This week, we take a look at emerging divisions within Reform, ask whether the party is suffering from a lack of radicalism, and explore who is doing the most to maintain the party’s changemaking credentials.

This newsletter’s agenda: New divisions emerge in Reform (full feature)

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Speaking of the ideological crisis the Labour Party finds itself in, Tom McTague succinctly described the set of economic and geopolitical issues that the country has been stuck with for the last ten years. Our place as America’s concierge in Europe, a doorway between continental goods and Atlantic capital, was shaken by the financial crash in 2008 and broken in 2016 with the Leave vote in the EU Referendum and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Much of the political turbulence this country has faced since those two consequential years has been a result of the shock they inflicted on our political leadership — who were (and are) faced with the necessity to confront the existential threats facing our country for the first time. ‘We just don’t have answers… nobody is coming up with an answer of how this country is going to get out of the doom loop it is in.’ McTague’s words ring true not just for the Labour Party of which he was speaking of, but also for the right.

What McTague did not address, whilst pointing out the cycle of failed Prime Ministers coming and going, is how far back the problem goes. The warm delights of post-war consumerism, of abundant access to international goods and capital, masked what was for Britain a deeply traumatic imperial collapse. David Edgerton proposed in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (2018) that post-war Britain emerged independent of its own collapsing empire, in much the same manner as the post-colonial states of Africa or Asia, asserting its own national identity and interests. His conception of post-war Britain is one in which, for a brief few decades, there existed a British nation, one that had broken free from a global empire that was a playground for ‘gentleman financiers’, before it was subsumed into another form of globalisation by Thatcher, Major, and Blair. For the first time in its history, he argues, British politics, industry and economic life was oriented around the national principle in the years 1945-79. Along with Adam Tooze, Edgerton has become the darling of a certain kind of leftist. The aping of Edgerton’s National Left is best exemplified in Will Lloyd’s recent profile of Ed ‘British Gaullist’ Miliband — which specifically chose to highlight Miliband’s nationalism. After a decade of humiliation for the left, and the internationalist project overall, it is unsurprising that some of its supporters are beginning to reconsider their priors, and Edgerton offers the British left a certain kind of historical legitimacy that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Though I have some sympathy with Edgerton’s view, I find the notion that we are entering our first big moment of post-war national self-conception more compelling than the idea we are entering our second. It would be nostalgic to retroactively look at the consensus that spanned from Attlee to Callaghan as something other than a transitory period in which the nation scrambled around awkwardly, looking to maintain at least some place in the sun. In many ways, we were no more disentangled from Empire between 1945 and 1979 than we were before or even after. As Edgerton himself notes, British industry and trade may well have been more ‘national’ than ever before insofar as it was ostensibly organised around the interests of the nation as a whole, but in other ways it was more imperial than the high mark of Britain’s formal control over foreign territories. It was in the 1950s that the share of trade with the Commonwealth was at its peak, and not a century prior, when the country was the uncontested workshop of the world. Attlee’s economy depended upon dollar exports of Malayan rubber and Ghanaian cocoa, and sought to foster new resource extraction initiatives (such as the Tanganyika groundnut scheme) to help maintain the strength of Sterling and avoid importing dollars. Though the architects of Imperial Preference had struggled to tighten economic integration with the Dominions and Colonies, the Empire had become more important to the British economy after the end of that framework. Imperial Chemical Industries, the largest chemicals manufacturer in Britain for a long period of its history, was never nationalised, but in 1955 a company book for employees and shareholders sought to explain the manner in which it ‘discharges its responsibilities to Great Britain and the British Commonwealth of Nations’. The process of disentanglement was ongoing and incomplete.

The post-war period was also mired by decades of distraction abroad, with far more conflict happening away from Europe than we had dealt with before the Second World War. Even after throwing away so much of our empire as quickly as possible, we were still left with dozens of anachronistic overseas territories which created defensive obligations and gave those who sought them opportunities to LARP Empire. It is in this context that territories such as Akrotiri and Dhekelia can be seen as barnacles on the hull of a ghost ship.

You may refer to Britain’s former continental love affair, best represented by men such as Ted Heath and Oswald Mosley, as evidence to the contrary — proof that Britain had turned away from Empire. The scars of the two European civil wars left many of their generation pining for European unity and the prevalence of collective common interest, against the protestations of anti-racist liberals such as Enoch Powell and nationalist socialists such as Michael Foot and Tony Benn. But, if anything, our entry into the European Economic Community was not the assertion of national and continental interests in the shadow of empire but a continuation of imperial ambition and the delay of national self-conceptualisation. Throughout our fall from first to second to third power status, we have continued to present ourselves as a leading player on the world stage. Our European Union membership sated our desire for the comforting illusion of a continued nineteenth century, with Britain arranging new Concerts of Europe, as in Humphrey’s dictum. Given that, from the bloc’s foundation, half of its members were set against our entry precisely because they knew too well the nature of our ambitions, it could never have been so — and as this became ever more clear, support for our membership waned.

Labour’s 1945 victory was a class — and national — revolution. The globalised elites of the imperial class system, the gentlemanly aristocrats, financiers and industrialists who saw the export of British goods, capital and savings as indistinguishable from the national interest, were replaced by a new type of technocratic management of national life and industry that emphasised the strength of the domestic market via demand-management and the principle of full-employment, meaning that for the first time policy sought primarily to guarantee the security of the working majority.

The world that came before was hierarchical and deferential to a degree we now struggle to understand. The myths of ‘Tory democracy’ and aristocratic paternalism may have eased Conservative acceptance of the new Keynesian paradigm and the welfare state, but writers on the left throughout the early-mid twentieth century argued unequivocally that working-class culture must be the national culture for a new democratic Britain. Yer da’s intellectuals — men like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and R.H. Tawney — saw the communal, mutual-aid traditions of the working class as the only force that could provide an organically socialist alternative to Tory paternalism or bourgeois individualism. Hoggart despised the seeping commercialisation and Americanisation of mass culture. Their romanticised and rather parochial conception of the working-class experience, based on collective self-improvement, offered ways of living that could be extended to the whole society. Gentlemanliness was out; Britain, the real nation, was a workers’ state — or so was the hope.

The unprecedented security that industrial democracy and socialism brought to workers was underpinned by austerity and discipline. But as material comforts became increasingly widely available and the wartime spirit of restraint abated, the controls that sustained the national framework became increasingly unpopular, even if the post-war economic settlement itself was generally approved of. These contradictory demands, however closely held by the public, could not be sustained forever, and the partisans for a nationalist socialist Britain, such as Tony Benn, understood that their impulse to resist liberalisation — and preserve the new workers’ state — required a wholehearted commitment to what amounted to nothing less than a permanent siege economy. In the end, Labour’s austere industrial security gave way to SuperMac’s consumer society and bourgeois aspiration, a trajectory that could not be put into reverse. In this sense, by the 1980s, liberalisation had culminated in a fully-fledged revival of the economic forces of globalisation — especially of finance and its privileged place in the British system — which ultimately saw the Home Islands once again as a node within a global empire of free-moving capital.

Edgerton’s account of a nationalist golden age, as a man of the left, predictably falls most flat in its treatment of post-war migration and the issue of race — or in other words, the defining question of national identity. An obvious point of continuity between Edgerton’s post-war period and what came after is the distinctly anti-national endorsement of multiracialism and multiculturalism. Much of Britain’s political class indulged in this, entirely independently of the degree to which they championed economic globalisation. There is a widespread assumption on the online right that we had a self-consciously ethnic conception of British national identity before Blair. This is a projection of distinctly modern attitudes, which we assume must have been natural in a society with such demographic homogeneity. In fact, it is often the confrontation with the other that solidifies a certain understanding of identity. There is a distinction between a vague, commonly held understanding of some connection between a nation and an ethnos, and the explicit conceptual unification of the two.

Before Attlee, there may have been paper rights for all British subjects to travel freely across the territories of the Empire, but in practice very few overseas subjects made use of them. Pre-war governments had introduced regulations that permitted inspectors to prevent the docking and settlement of aliens, precisely because they were aware of the tensions created by even very small numbers of resident foreigners in Britain. One example is the fracas between black dockworkers and demobilised soldiers returning from the war as early as 1919.

Attlee’s government, however, codified and made real the inchoate logic of free movement, and in doing so pushed the legal understanding of Britishness away from the national principle. The 1948 British Nationality Act opened the door to immigration from the New Commonwealth, a shallow euphemism for the non-white colonies. Britain’s elite in the post-war period, just as much as in the decades of ‘neoliberalism’, had hoped to ignore the ugly and violent realities of ‘Empire coming Home’. It was in the nation itself that resistance to mass immigration manifested. Non-whites were excluded from British society, amenities and employment. Minorities faced violence from the National Front. Britain was indeed a racist society, and racial strife was an immediate fact of life from the first settlement of aliens. Resistance, too, was violent and ugly, and distasteful to our sensibilities — but, simply, the British people were never asked.

Governments were immediately aware of the fraught situation, and yet were resistant to straightforwardly rejecting the most overtly damaging legacy of Empire, partly due to new fears of appearing racially bigoted, and partly on the grounds that it would weaken Britain’s standing in the then-third-world New Commonwealth — which was increasingly flirting with Soviet influence. A fudge was reached on the race and migration question — implementing a directly American-inspired ‘civil rights’ anti-discrimination framework in response to the burgeoning reality of segregation, while arresting the inflow of Commonwealth immigration by new controls with Acts strictly limiting further Asian and black migration. Ultimately, the innovation of a British citizenship framework was established under Thatcher. The ambivalence our elites showed to the unprecedented and existential transformation of our country through mass immigration demonstrates the insufficiency of describing the period as truly national. There is a throughline from the ‘Together’ poster to today, as much as the British Pathé enjoyer might wish to ignore it. Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ and Tennyson’s ‘Timbuctoo’ sit happily within the liberal conception of Britain’s past and present.

My issues with Edgerton aside, the left-of-centre motivation in adopting his frame is an entirely natural, and mostly sincere acceptance of the changing world. The role that Britain has played for the last half century no longer exists. Being the Milchkuh for American capital interests in Europe once gave us lucrative opportunities, but now all that remains is what we are: a cold, rainy group of islands in the North Atlantic.

Britain, going back to the Acts of Union 1707, has never had a set of conditions which meant that it had to conceive of itself as principally a nation first and a nation only — without interests outside of the British Isles, and unconcerned with the goings on of the outside world. Moreover, a truly historical people, such as the British have been — as contrasted with, say, the Slovakians — will always seek to answer the question of their place in the wider world, and cannot be satisfied with life in the Shire. Simply whiling the time away, living to perpetuate a way of life, is not enough — even outside of the economic costs usually incurred by isolation.

Neither of these conditions continue to hold in the Britain of today. As the left is beginning to recognise, we are caught in a set of economic and political circumstances which guide us towards a new isolationist period. As a people, we have been laid low enough, for long enough, that our horizons have shrunk to precisely those things which would previously have been insufficient. We remain capable of achieving great things, but not of imagining them.

When no international role can be pursued, isolation logically follows. Every proposal of potential foreign realignments today is met with some degree of animosity from various parts of our society. There is no substantial change to our position in the world that could be made which would be sufficiently widely approved for it to be embraced as a domestic political settlement, and ‘more of the same’ is not an option. A neo-Cameronite overture to China would now be met with Cold War hysterics, fuelled by our increasingly petulant American overlords. A pitch back to the European Union would cause widespread revolt, and would be an embarrassment internationally (especially among European leaders, who would extract far too heavy a price as a result). Any lingering warm feelings towards America are (rightly) seen as a form of slavish masochism. The suggestion that the Old Commonwealth, strewn across the world as it is, could form the basis of an international bloc, popular among late-2010s CANZUK enjoyers, is obviously laughable.

These barriers are not purely political. There are concrete reasons why each of these paths forward are blocked. Europe demands alignment with a sclerotic regulatory regime as the price for any deepened co-operation, a cost which even many who opposed Brexit now see as unaffordable in such dire economic times. America, similarly, demands its own (de)regulatory alignment, seeking to siphon our only remaining source of wealth, financial and professional services, off to New York. Whatever the flaws of American vassalage, few are eager to see the influence of the Chinese state over our country grow, alien and unpleasant as it is.

Our current political economy was constructed around the assumption of American benign hegemony as the enforcer of the United Nations’ post-national permafrost: free trade, globalisation, and the ‘international rules-based order’. Now that America has abandoned this role, we have been jolted into a world in which national self-reliance matters again, and we have found ourselves to be among the states most vulnerable to this sea change. The ability of blocs or individual states to project power, and the spheres of influence they can establish, are once again relevant constraints on a country’s ability to trade and interact with the world. Britain neither has the ability to pursue alignments in any direction, nor the ability to project power alone. In such a circumstance, any international engagement creates only vulnerabilities. No path forward into the world is worth taking, and so we turn inwards.

The pressures described above are already shaping our politics in ways you might not have immediately noticed. On the right, the shift towards nationalism and isolationism is clear, not just in the replacement of the Conservatives by Reform but in the growth of grassroots dissatisfaction with even Nigel Farage’s lingering commitments to international causes (in the form of alignment with the US and Israel especially). But the left, too, is being reconfigured within this same set of constraints. Keir Starmer’s government, in its latest doomed attempt to rebrand, has pitched itself as the steady defender of the British nation against the turbulence of the outside world. Ed Miliband increasingly describes his progressive alternative explicitly as an outgrowth of nationalist commitments, leaning into the emerging leftist fascination with De Gaulle. Even on the radical left, Aaron Bastani argues that Britain has not yet fulfilled the Brexit promise to ‘take back control’ — and that it should do so with vigour.

Britain is no longer conceived of as a beacon of progressive virtue, leading the world by example, but as a nation with interests that must be enthusiastically pursued. This nascent, cross-party British nationalism is emerging not just in the crude outbursts of a single politician, but is taking form across the political spectrum, breaking free of the reactionary cage to which nationalist politics has been confined over the past several decades. In their New Statesman podcast on abolishing the Monarchy, Oli Dugmore and Will Lloyd spoke of the state in which the country finds itself today, and the injustice of our national strife. They discussed, in sombre, loving tones, how far this country has fallen and how ambivalent our royal family has been throughout that process. Their animosity for the House of Windsor comes not from communist resentment, nor a desire to trample over our heritage — in fact, it arises from precisely the opposite sentiments. One could not imagine Dugmore talking in romantic, Granville Thorndykean tones about our country ten years ago, yet here he is today doing precisely that.

The second Trump administration has spawned (particularly among the left) a deep animosity towards supposed Americanisms, real or imagined. A certain snobbish anti-Americanism has always been a feature of British upper-middle class attitudes, but the fear and suspicion of outside influence as a corruption of our national life is more than just a radicalisation of what previously existed. What this means in practice is a conservative, xenophobic retreat into the cultural signifiers that shape our sense of Britishness. When Zoe Gardner, perhaps the most totemic manifestation of out-group preference in Britain, calls opposition to abortion rights ‘yank nonsense’, it demonstrates that the political framework of our time is ordered around whether something is foreign (bad) or autochthonous (good). The argument does not make sense, but the right to murder the unborn is wrapped in the Union Flag and given legitimacy simply as a point of distinction against the reviled outside.

Of course, in so many ways, their understanding of what defines British nationhood is not ours — the elephant in the room is immigration, an issue on which the left has yet to break ranks, even as the Labour government makes increasing rhetorical (and to some extent material) concessions to restrictionism. This point, however, is not strictly relevant to the thesis I am presenting. The left’s increasing antipathy towards foreignness is genuine, and their justification of their politics as an outgrowth of nationalism is not simply a skin-suit, even if their definition of ‘foreign’ and ‘indigenous’ is not our own. Again, for someone like Zoe Gardner to be working from such assumptions to validate her beliefs is evidence of something having profoundly changed in our country’s political epistemology. That the Liberal Democrats have a Gott strafe Amerika leader in the form of Ed Davey is also part of that same phenomenon. Attacks on tax-dodgers, notably including emigrants to Dubai currently under threat from Iranian drone attacks, as traitors to the country are genuine, even if some readers may feel them unjustified.

To say that the left is often wrong in their interpretations is not to say that it is entirely devoid of valid manifestations of nationalist politics — even including forms which remain unrepresented on the right. Due to the nature of the mainstream right’s electoral coalition and the understandably narrow focus of its patriotic ire on the issue of mass immigration and demographic change, the right has thus far sidelined many other budding strands of nationalist sentiment. This can be seen most notably in its ongoing Atlanticism and its continued advocacy for entanglement with Israeli foreign policy objectives which have no basis in British national interests, but also in its blasé attitude towards foreign — and particularly American — ownership of British assets and key strategic infrastructure, from utilities companies to payments processors. All of these commitments are weakening, as the surprising interjection of Robert Jenrick against Reform’s support for the Iran war showed, but none have yet truly broken. The right has thus far avoided paying too high a price for these positions, because its nationalistic credentials are simply not judged in these terms by much of the public, yet that situation may not persist indefinitely as the logic of this cultural discourse plays itself out.

This inwards-looking dynamic is dragging all sides towards an emerging nationalist and isolationist consensus. The one question that keeps Britain engaged with the wider world is the Ukraine war, yet even here public interest has waned. The peak of support for Britain’s role in the conflict was in February 2023, with 68% in favour. By February 2025, that number had dropped to 53%. It is still the case that any suggestion of abandoning Ukraine would produce hysterical accusations of treason from various sections of society, but it is not clear how strong that feeling will remain as economic conditions worsen and the energy crisis intensifies.

One unexpected consequence of this nascent political moment is the tacit desire across the political spectrum for Reform UK to win a majority at the next General Election. This desire is by no means shared by everyone, but it finds expression — even if only implicitly, and in many cases without full self awareness — in every corner. With the Labour party incapable of ushering in the changes made necessary by this new logic, there is a growing sense among many on the left that Reform would at least break through some Gordian knot and open the floodgates of a new dispensation, even if that involved much they cannot support. Figures such as Aaron Bastani and Lewis Goodall increasingly criticise Reform not for believing what they believe, but for hypocrisy or inconsistency — which is to say, for not believing what they believe hard enough. For the first time, right-wing politicians are under pressure to be more consistently nationalistic, rather than to abrogate nationalist concerns in favour of global commitments or universal values. Had Reform come to prominence ten years ago, it would have received nothing but encouragement to soften its positions; now, it is faced with constant pressure to live up to its revolutionary potential. The necessity of a radical disruption to the political system is now almost universally acknowledged, other than in the office of the leader of the opposition, and the focus increasingly shifts towards eagerness for that which is beyond that horizon, rather than litigating the specifics of the rupture itself. Even Reform’s opponents recognise in ever greater numbers that it is the only party capable of breaking out of this era-at-an-end, and opening a new chapter in British national history.

The next general election will consummate ‘Brexit Britain’ and usher in a new era. Prime Minister Nigel Farage, first leader of post-post-war Britain, will enter office on an explicitly nationalist platform. His opponents on all sides will spend the next five years contesting not the principle of nationalism, but the definition — with each side competing on who truly represents Britain as Britain and who can best insulate our country from a world of turmoil. As Britain’s post-war identity as a multiracial province at the intersection of various international organisations fades, this competition will be the basis of what comes next. It is, of course, impossible to predict the specific terms that will emerge victorious, but what is certain is the inevitability of what could be called ‘The Inward Turn’.

We will soon have a society which is more introspective, more insular, and thoroughly self-obsessed — xenophobically defensive towards the outside, but more internally self-critical. Such a society — especially under conditions of extreme economic and social pressure — could find itself the engine of great progress. Britain will be uniquely placed to debate and answer the problems currently faced by all Western nations. A soft Sakoku of voluntary preference will leave Britain poised for a cultural renaissance, much as the quest for self-conceptualisation embarked upon by Norwegians in the nineteenth century spurred their own Romantic nationalist movement. Nor must this process necessarily leave us permanently absent on the global stage. Rather, a culturally flourishing Britain which has finally reckoned with itself could present itself then as a source of wider European revitalisation. Often, a people needs the space to define itself internally, and to construct a future to believe in, before it can find the will to act on the world.

The period into which Britain is entering may not be a prosperous one. Many hardships lay on our horizons. But for all that we will suffer in the coming years, we will count ourselves lucky, in the future, to have been presented with the opportunity — the necessity — to look up from the ashes of what came before and consider what must come next. The collapse of a political paradigm as deeply entrenched as ours is never smooth, but we can take solace in the understanding that the birth of a new world requires the death of the old. And in the next decade or two, if you chance upon a retired Ed Miliband, shake his hand and thank him for choosing Rolls-Royce over Westinghouse. There is a nationalist in all of us now.

This article was written by Bukes, an enemy of the Pimlico Journal. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Baroness Casey also led a 2023 review of the Metropolitan Police. This was commissioned as a response to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by an off-duty police constable, Wayne Couzens. It is entirely reasonable to say that the ability of someone like Couzens not only to become an officer, but a firearms officer who was responsible for protecting nuclear power stations and the Houses of Parliament, in spite of numerous red flags, raised serious questions about the police force. But the Review instead turned into a politicised broadside on policing as a whole — issues mostly or entirely separate from the problem of an individual like Couzens.

Casey’s report, entitled An independent review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service, found it to be institutionally racist, sexist, and homophobic. This was followed by breathless reporting about how the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) was on the road to being broken up. Senior officers mostly lined up to agree with her findings, with only the slightest resistance to the ‘institutional’ label from Sir Mark Rowley, the current head of the Met. Recently, Baroness Casey stoked the embers by suggesting Sir Mark is ‘not man enough’ to accept these labels. Sir Mark finds himself in a difficult position because, having given Casey an inch, she is now trying to take a mile. All of policing, and not just the Met, should have pushed back much more strongly on the Casey Report, because the majority of it is nonsense, and accepting its arguments necessitates accepting Casey’s fundamentally anti-policing (and often stupid) premises.

Casey says that the Met is often defensive when criticised. This was a clever point to make, because it means that it is hard to disagree with her without appearing to do exactly what she criticises. Yet this does not actually make any of her criticisms necessarily true. She specifies that this defensiveness can manifest when ‘[the Met] looks for, and latches onto, small flaws in any criticism’. Setting aside the obvious fairness of being able to point out flaws in criticism of oneself, even ‘small flaws’ can actually reveal big failings. Take, for instance, the Casey Review’s uncertainty about the name of the MPS’s professional standards body. She refers to it variously as the ‘Department for Professional Standards’, the ‘Professional Standards Directorate’, and the ‘Directorate of Professional Standards’. Only the last of these is correct, and this error is immediately obvious to any MPS officer who reads the Review. Casey would likely say this is one of those ‘small flaws’ that the Met likes to ‘latch onto’, but in reality, it seriously undermines her argument. It shows that her report has not been proofread by even one person with a good eye for detail or with working knowledge of the MPS, that at least parts of it have been written by various people with a poor grasp of detail and a lack of curiosity, and that she did not seek any feedback from any police officer to ensure accuracy.

Now we know the basic lack of care which has gone into producing the criticism in the Review, this ‘small flaw’ must surely prompt the reader to ‘latch onto’ a bigger question: what else did Casey not bother to get right? Due to the limitations of space and sanity, I will only go into a few of Casey’s more egregiously stupid passages, but I urge anyone reading the Review to always bear in mind that its authors evidently did not hold themselves to high standards of accuracy.

Before examining some of the more glaring errors, it would be unfair not to note what the Review did get correct. It is true that the MPS’s senior officers are prone to groupthink (although Casey would disagree as to what they tend to think groupishly about), that the MPS’s restructuring from a borough model to Basic Command Units was a disaster, that getting rid of the specialist sexual offences investigation unit was foolish, and that austerity obviously did not make anything better. All of these criticisms are fair and any MPS officer below the rank of Chief Inspector would have freely told you about them, and yet, because of the cultural weight that comes behind accusations of racism and sexism, the Met’s senior leaders have completely ignored them and instead focused on Casey’s fatuous claims about race and sex, and vowed that no stone will be left unturned nor any standard be left un-lowered in the pursuit of achieving Casey’s ridiculous idea of ‘equality’.

A consistent failing of the Review is that Casey confuses anecdotes for data. Most of the discussion of institutional prejudice relates to first-hand accounts of complaints made by Met officers and staff about other employees and then being dissatisfied with the outcome of their complaint. Some of the examples provided are indeed shocking (although it must be said that they are all from one perspective, and no effort whatsoever is made to confirm their accuracy or ask for any alternative account of events). But even if we accept that every single anecdote is a full and accurate account of what happened, anecdotes are not data. It is not possible to draw conclusions about an institution with tens of thousands of employees from even dozens of accounts over several decades.

When Casey does gather data, she either does not recognise its shortcomings or hopes the reader will not notice. The Review surveyed the MPS to find out how many people had been bullied, discriminated against, and so on. This was sent by email to 47,000 officers, staff, and volunteers, and there were 6,751 respondents. A response rate of just under 15% is perfectly acceptable; political polling companies can draw valid conclusions about the mood of the nation from a much smaller group. But Casey’s survey was sent out and advertised as an opportunity to raise issues of bullying. What effort was made to make sure the results didn’t reflect this obvious risk of selection bias among respondents? Absolutely none. On page 352 out of 363, within ‘Annex B – Methodology’, Casey finally brings herself to admit, just the once, that ‘Due to the survey methodology, the findings reflect the perceptions of those who opted to take part and are not necessarily representative of every Met officer, staff and volunteer.’ And yet, even with this enormous bias, the survey found only 22% of respondents had experienced bullying at work. (The Baroness does not tell us when this bullying occurred, either because she did not think it pertinent to ask or does not want us to know. Yesterday? Last year? 1991? Who knows.) Compared with non-rigged staff surveys finding that 14% of Home Office civil servants reported having been bullied in the previous year in 2019, and that 18.7% of NHS staff were bullied by a colleague in 2021, it would appear to an objective reader that Casey discovered that the MPS is staffed by something approximating the general public, and nothing more insightful than that — not that you’d know it from any newspaper coverage.

It is when the Review turns to the thorny topic of racism that Casey most obviously loses touch with reality and any pretence of integrity. Casey believes, with arguments only a mother could love, that a police force should ‘look like the community it serves’. I don’t plan to go into why this is a braindead aphorism, so let’s just leave it described as something which Casey unfailingly and unreflectingly believes in, and all of her recommendations keep this in mind as the platonic form of a police force. As evidence of the Met’s institutional racism Casey says:

The Met continues to say that only a tiny minority of officers display discriminatory behaviour. But our survey of Met officers and staff found a different picture:

• 46% of Black and 33% of Asian Met respondents report personally experiencing racism while at work.

Casey only acknowledges in a footnote that ‘…due to the survey wording this may refer to experiences from working with the public as well as experiences with other Met employees.’

Casey also says that worse retention of black officers than white officers is further evidence of racism within the force. But is it perhaps instead evidence of poor behaviour from the black community towards officers who ‘look like the community they serve’? We can’t say for sure, but Baroness Casey doesn’t consider the possibility of this for even a single moment. She knows what’s going on, and she’s going to find or make the data prove it.

The Review discovered that non-white officers are 81% more likely to have misconduct proceedings brought against them. Casey says this is because the misconduct system is ‘systemically biased’. She even claims that non-white officers being more likely than white officers to be found guilty of misconduct is also evidence of racism. Apparently, the fairly obvious conclusion — that this is actually evidence of non-white officers committing misconduct at higher rates — does not occur to her. We could say that Casey fails to apply Occam’s razor, but even this would be a stretch: Casey simply does not think about these matters in the same way as a normal person. Nor does she think it is important to mention that misconduct hearings are led by Legally Qualified Chairs — that is to say, by people independent of police forces. It would appear that the only misconduct system Casey would not describe as racist would be one which did not involve black officers at all.

Casey says that it is a ‘racist myth’ that the Met lowers standards to increase diversity. She must not have read reporting over the last decade that the Met first reduced the importance of English and Maths tests, and then removed them altogether, in an effort to improve the acceptance rates of ethnic minorities. Since 2020, the Met has also maintained an ‘Equalities Team’ within vetting. This team’s role is to help black applicants through the process of vetting, including by advocating for vetting failures to be overturned. Could lowering the intellectual and moral standards of a group you’re trying to recruit result in recruiting people of a lower standard who commit more misconduct? If you thought ‘yes’, then Louise Casey says you’re racist.

When it comes to policing London’s black community, Casey claims there is evidence of institutional racism in black people’s experience of policing in that they are disproportionately likely to be policed, i.e., being arrested or having force used on them, and that they are disproportionately likely to be victims of crime, leading her to use the truly moronic expression that black Londoners are ‘overpoliced and under-protected’. It is, of course, the case that if black Londoners are ‘under-protected’, it is from the predations of other black people. Again, Casey makes a selective use of data to back up her argument. She is clearly aware of the rates at which black people are victims of crime, but has a peculiar lapse of curiosity when it comes to the rates at which they perpetrate it. A few seconds on Google would have told her that black people are 16% of the population of London and commit nearly 60% of its murders. Casey notices that black people are four-and-a-half times more likely to have force used on them by police, but this evident tendency towards murder suggests they might be about four-and-a-half times more likely to use pretty serious force themselves, which one might expect to prompt something of a reaction from an organisation charged with preserving law and order. Casey may or may not think so, but she doesn’t think it worth considering in her report.

Sexism is another area in which Casey departs from basic considerations of rationality. Casey recently described herself as having a chip on her shoulder (as if we didn’t already know), and approaches the review in the absolute certainty that a police force — the members of which must physically confront violent criminals, the vast majority of whom are male — should be 50% female, so as to ‘look like the community [the Met] serves’. The Baroness has not spent one second doing any police work in her entire life, so let’s give her views on the physicality required to arrest violent offenders the respect they deserve. In particular, she is upset about women’s experiences within the Met’s firearms unit. Again, she uses mostly anecdotes to back up her views, and again, some of them are shocking. Yet the data which does not interest her at all is the data on the effectiveness of firearms units. The Met shoots hardly anyone, and when it does it is never found criminally liable. The vast majority of armed operations end with a bad man taken off the streets and without a shot being fired. But Casey does not think this is the correct way to judge a police force’s firearms capability; instead, she believes that such units exist to fulfil the ambitions of women who want to be armed cops. So when the firearms instructors, who are responsible for gate-keeping the quality of officer who makes onto our streets with a gun, decide that someone isn’t up to scratch and cause them to be removed from the recruitment pipeline, the correct response is to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they probably know what they’re doing. The real world evidence implies they’re doing well. It’s only compared to Casey’s made up standard of ‘representation’ that the output can be judged to fail.

None of the problems with Casey’s review which I’ve mentioned are obscure. Any police officer, of any rank, would have noticed them immediately. This then raises the troubling question of why have senior officers been so reluctant to point out such obvious shortcomings, rather than pursue their actual course of action of falling on their faces and begging the Baroness to show mercy. The answer, contrary to Casey’s criticisms, is that they actually agree with her. It is orthodoxy amongst senior officers, and an orthodoxy that any ambitious officer must at least enthusiastically parrot, that a police force should ‘look like the community it serves’, that there are no meaningful differences between men and women, that any racial disparity can only be evidence of racial prejudice, and that a police force exists to make people feel good about themselves and has only a tangential role in physically confronting criminals.

And so Casey will get what she wants. The Met will continue in its evolution towards a photo-op of the sort of state institution which people like Casey find palatable, and when reality intrudes, it is not the photo-op which will adapt. Proactive officers will be demoralised and dismissed; stop and search will continue to fall from its already record-breaking nadir; recruitment standards will be lowered beyond the point where they actually weed out anyone; and the police service across the country (because obviously none of Casey’s ideas limit themselves only to policing London) will continue to get worse. You will be left at the mercy of criminals as the Baroness and the Met’s senior leaders pat each other on the back for a job well done.

This article was written by DS Andy Wainwright, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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The son of a well-to-do Madrid family that read newspapers and sent its children to the right schools, Sánchez joined the PSOE at twenty-one. By twenty-six he was already saying he would become secretary-general of the party and prime minister of Spain. At the time only his friends admired him, mostly because he was good-looking and, whenever he set his sights on a woman, he seduced her with unfailing ease. His Prince Charming looks and his success with women must have reinforced his aplomb, just as much as the complacency of the Madrid left that shaped his formative years.

Before committing to the PSOE in 1993, Sánchez gave up basketball, aware that he would never be a brilliant player and that — tall as he was — he was simply too handsome to stand out in such a bruising sport. Throughout his career there has been a constant effort to fill his image with substance. If anything has brought him trouble, it has been his inability to adapt to the decorative roles Madrid had reserved for him. While others adapted or broke under pressure, Sánchez found in the hostility of the establishment a reason to push forward.

When Sánchez entered politics, the idea that the PSOE stood on the right side of history — that the socialists were the good guys — was already beginning to crack. The ghosts of Francoism were fading, corruption inside the PSOE was emerging, and the Spanish right was reclaiming its place in democratic politics. Sánchez first obtained a grant to work with the Socialist group in Brussels, despite his shaky English. Later, in 1998, he managed to join a peace mission to Bosnia led by a former minister of Felipe González, just after the party had lost power (González remains Spain’s longest-serving elected prime minister).

In 2000, when José María Aznar was touring Europe lecturing his peers, Sánchez entered the party apparatus. He did so through José Blanco, the strongman of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the future prime minister who would promote the reform of Catalonia’s self-government to lead his party out of the political wilderness. Unlike other figures who would later become part of his team, Sánchez advanced slowly and awkwardly under Zapatero. In 2003 he ran in the Madrid municipal elections and narrowly missed entering the council. In 2008 and again in 2011 he appeared on the PSOE list for parliament and once more fell just short.

After briefly entering parliament in 2010 to fill a vacated seat, Sánchez won the award the press corps gives each year to the most promising new MP. Even so, he continued to be regarded as the ugly duckling of the Socialist group. Blanco, the party’s organisational secretary, assigned him the most thankless tasks and, in 2011, when the Popular Party had returned to government and everyone assumed Sánchez would give up, he began writing a doctoral thesis on Spanish diplomacy. Spain was teetering on the edge of a European bailout, Catalan separatism was growing rapidly, and the Barcelona left — allied to the PSOE since the Transition — was beginning to accept the idea of Catalan self-determination. Zapatero had fallen into total disrepute after swelling the debt of a country the PP had left with a budget surplus.

The thesis, which he completed in record time — eighteen months — received a cum laude distinction, but specialists later tore it apart. The fragments that circulated when he became leader of the PSOE were astonishingly banal. They reinforced his image as an insubstantial man, hoisted up to varnish the Spanish regime at a difficult moment. Sánchez had written the thesis with the idea of turning to teaching while waiting for his fortunes in the party to improve, but he soon began combining his doctorate with growing political responsibilities. The credential, in any case, gave him an academic sheen that helped him stand up to the rivals of his generation, all laden with degrees and top-of-the-class attitudes.

The first real turning point in Sánchez’s career came in 2014, when Catalan separatism began to look capable of imposing its programme. Scotland was about to hold a referendum on self-determination. Catalonia had shifted the axis of political debate by staging grassroots consultations in towns and cities across the country. The regional government had called an unofficial referendum for 9 November that year, to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was all a sham, a trick to preserve the political system and keep the real independence forces at bay. At the time, however, few Catalans — let alone Castilians — could see it.

To combat separatism, Madrid was promoting new faces, and Sánchez sensed an opening. Adopting the grassroots style of the independence movement, he drove more than 40,000 kilometres in his Peugeot 407 to make himself known among party members. At the height of the craze for fresh faces, he became secretary-general of the PSOE in July 2014. Dressed in jeans and a white shirt, he looked on the day of his victory as though he had just stepped out of a Miami swimming pool, and he announced the beginning of the end of the Spanish right — the historic enemy of Catalan nationalism.

At first, the PSOE’s sacred cows let him have his head while calling him el guapito (the pretty boy). The young politicians who had emerged to contain Catalonia with talk of democratic renewal looked at him with condescension. Pablo Iglesias and Albert Rivera, to name just two, seemed more intelligent and better placed. Compared with Podemos and Ciudadanos, the major new parties, the PSOE was flat-footed. Sánchez was alone. He may have been a free spirit within the system, but he looked like an Adolfo Suárez backed more by marketing than by dictatorship. His attempts to compete with the rivals of his own generation soon showed him that the democratic ideals he had grown up with were a lie. His mentors in the party did not want him to fight, only to play a part.

Spain wanted to feel as new and democratic as the independence movement, but without changing a thing, and Sánchez began his race to the Moncloa as just another puppet of the 1978 regime. Unlike his rivals, Sánchez could wrap himself in the Spanish flag without coming across as a fascist in Catalonia or making his own supporters uneasy. Perhaps that is why all the young figures the State had hoisted up were singed by the 2017 referendum. As the persecution of Catalan politicians intensified, Sánchez was left standing alone as the sole representative of a generation of politicians brought up under democracy. Because he seemed the lesser evil to Barcelona’s establishment, he could also accept the votes of Oriol Junqueras — the imprisoned Catalan vice-president — to table a constructive motion of no confidence — a constitutional mechanism that allows an opposition leader to unseat the prime minister and take office himself, bypassing a general election.

Although in the Spanish political system votes of no confidence have always been something of a pantomime — a way of preparing the public for changes of government long before the fact — Sánchez did bring Mariano Rajoy down. The Spanish right was enraged, but Sánchez had the support of Europe and of the independence politicians, who used him as a shield. Europe was already dealing with Donald Trump and needed peace to hold in Spain. Carles Puigdemont was exiled in Brussels, and seeing him handed over to Madrid would inevitably have recalled what the Gestapo did to Lluís Companys, the former Catalan president executed in 1940. The memory of Francoism was a burden for the PP, and it was no accident that one of the first things Sánchez’s government did was turn the Valle de los Caídos into a museum. Barcelona is the capital of anti-Francoism and of the left’s aesthetic imagination: without the Catalans, the Basque right can neither negotiate with Madrid nor keep former ETA supporters in check.

The PSOE, which a century ago had already taken part in Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship to stop Catalan campaigns for self-government, has under Sánchez become the alpha party of Spanish democracy. As it has done at other times, under other political regimes, Spain is again trying to trap Catalonia inside a dead idea. Now it is the dead idea of democracy, just as in the seventeenth century it was the dead idea of empire, or after the War of the Spanish Succession — when England left the Catalans in the lurch — it was the dead idea of absolute monarchy. The point is to stop time and strip the bones of the present clean, so that the conflict between Catalonia and Castile does not finally erupt in the open.

Sánchez’s quixotic streak comes out of this historical sediment — or this democratic residue. Quixote is a caricature of cuixot, a Catalan word once used to describe thigh armour worn in the Middle Ages. Cervantes says that Tirant lo Blanc is the best book of chivalry because Joanot Martorell was proposing a reform of the old medieval codes, drawing on the tradition preserved by Warwick the Kingmaker. Don Quixote longs for Tirant lo Blanc in a Hispanic empire dominated by Castilians. Sánchez longs for Catalan anti-Francoism, and for the democratic values promoted by Catalonia, in a Madrid that no longer admires Barcelona or copies it as it did when he was a child and the PSOE seemed to be what it was not: the party of the good guys.

In a bureaucratised Europe that has turned its virtues into dogma to defend privileges it can no longer afford, the quixotic adventures of Sancho Sánchez are bound to grow ever more influential. Just look at the Hispanic empire’s dark and long decline. Don Quixote marked a symbolic break: it severed the Hispanic empire from the Mediterranean and humanist imagination with which the Catalans had sought to imbue it. If one is so inclined, it is easy to see Charles V as a kind of Quixote, attempting to navigate a world no longer his own — with Tirant lo Blanc as his manual — before being defeated by Luther and the rigidities of the Counter-Reformation. Now that nation-states are dissolving into continental structures, Sánchez is attempting to turn the democratic aspirations of the Catalans who voted in the 2017 referendum into rhetorical fuel to justify Spain before Europe, and Europe before the United States and the world.

While the Catalans have turned their backs on Madrid — they have recovered their language, lost their businesses, and no longer believe collaboration with the Castilians is possible — Sánchez is saturating Catalonia with impoverished immigrants, much as the dictatorship once did. The Spanish prime minister hopes that out of this social ferment something will emerge to secure the sentimental and political hegemony of the PSOE, which the Germans and the Americans underwrote during the Transition. The hypocrisy is that, this time, immigrants are not coming to sustain a dictatorship but a democracy, and they arrive with the complicity not of a bourgeoisie but of decadent, extractive elites. Sánchez wants to feed on Catalonia’s civic energy, as many predecessors have done before him, but the Catalans are Europeans, and the consequences of the tug-of-war between Barcelona and Madrid will, in the end, be paid for by the whole continent.

Since 1950, Catalonia has absorbed around 3.4 million net immigrants, raising its population from 3.2 million inhabitants to 8.1 million today. Valencia has taken in some 2.2 million, and Mallorca roughly 700,000 over the same period. In other words, the Catalan-speaking territories have absorbed net immigration equivalent to more than 100 per cent of their original population. The backbone of the former Crown of Aragon is not merely another corner of Europe inundated by immigrants. Historically, its inhabitants have also been those who connected the State as a whole with Europe, pulling it away from the gravitational influence of the South and spearheading its modernization. One need only turn to history to see that the finest contributions to Western culture from Spain have, to date, reached the Continent by way of its Mediterranean flank — not to mention the fact that it is in Barcelona where Don Quixote finally regains his lucidity.

Many elsewhere in Europe might be tempted to dismiss the Catalan cause as irrelevant or sentimental. I would argue that it has been centuries since the struggles of the Catalans aligned so closely with those of their fellow Europeans. It is unsurprising that the torch of Catalan survival is now passing from the establishment forces that have cynically carried it for the past decade to newer actors apparently more closely aligned with the challenges facing the rest of Europe. Junts, the centrist party which led the previous push for self-determination, has crashed in the polls as the right-wing Aliança Catalana and the left-wing parties surge. In so many ways, the struggle within Catalonia now reflects the struggle of each and every country in Europe: new parties of the extremes battling to define national identity as the ailing establishment of a larger structure seeks to cling to the past.

The man who eventually finds a way through these challenges will need more than quixotic ambition and good looks.

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

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As the Greens become more popular, raising the prospect that they may well be involved in a future government, they are rightly coming under increased scrutiny. The Financial Times has questioned their economic, defence and drug policies, whilst GB News has highlighted some of their wackier suggestions, such as requiring all dog owners to acquire a licence. Pollsters like YouGov are probing the public on Green policies, including reducing the speed limit on motorways to 55mph (which 69% oppose, including 62% of Green voters). For a party with so much momentum, you’d think there would be more eagerness to tout their plans for government, especially if they believe them to be popular with the public, yet Polanski continues to favour vague sentimentalism over concrete commitments — at least, that is, in public.

One area on which the Greens have yet to receive substantial questioning is immigration. This is one of the most important issues for the public at large, according to periodic trackers from YouGov and Ipsos. As we enter the warmer months, we are likely to see small boat crossings surge and the salience of this issue rise further. Across the three manifestos, migration, immigration, and asylum receive very little attention, beyond vague platitudes like ending the hostile environment, opening safe and legal routes and processing asylum claims more quickly. Given that the party has made a name for itself for taking bold, left-wing positions in contrast to Keir Starmer’s Labour, it seems strange that such a significant issue is left untreated. Dig a little deeper, however, and answers do avail themselves. The Green Party operates a separate website where they list their Refugee and Asylum Policy and Migration Policy, which, as the website notes, were agreed at conference in October 2021 and Spring 2023. Both these pages offer substantially more details about what the Green Party would do if they got into power.

A quick note before we begin exploring these proposals: you will see various references to Universal Basic Income (UBI) throughout quotations from the document. The Greens have declared an intention to phase in UBI, but details are as yet unclear. Without doubt, it would be set at least at the level of Universal Credit, including the £40pw increase the Greens propose, which would put it at £600 per month. Given that UBI typically intends to replace other benefits, we can assume that the housing supplement would also be included, bringing it up to as much as £1500 per month. As the name implies, this would be a universal entitlement, and would not be means tested.

Refugee & Asylum Policy

It is very unfortunate that in this country right-wing media play into popular racism and xenophobia by suggesting that those seeking asylum are not genuine or are abusing our hospitality, and that right-wing governments therefore seek popular approval by making it as hard as possible to gain protection.

The naivety of these opening lines sets the tone for the rest of the document, which makes no attempt to reckon with the possibility that not everyone, everywhere, is purely motivated. It is worth noting that Home Office intelligence estimates that people smugglers charge anywhere between £15,000 and £35,000 per illegal migrant, a sum on the upper end comparable with a down payment on a flat in London — suggesting many migrants have an easier time saving money than many British grads. Downtrodden indeed.

Categories of eligibility

RA 102. The Green Party will extend the applicable definition of a refugee to include those forced to leave their homes by reason of “external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order” (Convention of the Organisation of African Unity 1969), and affirms that global heating and environmental catastrophe are included under the term “events seriously disturbing public order”.

The current definition of a refugee, as laid out in the Refugee Convention, focuses on a person’s risk of persecution by their own government. That naturally limits eligibility, on the assumption that it is the responsibility of the British state to look after foreigners only if their own state actively does the opposite. This loosening of the rules would make eligible anyone fleeing conflict — including most of the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, as well as millions more in Myanmar, Sudan, Congo, Somalia, etc. — immediately eligible. Estimates suggest that upwards of twenty million a year are currently displaced as a result of climatic events, with up to 1.2 billion affected by 2050 (although those estimates are wildly speculative to say the least).

Arriving in Britain

RA 403. The Department of Migration will deploy no physical or administrative barriers to prevent or deter those wishing to enter the UK to claim protection.

RA 404. The Department of Migration will announce its intent to establish, in consultation with other countries, a system whereby it will be possible for those requiring it to obtain at UK embassies abroad, or online, a visa for the sole purpose of entering the UK to make a claim for asylum or protection, and to remain until their case is decided.

RA 405. Penalties imposed on commercial carriers for transporting undocumented migrants will be abolished.

Taken together, these measures mean that literally anybody in the world will be able to come to Britain without any barriers, claim asylum, and remain in the country at least until their claim is rejected. Currently, it takes more than a year on average to receive an initial decision, and around three quarters of rejected claims are appealed, adding another forty weeks to the process. Even setting aside the Green Party’s proposed complications of this process, the increase in claims would extend the backlog to a degree which is impossible to forecast, but would surely at least double average resolution periods. It is by no means implausible, then, that this policy would result in a universal de facto right to live in Britain for at least five years.

Deciding on your claim

RA 103. Humanitarian Protection will be given to those who meet the above criteria but do not fall within the definition of a refugee as given in the UN Convention, and to all those persecuted on the grounds of any characteristic protected in this country under the Equality Act 2010, such as LGBT people.

RA 501. A neutral approach will be adopted when interviewing applicants: i.e. interviews will not be conducted from the perspective of disbelieving the applicant, and what the applicant says will be believed in the absence of contrary evidence. The object will be to establish the reasonable likelihood that the applicant requires protection. No applicant will be discriminated against in any way. All interviews will be recorded. The recording will be carried out as a video for safeguarding purposes, and the applicant will be provided with a copy of what is said, and of the video if they have the necessary equipment. Applicants will be given the opportunity to add to, or correct, anything said in their interview.

The UK asylum system already has one of the highest grant rates in Europe. Approximately half of applications are successful at initial decision, and half of rejections are overturned at appeal. Even those who are ultimately denied may be given discretionary leave by the Home Office.

Defaulting to believing applicants’ claims will, of course, increase this further. It will also create further incentive for applicants to destroy evidence (such as their passport and other documents). More importantly, and especially in the light of tightened protections on the basis of sexuality, many forms of eligibility are fundamentally unprovable. There is no way to disprove an applicants’ claims about their sexuality, if their assertion that they are a sexual minority is simply to be taken for granted.

Life in the UK

What will life in Britain look like for prospective ‘new Brits’ awaiting asylum decisions?

RA 601. All applicants will be provided with accommodation and financial support, as required, from the date of their application. Financial support will be at the level of Universal Basic Income if it is in force, or at a similar level if not (adjusted if utilities and taxes are included with accommodation). Applicants will be able to access the same range of services as someone granted leave to remain.

RA 703. The category “No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF)” will be abolished.

RA 602. Families seeking protection will be accommodated in a house or flat with exclusive use and without overcrowding. Single applicants may be accommodated in houses of multiple occupation but they will each have their own room. Characteristics of the individual will be used to determine the groupings within shared accommodation, and for safeguarding purposes LGBTQIA+ people will not be asked to share accommodation with others. Accommodation will not be provided in places not generally considered appropriate for civilian habitation (decommissioned prisons, military camps, ships etc.), nor in houses deemed unfit for human habitation, nor in accommodation designated exclusively for asylum seekers. Provision will depend on availability and expense, but the clustering of asylum seekers in particular areas will be avoided.

RA 604. All applicants will be provided with free access to all NHS facilities. That provision will remain as long as they are in the UK, even if their case is rejected. A dedicated mental health provision for those seeking protection will be established, and its services will be available to any applicant from the start of the process.

Honestly, it’s hard to know how to respond to this, other than to point and laugh. It reads like a parody of British immigration policy: open the borders to anyone, and give them access to every benefit (PIP, child benefit, social housing, the NHS, etc.) without charge, from day one — plus a universal basic income. This wouldn’t just be a huge financial cost to the taxpayer: it would also place extreme strain on already limited resources, such as housing, which cannot be quickly expanded. The Greens would devote even more social houses and private rented accommodation to those claiming asylum. And of course, any migrant could claim to be ‘LGBTQIA+’ and, rather than being housed with others, would get their own private accommodation, creating more incentives to lie.

RA 606. All applicants of working age will be allowed to take up employment, with no restriction as to occupation.

But with those benefits, why would you even bother?

If you’re accepted

RA 700. Applicants whose case is accepted will be granted indefinite leave to remain. They will be eligible to apply for citizenship after a period of 5 years’ residency.

At this point, ILR will be a mostly cosmetic status given the abolition of limitations on other visa statuses, but there is still something offensive about the idea of giving formal permanent residency so freely. It is worth noting that refugee status lasts for five years under current rules. At the end of this period, those with refugee status can apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain for free. The regular cost for ILR is £3,226 per person. Refugees also don’t need to demonstrate English language ability or pass the Life in the UK test, whereas migrants who arrive legally must do both.

RA 701. A settlement grant will be made to those granted protection to allow them to purchase essentials to establish a home. Assistance will be offered in the practical aspects of resettlement. They will be allowed to remain in their accommodation for up to six months.

Just in case you hadn’t managed to save up enough for some new pyjamas, a TV, and a hot tub with your UBI whilst waiting for approval, the government will give you an additional cash grant to set up your new home once your approval has been granted. Isn’t that nice!

If you’re rejected

RA 505. An applicant whose case is rejected will be granted the right to appeal to a tribunal or higher court as appropriate.

RA 506. Applicants will be permitted to submit further evidence at any point, including after a finally rejected application. Such submissions may be made by post, or, at the applicant’s choice, in person.

Claimants can already appeal their initial rejection, and currently around 75% of them do. For the Greens, however, this is not enough — rejected claimants will be given seemingly infinite opportunities to make new submissions. It is not clear, however, why they would even bother, because…

RA 507. Immigration detention will be abolished. An applicant who has been found not to need protection and who has exhausted all appeal rights and the six months’ grace provided for in RA 607, and who then remains in the country, will be treated as a migrant not seeking asylum or protection.

RA 508. There will be no requirement for any applicant, or any person whose case has been refused, to report regularly to the Department of Migration.

If, despite these proposed reforms making it almost impossible, your claim is rejected, no need to fear. You will not be deported — you will just be treated as a normal economic migrant (more on what that means later). Even if the government wanted to deport you, it would be essentially impossible to do so, with the abolition of any detention or monitoring procedures allowing migrants to disappear into the general population. You can even keep your free housing for six months, or more:

RA 607. Accommodation and support when an applicant has had their case rejected with all appeal rights exhausted will be continued for a further period of 6 months to allow them either to gather material for a further submission or to make preparations for their future.

RA 608. No one will be left in destitution, no matter what the state of the relevant application.

Defending justice

The above list could easily have been twice as long — there are various other routes for family reunification, chain migration, community sponsorship, as well as plentiful offers of extra help and benefits to migrants of all types. However, with these policies alone, we have established that every single person in the world will be allowed to come to Britain and immediately claim UBI, which they will keep even if they are rejected. In fact, if I were a Chinese tourist looking to spend some time in Britain, I would forego a visitor visa entirely and simply apply for asylum, withdrawing my claim after finishing my trip (and collecting UBI for the duration).

One might ask how people will possibly accept such an insane system. Well, the Green party has an answer to that:

RA 407. The Department of Migration will work with the Department of Education and the government information service to disseminate knowledge of the situations from which those seeking asylum and resettling refugees are fleeing, and the need for and moral obligation of asylum and humanitarian protection.

Government propaganda will be delivered to adults and children alike, assuring them that the millions pouring across the border every year are fleeing awful circumstances, and that denying them would be genocide. A perfect solution!

Migration policy

Given that we’ve already established open borders through Green Party asylum policy, assessing the impact of other migration policies seems something of a moot point. Nevertheless, there are a few things worth commenting on which truly highlight the insanity of the party which could plausibly form the official opposition in the next Parliament if current trends continue.

MG100. The Green Party wants to see a world without borders, until this happens the Green Party will implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration where people can move if they wish to do so.

Of course, when ‘a fair and humane system of managed immigration’ means open borders with some additional complexity, one may as well just drop the act. In the background policy paper, the Greens note that border controls are ‘relatively modern inventions’. While this may be true to some extent (restrictions date back to at least 1793 in Britain, and the modern system of general regulation came into force in 1905) the Greens don’t examine any of the economic, technological, security, social, or cultural reasons for why every country on earth has had some form of border control and immigration restrictions for at least one hundred years.

Entry rules

MG301. All visas can be applied for on entry, while in the UK, or before entry.

MG400. All arrivals to the UK without a visa will be granted a visitor visa for a period of three months regardless of where they have come from unless standard exclusions apply. They will then have this period of time to apply for a different visa if they so wish.

MG310. Visa applications from specific individuals may be rejected on grounds of public safety. These grounds are restricted to serious crime and threats to national security.

In the light of MG301 and MG400, MG310 provides little reassurance, as applicants would already be in the UK without any detention or tracking measures. It is therefore unclear how they would be found by authorities upon rejection, or even whether they would be deported could they be.

Eligibility requirements

MG305. Minimum income requirements will be removed from all applications as well as any benefits from having a higher income.

MG306. Language requirements will be removed from all applications. Free language classes will be made available to promote and encourage integration.

MG507. Workers with a confirmed contract of employment satisfying UK employment laws will automatically receive a visa to work unless standard exclusions apply.

One of the key drivers of the Boriswave was the relaxation of salary, language, and skills thresholds. If you limit the issuance of work visas purely to a valid contract of employment, this will presumably include sponsoring migrants on zero-hours contracts. In the policy paper, the Greens also suggest abolishing the Immigration Skills Surcharge, which would make it cheaper for more businesses to hire overseas labour. Besides companies like Deliveroo being able to ship in as many workers as they like, there would be nothing preventing immigrant-led companies offering zero-hours contracts to every person in their village looking to move to Britain.

MG509. Visa residents will have the right to bring members of their family to the UK who would normally live with them in their country of origin, or would do so if it were permitted by law or custom.

Of course, it doesn’t much matter how easy it is to bring family members as family members if they can simply come individually with ease, but it is worth noting that this would expand eligibility substantially. In many other cultures, there is a strong desire to bring over not just children or spouses, but also friends, neighbours, cousins, parents, etc. This policy would turbo-charge family reunification and chain migration. In the policy paper, the Greens cite examples of migrants who have tried (and thankfully failed) to bring their parents and grandparents over. The paper also describes sham marriages as a ‘moral panic’ and downplay spousal visa fraud because TV shows like Married at First Sight exist — I only wish I were joking.

Even with de facto open borders, measures such as this will still increase flows, because they make it more obvious to more people that coming to Britain is an option. A great deal of migration decisions are far less calculated than many assume. Many people move thousands of miles from home, essentially on a whim, having been told by someone in their community — often someone who has already made the same move — that there are opportunities.

Benefits and entitlements

MG500. For the purposes of this policy, visa residents are defined as migrants who have a non-visitor visa, do not have settled status and are not British citizens.

MG502. Access to the NHS will be free and comprehensive for all visa residents.

MG503. Any No Recourse to Public Funds conditions will be abolished and visa residents will have access to welfare benefits or Universal Basic Income.

Again, there is little to do here but laugh. Every migrant, on every visa, would have immediate access to every benefit to which British citizens are entitled.

The policy paper notes that the Greens would abolish the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), a fee that migrants not working in the NHS must pay before their visa is issued. The Greens cite that this raised £297.7m in 2018/19, even though the policy paper was published in 2023. This is a pre-Boriswave figure. In 2024/25, the IHS raised £2.4 billion, it raised £1.7bn in 2023/24. Even at the time of publication, the 2021/22 figure was available, showing £1.4bn had been raised that year. Perhaps the use of such an outdated figure is intentionally misleading. Regardless, there is no attempt to explain how such an expense can be afforded.

MG601. Residents with settled status have the same access to benefits, student finance, and the NHS as British Citizens.

MG602. Children of residents with settled status will have access to student finance for their higher education and will not be liable for international fees.

These measures are already in place, but it’s nice to know the Greens don’t intend to take away any of the current handouts migrants receive, even as they offer so many more on top.

Citizenship and participation

MG501. All visa residents will have the right to vote in all elections and referendums.

It is already a disgrace that we allow millions of non-citizens from Commonwealth countries the ability to vote, including those on temporary visas. Expanding this further would make British citizenship administratively meaningless.

MG504. All Visa Residents will be able to apply for settled status after five years.

MG603. Any resident with settled status can apply for citizenship if they wish to do so.

As is already the case — although, currently, time spent on a study visa doesn’t count towards the 5-year ILR route, though it does count towards the 10-year ILR route. Allowing a 5-year route to ILR across all visa categories would enable hundreds of thousands more to settle in Britain each year. In the policy paper, the Greens make it clear the purpose of this policy is to enable more migrants on study visas to settle in Britain.

MG701. All children born in the UK are automatically British Citizens.

The British Nationality Act 1981 abolished birthright citizenship. Reintroducing it would fundamentally change the definition of British nationality — but of course, that is precisely what the Greens are looking to do.

MG702. A Green Party led Government will commit to tackling statelessness and will ensure that once citizenship is granted it cannot be removed.

The British Nationality Act 1981 allows the Home Secretary to revoke citizenship when it was obtained via fraud, or when the removal of citizenship is conducive to the public good. It was on this basis that the citizenship of Shamima Begum was removed. By removing the ability to strip citizenship, which has been in place since at least 1915, the Greens would deny the British government any ability to redress fraud or to punish terrorists or perpetrators of organised crime.

According to a House of Commons research briefing: ‘Many of those deprived of their citizenship on “public good” grounds are thought to be Muslims. Most fraud cases involve naturalised Albanians.’ —SN06820, p10

Illegal migrants

It’s not clear how any migrants could realistically end up without a visa of some kind, given the laxity of the rules laid out so far. But in the rare cases that they do, will they finally be deported?

MG800. Undocumented migrants will be given free advice and support to help them to regularise their status without penalty for being undocumented.

MG801. Undocumented migrants who have been in the UK for at least five years will be invited to apply for settled status unless the standard exclusions apply.

One wonders why the Green Party bothered to write thousands of words on migration policy, when they end the document with this. Given that there will be no barrier to entering the country illegally, and that illegal immigrants will be allowed to apply for ILR after five years, there really is no restriction whatsoever on who can settle in Britain.

This would also mean amnesty for the entire existing illegal migrant population. Estimates of their numbers are by definition hard to gauge, with the last official estimate being produced in 2005, which suggested an illegal population between 310,000 and 570,000. A more recent estimate from Pew Research places the figure in 2017 at between 700,000 and 900,000. Since 2018, we’ve seen nearly 200,000 small boat arrivals, and since 2021 the Home office has stopped conducting exit checks. There are almost certainly more than a million people in Britain who either arrived illegally or have overstayed their visa. Of course, that is just a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers that will be coming in every year under the Greens’ proposals.

Conclusions

It should be clear from this exploration that the Greens are not a serious party. Obviously, they are insane, but, beyond that, their refusal to consider any practical restriction on their moral impulses is disrespectful and negligent towards the people they wish to govern. It is not nice or cuddly to suggest policies which would lead to fiscal collapse because they sound virtuous to the mind of a particularly naïve child.

It is impossible to say just how many people would come to Britain under these plans each year. Would it be ten million? Twenty? One hundred? The Telegraph’s claim that it would be a mere 4.4 million (only barely more than the rate of peak Boriswave) is surely an underestimate. There are certainly billions who would take the offer. If the tidal wave ever abated, it would only be because word had reached Lagos that London has become just as much of a festering shanty-town, only with worse weather.

One other realisation dawns looking at these policies. They read like a left-wing wish list, often overlapping with various redundancies. In fact, that is precisely what they are. Green Party policies are agreed at conference, and are binding on the party. Were the Greens in government, they would, in theory, be committed to following the whims of their membership, regardless of the basis of their mandate. As well as being democratically illegitimate, this is not a functional way of building an agenda for government. Your Party has largely collapsed as a result of the left’s obsession with procedural governance, which eschews any principles of organisational management in favour of ideological shibboleths about internal power structures. The Greens are, structurally, no different — but their higher average human capital obscures this dysfunctionality. We should be deeply interested in how the Green party operates, if they are to play a role in future British governments. A party that is run in this manner has no business doing so.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and there is reason to believe the Green coalition is showing signs of fraying. It is incumbent on all political parties to confront the Greens with their own policies, as Reform UK have started doing. If the Greens are confident, they should welcome their policies reaching the limelight and coming under scrutiny. The fact that they host their own immigration plans on an external website, even excluding them from their 2024 manifesto, suggests a very different reaction.

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

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A slow week this week for domestic news, as the Iran crisis continues, so we thought now would be a good time to preview next month’s local elections, with some insight into what Reform are hoping to achieve internally and what would represent success on May May 7th — but first, a quick word on Zia Yusuf’s reparations visa bans.

This newsletter’s agenda: Zia Yusuf proposes visa ban on countries demanding reparations; Local elections preview

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Even the names repeat themselves, although in this case tragedy follows on the heels of farce. Tisza’s son István also twice served as prime minister (1903-05, 1913-17), and Orbán’s supporters today are quick to draw parallels between his doomed opposition to Austria’s war in 1914 and the current officeholder’s critique of Western involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

Whatever other reasons may exist for his pacifism, Hungary’s experience of great power conflict weighs heavy on Orbán’s conscience, for had the younger Tisza’s warnings been heeded, the country would not have been partitioned in the postwar Treaty of Trianon. The Tisza river, from which this illustrious family took its name, was also dismembered by the treaty: though its main body winnows through Hungary’s sleepy, post-industrial east on its way to meet up with the Danube near Belgrade, its source is in Ukraine, as well as a small Hungarian minority, although the influx of wartime refugees has noticeably altered the region’s ethnic makeup. The word Tisza is a hair’s breadth away from tiszta, which means ‘pure’ or ‘clean’, although the two are not etymologically related. In short, this is a word with powerful associations, whose rich evocations of timeless landscape, Belle Epoque splendour, and ancient Magyar soil beyond the borders made it a natural choice when Péter Magyar, a picaresque former government hanger-on plucked from the pages of a Mikszáth novella, found himself needing a name for his hastily convened political party in 2025.

So transformative, so long Orbán’s reign, that it has cleanly split Hungarian society into two camps: those who want it to continue, and those who do not. For the first time in a decade and a half, including four years ago when an unholy alliance of everyone from the post-fascist Jobbik to the Greens to the followers of disgraced former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány banded together in a failed attempt to dispel the prime minister’s spectre, Orbán’s majority is finally under serious threat. This can be seen in the polls published by both the pro-government and independent pollsters, although the former show a close election and the latter a landslide Tisza victory, in the comparative size of their rallies in Budapest on the March 15 national holiday (those who put this down to the ‘home advantage’ of liberals in the capital should be reminded that a Fidesz mayor governed the city from 2010 until 2019), and in the desperate measures that the government has taken to stem the bleeding, whether it be fiscally irresponsible giveaways like a fourteenth monthly pension payment, the dismissal of the party’s experienced campaign manager András Gyürk for Orbán’s spad Balázs Orbán (no relation) last August, or the aggressive surveillance campaign that the security services — or at least those branches housed in the Prime Minister’s Office — have conducted against the Tisza Party. This is not the behaviour of a government confident in its prospects of reelection.

In certain regards, Magyar is the ideal challenger to Orbán’s seemingly endless rule. His youth and energy present a favourable contrast to the flabby, zebra-munching incumbent, and the girls seem to like him. His lack of political experience — or any experience at all, having spent almost his entire career banqueting from the governing party’s teat — spares him the unsavoury associations with the cabinet of old socialist skeletons that spooked wavering centre-right voters from voting for the united opposition last time around. As a former Fidesz apparatchik, Magyar’s appeal is to the party’s conscience; the essence of his pitch is to finally give the people the good king without the wicked advisors.

Yet caution is advised. There were very good reasons why Fidesz kept Magyar far from any real power: his indiscretions and frankly bizarre conduct of his personal affairs — again, we are on Mikszáth’s turf — are the talk of the town in Budapest. What is publicly known is that Magyar was previously married to Judit Varga, who served as Fidesz’s Minister of Justice from 2019 to 2023. In April 2023, Varga, along with the President of Hungary, Katalin Novák, had signed off on a pardon for a man who had been convicted of helping cover up sexual abuse in a Calvinist-run children’s home. Novák, like Orbán, is a Calvinist, and was close to the synodal president of the Hungarian Reformed Church. Unsurprisingly, there was a scandal when this was revealed in February 2024, and both Varga and Novák resigned. Into this whirlwind, Magyar, previously an obscure pro-Fidesz apparatchik, released secret voice recordings of his ex-wife (the relationship broke down at some point in early 2023) calmly and matter-of-factly discussing the corrupt dealings of the Orbán government. Magyar began organising anti-government protests, and in July 2024, he took over the (mostly inactive) Tisza Party in order to contest elections. Soon after the release of the voice recordings, Varga alleged both verbal and physical abuse from Magyar, as well as generally unstable behaviour, backed up by a police report from 2020 (which Magyar disputes the accuracy of). Magyar has, in turn, alleged that state personnel attached to Varga had been improperly used for personal purposes in order to coerce and intimidate him.

Some sort of kompromat drop has been hinted at by the pro-government media and is expected before the election, although nothing damning has appeared as of this article’s editorial deadline. In early 2026, Magyar even stated, pre-emptively, that a secretly recorded video of him having sex from 2024 existed and was being used as blackmail. Magyar’s combustive personality, his inexperience, the slapdash organisation of his young party, and his decision to fill his shadow cabinet with ‘big beasts’ with established careers in politics and industry (such as former Shell executive István Kapitány or old Fidesz foreign policy hand Anita Orbán, of no relation to the prime minister or to Balázs Orbán), and who no doubt bring ideas of their own about the future direction of the country, understandably raise questions around his ability to impose his authority over a future Tisza government.

What explains Magyar’s rise? A commonly proffered explanation is corruption; this is plausible only to those whose knowledge of the region extends no further than the inner rings of Vienna or Budapest and who, when they go to the Kaffeehaus, order Wiener melange, when in fact they should try the black Central European brew of hypocrisy and ennui in which everything in this part of the world is drenched. East of Munich, a blasé ‘they’re all doing it!’ attitude towards corruption is the norm, and Péter Magyar’s success in boosting his profile through an anti-corruption message is less due to moral outrage than pleasure taken in salacious gossip (and as the events detailed above demonstrate, the gossip is indeed highly salacious). Corruption cannot explain any variation in Fidesz’s fortunes — Lőrinc Mészáros (a childhood friend of Orbán who is now the richest man in Hungary) and all the rest were already rich men ten years ago, yet this never lost Fidesz an election. None of this was ever a secret; the internet exists in Hungary too, and critical journalism is easily accessible. It is simply of no concern to the coalition of pensioners, gypsies, and wage labourers who vote for Fidesz that public tenders are rigged, private enterprise squashed, and EU development funds put towards questionable ends.

No: the Hungarian voter will forgive Orbán his zebras, and they will allow him much more. What the man on the Csepel omnibus truly cannot forgive is the decline of his own living standards. Real GDP has stagnated, the figure for 2025 being only 98.7% of where it was three years ago. Orbán frequently boasts that Hungary’s continued energy trade with Russia has allowed it to weather the supply shock that has bedevilled heavy industry elsewhere on the continent, yet Hungarian inflation has consistently been the highest among the Visegrád countries (consisting of itself, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia), accelerating in 2023 even as it mellowed elsewhere. The bill for Orbán’s Faustian bargain with German auto manufacturers, placed at the commanding heights of Hungarian industry in exchange for a decade of modest growth, has finally come due, with the country’s industrial output shrinking to 93.6% of its 2021 value. Since Orbán took office, the labour share of GDP has, against the tendency to stagnation both in the region and the EU as a whole, undergone a steady decline. All this has only been exacerbated by Hungary’s constrained access to EU budgetary funds, which over the period of the bloc’s 2014-2020 budget (or ‘multiyear financial framework’ in eurocrat jargon) averaged 3.2% of the country’s GDP per year.

Remember that it was not always such. It is easy to criticise Orbán’s economic policies from the vantage point of 2026, but his government, though it crushed the ambitions of the entrepreneurial middle classes, brought real, tangible benefits to the ordinary citizen. Critics of Orbán’s economic policy often cite Hungary’s middling GDP growth measured against the regional average, but this neglects the picture in the latter half of the 2000s under the socialist government, when the country had fallen behind its neighbours. Hungary was also disproportionately affected by the global financial crisis, which forced the communist successor party to turn to the IMF to avoid default.

Orbán, by raiding Hungary’s private pension funds to the tune of €14 billion, managed to stabilise the deficit while also reducing the corporate and income tax burden, paying off the government’s outstanding obligations to the IMF by 2013 and closing its Budapest office. In 2011, he bailed out homebuyers by allowing them to pay off foreign currency-denominated mortgages at submarket fixed exchange rates, an episode largely unknown in Britain, but an abiding source of trauma in relations with Austria, whose banks suffered the brunt of the adjustment. Unemployment has been consistently low. The government’s signature policy of subsidising household energy bills is wildly popular for reasons that need no explanation. The tightening of these subsidies almost certainly played its part in Tisza’s poll surge, although the government has once more dipped into its pockets in advance of the election.

It will not come as news to Pimlico Journal’s readers that in the age of mass immigration, figures like GDP paint a much less reliable picture of a country’s quality of life than they once did. British visitors to Budapest are often favourably struck by its safe streets and its largely autochthonous population, while Orbán has pitched Hungary as an island of demographic calm amidst the maelstrom gripping Western Europe at the centre of his pitch to supporters at home and abroad — ‘no migration, more babies’ as one government minister recently proclaimed to GB News. But Hungary, too, is wrestling with its own Orbánwave in the rapidly multiplying numbers of (mostly) South Asians to whom the government has issued work and study permits since the lockdowns, and who have been deployed as the avant-garde of wage discipline everywhere that labour markets are tight.

Their presence is laxly controlled and their true numbers are almost certainly not known — take it on the authority of my Indian roommate in the sleazy Ferencváros, who used to regale me with lurid tales of visa fraud among his Deliveroo milieu (they still wear their traditional light-blue dress in Hungary too). These migrants have palpably changed the civic landscape not only in Budapest, but in provincial backwaters like Hajdúszoboszló on the Great Plains, bringing with them the usual range of behaviours drearily familiar in the West. As in Poland, where Donald Tusk was successfully able to take the immigration issue out of the hands of PiS, this has provided easy fodder for the opposition, with Tisza promising to terminate the government’s guest worker program once elected.

What does Tisza want? No one in Hungary is quite sure. The Tisza manifesto is an awkward jigsaw of ideas that do not fit together, promising fiscal austerity while offering generous social promises. That this is a campaign brochure and not a program for government can be seen by the fact that it duplicates, and in some cases outbids, the government’s election giveaways like the fourteenth monthly pension payment and energy subsidies. This is to be paid for by a progressive shakeup of the tax system, although this has not been costed. There are fairly credible rumours dating back to November of a ‘secret’ government program in which the burdens of the tax reform and the austerity program are made more explicit, but the general thrust of this document is not that different from what Tisza is openly campaigning on. In Magyar’s party, all the classic elements of Eastern European anti-politics unite — a charismatic leader with a field of paper candidates and shady businessmen behind him, a vague ideology of professionalism, decency, and anti-corruption, and a set of centre-right policies tacked on as an apparent afterthought. In the event of a Magyar victory, Budapest’s charity shops will see an influx of tweed and Barbour jackets; its department stores a shortage of blue polyester suits.

It should be clear from the above that Magyar’s challenge is not an intellectual repudiation of Orbánism, but an immanent critique. Thus, with no ideological differences, ideas have played little role in the campaign, which Magyar has tried to centre around corruption and cost-of-living issues, and Orban around issues of sovereignty raised by the war in Ukraine. The whole awesome power of the government’s public relations apparatus has been levied for a campaign smearing Magyar as a puppet of Zelensky or the eurocrats (the anti-Tisza billboards that have covered the country for a year now often feature the EPP’s president and parliamentary group leader Manfred Weber, a man barely known even in his native Germany, as the personification of this sinister power). Magyar has been careful to dodge this obvious tripwire.

Fidesz and Tisza are not the only parties contesting the election. Current polling suggests a potential four-party parliament, with the centre-left Democratic Coalition and the radical-right Mi Hazánk (‘Our Homeland’, a splinter from Jobbik after it politically moderated) each forming small parliamentary groups. The Democratic Coalition was for many years the party of the aforementioned disgraced former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose loyal cohort of followers wandered the desert with him for two decades, living off the carcasses of whatever opposition campaign they attached themselves to before moving on again. He stepped down last year, and the party leadership fell into the hands of his former wife of thirty years, Klára Dobrev. Whether they enter parliament is questionable; their contribution will be to act as a spoiler for Tisza, although Magyar will certainly be happy to have the Gyurcsányites campaigning against him rather than beside him. Our Homeland is exactly what one might imagine a party of that name to be: a jolly coalition of coronaboomers, fascist bodybuilders, and grizzled Christian Democrat Carroll Quigley enthusiasts for whom Orbán is a traitor to the national cause and an agent of dark masonic forces. Although some pro-government polls suggest they might be the kingmaker, it is improbable in the extreme that they will lend their support to Fidesz, nor will they happily lend their votes to Péter Magyar’s program of fiscal consolidation.

The outcome of the election is anyone’s guess. As my own well-placed sources in the Hungarian version of the Red Lion inform me, the mood in the government camp is that while the headline numbers put out by the independent polling companies forecasting huge majorities for Tisza are misleading insofar as they do not take into account what they themselves show are the large numbers of undecided voters, it will be a close-run thing. Their recurrent contention that polls are not neutral reflections of a reality that they do not interact with, but themselves shape individual behaviour by influencing perceptions of the probability of certain events, applies no less to their own optimistic internals, the implicit message of which is ‘Orbán’s got this, don’t defect’.

Fidesz has so thoroughly ensconced itself at every level of public life that an oppositional parliamentary majority alone would not be enough to dismantle the regime, any more than the collapse of communism displaced the old socialist networks from the bureaucracy. Yet the mere fact of Magyar’s exit shows that the centrifugal forces within the government coalition are already strong and will only grow stronger, with secret service repression of the type that has already reared its ugly head during the campaign — and which will only intensify with the widely anticipated reorganisation of the Interior Ministry in the event of a Fidesz triumph — perhaps Orbán’s only card left to play, regardless of whether he wins or loses. When the Liberal patrimonialism of Mikszáth’s day finally imploded and the boozy squires were turfed out of parliament, dour security men stepped into their place to restore order. Perhaps the lesson of the Tisza experiment will be that you really can step in the same river twice.

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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Much has already been written about the reasons and motivations for this catastrophic policy, which is now near-universally recognised to have been an act of egregious national and political self-harm. This is in spite of Boris Johnson’s attempts to revise the history of his own premiership, simultaneously claiming that the policy was a sensible choice to combat post-lockdown inflation while also claiming that it was an inescapable consequence of necessary grants of asylum for Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, and Afghans. Thankfully, there is no longer much interest in the thoughts of Boris Johnson, especially on the topic of Boris Johnson.

Britain now stands as a visibly less European country, and demographic transformation continues apace. It is in this context that some on the right, feeling the immigration restrictionist case for Brexit to have been nullified by the Boriswave, have begun to pine for the halcyon days of the early 2010s, in which Italian baristas and Romanian receptionists made up the bulk of the foreign population in Britain’s major urban centres. A recent article in J’accuse called for a second ‘Cameron-wave’, suggesting that (as well as creating a hostile environment for immigrants from the Third World), Britain should engineer a demographically favourable pattern of migration by increasing entries from Europe (and presumably also its diaspora nations). Whilst explicit Bregret is still uncommon (and perhaps rightly so), there is a growing sense that the unilateralist, anti-globalist populism of the previous decade needs to give way to a more consciously international outlook among nativists here and elsewhere.

As a proud Briton and European, I am an enthusiastic partisan of this approach. European migration should be liberalised, albeit with controls against welfare opportunists and criminals. We should also extend visa opportunities to members of European-descended populations in the Western and Southern Hemispheres. Whilst this alone will not fix our demographic issue — halving the non-European percentage of the population would require doubling the overall population through European migration, a goal too ambitious even for me — it would, combined with a maximally restrictionist approach to third-world immigration, do much to rectify the current state of British cityscapes.

For nationalistically-minded readers who baulk at this suggestion, I would stress that the mobilisation of foreign populations for domestic political purposes is not without precedent. Where we once settled Huguenots in Ulster and Flemings in Pembrokeshire to bring those unruly territories under control, we can now deploy our best South Africans and (selectively) Ukrainians to fill the newly privatised and redeveloped council estates of Stepney Green and Stockton. A new cosmopolitanism, for a new age.

There is, however, one major barrier that such a policy would face. Ease of movement between countries makes all partners vulnerable to the immigration policies of the weakest link among them, and non-European migrants naturalised in that country may well take the opportunity to migrate to countries with more bounteous opportunity. Indeed, it is some of the poorest countries in Western Europe (Portugal and Spain in particular) that have enacted some of the most liberal immigration policies, with naturalised residents often using these countries as ‘stepping stones’ on the way to Britain, Germany, or even Canada. If a more prosperous right-wing Britain were to implement CANZUK (a darling of the Boring Right), one could also reasonably expect an influx of Indians from Canada and Chinese from Australia to dwarf the flow of returning British stock.

Post-2020 Brexit revisionism has a tendency to overlook the already significant non-white immigration to this country, a sizeable proportion of which was facilitated by freedom of movement. The most obvious example of this is the mass movement of Romani from Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. Of the 225,000 Roma living in this country, 85.7% (as of 2021) have a foreign country of birth, principally EU member states (especially Romania, Italy, and Slovakia) and Moldova (itself likely to accede to the EU soon) — and the 225,000 number is considered by demographers to be a relatively conservative estimate, given that many Romani gypsies will either not respond to the census or will (as is common in Eastern Europe) give a misleading response to questions about ethnicity. It was estimated by our editor-in-chief that 1% or more of all births in 2024 were to Romanian-born Romani mothers, on the basis of an inference from the massive per capita difference in births from Romanian-born (a group including both Romanian and Romani mothers) versus Polish-born (almost solely Polish) mothers, and that’s before considering Romani mothers from other EU countries.

It should also be noted that the British Romanichal community (distinct also from Irish Travellers) are overwhelmingly of north-western European ancestry, while conversely the more historically endogamous Roma of Eastern Europe are a phenotypically distinctive South Asian ethnic group with only minor European admixture. As anyone who keeps track of recent race relations will note, the Roma have managed to live up to every negative stereotype held of them by their Slavic, Romanian, and Hungarian compatriots. From Harehills to Ballymena, they have been both the instigators and the targets of riots due to their antagonistic behaviour towards native British people. Additionally, like their distant South Asian cousins from Pakistan, they have participated in rape gangs in many parts of the country, particularly in Scotland. None of these people were ‘Boriswavers’ brought into the country as part of Johnson’s liberalisation of immigration; they came on the passports of EU member states, alongside tradesmen and students.

We can point to other examples of European states which have enabled third-party immigration to Britain. Portugal and Spain, due to their liberal post-imperial citizenship laws, have become conduits for immigration into Britain from Latin America, West Africa, Goa, and East Timor. France has enabled at least some Françafrique migrants to settle in London. The Somali community in the Netherlands partially migrated to the UK. Indeed, Britain, as a country which gave the world its current lingua franca and hosts a major international city which is not really matched by any other in Europe in its international allure, is uniquely vulnerable to this type of ‘country hopping’, which — as we will see — is not just the preserve of boat migrants. This would remain true even with a far more restrictive welfare system. Even aside from the existence of London and this country’s use of the English language, our more liberal labour laws are also appealing; non-whites in Continental Europe generally perceive Britain as a less racist country; and Britain is also already host to at least a segment of most existing third-world diasporas, greatly smoothing the process of migration.

As the demographic situation in most European states (and especially in the diaspora countries of North America and Oceania) worsens over the next few decades, it is worth considering how we might factor this into future immigration policy — even whilst we hope a political solution emerges to prevent this elsewhere, as we do for Britain. The simple solution of ending all immigration, which tempts a small minority on the right, would forego the opportunity of consolidating Europe’s best and brightest within our borders. As European countries converge economically, reciprocal free(er) movement makes increasing sense, given the decreasing likelihood of significant unidirectional flows. More importantly, indiscriminately closing the borders would mean closing off the possibility of return to the descendants of these islands now living in countries which are further down the path of demographic replacement than us, and may or may not be able to halt the process before it is too late. We should not be so blasé about dooming our cousins to that fate.

That said, the period in which we could fairly safely assume that a Spanish passport holder is likely to be Spaniard is now long gone. Therefore, absent a formal system of pan-European tiered citizenship, a policy framework will need to be established in Britain which selects against these unwanted intrusions. Before I provide an overview of what this might entail, I want to outline the existing migrant diasporas who arrived through EU channels, and additionally the longer-term threat non-European migration poses to visa liberalisation within a wider Western context.

The Roma

Both the exonyms we have applied to itinerant populations and the self-descriptions they offer to us have obscured the origins of many of Britain’s ‘traveller’ communities.

Broadly speaking (and often to the confusion of Continental Europeans), a distinction is drawn between Irish Travellers and Romanichal Gypsies (with the term ‘gypsy’ sometimes, but not always, regarded as a pejorative when applied to the former). These groups, while both having immigrated to Britain in the Early Modern Period and sharing a predisposition towards predatory criminality and random acts of anti-social violence, do not have a common origin. Irish Travellers, unsurprisingly, are of Irish provenance, where Romanichal Gypsies descend from a small population of Romani migrants who subsequently mixed with natives, making the modern population mostly European in ancestry. Interestingly, they retained Romani ways of life and even the Romani language until the nineteenth century, when it was largely replaced by Angloromani, an English pidgin featuring Romani vocabulary.

In accounting for their similarities, it’s worth stressing that most predominantly agricultural societies have a tendency towards internally exiling some elements within their populations, either due to socio-political exigencies or because certain individuals’ basic psychological profile is incompatible with a sedentary and often onerous working lifestyle. Most European countries, even though this has been lost in popular cultural narratives, had their own respective ‘gypsy’ groups, usually (but not always) the product of the intermingling of native criminal elements and Romani vagrants. The Taters of Sweden and Denmark (now largely assimilated) are one example, but there are also other native Germanic groups who, while being nearly entirely mono-ethnic in their origins, absorbed elements of Romani culture, such as the Fantefolk of Norway or the Yentish of Germany. However, the British Isles were relatively unique by the latter decades of the twentieth century in Western Europe in still being host to these archaic and quasi-nomadic ethno-social groupings in such large numbers. One might attribute this to the robustness with which Nordic social democracy dealt with unconventional minority groups, among other factors…

Into this confusing mix leapt the endogamous Roma of Eastern Europe, who have flooded the streets of Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, London, and Dublin, and of course the many English provincial towns where they can be seen begging, flogging the Big Issue, or otherwise pickpocketing unsuspecting East Asian tourists. In contrast to the actually-travelling Roma of Britain, who are fair-complexioned due to centuries of out-marriage, the Roma of the East look quite literally South Asian because they are of largely South Asian (and to some extent Middle Eastern) ancestry.

The following article from 2004, detailing Ken Livingstone’s ‘celebration’ of Roma culture, testifies to the elision of these ethnic categories in the wake of mass EU migration. Essentially white people celebrating exoticised folk customs held stage with foreign ‘asylum seekers’ (the fact that countries like Hungary and Czechia are regarded as ‘safe’ by British authorities is still a point of grievance among some Romani). The article also makes mention of the killing of an Irish Traveller called Johnny Delaney. In reality, the forcibly sedentarised and ghettoised Roma of post-communist countries have the same historical relationship to our longer-established Roma communities as the Beta Israel (‘Jews’ originating from Northern Ethiopia) have to the Ashkenazim.

Nevertheless, the official Roma population of Britain has exploded, and we are now host to one of the largest diasporas as of 2013. This Channel 4 ‘exposé’ from the time of the debate over Romania and Bulgaria’s accession to the EU is revealing. Documenting the Roma enclave in Page Hall, the presenter spends time interviewing the community of migrants as they loiter in previously English neighbourhoods and learn how to claim disability benefits in the local job centre. Sheffield (in which Page Hall is situated) is still host to a sizeable Roma community — estimated to be between 2,000 and 7,000 — and is a site of ethnic conflict between gypsies, native Britons, and sometimes Pakistanis also.

Telford, another town badly afflicted by the blight of multiculturalism, also has had to endure Romani gypsy migration and witnessed clashes between Roma and English youths in 2014. More recently, Harehill (in Leeds) was the centre of significant Roma riots in response to the state taking several children into care due to allegations of child abuse in the summer of 2024. As previously mentioned, in Ballymena in Northern Ireland, British protestants successfully expelled the larger part of a relatively small but aggressively anti-social minority in the town which had occupied a certain residential street (having spent some time in the poorer East Anglian towns around Cambridge, Romanis tend to rapidly assume control of a street or two, and therefore are capable of acting as a concentrated and menacing presence in spite of low absolute numbers).

The trigger for the riot — the rape of a 14-year-old girl by two Roma, the perpetrators of which fled the country — reflects wider patterns of sexual violence committed by men from this community (the prosecution seems to have inexplicably collapsed and never resulted in a conviction). Dundee recently saw the conviction of a five-member gang of Romani Romanian nationals for the sexual exploitation of ten women between the ages of 16 and 30, while in Canterbury in September 2025, three men were prosecuted for the gang rape of a 12-year-old girl. More historically, in February 2014, a mixed Roma-Kurdish gang were prosecuted for crimes against five adolescents in London. Roma have also been involved in intracommunal trafficking, such as in January 2015, in which five men were prosecuted for sexual offences against a fellow Roma. It should be noted that these crimes are different from the Pakistani rape gang phenomenon, insofar as the gangs are often more ethnically mixed, drawing from criminal elements within other diasporas, and targeting girls from their own ethnic background alongside British ones.

Britain, like Hungary or Slovakia, now has a self-perpetuating Roma problem. While EU remigration is a real phenomenon, and we unfortunately don’t have concrete ethnic exit data for these groups, we can safely assume that it is largely professional and working-class Eastern Europeans who are returning, and not members of the distinctive and ghettoised enclaves which now occupy various corners of British towns and cities. As a migration problem, it highlights how a policy like free movement amongst European nations, which is laudable in theory, has facilitated some of the worst forms of Third World migration. Most pickpocketing in the centre of my city is committed by Romani gypsies, and reviewing this event helps us contextualise recent historical Eurosceptic anti-immigration sentiment, even if it now seems passé amid the current deluge.

Lusophones and Hispanics

Whilst less problematic than the Roma, another two groups are also conspicuous newcomers whose presence in the country is almost entirely the product of intra-European migration, specifically, from Portugal: Goans and Timorese. All Goans born during the period of Portuguese rule (and, importantly, their descendants) are eligible for Portuguese citizenship, provided they are able to show birth certificates, marriage certificates, or passports indicating this. Depending on the documentation, this costs as little as €120-175 for descendants. Documents must be registered in Portugal itself, and Indian citizenship must be renounced. Taking just two to three years, this is obviously an attractive route — and there are currently 400,000 Goans who fit the criteria. Portugal is host to between 20,000 and 50,000 people of Goanese descent. Shockingly, Britain is home to 35,000 itself — with 20,000 concentrated in Swindon alone.

It should also be noted that similar naturalisations are extended to the two smaller and lesser-known Portuguese Indian territories of Daman and Diu. Predominantly Hindu and less culturally distinctive, migrants from these areas have also taken advantage of liberal immigration policies and have settled in the UK. Interestingly, EU-facilitated Indian migration has been cited as a trigger for the Leicester Hindu-Muslim riots, as Portuguese nationals broke the historic spatial divide between the Ugandan Asian Hindu areas to the north of the city and the predominantly Pakistani areas of the east.

There are estimated to be 20,000 Timorese in the UK, principally concentrated in Oxford, Peterborough, and Dungannon. Most of these in the first city are concentrated in Blackbirds Leys, and will presumably have access to social housing found in estates such as Littlemore. One particular Catholic comprehensive school in the area, called Greyfriars (which, under various other names, has been the most persistently failing school in the country), is host to a large number of Timorese who can only speak their native language of Tentum (non-proficiency in the English language is widespread throughout the community). While not notoriously problematic (indeed, many of them seem to have found work in Oxford’s colleges alongside a distinctive community of Central Americans), this is a highly welfare-dependent group (in terms of access to public housing and in-work benefits) which, despite possessing EU passports, indicates the same basic life outcomes, cultural attitudes, and social incompatibility of any other Austronesian ethnic group.

Of course, the biggest country with which Portugal maintains post-imperial connections is Brazil. There were approximately 220,000 people born in Brazil living in Britain in 2021, according to the Brazilian embassy, with 29% of those holding EU passports, with most having first lived in Southern Europe (primarily Portugal and Italy) before moving to Britain after the financial crisis. Numbers had doubled between 2011 and 2021, and have undoubtedly risen further since (even without free movement with Europe).

Finally, there are Portugal’s former African holdings, including Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. The latter was the birthplace of Valdo Calocane, who moved to Portugal and obtained citizenship before relocating to Britain, and after Brexit received EU settled status. In 2023, he murdered two students and another man in Nottingham during a psychotic episode, one of many such cases among African migrants. Ironically, Calocane’s first home in Britain was Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, where the English government once settled Flemings considered too violent and unruly to remain in the southeast of England, where they had originally landed. I wonder how much the lives of its modern inhabitants might be improved were Belgians once again their greatest concern.

In some respects, Spanish post-imperial citizenship laws are more radical than even those of Portugal. Spain allows citizens from Ibero-American countries to gain Spanish nationality after only two years of residency in the country, with the caveat that applicants must be able to demonstrate proficiency in Spanish (not exactly a high bar for immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries).

There are an estimated 250,0000-450,000 Latin Americans present in Britain, including first-generation immigrants and their descendants. The significant variance in estimations is the result of there being no ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ classification in the census. This also makes it difficult to assess what fraction of the British Hispanic population holds EU passports, but a 2011 survey estimated that 38% of London-based Latin Americans had lived in another EU country first. Other surveys suggest that 18% of British Hispanics have EU passports, and that 55% arrived between 2001 and 2011, with a significant increase after the financial crisis (a similar pattern as seen with Brazilians).

MENAPT and Sub-Saharan Africans

More concerning than the above cases has been the tendency for naturalised Muslim and African migrants to immigrate to the UK from Continental Europe. Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found that as of 2013, 7% (a total of 141,000) of those who had come to the UK under EU rules were born outside the continent. EU migration to Britain continued to rise over the next several years, as did the share of the EU population born overseas.

Most well known is that 20,000 Somalis came to the UK from the Netherlands — about a third of the total community in that country. Most of these Somalis went either to London or to Leicester. Similar stories can be told of Moroccans, Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans, and other groups. Data on onward migration among these groups is generally hard to find, but it is unsurprising that people who have already left home for a foreign continent find it relatively easy to move again when other countries offer better rewards, especially in terms of welfare.

Some surveys have suggested that part of the motivation for this movement is that Britain is ‘less racist’ than other European countries, and various commentators (more often in the 2010s than now, except for last Cameroon standing, Fraser Nelson) have used this to construct a notion of anti-racist British exceptionalism which justifies the claim that Britain is unusually well-positioned to integrate such communities.

However, digging into these perceptions among this group, we see an entirely contradictory picture. What is generally meant by this notion is that it is easier for immigrants to maintain a separate ethnic and religious identity against British norms, whilst still enjoying the fruits of living here. This is in no small part because of the pre-existing presence of (at least small groups of) virtually every ethnicity in Britain already — some of whom have even achieved a level of success which might enable them to support newcomers within their community. All of these motivations are essentially self-referential, in that they express no positive identification with Britain, and instead only the instrumentalist view that Britain could provide their diasporas with unique opportunities.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the character of migration to Britain changed substantially after Brexit. More immigrants from the Third World arrived on our shores than before, dramatically shifting the demographic composition of the country. However, we should also be aware that migration from the EU was not always more desirable, and that it has gifted us some of our most problematic diasporas to date.

Britain was right to extend residency to EU migrants who had arrived prior to 2016, and I am glad that Reform has said that its abolition of ILR will not impact this category of foreign national. But an opportunity was lost for a more discerning policy of remigration. There was no reason why the Roma, and also onward migrant diasporas originally from Third World countries, should have been allowed to stay. I believe that, particularly concerning the former population, a working relationship can and should have been established with the governments of Central and Eastern Europe to ensure their repatriation. There are ≈350,000 EU nationals of African, Asian, or Roma origin in Britain; logistically and legally, this is an easy win for an immigration restrictionist government seeking to deport interlopers.

Going forward, we need to remain conscious of how immigration agreements might unintentionally bring third-party populations to our country. Of course, most long-term immigration to Britain and other European states was the unintentional by-product of often well-meaning legislation. Britain’s Windrushers came accidentally after a policy designed to enable greater migration between dominions begat an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Similarly, Germany’s Gastarbeiter policy was designed to fill short-term job vacancies in particular industries rather than to enable the permanent settlement of Turks. If we are to effect an internally liberal system of immigration between culturally compatible countries, there will need to be conscious controls against the immigration of dual or recently naturalised immigrants from these countries (e.g., first- or second-generation Indian immigrants from Canada). Likewise, if there is to be a pan-European Youth Mobility Scheme, it is possible that it might be extended to countries with a significant Roma population, like Moldova.

A cosmopolitan but informed immigration system is possible, and even desirable. If Britain is to be a world centre, rather than an inward-looking and stagnant shire, it will be necessary to enable culturally compatible foreigners to live and work here to some extent, even if we can debate precisely what that extent is. Indeed, it is surely desirable to secure reciprocal arrangements which allow British people to pursue opportunity abroad, whether in Europe, North America, or Oceania. Ultimately, as European countries converge towards a similar level of wealth, we should not expect large groups from particular countries to permanently settle as a result of this. Even if Brexit had not happened, the rapidly increasing wealth of Poland and Romania would have tempted many of their diaspora back — as it has done across Europe in the past decade, despite continued EU membership.

It is often — correctly — lamented that London, more than any other city, as the historic centre of English national life throughout our nation’s history, is no longer an English city. Indeed, restoring its place as a national capital is a worthy goal. Nevertheless, it would be hard to argue that life in our greatest city would be made worse by the presence of young Europeans from across the continent, or that London’s position as a global financial centre would be bolstered by preventing those same people coming here. However, if young Westerners are to be able to enjoy mobility between kindred states, as they should, this will require more rather than less discrimination — and any future approach must reflect this.

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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Kebatu was swiftly arrested and charged with the sexual assault of the teenager. Word got out about the incident, and it erupted. One week later, the eyes of the nation turned towards Essex and the Bell Hotel in Epping. On 17 July, what could reasonably be described as a small riot kicked off, with police vans attacked, rocks thrown, and fireworks launched. It was immediately reminiscent of the Southport riots, and I should know.

I didn’t make it to Epping that first night, or the following evening when leftist activists made their way up from London, eventually being shuttled back to the tube station in police vans after the locals became rightfully angered by their presence, but I was there by the weekend. It was the first visit of many over the next few months, as the energy of Epping flooded the streets across Britain. More and more incidents of asylum hotel residents molesting and attacking the good people of this country hit national headlines. From Norwich to Nuneaton, the Isle of Dogs to Waterlooville, British citizens of all social classes and groups took to the streets to protest against the housing — at eye-watering expense — of irreconcilably alien men, hailing from backwards countries, with backwards attitudes and the conviction rates for sexual assault and other offences to prove it, right in the midst of our towns and cities. Ordinary, law-abiding British people and their children were expected to live, cheek by jowl, alongside them without any measures to ensure their security.

While covering these plucky locals with my phone and a janky mic setup finally gave me my big break as a reporter, these aren’t the first protests I’ve covered in my time. Since 2018, I’ve covered marches organised by Tommy Robinson, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests, Black Lives Matter protests, and the associated counter-rallies in Parliament Square — to name just a few. The day after Axel Rudakubana brutally murdered three innocent children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party (a year prior to the Epping protests), I hit the streets of Southport, just a short train ride away from my then-abode in Manchester.

I have never felt more like a ghoul in carrying out my job than when I started taking pictures at the memorial service in the town. Hundreds of people turned out in front of the town hall to pay their respects. Friends and families hugged and cried just metres away from me. The face of a young expecting mother standing next to a pile of flowers that I photographed is still forever burned into my memory. I had to keep reminding myself of the importance of my work — that people needed to see the impact of these crimes, and the brutal reality of mass migration — such was the sense of imposing on what should be the private grief of a bereaved community.

Just twenty minutes down the road was the location for what I expected to be a protest, near where the attack had actually happened. When I turned up, the riot was already in full swing. I’ve still never seen anything like it. Police vans beeped in desperate screeches as they were set on fire. Bricks were flying over my head, crashing straight into a mosque on the corner of the crossroads. Ordinary members of the public cheered on young men as they tried to fight with riot police. There is no stranger situation for someone used to the impenetrable social order of rural, middle class England than the eruption of chaos and violence all around, the shattering of that stability which is often taken for granted. Though the first night in Epping was riotous, Southport was a different level entirely. I eventually got the stuffing knocked out of me (and half a tooth), as a number of the protesters assumed that, as a journalist, I was part of an enemy outlet — but that’s a story for another time.

The riots then spread across the country. In some areas, Muslims counter-protestors made a stand against whites. Some all-too-excitable corners of the internet forecast that a race war had begun in England; instead, it fizzled out in around a week. The level of violence in Southport, Sheffield and Middlesbrough burned hot and fast, but never had the momentum to continue indefinitely. What was far more significant at Southport wasn’t how everyone acted, but who acted. Yes, the majority of the actual violence was conducted by young white men. Yet the people on the streets where it all kicked off were of all ages and, in particular, there were far more women in attendance than ever before.

Historically, right-wing street protests in Britain were completely dominated by one specific demographic: highly politicised working-class men from their twenties to fifties. These were the people who hit the ground backing Tommy Robinson’s EDL marches in the early 2000s, and the same basic pattern continued when Britain First sprung up onto the scene. Recently, some of the ‘For You’ page right have gone out of their way to attack football hooligans, claiming they are falling for some kind of ‘bread and circuses’ operation to hold the British people down, foolishly dispersing their energy fighting each other rather than focusing on the real enemy. This has absolutely zero connection to the truth, as anyone who has done the slightest of research into right-wing street movements would know. In reality, it was precisely this demographic who were among the first in Britain to react to the scourge of the grooming gangs. That is not to say their activities were particularly effective, but to claim they were all too distracted by football matches is absurd.

Infamously, one drunken young man slurred his words during a television interview at one of these protests. A reference to (very much real) ‘Islamic rape gangs’ was instead understood by the chattering classes to actually be a reference to (obviously fictional) ‘Muslamic ray guns’. This became a leftist meme that you can probably see on BlueSky still today, though the more intelligent left-wingers have probably already hastily deleted their old posts mocking this young man in fear that someone might dig them up and release them into the much-changed political and social environment of 2026. These men were rowdy, violent, and ready for a fight, just like they’d be with their rival football team on a Saturday.

Just as these men would follow their local club to away matches, the men in the EDL, the DFLA (the ‘Democratic Football Lads Alliance’, a splinter from the original Football Lads Alliance), and Britain First would also tour around the country. When away from their home bases, such as Luton or Manchester, the right-wing protesters in a town would not have garnered their strength primarily from the local population; instead, ranks would be filled by whichever organisation was on the move to the location of protest for the day. For the various post-EDL Tommy Robinson marches I covered in London in the late 2010s, this remained true. The same faces popped up again and again every time that Robinson whipped up a crowd to march on Downing Street. This pattern would still mostly hold for the counter-rallies against the left-wing extremists who had toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and defaced other statues and memorials (including the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square and, unsuccessfully, the Cenotaph) across the country in 2020.

While those who attend right-wing street protests will still constantly see the same faces from the alternative media sphere — the people who, like myself, are there to cover the protests, rather than to protest themselves — the ranks of the protestors are now mostly comprised of actual locals. This is a big change. Anti-immigration protests now have a fundamentally different character, chiefly because they are no longer driven primarily by a small cadre of activists moving up and down the country. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to during my time on the ground told me they had never been to a protest before this summer. Many told me that they did not care about politics at all until the consequences of mass migration knocked on their door. This has made the protest organisation itself very grassroots, as I noted in my article for The Critic last year:

The protests of 2025 are also organised in a way that literal communist “community organisers” could only hope to dream of. Sometimes, known activists in the community are responsible for bringing everyone together, like James Harvey and Sydney Jones, who organised the protest in Norwich last weekend. Other times, a Facebook group or WhatsApp chat will be set up, along the lines of “X COMMUNITY SAYS NO TO Y LOCAL HOTEL,” by a completely random local resident, who just decides to start organising protests, despite having absolutely zero experience doing so.

The difference from how left-wing ‘street protestors’ operate could not be more stark. While it is true that the EDL was an organisation that organised big marches in specific areas, with attendees travelling in from around the country, it was nonetheless a completely grassroots effort when it was created, without powerful backers — just British people who were angry at the situation in front of them. By contrast, organisations like the Socialist Workers Party and Stand Up To Racism receive hundreds of thousands of pounds from trade unions, and sometimes even the government. Your average left-wing ‘street protestor’ (though even describing them as such is potentially misleading) will be rounded up from universities and other far-left groups, given pre-printed placards to hold, all assembled beforehand, and will chant exactly the same slogans time after time. When you report on enough of these, you end up learning them by osmosis.

Not only do they travel as complete outsiders to different towns, but if the distance is great enough, they will get sponsored coaches, all paid for by their powerful backers, in order to give the impression that everyone in that locale was behind them. A now-infamous instance of this took place in Epping, when Stand Up To Racism activists took the tube from the middle of London, holding their placards declaring that ‘Epping says no to racism’. To my knowledge, quite literally none of these people were from the town. They were, quite rightly, despised by the locals.

Because the supporters of Stand Up To Racism are both few in number and highly geographically concentrated, this summer saw them meet more than their match in town after town. When Britain First would organise an event somewhere in the country, the forces of the left would ferry their activists to confront them on the streets, hopefully in equal (or greater) numbers, but at least with enough of a show of strength to not be embarrassing. That’s easy to do when you have one or two national groups to oppose wherever they turn up, pre-announced. But when you have basically spontaneous protests popping up all across the country with practically no notice, they showed themselves to be incapable of putting up a serious show of force anywhere outside of a small number of urban areas and university towns. No longer could the pretence that angry right-wing street protestors were matched by their equally passionate left-wing counterparts hold. One particularly stark example of this new dynamic took place during the protests in Nuneaton, when what could not have been more than two dozen or so Stand Up To Racism activists were literally hounded out of town after around one thousand local protestors decided they’d had enough of them.

Just as the organisation of right-wing street protest has shifted, so too have the demographics of those who turn out. One useful comparison would be the differences between the people who turned out to protest the Britannia Hotel on the Isle of Dogs and the Bell Hotel in Epping. The protestors against the Britannia Hotel were more diverse, with at least a few visible minorities present every time I went. The majority were people who had lived in London their whole life — often the remaining Cockneys resisting demographic replacement. I would suggest that most of them were probably former Labour voters, and the great majority of them were working class. One of the leaders of the local protest, Lorraine Kavanagh, once told me that instead of spending taxpayer money on asylum hotels for illegal immigrants, this money should be redirected towards the NHS and for benefits for disabled people who can’t work — not exactly the priorities of your average Conservative or Reform voter. Other attendees were people who moved to work in Canary Wharf, including people from the finance and tech sectors. The result is that the people protesting in the middle of London hardly possess the instincts of traditional right-wing voters.

The views of the people protesting the Bell Hotel in Epping were different. The crowd were basically what you would expect from Essex, with many small businessmen and middle-class commuters into London. While not bereft of working-class protestors, I would be shocked if the average salaries here were not significantly higher than the average salaries of those protesting the Britannia Hotel. And this is the rub: it is no longer true that anti-migration protests in Britain are something attended by the same kind of people who would also have gone to EDL, DFLA, or Britain First protests — people who, yes, do have very real demographic strength in certain areas, but are certainly not predominant in all of (or even most of) the country. Attending one of these protests is increasingly a class-neutral signifier. The attendees do not represent a narrow ‘football lads’ demographic, but genuinely reflect the makeup of the town in which they happen to be taking place. A protest in Surrey and a protest in Lancashire will look pretty different to one another.

Left-wing street protest never had the class barrier that previously afflicted protest from the right. Both middle-class and working-class people on the left would happily turn out to a Stand Up To Racism rally; accordingly, the typical rally will have a mix of ageing trade unionists, hippie students, fresh-off-the-boat Boriswavers, and Green-voting London grannies living in million-pound houses, all turning up to the same event. Now, they might not exactly mingle with each other if there are enough of them, but it is still fair to say that ‘protesting’ was always something that the left could brag about. An oldhead left-winger in 2026 could brag about their history of marching with the CND in the 1980s, or against the Iraq War in 2003 and, in the company of polite society, would probably get pleasant nods of approval in return. Some right-wingers might tell similar stories of protest, but would probably look upon it as the folly of youth. They would certainly never dream of boasting about taking to the streets in support of any kind of right-wing political view (except perhaps, in certain company, the defence of rural interests). While I suspect that the ‘metropolitan elite’ (for lack of a better word) would still look down upon right-wing street protest, this taboo is breaking in the social circles of the more provincial middle classes. Certainly, both left and right have similar-looking faces at their protests nowadays.

But the biggest shift in demographics of all is the number of women. Women now not only attend the protests, but often lead them. The creation of the Pink Ladies, which sprang up simultaneously outside the Bell Hotel and the Britannia Hotel, and is now led nationally by Orla Minihane from Epping, was perhaps the best example of this change. Women often held back the more rowdy protestors from drinking, fighting, and, in some instances, even had entire female-only protests, standing up against the migrants who were committing the awful crimes against them. In terms of optics, this was the biggest win for the right. It’s rather hard to label a crowd of women of all ages saying ‘I’m in danger of being attacked by scary men’ as ‘far-right extremists and racists’.

In fact, there was only one demographic that was generally not present at all at the most recent wave of protests: women in their twenties. Every other age group of women would turn up everywhere I went. It’s likely that this has something to do with the fact that these women are the most left-wing demographic in their cohort to begin with, that schoolgirls have been regularly targeted by the migrants, and that the mothers (usually at least in their thirties, and generally in their forties) and grandmothers would then come out worried for their daughters and granddaughters.

So what does all of this mean? The biggest consequence, in my eyes, is that politics is now for many more people, no longer conducted only at the ballot box. This is a shift away from protest as an activity only a small cohort of radicals engage in, to something that you could see your mum attending every week with her friends from the coffee morning. When ‘normies’ are taking to the streets of this country in their thousands, often having never even thought about the political system before, you know that we’re in an era ripe for radical change.

I expect that the protests will return this summer. Everyone knows that summer is far more febrile for protests, riots, and generalised anti-social behaviour than winter — whether it is right-wing or left-wing protest, football-related disorder, or hordes of euphemistic ‘teenagers’ causing mayhem in parks and beach towns. The obvious reason for this is that no one wants to go out and protest every week when it’s freezing cold and raining. But it is often forgotten that another reason for the protests dying down in the winter months is that the number of incidents inciting protests also went down. After all, these protests against asylum hotels erupted because, in practically every town, an illegal immigrant actually sexually assaulted or attacked somebody — the mere presence of the hotel alone was generally not sufficient. Just like us Brits, the residents of asylum hotels don’t like going out in the cold and rain. Now that the weather is turning back, we’ll once again begin to see Afghans roaming our streets, our parks, and near our schools, with predictable consequences.

Now that the barrier to right-wing protest has been broken, I believe it will be hard to put back in the bottle. The only way that we will ever see these protests stop is if this country engages in a policy of securely detaining and deporting these illegal immigrants who have subjected the British public to terrible crimes despite the fact that they never should have been here in the first place.

This article was written by Jack Hadfield, Respected Newsman and friend of Pimlico Journal. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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This week, we were reminded of Britain’s interminable gerontocracy as Robert Jenrick announced a Reform government would maintain the triple lock on pensions. Could we ever have hoped otherwise?

Plus, we look at the fall of Reform’s Housing Spokesman, and ask whether the party might do better to avoid such appointments for the time being.

This newsletter’s agenda: Reform commits to the triple lock; Spoke too soon?

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Is it antisemitic to say so? Last week, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organisation that trains the FBI to identify extremism, declared that it was. Greenblatt lamented that blame was being ‘placed at the feet’ of the Jews, before denouncing those who claimed the Israelis had ‘whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.’ These are, of course, two separate questions. Yet for Greenblatt and Israel’s most vocal advocates, ‘Jews’ and ‘Israel’ are interchangeable. A political argument is thereby transformed into a moral one; a nuanced question is wrenched into a binary in which right-thinking people can find only one correct answer. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recognised the ruse: ‘Some Jewish leaders, alarmed by the backlash to the war, are trying to rule any discussion of Israel’s role in instigating it out of bounds… Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to overlook provable facts.’

The facts are damning. Marco Rubio all but admitted that Israel, supposedly the junior partner, compelled America to go to war. Rubio’s later attempt to pretend that he said something else entirely has hardly put the matter to bed, not least because at the outset Trump and the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, gave broadly the same account. Less than forty-eight hours before the war began, Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump there had never been a better window to kill the ailing Ayatollah Khamenei — the despot, Netanyahu stressed, who had allegedly attempted to sponsor Trump’s assassination during his election campaign. The head of the Mossad assessed that a decapitation strike was likely to topple the regime, although whether Israel actually believed this on the basis of their intelligence, or said this only to try to persuade Trump, cannot be known. Three White House sources say the call was persuasive, despite Trump having already approved the war in principle.

Israel’s influence has at times been exaggerated, and it is true that Trump bears full responsibility for the decision, which he took in the wake of an audacious operation in which US Delta Force abducted the president of Venezuela, a supposedly ‘perfect’ example of regime change that he may have felt augured a similar triumph in Tehran. Yet the environment in which the decision was made was shaped at critical junctures by people who appear unwilling or unable to distinguish Israel’s interests from America’s. Trump’s special envoys, ardent Israelophiles Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, jettisoned negotiations with the Iranians that were reportedly going well. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is a Christian Zionist who has previously called for Israelis to rebuild the Third Temple — requiring the demolition of the third holiest site in Islam — and was the first cabinet official to endorse the war.

While a solitary American interest in this war is hard to discern, Israel’s prerogatives shed rather more light on things. In the weeks before the bombing began, Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest confidants, coached Netanyahu on how to persuade his own president to go to war. The White House manifesto for that war, which has so far seen 50,000 American troops deployed to the Middle East, appears to have been plagiarised from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an organisation founded ‘to enhance Israel’s image in North America’. The non-profit has been described as an Israeli government asset by the director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director, Joe Kent, resigned over the war, claiming Iran posed ‘no imminent threat’ to the US, which, he said, ‘started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.’ Even Robert Kagan, the neoconservative hawk and ideological architect of American interventionism, struggled to fathom America’s actions. ‘Iran is a much greater threat to Israel than it is to the United States’, he told a blushing fellow neocon, Bill Kristol. The idea that Israel is ‘America’s greatest ally’ has, finally, left Kagan cold. ‘It is a great ally, in defence of Israel… It’s kind of like saying South Vietnam was a great ally in the fight against North Vietnam’, he scoffed.

The Third Gulf War is merely the most conspicuous consequence of a decades-long open secret: Israelophilia — the unconditional love of Israel — has helped to create a looking-glass world in which Western interests, freedoms, and judgment have been subordinated to the imperatives of a single foreign state. It has led avowed doves like Donald Trump to start foolish foreign wars. Self-described free speech advocates such as Marco Rubio have locked up and deported Israel’s critics. Many journalists have come to act as wartime propagandists. Through claiming a monopoly on Judaism, Israelophilia has also left Jews as a whole more divided and more vulnerable, and less willing to distinguish romanticised ideas of Israel from the reality.

The Israelophile case for the Iran War mirrors the arguments Israelophiles have put forward for most others. The Middle East’s sole liberal democracy faces existential threats from millenarian Islamic neighbours bent on its destruction, and must therefore deploy the world’s ‘most moral army’ to act with extreme violence to ensure its survival. The West is morally bound to help with this endeavour, or at the very least to suppress its criticisms of a nation essentially cast as the goodies in a Manichaean battle between good and evil. In this telling, Israel merely happens to be on the front line of a war involving all free societies: a war of civilisation versus barbarism in which the rest of us, if anything, are not really pulling our weight. The Islamic republic needed to be toppled to contain its looming nuclear threat; the same threat Trump and Netanyahu claimed had been destroyed last year.

This version of reality does contain some elements of truth. Iran does pose a threat to Israel, and Israel’s alarm at the prospect of the Mullahs obtaining a nuclear weapon is entirely understandable. Yet Israel’s leaders have for three decades responded by exaggerating the exact nature of the threat, most recently by claiming that Iran planned to strike Europe with ballistic missiles. A subtler riff on this argument presents Israel’s fight with its neighbours as somehow linked to anxieties about Muslim immigration across the West — as if Israeli military victories are wins for us all. Yet the past quarter century of failed interventions suggests the correlation runs the other way: the more destruction in the Middle East, the greater the immigration burden borne by Europe. Chaos abroad does not necessitate or justify immigration to Europe, but our current leaders will act as though it does. Israel’s objective of destabilising Iran may in fact produce the biggest migration wave yet seen. We should therefore resist the temptation to project domestic culture wars onto foreign kinetic ones.

That entails having a clear-eyed view of the Middle East. Israel — within its Green Line borders — is the region’s most robust democracy. It is more liberal than most of its neighbours. Israel also faces complex security challenges that most of its Western peers do not. And yet none of this should obscure the profound philosophical differences between the Israeli state and its Western peers: Israel is at its core an ethno-state whose policies are, as it stands, guided by biblical claims and obligations.

These differences tend to be softened in the vision of Israel presented by Israelophiles, which closely resembles the wartime propaganda the Israeli government promotes in English for suckers — or, if you like, the Yiddish formulation that gets much mileage in Israel, the freier. The message aimed at a domestic audience in Hebrew tells a rather different story. Last year, Netanyahu told the i24 news channel in Hebrew that he was on a ‘historic and spiritual mission’, and that he was ‘very’ attached to the vision of a Greater Israel. That segment was cut from the broadcaster’s Hebrew and English YouTube channels, appearing only on its Hebrew website. As the war entered its fifth week, Netanyahu declared in Hebrew that the conflict was ‘changing the realities in the Middle East’ and ‘increasing the status of Israel as a superpower.’

Since the Iran War began, Yair Lapid, leader of Israel’s opposition, has also called for the establishment of a Greater Israel. He said he would support ‘anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land and a safe haven for us’. He added: ‘Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the land of Israel is biblical, [and] the biblical borders of the land of Israel are clear.’ This is not a Tanakh-thumping settler, but the ostensibly secular voice of centrist moderation that Israel’s liberal backers have long hung their hopes on.

Lapid’s remarks were not widely reported in the English-speaking press. The reluctance of some Anglophone journalists to cover Israel’s expansionist ambitions might stem from the fact that Israeli politicians are prone to making inflammatory statements, and linking them to imperial intent can at times carry the whiff of conspiracy theory. Other journalists have built careers linking criticism of Israel to antisemitism, a delicate art that depends on Israel appearing as benevolent and normal a state as possible. This creates genuine ethical quandaries. A fairly prominent British journalist once arrived at a dinner I attended after interviewing Israel’s Diaspora Minister, Likud’s Amichai Chikli, and relayed to me with some alarm that Chikli had spoken favourably about Greater Israel. The journalist was conflicted about whether to report statements that could be weaponised by pro-Palestine activists, and ultimately declined to publish them. This attitude towards inconvenient facts would no doubt resonate with the former head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, who told the New York Times Magazine it was ‘naïve’ to believe that the ‘free market of ideas ultimately sifts falsehood to produce truth.’ There are times when you must put your thumb on the scales.

Israel’s conduct during this war may surprise some of its supporters abroad, yet readers of the Hebrew press will recognise it as the logical conclusion of ambitions that enjoy significant political support. Religious settlers have perpetrated more than twenty pogroms against Arabs in the West Bank with legal impunity. Judges have dismissed charges against soldiers accused of gang raping a Palestinian detainee. The men were later fêted on television programmes. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man who once hung a portrait of the terrorist Baruch Goldstein (a physician who murdered twenty-nine Palestinians whilst they were praying in a mosque in the West Bank) in his living room, has served as Minister of National Security (almost) continuously since December 2022. His appointment preceded October 7, and must be understood as representative of wider trends in Israeli political culture, rather than as simply a radicalisation in response to those events. After his party, Otzma Yehudit, passed death penalty legislation for Palestinians who kill Jews (but not vice versa), Ben-Gvir handed out champagne in the Knesset. And that’s just the domestic front.

As religious Zionists continue to outpace secular Israelis demographically, strengthening the hand of Likud and the likes of Ben-Gvir, the gap between the Israelophile vision and Israeli reality will only widen. The foreshocks of this trend are being felt at Israel’s borders, which the state has never cared to define and yet have already been unilaterally redrawn. Israel’s invasion and displacement of one million people in Lebanon has been declared a formal annexation of the territory south of the Litani River. The Israel Defence Forces plan openly to demolish thousands of homes and commit ethnic cleansing, while right-wing activists have called for Jewish settlement in the area. Israel has bombed Iran’s energy facilities despite protests from the United States, leading the Iranians to escalate in turn by destroying energy infrastructure in the Gulf — something that will almost certainly result in a global recession. That is the same Gulf which the United States has put significant efforts in pushing towards friendlier relations with Israel, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords. Israel also appears to have cynically targeted officials that the US regarded as moderates or viable negotiating partners, thus foreclosing American exit routes from the war.

These actions are hard to square with the Israelophile vision of a beleaguered liberal democracy fighting for its survival. The way Israelis and their allies have framed the war to friendly audiences only deepens the contrast. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have referred to enemies in Iran and Gaza as ‘Amalekites’, a biblical tribe the Hebrew God ordered to be eradicated down to their children and livestock. At the outset of the war, Netanyahu told a crowd in Hebrew: ‘We read in this week’s Torah portion, “remember what Amalek did to you.” We remember and we act.’ Netanyahu stopped short of the full biblical injunction. Deborah Lipstadt, the genocide scholar and former US antisemitism czar, was less restrained. ‘Those of us who were in synagogue yesterday heard… a very brief reading from Deuteronomy about Amalek’, she told an audience two weeks into the war. ‘What are we told to do? Don’t forget… remember… and wipe them out!’ Whatever Lipstadt was getting at, it seems ‘Never Again’ was far from her mind. In an appearance on Fox News, Rabbi Chaim Mentz from the mainstream Chabad sect further illuminated what acting on the injunction might look like. ‘There’s definitely going to be regime change’, he prophesied, before handing the presenter a Purim gift. ‘2,300 years ago, the entire Iran, negative people, were wiped out. And therefore we give presents.’ The show’s guests were amused by the genocidal aside.

To unconditionally love a foreign country, it helps to believe six impossible things before breakfast. One such impossibility is that Jews and Israel are indivisible and yet also distinct. Their enemies, past and present, can be similarly fudged. Iran, Amalek, Pharaoh, and Hitler are often invoked by Israelophiles as reincarnations of the same enemy that cannot be reasoned with, only overcome through tribal solidarity and brute force. The appeal is understandable. Ancient archetypes can steady us. But the American literary critic Leon Wieseltier recognised that weaving them into contemporary conflicts can leave us blinkered. ‘Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death’, he wrote. ‘To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological view about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.’

Like many of Israel’s defenders, Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus of law at Harvard, takes the opposite view. He recently told his audience: ‘If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear bombs, he [sic] will do what Hitler did and there will be millions and millions of deaths… Had President Trump been in charge in 1935, 1936, I think the Holocaust would have been prevented.’ If you can believe this, as the saying goes, you will believe anything — except US intelligence reports showing Iran had not pursued a bomb in the build-up to the war. Israel and its allies have been fighting Hitler’s ghost since the founding of the state; Dershowitz has merely absorbed the canard. During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister, deployed the late Führer for political purposes so many times the writer Amos Oz was moved to remind him: ‘Hitler is already dead, Mr Prime Minister. Again and again Mr Begin you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists.’

Sating that urge comes at a cost. It leaves little room for what Hannah Arendt, a free-thinking Jewish writer who fell foul of the ADL and other Zionist organisations, called ‘loyal opposition’ from within the Jewish community. Since October 7, there has been an understandable closing of ranks among many Jews. But this has often entailed the closing of minds. Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organisation in America, proclaims on its website that ‘all kinds of students are invited and encouraged to bring their whole selves. Whether students keep kosher or have never attended synagogue; whether they want to participate in Shabbat or in a study group’. Everyone is welcome, that is, apart from speakers who ‘delegitimise’ Jewish statehood. As the writer Peter Beinhart points out, ‘there is no prohibition on speakers who “delegitimise” God.’ Brandeis University, bearing the name of a Jewish free speech advocate, has similarly prohibited a pro-Palestine organisation, advertising itself as a place where Jews can ‘feel safe in their Jewish identity.’

This self-ghettoisation is surely an act of communal self-harm. Jewish emancipation from rabbinical authority afforded Jews two centuries of intellectual flourishing, sustained by free thought and association. Many Israelophiles appear intent on reversing that progress by substituting God with a form of idolatry Hebrew scripture warns against: state worship, complete with new blasphemy laws and high priests claiming the power to excommunicate.

Israel’s capture of American institutions is a byproduct of a campaign that originated with the claim of Israel’s founders to represent all Jewish people, a remarkable gambit in the 1950s, when there were four times as many Jews living in America as in Israel. David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan appealed to American Jews to pledge themselves to Israel, to the exasperation of American Jewish leaders, conscious of the success of Jewish assimilation. Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, said it was an ‘unheard-of request for allegiance to a foreign power.’ Almost twenty years later, following the Six-Day War, Jewish American attitudes became decisively pro-Israel, and hundreds of millions of dollars began flowing to Zionist organisations.

What began as a flirtation between minority rights activism and foreign interest lobbying has since blossomed into a marriage. Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, America’s antisemitism czar, recently announced the State Department has established ‘a whole division’ to combat ‘anti-Semitism on the internet’, which encompasses accusations of dual loyalty, applying ‘double standards’ to the state of Israel, or claiming that the Jewish state is ‘a racist endeavour’. Despite the possibility that these claims may, at least in some cases, be accurate or warranted, the American government has for decades attempted to make them unutterable. For the Trump administration, this represents a clear departure from a foreign policy that professes to champion free speech. The self-same US administration that rebuked Europe for ‘Orwellian’ online speech codes forced the sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison, a major private donor to the IDF, following a campaign that alleged the platform hosted too much Israel-critical content. That content is now censored by a former IDF soldier whose brief entails a special focus on antisemitism.

The conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel was a deliberate strategic decision taken by Israel and its defenders. In 2004, as Mark Mazower documents in Antisemitism: A World History, the Israeli minister Natan Sharansky announced that ‘the State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and to implement a coordinated counter-offensive’ against a new kind of antisemitism: anti-Zionism. That same year, America formally adopted the view that antisemitism encompassed ‘vilification of Israel’ and established numerous official bodies to combat it around the world, obligating American diplomats to ‘act on behalf of a foreign nation.’ As far as I can tell, it remains the only arrangement of its kind. Just like any other state, Israel is not a disinterested party that can be relied upon to decide where legitimate criticism ends and vilification begins. Yet Israel and America — its foremost ally — have deigned to mark Israel’s own homework, using antisemitism to advance its interests through coercive diplomacy.

Greenblatt and his ilk are the progeny of this shift, which has seen Israel’s American advocates grow bolder over time. Last year, he claimed that ‘every Jewish person is a Zionist’ and that one could not ‘take Zion’ out of Jewish identity. He went further: anti-Zionist Jews were themselves antisemitic. The danger of the game Greenblatt is playing became apparent when, on a separate occasion, his doppelganger must have asked a CNBC news anchor: ‘Why is it that Jewish people in this country get blamed for what a nation on the other side of the world is doing?’ Greenblatt was apparently unaware that his life’s work eloquently answers his own question.

Greenblatt is not alone in attempting to collapse the distinction between Jews and Israel. Addressing a pro-Israel conference in New York last year, the Times columnist Melanie Phillips urged Jews worldwide to put the ‘the Jewish people and the Jewish nation’ first. She added that ‘In Britain, they’re not just British Jews with Judaism added on… First and foremost, you are Jews. Everything else is secondary.’ That is presumably the same Melanie Phillips who complained in 2018 that ‘Jewish defenders of Israel like me were accused of dual loyalty.’ The contradiction in Phillips’s position had been less apparent in 2019, when a Conservative Party candidate remarked that ‘her allegiance is greater to Israel’. At the time, a Campaign Against Antisemitism spokesman condemned the candidate for an antisemitic slur, as per the IHRA definition adopted by the British Government: ‘Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.’

A perfectly true statement, then, can be deemed unutterable according to an expansive definition of antisemitism promoted around the world by Israel and its American allies, whom the definition conveniently shields from criticism. These guidelines constrain the freedoms not only of American and British citizens, but also Israeli moderates who might benefit from allies in their frank criticism of Israel’s trajectory. It is in this sense as useful a cudgel for Israelophiles as ‘Islamophobia’ is for Islamophiles. As Alice said to Humpty Dumpty: ‘The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ To which he responded: ‘The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.’

Greenblatt and Phillips’s quest to merge Jews and Israel is something they share, ironically enough, with genuine antisemites. The insistence that Jews identify above all else with Israel is a whisker away from blaming the Jewish people for Israel’s actions. The latter is antisemitic and nonsensical regardless of Israel’s culpability for the Iran war, not least because polling shows that most American Jews oppose it. As with the Iraq War, pro-Israel organisations have been far more bullish than the Jewish diasporas they claim to represent. As the war’s repercussions — inflation, fuel rationing, food shortages, and a probable recession — begin to set in, the question of what — and who — caused it will become impossible to avoid. There is compelling evidence pointing to Israel and its allies in America, for which they alone should be called to account.

Since October 7 and the war in Gaza, Israel’s popularity has plummeted among Americans of all ages, with 42 percent saying they sympathise more with the Palestinians, and only 36 percent saying the opposite. This marks a reversal of the double-digit lead in support Israel enjoyed for the past quarter century, and the slide is likely to worsen as the scale of America’s blunder in Iran becomes evident. During the war, Israel’s actions — assassinating Iranian negotiators, bombing energy facilities against US wishes — have publicly undermined Washington’s stated objectives. These attempts to draw America further into an unpopular and unwinnable war have come at the price of throwing the gulf between Israeli and American interests into sharp relief. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians have already begun prematurely cashing in their winnings by attempting to frame Turkey, a NATO member state, as the ‘new Iran’.

Israel is vying for regional hegemony, and America seems to be helping it get there in the erroneous belief this is a civilisational war in which America has an equal stake. There appears to be no bridge Trump and Israel’s allies are unwilling to burn to bring this about. Lindsey Graham has called for Trump to cut ties with allies deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the war; Trump has threatened to drop NATO, an alliance explicitly established to serve US interests, for the same reason. The self-destructive toll of confusing Israel’s interests with one’s own could find no more naked an exhibit.

And yet America is well on the road to Damascus. Prominent Democrats and Republicans are voicing criticisms of Israel that were unthinkable only five years ago. Attempting to rebuff that scrutiny with accusations of antisemitism would be to extend to a nuclear-armed regional superpower the protections and sympathies owed to a potentially vulnerable ethnic minority. It is absurd, certainly, but also counterproductive and potentially dangerous to inflate the term at a time when real antisemitism is on the rise. So long as Israel’s defenders continue to confuse the facts and muddy the waters between Israel and Western Jews, they will continue to provide their detractors with the ability to do the same. For us in the West, we should not allow a term which has been so clearly abused, including as part of explicit attempts by a foreign state to influence our policy choices, to blind us from the truth.

This article was written by Michael Murphy, a Pimlico Journal contributor. You can find more of his work at his Substack. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Historically, this ideological fervour has meant that where diversity has, in fact, proved a profound weakness, institutions have responded by ignoring and downplaying problems — a dynamic most obvious in the decades of failures and continued foot-dragging over the Pakistani rape gangs. Today, though, amid daily headlines of migrant crime, rape gangs, electoral sectarianism, and Islamism, this ‘see no evil’ approach is becoming untenable. Keir Starmer, who entered office imagining that his Labour government would cool the fractiousness of modern Britain by returning ‘respect’ and ‘moderation’ to politics, immediately found his premiership rocked by mass anti-immigration riots, on which he effected a harsh and punitive crackdown, gaining the moniker ‘Two-tier Keir’. Before long, he was barracking the Conservative Party’s ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’ and lamenting that we’ve become an ‘island of strangers’.

It would seem Chernobyl has exploded, and as a result, British officialdom is being dragged towards some glimmering of glasnost. To ‘save’ multiculturalism, it is now deemed necessary for it to be subjected to some (small) measure of criticism. This is what we find in the government’s latest social cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters’, which has within its remit both the ‘whole of government’ and the ‘whole of society’. Starmer’s gloomy foreword, for instance, goes as far as describing a ‘dangerous’ and ‘volatile’ United Kingdom suffering under an integration ‘emergency’. An overview of ‘demographic’ challenges then admits that the previous government’s immigration policy was ‘unsustainable’ and that it has placed ‘huge pressure’ on wages and public services. Migrant communities are living ‘parallel lives’ and social trust is ‘fraying’, we learn. Everywhere and always lurks the ‘real threat’ of ‘extremists’, who ‘foment division and target UK institutions’. ‘Social cohesion’, according to housing minister Steve Reed in his own foreword, is even ‘a vital front in the resilience of our national security’, with Britain needing to alleviate social strife so that it can ‘weather the storms of this volatile world’.

This all sounds rather dire, and it should do. Once again, the Politburo of the multicultural state are being forced to admit that the multiracial society they have created — wholly against the electorate’s wishes — has proved an utter failure. One might have thought this would prompt a moment of honest reflection about the policies that led to this, or even, dare we say it, contrition. But we are not quite there yet. The old instincts to dissemble and propagandise remain deeply ingrained, resulting in a paper that combines moments of startling frankness with many of the same familiar lies: ‘[O]ur diverse democracy is both envied and feared around the globe’, Starmer insists, unconvincingly, alongside other such bromides. Revealingly, an attempt is also made to delineate what kind of criticism of the current settlement is and isn’t acceptable, and from whom. ‘In a world where so many people — digital grifters, hostile states, politicians of grievance — have a vested interest in division’, the Prime Minister adds, ‘we need to be much more active in asserting British values and the responsibilities of integration.’ The Government and its officials get to hold forth on the need for greater social unity; however, when ‘politicians of grievance’ (opposition politicians) or ‘digital grifters’ (journalists or engaged citizens) do the same with just a little more perspicacity, they are peddling ‘division’.

Such a line seems entirely untenable, not least since any critic can note they are only agreeing with the government’s own admissions. Still, the felt need to circumscribe political discourse in this way speaks to a brittle authoritarianism in the corridors of power. Only avowed Marxist-Leninists may be allowed to note the scale of the food shortages.

Further weakness is evident in what is offered to knit our frayed society back together. Anxious officials, weary from trying to keep a lid on Islamism, hail the success story of ‘the community who came together and, with government backing, are restoring their local pub in Tafarn y Plu’. That sounds lovely! But what is happening to pubs in places like Oldham and Bradford, described by the government as ‘completely divided or segregated’ as long ago as 2001, after seeing mass race riots? Brits ‘worried about the consequences for crime and public safety’ of asylum hotels will (apparently) be mollified by a ‘UK Town of Culture’ competition, £500,000 for ‘community-led school linking projects’, and an initiative to tackle male loneliness. Watermarks will appear on AI images to reduce ‘online harm’. Some £1.5 billion will be spent on ‘cultural organisations’, with a further £150 million to ‘rebuild confidence in our high streets’. Defra will draw up a ‘Waste Crime Action Plan’, and there will be several new bureaucratic frameworks to measure how much we all hate each other: a ‘cross-government Cohesion Support and Interventions Function’, a ‘Social Cohesion Measurement Framework’, and a ‘local cohesion risk assessment tool’, too. You get the picture. Perhaps some of these policy announcements might end up achieving something (although probably not), but they hardly seem appropriate given the scale of the challenge, as outlined by the government itself.

However comically inadequate such initiatives may be, the British state has become deeply paranoid, and that paranoia makes it dangerous. The regime sees enemies everywhere, both external and within, and it is clear from ‘Protecting What Matters’ that it believes those enemies are principally to blame for the problems and instability it faces. Thus, arrayed against ‘our communities’, warns Starmer’s foreword, are the dangerous forces of ‘exclusion and those who seek to divide us’. He is echoed by the Housing Secretary, Steve Reed, who describes those ‘who want to divide us’ as ‘hostile actors’ from whom the government must ‘protect our country’, by ‘uniting those of us who are proud of the UK [sic]’. This is the basis for Starmer’s new, ‘confident, modern patriotism’, a ‘collective act of community-building that is totally opposed to exclusion and those who seek to divide us’.

There is, of course, a tremendous irony in a political platform which claims to be ‘totally opposed to exclusion’ while treating political opposition as enemies of the state. But we learn that ‘the extreme right… [who] equate being English with being White or being Christian [and] exploit national identity as an ethnic construct’ are ‘hostile actors’, who it must implacably oppose. Thus in the section on hate crime, Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Roma are namechecked as victims, but there is no reference to historic and ongoing Pakistani rape gangs targeting white English girls; nor is there any reference to, say, Richard Everitt or Kriss Donald. Under ‘modern patriotism’, the white British population are not allowed to be considered victims of racist crimes. There is a blind spot around Christianity too; we are told that the state has ‘commissioned academic research papers on antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Sikh hatred, and online religious hatred’, but for the established faith there is nothing. In service of the multicultural narrative, ‘Protecting What Matters’ also presents a false history of a Britain which was never ethnically homogenous, claiming that ‘for centuries, people have come to this country to build a better life, contributing economically and culturally to our society and helping to rebuild it after major shocks, such as the Second World War’.

These, then, are the internal enemies of the British state: those who challenge multiculturalism as a concept, those who recognise that the English are an ethnic group, and those who know the true history of these isles. This fear of resurgent English nationalism is particularly perverse and evil. For the British imperial state, in its final form, now considers its own primary nation-forming ethnos and religion to be such a threat to the multicultural project that it is denying their very existence.

It is no doubt humiliating for the British state to find itself admitting that its primary antagonists are within its own borders. And so we also see a concerted effort to blame external foes for our ‘division’. We are told that at ‘various points in our history, community tensions have erupted into social disorder’ and that ‘foreign actors, and hostile states, particularly Russia, which is engaged in information warfare against the UK and Ukraine, often attempt to fan the flames of such violence, exploiting people’s frustrations and concerns, through spreading or amplifying disinformation online’. In this worldview, internal ‘extremists [who] are exploiting people’s fears for their own purpose’ are aided by, and are aiding ‘malign foreign influence’, in ‘online echo chambers’ where harm is ‘exacerbated by malevolent algorithms’. The last claim is particularly astonishing. The British regime has become so paranoid that it now attributes agency and malice to ‘algorithms’.

One real enemy is acknowledged in the paper: Islamist extremism is described as a ‘predominant threat’. No wonder, given that this ideology’s adherents represent three-quarters of MI5’s caseload and have murdered 97 innocent Britons since 2001 and injured many more. This stark fact is damning in and of itself — and so, naturally, the state chides people not to draw the wrong conclusions. Despite many of these terrorists (such as the 7/7 bombers) being British-born and notionally integrated, we are reassured that ‘Islamists do not represent the Muslim communities of the UK’. This is might well be true in the most technical and literal terms, in the sense that the most extreme elements within any given demographic group can always be said to be ‘unrepresentative’. Yet it will hardly offer much comfort to the victims of Islamist terrorism; nor does it bother to address the fundamental question of whether some of the more ‘moderate’ elements within the Muslim community might sympathise with at least some of the ideas of Islamist extremists. That they even bothered to give this caveat is (once again) highly suggestive of the state’s basic unwillingness to accept responsibility for its own failings — in this case, the entirely unnecessary harm caused by home-grown Islamic terrorism — even in a paper that is supposed to subject British multiculturalism to some degree of frank criticism.

This specific caveat is not mirrored in the section about ‘Extreme Right Wing’ threats, whose views are taken to be so pathological as to sit entirely outside society. The regime is unwilling to consider the possibility that real, material conditions might be the true cause of discontent, disorder, and even riots. While it does accept those factors exist, it believes that enemies within and without are taking advantage of these challenges to attack the state. Through this lens anyone who is found to be ‘exploiting people’s frustrations’ (or rather, speaking about the many problems facing the country, and the failures of our state) is an enemy.

Once we understand who the state believes to be its enemies, the regime’s plans for online environments and the education system take on a sinister quality. The plan is to ‘ensure that…digital literacy [is] embedded into the curriculum’ so that young minds might better identify and reject counter-revolutionary ideas. The regime will ensure ‘that citizenship is taught in both primary and secondary schools to… raise awareness of threats to democracy’. As we have seen, those ‘threats to democracy’ include anyone who challenges the multicultural state and its messages. Finally, the state seeks to control the past. It will ‘ensure high quality teaching of our nation’s history’, meaning that the state’s preferred — false — account of British history will be taught as fact.

Meanwhile, this fear of ‘algorithms’ and ‘online harms’ leads the state to threaten that it will be ‘securing online spaces’, using ‘robust powers to require platforms to mitigate risks related to their algorithms’, with the goal being to ‘reduce accidental exposure to hateful content’. Platforms will be required to give ‘independent researchers’ access to their data. And despite the Home Secretary’s recent statements that police should not be investigating ‘perfectly legal language’ used online, we are told that ‘an online hate crime reporting portal’ will ensure that reports are ‘swiftly investigated’, with police forces expected to ‘bring perpetrators to justice’. A special Muslim hate crime helpline will encourage reporting of incidents even without ‘evidence or certainty’ that they have happened. Alongside the new ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition, this is an invitation to widespread weaponised reporting of ‘hate’, where for many the process alone will be punishment.

The already draconian Online Safety Act looks likely to be strengthened — the excuse being that the ‘public disorder that followed the Southport attack’ was somehow caused by ‘viral, harmful content’ which ‘can destabilise communities’. Despite both the police inspectorate and the Home Affairs Committee pouring cold water on this narrative last year, it has become deeply embedded in Whitehall, with the notorious pro-censorship campaign group the Centre for Countering Digital Hate chairing a discussion shortly after Southport from which emerged a plan to award Ofcom ‘crisis powers’, a cause the report takes up. These would give the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, the ability to directly flag online content for removal where it is deemed to pose a threat to public safety. These powers are also to give ‘due prominence’ to ‘trustworthy media’ during such periods, so that the public will find ‘authoritative sources to counter mis- and disinformation’ pushed onto their timelines. The meaning, of course, is that when the next Rudakubana strikes, the state will suppress evidence and arguments which most acutely show the failure of multiculturalism, or blame the regime itself.

Throughout, it is clear that the state believes ‘cohesion’ is fundamentally a matter of controlling what information people are allowed to hear, and through which medium — rather than, say, preventing knife attacks on children. Following Marx, leftists once held that material conditions determined everything in society, with ideas being merely a ‘superstructure’. But today there is no space at all in the regime for a material analysis of the conditions and grievances which are causing social breakdown and making people want to riot, perhaps because such an analysis would lead to conclusions which the state is unwilling or unable to countenance.

All of this is, as noted, sinister. As the British state weakens and dies, its growing paranoia makes it dangerous. Still, it is weak, and it is dying. What is most striking on reading ‘Protecting What Matters’ is how few ideas the multicultural state’s Politburo have. Suppressing speech, rewriting history, pandering to ethnic client groups, and building tools to measure how bad things are. None of this is going to save the failed experiment, nor somehow renew the regime. The same problems will continue and indeed the decline will continue to accelerate.

But the state’s weakness has made it easier for others to challenge multiculturalism. It’s now clear from even the government’s own admissions that the present multicultural settlement is wholly unsustainable. This presents a tremendous opportunity for those who would shape what comes next. We are fast approaching the point at which radical, revolutionary change becomes likely, leading to a new Settlement. The last time such a revolutionary change happened in a major economy was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Where will the British 1989 come from? We know there is little radical thinking on the left — the ‘insurgent’ Greens merely offer what we’ve had for the past quarter-century, but more, and faster. It is on the right that truly radical ideas are found, of reshaping the state and reversing the failed experiment of multiculturalism. This moment is the right’s to seize, if it has the necessary wisdom and will.

This article was written by David Shipley and Laurie Wastell, Pimlico Journal contributors. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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This week, we’ve seen Reform announce hundreds of new candidates, expel a few more, and hint at the return of others. We’ll be looking at who’s in, who’s out, and what to make of it all.

Plus, we’ll be looking at the impact of Labour’s blatant attempt to rig political financing in their favour, and how it might impact Reform’s fundraising capabilities.

This newsletter’s agenda: In and Out: Scotland, Parry, McMurdock; Crypto-fascism?

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‘But I was surprised that [Pelosi] didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost — it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would’ve been a wonderful thing…

Absolutely. For the war. For the war…

Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies… By saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.’

—Donald Trump, 2008

If Donald Trump made only three promises to the American people when he came down the golden elevator into the lobby of Trump Tower and announced his intention to run for President, they were the following: no more mass immigration, no more deindustrialisation and outsourcing, and no more pointless and costly wars in the Middle East.

On the first, the record is mixed. Border crossings have been reduced to zero, and deportations have increased. A fee of $100,000 has been attached to the most controversial visa route, helping lead to net negative migration for the first time since Hart-Celler was passed in 1965. On the other hand, the disastrous choice to encourage voluntary exits of illegals with highly publicised performative cruelty has greatly harmed the popularity of the restrictionist cause for very little gain, and the number of deportations has been woefully insufficient as a result. On the second, a year of tariff chaos has seen the manufacturing sector decline as a percentage of GDP, with Trump touting ‘the greatest economy in history’ whilst average Americans still feel the squeeze. Ostensibly strong growth numbers seem to be artificially buoyed by wealthy Americans spending returns from rapidly growing AI stocks on healthcare — not exactly the industrial renaissance that was promised.

Until February 2026, however, Trump could still claim — accurately — to be the only President since Carter not to have embroiled the United States in a war overseas. He had failed to end the Ukraine War, and appeared unable to restrain Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, but despite the increasingly grating attempt to distract from this by reference to his ‘resolution’ of conflicts to which nobody had paid any prior attention instead, they were not his wars — and as such he could largely escape blame. He had bombed Iran and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — but both of these operations were quick, successful, and arguably justifiable in terms of American interests. Despite all of this, he had not started a war of his own.

No longer. Now, Trump has declared not just another war in the Middle East, but the war in the Middle East that he campaigned against for decades. He has provided no consistent justification for this war, no plan for how it might end, and no explanation of how it might serve American interests or global stability. How will this betrayal play out in the weeks and months to come?

The price already paid

Let us summarise briefly the scale of the war currently and its impact. Fifteen countries are now involved. Every city from the Sinai to the Hindu Kush, as well as targets in Cyprus, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, is at daily risk of missile and drone strikes.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of global oil and gas supplies flow, has been effectively closed for nearly four weeks, since March 1. Oil is now trading at around $100 per barrel, having begun the year at around $60. Even this price does not reflect the severity of the situation: markets are currently pricing in an end to the conflict and a reopening of the Strait in the next week. Even if that does happen, it will still take several weeks to return output to normal levels, as production facilities which are meant to run continuously slowly come back online.

Whilst energy infrastructure has largely been spared thus far in an attempt to limit long-lasting repercussions, Israel did strike Iran’s South Pars gas field (part of the largest gas reserve in the world, which lies beneath the Persian Gulf and is shared between Iran and Qatar), leading to Iranian retaliations against Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the largest gas production facility in the world. These attacks took out two of the fourteen production units in the city, reducing Qatar’s gas output capacity by 17% (Qatar represents 20% of global gas output). It will take between three and five years to repair the damage. As a result of this damage and the closure of the Strait, Qatar has announced a force majeure, halting all liquefied natural gas production and cancelling existing contracts. This will be particularly catastrophic for Europe, which — having decided to stop purchasing Russian gas and shut down coal plants in favour of unreliable renewables — is reliant upon liquefied natural gas, especially from Qatar, to keep the lights on.

The impacts are not confined to the energy market. The Strait of Hormuz is also a crucial transit point for fertiliser and other resources, and disruptions to the production and shipping of these supplies will cause substantial effects on global food markets. The increased cost of plastics will also soon feed through to consumers. Dubai and other cities which have built a reputation as safe havens for the internationally wealthy may never recover from the new perception of risk that has been introduced following Iranian drone attacks against airports, military installations, and even city centres. Gulf states have largely blamed the United States for this effect, which has compounded concerns over the unavailability of US defence tech (at one point, Qatar was down to only four days’ supply of patriot missiles) and led to a substantial pivot in diplomatic posture away from reliance on the United States and towards increased collaboration with Europe. The net effect of this is a substantial decrease in American influence in a region which has now been subjected to unprecedented destabilisation.

It is remarkable that the United States, the global hegemon, is at war with Iran, yet it is Iran that is currently peeling off America’s allies, with Qatar and Oman — historically the friendliest of the Gulf states towards Iran — paying substantial bribes to allow their ships to pass the Strait of Hormuz. Even left-wing Spain has been given the same opportunity as a reward for speaking out against the war. Spain is a NATO member state (albeit a parasitical one), and yet any neutral observer would describe them as being more aligned with Iran in this conflict. What other countries might follow these examples? Not even Trump’s tariffs on crucial allies against China in Asia or his threats over Greenland against Europe have caused so substantial a rupture.

For a world already teetering on the brink of global recession, suffering from persistently low business and consumer confidence, this is not a blow which can be easily weathered. The chance of 2026 being the year in which the global economy begins a shaky recovery has now evaporated. With it, the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections (already meagre), have collapsed entirely. The Democrats will almost certainly take the House. The GOP may retain 50 seats in the Senate — a notional majority, but one which would rely on both Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), both opponents of the administration, to pass legislation.

That congressional opposition will render Trump a lame duck in little more than seven months from today, limiting his ability to exert influence and thereby improve his party’s prospects for 2028 — admittedly, not that we could rely on his actions to have this effect. This is a disaster for America. According to current polling, both Vance and Rubio, Trump’s most likely successors, are already running behind Newsom, Harris, and even AOC in head-to-head match ups. Of course, the election is a long way away — but what evidence have we seen that the administration will rescue its reputation in the next two and a half years?

The hour in America is incredibly late. Trump’s policies have halted demographic change (at least via immigration) for now — but they have not begun to significantly reverse it. A Democratic Presidency in 2028 — with a revanchist and energetic leader — would lead to a reopening of the borders, likely combined with some sort of amnesty for the 20 million or more illegals currently living in the country. When California enacted amnesty, it locked in Democratic rule indefinitely. The same fate now awaits America as a whole.

How will things play out from here?

One upside of the rampant corruption of the Trump administration is that there are now several Polymarket accounts (likely belonging to family members of the Cabinet) which can be tracked to give some advance warning of US policy, and to divide noise and signal in Trump’s public statements. On Sunday, a number of these accounts placed large bets on a ceasefire being implemented before the end of March. Very shortly after, Trump extended the deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz by five days, thereby delaying planned strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. Iran has denied that talks are occurring, suggesting that the Trump administration has climbed down of their own accord. It is impossible to know who is telling the truth, although peace demands have now been sent by both sides.

The American terms include:

• A 30-day ceasefire whilst terms are negotiated.

• Ending of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with International Atomic Energy Agency supervision of civilian nuclear infrastructure.

• Limits on missile numbers and ranges.

• An end to Iran’s support for proxies in the region.

• Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

• Removal of all sanctions on Iran.

• Civilian nuclear co-operation.

Iran has rejected these initial terms, and issued the following demands in response:

• An immediate and permanent end to the fighting.

• Reparations for damages incurred as a result of US and Israeli strikes.

• International recognition of Iran’s right to exercise authority over the Strait of Hormuz.

• The closure of all US military bases in the region (this was reported by Iranian state TV, and may not be a serious demand).

• Removal of all sanctions on Iran.

Whilst the Trump administration is clearly signalling its desire to wrap up what even they recognise has been a calamitous embarrassment, US special forces continue to build up in the region, signalling some degree of preparation for further escalation. Trump has threatened a resumption of strikes in the face of Iranian stubbornness.

Strategically, Iran holds most of the cards in these negotiations. If negotiations continue under the status quo, Iran will continue to suffer from further strikes — but will impose greater damage on the rest of the world through the ongoing closure of the Strait. American war exhaustion, and the political necessity of ending the conflict, will only become more acute. It is in Iran’s interests, therefore, to hold out for better terms. The only response that the US has to this is escalation: striking Iranian energy infrastructure as planned. However, whilst this would represent a great cost to Iran, it would certainly provoke a massive response against energy infrastructure in the Gulf. We can see from the strikes against Ras Laffan what the impact of this could be: a 20% reduction in global gas and oil supplies for at least three years. If this were to occur, oil prices would hit an estimated $200 per barrel, and stay there until repairs were completed.

The impact of this would be a global depression worse than 2008 — and it is not even clear that it would force Iran to the negotiating table, because it would not change the fundamental strategic fact that Iran can impose more costs on the world than the world can impose on them, meaning Iran loses less from holding out than its opponents. On top of all of this, it must be remembered that the Iranian elite, while not the generation that were forged in the heat of the revolution itself, are deeply ideologically committed to a worldview that glorifies martyrdom and have spent their entire adult lives under a siege mentality, preparing for precisely this eventuality. They are not simply going to give in for hopes of an easy life.

As bad as all this would be, there is an even more terrifying possibility that emerges from American strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure. Iran has, on a handful of occasions, threatened to target water desalination facilities in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — America’s closest allies in the region. Desalination provides 47%, 18%, and 41% respectively of these countries’ water supplies, and up to 90% of drinking water in the region. Water reserves in the Gulf would barely last a week were supplies to be closed down. With the Strait of Hormuz closed, there would be very little opportunity to source alternatives. It’s impossible to know quite how bad this situation could get — but what is certain is that millions of people would be at direct risk of being left without drinkable water in one of the hottest and least hospitable parts of the world.

Trump is therefore left with three options: end the war largely on Iranian terms, allow the current situation to continue, or be directly responsible for the collapse of the global economy (and worse). One might normally expect that no President could ever select option three, but it is not in Trump’s nature to run away with his tail between his legs (to put it mildly). The bigger problem is that Trump has shown himself incapable of this kind of strategic calculation. As far as he is concerned, he has the strongest military in the world — so he has the leverage. The bigger fish will simply eat the smaller fish, or so he believes.

Worse and worse outcomes look increasingly likely. In particular, the US seems to be gearing up to attempt a seizure of Kharg Island (through which the vast majority of Iranian oil flows), utilising the special forces that have built up in the region in recent weeks. This desperate attempt to reclaim escalation dominance would be unbelievably risky. The island sits only 20 miles off the Iranian coast, rendering the US ability to prevent Iranian drone attacks woefully insufficient and making significant casualties likely — a textbook example of how a country can be drawn deeper into a war even against their intentions.

The collapse of MAGA

Trump’s betrayal over Iran, and the dire economic consequences of the war, will have substantial political impacts beyond dooming the GOP in 2026 and 2028. Many of the trends it will accelerate were already in motion beforehand. None of them are good.

A substantial fraction of the Republican base remains loyal to Trump as an individual, and will do regardless of his actions in office. As far as these people are concerned, Trump is correct to say that MAGA is him and him alone, defined only by his whims in any given moment. After Trump leaves office, these people will presumably transfer their support to whichever force lays the most legitimate claim to his legacy. The President’s embrace of foreign interventionism, and his drift away from the core issues of the 2016 campaign, has given an opportunity for those elements of the old GOP establishment which have kept their heads down and given some pretence of moving with the times to lay claim to this mantle. If MAGA means ‘American Greatness’ on the international stage (i.e., flexing military power), then MAGA is entirely compatible with the acolytes of George Bush and Dick Cheney. The claims of figures such as Lindsey Graham and Mike Waltz to a place in the future of the Republican Party have been infinitely strengthened.

On the other side of the equation, a substantial fraction of the MAGA base has begun to diverge from Trump as his focus has shifted away from the key planks of the 2024 campaign. Whilst they may cite frustration with the lack of progress on deportations, it is more common to hear them cite the President’s hesitance to release the Epstein files, generalised conspiracism, his failure to deliver on his economic promises (especially contrasted with his focus on ‘tax cuts for the rich’), and his preoccupation with foreign policy — particularly relating to Israel. This faction is a smaller part of the Republican electoral coalition, but according to friends of Pimlico Journal working in Washington DC these kinds of people are around one-third of young Republican staffers at the more junior levels.

The origins of this tendency are best understood as ‘pure populism’ — a distillation of the class politics that has been present since the beginning of the Trump phenomenon. Driven by resentment against ‘elites’ (and partially as a result of their overrepresentation among black and especially Hispanic Republicans), they place less emphasis on immigration. They were deeply suspicious of the alliance between MAGA and Silicon Valley, which incidentally motivates a deep suspicion of JD Vance in particular. You will often hear them complain about land being repurposed for data centres or housing stock being ‘bought up by BlackRock’.

The collection of issues which they care about is eclectic, but creates a Venn diagram with an unfortunate antisemitic crossover, about which they are increasingly self-aware. For many decades, the memory of the Holocaust has made any such intimations politically toxic to say the least. Holocaust memory is already fading, and the conduct of the Israeli government in the aftermath of October 7 has not only accelerated the collapse of this protective shield, but has reversed the moral valence of Israel in the American public imagination (at least for large sections of US society).

There is a much longer history of legitimate concern over Israeli influence on American foreign policy, levelled by academics like John Mearsheimer. It is true that the Israeli lobby has always had outsized influence, but attempts to describe US policy as solely driven by Israeli demands have historically been overblown. Under the Trump administration, however, these claims have been entirely vindicated as a description of the present, if not of the past. Absolutely no attempt was made to justify the Iran war as anything other than a defence of Israeli interests. In interviews, Donald Trump, supposedly the senior partner in this relationship, even explicitly deferred to Benjamin Netanyahu when asked questions about the war. It should not be a surprise that those who have staked the most radical position are now poised to reap the benefits.

Whilst Nick Fuentes, ‘Sneako’ and associated characters have been open about their views on this subject for many years, others, such as Tucker Carlson (who seems to have only recently shifted on such questions), have as yet kept it implicit; however, in the coming years, that will be less and less the case. If readers are tempted to dispute this characterisation of Carlson, and still believe that this tendency is still mostly confined to obviously insane people like Candace Owens, this quote from his speech at Charlie Kirk’s funeral should give pause:

[He] shows up and he starts talking about the people in power and he starts doing the worst thing you can do, which is tell the truth. And they hate it and they just go bonkers. And they become obsessed with making him stop.

I can just sort of picture the scene, in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking!’

Perhaps this could have been defended at the time as nothing more than a cack-handed attempt to analogise Kirk to Jesus, but the later endorsement of the most lurid conspiracies about Kirk’s death by Carlson’s own brother have rendered this explanation implausible. Charlie Kirk’s murder should have been a unifying moment for MAGA, and an opportunity to refocus on the enemy to the left. Instead, the Sneako-Carlson wing of the Republican Party has blamed everything from Turning Point USA, to time-travelling Sumerian Demons, to — of course — Israel for his death.

For the first time in post-war history, it seems likely that antisemitism may become a serious political force in a major Western country. This might be shocking, but perhaps it should have been more obvious that this could emerge as the uniting force for the ‘multi-racial working class coalition’ within the new GOP.

This prediction may seem outlandish to some, but in fact it is already happening. The Florida gubernatorial campaign currently being run by James Fishback is, as far as we can tell, the first notable campaign in many decades to be run on a self-consciously (if still mostly implicitly) antisemitic platform. Of course, Fishback himself seems to be a dishonest grifter who sees where the winds are blowing and wants to launch some sort of career as an influencer, but that is largely irrelevant to the point. He is not going to win, but candidates like him will begin popping up all over the country in Republican primaries. It may even be the case that a candidate like this — perhaps even Fishback himself — makes an impact in the 2028 primary, if not as a significant contender then at least as a Ramaswamy-style high-profile no-hoper. On the other hand, if Tucker Carlson is the candidate of this faction — which currently seems unlikely due to his personal friendship with JD Vance, but is certainly not impossible — this will mean all-out GOP civil war.

Beyond being straightforwardly bad, this tendency will be disastrous for the Republican Party. It will continue to distract focus from the key issue of immigration — and we are already seeing prominent representatives, including both Fuentes and Carlson, increasingly raising the idea that immigration is in fact nothing but a tool used by ‘elites’ to distract people from ‘more important issues’. This will be most deeply felt on the right of the party, which should be the standard bearer of restrictionism. It will also demolish the party’s prospects at general elections. Even if these candidates do not win, their presence in the party will harm its candidates even more than the presence of figures such as Ilhan Omar puts many off of voting for Democrats.

Torn between these forces will be the heir presumptive of MAGA, JD Vance, once the Prince Who Was Promised to unite the tribes and continue the MAGA project, but now finds himself increasingly reviled by all. Vance is by no means perfect from our perspective, and has rightly become extraordinarily unpopular in Europe. But from the American perspective, if anyone was going to keep faith with the original goals of the Trump movement — immigration restriction, reindustrialisation, and international peace — it would have been him. His silence on the Iran war is understandable, and may well be advisable as he prepares for a Presidential campaign in which the necessity of running against his predecessor’s legacy looks more and more likely. Nevertheless, Trump will give no leniency for expedience. Vance may enter the race without even his endorsement, and with little support elsewhere.

This is the consequence of Donald Trump’s betrayal and failure: a right in disarray, with its worst tendencies in ascendence, quite possibly locked out of power for the foreseeable future. More importantly, even if the Republicans manage to return to power in a different form after a few election cycles, the demographic issue is now irreversibly lost. If there is still a slim European majority in America (current estimates put it at about 56%), it will be ended under the next Democratic Presidency. The territory and its people may continue to enjoy relative prosperity for some time to come, but the country as it has existed in the past will not exist in the future. That makes America the second Western country to be lost in the last few years, following in the footsteps of its northern neighbour: by the time of the next election (at which Mark Carney’s Liberals currently seem poised to increase their seat count), English Canada will be majority-minority even if French Canada keeps the country as a whole hovering just above 50%.

We on the other side of the Atlantic must reckon with that fact. Demographic replacement is not something that might occur in the far future. It is an imminent possibility. If we on the right fail, here and now, it will happen. The consequence of a distracted, amateurish right is that our countries as we know them will cease to exist within our lifetimes. If we do not learn this lesson, that is the fate that awaits us.

Where next for European populism?

Whilst Britain and Europe have thus far played little role in the conflict, we will pay a far higher price than America (at least in immediate economic terms) as a consequence. Whilst the US is not entirely insulated from global price shocks, its position as an energy exporter gives it somewhat more fiscal flexibility. Europe has no such reserves to draw upon. Moreover, it has become extremely reliant on LNG, much of which was meant to be sourced from Qatar. After years of stagnation, Europe is now at risk of a deep recession.

Typically, this would come with a dire prognosis for incumbent governments. That assumption should not be entirely discarded. Regardless of context, if people feel significantly poorer they are unlikely to deliver re-election to their leaders. The question is who will benefit from this, and who will be harmed. The perception of closeness to the Trump administration has already harmed the electoral prospects of right-wing parties in Canada, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark (albeit to a lesser extent). It seems likely to have a similar effect in Sweden and Hungary later this year. As economic prospects become more and more dire, this effect will only get stronger.

In France and in Germany, the national-populist right has begun to learn this lesson, with National Rally’s Jordan Bardella criticising America’s ‘imperial ambitions’ in Venezuela and Iran, and regional AfD leaders disavowing the war in Iran. It is crucial that parties elsewhere, including in Britain, follow their lead. It is still unlikely that Keir Starmer, given the sheer depth of his unpopularity and his historical closeness to Trump, could see any kind of resurgence — but a new Labour leader may bring better prospects. Nigel Farage is uniquely vulnerable to this line of attack, having been so tightly associated with Trump for over a decade. Reform have started to distance themselves over the Iran war, but it will be necessary to expand their hostility towards US policy as the situation worsens — and to do so ahead of time, if this shift is to be believed by the public. We have seen what happens when the right squanders the narrow opportunity we have available. Failing to do so now will not just be a disadvantage, but could be fatal, both for the party and for the country.

This article was written by the Pimlico Journal editorial team. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Last week, that holiday ended. ‘Big Ange’ emerged from that hole in Hove she had been hiding in. To Mainstream — the Burnham-associated grouping of the Labour ‘soft left’ — Rayner declared that Starmer’s government is ‘running out of time’, that the public’s view is that Labour now ‘represents the establishment’, and that the ‘very survival of the Labour Party is at stake’. She also spoke about her desire to see major constitutional revisions, and, weirdly, created a hypothetical that immigration reforms that sound a bit like those proposed by Shabhana Mahmood, rather than Mahmood’s own, ‘would be un-British’. Leaving aside the possibility of Rayner having a rather low verbal IQ, this suggests a reluctance — for now — to attack the Government directly, and indicates that the announcement of an immediate leadership challenge is unlikely. But at the same time, there is one outstanding phrase: ‘Are we ready for this fight?’ Who is ‘we’?

There is, of course, a lot of doubt about Rayner’s suitability to lead at all, with a pervasive sense her leadership would be ‘a one stop trip to the IMF’. Rayner has increasingly been treated with scepticism even by those sympathetic to her wider faction. Dissenting voices in the party are contingency planning to bring things to a head on the question of the leadership after the local elections in May, and to refashion the party structure after the NEC elections later in the year. In advance of this, Rayner has clearly been trying to gain sensible credits — even giving a speech to City investors and BNP Paribas (being paid a handsome five-figure fee, going some way to pay down her £40,000 of unpaid stamp duty) — and is now signalling that she is ‘adamant’ about sticking to the pledges in the 2024 Manifesto. The Manifesto is now apparently something of a Rorschach test, with investors seeing ‘fiscal rules’ and the ‘radical-wing-of-the-soft-left’ (to steal from the New Statesman) seeing ‘good vibes only’. Whether these efforts will leave Rayner as the most credible alternative to Starmer is yet to be seen, but for now the point is that she is trying to make the case.

There is, however, a distinct possibility that none of this contingency planning will ever have to be put into motion. Developments in No. 10, which we will detail below, could produce a curious dynamic in which the Labour ‘soft left’ — and backbenchers more generally — can strongarm the government into giving them almost whatever they want, whilst (crucially) retaining the City-whisperer Rachel Reeves and thus averting an immediate strike of the so-called Bond Vigilantes. This would, in fact, be entirely desirable if one leaves aside hurt feelings and the bad blood that has built up over the past eighteen months or so, though this is a factor that should never be underrated in politics.

An ongoing backbench rebellion that has only slowly gained momentum amongst Labour MPs, led by Tony Vaughan (flagged as one of the worst newly-elected Labour MPs by Pimlico Journal immediately after the election, he also introduced Rayner at the Mainstream event), has been the demand that MPs have a vote on the Home Office’s plans for ILR. If such a vote takes place and Mahmood’s proposals are scrapped or substantially watered down, she would, of course, face no choice but to resign, and has said as much publicly. While Mahmood has argued that this is strictly a question for the Home Secretary and the Home Office alone, this rebellion and Rayner’s intervention have come during a longer process in which Starmer’s government has already softened the language on the reforms substantially and has been seeking to reset its relationship with its MPs and ‘the left’ more generally.

As George Spencer and I discussed in a piece following Morgan McSweeney’s departure, any chance of left-reformism was confirmed dead with the demise of ‘McSweeneyism’, for which immigration reform (it is worth noting that the retroactive ILR reforms were first proposed under Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary, and not Blue Labourite Mahmood) has been the cornerstone, the central issue on which traditional Labour voters in the old ‘Red Wall’ have become most sceptical of the left in general.

After McSweeney’s departure, the government has made little effort to announce a big public ‘relaunch’ detailing a strategy and changed priorities — perhaps because there have already been three attempts which all fell flat in 2024 and 2025 — and has instead taken a ‘business as usual’ tone with the public. To an outside observer, this public posture might look weak, with the decision not to reshuffle or remove the Cabinet Minister closest to being openly disloyal during the Mandelson saga: Wes Streeting.

The reaction does make some sense internally, and the fourth go at Starmerism represents something more significant than all of the other resets, including the ‘Phase Two’ stage, which brought Mahmood into the Home Office last September. In response to the PIP rebellion last year and long-standing charges that Labour MPs felt ‘unheard’, it was with Phase Two itself that the government began to make substantial overtures to placate backbench opinion. With the addendum that the government still had its priorities, the last quarter of 2025 saw major reworks of the No. 10 Policy Unit, apparently indicative of the ‘hippy-bashing’, anti-progressive culture of the McSweeney era.

Fortnightly meetings are now held between the No. 10 Policy Unit and the PLP to address their tense relationship, and working groups of MPs have been established on specific issues. More ‘policy roundtables’ will be held between ministers, SpAds, and Labour select committee members, and a slew of changes that intend to change both the process and ‘culture’ of No. 10 have been promised. Now that McSweeney is gone and Mahmood is isolated (and likely to follow), given signs pointing to major concessions on the hundred-strong rebellion on ILR and refugee status, the true inauguration of the ‘Reign of the Backbenchers’ may be imminent.

Where will all of this restructuring lead? Well, way back in October of last year, still back in Phase Two, we learned how some of the wonks in the unit are thinking. Labour’s Top Minds got together and bashed out a note to distribute amongst themselves: ‘Project Home Turf’. What was the Wiley Webbite scheme?

The proverbial Red Pill of The Project was that the reason for the Labour government’s abysmal record in communication, and therefore its ratings, has thus far been that they have been playing on ‘away’ ground — immigration, law and order, defence and the economy. Instead, they should have played defence-attack on ‘home turf’ — the NHS, schools, bennies, and housing. The big idea here is that on ‘away’ issues, the best thing is to ‘neutralise’ them (that is to say, move on) and talk about their ‘home’ ones. Apparently, ‘managing the economy’ is now a right-wing issue, and Labour should simply give up even talking about growth. What was delivered as Reeves’ ‘Budget for Growth’ should instead have been sold as the ‘Budget for the NHS’.

Hippy-bashing stuff indeed. Needless to say, if this were somehow missed by Labour MPs, the idea that the economy framed on its own is always going to be a losing issue for Labour is — as friendly advice — perhaps a sure-fire way to lose what credibility remains with voters who are not on benefits, working for the public sector, or deluded recent graduates. Of course, I am being facetious, and this plan is equally a recognition that, for now, they should be holding on as tightly as possible to those groups and give up any serious claim to govern in the national interest. Perhaps Polanski and his ilk might think that this is Tough Stuff, but everyone knows that the wider British public does actually care if their standard of living continues to fall (or rises) independently of the level of NHS cheerleading that goes along with it. What can at least be said in its defence is that it is definitely the kind of thing that rebellious Labour MPs would probably lap up. There is plenty of common ground between the two camps after all!

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This article is in reply to George Ruska’s case for a right-wing republicanism, published in these pages on March 19, 4 Cha. III (or 2026 as Ruska would doubtless prefer).

Let us begin with a brief summary of George Ruska’s article. The author makes no pretence of doing so fairly, but the reader may read Ruska themselves if so inclined. Ruska asserts that the popularity of the British monarchy is overstated. He observes that ‘unassimilated foreign-born or foreign-descended populations’ within our unhappy realm have little affection for the institution of monarchy, but he cautions us that this fact alone is no good basis on which to found any fealty to Our Sovereign Lord Charles. From this, he spends some time developing the King’s tacit and explicit support for multiculturalism, diversity, and every other execrable shibboleth of our modern stakeholder kingdom: the burden of which is simply to say that Woke King Chuck is Woke, a fact which perspicacious readers might already have deduced from the fact that he is called Woke King Chuck. By invoking the tedious Mike Bartlett play King Charles III, he suggests that Woke King Chuck might try to make mischief for a future right-wing government.

Ruska then imagines a future Reform government and recommends to it a program of removing the vestigial powers of the monarchy and downgrading it to a sort of marionette of the state. Here Ruska’s proposal falls rather short of the sexier promise of his article’s headline ‘Abolish the Monarchy’. However, readers ought to be aware that it is editors and not writers who choose headlines, and for all I know I could presently be writing under the headline ‘A Gay Retard’s Case for Monarchism’, and so we should not hold this against Ruska.

If I may, Ruska’s argument boils down to: the Windsors are Woke; the Right should take revenge upon them for being Woke; and this will not all be an Iran-bombing waste of political capital because the Monarchy is not that popular anyway.

With respect to Ruska, the strawman just assembled is a weak case for abolishing the monarchy, and one that ignores the great utility the monarchy can offer to a future government of the right.

Is Woke King Chuck Woke?

Yes, of course he is. That is why he is called Woke King Chuck. His son is Woke too. So was his late mother, after a fashion. But his Wokeness is shallow and is largely a defence mechanism.

It is the stated view of distinguished former sports broadcaster David Icke that the Windsor family are intergalactic lizards. Of course, this is a fantasy, because their true and final form is that of the cockroach. Like the cockroach, popularly reputed to be hardy enough to survive a nuclear war, the Windsors’ chief instinct is survival.

In 1914, the professional head of the Royal Navy was Woke King Chuck’s great-grandfather, the Prince Louis of Battenburg, a German prince and career naval officer. Upon the outbreak of war, such was the anti-Teutonic sentiment in Britain that His Serene Highness was pressured by Churchill to resign as First Sea Lord. By 1917, he relinquished his German titles and anglicised his surname to Mountbatten. Three days later the Royal Family followed suit and changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Knockwurst-Biershinken & Gotha, to just plain old Windsor, after a property they owned near Slough. The ignominy for the former Prince Battenburg did not end there, as he was then forced to become the Marquess of Milford Haven, a crap seaside town near Swansea.

Here we see the alacrity of our Royal family (and particularly the more intelligent cadet branch of it, the Mountbattens) in recognising the way the wind was blowing and tacking closely to it in order to survive. It is somewhat remarkable that a family of German aristocrats managed to cling to the throne during a vicious and highly destructive war against Germany and Austria, and it should also be remembered that the Windsors emerged from the war as the only surviving royal house of a European great power (assuming you do not count Italy as a European great power, which you shouldn’t).

After the end of the war George V — another of Woke King Chuck’s great-grandfathers — was sensitive to the growing democratic and socialist spirit of the age and thus adapted the Royal family to meet it. As a new king before the war, he had already intervened to secure the passage of the so-called ‘People’s Budget’. During it, he opposed his Government’s plan to offer asylum to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II due to concerns that this could provoke anti-monarchist sentiment in Britain (Nicholas II was then murdered along with his wife and children in a dirty cellar in Ekaterinburg in 1918). Following the war, he created new orders of chivalry specifically designed to co-opt and buy the powerful leaders of the trade unions without embarrassing their socialist scruples. He used his vestigial political powers to invite Ramsay MacDonald to form Britain’s first socialist government in 1924 after an inconclusive election, and cultivated friendships with leading Labour politicians. He enthusiastically took to addressing his subjects via the new invention of radio, establishing the Christmas broadcast as a royal institution.

Woke King Chuck’s promotion of the diversity agenda is rather unlikely to be any more sincere than Louis Battenburg’s abandonment of his German titles and possessions, or George V’s commitment to the People’s Budget’s populist tax raid on the wealthy. Much like his great-grandfathers, he simply senses the way the wind is blowing. Ruska’s ultimate prescription is that the government should insert its arm up the backside of his royal personage and operate his mouth like a sock puppet. But this seems to fail to understand what is already happening. The Royal Family has not led the state in promoting a diversity agenda: it has followed it. There has been no need to place the various royal press officers under direct Cabinet Office control, because they already say what the Cabinet Office would tell them to say without it ever needing to.

There are some matters about which Woke King Chuck is probably sincerely passionate. One of these is the environment, which as Prince of Wales he spoke about incessantly, and long before it was modish. However, his environmentalism is in the Scrutonian mould, which is simply to say that he is sentimental about the English (and Scottish) countryside, and that he (when not blasting them apart with his Purdey) likes cute furry animals. It is obvious to all except perhaps Ed Miliband that the Net Zero agenda will be cast aside and forgotten about as quickly as you can say ‘power cut’, and there is no way that Woke King Chuck would stake his crown on promoting hair-shirt miserabilism for his subjects from the comfort of one of his many palaces. He might have a Third from Cambridge, but he’s not quite that stupid.

His other great passion is architecture, and here, in fact, his aesthetic senses are far more in tune with the swinish multitude than the Royal Institute of British Architects is. Allow me here a digression from the main march of my argument for a brief flight of fancy. Whilst our housing crisis is largely a product of immigration, and should be solved as such, we still have a great deal of housing stock in the wrong places, and it is far too difficult to build industrial plant under our current planning system. A Reform government would be well advised to commission Samuel Hughes or Quinlan Terry or that Irish homosexual with the country house Instagram account to produce an architectural pattern book in the popular traditional vernacular style. This would be sponsored by Woke King Chuck and named in his honour. Projects which followed the King Charles Pattern Book would be exempted from the Town & Country Planning Act system. Data centres, nuclear waste processing facilities, and nerve gas factories would then spring up across the country in attractive neo-Georgian style, and with tacit Royal approval, so as to soften the blow for Nimbies, auguring in a new ‘Carolean’ age of prosperity.

Let us pause here and take a breath. So far, the author has taken you through a potted history of the House of Windsor, and has succeeded only in persuading you that they are craven and cynical survivalists. This, you might think, is hardly a promising foundation for a right-wing case for monarchism. However, dear reader, you are quicker than that, and you can already see the drift of the author’s case. The wages the Windsors pay for survival are the provision of stability and continuity to the government of the day. Let us continue.

The Utility of Monarchy

We are living in Britain’s century of humiliation. When the late Queen was crowned, the only head of state in the world with more subjects was Mao Zedong. She was queen not just of the White Dominions, but of independent states like Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It is true that Britain had been replaced by the United States as the world’s greatest power; however, Britain was still competitive with the Soviet Union, with a larger and more advanced economy, and with a Navy that would not be surpassed by the Soviet fleet until well into the sixties. When the Queen died Britain was barely within the top five of the world’s largest economies, with a Navy that (as recent events have shown) could barely put to sea.

There was nothing inevitable about Britain’s decline as an economy and as a military power. It was a policy choice made by politicians who, in ecumenical consensus, wanted to prioritise the indirect welfarism of a nationalised industrial strategy, and the direct welfarism of, well, welfarism, over Britain’s economic dynamism and military prestige. Britain’s great post-war poet Philip Larkin captured the age well in his acidic ‘Homage to a Government’ written in direct response to the decision to withdraw from East of Suez, and not long after Britain had cancelled its advanced ballistic missile, strike aircraft, and aircraft carrier programs.

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

We are, in fact, not the children Larkin wrote about, but rather the grandchildren. And Larkin was right. Like the fabled boiled frog, the transformation of Britain from a preeminent industrial and military power to a financial services sector with a welfare state attached has gone largely unnoticed by the public at large.

Less than ten years after Larkin wrote the above poem, he was asked to write verse for the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. His first attempt, shared privately with his friends, is widely reproduced by left-wing academics as proof of Larkin’s racism, and consequent unsuitability for the school syllabus:

After Healey’s trading figures,

After Wilson’s squalid crew,

And the rising tide of n---ers

What a treat to look at you.

His serious published attempt expresses a similar sentiment, albeit in a more sombre tone as an epitaph:

In times when nothing stood

but worsened, or grew strange,

there was one constant good:

she did not change.

It is from this that we can begin to understand why Larkin correctly predicted that the children of his generation would not know they were living in a different country, despite the enormity of the change which was occurring. More important than the statues standing in the tree-muffled squares was the sense of solidity, permanence and, most importantly, historical continuity provided by the institution of the monarchy. This provided an analgesic for the public during a transformation no less profound or humiliating (albeit less precipitant) than that experienced by Russia at the end of the Cold War, or even in the final years of the Qing Dynasty.

By the 1990s, the then Prince of Wales’s much-publicised infidelity, followed by the sudden death of his popular spurned ex-wife, brought the Royal Family to a crisis comparable with the Abdication Crisis of 1936, or the present crisis concerning Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. There were signs that vicious and doctrinaire republicans like Alistair Campbell might use the Royal Family’s weakness as an opportunity to strike. However, wiser and more subtle intelligences prevailed, and the Blair government nurtured and defended the Royal Family. In return, the Royal Family provided tacit and — eventually — explicit support for the cultural and demographic transformation that the Blair government was enacting. Again, the only thing more striking than the ambition of Blair’s transformation of Britain was how few noticed it was happening. The statues remained in the tree-muffled squares; we did not realise we were living in a different country. And throughout it all was the Queen, waving on her Golden Jubilee, grinning from her box at the Royal Variety Performance, parachuting into the Olympic Stadium, providing us with that false sense that we were connected to a continuous golden thread reaching back into forgotten mists of our history.

The author very much hopes that after the next election the Right will find itself in a 1997 moment, with a large majority, a demoralised opposition, a revolutionary agenda, and a Royal family suffering from severely damaged prestige. If that is the situation an incoming Reform government finds itself in, then it should seek to put the Royal Family to the work that Macmillan and Wilson put it to in order to conceal decline, and that Blair put it to in order to conceal left-wing cultural and demographic transformation. A genuinely reforming Reform government should use the Royal Family to maintain a veneer of continuity on the surface, whilst disembowelling and recasting the British state beneath it. That is the utility that the monarchy can offer to the Right. The alternative is to open yet another front in the war Reform will need to wage against the decaying institutions of the British state.

Our Republican Constitution

Consider the United States of America, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. One is a constitutional monarchy; the other is a republic.

The intelligent reader will soon recognise that America is the constitutional monarchy, and Britain is the republic.

After the failure of the Continental Congress, the United States ratified the constitution we know today. In so many ways, this was a return to a system of government which closely resembled that of Britain at the time. In the eighteenth century, the British constitution was comprised of three estates: a powerful executive King (albeit one who, by this point, selected his ministers from Parliament), a Parliament upon which he relied for legislation and supply, and a judiciary which was increasingly an estate in its own right, independent from the King. Having rejected the hereditary principle, the Americans established an elective monarchy, and called their temporary king the President, and a Parliament they called ‘Congress’, with an elected house representing commoners and an unelected house representing grandees of the state. The judiciary’s independence from the executive was enhanced and codified, becoming the true third estate, thus completing the three-legged stool in which each coequal branch checked the other, rendering any major reform almost impossible. The great irony of the American Revolution is that rather than overthrowing the British mode of government, it set the eighteenth-century British constitution in aspic and remains ruled by it to this day.

Conversely, Britain’s long civil war between royal and parliamentary power continued to rage well after the American Revolution, and by the reign of Queen Victoria it had largely realised its recognisable modern form. Parliament had wrestled from the King his executive functions, which were now exercised by what was effectively a sub-committee of Parliament called ‘the Cabinet’, headed by a senior parliamentarian for whom the (initially informal) title of ‘Prime Minister’ was invented. The judiciary remained culturally independent, albeit formally they were led and selected by a minister of the Government, and whilst the Government was constrained by law, Parliament had (effectively) the unfettered power to change any law at will. By the nineteenth century, it was possible to summarise the British constitution in a single sentence: whatever Parliament commands is law. As the franchise was expanded until suffrage became universal, Britain had the most radically democratic constitution in the world, as nothing constrained the power of Parliament, and Parliament was elected by the mob.

This radical democratic nature of our constitution (in modern parlance, the word ‘populist’ would be preferred to ‘democratic’, as a sustained attempt has been made to change the meaning of the latter word to something like motherhood, apple pie, and friendliness to international NGOs) had, in practice, been constrained by political rather than constitutional means. The advent of the party system, followed by the cartelistic collusion of the post-1945 Labour and the Conservative parties on matters as diverse as economics, demographics, penology, and law and order, expressly against the instincts and preferences of the British public, has acted to blunt the extraordinary democratic potential of our constitution. However, we find ourselves in an era pregnant with the promise of tectonic change, as both of the traditional parties have been surpassed in polling by radical and populist parties of the right and the left.

The Crown, however, has retained a small residue of power and purpose in our republican constitution, albeit the role it performs is not obvious, and is rather technical.

If the Cabinet is just an executive sub-committee of Parliament, why does the Government not dissolve with Parliament prior to an election? Why does anarchy not therefore follow? The answer to this is that the Government does not claim to be an executive sub-committee of Parliament: it claims to be the King’s Government, exercising powers delegated by the King. It is well understood that if the King was to cast doubt on whether he had in fact delegated such powers to the Government, or if he tried to exercise them personally, then it would be the very last thing he ever did. As such, the legal fiction of ‘His Majesty’s Government’ is vital to our republican constitutional project. This residual constitutional role of the monarchy comes with very little actual power. The only situation where the monarchy may be called upon to exercise any power is in circumstances where, through an inconclusive election, or the fragmenting of parliamentary political parties or coalitions, there is need for a referee to decide who may attempt to form a government, and whether Parliament should be dissolved and an election called. This role is performed in foreign ‘Westminster Model’ constitutions, either by a non-executive ceremonial president, or (as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand) by a Governor General.

So why can’t we guillotine Woke King Chuck and retain the rest of the constitution as the editors of Pimlico Journal would no doubt prefer? Or for Ruska, replace him with a president like that mad old man with those big dogs that they had in Ireland? The correct answer to this is nothing to do with Chinese tourists wanting to visit Buckingham Palace, nor is it the fear that a president might command a rival mandate to the Prime Minister. The answer is that the replacement of the constitutional role of the Monarchy with anything else, in the current climate — remember the temptation for many otherwise good enough politicians to buy into the ‘need’ to have a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act (and would have strengthened the Supreme Court after the whole rigmarole of 2019) — will create overwhelming pressure to draft a written constitution, with or without a non-executive ceremonial president.

If a written constitution is promulgated, then it is the written constitution that will be sovereign, and not Parliament. And, as the constitution will be interpreted by judges, it is they who will essentially constitute a sovereign regency council. And thus, no longer will Parliament be sovereign, and as it is the people who elect Parliament, no longer will the people be sovereign.

The removal of the King’s vestigial constitutional function (either through abolition, or as Ruska suggests, his relegation to a Japanese-style figurehead) will finally complete the Blair project of subordinating the radically democratic character of our republican constitution beneath the yoke of judicial human-rights liberalism.

And so, dear and loyal reader, let us be upstanding, and together give two cheers to Woke King Chuck, servant of the revolution, and all his heirs and successors.

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

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At the time of announcement, it was my strong suspicion that an early election could backfire for Fredriksen. This is because Rasmussen, who has served as Foreign Minister since 2022, has been as much — if not more — the face of foreign affairs as Fredriksen. After all, it was Rasmussen, not Fredriksen, who visited the White House during the peak of the Greenland Crisis earlier this year. It increasingly seems to be the rule in European politics today that when the conversation turns to foreign policy (and especially Russia or the United States), the establishment parties and the status quo will massively benefit. Mette Fredriksen has therefore been incredibly unlucky that the Foreign Minister inside her government happens to be a man from a different party who is himself a two times former Prime Minister and who has been a senior minister in one form or another since 2001, with just three years in opposition in those twenty-four years, thus capturing the pro-establishment foreign policy polling bonus for himself.

Rasmussen’s status as the biggest beneficiary of this foreign policy focus poses problems for Socialdemokratiet beyond simply losing out on vote share. He is loyal only to is himself, and would have no problems booting them out of government if doing so were to his advantage. Before Fredriksen became Prime Minster, Rasmussen held the position with the blue bloc (the coalition of right-wing parties) behind him, and if the electoral arithmetic after the election supports him being in government so long as he joins the blue bloc again, back he will go.

Local elections in Denmark took place in November last year, and Fredriksen’s party was handed a historically bad result, starting with 44 mayoralties but retaining just 26 across the country, as well as losing Copenhagen for the first time since 2004 to their left-wing competitors Socialistisk Folkeparti (F), who did well in these local elections. However, whilst the right-wing parties which saw a fall in their projected vote share when the Greenland Crisis began have seen something of a rebound, it looks as though the similar fall in polling for Socialistisk Folkeparti might be more permanent.

Whilst it is true that foreign policy being the story of the day benefits the establishment, the calling of an election often broadens the political horizons. As Theresa May discovered in 2017, leaders frequently fail to define the terms of a contest, with various other issues bubbling to the surface — often including questions that could never have been anticipated. The campaign began with Danske Folkeparti leader Morten Messerschmidt being crucified for his multiple visits to Mar-A-Lago after Trump threw a tantrum because he wasn’t given the Nobel Peace Prize, and informed Denmark that he was ‘not ruling out’ taking over the Danish territory of Greenland (perhaps by force). And yet, throughout the subsequent campaign season, foreign policy has not featured especially prominently, and on election day that controversy is now a distant memory.

As the public’s shock faded, conversation at the start of this month turned to more mundane day-to-day issues such as Socialdemokratiet’s plans to try and lower retirement ages for everyone in society all the way down to 20 year olds; the regular TV debates brought the government under fire for the 124% gross increase in immigration from MENAPT countries (a Danish statistical category created in 2021 covering the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey) and Bangladesh during their tenure; and, gradually, the polls began to regress to their pre-foreign policy bonanza mean.

In my opinion, one of the biggest issues in this election was — unfortunately — the issue of clean drinking water. This is unfortunate because, as I am sure you will be shocked to hear, the water in Denmark is in fact perfectly safe and clean to drink: this is not a war-torn fifth-world African nation. The fact that this discourse was given any legitimacy by the right inherently means vote share loss, because there is no way to argue against the premise successfully if you concede truth in it. It became such a major issue that Mette Fredriksen came out at the end of the campaign and said that a national pesticide ban is an ultimate requirement for her to lead a future government.

I suspect this was nothing more than a cynical ploy to get that all-important Danish cross-party consensus which any major policy decisions require to be passed (without incident) on making Denmark compliant with the EU nitrates directive which requires a culling of herd sizes in major European beef and dairy producers, and has been the source of major protests in the Netherlands, Ireland, and at the EU Parliament and Commission in Brussels. But whether I am right or wrong, ‘you want us to have drinking water that gives people cancer’ is never a good accusation to receive.

The final event in the election which I want to speak about involves leader of the Liberal Alliance (L), Alex Vanopslagh. The Liberal Alliance is the most economically right-wing party in Denmark, enjoys a very young support base (so much so that it suffers from the voting age being 18) and, unlike the increasingly irrelevant establishment Konservative Fokeparti (K) — which previously had ties to the Republican Party — and Danske Folkeparti — which had ties to MAGA World — Vanopslagh and the Liberal Alliance had no connections to disavow, and so were not harmed electorally by association. They were already second of all the blue bloc parties, polling behind only Venstre, which had been damaged by governing in a grand coalition as well as suffering from a bland leader.

That is until Vanopslagh was asked on DR (the Danish state-funded public-service broadcaster) on March 11 if he still supported the legal sale of cocaine and amphetamines in pharmacies, as he said he did in 2023 (a typical libertarian). He answered in the negative: he had changed his mind. Unfortunately, this seems to have angered someone into leaking proof that he does indeed use cocaine, as the very next day, Ekstra Bladet shoved a camera in his face asking if he had ever used cocaine while serving as party leader. This resulted in a lengthy confession and explanation being issued on Facebook by Vanopslagh, and so the last clean party in the blue bloc capable of reaching double digits was implicated in scandal. With the election just twelve days away when this confession was forced from him, and given the reception that this revelation received from the sort of older voters from whom Vanopslagh already receives a frosty reception (it is common to hear him mocked for his ‘King of TikTok’ status by older people when asked about him), this looked like death for him and the blue bloc’s chances of getting elected.

Predictions

At the start of this election — when it looked like foreign policy would be the dominant issue — it seemed that the most likely outcome would be a continuation of the same governing coalition, albeit with a stronger Lars Løkke Rasmussen. Now, it looks like this will be mathematically impossible as both Socialdemokratiet and Venstre bleed vote share. I feel confident in saying that Venstre — which, as an aside, means ‘Left’ in Danish (because they used to sit on the left side of parliament) — will accrue the worst result in their party’s history and will still finish behind LA despite CocaineGate, and possibly behind Danske Folkeparti as well. Beyond this, another grand coalition would likely be political suicide for all involved — especially in a country where there is not even a cordon sanitaire which justifies excluding certain parties of the right.

Polls show neither the blue bloc nor the red bloc securing enough seats to form a majority on their own, with the two entering election day neck-and-neck, but this does not account for two important things. The first is that Denmark elects 179 seats in its parliament (allocated under the D’Hondt Method with a 2% minimum national vote share required for seats), but only 175 represent Denmark proper, with 2 representing the Faroe Islands and 2 representing Greenland. Normally, Greenland’s representatives are red and Faroe’s are split. However, in part because of foreign policy, it looks as though both of Faroe’s seats will be blue, and Greenland will be split — an important advantage for the blue bloc compared to normal elections.

The second is that Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who is best positioned to gain seats at this election (a major reversal in fortunes from the local elections, at which his party received only 1% of the vote) is not counted in either the red bloc or blue bloc. Lars Løkke Rasmussen may, in theory, have other views, but his only true political commitment is that he should be in government. He has already publicly stated that he would like the king’s blessing to negotiate a new government, and it is my belief that if he is offered his current job of foreign minister by the blue bloc he will take it. Whilst he has declared a red line against joining a coalition with Danske Folkeparti, he previously served as Prime Minister for Venstre (before setting in motion the series of events steadily leading to their destruction) whilst using Danske Folkeparti as a confidence-and-supply partner. For that reason, I think we can safely expect his first principle of politics to override this ‘red line’.

It is, of course, very difficult to predict the ultimate result of an election in which the polls are so close, from which all three of the ‘traditional’ outcomes (left bloc, right bloc, and grand coalition) seem impossible, and where various ‘red lines’ block any other combination. Someone, somewhere is bluffing, even if they themselves don’t know it yet, but we won’t be able to do better than guess about who until tomorrow morning at the earliest.

A casual guide to Danish political parties for the English reader

Enhedlisten (Ø). ‘Red-Green Alliance’ (lit. ‘The Unity List)

The ‘gimmie more PIP, I have too much anxiety to work!’ woke party. Polling at 7% (previous election 5% and 9 seats).

Alternativet (Å). ‘The Alternative’

Inseparable from the aforementioned Enhedlisten. Discovered it was actually something separate just last week. Polling at around 2-3% (previous election 3% and 6 seats).

Socialistisk Folkeparty (F). ‘The Green Left’ (lit. ‘Socialist People’s Party’)

The woke party for people who are actually employed. Polling at 13% (previous election 8% and 15 seats).

Socialdemokratiet (A). ‘Social Democrats’

Danish Labour. Polling at 21% (previous election 28% and 50 seats).

Radikale Venstre (B). ‘Social Liberals’ (lit. ‘Radical Left’)

The male feminist party. Polling at 5% (previous election 4% and 7 seats).

Moderaterne (M). ‘The Moderates’

The Lars Løkke Party. Literally the party from Borgen s3. Polling at 6% (previous election 9% and 16 seats).

Venstre (V). ‘The Left’

The rural wing of the Tory Party. Polling at 9% (previous election 13% and 23 seats).

Det Konservative Folkeparti (C). ‘The Conservatives’ (lit. ‘The Conservative People’s Party)

The Emily Hewertson and Nick Timothy wing of the Tory Party, i.e., the Tory Party as it is today. Polling at 7% (previous election 6% and 10 seats).

Danmarks Demokraterne (Æ). ‘Denmark’s Democrats’

The Tommy Robinson Party. Polling at 7% (previous election 8% and 14 seats).

Liberal Alliance (L). ‘Liberal Alliance’

The Robert Jenrick wing of the Tory Party before he defected. Polling at 11% (previous election 8% and 14 seats).

Danske Folkeparti (O). ‘Danish People’s Party’

The Gaffers. Polling at 8% (previous election 3% and 5 seats).

Borgernes Parti (H). ‘New Right’ (lit. ‘The Citizens’ Party’)

A poor imitation of Prime UKIP. Polling at around 2-3% (previous election 4% and 6 seats).

Total red bloc polling: 48-49%

Total blue bloc polling: 44-45%

Governing coalition polling: 36%

This article was written by Christopher Danby-Lloyd, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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This week, we look at rumours of an upcoming Tory reshuffle. Who’s in, who’s out, and why should we care? Also, we look at an interesting shift in messaging on immigration from Reform…

This newsletter’s agenda: Kemi Badenoch considering major reshuffle; Reform raises replacement

Read more

“Regretfully, I speak this fatal truth: Louis must die, so that the nation can live.”

—Maximilien Robespierre

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor for misconduct in public office is the greatest reputational crisis that the British Monarchy has faced since the abdication of Edward VIII almost a century ago. The images of a convoy of police cars escorting the bleary-eyed former prince out of his Sandringham residence on the morning of his sixty-sixth birthday are now etched forever into public consciousness.

That the Monarchy is the fundamental pillar of British identity has long been a hackneyed trope, favoured by both left-wing and centre-right histories of post-war national life. Indeed, it is a central feature in most metanarratives of ‘post-imperial’ Britain that the Windsor Dynasty are a focal point of affection in a wider context of increasing uncertainty about the nature of our nationhood. More recently, these analyses have taken an introspective turn, reflecting that Britain’s various crises are, to some extent, rooted in the ambiguous nature of our modern identity as a result of the loss of Empire, deindustrialisation, and shifting class boundaries. Here again, the strange indeterminacy of what precisely the House of Windsor represents is presented as either a reflection or a cause of these confusions.

Britain’s societal transformation has been subject to a variety of dramatisations, but it is the play King Charles III which best typifies the centre-left commentariat’s conception of the importance of the Monarchy to national mythmaking. Parliament, the Crown, the NHS, and the ‘Forces’ are all presented as perennial bedrocks of British identity — which are also forever in danger of institutional erosion. In the play, the Queen’s death sends the public into a semi-catatonic state, somewhere between terror and bewilderment. The coronation of Charles III subsequently engenders a constitutional crisis through the new King’s refusal to grant assent to an act of legislation which is perceived as restricting press liberties (even though we might reasonably anticipate that the actual King would be sympathetic to such a measure).

The play is interesting in so far as it captures an essentially conservative idea of the role of the Monarchy in national life whilst being deeply sympathetic to the motivations of the would-be absolutist protagonist (revealing, in the combination, the reactionary attitude of today’s centre-left towards our country’s institutions). Charles’ monologue describes the Monarchy as an ‘oak tree’ which binds the past, present, and future, and it is assumed within the plot that it is a genuine object of affection and loyalty for the British people in general. Charles’ dissolution of Parliament is essentially an idealistic challenge to a venal political class with ‘authoritarian’ instincts which are implied to be alien to Britain’s national culture.

Of course, the actual death of the Queen played out very differently. Besides the brief public mourning in central London, it was — by and large — a non-event. When her passing was announced that afternoon, people, contrary to prior expectations, simply went on with their day. That evening, everyone sat down for dinner as usual. There were no spontaneous displays of grief, no palpable sense of discontinuity and confusion. There was a strange dissonance between the poignancy of the projection and the insignificance of the reality. What was expected to be a moment of genuine uncertainty about the future, the abrupt disintegration of the lodestar of British patriotism, was in reality a basically normal Thursday evening.

Since then, King Charles’ reign has been relatively uneventful, beyond the not-unexpected drift into increasingly political partisanship (as demonstrated by the explicit celebration of multiracialism in the King’s most recent Christmas speech — more on that later). The forecasts from some conservative commentators of a new ‘Carolean’ era which would usher in some vague cultural and aesthetic revival have, as yet, failed to materialise. Similarly, the tragic cancer diagnosis of Princess Catherine (probably the most sympathetic member of ‘the firm’), and also that of King Charles, have received far less attention from the public at large than might have been expected.

Indeed, the only story concerning the Monarchy that has received substantial attention for some time has been the Epstein scandal. Historiographically, we can view Andrew’s arrest as a tawdry denouement to the high Windsorite identity of post-2008 Britain. Since the Second World War, Britain has experienced ethnic Balkanisation, and the Monarchy correspondingly assumed an increased importance in the attempt to define a national identity in the absence of any organic asabiyyah. This dynastic nationalism reached its zenith in the coalition era, with the gaudy celebrations of both the wedding of William and Catherine and the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Endless Union Flag bunting and monotone renditions of ‘God Save the Queen’ captured the self-consciously royalist aesthetic that the political mainstream embraced in order to present a picture of a modern, ‘diverse’ Britain at one with its past. In the absence of any substantive criteria for national membership, affinity for the ‘Crown’ constituted the sole reference point for understanding national belonging.

It is worth noting that this royalist renaissance was different in character from that of the 1980s, which was by no means deferential in nature and was driven by a prurient interest in the affairs of the Royals as celebrities. It also sat alongside a genuine national renewal, in a wider context of military victories and economic recovery. The 2010s revival was, by comparison, more narrowly conservative insofar as it returned to historical norms of journalistic obeisance to the Crown but also coincided with a period of national decline in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, compounded by the failures of New Labour and the impact of the 2011 riots.

The collapse of royalism in the 2020s, then, is not a decline in genuine affection for the Monarchy (which has always been vastly overstated), but the collapse of the narrative that the Monarchy plays an integral functional role in British national life. Centre-right apologia for the Royals, even in the face of their increasingly leftist political sensibilities, has never seemed less plausible. How can this family possibly serve as a non-partisan centre of patriotic sentiment when, for increasingly large swathes of the British public, they are tainted by association with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s questionable proclivities?

One can reasonably assume that more revelations will come forth in the coming months as police actively investigate Andrew’s affairs, which could easily be worse than what we have heard already both in terms of corruption and sexual misconduct. The fallout from this can neither be nor should be contained to the figure of the former Prince. Andrew was purportedly the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and it is implausible to suggest that his activities were entirely unknown to her and others within the Royal family. Sarah Ferguson would not have fled the country for Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland if she expected only the fallout of a single episode of Royal indiscretion, as it was presented in 2021. Her actions make far more sense in the context of an egregious and long-running cycle of lurid corruption, familiar to any denizens of a Third World country governed by a jet-setting elite.

There are other more fundamental reasons why the Monarchy’s popularity will decline in the near future. Britain’s demographics are essentially unfavourable to the Royals, and this is largely a result of policies they themselves have endorsed. Britain’s youngest cohort is now only ≈50% white British. As has been recorded, non-whites are, on average, less favourable to the Royals (and to historic British institutions generally). One of the great ironies of the Queen’s death was that whilst it was presented as a unifying moment of commemoration for the country as a whole, it was in fact primarily white British (and older white British at that) people who engaged in remembrance after her passing. Despite the reality that the Monarchy was a central factor in the development of multiculturalism in Britain — it was as subjects of the King and Queen that immigrants first arrived in Britain, and through their Commonwealth citizenship that their legitimacy as part of the nation was laundered — the evidence suggests that it is only (some) white British people who have bought into the Monarchy. One particular episode captured this projection perfectly, when demonstrations by blacks angrily protesting the defensive police shooting of the murderer Chris Kaba were mistaken for a vigil for the late Queen.

Many right-wingers might be tempted to dismiss the attitudes of unassimilated foreign-born or foreign-descended populations, and say that these people’s views should not be factored in to considerations of our constitutional order. After all, the same demographic trends are seeing Britain’s electoral politics drift towards the foreign policy preoccupations of the Ummah, and we oppose the integration of these concerns into our foreign policy because they represent a form of colonial intrusion at the expense of British domestic concerns. Indeed, some will predictably become defensively royalist, either as a reaction to the republicanism of foreigners and their native allies or as a declaration of loyalty to something which feels familiar in the face of cultural erosion, much as some on the nativist right (such as Matt Goodwin) adopt reflexive support for Israel for the very same reasons. Of course, the basic point that Britain’s future should be determined in the interests of native Brits is correct, but as the question of Israel demonstrates, it is a mistake to simply adopt the opposite view to your opponents, supporting something just because your enemies oppose it.

Our position on the Monarchy, as with any institution, must instead be based on an unprejudiced assessment of the extent to which it advances the interests of the British people. In 2026, there is zero ambiguity regarding the Monarchy’s ideological orientation under the leadership of King Chuck the Woke. The Crown’s historical record is not much better, especially regarding the British diaspora in the aftermath of decolonisation. Whilst Queen Elizabeth is often favourably contrasted with her son for being more politically neutral, it’s worth noting that there is a variety of anecdotal evidence to suggest she was in fact relatively left-leaning, including — amongst other things — Margaret Thatcher’s reference to her as ‘the kind of woman who would support the SDP’.

This stemmed from not only her opposition to Thatcher’s economic policies, but also their clashes over South Africa and the Prime Minister’s refusal to impose sanctions on the country. The New South Africa of which the late Queen was so supportive has subsequently descended into a failed one-party socialist state which has been arguably genocidal in its negligence in protecting white citizens from rampant, racially-motivated murders. The Queen may have been blinded by genuinely held universalism, but even had she understood these consequences her commitment to representing all her Commonwealth subjects equally would have bound her to support the transition to democracy and all the horrors that entailed.

This same tendency might also explain her indifference to the suffering inflicted on her British subjects by the (proportionally significant) criminal elements amongst her Afro-Caribbean and South Asian subjects. While her right-wing defenders will claim that she was bound throughout her reign by unwritten constitutional commitments to impartiality, this argument fails because — particularly in the latter part of her reign — there were in fact increasingly celebratory references to ‘diversity’ in her speeches. But to refute it on its own terms, we have to consider whether it can ever make sense to talk about neutrality on existential issues relating to national survival. The questions on which the Queen was neutral were not quotidian elements of policymaking, or even contested issues of public morality. These questions related not even just to the (often violent) demographic marginalisation of whites in urban areas but to the broader (democratically non-consensual) ethnic and cultural transformation of vast swathes of the country.

During the course of her entire reign, the Queen never saw it fit to comment on the systemic sexual abuse of white British girls by Pakistani rape gangs. Neither did she deign to comment on the corruption, complicity, and active collaboration of local government and the police services with these criminal organisations. We have a clear example of a public crisis which dwarfs any other and which relates to coordinated physical and sexual violence against the most vulnerable constituency within her realm. The difference she could have made to this issue by intervening rhetorically would have been significant — but she always refrained from doing so. It is a moral failing of the Monarchy that its ‘neutrality’ extended and extends to a passivity in the face of immense evil.

The King, of course, continues in this tradition, although has added to the celebration of multiculturalism a pseudo-intellectual ‘perennialist’ inflection. Charles is purportedly a fan of René Guénon, and this might explain his longstanding sympathy for Islam (interestingly, Anthony Burgess’ second dystopian novel 1985 envisioned the then-Prince of Wales leading a surreptitious Islamisation of the country upon his ascent to the throne). One of my childhood memories was that of a speech he gave on ‘Islam and the environment’ in the Sheldonian, and, as you would expect, it consisted of the same ecumenical platitudes about shared ‘Abrahamic’ values of stewardship delivered to an array of self-aggrandising ‘faith leaders’.

Of course, this dual ‘Green’ outlook stands at odds with the reality of diasporic Islam in Britain, as reflected by the rampant littering in inner city Birmingham and other ghettoised urban areas. In a different era, Charles’ affinity for humanistic Sufi traditions (which are, of course, a marginalised and victimised tendency within the faith) might be understandable, but it seems utterly incongruent and bizarre when viewed through the prism of twenty-first century Britain. Islam in this country is — by and large — Deobandi: puritanical and sterile, but also callously and venally indifferent to the wellbeing of animals who have their throats slit in backstreet abattoirs. The Deobandi tradition, especially in Britain, is materialistic, criminal, and essentially anti-social. Again, this is not a condemnation of Islam per se — the tradition of English Arabophilia is a long and in many ways a justifiable one — but to project idealisations onto the religion as it actually exists in Britain today is simply to neglect the duty of the sovereign to defend the people and culture of the nation.

But the King’s most egregious action so far, not just as a violation of the Monarchy’s own definitions of neutrality but as a demonstration of his anti-British political commitments, came in the form of his 2025 Christmas speech. In it, he declared ‘that the great diversity of our communities’ will help ensure that ‘right triumphs over wrong’. There is no forgiving this deceitful statement after the horrors of the last seventy years have been made manifest for all to see. To not only ignore the costs and injustices wrought by mass immigration, but to suggest that it is in fact the guarantor of moral virtue is as perverse as it is anachronistic. It cannot be emphasised enough that not even the Starmer Government is willing to defend the legacy of immigration in such strong terms.

We may reasonably anticipate that Charles will act as a centre of opposition to a future right-wing government when the serious business of righting these wrongs through mass deportations begins in earnest. Indeed, reports that he referred to the Sunak Government’s feeble Rwanda Plan as ‘appalling’ confirm this. Whilst the Monarchy’s constitutional power is (in theory) limited, it would be naïve to suggest that an institution with such substantial ‘soft power’ over the media and the state cannot form a significant obstacle to a Prime Minister if it so desires.

When we look at the Monarchy today, then, we see an institution which is:

1. Tainted with heinous tales of corruption and abuse.

2. Increasingly unpopular with native Brits as a result.

3. Facing unfavourable demographic trends which it nonetheless continues to encourage.

4. Not just indifferent to, but actively complicit in the obfuscation of crimes against our country and its people of the most serious nature.

5. More and more likely to act as a focal point of resistance to a future right-wing government.

In the light of these facts, the case for a British Republic has never been stronger. We should not be tricked into adopting a losing position in defence of a decrepit institution just because Zarah Sultana also opposes it.

Any hopes that the coronation of Prince William might offer a chance to refresh the Monarchy’s image and reinvigorate its position in public life seem overly optimistic at best. As Will Lloyd wrote in the New Statesman recently:

William, the heir to the throne, is perhaps the most underexamined of all. We are briefed that like Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III before him, he will be a fresh, positive, modern influence who will delouse the archaic fabric of monarchy. He cries in commoner’s kitchens about mental health and is praised for his empathy. He watches Aston Villa and may even be able to name their second-choice goalkeeper. He even made sure his press secretary went to a comprehensive, not a public school. We know from the royal super-biographer Robert Hardman that William is unable to name a favourite author, but that this “box-set guy” does love “Batman-related” superhero movies.

In some respects William might simply reflect what the average British bloke is like today. But average isn’t the expectation of the Crown, and he differs a great deal from Charles and his grandmother. Thanks to Valentine Low, another long-time royal observer, we learn that: “William is not a great reader: he prefers an oral briefing.” In Power and the Palace, Low reports that William will be the first monarch in several generations not to have read Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution. Read between the lines. What are they telling you?

I will make explicit what Lloyd did not. William is a dullard, uninterested in the history that shapes the nation that he is destined to inherit and the constitutional role he is set to take up. In happier times, this might not matter. But given the situation we are facing today, how can we expect such a person to lead any kind of institutional rejuvenation? Why would we taint ourselves with loyalty to such a person?

Given all the current trends outlined above, and the hopelessness of a future dependent on the current heir, it seems reasonable to suggest that the abolition of the Monarchy is likely in the coming decades. Whilst it would not, in fact, be necessary to combine this with substantial constitutional reforms (one could easily just abolish the legal fiction that the Prime Minister’s powers are exercised on behalf of the King and be done with it), it is nevertheless the case that this will present an opportunity for broader change which whoever is in power at the time is likely to take up. If we take ourselves out of this conversation by sticking to the defence of the Monarchy, it will be our opponents who define this new settlement.

How might abolition come about, and what form could we hope subsequent constitutional revisions to take? It is impossible to predict the precise circumstances under which conflict between the Monarchy and a right-wing Parliament will arise. No doubt, this could begin with the attempt of the King to rhetorically intervene against a repeal of the Human Rights Act and a withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. It might also come in the form of veiled or open attacks against a ‘British ICE’, particularly if during the course of its operations it accidentally kills or injures an obstructive illegal migrant or an extremist agitator. A government which went further — for example with large-scale denaturalisations — would almost certainly see an intervention from the Monarchy. We might even see it in the context of something as puny as the removal of the (insane) voting rights we grant to so-called ‘Commonwealth citizens’.

Regardless of the particulars, there is an open goal waiting to be scored. It will be easy to mobilise populist angst against the multicultural paternalism of the King. The Crown Estates have an estimated value of £21.3 billion, while the Sovereign Grant, the untaxed allowance derived from profits from the Crown Estates, has tripled in real terms since 2012. It doesn’t matter if this is actually a relatively trivial sum when compared to the national debt and annual governmental expenditure: it sounds like a lot to the average voter, and can easily be tied into some resolving some populist cause, whether housing veterans and homeless people or contributing towards a student debt jubilee. It would be easy to attack Charles on the basis of his longstanding political inclinations, especially given the general ill favour with which he is viewed by many older Brits due to the Diana scandal, as well as the general indifference of younger generations.

Despite all of this, it must be recognised that the sections of the public which do maintain lingering affection for the Monarchy are overrepresented among the social base of right-wing parties in Britain. Advocating for direct opposition may therefore be politically harmful for a right-wing government with its own base, even if the position were popular in the country as a whole. As such, the correct path forward in the face of Royal opposition would be to call a referendum not directly on the future of the Monarchy, but in support of an Act of Parliament which fundamentally alters its constitutional status.

The Crown Estate and the analogous Duchy of Cornwall, along with privately-held assets such as the Duchy of Lancaster, the Sandringham estate, and the Balmoral estate would be nationalised along with all other British real estate held by the Royals personally or by the Crown. The Royal Family will be granted permission to use some of these residencies — perhaps Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Balmoral — which will be maintained by the state. On top of providing residences and the requisite staffing, the Royals will be reimbursed for expenses incurred in the conduct of their duties, and will receive a personal family allowance of £2m, to be distributed as the King sees fit, which should keep the number of ‘working Royals’ to a minimum and force the rest of them to do something useful with their lives. The Royals will also retain existing privately-held assets (excluding land), possibly with the exception of any historically-significant jewellery or artifacts — no need to feel too sorry for them. The effect of these measures would be financial regularisation of the Monarchy, transforming the Royals into highly-paid civil servants with a few extra perks, and stripping the unjustifiable privileges and feudal hangovers that currently define Royal wealth.

Constitutionally, the powers of the Royal Prerogative which are currently held by the Monarch but exercised by the Prime Minister will be formally conferred upon the office of the Prime Minister in its own right. This includes the power to summon, dismiss, and dissolve Parliament (as constitutionally permitted), the granting of final assent to legislation, the ultimate command of the armed forces, and the granting of honours and peerages. These powers had functional purposes in the past, but they have evaporated as the Monarchy has stepped back from its constitutional role. A democratically legitimate Prime Minister would be able to wield these powers as intended, and a strengthened executive would be no bad thing for a reformist or radical government. Additionally, the elected government will be given powers to control and direct the public activities of the Monarch and other Royals, as employees of the state. This includes the power to approve or deny public statements and interventions. Neutrality cannot mean supporting only those aspects of government policy with which the Monarch personally agrees, and the Monarchy must be a tool of the British state if it is to serve a useful function for the British people.

As for the Windsor family, they would retain a purely ceremonial role, and would have the same constitutional status as the Japanese Emperor — that is to say, they would be a symbol of state with no invested authorities. These reforms would mark a significant move towards the modernisation, rationalisation, and defeudalisation of the British state. These terms may scare more conservative-minded readers, and there may be a place in national life for ceremony and for historical peculiarities, but that place should not be in the legislative process or the executive function of government. Byzantine procedures and financial structures serve only to retard the state, to make its actions less explicable, and to make it harder for necessary reforms to be carried out.

This approach is premised on the expectation that, whilst the Monarchy will continue to decline in popularity, a confrontation which necessitates reform is likely to occur whilst it still maintains some support, at least among the more conservative voters who will form the bulk of any right-wing electoral coalition. It is, of course, entirely possible that upcoming revelations might be so bad as to erode the institution’s legitimacy sufficiently to render this intermediate step unnecessary. If not, these measures will at least minimise the power of the Monarch to interfere with an elected government, and what remains of the Monarchy can be phased out in due course, hopefully before any succession occurs.

In concluding this article, it is worth stressing that there is nothing unpatriotic about opposition to the Monarchy. I am not an ideological republican as such, and I recognise the value that a variety of constitutional regimes have contributed historically. But to conflate dynastic patriotism with British nationhood is a grievous political mistake as well as an error of historical interpretation. Britain was unified under a monarchy, but it only became a single state under a republic. It emerged as a global power under an oligarchic regime which vested near-absolute power in Parliament. The British, more than any other nation, have maintained a flexible constitution under the recognition that no single form is preferable at all times and for all people.

It would be deeply unwise to hitch the future of our country to an institution which has no clear purpose or sense of its own identity (at least an identity and purpose which accords with the political goals, sentiments, and interests of the British people) in the modern era. Much as the Monarchy has historically damaged the national cause by confusing our self-conception of nationhood and perpetuating an outdated notion of imperial citizenship, today it damages the British right by forcing it to treat the associates of Jeffrey Epstein, and those who defend them, as the focal point of national loyalty. I look forward to the day when we might raise anew the arms of the Protectorate over Buckingham palace; when we once again have leaders who wish to make the names of Englishmen as great as ever those of the Romans had been. This should be the hope and aspiration of all Britons.

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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The first is from Carl Benjamin (‘Sargon of Akkad’) of the Lotus Eaters. In a video published on 27 June 2025 entitled ‘Starmer Regrets His Island of Strangers Speech’, Benjamin provides his understanding of the state of demographics and race relations in Britain before Blair. He asserts, specifically regarding demographics, that

‘…prior to about 1997, Britain was an incredibly homogenous place. It was probably, I think [sic] it was about 91% native when Tony Blair took over, and so you would have a hard time finding foreigners in the country, non English, Welsh or Scottish [sic] in the country…’

And for race relations more broadly, he states:

‘…and when you did find [foreigners or people of non-white British background] they were mostly from London, sometimes from Manchester, Birmingham, but they were also heavily integrated culturally because they had no choice but to be, you couldn’t not be surrounded by British culture. And so there was no way that you could set up your own little enclaves and escape it, and be affected by the nature of the [native British] culture, so when you spoke to a black British person from the 1990s, they just seemed like a normal British person. So they [native white British] didn’t feel like strangers. But that’s the important part, is the fact that you felt like you had a national relationship with that person, and so they weren’t an offensive person to be around.’

The second of our three statements is from Cambridge academic James Orr, now Head of Policy at Reform UK, in an interview with Steven Edginton for GB News, published 10 July 2025. When discussing an Englishman’s sense (or lack) of connection to the country, Orr states that

‘…quite dramatic changes were already underway in the 1920s and but the sort of demographic dislocation doesn’t emerge until much later on, and does not really emerge until the beginning of this century.’

Later in the interview, contrasting the nature of immigration and race relations in Britain before Tony Blair to more recent arrivals, Orr says that:

‘…in the 1950s and 1960s when we saw waves of migration from the Indian subcontinent, what you saw broadly was an integration success story, certainly compared to the post-colonial migration of other colonial powers, certainly better than I think we achieved much better rates of integration and assimilation… because it was understood, what you know, to be British was to become British was… seen as something that was broadly civic than rather than… ethnic…’

This view is also shared by many right-wing politicians, both in the Conservative Party and in Reform UK. And in fact, Restore Britain’s leader, Rupert Lowe, who will provide the third of our statements, seems to also cling to this narrative, stating that:

‘In 1997, Britain was in good shape. We knew who we were, we were still one country, and most importantly, the population was stable. And immigration was under control.’

This quote is not from an old clip taken out of context, and is not just some half-thought-through commentary given in an interview of little importance — this quote is directly taken, word for word, from a reel on Restore Britain’s Instagram page on the very day that they launched as a political party. In fact, it’s the very first thing said in this reel, suggesting the degree of importance that Lowe and his acolytes place on the idea of 1997 as the real turning point for this country.

Hearing this historical perspective, which I call the ‘Pre-1997 Narrative’, one could come to three conclusions about immigration into Britain prior to 1997:

1. Before 1997, the effects of immigration were at worst benign and at best beneficial to Britain

2. Before 1997, the average person from an immigrant background usually understood themselves to be as (and were as) ‘British’ as the native population, and did not view themselves as radically different from the native white British population. If they were distinguishable from the native white British population in culture, mannerisms, and outlook in questions such as history and trust in the government, this did not create serious challenges for the majority.

3. Before 1997, establishment figures, whether politicians, journalists, or academics, were in the process of being able, or at least expected to, integrate those of immigrant backgrounds into becoming ‘British’. This ability or expectation changed after Blair.

This article will certainly not dispute the fact that Tony Blair’s government increased immigration to unprecedented levels. Nor will it dispute the negative effects of the laws that this government passed over its thirteen-year tenure, or the ‘pro-immigrant’, ‘left-wing’, and ‘liberal’ attitudes of the likes of Barbara Roche, aiming to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. These are facts that we can all acknowledge. It is therefore true to say that in certain respects 1997 was a turning point — but the ways in which it was have often been grossly misunderstood.

What we must insist on is that the ‘Pre-1997 Narrative’ dramatically understates social frictions and racial strife in Britain long before New Labour, overlooking the political class’s inability to either stop or integrate new arrivals into Britain from the Attlee Government onwards. Pre-1997 immigration and its attendant problems very much set the stage for later problems. Indeed, Blair marks no meaningful discontinuity except for the increase in absolute numbers. The Blairite approach towards race and immigration should be largely seen as an evolution of pre-existing views within the political class, and not as something particularly radical or new.

A brief overview of immigration into Britain before SS Windrush

Modern immigration is characterised by a constant stream of arrivals settling in a country so as to permanently and meaningfully change the makeup or character of its population. In Britain, for all the talk of Huguenots, this process of sustained, large-scale, long-term settlement only really began with Irish immigration in the nineteenth century.1 Beginning in the 1840s, it was largely triggered by events such as the Irish Famine. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people left for Britain (though many more went to the United States), settling in cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and, of course, Liverpool. It is estimated that up to three-quarters of Liverpool’s population has some Irish ancestry today.

Naturally, this changed the character of the parts of the country in which the Irish settled. As Sean Glynn notes, ‘it was in such neighbourhoods particularly that the Irish appeared to form racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groupings which were often clearly differentiated from the indigenous population’.2 The Irish population was even large enough to change the political landscape. Echoing today’s rise of the parliamentary group ‘Independence Alliance’ — a group of MPs of South Asian Muslim background (Jeremy Corbyn excepted) from largely South Asian Muslim-populated constituencies, championing the interests of their fellow Muslims in Palestine — the constituency of Liverpool Scotland between 1885 and 1929 voted for T.P. O’Connor, who was born in Ireland. O’Connor stood for the Irish Parliamentary Party, and was the only representative of an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected in a constituency outside of the island of Ireland.

While the Irish dominated this era of immigration, Jewish immigration, fleeing increased discrimination and violence in Eastern Europe, also increased during this period. Comparing government responses to each group, the reaction to Jewish migration can only be described as disproportionate. While around 150,000 Jews had settled in Britain during the latter half of the nineteenth century, compared to around 425,000 Irish over a similar time, it was Jewish immigration which induced the government to introduce legislation reducing immigration. As Endelman notes:

‘The number of newcomers in itself was not the problem — the Jewish population never exceeded one percent of the total population of Britain — but, rather, their concentration in three or four urban centers, the East End of London preeminently, which was already the focus of much middle-class concern’.

This led to ‘a transformation of the regulatory ambitions of the British state and a reorientation of the idea of the nation’.3 Fears of a non-European, non-Christian presence in England, caused by immigration, triggered the Balfour Government to pass the Aliens Act of 1905. This empowered immigration inspectors to exclude immigrants deemed ‘without means’. Comparing Jewish to Irish immigration, we can see that it took a far smaller influx to prompt government action.

While the British government’s response to Jewish immigration may appear harsh, its efforts to curb non-white immigration before 1948 were, by comparison, even more aggressive. Though port cities have always been home to a number of foreign seamen, temporary or permanent, the non-white presence in Britain increased relatively significantly during the First World War, with Asian and black merchant marines being brought into British port cities to support the expanded shipping industry. While these numbers were still very small compared to what was to follow from the late 1940s onwards, these arrivals still had a great political and social impact. Or, less euphemistically, they led to what can be considered the first major race-riots in Britain in 1919, in port cities such as Glasgow, London, and most seriously, Cardiff,4 where local demobilised soldiers fought with predominately black men over employment and response to, as the assistant head constable of Liverpool had delicately put it, ‘blacks interfering with white women’.

The consequence of this, as Ian Spencer describes, was ‘an immigration policy that restricted entry of Asian and black people to Britain’, and thus ‘…the slow growth of Asian and black Britain following the acceleration associated with the First World War.’ This was regulated by a series of pieces of legislation: first the Aliens Order of 1920, which refused permission to land non-white seamen unless they could prove British subject status, and then an expanded Order of 1925 which had obliged non-white seamen, regardless of their actual citizenship, to register with the police as aliens and carry identity cards, effectively restricting their right of entry and permanent settlement in Britain. Furthermore, British overseas agencies were instructed to restrict the issuance of travel documents and passports to certain non-white individuals, hindering their entry and settlement in the UK.5 According to Spencer’s estimates, by 1939, the non-white population was estimated to be just seven thousand, when the British population was around 40 million people — that is to say, the non-white population of Britain was 0.0175% of the total population.

Attlee’s change of course

There is increasing awareness that the Attlee Government did not invite the SS Windrush to Britain in 1948. Its arrival was a surprise for the authorities at the time. However, it must be noted that it was largely a coincidence that the Windrush’s arrival and the passage of the British Nationality Act occurred in the same year. The British Nationality Act 1948 was primarily enacted because the Attlee Government felt the need to define British citizenship for the first time in law in response to Commonwealth countries such as Canada, India, and Pakistan explicitly defining theirs. To be specific, it sought to maintain unity by recognising all citizens of the remaining Empire or Commonwealth as British subjects in an attempt to maintain British international influence.

There is hesitation among some academic historians to link the Act with increased non-white immigration into Britain. For example, Spencer, whom I have used primarily to document the history of specifically non-white immigration into Britain between 1919 to 1950, asserted definitively that ‘…in no active sense did the Act contribute to the flow of British subjects into the United Kingdom, nor was it seen at the time as likely to do so.’6 Similarly, the British Government’s website page on the ‘Windrush Scandal’ argues that one of the ‘…most common misconceptions about the British Nationality Act 1948 (BNA 1948) is that it marked the beginning of an age of migration from the Black Commonwealth to the British Isles.’

Such assertions are quite puzzling, and I believe those who argue as such about the BNA 1948 frankly seem to be missing the point. In regards to actual policy, while the British Empire did indeed hold the idea of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ in the abstract from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the de facto understanding of race vis-à-vis immigration policy was was that non-whites, as ‘physically and culturally distinct groups’, were seen as unassimilable and likely to cause ethnic conflict with the natives. An influx of non-white immigrants was therefore to be avoided.7

While the legislation of the 1920s clearly violated the basic principle of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’, this was of no practical or political concern. By contrast, the BNA 1948 clearly affirmed the de jure right of all British subjects to move around the empire freely, and actually made the emigration of non-white people into Britain far more feasible. Spencer notes that although border guards still maintained subtle ways to keep non-white immigrants out, like limiting travel documents in the colonies,8 they could no longer turn them away at the ports, as they did in the 1920s. As Rieko Karatani also puts it, ‘….Commonwealth citizenship [affirmed by the BNA 1948] was the basis of citizenship rights and privileges inside the United Kingdom.’9 Overall, the true facts on the ground are determined by what is practically and legislatively acceptable (such as the 1920 or 1925 Acts, or conversely BNA 1948), not what is merely theoretically possible (as in the often-ignored general principle of ‘Civis Brittanicus sum’).

And indeed, the facts on the ground did change after BNA 1948. The growth of the non-white population of Britain became a point of concern even as early as the latter years of the Attlee Government. Reports of racial fracas, akin to the race riots in 1919, are found in towns such as Liverpool, Deptford, and Birmingham during the late 1940s. Cabinet-level discussions on ‘coloured’ immigration occurred in March 1950, over a growing concern about ‘serious difficulties which were thought would arise if immigration from British colonial possessions was allowed to continue or increase’. However, by February 1951, the Cabinet concluded that no legislation should be introduced at that time, against the precedent of such legislation being introduced in the 1920s. The reasons given were that such legislation was seen to be too controversial abroad, and might weaken British colonial and Commonwealth influence, as well as at home, for being racially discriminatory in nature.10

There was a clear change in policy towards immigration and race during the Attlee premiership, as the de jure policy of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ was now more formally upheld. While border officials in the 1920s were at liberty to restrict access to Britain to most non-white people (particularly seamen), after BNA 1948, these prerogatives were rescinded. Though we can credit the Conservative Government that followed for an increase in arrivals, we must conclude that the Attlee Government was responsible for constructing the legal framework which allowed colonial subjects into Britain.

The incohesive state

But why does Attlee’s decision even matter? After all, as Carl Benjamin argues, if one were to come across someone of immigrant background before 1997, apparently ‘they were also heavily integrated culturally’, and as British culture was so potent before 1997, ‘there was no way that you could set up your own little enclaves’. The insinuation is that while the BNA 1948 helped those in the colonies come to Britain, those who did enter became sufficiently culturally British and thus many of the problems that have been associated with immigration did not happen before 1997.

Except they did. From the 1950s onwards, Britain saw a spate of race riots. The existence of large-scale racialised violence substantially undermines the happy view of pre-1997 immigration espoused by Benjamin, Orr, and Lowe. Three post-1948 case studies reveal the origins of this unrest and present a very different image of immigration before Blair.

We can first observe the Notting Hill Riots of 1958. While no report was launched by the authorities at the time, what is clear is that the new Jamaican population was heavily concentrated in specific locations; or ‘little enclaves’, we could even say. As many native landlords would not accept Caribbean tenants elsewhere, those immigrants typically concentrated in areas where accommodation was cheapest and of the lowest quality.

Certain cynical actors, such as the landlord Peter Rachman, would seek to exploit the situation by trying to coerce white tenants out of their properties. (Many existing tenants had statutorily controlled rents, so their removal in favour of a new tenant was potentially highly profitable.) According to Christopher Hilliard, to do this, Rachman would rent to ‘a host of Caribbean men’ and encourage disruptive behaviour, such as playing loud music to make elderly white tenants move out. When colonial immigrants became landlords themselves, similar tactics were used. For example, a Jamaican landlord was reported to have attempted to evict his white tenant, and when she told him he could not lawfully do this because it was a controlled tenancy, ‘…he threatened to let out the rooms around her to some ‘picked’ obnoxious coloured people whom he would encourage to annoy her in every possible way.’11

Over time, these practices led to overcrowding and concentrations of black tenants in specific properties, effectively pushing out white residents and creating a form of segregation, making it ‘unbearable’ for a white person to rent in such areas. In the riot of 1958, many of the white rioters were known to have been not immediately from areas of the riot itself, but rather ‘walked (or in some cases drove) to areas with more black inhabitants, and challenged them there’, indicating the widening segregation of communities only ten years after BNA 1948.12 From this, we can see that segregated communities and serious racial tensions between them are hardly a new phenomenon that emerged after 1997.

Jumping forward twenty years, we can then analyse the Scarman Report of the Brixton Riot of 1981. Relations between the new black population and the police were particularly poor, with the black community consistently accusing the police of institutional racism (though the Scarman Report disputed this). The Scarman Report confessed the existence of ‘racial disadvantage’ for black people in society more broadly, and even that positive discrimination to was a ‘price worth paying’ — but it also acknowledged the growth of areas defined as being predominantly black and hostile to the police. Indeed, regardless of one’s view of whether there was serious racial prejudice or simply a lack of trust in the institutions of the state within the black community,13 what is indisputable is that the black population was increasingly identifying itself in ways that separated themselves from broader British identity.

Though advocates of the Pre-1997 Narrative will argue, explicitly or implicitly, that colonial immigration to Britain was ‘an integration success story’, exclusive black forms of identity were becoming increasingly popular with the black population in Britain. For example, as a Marxist article commenting on the riot noted, ‘In the “popular” form, what this amounts to is a tendency for many West Indian youth to identify with symbols of black assertiveness — in the late 1960s with the black power slogans from the US, today with some of the imagery of Rastafarianism and with reggae music. The number of committed, believing members of the Rastafarian cult is very small. But the number of youth who vaguely identify with its symbolism is much higher. A survey of a group of black youth in Handsworth showed that half thought Rastafarian [sic] “significant”.’

Finally, we can look at the Bradford Riots of July 2001 and the findings of the Ouseley Report. Though this obviously occurred after Blair took power, these events involved people and communities which existed in Bradford long before 1997, and it would be disingenuous to simply blame the Blair Government for what happened. In 2001, Bradford experienced a thousand-strong riot between white and Pakistani youths of the city. It is clear that for all of the claims of integration in pre-1997 Britain, many British cities were marked by extreme segregation. This was not denied in the Ouseley Report, which noted the existence of ‘comfort zones’ for both whites and Pakistanis, where ‘different ethnic groups are increasingly segregating themselves from each other and retreating into [areas] made up of people like themselves’.14 Furthermore, Ouseley observed the ‘virtual apartheid’ in secondary schools in the area, further demonstrating the lack of cultural cohesion between communities, completely contradicting the ‘heavily’ culturally integrated image of pre-1997 Britain.15

It should be clear by now that the Pre-1997 Narrative of a successful British cultural assimilationism inverts the reality. The ‘steelman’ of these claims should ultimately recognise that policymakers with varying degrees of alarm towards these issues tacitly settled on demographic stabilisation as the correct response. Long before Blair, and in fact even before their explication in Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the challenges of multiracialism were of enough concern to start unwinding the Attlee Government’s experiment in putting ‘Civis Brittanicus sum’ into practice.

The 1948 framework began to be seriously broken down across bipartisan lines over the 1960s with the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts in 1962 and 1968, as well as the Immigration Act 1971, under Macmillan, Wilson, and Heath. The 1968 Act by the Wilson government is revealing: it targeted the influx of Kenyan Asians, including some who had British passports, who fled Jomo Kenyatta’s ‘Africanisation’ policies. The 1971 Act under Heath introduced the concept of ‘patrial’ citizenship to immigration law, establishing a framework which introduced controls on those without a parent or grandparent born in the UK, in essence without doing so for those of British descent. This process of unwinding the BNA 1948 was finalised in the creation of British citizenship in the British Nationality Act 1981 under Thatcher, which finally severed ‘UK citizenship’ from the imperial structure of subjecthood (though maintaining outdated concepts such as Commonwealth voting).

Of course, there was no Powellite repatriation of those settled. Instead of Powell’s more radical solution, a halfway house was reached to ‘stop Empire coming home’ whilst simultaneously importing another imperial framework to ‘manage’ race relations in the Race Relations Acts. The first Act of 1965 established the Race Relations Board, whose first (Liberal) chairman, Mark Bonham Carter, viewed the ‘permanent historical problem’ of a significant African-descent minority in the United States with misapprehension, whilst also looking to the Civil Rights movement for inspiration. The second Act of 1976 created the groundwork for Blairite equalities policy, replacing the Board with the Commission for Racial Equality. Before Blair, Britain had just about struck a delicate balance of demographic control with special minority protections. Since Blair, and certainly in the past few years, any semblance of that balance has been completely blown up.

Ultimately, if one could (incorrectly) think of the pre-1997 era as racially harmonious, it is only because there had already been an inescapable demand from the British public to arrest and reverse demographic displacement. This is far from the claims of any kind of deep assimilationism at this time.

The insufficiency of the Pre-1997 Narrative

It is only as a result of this process that Benjamin, Orr, and Lowe are correct in their understanding of pre-1997 Britain by comparison to today. For all that has been described above, Britain still remained a largely homogeneous country: in 2000, around 9 percent of people in Britain were non-white. However, it is clear that even by the 1950s — despite relatively low levels of immigration by contemporary standards — race relations were a serious concern. There was violence, alienation, social incohesion, and distrust between native and immigrant, decades before Blair was given the keys to No. 10. This clearly invalidates statements such as immigrants being ‘heavily integrated culturally because they had no choice but to be’, or that before 1997, immigration was ‘broadly an integration success story’.

We can therefore assert that the Pre-1997 Narrative fails to address two key points. Firstly, immigration of people from vastly different countries to Britain, on any scale, led to racial strife. Even levels of immigration far below that of New Labour created serious problems. Carl Benjamin’s Lotus Eaters can lament the increased presence of non-whites in his native Swindon, Orr may feel uncomfortable going around many parts of London, and Lowe might assert that until as late as 1997 we were ‘still one country’, but such feelings of alienation were experienced by poorer white-working-class communities in cities many years before either Benjamin or Orr were even born. It explains, for instance, the rise of far-right organisations such as the National Front in the 1970s or the British National Party in the 1990s, or the overwhelming support for Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech.16

Secondly, it was not from 1997 onwards but from the 1940s onwards that the political class adopted a deeply flawed approach to immigration, as demonstrated by the racial strife and violence this approach ultimately caused. This approach was also against the wishes of the native British people. That is to say, the ideas of the political establishment did not suddenly become ‘Woke’ vis-à-vis immigration and integration from May 2 1997. It appears that, from a very early stage, the political class adopted views that were, and are, radically different from those of the British public, and were exceptionally slow (and reluctant) to row back from this even after these ideas proved disastrous.

While the British public agreed and supported the maverick Enoch Powell, Brian Walden, the Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood (which is now one of the least white constituencies in the entire country, currently represented by Shabana Mahmood, who faced a strong challenge from Akhmed Yakoob, an openly racially sectarian candidate, in 2024) in the 1960s and 1970s, regretfully sums up what he and his fellow MPs’ beliefs about immigration and immigrants were in a radio broadcast. It does not sound particularly different from what many say about the political class today:

‘I can’t say that my own efforts did much to improve public understanding. I suffered from the not uncommon failing of politicians, that having made up my mind, I refused to take up any notice of evidence that contradicted me. In the 1950s and early 1960s, large numbers of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean came to the West Midlands to take jobs in industry. There was an anxiety amongst the local population at an influx on this scale, for which nothing could prepare them.

In confronting this problem, my failing was liberal intolerance. I believed in racial equality, and was upset by colour-prejudice and so my sympathies were with the immigrants.’

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

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