which they are financially involved) or enacting other highly public displays in exchange for votes. This strategy has persisted since the earliest days of Brazilian independence, keeping the same families in power and the rest of the people trapped in poverty. This establishment has no interest in developing the country, as that would destroy the system that keeps them in power.

Big Center politicians prefer low-profile offices to avoid scrutiny, mostly in the legislative branch. If they run for executive positions, it is mostly mayoralties or gubernatorial offices in the poorest states, where their political groups already have an entrenched position. Furthermore, the Regime of 1988 supports the Big Center position by greatly restricting the power of the Executive office. The Constitution stipulates minimal constitutional investments as a share of GDP in many areas, such as Education and Healthcare. Moreover, the country is facing rapid ageing, with pensions consuming an increasingly larger share of the budget. Brazil also has one of the highest real interest rates in the world, and past fiscal incontinence has meant that interest payments have totalled as much as 45% of Brazil’s annual government revenues. All in all, almost all of the country’s expenses are automatically determined, with less than 10% of the budget remaining subject to discretionary control. Finally, as the government cannot cut these expenses by itself, and institutional control over the budget is low, Big Center politicians take the President hostage by diverting larger and larger shares of the budget to their personal and political gains.

This reading of the Big Center’s role in Brazil’s politics has two implications for MBL strategy. First, it meant that they needed to create their own political party. Non-leftist political parties in Brazil are usually controlled by Big Center politicians as a way of electing congressmen and making money. Brazil finances its political parties annually with its budget, giving more money according to congressional representation. This year, the Party Fund (as it is known) totals R$1,2 billion (about £177 million). Besides that, Brazilian elections are mostly financed through taxpayer money, which again is proportionally distributed according to parties’ size in Congress. This year’s election is estimated to cost about R$ 5 billion (circa £740 million). Thus, Big Center politicians run Brazilian politics as a closed cartel, aiming to get the largest share possible in Congress to keep the money flowing, eventually aligning themselves to a nationally relevant politician (such as Lula or Bolsonaro) to attract votes.

Nor is starting a party in Brazil a simple process. Running as an independent candidate is not allowed, and creating a new party is incredibly hard. Not even Bolsonaro succeeded in doing so, forcing him to run in 2018 and 2022 as the candidate of two small, near-defunct but still approved parties. MBL ran a two-year process of collecting and validating enough signatures all around the country to launch their new vehicle. In November of last year, it was officially announced that its party, Partido Missão (Mission Party), had been approved by the Brazilian Electoral Court, meaning that it could run candidates independent of Big Center politicians.

The second strategic implication was that it needed to abandon some of the libertarian commitments it had previously held. One of these fetishes was the transposition of the American federalist system to Brazil. Many on the right, including Bolsonaro’s former Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, thought that Brazil centralised too much power at the national level, and defended more autonomy for local governments. However, if local governments are mostly run by Big Center politicians under little public scrutiny, that meant a consolidation of their power. Something analogous had happened in Brazil during its First Republic (1889-1930), where states were basically mini-republics, having their own constitutional arrangements. It is a period known for limited economic development and concentration of power in the hands of a few local families, ending with a civil war in 1930. Repeating that arrangement would be historically imprudent.

MBL updated its intellectual canon. It replaced Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for Curtis Yarvin, Nayib Bukele and Lee Kwan Yew. They created their own printed magazine, Revista Valete, to provide a place for dissident and creative voices to express their ideas. It still shared most of the right’s critique of the PT, from its corruption to its economic incompetence, but elevated it to something beyond ‘privatise everything and lower taxes’ — the agenda of the right before Bolsonaro. It now offers serious solutions to fight criminality, a topic on which Bolsonaro was previously seen as unassailable, with policies based on the Enemy Criminal Law doctrine from Gunther Jakobs. Proposals such as judicial bans of criminal organisations and prohibitions on propagating criminal culture through songs and symbols, as is done in democratic countries like Denmark, are a significant improvement from the ‘give guns to everyone’ approach of Bolsonaro. Most importantly, it aims to redesign Brazil’s political incentives by attaching public funds distribution to measurable achievements, such as the share of the population with sewage coverage or child illiteracy rates. As said by the presidential candidate for the Mission Party and MBL leader, Renan Santos, in a speech to a gathering of mayors: ‘I don’t want to see mayors debating transgender bathrooms, I want you to be concerned with whether the children in your cities can read.’

Infighting in the Bolsonaro Camp

Today, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, is still the favourite to be the right’s candidate for President running against Lula later this year. However, whilst he maintains a significant lead over his competitors (if not over Lula himself), his numbers have fallen over the past few months.

The first reason for this is his association with the Banco Master scandal, by far the most significant one he faces. Banco Master was a bank that sold fake financial products in a pyramid scheme, leading many clients to lose substantial sums, including the public pension funds. The scheme is one of the largest in Brazilian politics, with politicians from all sides involved. The biggest hit to Flavio so far was a leaked audio message between him and the bank’s CEO, Daniel Vorcaro, in which he asks for R$61 million (£9 million) to finance a movie about his father.

Secondly, Flavio has been in a power dispute with his father’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro. While she is not seen as a true Bolsonaro by his most committed supporters, she is deeply Evangelical and has some popularity, especially among Evangelical women. She is also quite close to Congressman Nikolas Ferreira. Nikolas is young, Evangelical and received the most votes of any congressman in the 2022 election thanks to Bolsonaro’s support. While he has never criticised the former President, it is clear that he is amassing a followership, and many conservative Evangelical leaders disillusioned with Bolsonaro and his family see him as a preferable successor. For now, though, it seems that Michelle has lost the feud with Flavio, showing the grip that the family clan still has over their followers.

Finally, Flavio Bolsonaro is running a markedly different campaign to that of his father in 2018. Flavio is now running a socially progressive campaign which is keen to avoid allegations of sexism or homophobia. He has on occasion adopted the use of gender neutral pronouns, and has supported feminist proposals in an attempt to court the female vote (Brazil, much like Argentina, has an unusually intransigent feminist movement). Earlier this year, he voted for the ‘Misogyny Law’, which characterises a broad range of acts including ‘misogynistic’ jokes and even controversial readings of bible verses as criminal, and now he proposes to give free mobile phones to over 70 million women to expand internet access.

All of this is leading to a corrosion of the Bolsonaro family’s grip on the right, much to the benefit of Renan Santos and Ronaldo Caiado, the former governor of Goiás and the third contender in the race. Caiado tries to claim that he is more conservative than Bolsonaro, but so far lacks substance and fails to attract voters outside his electoral base in the middle of Brazil. Furthermore, as the Bolsonaro family still holds a tight grip on this kind of ideological voter, it is hard for Caiado to make inroads.

Santos, on the other hand, pitches himself to the voters who search for an alternative to both Lula and Bolsonaro, visiting small towns run by organised crime and underserved by the public sector. He tries to show what the real Brazil looks like, bringing up solutions for problems that voters experience day to day, such as violence and lack of social mobility, beyond the spurious discussions of the great salons in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

This is a smarter strategy than Caiado’s. Santos’ strategy dates back to 2022, when MBL did not support either Lula nor Bolsonaro in the run-off. Whilst polling in Brazil is somewhat unreliable, Santos is hitting nearly 10% according to certain pollsters. By attracting voters who identify with neither of the two frontrunners as well as disillusioned Bolsonarists, MBL hopes to continue gathering steam and eventually defeat Flavio to enter the runoff against Lula. However, Santos is fighting an uphill battle. The election is in October, and his campaign is woefully under-resourced compared to his competitors, who have extensive public funding at their disposal. It may be that only another defeat and four more years of PT governance can disabuse the Brazilian right of its obsession with the Bolsonaros — but mounting a serious campaign this time round will place MBL back on the map, readying them to take up the mantle after Flavio’s failure is revealed.

Conclusion

The spirit of the 2013 protests was not right-wing, but modernising. Brazil had failed to realise its potential, and remained stuck at the same level of underdevelopment it had been at for decades. Anticipation of two major sporting events to which the country would play host (the World Cup and the Olympics) and the resulting comparisons to other countries at home and abroad brought home this reality all the more starkly.

The impeachment processes of 2016 revived the right for the first time in decades, and propelled it to the centre of Brazilian political discourse, culminating in Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018. Outside of the specific missteps of that administration, its movement was entirely reactive, dumbly reflecting the concerns of large parts of Brazil’s population without a clear agenda to resolve them. More than anything, it left behind the spirit of 2013. It had no interest in modernisation, political or economic, and fell therefore into the same traps that every previous administration had: corruption, welfarism, and incompetence.

MBL and Renan Santos, on the other hand, represent the real spirit of the 2013 journeys. Whilst clearly positioning themselves on the right, their enemy is not left-wing politicians or the decay of Christian morals, but the Regime of 1988 within which all politics has been conducted previously and which is the cause of the permanent pauperisation of the Brazilian people. In that way, they offer a far more radical critique than Bolso-Olavism.

All over the world, we have seen right-wing governments rise to power only to fail in delivering on their promises and cede control back to the left after their inevitable defeat. In none of those countries has the right subsequently conducted such a comprehensive review of its canon as it has in Brazil. The new right in Europe is, perhaps understandably, developing its agenda around identity and the preservation of native culture in opposition to migration. Yet the challenge in Brazil is very different, and the response must be too. MBL’s mission is to overcome its country’s political structure, the latest incarnation of a fundamental misconception which has delivered misery for 200 years.

Brazil has spent many decades trapped in the consequences of its chequered past. But among these sparks of possibility, still yet to burst fully into flame, one cannot help but hope that it may become the first country in which a reinvigorated right can accomplish a modernising revolution. Never truly the country of the future, perhaps Brazil can nonetheless become a country of the present.

This article was written by João Rafael Rodrigues Santillo, a Brazilian economist based in Copenhagen. He also writes an economics newsletter in Portuguese and English. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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There is, of course, some superficial validity to this interpretation. Yet it ignores the fact that the collapse of British international power was a process more traumatic than is commonly understood for the British ruling class of the time, and, more importantly, the motivations and ideas of the actors who shaped Britain’s responses throughout the period. The much loftier — and mostly unrealised — ambitions contained within British attempts to shape the international system that would ‘inevitably’ replace Pax Britannica are now mostly forgotten.

Indeed, there were many intellectuals and political actors who sincerely believed that the new world order would be a joint Anglo-American endeavour, at least in design and to a certain extent in operation. Most prominent among them was, of course, Winston Churchill, the statesman who presided over the irrecoverable expenditure of British power to wage a war he understood to be existential, and readily accepted the establishment of Britain’s dependency upon the United States in order to do so. That acceptance was based on a complicated and ultimately mistaken comfort which was taken by Churchill and others in fundamental commonalities between the two powers, often truncated in popular history to ‘shared values’ and ‘democratic government’, but in fact rooted in a more complex and deeper sense of supposed bonds including civilisational and, yes, racial kinship.

In particular, the way in which Churchill’s Americanism rhymes with his support for federalism in Britain (often treated as a footnote in his early political career) and his desire for political association between the British Isles and the White Dominions (with ultimate aspirations in the direction of Imperial Federation) is often overlooked as a result of this simplification. Churchill’s self-consciously Whiggish Anglo-Saxonism was central to all of these tendencies.

Since the decline of noughties ‘Churchillmania’, Britain’s wartime leader has retained salience in public debate only as a football in the woke / anti-woke debate, neither side of which succeeds in providing a convincing account of the man. Churchill revisionism, however, which once had a place exclusively in academic discourse, is now finding some political expression among parts of the right (as demonstrated by renewed interest in the work of historian John Charmley, who largely presents British reliance on America as the result of naïve expectations of the role that the we would play in the new world being built, and lays most of the blame for the collapse of British power on the decision to continue the Second World War instead of pursuing a negotiated peace in 1940).

British misconceptions of America and of the intentions of the Roosevelt Administration during the war were undoubtedly one cause of the decisions which ultimately led to that collapse, but if we are to critically assess a period of history or the actors within that period we must at least have a sense of the mentality and understandings which informed them. The reasons for those misconceptions are complex, arising from contemporary interpretations of Britain’s own imperial history and the ideological basis of Empire, yet on closer examination it becomes apparent that many of the dreams of a specifically Anglo-American world order held transatlantic appeal even outside of these mistaken guarantees.

This article also seeks to probe the continued salience of federalist proposals on the British right, as well as contemporary advocacy for political integration between ‘Anglosphere’ countries. These historical tendencies have relevance to many of the debates which have animated the right over the last 20 years.

The devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the asymmetric constitutional arrangement this has established, encapsulated in the ‘West Lothian question’, have prompted many right-wingers to advocate for latter-day variants of the ‘Home Rule for all’ proposal. Federalism has been seen by a variety of political actors on the right as a ‘patriotic’ solution which preserves the union whilst providing political expression to English identity. This has ranged from UKIP’s advocacy of an English parliament to the BNP’s proposal for an all-British-Isles federation, with its parliament on the Isle of Mann. Indeed, one could go as far as to say that federalism (and English political devolution in particular) was a predominant tendency within the populist right for the first two decades of this century. Though this has declined in recent years, there are still unanswered questions about the country’s constitutional arrangements, with anxieties — hardly alien to the early 20th century — about the possibility of a left-wing government being sustained by regional separatists.

Similarly, Britain’s exit from the EU was seen by many on the centre-right as an opportunity to pursue closer relations with other Crown Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada (CANZUK). Whilst the institutionalist and Atlanticist argument for this relationship has weakened over recent years, as our faith in the eternal infallibility of our shared institutions and traditions of government has rightly ebbed and our relations with the United States (the inescapable guarantor of such a geographically distributed and militarily weakened union) have become more strained, it remains a temptation that many still find themselves subject to.

Both of these debates touch on the relationship that the nations of the British Isles should seek with each other and with our cousins overseas, and both are equally informed by and exert influence over our perceptions of our own identity. Reflecting upon similar attempts to grapple with these questions in history may provide some clarity for the present.

The historical context of Anglo-Saxonism and Imperial Federation

Reading the extensive work of Duncan Bell on Anglo-Saxonist unionism, it is hard not to feel a deep sense of lost possibilities. The belief in the possibility of a transoceanic Anglo-Saxon state was borne of latent concerns surrounding Britain’s increasingly precarious position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and forged amongst the various racial anxieties of the time, but it was also motivated by a profound optimism that traditional territorial and geographic constraints could be superseded by the revolution in media of communication which was ongoing throughout the period. The hope that the material advancement of the British and their diaspora could provide the basis for a genuinely progressive (in the sense of human development) world order was commonplace within large parts of both the old British ruling class and newly rising parts of the social order.

Feared obstacles to this possibility, such as the diverging strategic interests of the constituent parts of the Empire and the continuing demographic transformation of Anglo-America by European immigration, did in fact materialise and ensured that no such outcome could be realised. Further worst-case scenarios — including the prospect that non-white immigration would imperil the homelands themselves (presciently anticipated by New World writers) — are in many cases being contested within our politics now, if they have not already come to pass.

The relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and Imperial Federalism is complicated; though there was a significant degree of overlap, they cannot be treated as ideologically interchangeable. At core, Anglo-Saxonism represented the increased emphasis on race as an explanation of geopolitical and developmental dynamics between civilisations. Specifically, Anglo-Saxonists claimed that the unique virtues of the English-speaking people writ large were a consequence of their distinctive racial characteristics, rooted either in their descent from the particular group of tribes which settled Romano-Britain, more broadly in Scandinavian influence, or wider still in their membership of the greater Germanic family.

Their emphasis on British ethnogenesis was varied. Some argued that the experience of island settlement bequeathed the Germanic inhabitants of Britain a unique, thassalocratically oriented polity which predisposed the people and their constitutional preferences towards liberty- in contrast to their more authoritarian continental cousins. Others maintained a belief in a type of ethnically and regionally particular variant of ‘hybrid vigour’, in which the British had strained from a mix of varying northern peoples an independent and territorially acquisitive nature.

Neither are the origins of this ‘racial’ thinking exclusively modern, emerging solely out of enlightenment scientism and the discoveries in biology which preceded the period in question, as is often insisted by historians. Rather, race or heritage was largely understood synonymously with norms, culture and even political institutions over a long period dating far before Churchill’s time. It would therefore be wrong to understand this historic ‘racialism’ as coterminous with 21st-century ‘ethnonationalism’, which — operating under very different conditions in which the boundaries between ethnic origin and acculturation are far more blurred — seeks to draw far more solid lines between and within these phenomena.

As early as the fifteenth century, authors William Lambarde and William Camden shifted narratives of identity away from mythological and Roman accounts to ones which stressed a specifically Teutonic heritage. While we traditionally associate racialised defences of Anglo(-American) constitutionalism with the era of Imperialism, the idea that the English, and perhaps the British more generally, had been endowed with a love of liberty can be found as early as the seventeenth century, when parliamentarian John Hare declared England as a ‘member of the Teutonik nation, and descended out of Germany’ in opposition to the purportedly Norman-derived absolutism of the Stuarts. The 18th century would see further iterations of proto-Nordicism in the obsession of Whiggish England with the ‘Gothic’ origins of the nation, and the increased romanticisation of a primordial and Boreally oriented Germanic tribal past. The concept of the ‘Norman yoke’ was a useful rhetorical tool to depict disliked domestic institutions as derived from an alleged origin in a traumatic past, but it did reflect a genuine belief amongst such historically varied figures as the Diggers, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine that a freer form of political association had been destroyed by Gallic feudalism.

Obviously, identification with Germanic heritage should not be viewed as synonymous with support for liberal, democratic or federal political arrangements. There were Germanists, such as Thomas Carlyle, who were happy to credit the Norman contribution to England’s political order, naturally reflecting his own sympathies for absolutism.

This intellectual tendency came to a crescendo during the 1880-1914 period. A generation of historians began to explain the spread of both British racial stock and political institutions around the world as a natural outgrowth of liberty-loving, expansive energies. Britain had, in essence, found herself with a global empire as a kind of lucky accident. Its composite parts were poorly integrated, and it fell on London to work out what to do with them as old and new rivals abroad were rapidly catching up and closing new colonial markets, corresponding to the ‘New Imperialism’. This thinking shaped an entire generation of leadership in Rhodes, the Earl of Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill himself in his formative years.

John Robert Seeley’s The Expansion of England posited that a ‘Greater Britain’ already existed despite the British state’s failure to see it. Seeley brought the idea of imperial federation into political conversation, and presented the United States as a model for emulation. Charles Dilke, the Liberal Radical politician, extended these ideas towards a vision in which America provided a model of governance through which not only ‘Greater Britain’, but ultimately the wider world, might be integrated. John Fiske, an American historian, similarly saw Anglo-Saxon racial expansion as a world-historical evolution, within which America was one branch of a larger tree. The natural outcome of this evolution, so it seemed to those at the time, would be the eventual world leadership of Anglo-American civilisation, however the particulars might work themselves out.

J.A. Froude was more pessimistic about the fate of Greater Britain and America but saw the preservation of Empire — and more abstractly of a position of dominant influence within the world — as a necessary precondition for the continued vitality of the English as a people. Indeed, Froude would have conceded that any people would require such a canvas on which to express themselves in order to cultivate commercial and martial vigour, but he also suggested a particular need of the English for global scope of freedom to maintain their special expression of Anglo-Saxon virtues of freedom and adventure. The way in which colonial lives were lived and then valorised during this period and later paints this sentiment quite clearly: the unusual understanding of the good life consisting in travels to far-flung places seeking glory and opportunity — a life which could only be lived in the context of Empire.

Quasi-vitalist ideas such as Froude’s were especially influential on a young Churchill and on his understanding of the purpose of Empire, although — given that he was a man never particularly interested in detail — his reception of these ideas was always superficial at best. Nonetheless, a distillation of the vague sentiments underlying the ideas floating around in fin-de-siecle historiography and subsequent political thought underwrote much of his orientation towards the question of Empire and of Britain’s place in the world.

On a more mundane level, the question of ‘what to do’ with the Empire in the face of new, mostly illiberal, continental rivals, the steady closure of markets to British trade, and the exhaustion of virgin colonial territory around the world impertinently presented itself as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. An equally important question in these conversations was the recognition, to varying extents, of the rising economic, military, political and demographic weight of the self-governing Dominions, and how these newfound stakeholders would be accommodated within any future structure of political organisation. Grappling with these questions required an understanding of the nature and telos of Empire (and the English by extension), and drove an impulse in the fin-de-siècle generation towards politically liberal and racially Nordicist beliefs which went on to fuel numerous attempts to achieve the political union of English-speaking peoples.

Some, like Joseph Chamberlain, limited their ambitions to the unification of Britain and the White Dominions. Yet Imperial Federation was a nebulous concept which sometimes included the Empire’s other possessions and often overlapped with transatlantic unionism. Some Anglophilic American elites, such as Andrew Carnegie — a philanthropist, steel magnate, and one of the richest men in the world — believed that full reunification with the motherland would guarantee a pacifistic, progressive world order led by Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and dedicated much of his energies towards advocating the idea. His view was that ‘Reunion’ would have to take place in tandem with the dismantlement of the Empire, leaving only America, Britain, and the White Dominions within the official borders of the united state — yet the ‘dismantlement’ of empire in this context should be understood not as the sacrifice of Anglo-Saxon influence over those territories, but as the regularisation of their status as countries subordinate to the influence of this new hegemon.

In sum, Anglo-Saxonism manifested in competing accounts of the role that Empire would play in shaping the institutional forms through which ‘Greater Britain’ (and subsequently the rest of the world) would be governed in the next stage of its world historic evolution. Throughout all of these differing suggestions, the implicit linking thread was the notion of a particular destiny for the Anglo-Saxons; the management of the world in service of advancing the historical process which bends towards civilisation and progress.

It is in this context that men of Churchill’s generation came to consider the historical moment of 1945, and within which they would later imagine the terms of a ‘peaceful transfer’ of the reins of the global order from London to Washington.

Federalism and Empire

The emergence of ideologically systematic accounts of the British constitutional order and its relationship to the nation’s racial origins coincided with the growth of politically mature settler colonies in Oceania, Canada and (more ambiguously) Southern Africa. The question of how these new settler colonies would relate to the homeland was an open one in imperialist discourse. From the 1850s (starting with Nova Scotia) to the 1890s (concluding with Natal and the Cape Colony), colonies with significant white populations were granted ‘responsible government’, with each territory establishing a legislature to which governors-general were answerable. The readiness with which the Colonial Office acceded to (or indeed, actively prepared colonies for) self-government was influenced by a variety of factors. The last major set of white and politically self-conscious possessions to aspire to self-government had traumatically broken off from the British Empire in the American War of Independence. The Canadian revolts of 1837-40 and the resultant Durham Report also engendered a shift towards viewing self-government as a ‘safety-valve’ for settler discontent.

The prevalent liberal political tendencies of the 19th century and their intersection with racial ideology made the imperial centre more willing to grant self-government. It was felt that it was both perverse and unjust to directly administer predominantly white colonies populated by recent British immigrants and govern them in the manner in which coloured possessions would have been. The speed with which self-government could be extended was hampered in those ambiguous cases of colonies which possessed a large population of British settlers but which had non-white majorities (or significant non-white minorities) or indeed substantial non-British white populations whose loyalty was uncertain. This complicated the process in both New Zealand and Canada (where conscious efforts were made to dilute Francophone demographic influence), and most clearly in South Africa — where a demographic ‘settlement’ could only be partially reached even following the conclusion of the Boer War.

Though the journey towards colonial self-governance contained longer-term uncertainties, it was largely unimpeded by settler violence and imbued by a spirit of racial fraternalism and imperial loyalism. The logical next step for both peripheral and London-based actors was to strive for the consolidation of territorially contiguous and self-governing territories into sovereign Dominions within the framework of Empire. As John Darwin clearly documented in The Empire Project, the historiographical tendency to view the assumed course to dominionhood as a refutation of British identity is erroneous; Australian, New Zealander and Canadian nationalism were by and large new but rejuvenated affirmations of shared identity with the homeland. The architects of New World statehood saw their prospective countries as new expressions of a deterritorialised British racial identity. The understanding, therefore, that dominionhood and Imperial Federation were parallel, alternative solutions to how white settler colonies could be accommodated within the Empire is limited. Instead, they should be seen to have existed on an overlapping spectrum, with intra-continental integration of crown colonies often understood to prefigure some form of transoceanic federation. Figures such as John Buchan (himself heavily involved with the Round Table Movement) and Alfred Deakin saw Canadian and Australian federation respectively as naturally leading to the substantive political integration of these nations and Great Britain.

There were further complications in that some crown colonies, reflective of their own anxieties around the prospect of subordination to regional centres of power, sought to maintain direct relations with the crown in lieu of domestic federation. Queensland’s infamous stand off with the Australian Commonwealth over its enforcement of the White Australia policy, which mandated the end of the former’s planation culture (reliant as it was on indentured Polynesian workers, aka ‘kanackas’), the growth of the ‘Westralia’ movement, Nova Scotia’s resistance to rule from Ottawa and Newfoundland’s surrender of self-governance to a London appointed governor: all reflect intercolonial tensions which belie simplistic narratives of post-colonial nationalism.

The framework within which the British proper thought of their role within Empire thus developed: London as the manager of a world-system, with the boring administrative work of government left to the British majority Dominions, which (ostensibly) would be prone to develop a political will identical to the mother country anyway. By surrendering direct control where possible, London would therefore be freed to focus on broader external concerns, as well as the management and development of the coloured colonies. The fact that these domestically self-governing but imperially subordinate Dominions would inevitably demand full participation in imperial governance — perhaps through the establishment of an imperial parliament — was, at least in certain quarters, understood and readily accepted.

Failed attempts at unification

The practical and institutional push towards unification was, at least during its most energetic phase, driven by the exigencies of global conflict. The Boer War gave birth to the first circle of dedicated Imperialists, Milner’s Kindergarten, which was brought together under the influence of colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner. Together, they sought to solve the tricky colonial case of South Africa. With its divided populations of Anglo-South-Africans, Afrikaners, and various black tribes, the territory came with deep governance challenges, but also provided an opportunity of wider significance for the Empire in establishing unification, initially on a smaller scale, as a blueprint for resolving tensions, integrating the British Anglophone world, and handling heterogeneous populations within it. Milner’s groups would mature into the Round Table organisation, which would keep alive the idea of Imperial association, albeit on a more multilateral basis throughout the 1930s and 40s.

The Boer War also gave rise to the first serious military coordination between Britain and her fledgling diaspora states, with units from all parts of the white British world assembling under joint military command in South Africa. This pan-imperial upsurge in British racial patriotism was accompanied by real intergovernmental cooperation, which provided hope for federalists like Joseph Chamberlain that the beginnings of closer integration (namely a joint defence union and imperial free trade, effectively an imperial common market) could be established. However, whilst there was some sympathy for closer defence alignment, imperial free trade was ultimately rejected in favour of the watered-down concept of imperial preference. Similarly, the idea of a Pan-Imperial navy also fell through, as Dominions strove towards greater defence independence to address their particular security anxieties, whilst simultaneously displaying reluctance to bear the brunt of increased spending.

The narrative of a linear trajectory towards alienation from the British imperial centre is a simplistic one. WW1 would see a return, on an even greater scale, of intensified military cooperation and pan-imperial fervour, only to conclude in the unsatisfactory dénouement of the 1921 Imperial Conference (which was riven by differences over diplomatic posture towards the United States and Japan). However, the war itself revealed the Britishness of the fledgling nation-bearing states, which fielded disproportionately large volunteer forces on the Western Front whilst often fighting regional campaigns as well. Canada, it should be noted, opted to fly the Union Flag as opposed to the red ensign over Parliament Hill, and Commonwealth soldiers happily served under British coordinating command for the duration of the conflict.

Ultimately, the Dominions elected to become formally independent national states, a desire which was recognised in the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931. While these states would remain part of the ‘Empire’ and maintained close economic and military ties with Britain into and after WW2, they would do so as a set of associated states, which, as we have seen, would be forcibly divorced from each other by the actions of hostile domestic actors in all ‘Crowned’ members of the Commonwealth.

The significance of Churchill’s Atlanticism and federalism

Winston Churchill, close in his time to politicians like Joseph Chamberlain — but also to intellectuals proposing more radical re-imaginings of the Anglo-Saxon world such as H.G. Wells — provides an insight into the federalist milieus of his time. In particular, as an Anglo-American who supported both federalism within Britain as a solution to the Home Rule crisis and the close political association of Britain, her Dominions, and the United States, he embodied the elision of domestic and external politics inherent to liberal imperialism, and the influence of America’s constitutional order as a model for the broader Anglo-Saxon world.

During the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, Churchill advocated for the establishment of regional assemblies which would have extensive devolved powers. Seen as a means of accommodating Irish separatism within the framework of British unionism, Churchill envisioned a project which will be familiar to 21^st Century contemporaries, in which Ireland, Wales and Scotland would receive unitary ‘national’ legislatures, whilst England would be divided into regions such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and so on (Churchill’s proposals were never systematically outlined, but he gave greatest detail in his speech to the Liberal Women’s Federation in Dundee in the same year). An ‘imperial’ parliament would retain power over all other major external and defence-related affairs. Churchill linked this explicitly to discourses surrounding ‘national efficiency’, which were closely intertwined with debates on the future of the empire, arguing that such legislatures would be more sympathetic to local needs. But even more saliently, he explicitly referenced the success of federation in both the Dominions and the United States as a model for Britain’s internal reordering, stating that:

‘We are not venturing into unknown territory. The United States possesses many legislatures united under a federal authority. Germany has combined kingdoms and principalities into a strong federation. Canada, Australia and South Africa have all found federal institutions the means by which local development can be reconciled with national unity.’

And also that:

‘It was only another bold step onward to that of closer union with the overseas Dominions which must be achieved if Britain’s greatness is to endure’

Churchill’s advocacy of federalisation not only envisioned the constitutional reordering of the British Isles to address political exigencies. It also, in a type of ideological ‘boomerang effect’, presented the political order of settler possessions, past and present, as the normative model of Anglo-Saxon governance, one which if adopted, would facilitate closer union within the majority white parts of the Empire. It should be noted that Churchill did not explicitly advocate for the Dominions to send representatives to the envisioned imperial parliament, and that this stands at odds with his later advocacy of his tri-spheric model of Britain’s geopolitical future.

Churchill’s explicit references to the United States should be seen within the wider context of his pro-American sentiments and his envisioned closer relationship between the two Anglophone superpowers. Winston Churchill corresponded extensively with H.G. Wells, reading and commenting upon both ‘Anticipations’ and his subsequent (and slightly moderated) work, ‘A Modern Utopia’. Wells, whilst known primarily for his science fiction writing, was an extensive political commentator, who was primarily interested in the latent power of technological developments, and their intersection with the economic and political predominance of Anglophone peoples.

His preoccupation with political and industrial modernity, efficiency, and his ambiguous ontology of race make him a figure aligned with Churchill. Whilst chastising ‘race chauvinism’, Wells envisioned the unification of English-speaking people as presaging ultimate global unification, under a meritocratic world order which would dispense with less adaptive individuals through tumultuous processes of material change. Whilst it’s easy to see Wells’ ‘racially millenarian’ vision of a eugenically oriented and Fabian political order as a unique political program, its cultural meliorism (Wells’ recognition that coloured individuals could be absorbed into the future global Anglophone body politic) aligned with Churchill’s own attitudes towards race. The English-Speaking Peoples for Churchill were not an ethnographic unit exclusively defined by an essential biological unity, but also by their shared institutional and cultural norms, and Churchill hoped that those post-colonial states influenced by parliamentary governance could maintain a future relationship with Britain within the framework of the Commonwealth.

In a view he would expound to the ‘Co-Efficients’ dining club, Wells also saw the natural focal point of the English-speaking peoples in the nexus of Anglo-America, and saw the unification of the two sides of the Atlantic as a highly probably eventuality. Wells believed that the historically accidental formation of the Empire would eventually disintegrate in favour of rationalised and technocratic structures which were present (albeit haphazardly) in the industrial organisation of the United States already and would eventually proliferate throughout the English-speaking world. Wells’ ‘New Republic’ (much like his would-be patron Andrew Carnegie’s ‘United States of the English-Speaking World’) would be one whose political reorganisation would take its cues from the development of the New World.

Churchill was similarly enamoured with the United States and, like Wells, recognised that its political arrangements had an immensely compelling character at the time. He was in fact less equivocal in his recognition of the country’s emergent potential at the turn of the century and saw its democratic institutions (perhaps idealistically) as successfully navigating continental-scale union. Wells, conversely, saw America’s political optimism as unjustified in the face of the reality of demographic change and ethno-political corruption, which cast doubts on its future potential.

Churchill was not an imperial federalist in the mould of Cecil Rhodes or Joseph Chamberlain. However, particularly in his post-war writings, he gave more concrete political form to the romantic visions of Anglo-American unity expounded in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. His vision of ‘majestic three circles’ described a world in which Britain would function as liaison point between the Commonwealth, the United States and a united (Western) Europe. Like the more associative visions of imperial unity which prevailed within the Round Table circles, Churchill saw shared liberal democratic norms, as well as racial and linguistic kinship, organically directing the Anglophone and more broadly the Western world towards unity within a fraternal concert of nations. In this sense, there is continuity in Churchill’s political thought, in that he was consistently willing to think and advocate beyond the paradigms of unitary nation-states and believed in a proto-globalist vision of world unity guided by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.

Churchill’s relevance today

Churchill’s federalism, his Atlanticism and Anglo-Saxonism were mutually reinforcing belief systems, which influenced his domestic and international prescriptions throughout the first half of the 20^th Century. They existed within a wider context in which advocates of a semi-racialised liberalism sought to use political reform to strengthen imperial bonds, address domestic divisions and accommodate the emergent cousinly power of the United States.

Dreams of imperial federation had dissipated by the late 1940s. The former Dominions in subsequent decades drifted from the British orbit into closer association with an increasingly ethnically and (eventually) racially diverse America. Churchill, unlike Wells, did not anticipate this, and was blind to the changes that the United States was undergoing even as the very administration he dealt with throughout the war exemplified those same changes in its personnel.

Today, the beliefs of Anglo-Saxonism have a renewed salience amidst the demographic onslaught against white, English-speaking nations. The emergence of an international Western right-wing populism has pointed not only to the tentative possibility of European nativist unity, but also the reunification of the Anglophone populist right. The shared racial anxieties of white voters from Canberra to Calgary have lent some credence to the possibility of a transoceanic populism, uniting principally British and American, but also to an extent Australian immigration restrictionists. However, this tendency has hazily intersected with the more ‘liberal’ concerns of previous ‘Anglosphere’ advocates (Daniel Hannan, Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson) who have interpreted it through an institutionalist paradigm, in which a strategic Anglophone alliance would be a complimentary ‘circle’ alongside NATO, perhaps a reformed EU and (although less so now) a strategic alliance with the ‘parliamentary democracy’ of India.

The tensions between a latter-day, implicitly racial and populist vision of Anglospherism and a neoconservative one, focused on buttressing the post-war order, are not necessarily evident from episodes such as Brexit (which functioned as something of a floating signifier, feeding into both visions). We also see these ambiguities in Trump’s own referencing of the special relationship during the celebrations of the 250^th anniversary of America’s independence, in which he spoke of American revolutionaries’ veins running with ‘Anglo-Saxon courage’. Trump’s unique capacity to contain all the contradictions of his time within himself is at work here as elsewhere.

A sceptic might note that, despite the increasing prevalence of biological allusions within the utterances of various political and media figures, the ultimate commitment to a dogmatically culturalist understanding of their respective nations’ identities (and ultimately of Anglo-Saxonism itself) remains. Like Thomas Carlyle, we should note that the ‘neo’-Anglo-Saxonists tend to ascribe the success of their national character to their institutions, rather than the success of their institutions to their national character.

Yet despite this, the reality of demographic change forces reflection upon the basis of identity in much the same way as questions around the future of empire once did. In order to decide what we must do, we must first understand who we are. Whilst much of the youth wing of the GOP is dominated by the lowest common denominator populism of Andrew Tate and Sneako, unifying a multiracial coalition around misogyny, antisemitism, and occasional jabs at Indians, there remains a large faction outside of this which continues to view demographic questions as centrally important. A New York Young Republican delegation visited Orania in March of this year, and the Trump administration is the first Western government to be sympathetic to the plight of white South Africans since the end of Apartheid. At the same time, many of the newly emergent ‘nationalist’ tendencies in Canada and Australia have begun to lean away from particularism and towards a common British (or Anglo-Saxon) identity. It is not uncommon to see the Union Flag waved at their demonstrations — a marked shift from the 2000s and even the 2010s. As the former colonies transition towards majority-minority status and their historic majority populations lose their grip on a particular claim to nationhood within them, we can expect to see these trends continue as they seek an external anchor of identity.

There is a happy coincidence in which Britain, Australia and America all have institutionalised and relatively successful right-wing populist movements. No doubt all of these, particularly the chronically boomer-oriented One Nation party, have significant flaws. But it is up to younger generations to find the path along which these movements can align towards the preservation of a transoceanic Anglo-Saxon majority. To that end, further unification of the Anglo-Saxon right is desirable. It is hard to imagine a world in which one European or Anglosphere country alone tackles the problem of demographic change whilst all others fail. Even were that to be possible, that lone country would be left without kin in a world full of rising, alien powers.

This problem we face together, and in all likelihood, if it is to be overcome, it will be overcome together — first as the Anglo-Saxon right, with its shared political culture and heritage, develops a common path, and then as it leads its European allies along it. The future of the Anglo-Saxon might be once again, as Wells envisioned, to lead a broader unification of the world. An association, and eventual union of, free, sovereign and demographically secure British nations will lay the grounds for the unity of all European peoples, necessary to assert our sovereignty within the world. It is this force we must actualise, because without it, not only will we lose a bond essential to ourselves, but we also risk imperilling the future of our civilisation.

This article was written by George Ruska, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Last week, the Clacton by-election campaign finished with a bang as Reform hosted the first annual ‘Faragefest’ in celebration of their victory. But what does the Clacton result mean for the party’s future? Did Farage’s by-election gamble pay off? What comes next as we head towards conference season?

Read more

Spanish security forces are now on alert for a rumoured second attempt on Ceuta tomorrow. Though the authorities play down these reports as misinformation and most likely a hoax, accounts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have gained huge traction with the slogans ‘al-hajma’ (meaning ‘the offensive’ or ‘the onslaught’) and ‘15/08’ on videos of migrants entering through border checkpoints, and replies such as ‘see you all there’. Clickbait (or possibly a Moroccan government smokescreen) may be the most likely explanation, but it is hardly surprising if another violation of Spanish territorial integrity is on the table given the haphazard positioning of the government.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez responded to the Ceuta migration crisis with the utmost frivolity: a cocktail of lukewarm measures, half-truths, and, amidst all of the chaos, he thought it an opportune moment to share his Spotify summer playlist on social media. Featuring on the playlist were ‘SS26’ by Charli XCX, ‘Tantas Cosas’ by Melani, smatterings of Madonna, Gorillaz, Stereolab, and his stated ‘No. 1’ — ‘EL BAIFO’ by Quevedo.

While tens of thousands of people continued to overwhelm the autonomous city and dozens of deaths were recorded, Sánchez ensconced himself in a holiday in Lanzarote. He will stay there until 25th August, pas mal. His supporters argue that everyone has a right to rest. To quell the backlash, a panicking Moncloa hurriedly posted a photograph of Sánchez apparently working at his desk — though with such misfortune that the Spanish Prime Minister appeared legless in the frame. Commenters also point out the absence of cables into the free-standing monitor. The video of that moment is arguably worse: Sánchez is seen moving an optical mouse across a glass table without a mat. For those unaware, optical mice do not work on a glass surface. Triviality makes a poor match for a crisis of this magnitude — a lesson, I suspect, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is also yet to learn.

The Ceuta crisis — roughly 70,000 irregular entries in just a few hours —exposed the harrowing fragility of Europe’s southern border. Documents indicate that the 2026 migrant surge was seven times greater than that of 2021 (70,000 entries compared to 10,000). Sánchez is not the only one who must offer a mea culpa; the Spanish Supreme Court also bears responsibility, having ruled last June that pushbacks at the border could not be carried out if the crossing occurred by water.

One can reasonably say that Giorgia Meloni’s Italian government reacted quite diligently to the chaos by suspending Schengen free movement for third-country nationals arriving from Spain. The measure caught thousands of Spanish tourists off guard, forcing them into humiliating queues at various Italian airports. Sánchez responded with a measure bordering on the comical: random checks at maritime and air borders specifically targeting Italians.

The resolve that any serious nation would have directed toward Rabat, the Spanish PM instead directed theatrically toward Rome. Valle-Inclán, the writer belonging to the generation that lost the colonies, would surely repeat his famous barb with malice: ‘Spain is a grotesque deformation of European civilisation.’ The phrase, perhaps once excessive, now resonates with renewed force.

The New Role of Morocco

Some media outlets and numerous open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts point out that the Moroccan satellites Mohammed VI-A and Mohammed VI-B made frequent passes over the area in the days leading up to and following the human avalanche. Regardless of the veracity of these reports, the reality remains that Morocco has demonstrated that the borders of the Spanish enclaves in Africa are tissue-thin.

The crisis is not merely a Hispano-Moroccan affair. In a context of sudden geopolitical realignment, the United States is seeking reliable partners on the western flank of the Mediterranean. Morocco has proved adept at capitalising on this need. Spanish weakness is perceived with clarity, compounded by the fact that data from Sánchez’s own mobile phone is in Rabat’s possession. The Spanish piel de toro (‘bull’s hide’) is suffering, and the Moroccans know very well how to work the leather. Dreams of a ‘Greater Morocco’ no longer appear to be a hashish-induced utopia.

Foreign contributors to Pimlico Journal may be more bellicose than the state itself. Spain possesses very limited military and, most importantly of all, political capacity to convincingly defend Ceuta and Melilla. The formal sovereignty of these enclaves exists only on the pages of the Spanish Constitution; their effective defence, however, depends largely on their neighbour’s goodwill and the meagre support of allies like the United States, which tirelessly weaves the political twilight of the Spanish Prime Minister.

The siege against Sánchez is such that even Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, hinted at hosting the 2030 World Cup — currently expected to be jointly hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco — entirely in Morocco. ‘The 2030 World Cup will be the best in history because it will be held in the most beautiful country of all: Morocco’, Infantino remarked, oblivious to the fact that 70,000 people sought to flee that ‘beautiful’ country in a single day.

Spanish Ataraxia

Although Ceuta and Melilla may be described geographically as enclaves, and although Morocco presents them as colonial vestiges, they do not legally hold that status. In 1975, Rabat attempted to have them included on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories pending decolonisation, but the Special Committee de facto rejected the request and never incorporated them. Their decision was grounded in the Latin aphorism prior tempore, potior iure [‘he who is first in time is stronger in right’]: Spain’s rights over these two autonomous cities predate the creation of the Kingdom of Morocco and prevail over any subsequent claim. Unlike Ceuta and Melilla, the Falkland Islands have been on that list since 1946, as has Gibraltar. Following the events in Ceuta, it will be difficult for Spanish demands for the decolonisation of Gibraltar to be seen as anything more than tissue-thin rhetoric. Furthermore, two official referendums have been held in Gibraltar regarding its sovereignty and its relationship with Spain and the United Kingdom (in 1967 and 2002). In both instances, the population overwhelmingly rejected any move towards Spain or the ceding of sovereignty to it.

However, legality is one thing; reality is another. Even if Ceuta and Melilla are structurally incorporated parts of the nation according to the Spanish Constitution, there is a very real perception of vulnerability. Morocco operates in a ‘grey zone’ where migration is successfully utilised as a tool of diplomatic pressure. This is not a new tactic; Turkey has used similar pressure against Germany for half a century.

Pedro Sánchez’s response — sharing his ‘Summer 2026’ playlist while the city was being overrun — is a mark of a superficiality that Spanish writers and commentators have not overlooked, even if it was in the Anglophone world. Figures such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Fernando Savater have publicly expressed their unease at what they consider a loss of sovereignty and international prestige. For these perennially vehement authors, Sánchez’s pivot regarding Western Sahara is not diplomacy but a capitulation to Rabat’s blackmail; a surrender reminiscent of the ceding of the last colonies to the pressure of superior powers a century ago.

The long and storied pain of literary Spanishness has a root cause. It grew alongside the mirage that Spain, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and especially during the Aznar era (1996-2004), could ‘put itself back on the map’ under the American umbrella. Today, with the world’s axis shifting toward the Pacific, that pseudo-imperial vision of Spain has been sidelined. The giant Spanish flag in Madrid is merely the phallic sublimation of impotence.

Such is the shift in the political subsoil — and current Sánchez’s political orphancy — that the United States is considering moving its Spanish bases at Morón and Rota to the Ksar Sghir base in Tangier. Madrid’s refusal to support American operations against Iran served as the catalyst for this punishment.

The End of a Cycle

The Ceuta crisis is not the end, but likely the beginning of a deeper transition. If Trump consolidates Morocco as a preferred partner, he will accelerate the reconfiguration of the Western Mediterranean. The European Union, far from sanctioning Rabat, now fears losing a useful collaborator in the outsourced control of borders. This explains why the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, congratulated both Rabat and Madrid on their management of the crisis — a truly surreal gesture given that this ‘management’ resulted in a minimum of 88 deaths.

Sánchez acts today as a katechon who, with great difficulty, restrains entropic forces far greater than the chaos upon which he feeds. When the current Spanish Prime Minister exits the stage, it will not merely be a change of government; it will unleash impulses that Spanish democracy has contained — sometimes with violence — for nearly five decades. Waiting in the wings is a Cainite, vain, and revanchist Spanish right wing that could lead to a presidential republic. If that occurs, such a republic will be scarcely fit to contain the centrifugal impulses of the entire peninsula. Perhaps, in the end — as President Cánovas del Castillo warned in 1876 — the Spanish will indeed be those ‘who cannot be anything else’.

For the moment, this is all speculation. Let us enjoy Pedro Sánchez’s summer playlist on Spotify, the modern equivalent to listening to the violins of the Titanic as it sinks. Pío Baroja summarised this with cruel precision over a century ago: ‘In Spain, everything that is official is absurd, it is grotesque.’ Sánchez’s soundtrack is part of that most absurd continuity.

This article was written by Francesc-Xavier Soria Jofra, a historian and educator in Córdoba, Argentina. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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‘God save the Queen

She ain’t no human being

There is no future

in England’s dreaming’

Johnny Rotten sang these lyrics in the Sex Pistols’ 1977 single ‘God Save the Queen’. Released, in a gesture of extreme provocation, on 27th May, in anticipation of the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee — the song was banned from the BBC and independent radio stations, despite reaching number two on the official UK Singles Chart.

Today, of course, it is a thoroughly assimilated part of British cultural history, its excoriation of British patriotic complacency explicated in a hundred different books on the history of British music, punk rock, and so on, to the point it scarcely needs explaining. Indeed, its anti-establishment sensibilities have been so thoroughly integrated that its lyrics seem quaint. But there’s a line in the song that retains a certain potency, albeit in an entirely different, though still ‘British’ context (at least in aspiration). It’s that last line: ‘There is no future in England’s dreaming.’

I raise that line in the context of this essay on the pseudo-political entity known as Count Binface because it strikes me as highly relevant to the impulse of those still impressed by him. In ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘England’s dreaming’ was of an imaginary Britain, a nostalgic imperial fantasy that was, so the Sex Pistols felt at least, imposed upon a nation in a condition of severe decline by an establishment who were themselves largely insulated from its consequences in a futile effort to stave off the realisation of reality. Today, England’s dreaming can refer to Binface for much of the same reason, although the specific character of the nostalgia and the fantasy is very different.

I write this less than a full month since the shocking murder of ex-Tory MP and Reform immigration spokesperson Ann Widdecombe. It’s been two months since the release of the police bodycam footage showing Henry Nowak being bound in handcuffs by British police whilst vainly trying to alert them to the fact that he’d been stabbed and was actually in the process of dying. He was being cuffed because the police were arresting him for an imaginary incident of racist abuse, an accusation made by his murderer Vickram Singh Digwa. Nowak told the police ‘I’ve been stabbed’, and the police responded, ‘I don’t think you have, mate.’ Then he died. Meanwhile, the country is still in denial about the scale and the extent of the grooming gangs, a phenomenon which exists within the national consciousness in a curious sort of half-digested condition, as something ‘officially’ but not acceptably acknowledged. It is in this rot that ‘England dreams’ today, watching voters in Clacton who have a choice between Nigel Farage and ‘Count Binface’, a ‘joke’ candidate who wears a cape and a bin-shaped helmet.

The Binface character exists in an older British tradition of running joke candidates in important seats during general and by-elections. Its current form dates back over 40 years, with the Monster Raving Loony Party first officially standing against Peter Tatchell in what became his infamous loss of the 1983 Bermondsey by-election. Binface himself is the leader of the imaginatively titled ‘Count Binface Party’. His manifesto pledges include ‘nationalising Adele’ and ‘making 99 flakes cost 99p’. Previous policies include ‘rename London Bridge “Phoebe-Waller Bridge”’ and ‘banish Katie Hopkins to the Phantom Zone’. He is often photographed, in his bin, with his arms raised in the air like a sci-fi fantasy villain. His mission, as he somewhat awkwardly puts it, is to ‘demonstrate that British democracy is wonderful and unique in the entire cosmos.’

After Nigel Farage resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election, and Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Restore all refused to contest, Binface emerged as Farage’s most notable opposition. Everyone in Britain is absolutely thrilled by this. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham was photographed shaking hands with Binface two weeks before his coronation. Old Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested that voters ‘put their vote in the Bin.’

The presenter and commentator (and all-around establishment lackey) Matthew Stadlen tweeted on July 9th: ‘The attempt to portray a man with a bin on his head as the establishment is almost as hilarious as the claim that Nigel Farage is not the establishment.’ Alastair Campbell echoed this when introducing Binface in his recent appearance on The Rest is Politics: ‘When Nigel Farage resigned as member of parliament for Clacton, he grandly announced: “It would be a battle between me and the establishment.” Instead, it’s become him against a bin.’

Campbell and Stewart proceed to ask Binface if he’s seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, giving him the opportunity to demonstrate that ‘inside that bin’ is a smart guy (as they will later observe post-interview) with an impromptu recitation of Homeric Greek. They then subject him to a winking, faux-serious “critique” of his joke policies, as if they’re playing themselves on a parody TV show. And they take care, via the staging of a ‘serious interview’, to spell out the implicit joke, which is that just as Binface is ‘playing a character’, so is Nigel Farage, because Nigel Farage likes to drink beer, or appears to. In other words, whilst Farage may present himself as a populist candidate, Binface is the ‘real’ populist candidate, because he is ‘honestly’ playing a character.

Thus, we have two competing visions of populism, battling for supremacy over the cosmos, or at least Clacton. For the supporters of Binface, Farage represents ‘the establishment’ in an intuitive sense: he’s wealthy, privately educated, worked in the City, is a politician, all of which combine into a sort of vague archetype of someone that ordinary people ‘ought to be against’ for reasons that are social, aesthetic and moral more than political. They believe he is a bad person. Farage’s supporters, on the other hand, believe that he represents their political interests and don’t particularly care about his wealth or background or the supposed irony that he ‘is a politician’, which is clearly not an irony at all. Whether or not he is a bad person is irrelevant.

The type of populism represented by Binface was laid out in manifesto-like form by Sofie Jenkinson in an essay published in Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy in October of last year, titled ‘Mr. Blobby Patriotism’. In it, she attempts to describe a vision of British culture that will unify us in our times of trouble, alternately referred to by the title of the piece and by the term ‘Silly Sausage Britain.’

Pitched in opposition to various troubling signs and portents, riots outside asylum hotels, the Tommy Robinson march, a ‘rising political temperature’ and ‘then last week the awful attack on a synagogue in Manchester’ (this latter event now universally forgotten by everyone), that have simply appeared out of nowhere for reasons no reasonable person could understand, Jenkinson sits down to write a list of all the things she ‘loves’ about Britain.

What she loves about Britain, it turns out, is not anything substantive, like a tradition of liberal democracy or a functioning police force that protects children and doesn’t arrest murder victims. What she loves is an interminable list of crass psychic totems that, for her, conduct and transmit a non-threatening vision of British culture:

’Yorkshire Tea adverts with Sarah Lancashire and Sean Bean, Greggs, Pete Postlethwaite’s speech in Brassed Off, 2p machines, hun culture, the relentless sarcasm, Sam Fender hungover on breakfast TV, Big John, Bob Mortimer… Supermarket Sweep, Monster Munch… Irn Bru adverts, Tango adverts (apple and orange), Mr Bean, really bad service stations, Chicken Shop Date… the Lionesses going into the final, taking the piss out of our mates, meal deals…’

‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ What any one of these objects, adverts, public figures, television programs, events, and beverages is exactly supposed to do, aside from being invoked and chanted for the simple, reassuring sensory pleasure and familiarity of the names and words and mouth-sounds, is unclear. Monster Munch is not going to explain an attack on a synagogue. Mr Bean doesn’t speak to the country’s frustrations over immigration that have persisted over twenty years through various successive governments’ attempts to ignore them.

In a nation that now forgoes politics itself as, on the one hand, a great big joke that right-thinking people have learned not to take seriously, and on the other, whenever it erupts in the wake of a national scandal like Henry Nowak, a frightening, incomprehensible intrusion that has to be immediately stamped down, this metaphorical trash-heap of images and moments is all anyone is permitted. Everyone watches TV. Everyone drinks Yorkshire Tea. Everyone has ‘mates’ and loves to ‘take the piss’ out of them. ‘In our friendship group we have someone called Cheese.’ Build your national identity, your patriotic pride, around ‘nicknames for your mates’.

The thinking goes like this: in a country as ravaged by those twin dragons of Hate and Division as ours, it behooves us to join together around the things we can all agree on and find some common ground. The things that we all agree on and find common ground over can’t actually have any weight or identity because that’s how disagreements arise, which leads us back to Hate and Division. Ideally, we will look for something that opposes itself to even the possibility of weight, the possibility of identity, but that nevertheless retains some vestigial yet highly recognisable flavour of Britishness.

Jenkinson ponders: ‘Is not taking yourself too seriously a grounding and common force? Perhaps. What I do know is that even in London if something weird happens on a tube, the eye contact and tiny smirks between Londoners is off the charts.’

It is hard to think of a better example of what Jenkinson takes to be an image of common ground: furtive eye contact, ‘tiny smirks’, withheld comments, and of course, the inciting event around which all these smug, imperceptible little social gestures are directed: something weird happening on the tube, which is most likely a person making an obnoxious nuisance of themselves.

Count Binface stands for this supposed virtue of ‘not taking oneself seriously’, and he also stands for the loathsome, proud timidity of furtive ‘eye contact and tiny smirks’. In a later dispatch, Jenkinson confirms that Binface ‘represents the Silly Sausage Britain I know and love’.

There’s a certain quality of frantic relief here. It’s the relief of old, reassuring dramas being ritualistically re-enacted to soothe a troubled nation. The drama and pageantry of the Silver Jubilee, which the Sex Pistols travestied, was an attempt at restoring a sense of patriotic continuity. An echo of that moment (both the dream and the travesty) can be found in Episode 3 of the early 90s satirical British news parody The Day Today, in which it is reported that John Major has gotten into a fistfight with the Queen. This leads to an emergency broadcast in which a montage mixing absurd royalist and 90s Britpop imagery (dancing policemen smoking joints) is set to Holst’s Jupiter while an authoritative British voice intones ‘This is Britain. And everything’s alright. Everything’s alright. It’s ok. It’s fine.’

The Day Today was created by Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. Iannucci, of course, went on to make the British political satire series The Thick Of It, and the year after that, a spiritual successor to The Day Today (and Chris Morris’ Brass Eye), Time Trumpet, which was considerably less funny. Iannucci was part of a generation of British comic writers who, through their comedic talent and intuitive grasp of the British media ecology of their time, gained a reputation for incisive, intelligent satire, and, from this, an astonishing degree of influence in determining the canons of ‘sensible’ British opinion.

Jonathan David Harvey, the actual identity of Binface, a comedian, worked on both The Thick of It and Time Trumpet. I apologise for dragging in so many of these ancillary reference points, but they are necessary to sketch out the specific sense of British cultural continuity that Binface has come to represent. Because the continuity he represents, the identity he affirms, is that of the ‘sensible comedian’ (you could just as well say the ‘comedian sensible’). This was a British comic sensibility that addressed itself to an audience who were wise (or thought themselves so) to the manipulations and hysterias of television news, tabloid headlines, lowbrow entertainment, sensationalism. Binface addresses himself to this same audience, now older, rocked by the triple trauma of Brexit, Trump and Lockdown, confronted with new, bewildering social issues to do with race and gender, still clinging to a belief in their essential ‘reasonableness’ as if to a life-raft on stormy seas.

What was once a self-assured confidence has now curdled into a sort of mania, but it is a mania that speaks in a self-consciously wry, funny voice, when it doesn’t break down into the shrill, wounded tone in which Iannucci defended Britain’s shameful record on the grooming gangs to Elon Musk: ‘We’re more than capable of dealing with our difficulties ourselves.’ Binface, of course, is saved from this kind of embarrassment, because as a funny joke character, he is not expected by anyone to offer comments on the grooming gangs, or on Henry Nowak, or the murder of Ann Widdicombe, on any of these disturbing realities which suggest that Britain is not a reasonable place at all, hasn’t been for some time, and maybe never will be again.

This is his fundamental appeal. He does not exist in the same world as these things. As long as he is in the news, ‘standing up’ to Farage, those things do not exist. He is not capable of addressing them because, obviously, he is not actually a politician and not expected by anybody to take politics seriously. Ironically, this makes him, for his audience, into a strange messianic figure, and also a figure of paradoxical political legitimacy, a saviour come to restore a fundamentally apolitical faith in the power of a ‘reasonableness’ that is not quite the same thing as rationality, and make it, once again, the guiding principle of the country.

The Starmer Government attempted to contain the numerous tensions erupting across British society through an ineptly and inconsistently applied paternalism, in which political recognition was withdrawn from British citizens at precisely the worst moment possible to inflame those tensions further. The scandal of the Nowak case was not just that his murderer, a Sikh, could exploit his minority status in his favour to essentially temporarily recruit the police as his own hired thugs. It wasn’t just the fundamental obscenity of the crime. The scandal was also the ensuing depoliticisation of the incident, and the immediate canonising of this, within the British media, as a compulsory tenet of good manners. Nowak was murdered and then posthumously annihilated as a citizen through the transformation of his killing into a ‘random unfortunate event’, in the same way that thousands of British schoolgirls, despite being very much alive, were annihilated as citizens when every British institution, almost in concert, failed to ensure their safety from predatory Pakistani gangs.

When even the police assist your murderer in your own murder, when they assist your rapists, you are no longer a political subject. Time and time again, Labour under Starmer hammered the message of The Day Today emergency broadcast, but they spoke in a different language (and I imagine they will continue under Burnham): they didn’t say ‘everything’s ok’ or ‘it’s fine’, but they suggested that ‘everything’ would be these things, if the British public stopped allowing various inconvenient and unfortunate, but nevertheless apparently ‘random’ tragedies, to cause ‘Division’. More pertinently, the British public ought to stop allowing various semi-mythical entities or shadowy forces (Russian bots, trolls, ‘Musk’s algorithms’) from exploiting these tragedies to ‘sow Division’ and ‘stir up hate’.

The joke of Binface is that he is not a joke at all. Not a joke because for his audience, he is the last bastion of what for them counts as political seriousness. What counts for them as political seriousness is something that has been whittled down over the years and across various crises into a numb, feeble intuition that a certain British decency and good humour will carry us through despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite the severely compromised, limping condition of these national virtues. That Binface is not a joke is not forgotten by the ordinary voters in Clacton either; friends who have campaigned in the constituency inform me that if it were The Bin turning up on the doorstep, he could well be subject to physical assault.

Nevertheless, there he is on various morning shows, reassuring them that he is as committed as ever to ‘nationalising Adele’, the joke being, for everyone who is in on it, that ‘ironically’ this is actually ‘quite a good idea’. It’s a good idea because, like 99 flakes that cost 99p, like banishing Katie Hopkins to the Negative Zone, it’s something that everyone can agree on. And if everyone agrees on it, then Britain can be said, in some sense, to be in good health. Binface is a candidate of ‘unity’.

Part of the unity, too, is his affirmation of a generalised and, obviously, highly ‘sensible’ political cynicism that expresses itself in dismissive chatter about ‘politicians’, ‘politicians’ as figures of non-specific and self-congratulatory contempt. This was also the sensibility, buried under a few layers of superficial harshness, of The Thick of It, in its presentation of politics as a basically non-ideological arena of spin, cut-throat but also characterised by bumbling incompetent ministers who just want a decent night’s sleep. The characters in The Thick of It were slimy, scheming, pathetic, unlikeable… but they were predictable.

The murder of Ann Widdecombe was predicted by nobody because the idea of a leftist creep murdering an elderly lady does not have a home in British consciousness. So, the whole concept of Binface, as a heavily degraded (in the sense that, unlike The Thick of It, he’s not actually funny), vehicle of the same cynicism, is that he is a guarantee, a re-invoking of that same comforting, familiar landscape, in which politicians are non-ideological incompetent losers, but where those same politicians aren’t bludgeoned to death with a hammer by a malevolent actor whom nobody wants to acknowledge.

Looking out over that landscape, you might plausibly say ‘fuck it’ and turn to a man with a bin on his head who really does say the things that ‘everyone is thinking’ as long as those things really were as anodyne as ‘99 flakes should be 99p’, which is the wish that people are expressing through their support for him. That is what Binface invokes. It’s not the imperial nostalgia of the Silver Jubilee or what Sofie Jenkinson describes with characteristic clunkiness as ‘Reform’s top-down Rule, Britannia! patriotism’, but a nostalgia for a time and place in which the satirical function of a character like Binface would be effective, where he wouldn’t be a figure of denial.

The curious, redundant way in which Stadlen and Campbell ‘tell the story’ of Binface, as if to remind themselves of why it’s funny or convince you that it is, the way they insist on his irreverence, speaks both to an uncertainty that they must feel, and to a faith that this can be overcome if the story can play itself out. It’s a faith in ‘the inherent absurdity of the situation’, the faith that its absurdity will rescue us from it. The death of Henry Nowak was absurd, but this didn’t rescue him from it. The state of Britain is absurd, and this will not rescue us from it.

This article was written by Yeerk, a cultural critic and host of the Bistro Californium podcast. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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As these societies slowly converged economically with Western Europe, they also began to adopt Western patterns of labour migration (at least in recent years). Ironically, even political leaders who cast themselves as staunch opponents of immigration have quietly embraced large inflows of foreign workers. Viktor Orbán, often portrayed as Europe’s most hardline anti-migration figure, facilitated in the final years of his premiership a steep rise in legal labour migration into Hungary. Careful observers will note that his rhetoric rarely fails to specify its target as ‘mass illegal migration.’ The scale of this shift is staggering. Tiny Croatia, a nation of fewer than four million people, issued 85,574 first work permits in 2024 — more than Germany. Poland, now the EU’s premier destination for non-EU workers, granted 337,874 first permits, primarily to Ukrainians and Belarusians. For societies that only three decades ago were suppliers of migrant labour to the West, the inversion is astonishing.

Yet the roots of this demographic reversal lie deeper than post-Cold War economics. The very conditions that now allow employers to justify large-scale recruitment of foreign labour were created decades earlier. They lie in the institutions, social engineering, and ideological assumptions of the communist period. Policymakers and historians have paid surprisingly little attention to this, despite the fact that it reveals much about both the destructive impact of communism on family structures and the unique difficulties faced by countries that fall below replacement fertility before they become wealthy. Few things are more dangerous for long-term national vitality than collapsing fertility in the absence of economic affluence.

Communism, with its ideological hostility toward traditional institutions, its aggressive industrialisation and urbanisation, and its abrupt liberalisation of social mores, created demographic conditions that were historically aberrant. Long before Western Europe entered the era of low fertility, many socialist countries were already exhibiting birth rates comparable to advanced capitalist societies, a contradiction that Marxist theorists could neither explain nor openly acknowledge.

Marxist Theory vs. Demographic Reality

In theory, Marxism predicted that socialism would usher in prosperity and steady population growth. Malthusian anxieties about ‘overpopulation’ were dismissed as bourgeois pessimism. Lenin’s polemic The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism captured this outlook vividly. As John F. Besemeres summarised, Lenin scorned arguments for abortion as an attempt to spare children future suffering, precisely the kind of ‘petit-bourgeois pessimism’ that revolutionary consciousness was meant to overcome. Children, Lenin insisted, would fight against the oppressive conditions of the present.

This doctrinal confidence persisted well into the post-war period. Nikita Khrushchev spoke of ‘overpopulation’ as one of the West’s ‘cannibalistic theories’. In principle, socialist societies expected steady demographic expansion. High fertility was treated as both natural and ideologically desirable.

In practice, the opposite occurred. Communist modernisers engineered a radical break with pre-war social structures. Except in Albania, in the early stages of the communist regimes, they liberalised divorce, legalised abortion earlier and more extensively than almost any country in capitalist Europe, and sought to detach the family from its traditional economic and moral functions. Far from stimulating population growth, these measures helped accelerate fertility decline precisely at the moment when socialist doctrine insisted it should rise. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia became global leaders in abortion prevalence. As David Heer noted in his 1965 paper, the widespread availability of abortion effectively served as the primary method of fertility regulation, almost certainly contributing to the sharp decline in total fertility rates.

The gap between ideology and policy was especially stark in Poland. As Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska shows, Polish party officials in the 1950s and 1960s pursued a quietly anti-natalist orientation, despite public rhetoric to the contrary. Party-state journalists depicted the Catholic Church as demanding ‘unfettered fertility,’ while presenting the socialist state as the sole rational moderniser advocating smaller, higher-quality families achievable through contraception. A striking policy choice in a country traumatised by the wartime death of millions, yet it reflected the regime’s fear of rapid urbanisation and its inability to provide infrastructure for a growing population. A similar pattern emerged in Czechoslovakia, where post-war population policy blended socialist social engineering with pre-war eugenic ideas.

By the mid-1960s, European communist countries had become global outliers, not for high birth rates, but for exceptionally low ones. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania recorded some of the steepest fertility declines in the world. The Soviet Union’s overall fertility remained higher only because of its Muslim-majority republics. Among Baltic and East Slavic populations, fertility fell to Western European levels. Besemeres noted in Socialist Population Politics that by the late 1960s the socialist world was undergoing ‘agonising reappraisals’ of population doctrines — the high fertility once thought intrinsic to socialism had become ‘little more than a nostalgic memory’.

During the early Cold War, American strategists briefly feared that Marxist anti-Malthusianism, combined with support for anti-colonial movements, might yield a demographic advantage for the socialist camp. Yet by the early 1960s, some scientists realised the opposite was occurring. Brackett and Huyck in 1962 observed that every socialist country except Albania already had birth rates within the range of Western Europe, and below the United States. Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary had birth rates approaching that of Sweden, a historically low-fertility outlier and one of the most economically developed countries in the world. Economically, these communist countries belonged to Europe’s periphery, yet demographically they resembled its wealthy core.

This shift would later shape Europe’s demographic landscape in unexpected ways. Southern European countries like Spain, Portugal, and even Greece eventually surpassed Central Europe in population growth, despite having been poorer for most of the nineteenth and twentieth century (before communism) and having avoided the same degree of wartime devastation.

In 1970, Jerzy Berent concluded that crude birth rates across Eastern Europe were ‘somewhat below those in most of the industrially advanced West European populations’, accompanied by dramatic declines in annual births. Hungary recorded one of the lowest natural increase rates in the world. Russia’s total fertility rate fell to 2.1 by the 1960s, a sub-replacement level at that time, years before similar trends appeared in the West. These patterns were confirmed by Timothy Heleniak’s later synthesis of Soviet and East European demographic decline.

Western intelligence agencies took notice. A CIA report from 1968 warned that Soviet birth rates had fallen below the US level and were only marginally above the European average. The agency noted that declining birth rates would create ‘long-run difficulties’, including military manpower shortages. Far from being a sign of socialist success, the demographic situation in the USSR was becoming strategically alarming. CIA concluded: ‘The downward trend in the birth rate provides the Soviet Union with some short-term economic gains but portends long-run difficulties if it continues.’

Toward the end of the communist period, some regimes attempted to reverse the collapse through aggressive pronatalist measures. Romania banned abortion and contraceptives with totalitarian-level control, leading to a significant increase in birth rates. East Germany instead developed strong cult of motherhood. Yet across the region, these measures rarely produced lasting effects.

For instance, Romanian fertility rates immediately spiked upon the issuing of Decree 770 in 1966, which banned abortion in most circumstances and restricted access to contraception, with TFR increasing from around replacement levels in 1966 to a peak of 3.7 in 1967. The children born in the late 1960s and early 1970s became known as decreţeii (‘decretists’) — people born by government decree. The fact that this generation, by far the largest in Romanian history, is about to enter retirement is now a serious concern to the Romanian Government. The effects of the decree proved to be temporary: fertility rates rapidly declined in the years following, and were once again hovering around replacement level in 1989.

In contrast, the USSR, Poland, and especially Yugoslavia (on which more shortly) were more accepting of fertility decline. The divergence between nominal Marxist pronatalism, both in theory and, later, to some extent in practice, and the lived reproductive reality of socialism thus illustrates the central paradox of the communist demographic experience.

A Peculiar Case

Yugoslavia deserves special attention, not only because its demographic trajectory differed from that of the rest of the Eastern Bloc, but because its internal diversity makes it an instructive microcosm of how communist rapid modernisation efforts reshaped family life. Only three years after the Second World War, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform. The split had little to do with ideological moderation — dictator Josip Broz Tito’s regime was, if anything, more radical than Stalin’s at that time. Belgrade supported the Greek Communists against Stalin’s agreement with Churchill, clashed with the West over Trieste, and in general insisted on exporting revolution in ways Moscow found destabilising.

Paradoxically, this rift drew Yugoslavia closer to the West. The regime remained firmly communist, but now built alliances within the Non-Aligned Movement rather than the Soviet Bloc. In this respect Yugoslavia resembled neutral Austria and Finland, except that it was neither democratic nor market-based.

Demographically, Yugoslavia was a federation of extremes. Slovenia was, alongside East Germany, arguably the richest area in Europe under communist rule. Kosovo, by contrast, was one of the poorest in on the continent, comparable only to Albania. These disparities were reflected in fertility. Kosovo maintained one of the highest total fertility rates in Europe, while Slovenia, Croatia, and much of Serbia (especially Vojvodina) had fertility levels resembling Western Europe. For Serbia, such low fertility was particularly striking given that its level of development mirrored neighbouring Bulgaria and Romania, where fertility remained higher well into the post-war decades.

Crucially, surveys from the period show that the desired number of children was not dramatically larger than the number actually born. Depending on the sample and age structure, desired family size averaged roughly 2.5 children in some republics and around 2.0 in others — figures broadly comparable to contemporaneous France or Italy, despite Yugoslavia’s much lower average income. In other words, the fertility collapse cannot be reduced to a simple mismatch between private preferences and reproductive outcomes, it was embedded in structural change.

Even Bosnia and Herzegovina had fallen below replacement fertility by 1981. This pattern cannot be dismissed as a continuation of pre-war trends. As historian Ivana Dobrivojević notes, interwar Yugoslavia had one of the fastest-growing populations in Europe — four times the growth rate of Belgium and England in 1937, and twice that of Germany. Unlike several Eastern Bloc states, Yugoslavia never pursued pronatalist policy. Population policy was a political taboo and the question of demographic decline was barely discussed in official circles, and any consideration of economic incentives to influence fertility was avoided.

The regime’s modernisation strategy relied on rapid de-agrarianisation and urbanisation, processes that destroyed the social structures traditionally associated with higher fertility. Croatian geographer Ivan Friganović acknowledged in 1965 that fertility decline was linked to rising living standards, urbanisation, and the collapse of the agrarian way of life. But what could not be openly stated was the core problem: Yugoslavia’s fertility had fallen below that of many far wealthier Western societies, even though its level of economic development was nowhere near theirs. Countries such as Spain, Portugal, or Ireland, wealthier than even the most advanced republics of Yugoslavia, maintained significantly healthier demographic profiles.

Yugoslavia’s demographic crisis was intensified by two additional factors: high abortion rates and state-sanctioned mass emigration. In Serbia and especially in Vojvodina, the number of abortions had exceeded the number of live births annually since the 1970s, one of the most extreme ratios in Europe at the time.

Even more consequential was Yugoslavia’s unique policy of permitting large-scale emigration from the 1960s onwards. Other socialist states sharply restricted external migration; Yugoslavia encouraged it. The motivations were dual: to acquire foreign currency and to relieve domestic social pressure, but also, to put it bluntly, to give potential political troublemakers a chance to leave. Unsurprisingly, Croats, who had the strongest aspirations for independence from a Serbian-dominated federation, emigrated in disproportionate numbers. Although Croats made up just over 20 percent of Yugoslavia’s population, they constituted nearly half of all emigrants.

By 1971, nearly five percent of Croatia’s population was living ‘temporarily’ abroad, according to official terminology. This emigration coincided with Western-level fertility in Croatia despite its much lower income, inflicting a double demographic hit. Party-controlled media occasionally acknowledged the problem. In 1981, Croatian daily Večernji list noted that Croatia needed a fertility rate of 2.15 to maintain population stability, but the actual rate was 1.80. Yet public debate remained minimal.

Yugoslavia thus illustrates in compressed form the broader pattern of socialist demographic decline. Rapid industrialisation, collectivisation, and the destruction of the traditional village undermined the economic rationale for larger families. What united the Yugoslav case with the rest of socialist Europe was not policy uniformity but the underlying mechanism. The state imposed modernisation faster and more disruptively than societies could absorb, producing a demographic transition that arrived too early, too abruptly, and without the economic prosperity that typically accompanies it.

The Long Demographic Shadow of Communism

If communism had never taken root in Eastern Europe, the region would today be far more populous (perhaps dramatically so). Before communism, all mentioned countries were poorer than Western Europe but consistently more fertile, a pattern typical of pre-industrial or semi-industrial nations. Had that trajectory continued, Poland would not be comparable in population to Spain but closer to countries like Egypt. Bulgaria and Sudan had similar populations in the early twentieth century. Hungary was significantly more populous than Sweden, Bulgaria at one point exceeded it. Romania in 1939 was more populous than Mexico, but not enormously richer.

These comparisons underscore a simple counterfactual: without communism, Eastern Europe would almost certainly contain many tens of millions more people than it does today. And with population comes (geo)political power. Communism did not merely distort economic development, halting Central Europe’s historical trajectory toward the living standards of Germany, Austria or Italy. It also engineered one of the steepest demographic contractions in modern history.

Whilst fertility decline is a secular trend intrinsic to economic modernity, the path a country takes along its transition matters greatly in determining its future prospects. Capitalist economies experienced rising wealth in the aftermath of the war, before they underwent the radical disruption of social structures which underpinned high fertility. This enabled the Baby Boom, which provided the demographic basis for the greatest expansion in economic development in human history, powered by the combination of growing productivity and a growing labour force.

Anvar Sarygulov and Phoebe Arslanagic-Little note the rapid adoption of labour-saving household goods in the West, such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, which reduced the time costs of maintaining a home and having children. There was also a sharp increase in housebuilding and, relatedly, home ownership. As people became more prosperous, with their well-paying and secure jobs, bigger houses, and shiny new consumer durables, and felt themselves ‘established’ at an earlier age, marriage rates increased significantly and the average age of first marriage dropped. It is obvious that none of this would have been possible without the general economic prosperity and rapid economic growth of Les Trente Glorieuses. This period of population expansion paved the way for a more comfortable experience of demographic decline, the problems caused thereby being easier to resolve from a position of relative economic strength.

Socialist economies, on the other hand, delivered social disruption without economic prosperity. The destruction of the traditional village, the abrupt uprooting of rural life, and accelerating industrialisation would always have come about eventually — but the pursuit of these goals before the delivery of higher standards of living has left a demographic crater which continues to shape the economic topography of post-socialist societies. Wherever socialism drove rapid industrialisation in the 1950s and 1960s, fertility fell, whether in Eastern Europe, the USSR, or China. Socialist modernisation proved uniquely ‘efficient’ at suppressing fertility because it combined material deprivation with ideological hostility towards the traditional social structures which supported high birth rates.

Rising population can be politically disruptive, causing unemployment, unrest, or potential rebellion, but these problems are temporary. Artificially suppressing fertility is permanent. It leaves nations ageing, shrinking, and geopolitically weakened. Encouraging emigration, where it cannot be avoided, is always less destructive than encouraging people to have fewer children. Policymakers should remember that what feels ‘rational’ in the short term can be catastrophic in the long term.

Too often, Western European right-wingers cite Eastern Europe’s relatively anti-immigration and socially conservative attitudes as evidence that communism had some sort of upside compared to western liberalism. Yet the tragedy of Eastern Europe is not only that communist regimes impoverished their societies, but that they severed their demographic future. By the time fertility collapsed, the ideological rigidity of Marxism prevented honest assessment. The regime(s) insisted on its own superiority even as trends contradicted it. Ideology became a barrier to self-correction. In time, economic policy changed. But nobody can bring back those who were never born.

This article was written by Tomislav Kardum, PhD, a Croatian historian and writer. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Regardless, the point of this article is not to relitigate past decisions. It is not for us to drive from the backseat, and no-one can deny Farage’s unique ability to sense the public mood and find the most effective path through it. A good soldier in the people’s army answers the call of his leader whenever it is issued, and so it was that I found myself on the train from London Liverpool Street on two Saturdays in July, heading to Clacton to persuade the good people of Real England to turn out in force against regime thug Jonathan ‘Count Binface’ Harvey.

Unlike Gorton and Denton or Makerfield, Clacton is a highly politically homogenous constituency. A smattering of pleasant rural villages with names like ‘Great Bentley’, ‘Weeley’, and ‘Thorpe-le-Soken’ make up its inland reaches, whilst the bulk of the population live on the coast, split between the joint villages of Frinton-on-Sea and Walton-on-the-Naze and the Clacton conurbation, which merges with Jaywick to the west and Holland-on-Sea to the east. The villages, within easy commuting distance of Colchester and only an hour and a half on the train to the City, are much as any well-to-do settlement across vast swathes of England — but Clacton proper is more interesting.

A typical seaside town, Clacton suffers perhaps more than anywhere else from the unique deprivation such places have come to know. Having peaked economically in the first half of the twentieth century, the town has been in decline for more than five decades. Founded in 1871, by the interwar period Clacton had become the largest seaside resort between Southend-on-Sea and Great Yarmouth. Its story — and the political character which results — highlights the divide between Reform’s two great reservoirs of so-called ‘left-behind’ voters, and it would be a mistake to assume too great a similarity between places like this and northern post-industrial towns.

Unlike with northern towns, whose problems can reasonably be argued to be the result of at least somewhat avoidable political choices, Clacton is truly a place which has been left behind by modernity in all its forms. Ryanair is far more responsible for the decline of Clacton than any political leader. This is a place whose Butlin’s (the main budget holiday destination, and the town’s single biggest economic pull factor) closed all the way back in 1983 — even Skegness has yet to close its own Butlin’s resort in 2026.

Much like my native Lincolnshire (and for the same reasons), Clacton has always been a right-wing stronghold. The constituency re-elected Douglas Carswell as a UKIP MP when he held a by-election after defecting from the Tories in 2014, and stuck by him in 2015 — the only seat won by UKIP at that election. After Carswell left UKIP, it swung heavily behind the Conservatives in 2017, and gave Boris Johnson a remarkable 71% of the vote in 2019. Put simply, it is one of the most right-wing places in the country. This is, at least in part, because it has never had any kind of industrial economy, and has therefore never had any labour movement of significance. These are not voters who supported the Labour Party in the past and now feel betrayed: they are people who have consistently opposed the left, and wish to do so in the strongest possible way.

The population today consists mostly of retired working and lower-middle class people who moved to Clacton at the tail end of its brief period of economic viability, their adult children choosing to raise a family close to home, and those who moved to the town later as retirees (often examples of white flight from London). Primarily because of this extremely high proportion of retirees, Clacton has an economic inactivity rate of 50%, which is a remarkable outlier even in today’s Broken Britain. Given that 29% of the population are over 65, perhaps this is not surprising.

The 8am train from London Liverpool Street is no longer filled with London tourists heading for a weekend at the beach. By the time we passed Witham, it seemed the only passengers left aboard were those with similar intentions to mine. In the seats next to us were two obviously left-wing journalists who had dressed up in Union Flag suits and were discussing stratagems to catch Reform canvassers for an interview, no doubt hoping that their strange attire would lull their prey into a false sense of security. Luckily, their search was most likely in vain — we realised only after we had disembarked at Clacton station that the campaign HQ was hidden away in the constituency’s interior, 15 minutes drive away from the town itself (mostly for security reasons).

Despite this inconvenience, we managed to hail a lift from the Mayor of Southend (a sound man indeed) and were then taken from HQ to where we would be campaigning. Relatively inexperienced as I was, I was reassured by the presence of my more battle-hardened team and the easy introduction to campaigning provided by a contest on friendly turf with no real opposition.

My worries soon returned, however, as we were dropped off in Jaywick — a small town attached to the west of Clacton, and famously the most deprived part of the country. We parked in front of the small development which separates Jaywick proper from West Jaywick, originally intended to create a hyper-local economy and provide amenities for local residents, but now home to a dessert shop and several classic seaside tat emporiums.

Jaywick proper is not too terrible a place and is broadly in line with the rest of Clacton, if a little worse-off. It is West Jaywick which one imagines when one thinks of the most deprived place in the country, its residences constructed originally as wooden holiday shacks for East Londoners, designed neither for longevity or permanent habitation, becoming full-time dwellings only as that population began to flee after the war. Various attempts to encourage redevelopment or the relocation of residents since the 1970s have failed, with the local District Council’s most recent ambitions for the area — that by 2026 it would have benefited enough from investments so as to become attractive for developers — have evidently been frustrated once again.

Most houses had a dog of some kind (mostly pitbulls) either chained up outside or being held back in the house, which made knocking on doors a daunting task. There was quite a range of people here, though they all held in common a general resentment and deep sense of apathy towards the world. Anyone knocking at their door, especially strangers, was seen as a nuisance; an unwanted interruption to time well spent doing nothing. Politically speaking, Clacton is mainly home to two types of people: those who are extremely right-wing and love Nigel Farage, and those who are extremely right-wing with no hope for any politician, including Nigel Farage. In West Jaywick alone, the latter kind were in the majority.

Despite all of this, people were generally respectful and would just turn you away if they weren’t interested. One Roma woman we met said she wouldn’t vote because she couldn’t read or write. When told about the availability of accessible ways of voting, she turned us away all the same. All in all, the most deprived place in England will be more polite to Reform campaigners than most Liberal Democrat voting communities. These are generally a people who just want to be left alone to live the rest of their lives in squalor, undisturbed in the minor comfort of their internal narrative that no better world is possible, so best not to dwell on its promise.

We did meet two Binface supporters in this area. One of them was a seemingly out of place middle-class-sounding old woman whose shack stood out as having been done up to a moderately high standard. The other was an obese man in his mid-twenties. Kai Stephens, candidate for the British Democrats in Clacton, posted on X about his own experience in Jaywick, suggesting that people there resented Farage and were concerned about demographic change. I don’t know whether Stephens went to West Jaywick specifically, but I can’t help but doubt the veracity of his claims. Even there, the balance of attitude towards Farage was positive, though perhaps insufficient to motivate voters to turn out on his behalf — and I don’t believe the word ‘demographic’ was ever uttered on the salt marshes west of Clacton until Stephens himself set foot in the area.

On the second Saturday, we visited a much nicer area of the constituency, this time in the northern suburbs of the town itself. It was here that we found a more enthusiastic reception. North Clacton is populated mostly by retirees, with some young families occupying the colourfully painted Deanoboxes that fill out the newer developments. Homes were well-kept, and lawns well watered (although presumably no longer as Essex languishes under hosepipe bans along with much of the rest of southern England). Almost everyone we spoke to was excitedly supportive of Reform, believing recent attacks on Farage to be nothing but the attempt of an establishment which does not care for the British people to destroy a decent man precisely because he does.

One further point of interest from speaking to Clacton residents is that the most committed supporters of Reform are uniformly more politically sound, as opposed to being the ‘cringey daytime TV civic nationalists’ that many online would have you believe them to be. Being extremely right-wing is not sufficient to motivate defections to fringe parties, and in our experience elsewhere it was not even necessary (in Makerfield, we spoke to several voters who were tempted towards Restore precisely because they saw it as less ‘divisive’ or ‘abrasive’ than Reform — a notion that the party’s campaigners presumably disabused them of). One woman in Clacton put it succinctly: she supports Reform because they are ‘the only party who care about our people and are willing to put them first’.

The most hostile voters we ran into were, as always, younger women whose newbuild front porches were adorned with ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ affirmations. Mostly, though, such people intended not to vote. We only met one Binface supporter in this area (despite knocking on many more doors than we did in West Jaywick, where we met two). Across the constituency, it was the oddest characters who were most likely to be Binface supporters — whereas the average Reform supporter is a respectable homeowner who is a part of their local community. We ran into one Restore supporter, flying a Knight’s Templar flag in his garden, who we convinced to vote Reform. We did not meet anyone who supported any other parties, established or fringe.

The most surprising discovery from our two days in Clacton, however, was the extent to which immigration has affected even this tucked-away part of England. On both evenings, after finishing our day’s work, we went to the pier (which naturally marks the centre of the town). It is here that one finds the local Wetherspoons (the same pub at which Farage had a milkshake thrown on him in 2024), perhaps the most energetic place in the constituency with patrons of all ages talking and drinking in the sun. Even on the right, it is commonly taken for granted that places like Clacton remain relatively untouched by immigration. That belief is often the basis of attacks from the left — centred on the idea that opposition to immigration must be unreasonable and rooted in ignorance as the places most motivated by that cause are those which are least exposed to the phenomenon.

This, perhaps sadly, is simply untrue: Clacton is a place very much touched by immigration, in some very strange ways. One example could be seen at the Greek restaurant next door to the Wetherspoons, from which emanated the sound of incongruous tunes and the smell of weed as it hosted some sort of Afrobeats hour attended exclusively by around 35 recent sub-Saharan African migrants. According to one local, this valuable cultural enrichment occurs every Saturday — and one imagines that Clacton is all the better for it. Another experience we had was in a retail park in North Clacton. We stopped there for lunch at a Subway (our other options limited to a Greggs and a Costa — what else could you need?). Every single member of staff there was a South Asian immigrant, having obviously arrived during the Boriswave given their poor grasp of English. This was far outside of the centre of Clacton, and perhaps the last place in the country you might expect to see Boriswave workers — yet here they were all the same.

It is now that we realise why locals vote so strongly for Nigel. This is a place with very little economic activity and therefore very few jobs. These entry-level positions should provide at least some opportunities for young Clactonians to earn some money and start their journey in life. Instead, these businesses have imported workers across 5000 miles and two oceans to fill the roles. There is no sense in which we can call such a situation fair. There is no place in the country — no matter how remote or how deprived — free from this imposition. Migration now touches every corner of England, and its impact will only continue to grow even if inflows are substantially reduced. It is no wonder that locals are rebelling against it.

Clacton is a community which warned against the mistakes that led to Britain’s current woes at every stage, and whose embrace of Reform is as much an ‘I told you so’ as it is a ‘fuck you’. It’s not a surprise to the people of this place to find themselves left behind by an establishment which puts foreigners first, instead of them. Farage, to them, represents less an unexpectedly necessary correction than the fulfilment of a prophecy — and their devotion to him should therefore not surprise us. Even as voters elsewhere waver, the people of Clacton stand firm. On Thursday, they will re-elect him in a landslide. And if the establishment they despise succeeds in using parliamentary procedure to force a second needless by-election this winter, they will happily tell them again: Farage is their man now, as he was always going to be.

This article was written by James Hykeham, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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There were 7 ‘central’ newspapers, each of which was set up by the state as the official organ of a particular institution. The most important and famous was Pravda (Truth), the organ of the Central Committee, through which Soviet leaders often telegraphed changes in policies. There was also Izvestiya (News), published by the Presidium, Trud (Labour), published by the Soviet Labour Unions, two youth papers and one for Soviet Sports. During the Great Patriotic War, however, the most important was Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star. This was the newspaper of the Red Army, for which Vasily Grossman wrote.

From the Front Line is an appropriate title for this new collection of his war reporting: exempt from military service, Grossman nonetheless spent more than 1,000 days on the front line from the outbreak of war in 1941. The 49 articles are pooled into distinct phases of the war, beginning with the defence of Stalingrad, then the Russian counter-offensive, the gradual German retreats of 1943-44, Operation Bagration and then the fall of Berlin. The focus was not purely military: Grossman was one of the first journalists to write about Treblinka, interviewing former inmates and producing one of the earliest accounts of the extermination camp, as well as the wider ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front.

It was this work that began to place him at odds with the Soviet establishment. Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew himself, counted his mother among the 20,000 to 30,000 Jews murdered by the advancing Germans in Berdychiv, his birthplace. Grossman’s focus on the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the atrocities (‘Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.’), and willingness to discuss the role of Ukrainian collaborators came up against his editors, who followed the official Soviet narrative that the atrocities were a crime all races bore equally, and that all Ukrainians had resisted heroically. The turning point came with the government’s suppression of The Black Book, the landmark collection of evidence on the Nazi extermination of Soviet Jewry that Grossman helped compile, in 1948.

Grossman became something of a war hero in his own right: his reports were read by millions, and soldiers reportedly carried copies until they were little more than tattered scraps. It is little surprise. His inclination, as the translator notes, ‘was to focus on individual soldiers and their life stories, whereas the authorities wanted more emphasis on ideology, the collective, and the higher command.’ With an ability to win the trust of those on the front line, Grossman brought to vivid life the snipers, generals, fighter pilots, peasants and everyday soldiers he encountered.

Without a doubt, his greatest attribute as a writer is the ability to communicate the truth. This is, in his age of Soviet censors, a more remarkable attribute than it sounds — although the translators have carefully selected or pieced together the versions of his work least touched by the censor’s knife, as well as carefully removing Soviet ‘clichés’. His prose is simple, workman-like, undazzling: ‘He uses the simplest language adequate to the task. Beneath the plain surface of his prose, however, lie unexpectedly original and profound observations.’

See, for example, his description of a Red Army soldier he meets in a farmstead, working for rye whilst returning to his family home on foot.

‘It is not surprising that our Red Army soldier should stand before our eyes day and night and that we should remember him forever: in a greatcoat ripped by shell splinters, in a tattered cap with earflaps, with a half-empty shoulder bag, with grenades tied to his tarpaulin belt. May he now live a happier and easier life, a life free from hunger and poverty. Who in the world could deserve this more? Let us all bow low before him. Who could deserve this more?’

Or this, written as the Germans are finally pushed out of Stalingrad:

‘The dead now sleep on long-fought-over heights, beside the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and ravines. They sleep where they once fought. Standing beside trenches, bunkers, and the embrasure-marked stone walls of buildings that were never surrendered, these men’s graves are a majestic monument to their loyalty.’

‘Hallowed ground! How one wishes to hold in one’s memory this new city that has grown up amid the ruins, to take into oneself forever this city of triumphant people’s freedom—with its web of paths and tracks, with smoke now rising in the sunlight from the chimneys of its underground dwellings, with heavy mortars lifting up their muzzles between dugouts, with its hundreds of men in greatcoats, wadded jackets and caps with earflaps, all engaged in the sleepless business of war, carrying mortar bombs under their arms as if they were loaves of bread, cursing or singing under their breath, discussing last night’s grenade fighting, peeling potatoes beside a heavy gun that has already been aimed! All these men are so wonderfully ordinary in their everyday heroism. How can one preserve in memory the whole of this shifting panorama of the defense of Stalingrad, this living moment of a great today that tomorrow will become an eternal page of history?’

By speaking about the individual — but drawing out the collective — sacrifice Grossman is recording what one might variously call a national historical moment, a collective experience, a national psychology, or a testimony of a people. It is perhaps as much myth-making as it is journalism.

It would be impossible, of course, to replicate such stirring passages in reportage about modern Britain: there is no subject grand enough. Regardless, there is much to emulate in Grossman’s work for those of us who seek to tell the story of our own country in our own time, and to build political change in line with that testimony.

When British media deigns to do reportage (which it does rarely on account of the high expenses and low subscriber rewards involved, not to mention the difficulty of doing it well) from its own country, we are invariably treated — subjected may be a better word — to ‘dispatches’, lost meanderings from journalists who barely seem to understand the country they are reporting on. Invariably unable to drive, they hop on a train to wherever the discourse directs: Clacton, Makerfield, Gorton and Denton, Runcorn and Helsby.

Reform is an almost entirely provincial phenomenon. If journalists had any connection to these kinds of places, they abandoned them when they went to university and never looked back. As a result, none have an instinctive understanding of the everyday concerns or realities of life in the vast majority of Britain. It’s a meme that Fraser Nelson doesn’t understand the world outside Richmond-Upon-Thames, but it’s equally true to say the average Spectator hack has no idea what the inner banlieues of Bradford look like, either.

Could this be why the right has — until the arrival of Dominic Cummings, and then Reform — struggled to sell its message to a huge number of people who were naturally sympathetic to their cause? Previously firm Labour voters had been drifting away from the party since 1997; it took the Leave campaign, which largely eschewed traditional right-wing messaging, tactics and thinking, to win them over.

There is, of course, an implicit snobbishness. These journalists have no instinctive connection to their subjects, much less love for them (which is what made Grossman’s prose so moving). Even right-wing journalists have a strangely detached relationship with their own base. Their engagement with provincial voters occurs entirely within the context of intra-metropolitan disputes: the point of reporting Linda from Lincolnshire’s comment that ‘we’ve got to sink the boats’ is not to understand the subject but to highlight how ‘out-of-touch’ their Westminster opponents really are. By definition, one cannot understand the inarticulate simply by echoing a selection of their own words, and in taking this approach the right fails at what Grossman succeeded in doing — painting an honest and compelling picture of his countrymen and their times.

This compares entirely negatively to what PoliticsJoe does so well, which is finding articulate provincial left-wingers prepared to repeat conventional left-wing shibboleths for voxpops, which are then presented as evidence that the ‘normal’ Briton is entirely in favour of mass migration. Like Grossman’s editors, they work around inconvenient facts in order to build a narrative around what the country believes. It is only by dint of the extremism of their politics that their attempts are so ridiculous as to be unbelievable.

Well-done right-wing reportage in modern Britain could run counter to this, giving voice to ‘normal’ people whose communities have been blighted by mass migration, who have been laid off thanks to Labour’s tax plans, or, say, slightly less sympathetically, even those whose bucolic villages are suddenly surrounded by solar panels, etc. Present the voters as they are: by and large rightfully outraged at their circumstances and the places they live. They are not rubes there simply to opine on SW1 narratives with charming naivety for Westminster hacks, nor are they completely politically unaware. However, they have a limited idea of the impact public policies have on their lives: it is the job of good reportage to link the two together in narrative form.

One of the reasons the Boriswave and migrant hotels have been such a — sadly — useful development for the right is that the effects of migration have spread into the provinces, and are now unavoidable realities for people to face in their everyday lives. My sleepy home town, hidden away in the folds of the map, now has two Kurdish barbers and a mobile phone vape shop. I should not expect my neighbours to know that they are part of a nationwide problem, nor should I expect them to know the details: it is up to me to tell them, because I know and they do not. It is incumbent on the aware to explain.

This last point is particularly important given the geographical nature of many of Britain’s problems. Migration was by and large contained within areas where the original population moved out until the Boriswave, when the sheer weight of arrivals (and the fact many came from source nations that made self-ghettoisation unlikely) forced the problem out. Demographic change, along with the rape gangs, is an example of a problem that had until recently been understood but abstract, the impact too localised to feed through into the national narrative. There are examples of similar problems, less far along in their development, that might be brought to life through reportage. Consider Michael Murphy’s recent piece on Oldham, which offered excellent insight into the effects of a newly independent Muslim vote. As the editor of this magazine put it in a recent conversation: ‘measured, honest reporting that shines a light on phenomena that one would not have any understanding of living in most of the country.’

Sympathetic, attentive reportage from writers who — like Grossman are willing to develop a deeper connection to the people and places they report on, who understand their rhythms and can describe them without condescension — has a fundamental advantage over hackneyed attempts to use excerpts from the hinterlands to support a ham-fistedly imposed narrative: it rings true. Our great advantage is that our political ambitions do not require mangled reinterpretations of the public’s sentiments to justify themselves: they reflect the honest expression of the national mood. We need not seek a particular angle from which to take our snapshot of the country to support a predetermined conclusion.

Grossman’s great talent was not in telling the average Red Army soldier what they believed, nor in telling the centre what they said of themselves. It was in showing both who the people really were, what they were fighting for, and what they were building — the truth that existed outside of the stories any faction tried to impose upon it. That truth today is ours, and we should not shy away from telling it.

This article was written by A.E. Longhousman, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Today, we look at Rupert Lowe’s offer to co-operate with Reform, which came out of nowhere on Sunday and has set the airwaves ablaze with speculation.

Why has Restore reached out now? How should Reform respond? What should we make of Lowe’s demands? Is he a man who can be worked with? And is a deal really possible?

Read more

Today, where the populist right does not already hold power, it threatens to do so imminently. All European countries of note have right-wing populists in their legislature. Across the Atlantic, the how and why behind Trump still elude those outside of the Republican Party (and even many within it). That even Latin America and Australia are not immune demonstrates academia’s utter failure in understanding populism. The subject has outgrown its diagnostic criteria, themselves unchanged since the 90s. Each setback suffered sparks a brief refractory period, as commentators opine that ‘populism’ has peaked, only then to watch the hydra grow another head.

Since its study began, the populist right has grown exponentially and can no longer be treated as a monolithic movement. First finding expression in the 1990s, the initial populist wave was followed by a tsunami in 2016 — when electoral upsets in Britain and the US delivered a hammer blow to the establishment, ending the End of History. Reader, I was there. For all the predictions otherwise, the genie is yet to return to the bottle. Subsequent victories for right-wing parties in 2017 occurred in Europe and beyond. The bumps along the way have yet to derail this train.

The oft-uttered notion of this ‘populist wave’ sweeping the globe wrongly implies some amount of coordination/causation between each shock result. However, the idea that Brexit precipitated Trump’s victory gives us too much credit. Voters in Carlisle, P.A., were not looking to its namesake for inspiration when they spurned Crooked Hillary. Voting for Leave and Trump were independent reactions against similar circumstances. Immigration was, obviously, a first-order driver in both cases. Similarly, destitution sparked by industrial decline motivated Briton and American alike to stick two fingers up to the establishment. The latter needed no encouragement from the former.

That similar factors drive support for the populist right across the West demonstrates the spectacular, systematic failure of the political structures and culture shared between our countries. There is no Populist Playbook sent from the Kremlin detailing how to most effectively blame social atomisation on the hijab. The ‘populist wave’ is, in truth, a series of organic reactions to similar demands. The proposed address to these demands is what varies.

Far from academic axe-grinding, building our own typology of populism allows us to succeed in understanding what the establishment still does not. A broad analysis of the varied strains of right-wing thought reveals where Reform can look to for inspiration and operational pitfalls. Similarly, it demonstrates that, like all populist parties, Reform embodies the will of the people — and outlines the dead ends which may jeopardise this status.

Towards Europopulism

As we understand it today, right-wing populism was born in Europe. In the 80s, Jean-Marie Le Pen led the Front National on a long march towards political respectability. By eschewing Vichyist trappings, Le Pen was able to court once-unwinnable voters to a party founded by ex-SS members. Concurrently, Jörg Haider’s FPÖ was able to make inroads in Austria, and even formed a short-lived coalition with the centre-right following the 1999 legislative election. Under Haider, the FPÖ’s platform now seems de rigueur on the populist right — campaigning against EU enlargement (and its second-order consequences as regards immigration) and lambasting the SPÖ/ÖVP uniparty. So too was Haider an adept communicator – his straightforward ‘common sense’ appeal outshone his past gaffes praising the Nazi Party. At the subsequent election, however, the FPÖ vote was cannibalised by the centre-right ÖVP, with the FPÖ plagued with infighting over the moderation necessitated by coalition. While far from a killing blow (the FPÖ are still a major actor in Austrian politics), centre-right/populist-right coalitions are always at best risky for the anti-establishment party — something likely understood by those at home who desire a Ref/Con coalition.

It was in the 90s that scholars began to grapple with right-wing populism. The successes of Haider, Le Pen, and the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement invited confrontation. Among others, political scientist Cas Mudde would come to the fore — advancing the idea that populism is ‘thin-centred’; its only core tenets being the imagined struggle between a pure demos and an impure elite. Alongside Kaltwasser, Mudde later opined that populism is akin to an inflexion which must be applied to another, ‘thick-centred’ ideology, such as nationalism. These diagnostic criteria, which posit that the populist right is the Cherry Coke to the centre-right’s full-fat, are still the industry standard — and wholly fail to grasp the scale of an orientation now continental in scale.

Those whose ‘interest in politics’ is yet to venture beyond Wikipedia may study European Parliament groupings to divine the right’s fault lines. The populist right finds itself split between (increasing in supposed radicalism) the ECR, PfE, and the ESN — all to the right of the anodyne EPP. Relying on this typology, however, risks mischaracterisation. Notwithstanding that the European Parliament is ‘Fake and Gay’, the parties within routinely chop and change with each parliamentary cycle. That the FdI and RN are in different factions derives from the former’s desire for mainstream credibility. Readers of a certain vintage will recall that David Cameron moved the Conservatives to the ECR to bolster his Eurosceptic credentials — for all the legitimate critiques of Meloni’s tenure, her governing project is clearly distinct from our hoodie-hugging One Nationers. Where academia and Wikibox enthusiasts have failed, I will outline a new typology of the European right.

Routinely used as a slur in the media, divining who is actually a right-wing populist is best done through a say-what-you-see approach. For brevity’s sake, this analysis primarily contends with the most significant right-wing populist parties in each country. As in Britain, many of these parties face competition (of varying quality) from their right. Whether Mí Hazank, the FvD, Reconquête, or Futuro Nazionale can supplant more established names is yet to be seen.

Mudde’s aforementioned ‘thin’ view of the populist right holds some water, in that Europopulism prescribes just three central precepts: nativism, civilisational pride, and opposition to a mutually hostile establishment. Beyond this, parties of the right shape their values and policies according to their country’s own political circumstances. That the populist right presents neither a centralised Weltpolitik, nor its own economic consensus, is poorly understood by those outside. Answers to these questions are developed in situ — thereby allowing parties to offer bespoke solutions to the national malaise.

Opposition to mass immigration is the defining stance of Europe’s populist right. Tens of millions of non-European migrants have settled across the continent since 1945. To put it lightly, this historic demographic shift has not won universal acclaim. Tighter immigration controls are universally popular across Europe, while a plurality of respondents in major economies support mass deportations. With a few exceptions, establishment parties are yet to fall in line with public opinion. We should not be surprised to see that where there is demand, supply is not hard to find. Although these parties diverge in their tone and preferred redress, there is a broad consensus that immigration must decline and deportations must increase. The populist right can, in each corner of Europe, call upon a litany of atrocities committed by recent arrivals and the supposedly integrated alike.

In a similar vein, Islam receives special scrutiny. Although its salience spiked in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, Europe’s right has long considered Islamic migration as an existential threat. In 1973’s The Camp of the Saints, the arrival of millions of Indian refugees provoked France’s settled Muslim population into frenzied looting and raping. Prior to his assassination in 2002, Pim Fortuyn found success in Dutch politics on an otherwise liberal anti-Islam platform. Fortuyn’s contention of a conflict between Islamic and Western values may seem stale in 2026, but this argument still runs through the populist right today. Ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Hamed Abdel-Samad effectively offered a first-hand account of Islam’s ills while deflecting racism allegations aimed at self-professed Islamosceptics. This argument posits that the Islamic world is hamstrung by its illiberal values rather than anything more inherent to its denizens.

These axiological critiques of Islam inform Europopulism’s civilisational outlook. While espousing nationalism in their own countries, the European right create a macrocosmic civilisational narrative — sitting above the nation; not replacing it. Speeches and manifestos routinely call upon Europe’s historical development; beginning with classical civilisation and progressing through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and beyond. This civilisation faces enemies inside and out, in the guise of the EU elite and mass Islamic immigration respectively. With that said, talk of Frexit, Italexit and the like has cooled following our departure. Instead, the populist right now seeks their teleological ‘Europe of Nations’ within the EU’s ambit. Cooperation between right-wing populist parties across the continent will allow a right-wing capture of European institutions — eschewing closer union in favour of closed borders (at least, that is how the story goes). Withdrawal from some multilateral institutions is still mooted within (among others) the AfD, but the prevailing mood is that of reform.

That these parties are anti-establishment goes without saying. Yet, the nature of the establishment presents the primary cleavage. Germans weary of the thousand-year grand coalition would perhaps find common cause with those in Tisza’s camp. Orbán’s construction of his own establishment is well-documented in this journal, but that which he sought to replace was markedly different to Blobs closer to home. 1991 is the Eastern right’s Year Zero. Economic growth followed the end of communism, but the imposition of once-idealised Western institutions left many disappointed with the democracy they once desired. This synergises with lingering religiosity to win social conservatism and explicitly ‘illiberal democracy’ greater support than it could ever receive in the West. Immigration is an undesirable remedy for a post-1991 brain drain — thus, increasing the birth rate is a widely-desired goal. In many ways, eastern right-wing populism is more a reaction to the end of communism than (as in the West) the birth of woke in 1968 — the first attempt to construct an organic and native political modality after the interim default to Western liberalism.

Economic Consensus?

If social conservatism is not inherent to Europopulism, neither is a unifying economic theory. The populist consensus that politics isn’t working obviously extends to the economy, but solutions vary. This tension can be seen in France: Jordan Bardella’s interlude as presumptive presidential candidate raised expectations of a rightward turn — even up to pensions reform — but Marine Le Pen’s return could restore the RN to an interventionist course. This should not be understood as Total Boomerwelfarist Victory, however. While still avowedly protectionist, Le Pen has moderated over the course of her three past presidential campaigns — proposals to drastically lower the retirement age have been absent since 2012. While marginally less precarious than our own, France’s dire public finances may necessitate an about-turn rightwards upon her taking office. As well, Edouard Philippe, her likely second-round opponent, is expected to campaign on fiscal responsibility. Just as it is currently expedient to court the poor vote, it may serve Le Pen to pivot towards her protégé’s more free-market course once the second-round election begins.

Unburdened by standardised economic dogma, the populist right can advance fiscal policy tailored to each country’s economic conditions. Vox, among the most fiscally liberal parties on the right, fought the 2023 general election promising to reform Spain’s sclerotic planning laws and to revisit the Basque Country’s preferential financial arrangement with Madrid. It seems likely that Reform’s competing economic strands will coalesce into a similar problem-solving platform — slashing red tape and benefits while funding (in one form or another) industrial production.

In building a theory of populism, the establishment often assumes that economic deprivation is the sole factor of right-wing support, and that these parties’ underdeveloped economic policy presents a chink in the armour. The first assumption is laughable, and attempts at the latter often fail — millions of votes are routinely won by saying ‘millions must go’ and little else. The right routinely builds policy depth on top of these supposed protest votes. As one would expect, proximity to government necessitates a more cohesive economic prospectus. Reform’s 2024 manifesto included several fiscal policies which were, to put it lightly, questionable, but ultimately forgivable at the time given the impossibility of forming a government. That the party is now developing more credible policy is both a relief and demonstrative of the broader tendency. In 2013, the AfD nearly crossed the 5% threshold on a four-page manifesto — last year, they won 21% of the vote with a 177-page platform. As the right inches ever closer to power across Europe, one would expect further delineation of economic policy, in each case tailored to resolve specific shortcomings.

Foreign Policy

Of all the accusations levelled against the right, the most enduring is that of Russian subversion. Its formulation is routine — prior to Crimea’s annexation, a party official suggests some form of détente with Russia. Eyebrows are raised, but it flies under the radar. In the wake of the Russian SMO and defence policy’s newfound salience, however, the establishment recast an often throwaway opinion on an issue which once seemed to be of tertiary importance as an iron-clad commitment to sedition.

The mainstream press could fill a phone book with long-reads on ‘heightened geopolitical tension’. I have no interest in adding to this, but must affirm the obvious: yes, international politics has evolved somewhat since 2012. It is precisely for that reason that Le Pen’s call that same year for Russia’s inclusion in a pan-European project should not be understood as reflective of her position today. Likewise, a level-headed analysis of the AfD’s desire to resume buying Russian energy suggests a pragmatic solution to the cost-of-living crisis, more so than a desire to renew the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. At the risk of disappointing ‘NAFO fellas’, flogging a bootleg US election interference narrative won’t wash here. Russophilia is not inherent to Europopulism, and, as Russia begins to flavour its anti-liberalism with more than a dash of neo-Maoism (not to mention its active encouragement of illegal migration flows across its western border), even its mere presence becomes more and more diminished.

This misunderstanding has led to surprised column inches covering Meloni’s dedicated support for Ukraine — as much evidence of her desire for credibility and European leadership as anything else. Outside of Italy, Western Europe’s right-wing parties maintain (albeit often unenthusiastic) support for Ukraine. It would be reasonable to put this largely down to political expedience more than genuine commitment, although such conviction is present in various corners of the right. Again, that is not because of any real Russophilia, but instead the result of a certain apathy regarding the constitutional arrangements of foreign states and a conviction that reducing energy prices is ultimately more important than the question of who governs the Donbas. Ironically, a naivety regarding the potential hostility of outside states is the worst charge that could be levelled at these broadly nationalist political leaders — not that the supposed ‘realism’ of the establishment has produced any substantial address to the problems of decaying European military capacity and declining power projection.

Closer to Russia’s borders, though, a history of enmity engenders a more hawkish attitude. That states subjugated in living memory fear Russian expansionism needs little explanation. Europopulist foreign policy is circumstantial and pragmatic — in Germany and Hungary, access to cheap energy outweighs Crimea’s fate. This split has engendered much conflict between parties of the right in different countries — most notably when the Finns Party officially dissolved all relations with the AfD for their insufficiently hard-line stance on Ukraine. Nevertheless, the right’s past overtures to Moscow, such as they were, hardly constituted a ringing endorsement of the Fourth Political Theory. Dissatisfaction with domestic Wokery once inspired admiration of a country where it’s easier to get an abortion than a pride flag, but those still buying the Based Russia narrative now solely do so with rupees.

American Populism

American populism shares many things in common with its European equivalent. It is rooted in the same social base, and motivated by many of the same concerns: immigration, declining standards of living, and the erosion of national power and confidence. That said, there are a number of fundamental differences which give Trump and his movement a unique character.

The GOP

Unlike in Europe, where the populist right typically inhabits its own, newer political vehicle, Trump’s insurgency was born within the institution of the Republican Party. It’s easy to forget the extent to which Trump was an outsider within that party in 2016, but it was with an explicit hostility towards the career republicans with whom he shared the primary debate stage that he secured the party’s nomination for the first time. Just ten years later, his erstwhile opponents have, in many cases, become subservient loyalists — a remarkable transition, though the long-term sustainability of their commitment to the new order beyond Trump’s Presidency itself remains unclear.

All politics requires coalition management, and it is perhaps the case that Europe’s institutional arrangements make compromise even more inevitable, given that single-party governments are so rare as a result of proportional representation. Nevertheless, that same system means that parties can afford to limit their ambitions in terms of broad appeal, maintaining a more defined and particular political identity. Under the United States’ unique two-party system with open primaries, however, a tendency towards unification and homogenisation emerges on each side of the political divide. Georgia Meloni is leader of Brothers of Italy, in coalition with but separate from her various supporting partners. Donald Trump is the leader of the whole Republican Party — meaning his internal opposition must be kept within the tent, and a position must be carved out for them within his political narrative.

The core base of MAGA is indeed the same disengaged, ‘none-of-the-above’ voters that form the basis of populist right support in Europe, yet Trump himself must balance their interests with those of other key parts of his vote, including the more moderate productive middle class, business, tech, and the international death-and-kill ‘Holden Bloodfeast’ war machine. It should not be surprising, then, to see that the key concerns advanced by previous iterations of American conservatism continue to enjoy far more prioritisation than analogous issues in a European context would under a populist government here.

During Trump’s first administration, this accommodation took a very straightforward form. Most political appointees were drawn from the existing pool of Republican staffers and activists, and these people in general were given the right to operate as they would under any other Republican Presidency. The Biden interregnum provided Trump with the opportunity to focus four years solely on the remaking of the party in his image, a task which he completed with remarkable success. Yet the necessity of coalition management within the party meant that this could never mean the expulsion of concerns outside of his original platform. Instead, these concerns were redefined in the terms of Trumpism. Tax cuts, once a moral necessity in and of themselves, became a driver of American dynamism. Military intervention was recast as an expression of American greatness, rather than a global crusade for democracy. Though his most entrenched opponents had already fled the GOP through the Lincoln Project and similar organisations, most found a relatively comfortable place within the new regime.

Maintenance of political identity is also made easier in many European cases by the existence of a cordon sanitaire separating the populist right from mainstream parties. Yet this may soon cease to be the case, as dissatisfaction with grand coalitions drives ever more support for the right as the only alternative. The German brandmauer, perhaps the best-known example, is coming under increasing strain as the AdD gains traction. Cooperation now tempts some in the CDU, both at a federal level (see 2025’s migration motion) and in the lead-up to this year’s regional elections — which may leave the centre-right with no alternative but to govern with the AfD. In the Netherlands, the two coalitions which relied on the PVV collapsed after their withdrawal — though the success of Italy’s populist-fronted coalition, and VOX’s renewed collaboration with the Spanish centre-right demonstrate that the populist base can win out in European coalitions.

Personalism

Of all Republican Party’s stakeholders, the personage of Donald Trump is uniquely important. His influence over the movement he’s built goes far beyond the already high degree of personalism inherent to right-wing populism (even this journal’s well-informed readers may more readily recognise Geert Wilders than the actual Dutch PM). Once again, Trump’s primary campaigns best illustrate his ability to reshape politics in his favour – his 2016 nomination broke the mould of what a Republican candidate could be. Eight years later, his comeback against all odds reshaped what a Republican candidate must be. Trump’s absence from the 2024 primary debates rendered them as a kind of conceptual drama without a lead. Marine Le Pen’s (similarly lawfare-induced) absence from frontline politics did little to stall the party’s success. Bardella, blooded in as her heir-apparent, is a more-than-capable understudy and would possibly have fared better than his mentor in next year’s election.

That the RN can proffer high-quality alternate leadership is even more remarkable when one considers Le Pen’s relative success, longevity, and her surname’s intrinsic association with the right. Even Reform, oft-decried as a one-man band, has depth on the bench — though it may not currently be sufficient. An interesting question to consider when evaluating the degree to which a party has grown beyond a single individual is how much influence the leader would enjoy over the selection of their successor in the event of their resignation. How likely is it that any given Reform leadership contender could overcome Farage’s endorsement of their opponent after his exit? He may be the only European leader with as much personal influence over his movement as Trump has over MAGA.

Trump’s personalism, however, goes beyond mere political influence. Early in this presidency, Trump revealed a psychology rather unprecedented in American government — attacks on a friend’s enterprise (namely Musk) were to the President acts of Lèse-majesté. Nought came of it given the constraints of the American executive — but in shaping the culture of the party, Trump has been unrestricted. Structurally, the Republican Party has now become an organisation defined by his personage. The position of individuals within the party is far more defined by their relationship with Trump himself on any given day than by their official, institutional or even ideological roles. The GOP has become Trump’s personal court, complete with a system of political and financial patronage that has increasingly tainted his movement with the stain of corruption. There is increasingly little division between Trump’s personal finances and those of the GOP — with profits from various merchandising schemes and crypto scams directed straight to the man’s personal accounts. To be a Republican is to support Donald Trump in all of his endeavours — personal, political, and financial. It is unclear, even after a great electoral reckoning, how this strange dynamic will develop after his exit from the political stage in 2028, but it is likely that the Trump family and associates will maintain a privileged position within the party, and all the advantages that come with that.

Religion

Christianity plays a unique role in American political life, and in American populism in particular. In Western Europe, believers are few and far between, and even those who profess a Christian faith tend to do so more quietly and, to a certain extent, more shallowly. Supply of religion in politics is limited, and demand even more so. Where politicians do reference Europe’s Christian heritage, it is as a vague signifier of commitment to the particular norms and mores of European civilisation, typically in direct contrast to Islam — which for obvious reasons presents a more imminent contrast in Europe than it does in America.

America retains a large and politically active Christian population, committed to a biblically informed socially conservative agenda. But American political Christianity in 2026 is more than evangelical moralising about sex, drugs, and rock music. As demographic change transforms the country, Christianity is becoming the central pole of a new American national identity. It is quite normal to hear an American politician speak publicly of their faith as the basis of their moral worldview, but the increasingly common professions of a deeper irrationalism — as explicitly defended by J.D. Vance on Joe Rogan recently, and exemplified by the now not infrequent references to the literal existence of demons by American political figures including Tucker Carlson — show that something new is emerging here.

This phenomenon produces a very different character to American populism. Whereas its European counterpart is often deeply materialistic, focused on direct issues such as the price of energy, poor wage growth and the basic costs of mass immigration, the American right is far more prone to speaking in terms of civilisational exhaustion, spiritual decay, or moral degradation. Whilst this might supposedly open doors to more fundamental reassessments of political life, it more often serves to distract from the real issues that present themselves in the present, especially given the lack of compelling solutions to these deeper problems.

Empire

Of course, the biggest difference between American and European populism lies in the differences between America and European nations as political entities. Shared commitments to national renewal and consolidation of strength manifest very differently in a largely demilitarised lower-middle or third-tier power than they do in the global hegemon, a status which America maintains despite increasing strain.

Just as Trumpism has accommodated itself to the various commitments of the American right’s competing factions, it has also accommodated itself to the reality of America’s global power, having begun as a movement which contained some real impetus towards the rejection of this status in favour of becoming a normal country. Whatever one’s views on any particular example of military adventurism or international diplomatic activity, it is understandable and unavoidable that Trumpism’s accession to power would reverse the movement’s position on American empire — which, for all its faults, is obviously a net benefit to the US Government and its citizens, even if it is ripe for reorganisation.

As a result, where European populism often seeks to reinforce national independence against foreign political and cultural influence, American populism increasingly advocates for a new age of American imperial dominance — including the development of a far more exploitative relationship with European ‘allies’. There currently remains an alliance between populists on both sides of the Atlantic, bolstered by the Trump administration’s political and financial support for its European counterparts, but as these opposite tendencies continue to develop it is not unlikely that the two could come to regard each other less favourably.

Exporting Trumpism?

All of these dissimilarities did not stop the commentariat on either side of the Atlantic bestowing the epithet of ‘Ruritania’s Donald Trump’ on whichever outspokenly right-wing party leader was contesting an election that week. There is often an attempt to portray European populist leaders as imitators or puppets of Donald Trump, usually by their opponents, who hope to tarnish them in doing so. Yet, as we have explored, European populism is different and separate from its American variant. The Trump admin’s engagement with it is support for an indigenous tendency, rather than an attempt to create something in its own image. To what extent is this the case elsewhere?

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency strangely mirrors that of Trump’s first term. He joined the Social Liberal Party to facilitate a presidential bid, subsequently remaking the party in his own image. He triumphed over an establishment candidate with prior experience in both government and corruption, and then proceeded to effect little real change. Social conservatism was promoted, not enforced; environmental regulations were torn up, and ‘gender ideology’ was ‘opposed’. The courts stymied any concrete progress towards his flagship policies. Then, perceived mismanagement of the pandemic preceded a tight electoral loss and a farcical failed coup. Though Bolsonaro, like Trump, faced immense lawfare after leaving office, the Brazilian could not muster a comeback – consigning the Latin spin-off to cancellation after only one season.

The most recent recession of South America’s pink tide runs concurrent with Trump’s resurgence. In the last four years, right-wing leaders have assumed power in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Elections in Honduras and Costa Rica this year have delivered right-wing populists to government — alongside the ever-popular Nayib Bukele, darling of the ‘you can just do things’ right.

Understandably, the proliferation of friendly governments provokes conspiratorial election-rigging allegations. A far more likely explanation is that of pragmatic imitation. The US’s renewed commitment to its near abroad is overtly activist in nature. It lacks the relative tact of Operation Condor – the US-backed intelligence operation which targeted opponents of Augusto Pinochet and Argentina’s ‘civic-military dictatorship’. Instead, the powers deployed range from hard to firm. Latin America’s milquetoast centre-left need not fear extradition or blockades, but tariffs and oft-mooted remittance embargos remain potent levers at Washington’s disposal, and it would be wise to fall in line. Perhaps a far simpler explanation exists: even South Americans, by and large, don’t much like crime, and think the best way to deal with it is to lock up the criminals (a promise that any given country’s latest liberation theologist is unlikely to make). All the easier to indulge that impulse when the US will look positively upon it.

A Trump-esque inflexion is not unique to the region, however. The platform of Rodrigo Duterte, elected as President of the Philippines in 2016, was broadly right-wing populist and tailored to his country’s specific circumstances — though his rhetoric has much in common with his American contemporary. His tenure as Mayor of Davao City was successful in a crackdown on crime, and Duterte claimed to have personally executed several people. Recalling the rape and killing of an Australian missionary in 1989, Duterte lamented that, as mayor, he should’ve had first dibs. While exhibitive of a Global Majority tendency to overdo blue humour, these comments drew parallels to the Access Hollywood tapes and Trump’s assertion about being able to shoot someone on 5^th Avenue.

The style of communication that unites populism in the Americas and elsewhere is, interestingly, largely not exhibited in Europe. A recent Pimlico Journal article posited a sociolinguistic argument to explain the relative frankness of Australia’s Pauline Hanson in comparison to her European counterparts, and it is indeed the case that Europe’s populists speak in far more moderate tones than those in other regions. The late Jean-Marie Le Pen was the last great provocateur, and it’s hard to imagine any future European leader who could surpass him in his prime.

Again, it must be stressed that Duterte, Hanson, et al. aren’t emulating Trump. Rather, their similar political cultures naturally select for similar rhetorical styles. Yet, that Europeans no longer indulge this vulgar populist inflexion shows another fault line within the not-so-global populist movement.

The boundaries of populism

After the success of Trump and other politicians who have utilised social media to speak directly to voters on their own terms, many establishment politicians have rightly come to recognise the advantages of straight-talking — once the preserve of populist upstarts. An otherwise reactionary political project can dress itself up in populist clothes, without necessarily executing the will of the people. Populism sells — the media are keen to invoke the label, and its recipients are eager to accept it. This populist right inflexion was best demonstrated by Boris Johnson — who, for a few months, was the tool with which the national struggle was prosecuted. Mondeo Man wanted to Get Brexit Done, as did Stevenage Woman (albeit more out of fatigue than passion). Brexit must unquestionably be understood as an avatar of right-wing populism; thus its delivery briefly affirmed Johnson’s place in the populist right pantheon. His pandemic response, while rightly reviled, was undoubtedly populist — the manifest national will was to place young people under house arrest for the benefit of doddering pensioners. The rest, though, is history.

Centre-right parties adopting populist rhetoric is not a uniquely British phenomenon. Under Poilievre, the Canadian Conservative Party more readily plays up its populist ancestry. Had events not conspired against him, Poilievre’s government would’ve undoubtedly tacked right to address Canada’s farcical immigration catastrophe. Likewise, his leadership campaign pledges to oppose vaccine mandates and Bill C-11 align with a broader populist mood. Yet, Canadian populism must be understood in that same context — Preston Manning’s Reform Party, an antecedent of the modern Tories, invoked populism in the context of Canada’s east-west divide. Reform’s anti-establishment project was corrective in nature, seeking to remind Ottawa that western Canada felt neglected. This streak, which still runs through the CPC, is best understood as right-wing and populist, rather than the fused article — which is more the preserve of the minuscule PPC.

On the left, there is a growing attraction to the notion that adopting a populist communication style and speaking to the issues that animate right-wing populism (without doing anything meaningful to address them, of course) could provide a path to escape electoral oblivion. Andy Burnham is a perfect case in point. Yet, as Travis Aaroe’s excellent article recently described, this project is doomed to failure. Populism is driven not by aesthetic attraction to bolshiness or desire for a ‘common touch’, but by material dissatisfactions with policies that the left will not soon abandon.

There has also been a consistent attempt — by both supporters and opponents of Western populism — to identify commonalities with disparate movements and leaders across the rest of the world. This is more often than not uninformative, and commonly a political mistake. Despite the suggestions of The Atlantic, Vladimir Putin’s political project has very little in common with Western populism, a reaction to a domestic liberal establishment or their policies which never existed in Russia. Neither are the unique responses of Sanae Takaichi or Narendra Modi to the particular conditions of their countries meaningfully possible to translate into a Western context, despite being ostensibly ‘right-wing’ breaks from a previous consensus. There is also little merit in scrutinising third-world dictatorships for any hint of basedness, as some are wont to do — one struggles to believe we have anything to learn from Ahmed al-Sharaa, or even from Mohammed Bin Salman.

A descriptor which becomes excessively broad will inevitably be of little analytical value. That is especially true in the case of a concept which rests on family resemblances, rather than a strict definition, as populism does. As such, we should restrict the group around which we fit our definitions to the more recently established insurgent right-wing parties of Europe and the Anglosphere alone, and discuss anything outside of that only as a separate phenomenon which may nonetheless share certain features with the main object of our study.

Where does Reform stand?

Reform is not Britain’s first party of the right — the BNP found some electoral success in imitating the populist style of the FN and FPÖ in the early 2000s, before falling victim to the residual extremist tendency which the European right had largely snuffed out. Following their decline, UKIP emerged as the primary vehicle of the right — a far more straightforwardly populist movement, but still one with its own particular character.

As in UKIP, a libertarian streak runs through Reform which distinguishes it somewhat from the mainline of European populism. The party imagines an alarm-clock Britain of hard-working individuals, the fruit of whose labour is robbed by the nanny state to pay dossers. The European right valorises the hard-working everyman, though he never takes centre stage as he does in Reform. Despite hushed whispers of post-liberalism, Reform eschews the paternalism once endemic to the British right. Outmoded ideas stemming from the Big Society are unable to contend with the Britain of 2026 — where a clientelist state impedes the best and brightest to prop up their loyal unproductive class. As previously noted in these pages, the productive classes as a whole comprise Reform’s coalition. Reform’s desired regulatory bonfire dwarfs even that of the AfD — rolling back the state to let hard-working people get on with it.

This particular mission means that the civilisational politics endemic to Europopulism often takes a backseat in Reform’s communications, despite the orientation of Danny Kruger and, to a lesser extent, James Orr. That is in part because invoking the classics would contradict Reform’s everyman, ITV2 aesthetic. In addition, Farage’s role in securing Brexit, and the centrality of that fight in the political imaginations of many of his longest-standing supporters, mean that Reform will, for the foreseeable future, have a very different attitude towards the ‘idea of Europe’ than its continental colleagues do. Sovereigntism, a key plank of populists everywhere, in Britain remains an argument against integration — whereas many European populists have come, slowly and haltingly, to the conclusion that sovereignty in the world requires some co-operation at the European level.

Nor does Reform cast Islam as a macrocosmic enemy to our way of life. Scrutiny of sharia courts and radicalisation is but one facet of Reform’s broader anti-migration position. Some of the worst evils committed on our soil have been committed by first-and-second-generation Islamic migrants, but British voters rarely discriminate in their opposition to migration. The recent rehabilitation of the post-2004 Polish influx is justifiable, but we would do well to remember the common disdain once felt towards eastern European migrants. Equally, the Boriswave swept away any residual goodwill felt towards cricket-playing Indian doctors — today, the archetypical Sikh surname is not Singh, but Digwa. Reform grasped that which eluded Hodges et al, in the wake of Southport — it didn’t matter that Rudakubana was not Muslim. It’s that he was here in the first place, through lackadaisical immigration policy. If Reform are to fulfil the supply shortage in articulating the national will, they must reflect Britain’s fatigue with immigration as a whole. ‘Based Sikhism’ has run its course, and we’d do well to avoid making any concessions for others.

A Special Relationship?

Reform’s distance from Europopulism invites their comparison with Trump. Rather than pure imitation, the Republican project provides an ongoing case study from which Reform can learn. There have already been cosmetic allusions to Trump’s second term — local government DOGE programmes and a mooted British ICE are certainly required, but want for better branding. Similarly, the failure of Trump’s first term (and subsequent Day One fixes outlined in Project 2025) merit study in Millbank. A looming Reform victory has already energised SW1’s long-dormant fascination with electoral reform — this time pursued to Farage’s detriment. That such cynical moves are already being considered to prevent Reform taking power suggests that 2029 is our one and only chance. The successor to an impotent Reform government would spare no effort in preventing their re-election. At the risk of preaching to the choir, I implore well-connected readers to accelerate progress towards a Project 202x.

There are obvious operational lessons to be learnt from the US. We can lament foreign policy decisions, but one must admire their pursuit with such speed and ruthlessness. (Un)fortunately, remaking the world order is something now beyond Britain’s capability. On the international stage, Reform must stay afloat rather than chart a new course. Other writers have outlined how Britain may best engage with Russia in the coming years, and this essay will not reinvent the wheel by pitching foreign policy to Farage. Britain can neither pretend to hegemony, nor have the luxury of pursuing isolation. Cases can be made for closer alignment with Europe, or hoping for a friendly White House.

As regards mass deportations, ICE leaves a lot to be desired. Such a task necessitates a degree of heavy-handedness, but several poorly-prosecuted operations in the public eye have soured opinion towards the programme. It’s well-understood that, under Zia Yusuf, a British ICE must avoid the ‘bad optics’ which haunt US border enforcement. However, it is worth considering that, unlike the US, Britain’s history as a homogenous, un-multicultural polity engenders a latent ethnic nationalism. Whether on the right or left, Britons more readily disdain multiculturalism than Americans. While British ICE must still run a tight ship (and, preferably, adopt a better name), it demonstrates that Reform have the requisite headroom to pursue a more explicitly nativist politics than ever possible in a creedal nation.

In a similar vein, abortion and gay marriage — bread-and-butter issues for the US right — are near-enough settled questions in Britain. Assisted dying is the closest issue with any salience, and is not a hill worth dying on. One would wager that Britain’s religious right is as Islamic as it is Christian (if not more so) — bizarrely, there are more votes to be won in defending the right to shag one’s cousin than the life of the unborn. Short of courting Iqbal Mohamed’s defection, Reform have little reason to advance social conservatism. With just five years in power, political capital must be expended on things which move the needle. Zia Yusuf’s brief as Home Secretary is to stop the boats, reverse the Boriswave and close the vape shops. Regarding This Trans Business, it is enough to be tough on woke, tough on the causes of woke.

Populism with British Characteristics

All the movements outlined in this piece share a common factor: they fulfil the demand of the common man. Without consent, establishment parties across the West have pursued policies detrimental to ordinary people. The most obvious of these is mass immigration, though this is often accompanied by, and plays a role in, industrial decline, clientelism, and high crime. As in Britain, the West’s multifaceted crises stem from choices made by those in power. It goes without saying that the emergence of insurgent right-wing parties is a corrective to this, rather than a shadowy ploy directed from the Kremlin.

These parties offer a ‘common sense’ platform shaped by domestic political circumstances, and tailored to resolve the specific conditions of their national malaise. While this often looks similar, the variety of solutions offered reflects the intrinsic link to the will of the people. The AfD, PiS, and Trump’s Republican Party are proponents of the same wider movement, but must be understood as distinct entities. All share this same common factor, though inhabit different families within the populist right.

Britain’s situation is distinct from that of the US, El Salvador, or even France, and therefore provokes a distinct reaction. The silent majority clamour not for abortion bans or a revival of Judeo-Christian values, but for sending the buggers back. Populism, by its very nature, distils the will of the people into a political project. In response to Britain’s unique political circumstances, Reform’s position is an endogenous expression of the British volonté générale. This is distinct from that of the French or Germans — which have more in common with one another than they do ours.

Though it’s too early to mark Reform out as exceptionally hardline, they best express the British public’s unqualified fatigue with high migration. Public ire is not solely reserved for Islam — successive waves of migration (and subsequent atrocities) have hardened the national mood against all incomers. Likewise, a uniquely nonsensical approach to welfare engendered a working-class ressentiment towards scroungers and cheats — something which finds expression through championing ‘Alarm Clock Britain’. If enacted, their straightforward mission would be undoubtedly popular. This is inherent to common-sense politics.

Whether Reform gets a chance to enact the popular will remains to be seen. In just two years of prominence, they have faced cancelled elections, regime libel, and procedural warfare. The uniparty have closed ranks in support of a gimp dressed as a bin. It’s not entirely inconceivable that Burnham calls an early election or engages in constitutional chicanery to wrongfoot Reform and lock them out of power, before trying to imprison those who remain. While Reform could come to resemble the RN more easily than they could the Republican Party, there is much to learn from the latter’s success against all odds.

What factions could emerge out of a Reform majority? Though we all hope for comprehensive vetting, there will likely be a substrate of unsuitable MPs — this comes with being the voice of the people. Reform’s coalition is a broad one, and one would expect a diversity of opinions as regards fiscal policy and culture war issues. Perhaps some will look to the continent, and seek closer alignment with a Europe of Nations. Shire reactionaries not tempted away by Downes’ snake oil may stymie your author’s dreams of a laissez-faire, liquid lunching Britain. It is, as ever in this country, the composition of the few hundred or so that make up a majority in Parliament that will decide what comes next for the party of the nation. Whatever the makeup of this majority will be, we can only hope that they deliver what they were elected to do — reform Broken Britain. When Farage eventually retires and is made Marquess of Clacton, who, dear reader, will step in and lead the party to a third term? It could be you.

This article was written by Thomas Bretton, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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This horde, a half-naked rabble, had been seemingly loaded up into trucks and told to go to the border with little in the way of preparation. Some (though by no means all) of the initial wave appear to have eventually returned after realising there was nothing for them once the initial rush subsided, while the initial chaotic scenes equally served to encourage more prepared migrants from Morocco and further afield to make more genuine attempts of their own.

Spanish officials, including even the famously weak and treasonous Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, described this mass incursion as a violation of territorial integrity. Migrants themselves reported that Moroccan police waved them forward rather than stopping them, and social media videos of open crossings spread rapidly inside Morocco. Far from being a merely spontaneous reaction to a recent Spanish court ruling on maritime returns, this was clearly the deliberate opening of a pressure valve by the Moroccan state against Spanish territory it has long coveted. It had clearly secured at the very least tacit US-Israeli backing, after protracted lobbying of the US government. Signs of this diplomatic tête-à-tête include King Mohammed VI naming a road after Donald Trump, and the description of Ceuta and Melilla as ‘Moroccan territory’ by close allies of Marco Rubio in a budget report from the House of Representatives. The basic pattern of Morocco’s behaviour here echoes earlier, smaller surges, but the scale and facilitation make this recent episode an act of nothing other than state-sponsored aggression on European sovereign territory.

Such conduct is completely unacceptable. Furthermore, these actions should only be understood in relation to Morocco’s standing claim that Ceuta and Melilla are ‘occupied’ Moroccan soil — a claim which is historically false and strategically intolerable. These claims are backed, again, by US-Israel, partly to punish Sánchez for a lack of cooperation on NATO spending and diplomatic posturing against Israel’s wars. Sánchez had also injured his international standing further by angering European partners over the Spanish government’s actively malignant immigration policy; as a consequence, the immediate response of many European countries (led by Italy) to the incursion was to criticise, rather than to support, Spain. However, as the situation stands in Cueta — it would be unwise to leave the Spaniards in the dirt. These two cities have been under continuous Iberian sovereignty for centuries and (as many observers have pointed out) for longer than the modern Moroccan state has existed.

Ceuta was seized by Portugal in 1415 as the opening move of Iberian expansion into North Africa. After the Iberian Union it passed under Spanish control; when Portugal regained independence in 1640 the city itself chose to remain with the Spanish Crown, a decision confirmed by the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. Melilla was taken by Castile in 1497, five years after the fall of Granada, in a largely uncontested occupation of a ruined settlement. Nineteenth-century treaties fixed the present land borders: the Treaty of Wad-Ras in 1860 expanded Ceuta’s perimeter after the Hispano-Moroccan War, while subsequent agreements in 1861-62 and later demarcations settled Melilla’s limits. Other smaller nearby holdings which the Spanish call plazas de soberanía — namely Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, the Alhucemas Islands, the Chafarinas — were secured in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Kingdom of Morocco, as a sovereign entity recognised by Spain, dates from the end of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1956. It has never exercised sovereignty over either city or the islets, and neither has any predecessor state unless one is willing to go back half a millennium into history. Moroccan maps that erase these borders represent post-colonial banana republic irredentism of the worst kind.

It must also be noted that the deeper historical character of the North African shore facing Spain is as far removed from that of a peaceful trading partner as one could possibly imagine. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the Barbary corsairs — operating from ports that included Moroccan ones, most notoriously the independent corsair republic of Salé-Rabat, formed by expelled Moriscos and various other renegades — raided European shipping and coasts as far as Iceland, Britain and Ireland.

Estimates of Europeans captured and enslaved under this regime run from several hundred thousand to more than a million from 1500 to 1800. Captives were sold in slave markets, with this trade providing a major revenue source for local rulers, who took a share of the prizes. Morocco’s Alawī sultans actively encouraged the corsairs as a source of income. European powers paid tribute for safe passage or fought repeated campaigns — indeed, the United States fought its first overseas wars against the Barbary states. The French conquest of Algiers in 1830 largely ended the system. In a very real way, from Carthage to Al-Andalus and beyond, the position of the Maghreb in relation to Europe is an excellent barometer of civilisational health, with the pacification of North Africa correlating well with the ascent of European power.

The Spanish-Moroccan frontier is, for what it’s worth, probably the starkest ethnocultural divide within the European Space. On a genetic level, Spaniards, like all Europeans, are considerably more closely related to Turks than to Moroccans on standard autosomal measures, with Anatolian Turks sitting within a broader West Eurasian continuum, and Moroccans by contrast forming a distinct North African cluster dominated by isolated Maghrebi ancestry plus sub-Saharan African admixture.

Contemporary data on Moroccan populations inside Europe demonstrate just how practical this gulf is.

In Spain, Moroccan nationals accounted for 7.65% of all suspects in sexual crimes according to 2024 Interior Ministry figures, despite comprising only around 1-2% of the resident population. For crimes in general, even when age- and sex-adjusted, Moroccan adults commit crime at more than double the native Spanish rate. Africans as a group — of whom in Spain Moroccans form by far the largest contingent — show particularly elevated involvement in violent and property offences.

This is by no means confined to Spain. In the Netherlands, official statistics for 2023 record a suspect rate of 2.8% among people of Moroccan origin against 0.6% for those of native Dutch origin. Parallel patterns of Maghrebi over-representation appear in the available French and Belgian data too. Morocco produced Ridouan Taghi, one of the most notorious gangsters in Dutch history — whose gang had become powerful enough to be able to murder a nationally prominent crime reporter and investigator, Peter R de Vries, as well as the lawyer and brother of a witness during Taghi’s own ‘megatrial’. The vicious riots in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands by Moroccan diasporics prompted by the success of their home country’s team (itself largely comprised of Moroccans born in Europe) during the World Cup laid bare a hardly concealed contempt for their host nations.

Moroccans are also a highly welfare-dependent population. Moroccans constitute nearly half of all foreign recipients of Spain’s equivalent of Universal Credit, the Ingreso Mínimo Vital, making up around 70,000 of 140,000 foreign claimants despite being only one large nationality among many. In the Netherlands, official figures show first-generation Moroccan migrants receiving social assistance (bijstand) at a rate of 20.4%, against a national average of 4.2% and roughly 2.3% for those of native Dutch origin. Unemployment among Moroccan immigrants in Spain stands at 27%, more than three times the native rate of 8%. Similar patterns appear across other European countries with substantial Moroccan populations.

Let us then consider what could be done.

Military action taken in response to a foreign state’s attempt to annex sovereign territory should obviously not be verboten. Examining how things stand today, we already see that Spain’s military advantages are decisive for a limited, high-intensity campaign focused on the northern littoral. Despite being underfunded in comparison to other European powers, Spain has a modern navy and air force, and a defence budget several times that of Morocco’s (around $30-35 billion versus $6 billion). Morocco lacks undersea or high-end air assets, and its navy remains modest. Its main advantages lie in the fact that it has more active personnel and main battle tanks, and would have all the obvious benefits of home-ground logistics, as well as recent US and Israeli equipment upgrades.

A Spanish-led coalition of the willing drawing on other European contributions for logistics and air cover could secure the northern coastal strip, neutralise the border pressure points at Ceuta and Melilla, and establish control of key ports such as Tangier while avoiding a deep inland occupation of the Atlas or the desert. This would be closer to a reinforced version of historical Spanish actions in the Rif and the plazas than a continental war of attrition.

Morocco, of course, has its unholy alliance with US-Israel which will need to be reckoned with. It has been a participant in Abraham Accords normalisation with Israel since 2020, and as thanks has been the recipient of explicit American recognition of its claim to Western Sahara. Yet Israel is also heavily engaged on its home front and near abroad for the foreseeable future; the United States, even under administrations friendly to Morocco, one hopes, would have limited appetite for direct confrontation with a NATO ally over North African enclaves that are unambiguously Spanish under international practice (and is itself bogged down, for the foreseeable future, in its war on the behalf of Israel against Iran).

European resolve to back Spain would test how far Washington is prepared to go in defence of Israel’s preferred North African client against actual European territorial integrity. A short, decisive Spanish operation that presents a fait accompli before full diplomatic mobilisation would maximise the chance of success.

None of this, of course, is feasible at the current moment under the present Spanish government. Pedro Sánchez’s mass regularisation programme, opened in 2026, drew more than a million applications and forms part of a broader pattern of treasonous policies enacted by establishment politicians across Europe — of whom Sánchez is quite possibly the worst of all — and symptomatic of the deeper issue of Europe’s postwar settlement that subordinates itself to the religiously fanatic defence of Human Rights. It goes without saying that Sánchez should be removed from office and thrown in prison by a patriotic government which institutes a new constitution entirely.

The end state should be a permanent reduction of the Moroccan threat. At minimum, Spain or the European coalition manages the critical port city of Tangier as an international zone; the city was already jointly governed by several European states until 1956 to preserve its neutrality and important commercial position (and recent large-scale Moroccan infrastructure investment in the port and a nearby industrial complex has only increased its value should it be seized). Slightly more ambitiously, it connects a coastal security zone between it and Ceuta.

More ambitiously still, a band extending south and west to Rabat and Casablanca can be secured and opened to European settlement. The resulting territory would function as a sunshine paradise for Europeans, an economic zone for large-scale solar generation feeding European grids, and restore Tangier to its natural place as a cosmopolitan centre of commerce, banking, and bohemianism. Morocco would retain full independence, of course, but stripped of the capacity to threaten the Strait or to serve as a demographic launching pad ever again, and should be squeezed from the south by an independent Western Sahara and from the east by a European-aligned Rif Berber state.

In this grander vision, territorial holdings taken from coastal Morocco could be narrowly national (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, British zones) or, as there is already precedent, a joint pan-European administration, or some combination of the two. The British aspect is of particular interest, owing to Britain’s existing holding in Gibraltar. I can already hear the howls of BR dismay at the idea that Britain would defend Spanish interests in this region, to which I say: consider the bigger picture and the bigger prize. And to the Spanish, of course, I would urge them to consider giving some Moroccan territory to Britain in exchange for Gibraltar if the territorial integrity of Iberia is so important to them.

It should go without saying that Moroccan populations resident in Spain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe will need to be carefully managed over the course of this operation. Their massive criminal elements in Europe will almost inevitably descend into riotous violence, and for the public’s safety they should ideally be interned.

In the medium term, the necessary solution would likely be to expel the bulk of the Moroccan population currently resident in Europe. While sending them ‘back’ to Rump Morocco is logical on the face of it (and would hardly be the worst outcome), there may in fact be a stronger case for sending them instead to a truly weak state such as the Central African Republic rather than a reconstituted Moroccan homeland that they would serve to demographically buttress. But then again, a hypothetical Rifian client state could also absorb the many Rifians among the Moroccan diaspora as well. Fully untangling this interesting knot of questions related to remigration policy is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article to consider in full. But rest assured, dear reader, the author is no neoconservative nor warmonger, and has instead dedicated this article to the realm of mere thought experiment. What the wider rectification of Europe’s century of humiliation will look like is yet to be determined.

Morocco, if the shoe were truly on the other foot, would be among the lower-hanging fruits whose conquest could herald a new age of expansionist remigratory colonialism — even if only after Spain and Europe have first recovered the political will and freedom of action that the postwar, US-enforced postcolonial order currently restrains. A lightning strike against this alien and hostile country, a mere ten miles across the Strait of Gibraltar, to secure the northern littoral and impose a durable settlement is in fact feasible. Europe — and Spain most of all — has spent decades absorbing the consequences of Moroccan behaviour. It may be time to impose some small costs in the opposite direction.

This article was written by Strategic Advisor, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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For someone who at that stage had not been farther than the shores of the Mediterranean, all of this was of course mind-boggling. The sheer difference of India was indeed, to use a cliché, an assault on the senses. The heat, the cows wandering down the street, the extravagance of the architecture both Hindu and Muslim, and the chaotic traffic could not have been more different from the London and Oxford of my daily existence back home. But, without a doubt, it was the poverty which was most striking. Whilst my hosts were modestly comfortable, every town was thronged with underfed children begging at the traffic lights. A trip to a village a few hours out of Delhi opened my eyes to the even worse depredations and despair of rural poverty.

Decades later, my daughter won a scholarship at her college to be hosted by an Indian foundation and tour the sub-continent for a month. I joined her for a week and found a very different India. For sure, standards of living were still way below those of Britain, but the narrowing of the gap was astonishing. At the top end there was a whole new class of the affluent, the very affluent and the super affluent, all evident from the cars, the hotels and the shopping malls. But even at the bottom end, at least in the towns, the misery was noticeably attenuated. It is a line I often use against Malthusians: that when I went to India most recently, its population had doubled since my first visit while conditions everywhere, from the evident level of nutrition among the people to the state of the railways, had been genuinely improved almost beyond recognition.

The data backs up my impressions: since 1985 India’s infant mortality rate has plunged by 75% and is now quite close to where it was in the UK when I was born in the mid-1960s. At the time of my first visit to India, the average Indian could expect a life almost two decades shorter than the average Briton. Today that gap has almost halved, to not much more than a decade. And in the period of the current century, barely a generation, undernourishment in India relative to population size has halved. None of this is to say that India is a paradise on earth or that its people have reached material nirvana. But it would be foolish to ignore the enormous progress achieved since I first touched down in the country more than four decades ago. In raw size, the Indian economy will soon surpass that of its onetime colonial master. In price-adjusted terms (at ‘purchasing power parity’) it is already vastly larger. Income per capita and living standards will remain lower than the UK, but that gap will continue to diminish.

The year before my first visit to India, we had been exposed on the television to the horrors of the famine unfolding in Ethiopia. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, died of hunger. Like the other famines of the late twentieth century — in China in the late 1950s / early 1960s and in North Korea in the late 1990s — the Ethiopian calamity had more to do with the machinations and incompetence of a Marxist administration than it had to do with any food shortages which could not have been dealt with. Nevertheless, the compassion of people across the developed world was roused. Bob Geldof’s 1984 hit ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ awakened the world’s conscience and raised millions. About the same time, an acquaintance of mine passed the civil service exams and chose to join the Overseas Development Agency (later DFID). As well as being prestigious and exciting, it seemed like the most noble of callings.

All of this has significance for the policy debate as newly-crowned Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces calls to increase international aid from its current 0.3% back to the 0.7% it reached under the Cameron administration, in line with the 2005 Gleneagles Summit pledge. This comes at a time when the UK’s public finances are under exceptional pressure. The welfare spend has ballooned while an ageing population has ensured an ever-rising bill for pensions and healthcare. There are calls for a significant rise in military spending. Tax levels are crushingly high, arguably close to a ‘Laffer’ point where further rises will reduce the overall take. And all the while, borrowing continues apace and the national debt is at its highest since the immediate post-war period. And yet, if reports are to be believed, Burnham is trying to map out a path to the restoration of aid to its previous highs.

There are many arguments for and against aid. Some readers of Pimlico Journal likely object to a narrowly utilitarian determination of the case for foreign aid. But these decisions continue to be made on such logic by Western states and should be contended with on their own terms. On the one hand, a pound spent in the poorest communities in the world tends to have a more powerful impact on people’s lives than it has back home. On the other, every marginal pound the government spends is one borrowed. Should we be financing help for others from the debt markets — like a deeply indebted near-bankrupt generously helping others to funds he has just managed to wheedle out of the bank manager?

This debate becomes a dialogue of the deaf. We have some kind of ‘responsibility to all of humanity’; ‘with so many of our public services neglected at home, should we be prioritising those responsibilities over local requirements?’ At a now oft-cited dinner at Nuffield College, Oxford, my friend David Goodhart was astonished to hear the head of the Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, state that his objective was global rather than national welfare, the logic of which would suggest an indifference between a British citizen and anyone across the globe. The implication of such an approach, given that Britain remains a relatively wealthy country, would be to redistribute our national wealth until the average citizen has the living standard of, say, Turkey.

The advocates for aid might point out that the progress made in a country like India has in part been achieved precisely because of the generosity of a giver like the UK. Its regular detractors probably counter that in fact India’s economic reforms since the early 1990s, removing many of the Nehruvian Fabian-inspired restrictions, have acted as a vastly greater force for change than any paltry crumbs from the table of the West. Similarly, they would argue, China has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty without depending on Western aid but through turning its back, at least in part, on Communism and embracing the market. The most impactful thing the rich world did, by far, was not to scatter its charity but to open its markets and allow the toiling masses of the South and East to meet its needs. ‘Trade, not aid’, the slogan goes.

And then, although aid often has done much good, it is equally open to corruption. Witnessing some government officials swanning around Geneva or Zurich, one wonders how much aid money has simply gone to support the Swiss banking industry (which, in fairness, has tightened up on money laundering in recent years). The reasons for there being no Palestinian state are varied and contentious. But it can be explained by considering the $13m presidential palace Abu Mazen was preparing for himself in Ramallah while he was supposed to be creating such a state. For the aid-addled Palestinian Authority, financial assistance has been corrupting and debilitating, as it has been for many others. Meanwhile, giving aid to nuclear India, which manages to finance a space programme and spends more on its military than we do, might be argued as subsidising a superpower.

The circularity of this debate cannot fully be explained without the critical aspect of the ‘white guilt/saviour’ complexes amongst those who argue for it — aid has not been so much about the welfare of the recipients but the self-regard of the donor. The arguments for and against aid are all too often outdated; they ignore the basic change in the demographic facts, and a reasonable conversation about the issue, regardless of one’s ethical framework, cannot take place without first bringing them to the fore.

We have already seen how Indian infant mortality, life expectancy and nutrition have been revolutionised in the past few decades. For most of human history, progress depended on a good harvest or a fortuitous but all-too-rare technological breakthrough. Since the dawn of, at least, agriculture thousands of years ago, most of humanity has lived more or less close to the edge of penury and hunger, if not starvation. The harsh conditions the Reverend Malthus described in the first edition of his essay on population, published in 1798, held for more people most of the time. The last two centuries have been a story of human escape from those conditions. The first to emerge were the British and Americans. Europe followed and then eventually the rest of the world — parts of Africa are still in the process. I told this story and charted its political and economic implications in my second book, ‘The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World’. The world of 1984, when Bob Geldof sang for Ethiopia and 1985 when I first went to India, was a moment in time when a large chunk of the globe was still extricating itself from the Malthusian nightmare and those who already had could do more than look on with pity at the condition but could actively engage in its amelioration.

It is not just India which is now in a very different place, and indeed, not even particularly India. However impressive India’s advance has been in terms of the welfare of its people, and however important this is given the sheer scale of India, now the world’s most populous country, others have moved even faster. China, until recently the world’s population number one, has seen its infant mortality rate drop from more than forty per thousand in the mid-1980s to less than eight, not much above what prevails in the United States. And the life expectancy of the average American and Chinese is now more or less equivalent. Bangladesh has brought down the share of infants who die within their first year from more than 10% to less than 2% over the same period, while literacy rates have grown from less than one third to around 80%. Similar stories can be told of most countries in the traditionally poor parts of the world such as Latin America. Today the average Ethiopian is relatively well fed. The moral question of aid or no aid today is simply different to the one asked to the public, whose understanding of the terms is still largely shaped by Geldof’s hit song.

Overall, the world has undergone over the past four decades or so an extraordinary process, as I explained in my third book ‘Tomorrow’s People’, of demographically ‘getting to Denmark’. The term, originally coined by Francis Fukuyama, suggested that there was a global movement towards the indisputable calm, peace and constitutional good order achieved by the Danes. But while Fukuyama’s hypothesis is widely disputed — though often misunderstood — it is certainly applicable to demography if not to politics. Reasonably long life expectancy (and modest to low fertility) are the hallmarks of increasingly large numbers of people across the globe. The fertility side of the equation is complex and multi-faceted, but undoubtedly does have an element which testifies to global progress. (It must be better, surely, than Kenyan women are having today around three children each, not the seven they were bearing in the 1980s.) The mortality side must undoubtedly be seen as unmitigated good news, as children who once would have died in infancy make it through to adulthood and those in middle age have a reasonable expectation of experiencing some kind of old age.

All of this cannot but have implications for the question of aid. In the UK we no longer lead lives of towering material prosperity when compared to the rest of the world. It is not just that people like the Irish and Poles — relatively close-by and traditionally impoverished — no longer need to come to Britain in search of better living standards. (The Irish are unquestionably better-off and the Poles, if not already, are on the path to being so.) It is that the very poorest on the globe, those once called ‘the wretched of the earth’, are no longer quite so wretched or — in many cases — anything like so wretched. If we are to take the cosmopolitan welfarism which David Goodhart suggests Gus O’Donnell espoused, then we still have a long way to go before the average Briton is no better off than the average human. But if our motive is to relieve the very worst and most extreme need, then we have to acknowledge that that need has to a very large extent already been alleviated through our pursuing our commercial interests rather than through our opening our charitable hearts. We could even be completely cold-hearted and care for nought but ourselves; this fact would remain true.

If the multi-faceted debates about the size and scale of the aid budget do not take account of the increase in global welfare which can be seen in the demographic data, and we remain within the paradigm of the mid-eighties as if nothing had changed since then, then we will be failing to allow for the most dramatic transformation in raw material conditions the species has ever experienced. As so often, demography does not provide all of the answers, but to fail to take account of it when the facts and figures are so readily available and so utterly incontrovertible would be inexcusable.

This article was written by guest contributor Paul Morland. Paul is a demographer, author and broadcaster. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Thumbnail: ‘Bob Geldof, Youssou N’Dour, Campino and Bono’ by U2gigs.com is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.