I happened to be at Trafalgar Square at the time, and as such I witnessed the event that has generated so much controversy. Far from an Islamist domination ritual, the event featured half an hour of short speeches punctuated by a campy daytime-television-presenter-type woman in a colourful headscarf, including a standard collection of platitudes from Sadiq Khan, followed by five minutes of (yes, gender-segregated) prayer before a free meal deal courtesy of Comptoir Libanais. A standard celebration of multiculturalism in twenty-first century London — perhaps not what we’d like to see hosted in the space surrounding Nelson’s Column, but nothing we wouldn’t expect, and certainly not a sign of some new and terrifying threat. Of course, the reality of the event (which only 3000 people attended) matters little compared to the hyperreal online presentation of it. It may well have been ‘the largest public iftar in the world’, but that is because such events are rather uncommon. Iftar (the daily breaking of fast during Ramadan) is usually a private affair, held with friends and family. How large would the largest public Christmas dinner have to be?

Whilst it is new for senior politicians to speak in such stark terms, concern over Islam in particular, separate from immigration qua immigration, has long been a staple of the British right going back to the foundation of the EDL by Tommy Robinson in 2009. The fundamental reason for this is quite simple: it is more comfortable to speak of fears about the changing character of the country in terms of religion, which is a set of ideas that an individual could plausibly choose to abandon, than in terms of ethnicity, which has a chilling, inescapable finality. Furthermore, Islam can be criticised in explicitly liberal terms over its teachings on intersex and interfaith relations, making it an even more acceptable target. It is understandable, then, that those seeking to oppose mass migration would be tempted to push the issue by focusing on Islam — but to do so would be a mistake.

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A number of glaring issues coalesce to construct this perfect storm. A willingness to accept flagrant flouting of English language requirements and brazen academic fraud on the part of university administrations hungry for foreign cash has been supercharged by the mass adoption of AI to provide live translation services in seminars and even to produce work output, all of which has largely been ignored by institutions with a vested interest in turning a blind eye. My own experience, as well as that of another recent MSc graduate from a university with similarly deep historical roots, provides an insightful case study on how Master’s teaching has increasingly become nothing but a way for foreign nationals to buy credentials (and often visas), rendering British students a minority within their cohorts at most top institutions. Having explored how we got here, I will offer some tentative proposals to restore merit-based education in Britain and ensure our academic institutions serve British young people as they should.

The Problems

For any academically minded student, perhaps the core promise of university as an intellectual environment is the opportunity to pursue a discipline alongside a cohort of similarly passionate and intelligent peers — a prospect made all the more exciting by the opposite experience provided by comprehensive schooling. Especially in the humanities, there is often as much to be gained from conversation and engagement with peers as from lectures by professors, yet the flooding of undergraduate courses by those who have little ability and less interest in their subject of choice and who seek only an entrance pass into professional society has almost entirely removed that dynamic from the seminar room, even at the most prestigious institutions. My hope, then, upon entering postgraduate education, was to finally come upon the intellectual environment I had always hoped for: a departure from the mundane, run-of-the-mill lecture topics that pervade undergraduate teaching and the opportunity to engage seriously with my chosen discipline alongside my peers. The reality was starkly different.

Let’s begin with an obvious truth: it is hard to have a meaningful conversation with someone who can barely speak the language. The first sign that this was going to be a problem came during my earliest lectures, hard as it was not to notice the widespread use of real-time AI translation services by international students struggling to keep up with the content as delivered in English. Perhaps that much could be excused — lectures can move at pace, and are often the first time that complicated concepts are explicated. Yet in many cases, these same tools were also leant upon in seminars, with students typing in their responses in their native language to facilitate a stuttering rendition of ChatGPT’s translated English script whenever they were asked a question. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether these responses truly were mere translations, or whether the content itself was generated by the agent at least in part — but the regularity with which these students descended into silence when asked a follow up from their response indicates the latter possibility.

Perhaps the most egregious effect of this lack of English language fluency was on group discussion tasks. Simply not having the ability to speak the official language of study well is one thing; in many cases, international students proved entirely unwilling to even make the attempt to communicate in anything other than their native language, often looking with total bemusement at British students who were speaking or asking questions, either ignoring their discussion entirely or declining to participate when invited. The issue here barely needs pointing out: how are British students supposed to engage meaningfully with the subjects at hand, develop the requisite intellectual skills, and explore their own ideas if most of their peers are unable to participate in conversation outside of regurgitating AI-generated scripts, and unwilling to even make the attempt?

The course instructors were, of course, entirely aware of what was going on, and completely understood the deleterious consequences that this behaviour would be having on British students making a genuine attempt to develop their academic understanding. Nevertheless, nothing was done to improve the situation. No encouragement was provided to international students to improve their understanding of English. No punishments were enforced against the pervasive use of AI. That the denial of proper education to British students was ignored by those in charge of delivering it confers responsibility for that phenomenon directly upon them. They are, in effect, aiding and abetting a system which places British students at the bottom of the priority list. This is representative of the institutional view within ostensibly elite institutions that international students are never to be challenged, partly because the suggestion that someone does not have sufficient grasp of English to study in the language carries the faint whiff of fascism, but primarily because doing so would place the tremendous flow of overseas money into British universities at risk.

It is not only British students who are defrauded by this system. To qualify for an international student visa, the Home Office requires applicants to prove English proficiency that is ‘equivalent to CEFR level B2’, which would mean that the individual is able to independently understand and engage with complex texts and communicate fluently with native speakers. Simply put, it is not plausible that even a slim majority of the international students in my postgraduate seminars could have legitimately proved such abilities. If these students did in fact have these skills, why were they so unwilling to use them when doing so would have made their lives and everyone else’s so much easier, not to mention that it would have been to their own educational benefit? If they did not, how are the universities not participating in the defrauding of the visa system that they must have committed in order to be here?

We should not, however, be surprised that this negligence and dishonesty has become so rampant. There is essentially zero incentive for course administrators to tackle the pervasive and increasingly severe examples of academic misconduct which are ruining postgraduate teaching. As mentioned, international students pay eye-watering amounts of money both in the form of tuition fees and student accommodation rent (which is in many cases rented out by the university itself). Disengaged students enable professors to rest on their laurels. In most cases, academic misconduct is easily reframed as a problem of ‘inclusivity’ within teaching materials. There is very little oversight and less enforcement from the state or from regulators, both of which are often just as happy to allow this situation to persist. Successive governments have used universities as a vehicle for delivering financial support to otherwise economically struggling places, and are quite happy for this to be funded by the fees of international students. For Labour especially, this has the pleasant side-effect of turning previously competitive areas of small-town England (notably including both Warwick & Leamington and Canterbury) into safe Labour seats.

Some might be tempted to suggest that the problem goes beyond international students, and is in fact part of the general lowering of academic standards which has accompanied the democratisation of higher education since 1997. Whether or not there may be some truth in that, I saw first hand the impact that simply addressing this problem can have on course quality. The few optional modules that were disproportionately preferred by British students (or by the relatively fluent in English Europeans) offered a markedly better opportunity for academic engagement. Deep engagement with the granular details of required readings was the norm in such classes. Conversations flowed freely, and mutual criticism provided a genuinely valuable source of learning. Group tasks were completed efficiently, and the process of doing so was productive. None of this was the case in modules with a more representative take-up.

These issues are not simply an inconvenience or an annoyance for domestic students. In fact, they largely destroy the basis for embarking on postgraduate study. Traditionally, there were a few reasons that one might pursue a master’s in one’s chosen subject. Bookish aspiring academics who had real enthusiasm for research-intensive study would begin their intellectual journey proper at this stage, developing the tools which would ultimately allow them to make their own contributions later in their career. Current professionals, perhaps especially those looking to make some sort of career pivot, could use other courses as an opportunity to develop meaningful and productive skills and advance their prospects in the private sector. Graduates looking to enter technical industries which genuinely required study beyond undergraduate level required specialist courses before entering the workplace. All of these goals are economically, socially, and intellectually crucial, yet none can be achieved whilst these issues continue to plague British education. This situation therefore needs urgent remedy.

The Solutions

How might we attempt to do so? A simple answer to the problem of excess international students would of course be to bar them from admissions, or at least heavily restrict their numbers. This, however, would have sharp downsides. Higher education is expensive. Young people already struggle to handle its current costs, and the state does not have the fiscal headroom to pick up the tab. Subsidizing these costs with international student fees is not a bad idea, provided the issues currently being experienced can be addressed. It is also worth noting that, much as ‘soft power’ is a widely abused concept, Britain wins some advantages by being the educational destination of choice for foreign elites. Having such people spend what for most students are the best years of their lives in our country inevitably creates positive feeling towards us which works to our advantage in all sorts of tangible and intangible ways. The question, then, is how to ensure that strict selective criteria are applied which ensure that those international students we continue to take do not have a deleterious effect on the quality of education.

First and foremost, in-person, closed-book, independently administered English language proficiency tests must be made mandatory for all international students. These tests could be undertaken once international students have arrived at their chosen institution so as to avoid forcing students to travel potentially great distances just for a single examination, but on the understanding that failure to achieve a satisfactory score would mean that the student’s enrolment at their university would be cancelled and their student visa would be revoked. Universities could also be required to review their student admissions process following any such incident, indicative as it would be of an insufficiently stringent set of assessment criteria.

Universities could also have the privilege of admitting international students revoked, either in its entirety or through the imposition of a harsh cap on numbers, when found to be failing in their duties to enforce academic integrity and admissions standards. This could be policed in several ways, including unannounced audits of demonstrated English language fluency in classrooms and enforcement of language requirements in admissions, as well as randomly chosen assessments of international students against their ability to defend a representative example of their submitted work that proves individual creation and a fluent grasp on the relevant concepts to an appropriate postgraduate standard, with universities required to review their enforcement mechanisms if the failure rate on these assessments climbed above a certain level.

Regulators should also enforce academic standards by requiring that courses are taught to the historically appropriate level of sophistication, regardless of the composition of their cohort. If universities decide to dumb down the level at which postgraduate courses are taught so that more students might be able to undertake them, the opportunity to take an actual postgraduate course is removed from those who deserve it. Each course at each university should therefore receive specific scrutiny from an academic watchdog which has the power to enforce fines, refunds, or even the closure of courses not demonstrating teaching standards at the expected level.

Scottish universities (whose administration is a devolved matter) require specific measures in addition to these general recommendations. Scottish students do not pay tuition fees, with the Scottish government (using money from Westminster) instead paying £1,820 per Scottish student to each university. This is then supplemented by grants from the Scottish Funding Council. The system creates a payment-to-teaching-cost shortfall of £2,000-£7,000 per Scottish student, leaving a sector-wide shortfall of around £288m, with SFC / SAAS / Scottish Government payments covering only 82% of teaching costs per Scottish student. The ancient universities (Glasgow, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Aberdeen) have offset this by increasing their intake of international students, who pay far more in tuition fees. SFC have admitted that such elite institutions have become dangerously reliant on international student fees, and this is reflected in non-EU tuition fees accounting for 58.1% of teaching income in ancient universities.

To fix this (and fixing a fundamental unfairness in the British educational system, through which Scottish students are given a privilege unavailable to any others simply because their devolved government has no requirement to be fiscally responsible and can rely on English subsidy to provide benefits which secure its re-election) would require the abolition of free tuition in Scotland and the introduction of a tuition fee paid directly by students. This would allow institutions to adjust rates so that domestic students pay more of the cost of their own education, reducing reliance on international student fees. This would also dilute the financial clout of international students, and thus reduce the pressure on universities to ignore their misconduct.

These measures represent the necessary first steps to averting the further decline of British higher education, restoring domestic students to the top of the priority list, and ensuring that our universities can continue to play their necessary role in British academic and professional life. Theirs is one example among many of public and semi-public institutions which have developed their own sectoral interests which they now pursue at the expense of their proper part in a functioning society. Others may seem to have a broader impact, but no issue is more important for the long-term health of a nation than ensuring its most talented individuals are able to maximise their potential. We cannot continue to squander that talent.

This article was written by Aaron Burns and Oliver Daneel, Pimlico Journal contributors. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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It has been said — and said a good too many times — of the Velvet Underground that although their first record only sold a meagre number of copies, everyone who bought one was inspired to start their own band. The closest we have in our own unwanted reprise of ‘New York in the 70s’ is Dimes Square, from whose rejuvenating waters Willis drank during a spell in the city some years ago. Soho Reading Series is London’s ersatz Kofola version of this exalted milieu; a Sovereign House made safe for democracy; seen, said, and sorted. “I don’t want right-wing politics anywhere near [my events],” Willis tells one reporter, although earlier editions apparently used to feature sly allusions to the wit and wisdom of Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk. Watching him up on the stage, urging the crowd to ‘get drunk and talk to sexy people’, I feel like the old Croix-de-Feu activists waving their placards reminding Mitterrand to pay his membership dues. Is this to be the Spirit of ’16’s hollow, Spenglerian afterlife; the rituals acted out and the formulas repeated long after the zeal has gone, like the tedious Claude-generated homily of a jaded suburban priest who just wants to get away from his Boriswaver parishioners and back on the craic? Dein goldenes Haar Dasha…

Whatever else he got up to in New York, Willis managed to internalise one key mantra of lockdown-era right-wing Twitter: to achieve liftoff, a movement — or its destitute cousin, a ‘scene’ — needs women. There are indeed a lot of women here. One such specimen tells my colleague (reader, did you think that I would speak to them?) that she was remunerated for her presence — whether or not this is true, they all seemed to clock off around 9:30 sharp, leaving the night to what Willis refers to as “the young men skulking in the corner [who] will be fans of Martin Amis”. Soho Reading Series events are sometimes held in headband-friendly locations like Saatchi Yates, but this club, into which I had not hitherto ventured, turns out to be a subterranean chamber bathed in a horrific red light that recalls the caldera of a volcano or the Jack Anderton campus tour. Willis touts an audience of 400, but a scan of the (admittedly not small) crowd suggests this to be the kind of aspirational approach to arithmetic that Anton Drexler used for the early Nazi Party’s membership rolls. Everyone I talk to claims this is ‘the first time I’ve been to one of these things’; I don’t see anyone getting drunk, or talking to sexy people, and the whole thing is closer to ‘there will be a brief reception for tea and biscuits in the library; the entire congregation is invited to attend’ than the Thielbuxx-fuelled bacchanalia during the last days of Rome that Dimes Square was supposed to be.

An oft-repeated line of attack in the numerous newspaper portraits of Willis holds that his ‘scene’ is too elite; that the whole thing is just more soulless, swanky parties for the posh Oxbridge grads who have ruled the literary roost in Britain since the Norman conquest. This seems rather a mix of Woke rhetorical brinkmanship and wishful thinking, the clientele and conversations being more redolent of the university student society than of fox hunt chitchat. For the first time since my own school days, I am actually exhorted to read Edward Said by a Pakistani baddie who takes umbrage at my boring Borgesian arguments as to the singular beauty and depth of the English language. While I love the Global South as much as anyone, and try to assuage her of this by praising Urdu poetry and bringing up Enoch Powell’s (and, so it would seem, Louis Mosley’s) fluency in that language, it is to no avail. This exchange could have been held at any time in any place in the English-speaking world from the 1970s onwards — the right may no longer be at the peak of its creative powers, but it can take solace in that Woke 2.0 has yet to manifest, and its enemies are still mumbling the same old incantations to themselves in the forlorn hope that this time the base metals of Heinemann’s African Writers Series will turn into another golden summer of love.

The readings themselves are easily the worst writing I have ever heard. “I’m a writer and researcher who does a lot of stuff in fascism, but that’s not why I’m here tonight”, says one woman who proceeds to read one about the “[something I don’t quite catch] and vulnerability of relationships, centred on my boyfriend’s cat”, although my notes are smudged and I may be mixing up two different people. Another reads a stream-of-consciousness monologue about “my time recovering from addiction at a Buddhist monastery in France” in a cadence and vocabulary that I realise it has been several months since I last heard. “Afterwards there was a group photograph, everyone rushing to be of service… Once you’ve got two sayings in a row you’ve got a whole lot of prejudices, so it’s better to stick to the facts…”

So this is what Sir Keir’s speechwriters are up to these days. This is the kind of thing you could only do in Blair’s Britain; the whole thing reeks of Rainbow Rhythms. Younger Pimlico Journal readers, having grown up in an age whose religious imagination was shaped by Carolean perennialism, Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, and the barnstorming campaign against the assisted dying bill, will not remember that this is what passed for spiritual experience under New Labour, and still does in vast swathes of the country, although I suppose we can console ourselves that it is still more dignified than the psychiatric cant that has lately seized hold of the American mind.

Britain can do better. A consummate wokester like Willis might appreciate my providing him with the following land statement, which I urge him to read out at his next soirée:

This is the country which pioneered sentimentalism as a literary genre and whose sons carried the Oxford Book of English Verse into battle in their rucksacks in the Great War (the Germans, for their part, took Faust and Zarathustra); the island of gardeners who moulded the landscape in such a manner as to mimic the passage from one emotional state into the next; the land whose philosophers separated the provinces of experience into pleasures and pains and handed down the dictum that reason is the slave of the passions. Sentimentality is a hereditary disease in the English; the young people in attendance suffer no less from it than any of the illustrious names in our literary anthologies, but owing to the total collapse of education standards in this country, lack the repertoire of forms with which their predecessors pressed their flights of feeling into an enduring vintage.

Willis, who probably read a smattering of Mishima during his time in Dimes Square, has through these parties fashioned his own unique sensibility into a passable work of art, but in looking upon his works he must despair, for he has failed to cultivate the literary avant garde that might keep the flame burning after the last aspiring model and photographer has gone home and the last substack urls jotted down in the notes apps of the emaciated young men in jumpers swirling their pints of Murphy’s in the corners, to be deleted later that night as the ashamed realisation sets in — am I no better than this? No, there is no one to write about Tom Willis, and so to the dust shall he return.

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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Hughes argues that the Victorian system of boarding schools, the two universities and the London social scene knitted together a coherent ‘Gemeinschaft’ (a fancy German word for a community formed around common sentiment and tradition) which oversaw a ‘Gesellschaft’ (a fancy German word for a community formed by force and law) called the British Empire. It ran this empire very successfully, despite the fact that none of the elites knew any mathematics. This is because they spent all night drinking with each other and worked very short days, not doing much. This is because they rowed at Oxford. This is because they had homosexual flings at boarding school. Because of this, at the end of the Victorian period, Britain was a hugely successful nation that had left its rivals in the dust. The Victorian expansion of the British Empire had rendered her unassailable.

To make his point, Hughes defines the Victorian elites quite narrowly, while defining the successes of the Victorian era quite broadly. The rise of boarding schools meant that ‘elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family.’ Then ‘most elite Victorian men went on to Oxford or Cambridge’ and, in adulthood, ‘the elite of Victorian Britain congregated in London for what was called “the Season”.’ This gives us a pretty narrow definition of the elite. This would probably exclude, say, men like Joseph Chamberlain, Cobden and Bright — who came from the portion of the industrial middle-class that felt the existing social arrangements disprivileged the naturally meritorious and productive. These men were inclined not towards leisure and boozing — but more often temperance, austerity, religious non-conformity, the protestant work ethic and the politics of the liberal Radical tradition. Instead, it is the small group of upper-class bluffers, that Hughes argues formed the ‘Gemeinschaft’ which so successfully ruled Britain. It is their way of life which he explores, and suggests was the source of British excellence.

First, schooling. Among boarders, ‘quasi-romantic… relationships were quite common.’ Jan Morris (WHO remembers proper transvestites?!) is quoted in support: ‘the public school system…meant that male relationships were full of emotional nuance and undertone.’ Of course, what the elites were taught at school must have formed part of the reason for their success. ‘Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek.’ As a classicist myself, I was cheered by this. Patrick Collison, da mihi argentum! Not only did Latin predominate, but the headmasters themselves were hesitant even to teach science.

Not that Latin itself was very useful. Two whole students are quoted to demonstrate this. “I have gladly forgotten all my Latin,” wrote unknown war poet Charles Sorley. The relatively more famous Winston Churchill admitted that he had never managed to learn any in the first place. Therefore, Latin was important because it taught the ‘soft skills’ of ‘self-discipline, memorisation, and applying rules.’ Foreigners, of course, don’t have any of these things, explaining why the Victorians wiped the floor with all of them.

Hughes also argues that schools didn’t dedicate much time to teaching — Rugby School, for example, had a weekly timetable of just 21 hours of teaching, although that might seem reasonable given that my own school timetable had 25. Instead, they spent about half their time playing sports [sic], and this is where Texas high school football comes from. Yee-ha! Foreigners, meanwhile, preferred to study their books. Hence why the German chemical industry never got off the ground, and the French never worked out how to, erm, “Create Streets” that could rival Queen Victoria’s rookeries.

Next there is a section on Oxbridge, including a breathless description of a typical day-in-the-life of a student at the time. I must say, I didn’t find this very impressive. They had lectures in the morning, a nice lunch, ‘tutorials’ (Mr Hughes letting the reader know where he went) or ‘supervisions’ (I went to Cambridge, by the way) in the afternoon, before a formal dinner. This is presented as being extraordinary. Of course, anyone who did an arts degree at Oxbridge knows that this is still how the day goes, yet there is no Works In Progress article praising today’s Oxbridge graduates for how well Britain is being run today.

There follows a nice bit of cherry-picking by Mr Hughes. He points out that even as late as 1910-14, only 13.7 per cent of Oxford degrees were awarded to science students. But compare Cambridge in 1905:

‘In June 1905 there were 647 tripos candidates, 146 for the Natural Sciences, 127 for History, 111 Classics, 95 Law, 63 Mathematics, 28 Mechanical Science, 25 Theology, 13 Modern Languages, 5 Moral Sciences, 5 Economics, 1 Oriental Languages.’ If we combine Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Mechanical Science, we can see that 237 of the 647 tripos candidates (again, Oxford and Cambridge were much, much smaller before the First World War) did STEM subjects, or 36.6 per cent. It is also worth remembering that to obtain a Cambridge BA in those days, candidates had to pass the first-year Mathematics examinations.

Here is a question I picked at random from a Cambridge mathematical textbook of the 1870s. Can you solve it?

It’s not that hard — if you’ve read and really studied Apollonius’ Conics — but would you say someone who can solve such a question would be part of an elite with no interest in the sciences? It’s clear that the average Cambridge graduate in those days would have better mathematics not just than the average modern Englishman, but better than the average modern Cambridge graduate. And the mathematics required became more advanced as time went on.

Not all the elite went to Oxbridge, of course — not even then. The universities were much smaller, with fewer colleges and fewer courts. Some of the elites instead went to Haileybury College, where they were trained to run India. If we want to find out what made a great and successful Victorian, we should look no further!

Hughes quotes from David Gilmour’s paraphrase of the memories of one John Beames, a man who graduated from Haileybury in the 1850s. The day consisted of traipsing to chapel in one’s dressing gown, before retreating to one’s rooms for a claret-fuelled breakfast. After two or three hours of lectures, during which apparently some students didn’t pay attention — can you believe it?! The students broke for lunch (with beer — LEGENDS!) before going rowing or going into Ware or Hertford to play billiards. Then they would have dinner, another chapel service and then have a few more drinks before bed. Well then, drinking and playing must’ve made Britain successful - how else can we explain it?

Of all the arguments levelled by Hughes in this article, this is the worst. Haileybury at the time was really called the East India College, being run by the East India Company, and had little to do with the Haileybury College which opened on its abandoned grounds four years later. John Beames left Haileybury in 1858, the year it was closed down, because the East India Company was closed down, because its administrators had just provoked — and barely survived — the greatest rebellion in British colonial history, the Indian Mutiny. The graduates of this college are not at all the models of success. Their predecessors transformed the East India Company’s holdings from a well-run territory of manufactories and trading stations, which once turned a profit, into a bloated mess that lost money every year. The fallout of the Mutiny was Britain’s Victorian elites deciding to rule India directly, creating a huge drain on the Exchequer. In this unfortunate decision to conquer and rule all of India, Britain’s rulers took up the worthy burden of Empire, Conrad’s idea that “you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.” Beames and Co. unwittingly laid the foundations for Britain’s imperial overreach.

Into adulthood, Hughes’s elites have moved to London. We are told they all lived on either side of Hyde Park, in Mayfair or Belgravia. They lived in the West End but would walk into Westminster or the City to work, usually at mid-morning because the early part of the day was dedicated to sorting through and replying to correspondence (I think that is reasonable enough). They would have a nice lunch, perhaps at their club, and then carry on working until about five o’clock. A few hundred of them, sitting in Parliament, would slink off there around that time to catch an evening session. Dinner would be served around eight o’clock. The elites liked to dress for it — a practice which Hughes neglects to point out was facilitated by the glut of domestic servants in those days.

Between February and July, these elites would go to balls that lasted until the small hours of the morning (although it seems most people would’ve left by about two o’clock — from Hughes’s description these balls were pretty similar to the one described in James Joyce’s story The Dead). At these balls, everyone would drink. It is in this section that numbers are conjured to illustrate just how much Victorian elites drank: ‘young ladies seldom drink more than three glasses of wine at dinner but married ladies, professional ladies, and those accustomed to society, and habits of affluence, will habitually take five or even six, whether in their own homes or at the tables of their friends.’

This is an interesting quote, as much as we can see Hughes’s cack-handed attempt at a sleight-of-hand on the reader. This article is supposed to be about the men who built and ran the British Empire, and how they drank a lot, yet the only time in the whole article that actual quantities of alcohol are cited is from an etiquette guide recommending how many “glasses” it would be acceptable for a woman to drink. We are not even told how much wine would’ve been in a glass. No mention is made of the fact that Claret in Victorian times was only about 9% and Burgundy maybe 10% (outside of ultra-cheap brands avoiding tax, a modern wine-drinker would be disappointed in anything weaker than 13.5%, and would prefer 14%). So young women at dinner might’ve had three thimbles full of weak wine, and established matrons five or six. Is this more than the average American dweeb at a San Francisco house party would drink? Yes. Is it proof of the world-conquering benefits of being a pisshead? No.

So we have our elites, but what did they achieve? At first glance, this seems a stupid question. Wasn’t the Britain of 1901 richer and more powerful than the Britain of 1837? Wasn’t her empire bigger? Her subjects richer? Did railways not criss-cross her islands, and indeed, her colonies? At Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the old widow ruled over 400 million subjects — about 1 in 4 of every man, woman and child on earth. Such a country must have been ruled by people who knew what they were doing!

There are two problems: the successes are exaggerated (this was understood at the time, e.g. see below Kipling’s Recessional, written for the jubilee) and the successes were those of the Victorians’ Georgian predecessors or of their non-elite countrymen. The successes of Empire were fragile, and liable to be undone by self-congratulation:

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe…

Hughes at least admits it is a possibility that the Victorian elite was ‘parasitic’, but I would argue it is inescapable. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, was a product of the 1740s. The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater was perhaps the most Georgian man in history; enormously fat, he forewent the possibility of marriage and an heir because he was obsessively trying to make an extra penny or two on each ton of coal from his mines. It was the ruthless competition of George II’s reign that forced him to dig his famous Bridgewater Canal, in response to the Sankey Navigation. James Watt was so lowly that he could not even afford to become an apprentice, but his improved steam engine changed the world.

Trains and railways were a natural development of the horse-drawn wagonways of the Newcastle coal field. The maker of the first viable locomotive, George Stephenson, was illiterate until the age of 18. His first job was to walk around coal mines wearing damp rags and to use a flaming torch to set off gas pockets before they grew too big. In 1830, he and his son opened the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which could travel between the two cities in an hour. At the end of the Victorian period, the journey was no shorter.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel wasn’t really Victorian either. The great industrialists of the late Georgian period did not emerge from the “London season”. Even from a Works In Progress perspective, the best prime minister of Victoria’s reign was Robert Peel, who repealed the Corn Laws. Peel was born in Bury, moved to Staffordshire as a boy, but fine, an elite nonetheless. Others who campaigned for years in the Anti-Corn Law League — such as Cobden and John Bright — belonged to the abstemious industrial Radical milieu and spoke of the old British elite and unearned privilege, its constitution and pageantry with contempt.

Hughes is right, of course, that the Victorian period really is defined by the emergence of this tightly-knit elite. The expansion of the boarding school system, and its movement away from the Eton of the 18th century (two teachers who read the Aeneid over and over again, between occasional beatings) towards the Rugby of the 19th, did produce a distinctive class which drew from across Great Britain. Hughes admits it excluded Irish Catholics, but he also argues that this tight-knitness allowed Britain to avoid the civil wars which plagued other countries.

This is odd because the Irish Protestant elites (who were in fact excluded from Hughes’s mob, although to a lesser extent than their Catholic compatriots) nearly started a civil war in 1914. Their Catholic rivals had engaged in a campaign of agrarian violence and strikes to cast off the Protestant Ascendancy’s domination of land in the Irish Land War, led by Davitt and Parnell. Irish Catholics started a full and very real civil war in 1916. It was so vicious and bitter that its legacy almost stopped Brexit a whole century later. Perhaps if our Victorian elites had granted Home Rule in the 1880s, Ireland’s view of Britain would be more like Australia’s, instead of their perennial victim narrative. We would be two sovereign nations happily trading with each other, broadly aligned in our foreign policies, rather than awkward neighbours who keep competing to be America’s favourite. But no, our ladies just had to have their sixth glass of wine, didn’t they?

This ruling class did exist, and they were parasitic. They were behind none of the great successes of the Victorian era, and all of its catastrophes. Britain’s pre-eminence was won by the Georgians. India was all but conquered by 1820 and still run at a profit. Canals were followed by railways. Steam was tamed, and steel was forged. Britain had a pretty chain of trading stations lining the route to the Indies. What did the ‘Victorian elites’ do? They overstretched themselves in India, which became a drain on the Exchequer. They bungled the Irish Question until it became unsolvable. They occupied lots of Africa for no clear reason. They allowed Europe to sort itself into two opposing alliances and left their Edwardian successors with little choice but to pick a side. And to top it all off, the Victorian era ended with a bank run and a decades-long slowdown which hit Britain worse than the 1930s.

When the Widow died, Britain was no longer the richest country on earth. She had been overtaken by the United States. Americans were even richer per capita in 1901. Germany was not far behind. Her navy was spread thin over the globe and would soon be summoned home. Her army was thoroughly modern and thoroughly tiny. Despite her immense empire, Britain’s trade was being ground down by Germany and others. The Britain the Victorians inherited had defeated Napoleon. The Britain the Victorians left took three years to beat a handful of Dutch farmers and repeatedly embarrassed themselves and the country doing so. These many failures prompted, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, the patriotic endeavour of the British middle classes and ‘black-coated proletarians’ to replace their blustering elites, but that is a story for another article.

Outside of the realms of war and politics, and despite the global Long Depression of 1873-96, the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were successful. These were in the realms the elites had least to do with, and frankly had little or no interest in. Metallurgy and rivet-making were rarely discussed at London balls. The best thing these elites did was leave alone what was working. In a sense then, them being drunk and lazy may have helped. Britain certainly did improve under the Victorian elites, but this was not because of them. They gorged themselves on the fruits of others’ labour.

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

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This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found here.

In the first part of this series, we considered the prospect of civil war in the West — the formal breakdown of authority resulting in two armed factions competing for control of the state — and discussed the barriers that the social conditions of late modernity present to the kind of revolutionary action that would usher in such a collapse. Conditions that began to emerge during Europe’s entry into modernity, and which have only intensified since, have atrophied not only the capacity of European peoples for the kind of violent action that revolution requires, but also, ultimately, their conceptual horizons — the ability of individuals to imagine an alternative vision of life and society which might motivate any such activity.

We closed with the acknowledgement that hyper-specialisation has created new vulnerabilities for praetorian states. Insofar as it makes sense to describe a group within society as having particularly pronounced political power, it is as a conceptual shorthand for the kinds of particular leverage that that group may hold over the wider whole as a result of its dependencies upon them — think of lorry drivers as an obvious example of a group upon whom society depends in a way that can be easily exploited to political ends. These vulnerabilities create the possibility of something less than civil war, but still on the continuum of political violence, as groups within society attempt to exercise leverage to extract concessions from the state on any number of issues.

Ostensibly, modern states have an unassailable advantage against the mass of the population. Where once the mob could reasonably threaten to tear the king from his castle, today the state has overwhelming military superiority against the disarmed population. Speaking in terms of leverage, the state seemingly has the winning hand: it is the sole provider of security, public goods, infrastructure, and the enforcement of contracts — and every member of the public is dependent upon it for these services. A truly praetorian modern state, therefore, should possess a kind of escalation dominance which guarantees its victory in any standoff.

The state’s position, however, is weaker than it might first seem. The sheer size of modern states precludes the possibility of true praetorianism, which requires not only that the state, as an organisation, be technically independent from the population, but also that the people who make it up have a coherent and separate identity which preserves that independence at every level of its operation. An organisation consisting of millions of people cannot achieve this kind of unity, and indeed the vast majority of people who deliver the state’s capabilities at the ground level do not see themselves as parts of a defined organisation, but simply as people like any other who collect a paycheck that happens to come from the government. Such de-corporatised agents of the state cannot always be relied upon to favour the interests of the institution over those of dissenting factions within the population, with whom they may share certain identities or even personal connections.

This disunity is also reflected at the organisational level, where divergences in interests between different parts of government create internal factionalisation. This can be seen very obviously when one compares the competing desires of, say, the NHS and the Treasury, but it is also the case even between different parts of the security state which one might assume have a stronger unity of purpose. Dissatisfied factions within the state can break rank in a critical moment, siding with dissenters external to the state and offering accommodation in return for support, giving the latter the power to bring the complex social-economic machinery that keeps the gears of state power turning to a halt — so long as they are able to coordinate their disruptive activities sufficiently.

Those activities will look something like what Albert O. Hirschman described as ‘Exit’, the historical uses of which we explored in the last essay. As hinted above, the greatest challenge for such actors will be achieving the required level of co-ordination, especially in the face of the modern state’s unprecedented ability to pre-empt and shut down such organisation. The Southport riots proved hard to contain precisely because they were uncoordinated, yet this also meant that they did not present any opportunity to leverage concessions from the state. More recently, Danny Tommo’s success in concentrating a smaller number of protesters towards more politically potent action has shown the power of organisation — yet his arrest has demonstrated the weakness that the single points of failure inherent to coordinated efforts present. Nonetheless, dedicated cadres seeking to exploit a ‘shock use of Exit’ in tandem with mass disorder, state unpreparedness and the presence of potentially accommodating forces within the official mechanisms of democratic politics have found increasingly fertile ground in recent years.

‘Civil war’ proper — with two factions in violent struggle for control over the state — remains highly improbable in every Western country. Yet these new dynamics make a more simmering form of civil unrest imaginable in ways it has not been for many decades. The background hum of protest, riots, and directionless violence that we have witnessed emerging in Britain and elsewhere in recent years indicates the fragility of the present moment.

This second essay will examine what the exploitation of this fragility might look like under present circumstances, and what the likely outcomes of such activities could be.

The tools of rebellion

David Betz’s essays, though they neglect the organisational challenges for direct action, illuminate some of the possibilities. For our purposes, he makes three relevant points.

Firstly, the conditions underlying domestic tranquillity and the basis of political legitimacy in democratic countries — homogeneity, and the resultant identification with a shared national project — have receded. For a once-comfortable majority population, the prospect of minoritisation is particularly incendiary, especially when it coincides with economic stagnation and the imposition of disprivileges, and is prone to cause serious and potentially violent unrest. Secondly, the state’s lack of ability to police increasingly ‘feral’ cities and the vulnerability of critical national infrastructure create openings for direct action which, if pursued, could bring political legitimacy down to irrecoverable levels. Finally, the symbolic contestation over power is already in full swing: on the left, in the form of iconoclastic vandalism and the destruction of historic cultural infrastructure; and on the right, in the mobilisation of national symbols to signify allegiance to a pre-existing moral and political community against the state (more on this later).

Spasmodic episodes of civilian violence, occasional political assassinations, and the growth of ‘feral cities’ (often referred to as ‘no-go-zones’) in which states are unable to enforce their monopoly on violence are already the reality in most Western countries. In the United States, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the earlier murder of healthcare executive Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, as well as the various attempts on the life of Donald Trump, have thoroughly broken the dam in this regard. As a matter of fact, political violence is no longer off the table in Western democracies. In the first two cases, the symbolic contestation (over the memory of the victim and the martyrdom of the perpetrator respectively) was won decisively by the aggressing party, whilst the most notable attempt against Trump produced the opposite result — by Trump’s own demonstration of his vigour.

Similarly, Northern Ireland has seen a series of race riots and pogrom-like communal violence each summer over the last three years against Roma and other migrant groups in Ballymena, Belfast, and County Antrim. Several of these episodes saw rioters achieve their desired ends, in this case directly rather than as a result of accommodation by the state: approximately three-quarters of the Roma population left Ballymena for good in the aftermath of unrest there. The riots across the country in the aftermath of Southport have not been remembered as a brutish assault on foreigners or an ugly expression of rank bigotry, but rather as an understandable (if regrettably forceful) outpouring of frustrations based on entirely ‘legitimate concerns’. Despite failing to secure direct concessions, the rioters therefore achieved a symbolic victory — and it was only luck on the part of the state that limited it to this, given the apparently complete lack of contingency plans beyond ‘drafting in the military’ when rumoured mass demonstrations in Walthamstow and elsewhere were to have come about.

These events, taken together, begin to sketch the outlines of the civil conflict to come. Betz describes how these conditions may escalate in the near future:

‘the major cities and environs become ungovernable, even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasizing intercommunal violence… these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.’

Betz raises the following as an example:

‘In Britain, for example, there are 24 gas compression stations, all in semi-rural environs, two of which serve London. None are hidden or more guarded than any normal light industrial facility. Attacking one requires no more than being able to plough through a chain-link fence. Likewise the network of Major Accident Hazard Pipelines (MAHPs – the clue is in the name) is intrinsically vulnerable.’

The individual components of the electricity grid are just as exposed as is the communications network and, crucially, transportation infrastructure, which in both Britain and America has already been in a state of degradation for some time even without efforts to disrupt it:

‘New York [is] a prime example – accessed by bridge or tunnel which constitute known bottlenecks that are easily attacked.’

Over the last century, the ability to control or disrupt transportation and communications (whether this is done before or after the symbolic centre of executive control is taken) has been the critical factor for the success or failure of attempted coups and revolutions, at least in those cases where the pre-existing regime attempts to resist its displacement. Railway control or disruption in particular was integral in the Russian, Mexican, and German Revolutions and the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the 1910s. Likewise, the British state managed to avert the 1926 General Strike spiralling into what could have been a government-ending event by mobilising volunteers set against socialist aims to maintain control of critical infrastructure from strikers.

More recent cases demonstrate the possibilities. This is now a forgotten episode, but in 2000, the British fuel tax protests led the Blair government to make major concessions in the face of an obviously extra-legal form of political action. Decrying increasing fuel prices and endorsed by the Conservative Party, a relatively small but well-organised group of lorry operators created blockades to disrupt petrol supplies. So effective was the disruption that 75-90% of petrol stations ran out of fuel in several parts of the country. Public bodies, including the NHS and Royal Mail, and major retailers warned the government that their supply chains — including those that provided food to major metropolitan areas — were endangered. To avoid further escalation, Blair chose not to physically clear out the protesters, and no emergency legislation was passed. Instead, he made a series of concessions to satisfy their demands. Having beaten the elected government, the strikers went home — and one of their leaders (Brynle Williams) even went on to become a shadow minister for the Conservative Party in the Welsh Assembly. The Home Office was later forced to admit that it was entirely unprepared for this kind of mass disruption, and that no contingency plans existed to deal with such events in future.

The importance of logistical control is tacitly understood by those who operate these systems. In the aftermath of the 2020 US election, there was talk of a national truckers’ strike in solidarity with President Trump’s efforts to Stop The Steal. Properly organised, a national strike could have frozen freight, and with it the supply of essential goods, food, and medicine to Democratic cities and coastal power centres, bringing the entire economy grinding to a halt. What choice would the occupants of Capitol Hill have had but to negotiate?

Of course, the truckers’ strike went absolutely nowhere, which was not for lack of support or interest. Truckers on Reddit and other forums openly discussed plans but expressed scepticism over the organisational constraints. In this case, the structure of the industry and the dominance of independent contractors and non-union carriers made the exercise of organising an independent strike borderline impossible. Could a single, perhaps even vague, word from Trump have made the difference as it did on January 6th? What if the strike had operated in tandem with protests in Washington?

Since 2000, British governments have placed greater emphasis on ‘national resilience’ and continuity planning for critical national infrastructure failure, as well as emergency logistics (particularly for fuel). Nevertheless, the vast majority of critical national infrastructure remains without any physical protection against assault. Rather, just-in-time arrangements and contingencies exist to give governments leeway to respond should certain nodes of CNI be taken down by weather, cyber attack, accidents, industrial action or malicious interference. The tax protests showed that small numbers seeking disruption do not need to physically destroy infrastructure to cause a national crisis – simply disrupting the ordinary flow is more than enough to cause panic. Even with contingencies in place, systemic fragilities are visible everywhere; one only has to look at the news over the past few months to see them. The combination of several disruptions at once would present a potentially disastrous challenge.

Territory & Control

It should be noted that the state is increasingly planning for a showdown of this kind. Present attempts to directly challenge state policy meanwhile remain firmly in the realm of democratic opposition and ordinary protest– i.e. the ‘Unite the Kingdom’, January 6th, Euromaidan. Danny Tommo’s Patriot Platform is arguably an innovator in the anti-migration protest space, utilising face coverings and presenting a physical block against migrant arrivals, but a single effort to create networks of this kind is relatively easy for the state to intervene in and disrupt. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 was officially framed as part of the Government’s ‘Safer Streets Mission’, which apparently seeks to tackle knife crime and violence against women and girls, yet it contained provisions in Sections 157-159 which created an offence of concealing identity at protests, and gave the police powers to designate an area where that offence applies or is likely to apply for up to 24 hours. These powers were recently deployed in Gosport. But because the frog is boiling slowly, the state’s responsiveness to these crises — both in terms of acquiring these new powers for itself and deploying them — is also piecemeal.

Increasingly, resistance to the state’s mass migration policies has taken a ‘territorialised’ form. An essay by The Westering Sun outlines the shifting nature of this pattern in Britain:

‘Operation Raise the Colours involved campaigners and local groups displaying the St. George’s Cross and Union Jack on lampposts, street furniture, kerbstones and mini roundabouts in towns and white, suburban parts of the cities as an act of patriotic reclamation of public space. The St. George’s Cross long carried associations of the distasteful form of nationalist expression and was treated with suspicion by the left. What was new was the use of both the England and Union flags detached from any institutional authority – an allegiance to a pre-existing moral and political community. The ‘flagging’ episode revealed a turn in the British people, indicating a fealty to a political community whose relationship to the official state had become increasingly ambiguous.’

What is most interesting about these developments is the way in which the symbolism of territorial control — for example, the conceptualisation of especially illegal migration as an ‘invasion’ — becomes concretised as the primary mode of political contestation. The battle for control of abstract political territory thereby becomes a struggle to assert dominance over a defined physical one, in a manner reminiscent of the establishment of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. Flagging itself represents a middle ground between the symbolic and the real. So far, we have only seen brief glimpses of the fuller transition — most notably in the establishment of ethnic checkpoints at intersections in Birmingham during the Southport riots — but we should expect more of that to come as these modes of action become ingrained.

As the territorialisation of political action progresses, Betz’ forecasts become far more plausible. Today, the forces opposed by protesters remain for the most part abstract. Yet as the public (or large parts of it) increasingly come to see political distinctions as questions of territorial control — versus hostile occupation — the targeting of particular localities becomes a more conceptually obvious move. For now, few people see ‘London’ as a coherent political target (other than in the metonymic sense that the word might be used to refer to central government), but, as that begins to change, it becomes easier to imagine the scenarios that Betz describes in which the city as a whole is contested through attacks on the critical infrastructure which sustains it.

A wider outbreak of this kind of physical territorial contestation would test the limits of the state’s ability to assert control, judging by previous indications of the need to rely on military support. Although a larger portion of police forces have now received specialist public order training, overall police headcount has decreased since March 2024, further shrinking their capacity. Were those capabilities stretched to their limit, bringing in the military may not play out quite as the state desires. Whilst the police are, by and large, a praetorianised force with strong loyalty to the state and its political aims, military rank-and-file are far less comprehensively ideologically selected and far more likely to hold sympathies for the very people they would be asked to hold the line against. Military enlistment straightforwardly selects for those of a vaguely nationalist persuasion, and, unlike the police, the military is overwhelmingly staffed by white men (as shown by the oft-cited statistic that more British Muslims joined ISIS than the army during its peak). If forced to rely on these forces to maintain order, the state may well find itself less able to resist making concessions as its internal unity weakens.

Resistance & Concession

It is often asserted by online pop ‘elite theorists’ that a ‘peasant revolt’ (a popular uprising without support from within the governing classes) can never bring about regime change. This, however, relies on a circular definition of what constitutes an ‘elite’ opinion vs what is ‘popular’. Especially in times like ours, there are always factions within the governing classes who are open to collaborating with popular discontent to advance their own interests, or even groups which sympathise directly with popular grievances. ‘Grassroots’ action can therefore often summon elite support after the fact, and it is difficult to ascribe causal agency to one part or another when that coincidence results in political change.

Elite interaction with the ‘peasants revolt’ can take another form. It has become common to refer to the growth of civil unrest in Britain as a whole as ‘Ulsterisation’, referring to the emergence of community violence along ethno-religious lines. There is another parallel, however, which those who have deployed this terminology have as yet refused to draw. The violence of the Troubles was utilised on both sides by political actors seeking power and office within the official electoral system, and it was this interplay between legal and extra-legal political activity that gave figures like Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams the ability to assert themselves both into and de facto against the rest of the state. The earlier example of the lorry operators demonstrated how dissatisfied factions outside of the state can leverage concessions from hostile actors within it; but when politicians directly side with those factions and wield them as tools, they can be all the more impactful.

As yet, examples of this kind of collaboration have been minor and fleeting. No politician has truly sought to replicate the spectrum of relationships and alliances between formal and informal actors seen during the Troubles, and, for now, anyone who did would likely incur substantial political costs. In the context of long-entrenched and deeply felt divisions, conflict seemed inevitable; the relevant question being who could defend your side and win. Today, much of the public still hopes to avoid the slide into civic strife, and will punish politicians who too openly embrace it for their own ends. Yet that attitude can only persist for so long against the reality of increasingly common violence: eventually, people realise why everybody can’t just get along.

One might also expect that any adoption of this strategy would be met with a harsh response from the state, which has proven keen to tie dissenting political voices to extra-legal forces as a tool of delegitimisation. The re-election of Donald Trump, however, as well as the now likely election of Flavio Bolsonaro in Brazil (both of whom have or are associated with others who have at least flirted with this approach), have shown that most liberal states are actually rather flaccid in their lack of ability or willingness to strategically disempower their opponents once they have amassed a large enough body of public support. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise — after all, it is not clear how a state could meaningfully suppress political tendencies that attract the support of up to half of the population, especially when such suppression is likely to produce an intensification of their support. Whilst no politician in Europe has yet even gone as far as Trump in crossing this particular Rubicon, there is little reason to believe that European states will be better able to prevent future political entrepreneurs from doing so.

Neither is the state especially ruinous to established dissenters. Many of the most prominent extra-institutional political actors and protest leaders in Britain, for example, have undoubtedly broken the law under a strict definition, and some have been arrested as a result; none have faced particularly serious legal consequences (excepting Tommy Robinson, whose imprisonment has largely been for non-political crimes). In fact, such figures often relish the prospect of being thrown into the back of a police van screaming about the liberation of England for the inevitable publicity that mild repression brings. Insofar as the state brings down the hammer on anyone, it is chiefly ordinary people who take the blow: figures like Lucy Connolly who have limited notoriety and little recourse, nameless protesters who step just over the line, and of course young white schoolboys persecuted by Prevent for browsing naughty websites.

This precarious balance means that political actors will be able to walk a tightrope, harnessing the power of extra-legal activity whilst maintaining their distance from it. As political figures tentatively extend protection and endorsement to these activities, they will increase in frequency and intensity, an inevitable consequence of which will be the regular arrest (and, quite possibly, police brutalisation) of ordinary participants, generating martyrs who further radicalise the cause.

In a moment of strained legitimacy (for example, another sequence of summer riots following an inevitable sequel to the Southport massacre), this process could easily create new political possibilities. Imagine that such disorder was accompanied by a solidarity strike in the style of 2000 by lorry operators, farmers, or, of course, the white-vanned Proletariat. Imagine relevant voices in the opposition, instead of the usual calls for calm, made loudly the argument that the government had clearly lost control and called for its resignation and fresh elections — something which they could do easily even while distancing themselves from the worst of the unrest. Protests which began as directionless expressions of anger could easily be reoriented around this goal, and protests with a clear demand that can be met or denied naturally become stickier than those representing nebulous concerns (see the longevity of the Gilets Jaunes, or even the London pro-Palestine protests, vs the Southport riots). A government forced to concede on such terms would undoubtedly enter an election as the weak horse, whilst allowing the opposition to run on a ‘return to normalcy’ and a restoration of order, despite their engagement with the unrest itself.

The Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 were perhaps the most pronounced instance of these dynamics witnessed so far in the West. Much of this period has now fallen down the memory hole, but it should not be forgotten that rioters came remarkably close to storming the White House (having broken into the grounds, prompting the Secret Service to move the President to a secure underground bunker) with the tacit encouragement of figures such as James Comey and General Milley. Democratic Politicians did not go quite so far as to provide vocal encouragement, but remained deafeningly silent, having previously been loudly supportive of the ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ protests — a clear example of the tightrope being walked.

Whilst there are various ways that political actors and parts of the state itself can work alongside the extra-legal political activity of dissatisfied elements in the population, there are also many ways it might resist their demands. Modern states do have unprecedented repressive capacities. Post-war developments in counter-insurgency, and more recent innovations in counter-terror, have given the British security state powers and tactics that the late-Imperial Russian secret police could only have dreamed of. This includes not only the legal ability to proscribe organisations and curtail their activities, but the ability to disrupt and surveil them comprehensively. Much of the institutional apparatus for managing internecine conflict of this kind was itself derived from the experience of Ulster. But it is crucial to note there are key flaws in attempting to extend this model naively: for one, the British state could rely fully on the loyalty of its troops in Northern Ireland given that (no matter how much the British right may wish to believe otherwise) Ulster was a genuinely alien society to which they felt little connection. Many soldiers have said as much in their own memoirs. Deploying the same forces at home will bring unexpected complexities.

The ability of the state to disrupt anything resembling Northern-Irish-style paras-cum-local stakeholders, especially when this kind of grouping lacks the political and social entrenchment that they had in Ulster which was established before the emergence of the British security state, naturally imposes an evolutionary pressure on dissident organisation which selects for a hydra-like structure built on memetic communication and organic WhatsApp group networks with no clear central leadership. Whilst certain figures (including the likes of Orla Minihane) emerged as prominent representatives of the 2025 summer protests in Britain, there was no ‘organiser’ per se. Instead, gatherings arose spontaneously, advertised by ordinary attendees in Facebook groups and text chains. This form of organisation is far harder to disrupt or contain, because there is no central node to attack.

Modern states, abstractly conceived, have near-total power to direct, or if necessary, discipline the various interconnected parts of the complex social machine that exists beneath them. In reality, however, a state is itself a complicated web of relationships that is upheld by the ordinary functioning of the whole. Taken individually, any attempt at a shock use of exit is likely to fail. Yet at a crucial moment, when public demands coincide with divisions in the state and a willingness on the part of certain political actors to provide support and direction, there is good chance that these tactics could be decisive.

Conclusion

In the first essay of this series, we outlined why civil war ‘proper’ has become impossible in the West. Yet, whilst that question raises a series of philosophically interesting discussions on the nature of modern society, the point itself is perhaps irrelevant: the trajectory we have found ourselves on despite this remains one of increasing, if only simmering, violence and disorder. So far, our discussion has been purely analytical - but it is worth offering some reflections on this course, even if there is little that can be done to avert it.

The core issue raised in this series has not been whether a relative ‘return to normalcy’ in democratic politics is possible, but rather the narrow horizons of Western peoples in a moment that should be utterly transformative. The issues underwriting present political conflicts could and should have been resolved by established politicians at many points over the past several decades. That our political system has been unable or unwilling to deliver this outcome, such that the kinds of extra-legal action described above become imaginable given the extent of discontent among the population, is regrettable not just because it is likely to give rise to violence, but also because it demands our attention be dedicated to a series of issues which are, ultimately, banal.

It is obvious to any person willing to trust their lying eyes that mass migration has been a disastrous mistake, that the effective abolition of policing and the dramatic loosening of criminal justice has failed, and that a state which funnels 40% of the productive economy towards subsidies for idle clients will collapse any possibility of growth or prosperity. As the early 21st century gives way to the mid, the very phenomena which we discussed in part one created a society gripped by ennui (indeed, this is partly the reason that discussions of coming violent catharsis are so intoxicating to so many) and exhausted of vitality and cultural productivity. As the West drifts into this uncomfortable slumber, our power in the world shrinks, and our position at the forefront of technological civilisation recedes relative to our competitors. It is these questions of what our society is for, how we wish to live, and how we will remain competitive and generative in the future that should occupy our minds, rather than endless debate on whether to continue our national suicide.

Continuing these circular conversations with fists and fires rather than words is hardly an improvement on our situation. Those who hope that an intensification of the modes of political contestation might result in a heightening of political concerns will find themselves sorely disappointed. The strikes of the future will demand lower petrol prices and cheaper rent, not a revolution in moral sentiments or a new kind of man.

In fact, this detour into chaos will delay the one truly revolutionary process which holds open the possibility for broader horizons to open once again: the coming liberation of humanity from participation in the productive process as a result of artificial intelligence and robotics. Whatever challenges this transformation (and the transition period it entails) brings, developments in technology have opened for the first time the possibility to escape the pressure of economic incentives and reverse the trend towards specialisation (and the sociological and political dynamics it engenders). To bring us back to where we started, the culmination of the forces championed by Smith may prove to be the ultimate vindication of Ferguson after all. What comes after that is a question for another time.

This article was written by Francis Gaultier, Commissioning Editor, and Harry Jee, Managing Editor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Yet the fraud itself is not, in fact, the central issue with our Asylum system. Let us assume that the First Daughter of Kurdistan truly is as popular as these claims suggest. Can we make any case that the British state’s meagre funds are best utilised providing an effective subsidy for this spirited lifestyle by swooping in to rescue her every conquest from the consequences of his own actions? Indeed, Britain has been one of the main supporters of the Iraqi Kurdistan government since its creation in the aftermath of the Iraq war, with more than £200 million flowing into the region from the Exchequer since then. One would like to think we have the leverage to suggest that, if he really cannot learn to live and let live, the Prime Minister should have a quiet word with his progeny and advise her to settle down, rather than executing any man who dares tarnish her honour. Regardless, inviting a constant flow of failed suitors to take up residence on the Edgware Road seems a remarkably poor solution to the problem.

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So imperial has been their victory that not even they have even cowed their old enemies on the left into shying away from their usual vitriol. Sure, voters might still be angry at the Tory party — but the age old hatred of Tories themselves has visibly abated as the sights and fears of the left turn towards Reform. But as one young man at conference put it, there is only one reason for this: nobody cares any more. The great Tory comeback was the only conversation at Conservative Party Conference. It is only a conversation at Conservative Party Conference. Outside of Lord Ashcroft’s blatant propaganda and a few cherry picked examples, the polls tell a very different story — and one which suggests clear lessons for Reform.

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This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found here.

In the first part of this essay, we discussed the unique fiscal and economic circumstances that will surround the next market crash, whenever it may come. In particular, we saw how governments already straining under record peacetime debt burdens, competing for increasingly scarce savings with other sovereigns and a capital-hungry private sector, will find themselves more constrained in their ability to respond to a crisis than they have previously been. Today, we will explore how private actors and the state might respond to such an impasse — and examine the possibility that our future is one of financial repression unlike anything seen before in the West.

Capital flight in a digital financial system

Once investors begin to doubt the real return available on sovereign liabilities, the speed with which they can respond becomes important. Modern financial wealth can be reallocated almost instantaneously. An investor dissatisfied with cash or government bonds can move into foreign equities, commodities, gold, property funds or another currency without waiting for wages, consumer prices or conventional money velocity to adjust. Monetary distrust can therefore appear first as a portfolio movement rather than as an immediate surge in spending on goods. This makes attempts to suppress sovereign yields potentially less stable. The wider the gap between the return investors believe they require and the return governments are willing to permit, the stronger the incentive to move elsewhere. In earlier periods, geographical, institutional and technological frictions slowed that process. Today, capital can react to a deterioration in expected real returns within seconds.

Yet the same financial system which makes capital extraordinarily mobile also makes it more governable than previously. Most private wealth sits inside intermediaries such as banks, pension funds, brokers, and custodians. In Britain, for example, an investor generally retains the beneficial ownership of securities held through a nominee structure, but their transfer and settlement nevertheless occur through institutions subject to government regulation. The state therefore does not need to locate individual banknotes or prevent investors physically crossing a border in order to influence the movement of capital.

This creates a paradox: capital has never been easier to move voluntarily, but it has also rarely been easier to control administratively. Of course, sufficiently strong restrictions create powerful incentives for investors and firms to find ways around them (called ‘disintermediation’), but they substantially lower the administrative cost of the first stages of financial repression. If attempts to hold sovereign borrowing costs below their market-clearing level provoke increasingly rapid movement into foreign or non-sovereign assets, governments have both a stronger incentive and a greater technical ability to prevent that escape. The monetary problem can thereby become a problem of capital freedom, and we’re already seeing it take form.

What would financial repression look like today?

Financial repression need not begin with capital controls, compulsory bond purchases or confiscation. In a modern financial system it is more likely to arrive incrementally, through changes in the relative attractiveness of different assets. A government can encourage domestic savings, promote investment in national infrastructure, alter pension regulations, or give tax advantages to favoured securities. Each intervention may have an independent justification. Taken sufficiently far, the state ultimately comes to determine where private savings are expected, encouraged or, eventually, permitted to go.

Britain has already started down this path, although current policies should not themselves be confused with the much harder repression envisaged here. Gilts, for example, already receive favourable treatment because gains on qualifying British government securities are exempt from Capital Gains Tax. More significantly, the government has become increasingly interested in the allocation of Britain’s enormous pension pool. Defined-benefit schemes already hold substantial quantities of British government debt, often through liability-driven investment strategies using leveraged gilt exposure. Rising yields can create acute collateral and liquidity pressures for such strategies, as demonstrated in 2022. Under the 2025 Mansion House Accord, seventeen major defined-contribution providers, representing around 90% of active defined-contribution savers, voluntarily committed to place 10% of their main default funds into private markets by 2030, with at least 5% earmarked for UK investments. The Government estimated that the commitments could ultimately redirect more than £25 billion specifically into Britain. It subsequently legislated for a reserve power allowing ministers, under specified circumstances, to impose quantitative investment targets if voluntary changes prove insufficient. The present objective is productive investment rather than financing the gilt market, and pension schemes retain fiduciary obligations to their members. Nevertheless, the tools exist for the asset allocations of millions of savers to effectively become an instrument of state diktat. Post-war France, Japan and South Korea all provide historical precedents for this.

There is, however, an important limit to this power. As one might expect, financial repression changes behaviour. If regulated banks, pension funds etc are forced to offer inferior returns, capital has an incentive to migrate towards less regulated institutions. Post-war Britain repeatedly encountered this problem as restrictions on the clearing banks encouraged the growth of finance houses and other non-bank lenders, while attempts to restrict those channels simply pushed activity further towards the regulatory fringe. Governments can keep widening the perimeter, but suppressing disintermediation completely eventually requires increasingly intrusive control over ordinary lending, contracting and investment. Beyond a certain point, financial repression therefore begins to interfere with the basic mechanisms of a capitalist economy.

Britain has done something considerably harder before. Exchange controls introduced during the Second World War survived until 1979, long after the immediate emergency had passed. By the final years of the regime, British residents were still restricted in their ability to use official foreign exchange for outward portfolio investment and purchases such as foreign holiday homes. The Bank of England’s own history of the system confirms that controls were intended to prevent funds from leaving the country except for approved purposes and to reserve scarce foreign resources for uses considered to be in the national interest. The abolition of those controls in 1979 became one of the foundations of Britain’s subsequent development as an open international financial centre.

A return to anything comparable would therefore carry a cost that goes well beyond the inconvenience imposed on individual investors. London’s importance rests heavily upon the assumption that capital can enter and leave, property rights will be respected, and investors will not suddenly be trapped inside sterling assets simply because doing so has become convenient for Our Andeh. Hard repression would attack precisely that reputation. Even the expectation of future controls could encourage pre-emptive capital flight. The more aggressively a government tries to retain capital after confidence has begun to weaken, the greater the risk of accelerating the very process it is trying to prevent.

This is why a ‘boiling frog’ style progression of government policy makes the most sense. The first phase would probably be almost indistinguishable from ordinary industrial and financial policy such as tax incentives or pension reforms. If investors responded by moving capital through less regulated institutions or instruments, the natural response would be to widen the regulatory perimeter. A more severe fiscal deterioration could lead to explicit attempts to channel institutional capital towards government debt or to penalise foreign holdings. Only in a serious confidence crisis would restrictions on foreign exchange, outward transfers or foreign securities become plausible. Such measures would almost certainly be justified in the language of temporary financial stability rather than permanent capital control. But Britain’s own sordid historical experience shows how measures introduced as responses to an emergency can survive for decades.

Britain is particularly vulnerable

Britain combines weak underlying growth with a highly financialised economy, large sovereign financing needs and an exceptional dependence on the continued willingness of both domestic and foreign capital to hold British assets. The country’s post-2008 productivity record has been particularly poor. ONS estimates show that output per hour grew by about 2.2% annually in the decade before the financial crisis but by only around 0.4% annually during 2010–19; by the final quarter of 2025, output per hour was only 2.4% above its 2019 average. This is important because weak productivity limits the least painful route out of a debt problem.

The underlying current-account deficit, excluding volatile precious-metals trade, was £15.1 billion in the first quarter of 2026, equivalent to 1.9% of GDP; including precious metals it was 2.8%. That is why the recent emigration of wealthy residents is so disastrous, especially after the abolition of the ‘non-dom’ status with its tax advantages, and can be only expected to continue. Henley & Partners and New World Wealth estimated a net outflow of 10,800 dollar-millionaires in 2024 and 16,500 in 2025, compared with a net outflow of only 1,500 in 2016. The methodology has been disputed; these are modelled estimates based on investable wealth and inferred changes in residence rather than direct counts. Nonetheless, the direction of travel is clear; Britain appears to have moved from being a significant magnet for internationally mobile wealth to a substantial net exporter of it. This creates a particularly awkward starting point for any future attempt at hard financial repression. China established capital controls before accumulating the financial imbalances it now manages, which is partly why Chinese bond yields are bucking the global trend by declining to record lows; British policymakers would be attempting to restrict capital after building an economic model around its freedom of movement, and after having already lost a significant amount of capital, more than any other nation proportionate to its size.

When every government wants the same savings

Financial repression of the type described above would become more consequential when it ceases to be an isolated national response and begins appearing across several major economies simultaneously. One highly indebted country can suppress its borrowing costs while allowing dissatisfied capital to move elsewhere. The problem becomes much harder when several large sovereigns are competing for the same pool of internationally mobile savings.

Previous sovereign crises generally occurred within a wider financial system containing relatively credible external refuges or institutional backstops. During the euro-area crisis, for example, the ECB ultimately demonstrated that it was prepared to prevent self-reinforcing sovereign-market panic from destroying the currency union, even after stress had spread beyond Greece, Portugal and Ireland towards much larger economies such as Spain and Italy. But if the United States, Britain, continental Europe and Japan increasingly confront fiscal pressure at the same time, there is no equivalent sovereign balance sheet standing above the developed-world system as a whole. In practice, the closest thing the system has possessed to such an anchor has been the United States itself: issuer of the dominant reserve currency, provider of the deepest pool of safe assets and destination of last resort for global capital. The difficulty is that the country supplying the refuge is now becoming part of, or rather central to, the problem.

The result is potentially a non-cooperative game theoretical scenario. Policies which appear rational from the perspective of an individual government can make the international system less stable when pursued by everybody simultaneously. Capital can initially be ‘mobilised’, ‘aligned’, ‘redirected’ or encouraged towards ‘productive national investment’, while capital increasingly loses the neutrality with which it usually moves.

China occupies a different position because it enters this process with much of the relevant machinery already established. Capital controls continue to apply to most capital-account transactions, the banking system remains heavily influenced by the state and domestic savings are exceptionally large. Beijing consequently has considerably greater ability than Western governments to retain savings within the domestic financial system. This may make China comparatively resilient to precisely the kind of rapid capital flight that would complicate attempts at Western financial repression.

Yet, the same discretionary control which helps Beijing retain domestic capital makes the renminbi difficult to imagine as the universally trusted reserve asset of a genuinely open international financial system. Not to mention, of course, the unpleasant distortionary effects at home; the Chinese property market seems to in part be a consequence of trapping excess savings which can’t be put to productive use in the country. China therefore cannot easily offer foreign investors both unrestricted monetary refuge and the degree of administrative control over capital which gives its own system its present resilience. Despite China’s enormous role in global trade, the renminbi still represents only a small fraction of world official reserves and international transactions, and this will not likely change anytime soon.

The possibility is therefore not that China replaces the United States at the centre of the existing system, but that, worryingly, no sovereign does. If several Western governments increasingly seek to direct domestic savings while investors remain unwilling to entrust the same monetary discretion to China, the world loses some of the obvious sovereign escape valves which made earlier episodes of repression easier to contain. Capital would then have stronger reason to seek claims whose value does not depend upon the willingness of any single government to preserve an adequate real return.

The competition for savings has arguably already started. Norway’s $2.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund, one of the largest pools of capital in the world, has proposed reducing the government-bond share of its fixed-income benchmark from 70 to 50 per cent. Because US Treasuries are its largest sovereign holding, at roughly $215 billion, they would bear the largest absolute reduction. Reuters estimates that implementation could cut the fund’s Treasury exposure by almost $80 billion. Expect others to follow with time.

Where will the capital go?

The obvious candidates are equities, property, foreign assets, commodities and precious metals, but none provides a perfect escape. Each represents a different compromise between liquidity, political exposure, valuation risk and the degree to which the asset remains inside the regulated financial system.

Equities are likely to absorb a large share of the initial movement because they are liquid, familiar and represent claims on nominal revenues rather than fixed nominal payments. A company with pricing power or ownership of scarce productive assets can often adapt to inflation more readily than a bond whose return is fixed in advance. This is one reason an inflationary or repressive regime need not produce an immediate bear market in equities even when valuations are already stretched. If the alternatives are cash yielding less than inflation and sovereign debt deliberately prevented from offering an adequate real return, expensive equities can remain attractive, and rationally so. Their valuations may become still more extreme in nominal terms, particularly where investors expect policymakers to respond aggressively to any serious market decline.

Property performs a similar role, but with greater friction. Land and buildings are real assets, rents can rise with inflation and mortgages fixed in nominal terms can become easier to service in real terms. Yet property is highly taxable, immobile and visible. A government seeking revenue or attempting to discourage the hoarding of capital outside productive investment can alter property taxes, transaction taxes, planning rules or rental regulation easily. Property may therefore remain an inflation hedge while simultaneously becoming an increasingly convenient target for fiscal policy; the looming prospect of a ‘mansion tax’ in Britain is one such example, as are rent controls, which are not implausible in Andy Burnham’s Britain. Although an extreme example, The Weimar inflation warns against assuming that the physical reality of a house necessarily protects its owner. German rents had been price-controlled close to pre-war levels, so as the mark collapsed landlords increasingly found that regulated rental income no longer covered taxes, repairs and maintenance. Many were consequently forced to sell into a market dominated by buyers with access to hard currency. Stefan Zweig famously recalled that, near the height of the inflation, a substantial Berlin house could be bought for roughly $100, less than five ounces of gold at the contemporary gold price. One documented Berlin town house valued at approximately $100,000 in 1914 reportedly changed hands for only about $500 in hard-currency terms in 1923, a decline of roughly 99.5 per cent when measured in dollars or gold. Property had risen spectacularly in paper marks while simultaneously being almost annihilated as a claim on real purchasing power.

In terms of immobility and visibility, foreign assets have a similar risk; they are among the easiest categories to penalise administratively because they pass through banks, brokers, custodians and foreign-exchange markets. The main problem with corporate bonds has been explained previously; they are fixed claims whose real value can be eroded by inflation, which is more likely given the low probability of outright default risk. Their attraction in a repressive regime is therefore likely to depend on whether the additional spread over government debt compensates sufficiently for both inflation and credit risk.

Cryptocurrency appears to offer a more radical alternative, but the distinction between Bitcoin and stablecoins is important. Bitcoin has no sovereign issuer and its supply cannot be expanded at the discretion of a central bank, giving it a genuine form of monetary neutrality. Yet its extreme volatility, short history and absence of widespread official acceptance make it difficult at present to imagine as the principal reserve or final-settlement asset between states.

Dollar stablecoins are almost the opposite. The GENIUS Act requires regulated payment stablecoins to be backed one-for-one by highly liquid dollar assets, including short-dated Treasury securities. A saver can therefore exchange conventional dollars for a token which circulates globally while the issuer holds Treasury bills and similar assets behind it. Far from necessarily allowing capital to escape the American monetary system, widespread adoption can create an additional mechanism for financing it. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has explicitly argued that stablecoins will reinforce the dollar’s reserve-currency status and increase demand for US Treasuries, while estimates of the possible first-round increase in Treasury-bill demand by 2030 range from hundreds of billions to more than $2 trillion depending upon where stablecoin adoption draws its funds from. Stablecoins should therefore be understood less as an alternative to the dollar-Treasury system than as a technological extension of it.

There is, however, one asset — gold — whose monetary characteristics are importantly different. It is globally traded, physically scarce, held directly by central banks, carries no issuer’s promise to pay and does not simultaneously constitute somebody else’s debt. That is why gold provides perhaps the clearest test of whether the movement described here is simply another speculative asset boom or a repricing of the monetary system itself.

Why gold is different

Unlike a bank deposit, bond or share, physical gold is not another institution’s liability and does not require a continuing promise of payment to retain its existence. A Treasury bond depends upon the United States honouring a dollar claim and a share represents a legal claim mediated through a corporate and custodial mediator. An ounce of bullion remains an ounce of bullion regardless of the solvency of the issuer because there is no issuer. That characteristic becomes more valuable as financial repression increasingly concerns not merely investment return but control over the location and form of private savings.

Modern portfolios contain surprisingly little of it. The World Gold Council estimates that privately held investment gold represents only about 3% of global financial assets, compared with roughly 14% around four decades ago. Yet the entire above-ground stock is remarkably small by the standards of modern finance: about 220,700 tonnes, worth roughly $31 trillion at end-2025 prices. Central banks and other official institutions themselves hold around 38,600 tonnes, or nearly a fifth of all above-ground gold, while bars, coins and physically backed ETFs account for roughly another 23%. New mine production increases that stock by only about 1.8% annually. A comparatively modest reallocation from the hundreds of trillions of dollars represented by modern financial claims could therefore produce a very large change in gold’s price at the margin without requiring anything resembling a wholesale abandonment of stocks or bonds.

Recent events suggest that gold’s monetary role has not disappeared. Central banks have accumulated an average of roughly 1,000 tonnes annually over the past four years, around twice the average pace of the preceding decade. In the World Gold Council’s 2026 survey, 89% of responding reserve managers expected global official gold holdings to increase during the following year, while a record 45% expected their own institution to buy more. This shows that the institutions responsible for managing sovereign reserves continue to regard an asset without an issuer as useful during uncertain times.

For the private investor, the distinction between gold exposure and possession of gold may become important under harder repression. A gold ETF can reproduce the financial return on bullion extremely efficiently, but it remains a security held through brokers and custodians. Its tax treatment, transferability and permitted ownership can therefore be altered in much the same way as those of other securities. Directly held bullion is different. Governments can tax gold, regulate dealers, impose disclosure requirements, restrict its movement and, in extreme circumstances, compel surrender; the American experience of 1933–34 demonstrates that physical ownership is certainly not beyond sovereign power. Nonetheless, there is a good case to be made for the idea that possession of an asset itself may acquire a premium of its own over a digital claim.

The importance attached to physical custody is also becoming increasingly apparent among Western central banks. In 2026 the Dutch central bank reduced the share of its gold held in New York from 31 to 18.5 per cent while sharply increasing its London holdings, explicitly citing geopolitical unrest and geographical risk diversification, or, in simpler terms, the need to make its reserves more readily usable during a severe crisis. France went further in 2025, eliminating the remaining 129 tonnes of its gold held in New York and replacing it with equivalent bullion in Europe. The Banque de France describes the latter principally as a technical exercise to replace bars which no longer met its preferred trading standard, and neither institution has suggested that it doubts American custody. But recent events makes the jurisdictional dimension difficult to ignore. The freezing of Russian central-bank reserves demonstrated that foreign reserves remain ultimately subject to the legal authority of the country in which they are held, while the United States itself has historically shown, most dramatically in 1933–34, that legal treatment of gold can radically change in an emergency. The Dutch explanation of greater crisis preparedness is therefore not really separate from the question of confidence, as part of the value of physical gold in a geopolitical crisis lies precisely in knowing where it is and how quickly it can be mobilised without counterparty risk. In other words, it’s worth wondering if they even trust the US to keep custody of their assets.

Physical gold is in an interesting position because attempting to suppress it too aggressively risks strengthening the very monetary significance that governments would presumably wish to deny. Gold no longer has an official role, with the gold standard being scrapped over 50 years ago. A government which suddenly sought to prevent its citizens exchanging sovereign liabilities for physical bullion would therefore face the question: if gold were merely another commodity, why was it sufficiently threatening to require exceptional restrictions?

In 1933, when gold’s monetary status was explicit, restrictions formed part of a wider attempt to alter the dollar’s relationship with it. In a modern fiat system, confiscation of privately held bullion (leaving aside their digital intermediaries such as ETFs) would itself identify gold as a monetary competitor. The measure intended to suppress demand could consequently advertise the reason for holding it. A further difference now versus 1933 is that a lot more bullion is stored in neutral jurisdictions such as Switzerland and Singapore, putting it out of reach of more financially authoritarian governments.

These factors do not make physical bullion immune from government power, of course, but changes the political cost of exercising that power. Financial wealth via custodians and brokers is easy to target; pursuing dispersed private bullion may yield relatively little additional control while requiring a far more overtly coercive intervention. The advantage of physical gold is therefore not that governments cannot control it, but that doing so may require them both to expose the extent of the repression and, paradoxically, to reaffirm gold’s monetary importance.

Gold’s weakness, that it produces no cash flow and finances no productive enterprise by itself, becomes less important when the question is not how to maximise ordinary investment return but what asset can settle a claim without replacing one government’s liability with another’s, or indeed a corporation’s. That does not imply a return to gold coins circulating in shops or banknotes redeemable on demand for a fixed quantity of metal. The more plausible question is whether gold could recover a narrower role that it once performed extremely well; not as everyday money, but as the politically neutral asset sitting beneath a credit system when trust between the issuers of that credit weakens i.e. a means of final settlement — a way for governments to settle any trade or financial deficits without inflating it away.

Nor, indeed, would a renewed role for gold mean restoring the classical gold standard. The modern credit system solved genuine limitations of a rigid specie regime. Commercial banks can create credit elastically, central banks can supply liquidity during crises, and businesses can finance investments whose scale would be impossible if every transaction required prior accumulation of metal. The enormous expansion of credit over the past century contributed to real innovation and economic growth even as it also enabled increasingly large debt cycles. The relevant question, as posited by financial analyst Alasdair Macleod, is therefore whether gold could return underneath this credit structure rather than replacing it; for example, not at 100% M2, but maybe at 20%. Macleod’s insight here is that gold can discipline credit without itself being the everyday medium through which the majority of transactions occur. A future system might continue to use pounds, dollars, euros and bank credit domestically while giving gold a larger role in settling persistent imbalances.

What would prove this wrong? Is the situation salvageable?

Any argument about monetary regime change risks becoming unfalsifiable. If stocks rise, that can be called inflation; if they fall, the crisis has begun; if bond yields rise, that suggests fiscal stress; if they fall, repression. The thesis advanced here should therefore be abandoned if Western governments prove capable of restoring fiscal sustainability while continuing to allow markets to determine sovereign borrowing costs and capital to move freely.

The clearest disconfirmation would be a durable improvement in public finances. Sustained primary surpluses, unexpectedly strong productivity growth or sufficiently rapid expansion of the tax base could stabilise debt without forcing governments to suppress yields. Likewise, if long-term bond yields rise to politically uncomfortable levels and governments nevertheless allow them to remain market-determined, particularly while inflation is above target, the central argument put forward in this article becomes substantially weaker.

The opposite pattern would strengthen it. Repeated intervention whenever sovereign yields become painful, pension funds or banks increasingly directed towards favoured domestic assets, progressively worse treatment of foreign investment, or restrictions on investors escaping negative real sovereign returns. No single policy would prove the case. What would matter is accumulation in one direction. Governments must restore fiscal credibility, preserve positive real returns, and tolerate market-determined borrowing costs without recurrent intervention.

Political implications

A world of scarcer capital, increasingly captive domestic savings and governments competing to secure resources would naturally revive economic nationalism across the political spectrum. The important division would no longer be simply between those who favour or oppose a larger state, but between competing answers to the question of who should bear the cost of maintaining the state when growth can no longer painlessly finance its promises? Left-wing policies presented as national, ‘patriotic’ renewal could equally become vehicles for higher taxation, directed investment, price controls (i.e. a tax on producers) or the transfer of private savings towards politically favoured uses (or indeed politically favoured people, such as their own voters). The language of sovereignty, resilience and national investment does not by itself tell us whether the policy beneath it is productive. Right-wing political movements that concentrate exclusively on ‘culture-war’ issues risk discovering too late that the decisive battles have moved elsewhere. As restrictionist positions on immigration and other social questions become increasingly mainstream, we should expect the Left to appropriate parts of the rhetoric of nationalism for fundamentally different ends, even as the institutional consequences of multiculturalism and the fiscal burden that comes with it become even more deeply entrenched. The conclusion to draw from this is that the fiscal, not social, effects of immigration need to be hammered home much more than they are. Deal with the tangibles before the tangibles deal with you.

In the short-term, however, energy and food shortages are a huge risk. European governments are already preparing their populations for the possibility of prolonged disruption. The EU now explicitly advises households to maintain at least 72 hours of essential supplies (the British government has advised 96 hours), and is expanding strategic stockpiles and civil-military preparedness through, I think unrealistic, prospects of conscription. None of this proves that a wider war with Russia is inevitable, but it does normalise the expectation that rationing and reduced living standards may have to be endured in the name of national security. For now, it is something that European governments are keeping in their back pockets if the worst-case scenario comes to pass.

In other words, it is a potential smokescreen, a veneer of exogeneity to excuse the remarkable incompetence of European governments’ net zero agendas which have left us particularly vulnerable to supply shortages. The continent has spent years allowing refining capacity to decline, increasing its dependence on im ported energy and assuming that external suppliers would remain permanently available. The EU still relies on imports for the majority of its energy needs, while Norway and the United States now account for an outsized share of its gas and oil supply. Europe’s share of global diesel refining has collapsed from 23% to 12% in just a few decades. A future government facing shortages of fuel, energy, or food would therefore have an obvious political temptation to attribute the resulting hardship entirely to war with Russia, or even use it to bring about the capital controls and rationing that only martial law could excuse. Those factors may well be real, but they would not explain why Europe entered the crisis with so little resilience. War can create scarcity, but it can also provide a convenient explanation for vulnerabilities accumulated long before the first shot was fired. Europe’s natural gas storage facilities are currently only 70% full as of late September, much lower than at this stage in previous years. In a harsh winter, we should consider shortages or ‘brownouts’ to be likely.

Conclusion

The point of this article is not to predict a sudden return to 1923, 1929, 1971 or 2008 (although certain parallels can be made with 1971). History rhymes, certainly, but it does not repeat so neatly. Most importantly, losses cannot ultimately be abolished. They can only be recognised and corrected, redistributed or disguised. If governments increasingly choose the latter two, the defining financial event of the coming decade may not be the crash everyone has spent years anticipating, but the birth of a new set of economic circumstances which would follow. Stagflation may merely be its first visible manifestation.

A further danger is that the origins of inflation become increasingly difficult to disentangle as American fiscal dominance increases. If war, energy shortages, disrupted trade and agricultural failures are already raising prices, the inflation caused by subsequent monetary expansion is difficult to gauge, which may cause a large time lag in how households respond. Supply-side inflation and monetary inflation ultimately appear together in the same consumer prices, wages and nominal GDP. Policymakers may therefore find themselves tolerating, or adding to, inflation that can continue to be explained publicly by genuine external shocks. This misdirection would be convenient for, even if unintentional on behalf of, those same policymakers. But those setting policy and those living under it ultimately rely on the same price signals for economic information. As governments seek to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, they may soon find themselves driving in the dark.

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

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At the launch of the Health and Care visa in February 2022, then Home Secretary Priti Patel said: ‘This is our New Plan for Immigration in action, delivering our commitment to support the NHS and the wider health and care sector by making it easier for health professionals to live and work in the UK.’ As is now well known, while initial Home Office modelling expected between 6,000 and 40,000 applications a year, 132,452 care worker visa decisions (not quite the same as applications) were taken in the 12 months to October 2023, and in total 157,940 visas were issued to care workers between 2021 and 2025, and 48,328 people already in the country switched from student visas to social care. As a result of this, the Home Office estimates that 117,000 care workers and 79,000 of their adult dependants will settle between now and 2030.

The visa was conceived as a route to fill vacancies in the health and social care sectors, but what we have discovered is that in the care system, the state created an uncontrolled market. For the first two years of the visa, companies sponsoring care workers were not even required to be registered with the sector’s regulator, the Care Quality Commission, reflecting the government’s total disinterest in controlling the route. That lack of control was everywhere. There was no link between visa issuance and actual vacancies, no demand model and no automatic brake. Sponsors registered and generated certificates of sponsorship, and the Home Office processed those requests. The system was so permissive that only 1.5% of sponsor applications were substantively refused.

The results were predictable. When the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders inspected the system, they found the misuse of a genuine care home’s identity, forged evidence, fake jobs and a sponsor, Efficiency-for-Care that reported four employees, but generated 1,234 Certificates of Sponsorship, of which the Home Office later said 1,014 had been used in visa applications which are ‘referred for cancellation’ (although when we asked the Home Office for comment as to whether these visas had actually been sponsored, they did not respond). The compliance system was not worthy of the name because it had neither the staff nor the data to understand or test the market the state had created: there was only one compliance officer per 1,600 sponsors.

Furthermore, there are around 500 companies which assigned 22,000 visa sponsorship certificates for care workers in 2023 alone which are now dissolved or have entered insolvency procedures. According to the Home Office guidance on the matter, this should result in loss of sponsorship licence and the employees then have 60 days to find a new sponsor. In practice, this did not happen. The Home Office quietly relaxed its guidance on notifying employees that their visas were due for cancellation. As a result, it is unlikely that many — if any — ‘care workers’ have been deported due to their visas no longer being valid.

Many organisations portray these workers as entirely innocent victims of exploitation. While there are undoubtedly cases of this, there are equally numerous documented cases of fraud. It is known that the selling of sponsorships and even outright fake jobs was rife during this period, and it is likely a non-trivial number were knowingly participating in these schemes.

The lack of controls also extended to disappearing sponsors. As of July 2026, 748 companies who had registered to sponsor these visas could not be found on the register. They accounted for 48,874 certificates of sponsorship – 41% of the total. Despite this, 55 of the 75 largest companies are still active on Companies House. This points to another huge weakness in state oversight: we simply don’t know why sponsorship licences end. This must change.

Domiciliary care, in which care is provided in people’s homes, is the least auditable part of the care sector, as the absence of physical care homes makes it very difficult to judge whether the c.115,000 certificates of sponsorship issued were genuine or not.

The visa also drove a significant shift in the care workforce. Non-EU care workers increased by c.300,000, EU-worker numbers stayed flat, and c.105,000 Brits left the care sector. For context, there are around 1.7 million people working as carers. Given the importance of high-quality communication in care, and the strong anecdotal evidence of language barriers between carers and the people they are caring for, this likely represents a meaningful decline in the quality of care, albeit one which is not captured in official data.

Ultimately, 260,000 new people were recruited, with only 185,000 jobs being filled. The scale of recruitment reveals how little the visa route achieved in terms of resolving social care’s underlying retention problem. International recruitment was operating as a replacement system for a high-churn labour market, rather than simply adding workers to an otherwise stable workforce. Social care already had severe vacancy and retention problems, and this visa only perpetuated this system with workers from abroad.

The very design of the visa also served to obscure its harms. Reporting ‘health and care’ workers as a single category means combining clinicians earning an average of £58,000 per year, nurses earning an average of £35,400 per year, and care workers earning merely an average of £23,100 per year. Naturally the fiscal contribution or drain of these groups is markedly different, with the Migration Advisory Committee estimating that the typical care worker will cost British taxpayers £36,000 over their lifetime, with the health workers contributing an average of £168,000 over their lifetimes.

The warning signs were visible well before any changes were made to the route. As we have noted above, Home Office planning had envisaged between 6,000 to 40,000 care worker applications per year. Yet even in just the twelve months to October 2023, 132,452 decisions on care worker applications had been made. Despite an extraordinary and obvious overshoot, there was no cap on visas or any brake applied to the route. Additionally, there was no system for testing whether rising sponsorship reflected genuine expansion, replacement hiring, or churn. When the Home Office eventually tightened the route, applications fell sharply and refusal rates rose. The scale of the boom was not inevitable. Once the state began to exercise control, the route responded quickly. The greatest failure was that meaningful control came nearly two years too late.

When those changes were finally introduced by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the change was rapid. On 7 August 2023, ‘genuineness interviews’ were introduced, and further sponsor-compliance and contract-evidence checks were tightened throughout the autumn. As a result, main-applicant applications collapsed from 47,560 in Q3 2023 to 30,637 in Q4 to 10,238 in Q1 2024. Meanwhile, the refusal rate increased significantly from 5.8% to 13.9% and 24.8% over the same time periods. Subsequent dependant and CQC restrictions were announced on 4th December 2023, and did not take effect until 11th March 2024.

When we spoke to Braverman, she said:

When I became Home Secretary, Rishi Sunak promised me he would do “whatever it takes” to get migration under control. Once in power, however, he set about refusing my every measure to curb the blatant abuse of our visa system, from ending the dependents scam to increasing the salary threshold for entry. Robert Jenrick and I had to fight tooth and nail, and all we got was measly crumbs to try and fob us off, all the while the number of foreign caseworkers skyrocketed. It was our skilled worker genuineness requirement and other measures that managed to reduce the tsunami, however slightly, but when we wanted more stringent measures and tried to put the British people first, our own Conservative cabinet colleagues blocked us. Cambridge Circus Research has shown how the British people were once again deceived by the Conservatives’ great betrayal on migration and how those who would claim credit for stopping the fire were the same people who lit the fuse.’

We also understand that the additional restrictions announced by James Cleverly in December 2023, shortly after he became Home Secretary, were in fact policies which had been developed and advocated for by Braverman, and resisted by Sunak.

Recognising, then, that the care visa route was disastrous — ‘Between July 2022 and December 2024, the government has revoked more than 470 sponsor licences in the care sector to clampdown on abuse and exploitation… more than 39,000 workers have been associated with these sponsors since October 2020’ — uncontrolled — ‘We are unable to provide an answer concerning lost sponsor licences as this information is not centrally held and could only be collected and verified for the purpose of answering this question at disproportionate cost’ — and rife with fraud — ‘We have revoked the licenses of more than 1000 care providers who are now no longer able to sponsor migrant workers’ — and that the costs of allowing this group to settle would be very high, it is critical that the government’s proposed ILR reforms are implemented as soon as possible. While this is often characterised on the pro-migration left of the Labour party as a ‘retrospective’ change of rights, it is actually just a change to the terms on which this cohort might be allowed to settle.

It is also crucial that policymakers learn from the failures of the care visa route and ensure that future work visa routes are properly overseen, capped, and constructed so that there is friction and inefficiency in the process. This is important because the ease of certificate of sponsorship generation undoubtedly reduced the barriers to entry for those seeking to conduct large-scale visa fraud.

This article was written by Charles Talbot and David Shipley. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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In the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anyone, even Carpathian shepherds, their herds and Slavs, could dine beneath the chandeliers of Viennese salons if they had the means and proper decorum. If they were versed, they could waltz with a glass of Tokaji from the renowned viticultural region of Mongolia in hand, while economists downriver recited their perennial grievance against the English with the assurance of men soon to be disproven in all things. In one ear you were privy to analyses of whatever the hell the Saverne Affair was. In the other, a remnant of the decrepit navel-gazers of the Országgyűlés, a drunk explained, with confidence bolted on to his condition, that flight was an ‘American fad’ and would never take off, the bond markets would not have it and that Russia would steamroll their way to the Elbe in a three-day special military operation to smash any Prussian army (who are ‘FINISHED’) in its path.

The salons kept faith with their liturgy and the orchestra played on, even as the monarchy squared its shoulders for yet another reckoning with its eternal adversary, 500 kilometres downstream, because they would not stop throwing their faeces and the corpses of Bosniaks into the Danube, preventing the upstream migration of the Beluga Sturgeon and leaving Vienna and Budapest without any caviar. This is the sort of futility you feel entering Soho House on Greek Street.

Soho House opened its doors in 1995 as an antidote to ‘ossified’ rituals, a retreat for the ‘creatives’ rather than the calcified relics of some earlier epoch. Out went the cigars, the dinner jackets, and the gloomy, smoke-cured backrooms presided over by the gout-riddled alcoholics of the twentieth century whose enthusiasm for the company of women tended to outrun the women’s enthusiasm for theirs, and never seemed to outrun their enthusiasm for little boys. In swept seasonal artichoke, women named Allegra and people who donate to theatre troupes. And yet, whatever Soho House meant to be in 1995, thirty years on it is neither cool nor relevant. Having swollen to a quarter of a million members, it is not remotely private. Like Vienna before it, the House persists in the comfortable delusion that it still hosts the zeitgeist, long after the ‘creatives’ who didn’t quite make it packed their bags and decamped to Berlin, in pursuit of the next big thing.

I read Kara Kennedy’s review of the joint for the New Statesman, and it occurred to me that the club’s definition of ‘creative’ is a rather generous one if a contributor to a centre-left title, lately reinvented as ‘Royal Correspondent’ at The Spectator, could get in. I suppose the pitch she made to Fraser Nelson must have been deemed creative enough to allow her to cross the aisle and sit on the opposing benches.

The confirmation arrived quickly. ‘So, what’s your gig then?’ asked a reasonably attractive, unshod woman of middle age. I told her I wrote for John Merrick’s publication, The Break-Down, dedicated to left-wing thought from the London scene. ‘John Merrick? Like the Elephant Man?’ — I put on a smile. ‘Not quite. Ours is marginally better looking’. And a good deal more afflicted, I added in silence. ‘He also invented thinking’, I quipped.

I shuffled around attempting to discern precisely who would part with £3500 for the privilege of membership. You would picture a clientele of art-world sirens, Sloane Square MILFs, and guys who would take you to the Saatchi Gallery on the first date. The reality is more prosaic: at best, Soho House is populated by Kara Kennedys and those journalists who, when pressed to review the club, prefer to launch into catty tirades in a dialect I call ‘womanese’; babbling about other women they feel inferior to, delivered with forced wit and condescension while revealing nothing whatsoever about the business of the club itself.

But Soho House does have great problems, the first being its scale. With 270,000 members globally, it should probably just call itself a members’ club now, and drop the ‘private’ qualification. The most conspicuous flaw is the absence of a rigorous referral system, which effectively makes it a pay-to-play institution. It is adorned with Magic Americans and their cousins in the diaspora because it is the only club that admits them, perhaps rendering the concept of a private members’ club obsolete. Search for ‘Soho House Pool’ on TikTok, or don’t.

At some point, the management of Soho House did search this, and must have recognised the problem — and thus they began shutting younger people and newer members out of certain houses, especially in the West End, and funnelling them to Greek Street and Shoreditch instead. I tried entering ‘Little House Mayfair’, only to be turned away because the private members’ club was hosting an even more private event. After being redirected to their newest house, ‘Soho House Mews’, on Lancashire Court, the member I accompanied was told she needed to have been a member for 10 years to enter. They let us in anyway because the place was almost entirely empty and we didn’t look like Crystal Palace Academy prospects.

The membership bloat reveals the next biggest problem: there is no filter or criterion for what even constitutes a ‘creative’. Soho House on Greek Street is a perfect microcosm. ‘E-com’ guys in Moncler bin-bag jackets, quants, dozens of what could have been Cobham graduates but were ‘rappers’ and ‘producers’, made it clear what was going on. Have you ever been tailgated on the tube by this type? It’s pretty much the same thing — one signs up, then invites up to three friends with no screening for character or attitudes, and at any time the footfall per member can quadruple. Most members’ clubs will make you prepare a pitch deck just to invite someone once a month for a fee. For every failed ‘nah, it’s not a mixtape, it’s an addition to my story’ rapper the House admits, it must accept three more ‘hanger-ons’ or ‘day ones’ from their posse. There are still the expected household characters, and the gentrification of East London continues to rear its ugly head. ‘Men written by women’, spoken-word poets, and copywriters are all present, but I suppose the brochure was originally aimed at them after all.

The food is of little consequence: mostly gussied-up pub fare, not worth a detour. The service is abysmal, and a full Greek Street is no excuse. At Soho House Mews, with only ten souls present, it took twenty-five minutes for them to produce what they called an Eastern Standard, which is actually an Eastside cocktail they have appropriated for themselves. At £12.50, it is cheap for a Mayfair bar. Still, assuming the average cocktail in the area costs £15, you must consume 1,000 of them annually to justify the £2500 Every House Membership. The Mews redeems itself as just a nice place to be in, if nothing else, because the houses on the continent resemble airport lounges.

Soho House, for all its cachet, has never once turned a profit. I was short on it until they went private last year, in a move that happily helped me recover my losses from the catastrophic Nvidia short. It can also be worse. Other clubs went the opposite way, thinking that excluding men from expensive establishments would make for a viable business model, since The Garrick remained profitable despite not allowing women to be members. There was AllBright: A women-only members’ club, ostensibly dedicated to careers and networking, entered administration last year (again) and shuttered its flagship Mayfair townhouse on Maddox Street after only seven years. Its transatlantic cousin, The Wing, collapsed in 2022 amid financial troubles and, I kid you not, a ‘workplace culture scandal’. Chief, Grace Belgravia, Marguerite, one by one, all fell in the same period. There follows the usual post-mortem retrodiagnoses — “But when we conducted a survey, almost all women said they’d join an all-female members’ club”. The problem with this business model is self-evident, and I wish I could have sat down with the Woke harridans who thought excluding half the population which eats, drinks and spends more (often on the other half) could possibly pay dividends. There is little use for any career-minded woman to network in the space that excludes the very sex it is most advantageous to network with. They could have boasted healthy member numbers, and some did, but it requires women buying their own drinks, and I’m not sure any establishment can bear its patrons swirling the same glass of prosecco around for two hours and no men to fill them up.

Male heterosexuality: midwife of nightlife and good society

Nowhere is the centrality of men’s participation more vividly demonstrated than in the inexorable decline of the nightclub and nightlife as a whole. If you want to see what the war on male heterosexuality looks like on the ground, you go to a nightclub in 2026. Anyone who tells you the nightclub is dead because of energy costs or social media is a charlatan who either doesn’t understand how clubs make money or does and is too dishonest to engage with the reasons they don’t. At its core, almost all nightclubs rely on the same basic business model: women are brought in at little or no cost while men shoulder the costs via entry fees, drinks for themselves and the girls they’re chirpsing or at the top end via tables, booths and bottles. As an aside, it is telling that some fairly well-known organisers of literary events in London now engage in the same practices.

Historically, the nightclub functioned as a theatre for courtship, however crude and transactional. Two decades ago, a ‘couple tequilas for the birds’ typically sufficed, or if you were middle-aged, married and quite desperate, an emergency ‘Cuba Libre’ on demand with no guarantee of any affection. This arrangement endured until the Obama era, when the tacit social contract was unceremoniously discarded by Woke and the clubs became the first front line in an escalating campaign on what had previously passed for unremarkable heterosexual behaviour.

The opening salvo was the feminist critique that denied drunk women their agency or capacity for consent if they were drunk. For a time, this debate alone was enough to deter the more feeble-minded from clubbing altogether. Others, in search of moral equilibrium or plausible deniability, adopted the tactic of mutual inebriation by getting as drunk as possible to stave off the accusations of exploitation — ‘look officer, she had my head between her thighs in the back of the cab and wouldn’t let go- I’m also a victim here’ must have worked for someone. Anyway, suggesting women aren’t liable for choices they make because alcohol compromises their faculties and reasoning abilities means the franchise must immediately be subject to IQ testing: a 130 IQ woman after a night out still has better reasoning abilities than, say, a 90 IQ one, and if the former is stripped of her agency, so must the latter.

This is why no right-winger should concern themselves with the ‘Clean-up Crew’, the latest fixation by provincial ‘Anglo posters’ serving as a proxy for Americans projecting their rape fantasies onto Europe. A Clean-up Crew is not just hordes of predatory foreign men loitering outside clubs wanting to rape drunk women in an alleyway — this is a feature anywhere there are predatory foreign men present. The Clean-up Crew is largely the practice of moneyed-up black people (or adjacent ethnicities) often on the ‘two-man’, with nice cars parked outside the club, chatting up girls in the smoking area and, during closure, offering balloons, drugs and alcohol at the “AP” (after party), and usually there is one. This is far cheaper than buying a table, and less taxing than having to go and drop game in a club. The girls, almost always their own cohort (though it is increasingly difficult to parse out ethnicities in London these days), know exactly what the men want and go along to extract the gifts they’re bearing. This is not predatory; in fact, the guys will be partaking in the substances. If you do believe it is, you are either a slave to woke or must mandate that men become inebriated before ever speaking to a woman — which I imagine would turn out a lot worse for the women anyway.

After the first barrage on nightlife came the spiking hysteria. The idea of a roofie being slipped into vodka lemonades and blaming the lemonade for the fizz brought to life a real issue, until the narrative spiralled into frenzy over men allegedly sedating women with needles on crowded dancefloors. When slop accounts started posting this, accusing Maghrebi’s in Paris of injecting sedatives into packed crowds at La Fête de la musique, even the most ardent chuds of a National Socialist persuasion were quick to dismiss it. The credibility of spiking claims quickly unravelled thanks to women anyway when it turned out ‘yer bird’ was not spiked but had downed seven tequila shots in a row once the police reviewed the CCTV footage. If you are a predator, it seems you can safely leave the Rohypnol at home.

The ramifications of the MeToo consensus on corporate nightlife are no less pronounced. The boozy, long haul piss ups with your managers that started at 1pm and ended up in a club are long gone. Instead, you must settle for the sterile, eventified ‘Thirsty Thursdays’, where at the behest of women, you find yourself penned up in Leadenhall Market or Broadgate Circle like a broiler chicken because they want the ‘where to find finance bros’ TikTok and cocaine. A less judicious type could make a joke about pair bonding to a colleague who complained about being pumped and dumped, and find themself in a meeting being tried by some hag for ‘bullying’.

Now, women are just as likely to level accusations of sexual assault at the man they cheated on their boyfriend with after bawling their eyes out in the bathroom. Perhaps worse, some melt will accuse the man on her behalf for prying her from his hands. Then there are bouncers who use their remit, which they don’t understand the limits of, to behave like an Arkan Tiger while enforcing Woke. The bouncer, or ‘door supervisor’ in the parlance of the Security Industry Authority, is a person whose legal powers are, in practice, comically limited. The SIA licence is six days of training, four multiple-choice exams, a £184 fee, and now you have the de facto privilege of being the one to wield the state’s monopoly on violence in the private sphere. It, however, confers no special authority whatsoever beyond that of an ordinary citizen — no powers to arrest, search beyond your bags and pockets, or to seize your ID. They cannot detain you unless they are executing a citizen’s arrest, a power available to any member of the public, including the very drunk being manhandled out the door. What they can do is use ‘reasonable and necessary’ force, the same standard applied to you or me.

If you are shoved down a flight of slippery, Jagerbomb-lacquered staircases, get one-banged by Dani Williams or dragged out by the collar and deposited face-first on the pavement, often to the surprise of these ginger meatheads — the force is actually unreasonable and unnecessary. Legal action is entirely possible even if the patron was cunted, aggressive, or genuinely difficult. The law does not grant them licence to batter people simply because they are annoying. In practice, none of this is enforced. Bouncers, goaded by female complainants whose side tits they’re trying to grab when they hug them goodbye, enforce ‘Woke’ according to their own moral priors, much the same way the police officers ‘mate mate mate’ you and then kick your teeth in for wearing football jerseys numbered 97 (a retired number by law, apparently) or taking a photo in front of a burning police van.

Couple that with universal reluctance of the police themselves to pursue assault and property damage complaints against door staff, the difficulty of obtaining CCTV footage before it is wiped by staff, the social consensus that anyone ejected from a nightclub at 2am probably had it coming, and the victim themselves too drunk to follow through with charges. The result is a class of men (and it is almost always men, though the 2003 Licensing Act did introduce provisions encouraging female door staff) who have absorbed delusions of authority wildly in excess of anything the law grants them. They have appointed themselves judge, jury, and occasionally executioner of the night out, crafting job perks that include decking gangly students when their fragile masculinity is questioned, and getting touchy-feely with half-naked fresher girls — ‘I haven’t seen you in a while’ - ‘careful with this one, she’s naughty’.

There are those who reach for even lazier arguments than drink prices and vague mutterings about ‘costs’ to explain the death of the nightclub and why Gen Z do not drink. This is the preserve of SPADs with masochist complexes such that they think they have some God-given right to booze at places like The George and then complain about £8 pints. Drink prices do not constitute an argument when women spend £60 on ‘bottomless brunches’ to drink mimosas for two hours on their ‘pres’, given that orange juice drowns out the taste of alcohol in any drink, allowing bars to water down the ‘champagne’ content (which rushes to your head first). This is the kind of stunt, in principle, they pull on most Greek islands, scooping up unattended, half-finished drinks from tables and pouring them into a ‘punch bowl’—Káni éxi evró, fíle mou.

Equally misplaced is the social media argument: that Gen Z do not drink because they’re addicted to their gadgets. Too much doom-scrolling and too much gaming. ‘Someone should really just tell them to ‘go talk to her, bro’’. The arguments made by America’s housewives a decade ago to explain why Kyle punched a hole through the cardboard walls have now been repackaged by every bad-faith actor you can think of, from ‘macho’ Tateists, Miriam Cates, the fruity Al Fresco cabal who want to groom young boys into going outside to pay £8 pints at ‘The George’. It is a diagnosis shorn of any contact with reality. The people clocking 3,000 hours on Hearts of Iron 4 would have been staging historical re-enactments of Stalingrad in a field somewhere thirty years ago. They have never been an aberration. Excessive screen time contributing to youth loneliness serves as the same casus belli as pornography did for censoring social media and eroding online anonymity in this country. It’s a war on chuds, gamers, and most of all, chud gamers. Nobody ever bothers to explain the precise mechanism by which Instagram prevented a twenty-year-old from going to the pub or a club on a Friday night. I’d argue social media did the opposite by furnishing the lonely with the means of finding each other, which is considerably more than the nightclub ever managed.

The end of the nightclub

What actually ails Gen Z is Woke, and a particular strain of Wokeness I call ‘normie puritanism’: performatively abstaining from certain vices, particularly those easy to avoid if you are a loser. You have women on TikTok tallying up the number of months they’ve been celibate and the trend of ethnic minorities who aren’t Muslim suddenly deciding ‘you can’t put pork in your body, it’s dirty’ with no literature from the last 1400 years to back it up and then presuming to eat battery-farmed chicken. The rationale for Gen Z going teetotal is much more clear-cut. They have absorbed an ambient sludge of yer bird’s Instagram statistics and claims nobody has bothered to verify, without questioning anything. The teetotal Zoomer sincerely believes men beat their wives in drunken stupor every time England play. He believes alcohol causes violence, alcohol causes misogyny, alcohol is what makes men dangerous and that the pub is a vector of patriarchal harm and the right-wing politics of the gammon, who really just intimidates him. The Zoomer’s sobriety is his contribution to the resistance against the men he resents, in support of women, even if cuffed to the metaphysical cuck chair.

The same cultural vacuum that gutted the British nightclub has also trashed the music and style inside. Chart music 20 years ago sustained dance floors. By 2010, the well had run dry. British chart music had given us nothing to replace it; we will remember the 2010s for the tyrannical reign of Jess Glynne, Ed Sheeran and the massive corpus of boom-clap-hey-ho mind rape imposed on us by beige chino-wearing millennials and hairdressers who’d call into Capital FM and ask to queue Ella Henderson.

Where music went, fashion followed suit (or didn’t). The sartorial contract for men in nightclubs used to be unambiguous: you wore shirts, ideally with a collar, and shoes that were not trainers. The bouncer at the door actually did his job to enforce what ought to be a civilisational standard. This was a standard that pretty much collapsed everywhere that wasn’t a high-end club in Central London after 2008, but even they gave up on dress codes by 2019. The conventional explanations here are once again limited. ‘People got lazy and got scruffy and nightclubs had to accommodate by relaxing dress codes to increase footfall’ — this is true only for clubs in small provincial towns. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to go to a nightclub and then choosing not to because the dress code stipulates that you can’t wear trainers. Nightclubs in suburban areas and smaller towns probably had to drop dress codes because their footfall relies on guys who go to the pub dressed for the football and then choose to go clubbing. Perhaps dress codes all died when the last metrosexual threw himself off the Lehman Brothers building in 2008, but this merits an entirely separate article.

The elephant in the room is obviously immigration. You will be surprised at how little literature there is explicitly reckoning with the collapse of pubs, bars and clubs in areas now predominantly occupied by Muslims, however intuitive, I’ll address the nature of the problem. Muslims do not drink, and neither do Indians drink in sufficient quantities that could even keep a pub open. Nor are their cultures particularly favourable to ‘gender mixing’ or going out wrapped in bandages.

Clubs have an exceptionally fragile economic threshold because, unlike a pub or a restaurant, a nightclub requires high spatial density to generate its core product of a high-energy atmosphere and the collective pooling of pheromones. If a venue falls even below 15% of its target capacity because 15% of the youth in the club’s patron basin are now teetotal and spend their nights wrapping their Audis around lampposts, it causes a massive cascade effect. Once women notice less tightly packed dance floors, their intuition tells them ‘it isn’t a vibe’, and they will be the first to leave, perhaps to never come back. Word spreads, and other women will now frequent the club less. Female attendance is the core anchor for nightclub marketing, and they drive the decision-making process in mixed-sex groups regarding which venues to visit.

The men who spend £500 on a table and double that on bottles notice first, because they are spending all that for women and any perceivable drop in visual density means they’ll take their money elsewhere, which nightclubs rely on as their most profitable revenue stream, beginning the financial death spiral. Empty VIP sections result in fewer women looking to table-hop and nab drinks for free. With the hype and the women gone, there is no more incentive for the regular male patron who queues, pays for the ticket and pays for drinks for himself and the women he wants to chirpse. Eventually you’re left with an aggressive core of men and a minority of predictably problematic women that makes the problem terminal, which has been the trajectory of commuter towns in outer London and home county commuter towns for the last 20 years as more people arrive from abroad and from inner London.

Twenty years ago, the triangular stretch from Romford to Harold Wood and down to Hornchurch had perhaps the most flourishing club scene outside central London in the country, and all it took was for the white British population to recede from 90% to 70% in twenty years for it all to collapse. To blame the Elizabeth Line for gutting these places would be wrong, because National Rail already served them towards Liverpool Street. From what I can see, the primary purpose the Elizabeth Line served here was to connect South Asians in zones 2-4 to their cousins in the west.

What were their commercial third spaces, outside the confines of familial insularity, supposed to be, except for foreplay in public libraries? Fortunately, South Asians are distant enough in taste that Brits aren’t about to give up drinking and meet them halfway by ditching the bar and queueing for chicken and rice boxes from Pepe’s Whitechapel; there are enough youth subcultures here to immerse yourself in. In Germany, however, having started from zero a few times now, they have met the Turk halfway and become Bosnian in taste because cafe culture is certainly a feature: I saw Germans sitting outside fraternising with Turks over some coffee on a Sunday night, hijabis and what must have been a Polish girl by the size of the cross on her neck gossiping outside over cake. Perhaps because the Turk is still European enough in spirit and history and because they have a native cafe and patisserie culture, with tasteful Ottoman interiors and delicacies straight out of the Topkapı Palace kitchens, the German might find this amenable, which is not to be compared to the purple leather benches and syrup with a side of waffles being served by a ‘skilled visa’.

Perhaps worse are the minorities who do drink, and the elephant in the room is also the beast itself. It was when I saw Revolution, an enemy of the Pimlico Journal, organising ‘Indian nights’ on a Friday in October in a town with multiple universities that I began to grasp the scale of the issue. The cascade effect is still every bit as salient — if 20% of the queue for a student club is now Indians donning Brazil jerseys and running trainers, and not donning livers adapted for alcohol consumption, then girls will be put off for reasons you can just make up and probably be right anyway. In 2026 you will find Indian nights on Fridays at any given university town, which is either a segregation mechanism, or the kiss of death. Chinese internationals have been around for a while, but they are the only people who buy sections and bottles in student clubs because they don’t have a rave culture and remain fairly invisible. East Asians decked out in designer clothes sitting in the corner staring suspiciously, I feel, add a bit of character and authenticity if you pretend they’re Yakuza. Bharat patriots getting tanked up on VKs and scrapping over women they’ve just met (they are the only people who do this) do not add atmosphere; they add more bouncers, and migrant populations and their descendants create the need for bouncers from their own cohorts.

Drinking establishments in the first half of the 20th century only ever needed one bouncer, usually outsourced to boxers and veterans. The explosion of modern nightlife, discotheques, and large music venues in the late 1960s and 1970s to accommodate rock bands, cult followings and mosh pit crowd densities transformed the role into a massive commercial industry. Unregulated at the time, it fell to Maltese and Cypriot mafias pressing venue owners into hiring them for security, informing the owners their venue was in a ‘rough area’ and needed protection from troublemakers, and being the troublemakers themselves; they became the protection rackets that led to turf wars over doors.

Immigration from Eastern Europe created new demand for doormen from the same demographic pool specifically to deal with patrons of their own background. In the early 2000’s, perhaps every venue in north and east London had an Albanian bouncer specifically to reason and deal with his rowdy compatriots. It was the entirely predictable outcome of heathens who’d migrated from the Bronze Age straight to Britain, skipping the axial revolution. When you don’t turn the other cheek, when your native drinking culture is spirits, and you chug cocktails because they are “just juice bro”, having never had them before, then violence became routine. On the flip side, they had no inhibitions about enforcing club policy when it came to throttling those who weren’t their own as well. No sooner had Albanians mellowed out and learned about ‘the commons’ than other Eastern Europeans moved to Britain and recreated the same phenomenon, from drinking cultures where spirits and hand-wash fail a blind taste test.

Unlike Albanians, Poles are Christians who believe in ‘turning the other cheek’ and are in fact so Christian they started turning other people’s cheeks with their fists and apparently also baseball bats, which probably led to the closure of Madame Soho in 2017. The fridge-shaped Pole at the door has since been a recognisable fixture in every venue entrance in Britain. A drunken punch-up, a handshake, and going again the next week is a gentleman’s sport. The violence wasn’t unique to them, nor was it uniquely bad for the time. A punch-up is not, in the end, the same as bringing knives to block parties and Arsenal parades to settle ‘beef’.

In the 80s and 90s, London saw the rise of localised community firms within specific boroughs along explicitly racial lines. Venues playing black music genres hired reputable black firms, often the local gang, to manage the violence, crowd control and ensure the local gang itself wasn’t smashing windows and mugging drunk patrons. This didn’t mitigate the violence, of course, and in 2001 the Private Security Industry Act was passed to do away with the unregulated bouncer firms. This didn’t stop the Metropolitan Police from introducing Form 696 to assess the risk of violent criminality following a spate of shootings inside nightclubs by that same demographic.

The original form was explicitly targeted at black venues and events: it would ask managers for attendees’ ethnicity and the kind of music to be played. If the answers were ‘black’ to both, the Met, on top of their own focused police presence, would force venue managers to hire black bouncers or face having their alcohol licenses revoked. After backlash in 2008, the wording was changed to ask if there were ‘DJ’s or MC’s performing to a recorded backing track’, which famously led to high-profile artists like Giggs and P Money having their performances cancelled. To understand how bad the violence was, and could have been otherwise, the Met still deemed racial profiling necessary in this avenue against the backdrop of the Macpherson Report and the acceptance of institutional racism.

In 2017, the form was scrapped by Sadiq Khan, and the violence that prompted explicit racial profiling by the Met became an issue again immediately. Since 2017, Ricco Lounge (Kensington), Toro Gordo (Kensington), Concept Club (Mayfair), Pier One (Canning Town), Opium Nightclub (Soho), Cargo (Shoreditch), Circa Loca (Hounslow), The Socialite Bar (Muswell Hill), E10 Club (Leyton), Club 701 (Battersea), Pacha (Victoria), Studio 338 (Greenwich) and a slew of others have had to close or lose their licenses due to black violence, almost always involving arms, both inside and outside the club with many clubs actively hiding CCTV evidence to cover their own negligence. Oval Space in Bethnal Green had its premises license revoked when a gang member known as Chris Kaba smuggled in a handgun and opened fire inside a nightclub. For the same reason clubs have had to close, it is now also impossible to get a full premises license anyway, whether you’re in Lutfur Rahman’s Islamic Caliphate of Tower Hamlets or because the police won’t, or can’t, effectively police nightlife in London.

The omnipresence of Gambian bouncers manning the doors of even the most provincial Wetherspoons is to deal with this demographic and for establishments to avoid allegations of racism. It is why every single one of their events requires pre-booked tickets to filter out the trouble and the bad actors, and why clubs have to have airport-grade security procedures that have probably doubled queuing times. Eadn St Paul’s, the premier ‘lounge’ aimed at these people, has what you’d think was a PMC providing security for which you’d need Otto Skorzeny leading a raid to get in.

Clubbing is dead, and nightlife is the most ethnically segregated it has ever been. There is no multiracial youth listening to jungle and garage in a basement; there is no grime scene (not that its absence is worth ruing). There is no ‘Black British music’ scene that isn’t just a peripheral extension of the worldwide black music scene, a deal sealed by continuous migration from Africa. Aaron Bastani is not listening to Afro-Beats, Afro-Swing, Bashment, or Dancehall or going to their events. Aaron Bastani thinks Amapiano is ‘a nod to the jazz of the Windrush shebeens’. Aaron Bastani hasn’t been invited anywhere since he tried playing Stormzy when he was passed the aux.

Fortunately, the warehouse EDM rave and festivals will remain all-white oases - the tents, the mud, the MDMA and vodka in a resealed Evian bottle is too great a cultural and physiological gap for others to bridge. It retains the egalitarianism totally absent in London clubs, bar the Southwest yuppie belt, which can have a more even gender ratio because women actually pay for their own drinks. In the stretch from Lambeth, through Elephant & Castle, Southwark, circling to Shoreditch, the only way for clubs to compensate for ethnic women who think they should never have to pay for their own drinks is to then charge men extortionate entrance fees — Cargo in Shoreditch was charging £50 entry in 2019.

Higher-end clubs function like prostitution rings: table and bottle culture is not new nor is it foreign, but there are now dedicated apps for sleazy club promoters to scout girls for their guest lists with the condition that they remain sat at a table with Bedouins or Russians scoffing down chicken wings, and failure to adhere (they don’t even know themselves) will actually see them get kicked out by staff and blacklisted. Even that crowd is a dwindling one, and at least it meant they were parking their millions in London: the Miamification of clubbing, however, prompted by the ascension of hip-hop, now sees clubs like Tape London and Cirque De La Soir having to abdicate on their smart dress codes to accommodate drug dealers and the ‘as a man why are you not paying for my drinks?’ set, with neither actually dancing for fear of being asked ‘why you beggin’ it?’ and it is coming for a lot of people’s favourite spots.

I remember Scandal being the white man’s refuge, which also had the novel idea of keeping its hip hop nights from Monday to Thursday and its house nights from then on. White man stomping grounds like Blue Bird are now home to all white suits and crocodile leather shoes and what I think were Irish accents when I swung by for the first time in four years back in June, and I am not keen to find out what’s happened to Embargo — all roads seem to lead to cattle-pens like The Pear Tree and Infernos.

The new synthesis from this is thus the party restaurant, multi-floored establishments with live music, dining, separate bars and cocktail lounges shorn of the nightclub’s dodgiest elements. The Greeks did this first with their Bouzoukia (Turkish word meaning ‘broken’ as slang for the retuned lute; Smyrniotes apparently didn’t have a word for it in Greek when they landed in 1923) tradition of smashing plates on the floor, and paying to throw flowers at a live singer, and were the first to introduce the idea that you could eat and party at the same time. Elysee is still a good shout even today, especially with plate smashing apparently banned in Greece today on health and safety grounds. Turkish Cypriots arrived with the same tradition, adding cross-dressing belly dancers and other oriental intrigues to the growing Ottoman repertoire.

Albanians, Bosniaks, Bulgarians and Romanians all arrived but did away with the sotadism and realised you could just throw money rather than flowers directly at the singers; have belly dancers who are in fact women, and thus North London is full of these party restaurant lounges, sometimes nation-specific or homogenised to give you horrors such as ‘Balkan nights’. With cranial dimensions and Brachycephalic indices exclusive to those parts of the world, this is exactly what a janissary barracks must have looked like, with other novelties like emancipated Roma Gypsies who you would otherwise never see in public. You can imagine what goes on in joints named ‘PSG lounge’. Gaudy and foreign perhaps, but they don’t occupy prime real estate, and this is actually their culture, and it’s fun to LARP.

The worst are the overpriced chick restaurants in central London — Bagatelle, INCA, Piranha — with one-dimensional menus designed not with dining in mind, but bottle service beginning at 11pm and harlots dancing on people’s tables. London gets no reprieve from the Instagram scroungers and the Lebanese apostates of St Tropez described here before, but I’ve since thought about the moral implications. Imagine you’re a Palestinian kid who’s lost their home and most of their family only to see the monied Zagrosian diaspora doing the Dabka barefoot on tables, waving Hezbollah flags and screaming the lyrics to Boshret Kheir at the Maramia Cafe, using your plight to incense themselves. Lastly, and almost as bad as getting blown up by F35’s, is yer bird suddenly deciding she’s into ‘jazz nights’ and starts sending you TikToks of ‘The MAINE’, a gaudy new spot for the canaille who imagine themselves above the rest of us because they listen to the most sanitised genre of music of the 20th century, usually just pop songs but with a slightly exuberant, sweaty (no kidney’s?) fruit doing a jazz cover.

I have no policy recommendation, no bright vision for the future, nor words of hope because I’m not sure any of us really care about reviving it as an institution. You will be bringing your own vinyl to the bar, you will queue at this same bar and watch staff scramble around fixing drinks in the minute between Guinness pours, and you will watch them break glasses and hear Ash Sarkar let out a real patriotic “WHEYYY” all because Fenian superstitions take precedence over bottom lines and service. You will be sat outside thanks to the Al Fresco cabal only to be told you can’t smoke. You will be invited to London’s latest rooftop bar, situated on top of a two-floor building, not a skyscraper, so you don’t have a view of anything except antennas and the skyscrapers with actual views. You can’t look up and see the stars because my cloud-zapping white paper hasn’t been implemented yet, and you wouldn’t get to in the summer either because it’s light until 11pm and you’re shuffled back inside by then because the council demands it. Obviously, you can’t smoke. You will pay to run away and join a members club only to find the very same people you ran away from, or they’ve been forced to compromise on their famously stubborn rules of fraternity by doing something ridiculous like admitting women. You will be packed off to New Moon and The Lamb. You will listen to her set and watch her have a sort of mid-youth crisis where she decides she’s good at making house music.

We still have the festivals and the raves immune to demographic overhaul because centuries of selection pressures are required to filter out those who couldn’t develop a ‘constitution’ for the intoxication required for a multi-day bender. I’m not sure it will ever match Creamfields in 2019, where pyrotechnics caused four million pounds worth of damage after one Swedish House Mafia beat drop and probably gave thousands third-degree burns to their faces and they couldn’t tell because they were that cunted. You had to be there. I myself will be LARPing, most likely at a shisha bar, with female belly dancers, or, one would hope, an ethnically ambiguous harem, as did Ali Pasha of Yanina, who made it cool.

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

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‘I am the house now.’

Scott Bessent, September 2026

In 1966, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson wittily summarised the uneven credit given to prophets of doom when he congratulated Wall Street bears on predicting ‘nine out of the last five recessions’. Predictions of an imminent financial crash are usually wrong when made, but will always be vindicated in time. This article should not be understood simply as another contribution to that tradition. Forecasting the timing of the next downturn is not the intention. Instead, the interesting question is what that downturn might look like when it comes — how it will differ from past experiences, and how governments across the West might be expected to respond.

True, American equities are undoubtedly expensive by historical standards. The total value of listed US equities amounted to roughly 42% of GDP in 1975 and 153% at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999; today, it stands at approximately 236%. Some of this rise reflects perfectly legitimate changes in the economy. American-listed companies earn a much greater proportion of their revenues overseas, intangible capital has become more important, and expectations of corporate profitability have changed — all while capital markets have proved extraordinarily effective at financing innovation. Market capitalisation is also a stock of claims on future earnings whereas GDP is a single year’s production, so there is no immutable ratio at which equities become ‘too expensive’. Nonetheless, the sheer quantity of financial claims relative to current production means that when expectations change, a very large amount of wealth may well be repriced very quickly.

This is a normal part of any business cycle and should not be regarded as an existential threat per se. An excessively valued sector falls, investors reassess prospective returns and capital is reallocated towards more productive uses. Historically, the financial system has also contained a powerful stabilising mechanism when this happens. Capital leaving equities tends to move towards safer government bonds at precisely the moment central banks are cutting interest rates. Bond prices rise and yields fall. Governments are consequently able to borrow more cheaply just as recession increases their financing requirements; tax receipts decline, unemployment and welfare expenditure rise, and governments may borrow more to support household incomes or stimulate the economy. The private-sector contraction therefore creates demand for the sovereign liabilities used to cushion it: the so-called ‘rush to safety’.

In our current situation, however, this comfortable dynamic faces uncomfortable headwinds. The central problem is that the sovereign will enter the next correction in an extraordinary condition, very different from that in which it entered the last great financial crisis, and indeed almost any comparable peacetime economic challenge of the modern era. US net federal debt held by the public amounted to only 26% of GDP in 1971; 35% in 2006; and roughly 40% at the end of 2008. In 2026 it is expected to reach 101%. Interest rates, and with them debt servicing costs, have increased dramatically. Federal interest outlays amounted to roughly 1.6% of GDP in 2006 and 1.7% in 2008; the Congressional Budget Office now expects net interest costs of about $1tn this year, or 3.3% of GDP, figures which will continue to rise as bonds reach maturity. The federal government is already expected to run a deficit of approximately $1.9tn, or 5.8% of GDP in 2026, and this is before the additional fiscal deterioration that would accompany a serious recession.

There is, however, a second difference which is at least as important as the debt itself: inflation. The stabilising mechanism described above works best when recession weakens demand and therefore reduces inflationary pressure, allowing investors to accept lower nominal yields on government debt. That was broadly the environment confronting policymakers after 2008. But the market-clearing yield on government bonds reflects expected inflation, the required real return investors, and a premium for fiscal and duration risks. If expected inflation remains at 5, 6, or 7% over the relevant investment horizon, a 5% Treasury yield implies a zero or negative expected real return. This does not necessarily prevent Treasuries from acting as a safe haven, especially if other assets offer worse prospects. Persistent inflation can, however, constrain monetary easing and limit the fall in bond yields that would otherwise help cushion a sharp downturn. As such, bonds may prove a less reliable safe haven than they were in the years after 2008.

The geopolitical environment makes that possibility harder to dismiss because the current supply shock is considerably broader than crude oil alone. Disruption in the Persian Gulf and attacks on Russian refining infrastructure have limited supplies of diesel, jet fuel and other middle distillates even as global oil demand weakens, suggesting that the problem increasingly lies in physical refining and distribution capacity rather than overheating demand. Gulf sulphur exports have also been severely disrupted, pushing delivered Asian prices above $1,000 a tonne and threatening to feed eventually into phosphate fertiliser and agricultural costs. Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports and infrastructure have meanwhile reduced Black Sea grain exports and forced more cargo onto lower capacity and more expensive alternative routes.

A shortage of industrial inputs exists at the same time. Copper prices are at record highs as tariffs, mine and smelter disruptions, and higher electricity costs driven by the data centre buildout alongside generally growing pressure on the grid push up input prices and constrain supply. Meanwhile, silver is entering another structural deficit amid continued demand from solar generation, electronics and AI-related infrastructure. None of these pressures is individually sufficient to guarantee persistent inflation, but together they create a much broader set of bottlenecks across transport, agriculture, fertiliser and industrial production than existed going into either 2008 or 2020.

There are already tentative signs of that pressure further up the price chain. US consumer-price inflation was 3.4% in July, but producer prices were 4.7% higher than a year earlier, suggesting that the inflationary pressure facing businesses is currently greater than that visible in the headline CPI. Meanwhile, the ten-year Treasury yield has already breached 5% (a high level by post-2008 standards). If expected inflation were to return to more than 5% during the next crisis, today’s yield would imply a negative expected real return before any compensation for duration or fiscal risk. If investors instead demanded even a modest positive real return of 1 or 2%, alongside average expected inflation of 5-6%, the arithmetic would point towards nominal yields of perhaps 6–8% before allowing for an additional fiscal risk premium (actual outcomes will depend on a range of factors; this is not a prediction). The market-clearing yield required to compensate private capital could move materially above the yield that a government carrying debt of over 100% of GDP can comfortably allow to persist. Financial repression begins to become conceivable precisely when the demands of bond investors and the necessities of the sovereign cease to coincide.

This changes the significance of the next stock-market correction. In 2008, falling private demand and collapsing asset prices occurred against a sovereign balance sheet with enormous room to expand and an overwhelmingly disinflationary economic shock. The government could borrow heavily, the Federal Reserve could cut rates, and the resulting flight towards Treasuries reinforced the fall in government borrowing costs. The same sequence may begin during the next crisis. Treasuries remain among the deepest and most liquid assets in existence, and an initial flight to safety would probably still support them, but it can no longer be assumed that this dynamic will continue indefinitely. A recession would enlarge deficits and entitlement expenditure from an already historically weak fiscal starting point. If inflation simultaneously remains high, private investors may demand substantially higher nominal yields than governments became accustomed to providing during either 2008 or 2020.

That is where the primary danger lies. The market may require a yield high enough to compensate the private holder for inflation and fiscal risk at precisely the moment the sovereign cannot comfortably afford to pay it. Yet if policymakers prevent yields from rising to the level required to clear the market voluntarily, they have not eliminated that required return. They have merely created an incentive for private capital to leave government debt for foreign assets, commodities, property, gold or anything else expected to preserve purchasing power more effectively. The monetary danger examined later in this article begins when there is no politically tolerable yield at which both the government’s financing needs and the private investor’s required real return can comfortably be satisfied.

One plausible macroeconomic consequence of such a divergence is stagflation, in which both inflation and weak growth coexist. Persistent supply shortages and increasingly expensive capital would weigh on real growth, while the fiscal and monetary response required to prevent financial liquidation would make it difficult to extinguish inflation completely. This is the central problem examined in this article.

It should be noted that the US has seen similar levels of public debt once before — immediately after the Second World War, when federal debt held by the public peaked at approximately 106% of GDP in 1946. Yet this burden was borne by a state headed for a period of enormous economic growth, supported by rapid adoption of new technologies and a population boom the likes of which have never been seen since. Today, ageing populations, mature welfare states, large deficits, and lower baseline human capital mean that the same problem is more difficult to overcome. Nor is this exclusively an American problem. At the same time as the United States government demands the fiscal support of large pools of private savings, so too do the governments of Britain, Europe, Japan, and many other countries. The historically familiar response to financial repression in one country has been the flight of capital across its borders; that becomes much harder when several major sovereigns are attempting simultaneously to preserve domestic financing and prevent borrowing costs from rising too far. The technological nature of modern finance makes the situation more unstable still. Capital can now move out of domestic bonds and currencies almost instantaneously, yet most private wealth is simultaneously concentrated inside banks, pension funds, brokers, custodians and other regulated institutions. The same digitalisation that makes capital flight faster also makes the direction of savings easier for governments to influence, potentially leading to unprecedented levels of financial repression via bond buybacks, QE, and capital controls.

That is why the next crisis may differ fundamentally from the familiar stories about an imminent 1929 or another 2008. The interesting question is not whether equities will eventually correct; they will, as markets always do. Rather, it is what happens after they correct if the asset that would normally absorb the flight from risk is itself the liability of an increasingly stressed debtor, while inflation prevents that asset from offering the very low nominal yields that characterised previous crises. If governments cannot tolerate the sovereign yields that free capital markets would otherwise produce, they will have to influence either the price of their debt or the ability of savers to allocate capital elsewhere. At that point an ordinary business-cycle correction begins to carry consequences for the monetary system itself.

The sections that follow explain why the conditions that made the post-2008 monetary regime possible are weakening, why war and deglobalisation make the inflationary environment less benign, why the United States cannot simply repeat the Japanese experience, and why the interaction between sovereign debt, inflation, mobile capital and increasingly administrable financial wealth raises the possibility of a form of financial repression unlike anything Western investors have ever experienced.

Why the post-2008 regime worked

If the scale of monetary intervention since 2008 seems incompatible with the relatively modest inflation that followed for much of the next decade, the explanation is not simply that quantitative easing was harmless. It is that monetary expansion took place inside an unusually favourable international system. That system consisted of Japan’s enormous pool of savings and exceptionally low interest rates, China’s role as both a producer of cheap goods and a supplier of surplus capital, and the broader globalisation of production, which allowed Western demand to be met by an increasingly international supply base. Together, these conditions enabled low financing costs and an expanding supply of manufactured goods, while weak demand and private-sector deleveraging limited price pressures despite this monetary easing.

For most of the period following the collapse of its late-1980s asset bubble, Japan combined extremely low interest rates with weak domestic demand, persistent private saving and recurrent deflationary pressure. The Bank of Japan eventually pushed policy rates effectively to zero, followed by quantitative easing and later negative rates and yield-curve control. One might have expected such monetary accommodation, particularly alongside a public debt burden that eventually exceeded twice GDP, to produce sustained inflation. It did not. Part of the explanation lies in the Japanese private sector. The bursting of the property and equity bubbles had left businesses and households less interested in borrowing aggressively and more concerned with saving to repair their balance sheets.

In addition, Japan’s excess capital did not have to remain inside Japan. For decades, Japanese institutions have accumulated foreign assets on an extraordinary scale. Japan entered 2026 with a net foreign asset position of around $3.7 trillion, and its current-account surplus reached 4.8% of GDP in 2025, driven principally not by merchandise exports but by income earned on that huge stock of overseas investment. This was reinforced by the peculiar economics of the yen. When Japanese interest rates sat close to zero while yields elsewhere were substantially higher, the yen became an attractive funding currency. Investors could borrow cheaply in yen and purchase higher-yielding foreign assets, a process known as the ‘carry trade’. Institutions could borrow yen at perhaps less than 1% and buy dollar securities yielding substantially more, provided the yen did not appreciate enough to erase the spread. This was an important escape valve.

The United States was particularly well placed to reap the dividends. America possessed deep and liquid capital markets, the world’s principal reserve currency and an apparently inexhaustible supply of securities into which foreign savings could be placed. US Treasury debt provided the global benchmark safe asset. As of June 2026, foreign investors collectively held approximately $9.3 trillion of US Treasury securities. Japan remained the largest recorded foreign holder, with approximately $1.12 trillion, or around 12% of all foreign-held Treasuries. The United Kingdom ranked second at roughly $940 billion, followed by mainland China at approximately $633 billion (although this figure does not account for offshore holdings). China’s role should not be underestimated. Her national savings rate became extraordinarily high during this period, such that the current-account surplus rose towards 10% of GDP by 2007, an extreme figure for an economy of China’s size. A significant portion of these excess savings were effectively exported to the rest of the world — the beginnings of the transition from ‘made in China’ to ‘owned in China’.

Ben Bernanke famously described the broader phenomenon as a global savings glut. Emerging Asian economies, oil exporters and other surplus countries were supplying more savings than they wished to invest domestically. Bernanke’s argument was that this excess supply of international capital helped push real interest rates lower and asset prices higher, an important part of American external financing. China was therefore performing two disinflationary functions at once. The first was financial, and the second was physical. Chinese industrialisation massively expanded the global supply of cheap manufactured goods. At the same time, Western companies could relocate labour-intensive production towards jurisdictions where costs were substantially lower, keeping inflation low and shielding Western economies from domestic economic slack.

That combination helped produce one of the defining economic peculiarities of the period after the financial crisis, namely enormous appreciation in financial assets alongside persistently weak consumer-price inflation. Central banks could purchase bonds, yields fell, and investors could be pushed further out along the risk curve while property and equities could appreciate substantially. This explains why the post-2008 period confounded simple monetary predictions. It also explains why Japan became such an apparently devastating counterexample to warnings about government debt. Japan appeared to demonstrate that a state could accumulate public debt above 200% of GDP, have its central bank purchase enormous quantities of that debt, hold interest rates close to zero for decades, and nevertheless struggle to generate inflation.

This is nothing new. The observation is correct, but the inference frequently drawn from it is much more questionable. The crucial distinction that many commentators have not taken into account is that Japan itself was a net supplier of capital to that system, not its ultimate monetary foundation. Japan remains a huge creditor, but its interest rates are normalising. China remains an enormous exporter and saver, but its financial relationship with the West has changed. Global supply chains remain deeply interconnected, but governments increasingly treat the geographical location of energy generation, semiconductor fabrication, defence production and critical industrial inputs as matters of national security rather than issues of comparative advantage. The post-2008 regime should therefore not be understood simply as proof that vast sovereign debt and monetary expansion are inherently non-inflationary.

Can we all become Japan?

Japan entered its long monetary experiment as a major creditor economy whose private saving repeatedly exceeded domestic investment needs. The United States occupies almost the opposite position. At the end of the first quarter of 2026, Americans held roughly $43.4 trillion in foreign financial assets while foreigners held about $64.6 trillion in American assets, leaving the United States with a net international investment position of approximately minus $21.3 trillion. Japan’s prolonged deleveraging after its asset bubble also produced an unusually powerful private propensity to save, whereas the United States has shown a much greater willingness to support household and corporate demand directly during crises. Donald Trump has already proposed paying every adult American $5,000 if Republicans retained Congress in the midterm elections, a programme which would cost roughly $1.2 trillion and, absent very large spending cuts or new revenues, would have to be financed principally through additional borrowing.

But Japan itself is also changing. Japanese government-bond yields have risen to levels not seen for decades (2.98% on the 10-year yield at the time of writing), making domestic securities increasingly competitive with foreign assets. The yen carry trade has therefore become less compelling. A Japanese insurer or pension fund which can once again earn a meaningful return at home has less reason to accept dollar currency risk merely to obtain yield abroad. Japan cannot simply suppress this indefinitely, because the pressure then appears elsewhere. The yen recently fell towards ¥164 to the dollar, prompting intervention on an extraordinary scale. Between 30 July and 26 August 2026, Japan spent ¥15.4 trillion, about $96.5 billion, supporting the currency (a record amount), which nonetheless enabled only a modest recovery to ¥159 to the dollar. Even the US stepped in to support the yen (with Euros, no less), with Scott Bessent’s conspicuous ‘to do’ list consisting of only one item: buying up to $10 billion of yen to support the currency. Meanwhile, the Japanese Ministry of Finance has requested a record ¥36.64 trillion for debt servicing in fiscal 2027, using an assumed interest rate of 3.8%, the highest in twenty-nine years. Japan is therefore being forced to choose among a weaker currency, higher domestic yields and greater intervention, none of which is costless.

The implication for Western markets is that the source of cheap global capital that could once be taken largely for granted is becoming less dependable at precisely the moment the United States and other developed economies need enormous pools of savings to finance their own sovereign liabilities. If several major economies become increasingly unwilling to tolerate market-clearing borrowing costs at the same time, they will rapidly find themselves competing for the same increasingly limited pool of capital. We will explore this problem further in part two.

The debt trap

Every year, a large volume of existing Treasury securities must be refinanced while new deficits require still more issuance. The Treasury has also become more reliant than it was earlier in the 2020s on short-term bills: they accounted for roughly 22% of marketable federal debt by the end of 2025, and Treasury continues to use regular bill auctions as the principal shock absorber for fluctuations in its financing requirements. A greater proportion of borrowing at the short end does not increase the debt stock by itself, but it shortens the interval between a change in market rates and the rate the government actually pays. A thirty-year bond issued at 2% can remain cheap for decades; a three- or six-month bill must shortly be refinanced at whatever rate the market then demands. Investors may demand still greater compensation if they begin to doubt the sustainability of the fiscal path. The critical relationship is therefore not any particular numerical yield, but whether the effective interest rate on the debt remains persistently above the growth rate of the tax base from which it must ultimately be serviced. At debt ratios around or above 100% of GDP, even relatively small changes in that relationship become damaging.

Britain is particularly exposed. The OBR expects public sector net debt to rise from about 95% of GDP in 2025–26 to 97% in 2028–29, while debt-interest spending rises from roughly £110 billion this year to £137 billion by 2030–31. Interest spending is already around twice as large a share of GDP as it averaged during the decade before the pandemic. Britain also has an unusually direct sensitivity to inflation because a significant portion of its government debt is index-linked, at 25%, far higher than other G7 countries, whose proportion of index-linked debt ranges from less than 1% (Japan) to around 12% (Italy). In the first two months of the 2026–27 fiscal year, higher-than-expected inflation alone pushed debt-interest spending £2.4 billion above the OBR’s forecast. The previous Conservative government’s failure to refinance debt on a large scale during the historically low yields of the COVID period has proven to be short-sighted at best.

The available escapes are unpleasant. Governments can restore fiscal credibility through some combination of higher taxation and lower spending, or hope that productivity growth expands the tax base faster than the debt burden. Failing that (which appears a certainty), they must either tolerate the market-clearing cost of borrowing or attempt to prevent yields reaching it. The political attraction of the latter is obvious. Financial repression socialises the cost much less obviously than austerity, explicit taxation or default. The danger is that yields remain elevated long enough for refinancing to make those rates the government’s average cost of funding. At that point, the fiscal system becomes increasingly sensitive to movements in the bond market and the authorities acquire an ever-stronger incentive to intervene before the repricing is complete. Suppressing the nominal yield does not remove the underlying economic cost, but merely determines where that cost appears. Once the sovereign can no longer comfortably pay the return required by private capital and instead begins influencing that return, a fiscal problem has started to become a monetary one.

The implicit yield ceiling

The debt trap becomes politically important only when governments reveal that there is some level of sovereign borrowing cost they are no longer willing to accept. That level need not be officially announced; what matters is whether markets begin to infer from repeated official behaviour that sufficiently high long-term yields will provoke intervention. In that sense, financial repression can begin before anything resembling formal yield-curve control. The first stage is simply the appearance of an implicit ceiling.

Recent US policy indicates that this may already be happening. In August 2026, after long-dated Treasury yields reached their highest levels in roughly two decades, the US Treasury announced that it would at least double the maximum size of its liquidity-support buybacks in the 10-to-30-year sector, from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation. Treasury’s formal justification is ‘market liquidity’ rather than yield suppression, and it continues to issue long-dated debt through its regular auction schedule. Treasury buybacks are not quantitative easing, because the Treasury cannot create central-bank reserves, and the programme remains tiny relative to the overall Treasury market. Yet the timing and political rhetoric around the programme are hard to dismiss as insignificant, as the recent resurgence in the gold price suggests. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has openly argued that long-term borrowing costs are too high relative to economic fundamentals, priming the market to expect negative real yields for the foreseeable future.

Although the number is small, it has set a precedent. It tells investors that the Treasury itself is increasingly attentive to the price, which is important because the long bond is supposed to perform a disciplinary function. If investors become less confident about inflation, deficits or future debt issuance, the yield should rise until enough capital is attracted to absorb the supply. The government may dislike that verdict, but the higher yield is the market’s mechanism for producing buyers. Once the state begins trying to prevent that repricing, it risks treating the symptom of fiscal deterioration rather than the cause. As long as public debt is modest, the conflict can be negotiated. At debt around the size of GDP and with annual interest costs approaching $1 trillion, it becomes unmanageable.

Nonetheless, governments can suppress a nominal yield more easily than they can suppress the economic forces that caused investors to demand a higher one. If inflation remains elevated, or the supply of debt continues rising, the concession must appear elsewhere. Real returns can fall, the currency can weaken, or investors can seek compensation in equities, property, commodities and other assets, as they expect the value of those to rise more than the real yield they obtain from bonds. The immediate effect of intervention may therefore be a rally in both government bonds and risk assets, even while the underlying fiscal position has deteriorated. Indeed, the latest US interventions have already generated discussion of a wider ‘debasement trade’, with the rise in the gold price indicating that the real purchasing power of the USD is declining, and suggesting that the market is already sensing the direction of travel.

The crash that may not last

The next major downturn, ‘the coming collapse’, a normal part of the business cycle, may therefore be important less for the scale of the initial market fall than for the response it provokes. A conventional financial crisis is recognisable; asset prices fall, bad investments are liquidated, deleveraging occurs, and the resulting recession eventually creates the conditions for recovery. The more unusual possibility is that the authorities once again prevent much of that nominal adjustment from taking place.

The pandemic provides the clearest recent demonstration of how quickly such a reversal can occur. The S&P 500 lost roughly a third of its value between its February 2020 peak and the March trough, while employment and output collapsed at a speed without modern precedent. Yet by June the index had recovered to about 94% of its February level, and by early 2021 it stood roughly 15% above its pre-pandemic peak. This recovery occurred alongside an extraordinary monetary and fiscal intervention. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet rose from about $4.3 trillion in mid-March 2020 to almost $7.2 trillion by early June. Broad money subsequently expanded at a remarkable rate. M2’s year-on-year growth reached 26.9% in February 2021, higher than during either the post-2008 quantitative-easing programmes or the high-inflation decades of the 1970s and 1980s, and the level of M2 ultimately rose by roughly 40% between the eve of the pandemic and its 2022 peak. This was attributed not just to QE alone but to a combination of fiscal stimulus, monetary accommodation, unusually large precautionary deposit holdings and changes in the banking system. That distinction is important. The lesson of 2020 is that, with sufficient intervention, an economy can experience severe real disruption while fiscal and monetary policy simultaneously preserve nominal incomes and asset valuations. Inflation came, but only much later. US consumer-price inflation was still only 1.4% at the end of 2020, but reached 9.1% by June 2022. Energy and supply disruptions contributed heavily, as did reopening effects and other pandemic distortions, so it would be equally mistaken to attribute the entire increase to monetary expansion. Nevertheless, the episode demonstrated that the inflationary consequences of a rescue need not appear at the moment the rescue is conducted.

This creates a very different risk from the familiar prediction of an imminent stock-market collapse. American equities are historically expensive by several measures, and the present AI boom may eventually precipitate substantial consolidation, but neither observation implies that a correction must become a prolonged nominal bear market. If a sufficiently large equity decline threatens household wealth, pension solvency, private credit, employment and tax revenues at the same time that the sovereign is already struggling with high borrowing costs, the political pressure to intervene with renewed liquidity support, rate cuts, or otherwise, will be enormous, especially given the increased (albeit mostly one-way) connection between movements in the stock market and the fortunes of the economy as a whole. The question would be whether they are deployed while inflation remains high and equilibrium yields are higher. A rescue conducted under those conditions would be fundamentally different from the post-2008 interventions undertaken in an environment of low inflation.

Such a rescue could make the stock market look healthier while making the monetary problem worse. Equities might recover rapidly in dollars because the authorities have supplied liquidity, stabilised credit and reduced the attractiveness of cash and government bonds. But if an equity index gains 20% while the prices of gold, energy, property or a broader basket of scarce assets rise by 30 or 40%, the investor has become wealthier in the unit of account but less able to purchase those particular assets, even though their purchasing power above that of ordinary consumption may have increased. Once this is realised, it’s difficult to tell how bad things could get.

However, high valuations do not necessarily make equities an obvious short in an inflationary regime. A company represents a residual claim on productive assets and future nominal revenues. Thus, firms with pricing power, foreign earnings or ownership of scarce productive capacity may adjust more readily to currency depreciation than a fixed-rate government bond whose payments are predetermined in nominal terms. This difference between nominal and real performance is also the reason a future crisis need not resemble either 1929 or 2008.

War, weather, and the return of supply-side inflation

The difficulty with assuming that the next recession will automatically restore low inflation is that some of the most important present pressures on prices originate not in excessive consumer demand, but in the physical supply of energy, food and industrial inputs. A recession can reduce demand for these goods, sometimes dramatically, but it cannot reopen a shipping lane, rebuild a refinery, replace a missed harvest, or immediately replenish depleted inventories. The world is therefore entering the next phase of the financial cycle with a range of supply shortages quite different from those preceding the major financial crises of this century.

Before the Iran conflict began, the Strait of Hormuz carried roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG flows. Six months into the war, traffic remains sparse and negotiations over reopening the Strait have repeatedly failed.

The consequences are no longer necessarily best measured by the headline crude-oil price, which might be compared more to a betting market on occasion. Benchmark crude itself is priced through an enormous derivatives complex in which financial contracts greatly exceed the quantity of oil changing hands for immediate physical delivery, and change on the whim of President Trump’s latest statement. Those markets remain anchored to physical crude through arbitrage and settlement mechanisms, so they cannot suppress scarcity indefinitely. But they can make the headline futures price an imperfect guide to where that scarcity is presently most acute. The physical market increasingly reveals itself instead through premiums for particular crude grades, freight and war-risk insurance, and above all the widening margins between crude and the refined fuels actually required by consumers and industry. In other words, a relatively low Brent price does not necessarily imply an equally well-supplied market.

A better reflection of higher producer inflation comes through the refined products which are not as distorted by financialisation, the so-called ‘crack spread’. Global refinery throughput remained almost 5 million barrels a day below its year-earlier level in July, while diesel exports from Russia, the Middle East and Asia were around 1.3 million barrels a day lower, equivalent to roughly 20% of global seaborne diesel trade. Jet-fuel exports from the same regions were down by the equivalent of around 34% of global trade. Singapore gasoil refining margins have risen by more than 200% since the conflict began, while US ultra-low-sulphur diesel futures jumped 7.4% in a single session in August.

The apparent resilience of headline crude prices has also depended partly upon drawing down emergency stocks. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to roughly 285 million barrels, its lowest level since 1982, and previously agreed releases could take it towards 243 million. Emergency stock releases have helped replace barrels temporarily removed from normal trade and therefore moderated the immediate price response, but Japan is especially exposed to the exhaustion of this buffer. It imports virtually all of its crude oil and ordinarily obtains around 95 per cent of it from the Middle East; during the present conflict it has already announced a record release of roughly 80 million barrels from its own reserves and sharply increased purchases from the United States, but exports are drying up quickly. At current rates of depletion, their reserves will dry up around the middle of 2027.

What makes this particularly notable is that these shortages are happening against weak demand. As of September, IEA expects global oil demand itself to fall by roughly 2.5 million barrels a day during 2026. The tightening in refined fuels therefore cannot be explained simply as the consequence of an overheating world economy. The problem increasingly lies in the physical capacity to refine, transport and distribute fuel. Diesel matters in particular because it is not merely a consumer fuel: freight, agriculture, construction, mining and much heavy machinery all depend upon it, allowing higher diesel prices to spread through the cost structure of the physical economy.

The Russia-Ukraine war is reinforcing the same problem from another direction. Repeated Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries have reduced fuel production sufficiently for Moscow to extend restrictions on diesel, marine-fuel and gas-oil exports. Russia is normally one of the world’s largest exporters of diesel, making disruption to its refining system economically significant even when crude production itself remains comparatively resilient. At the same time, attacks by both sides on Black Sea ports and vessels are disrupting grain exports during the principal shipping season. During the first three weeks of August, Ukrainian grain exports were only around 539,000 tonnes, compared with 1.73 million tonnes over the same period a year earlier. Ukraine has consequently reduced its expected 2026–27 grain exports as exporters are pushed towards smaller and more expensive alternative routes, including the Danube.

Some of the less visible shortages may ultimately prove just as important. Sulphur is one example. Much of the world’s traded sulphur is recovered as a by-product of oil and gas processing in the Gulf and then converted into sulphuric acid, an essential input into phosphate fertiliser and numerous industrial processes. Qatar’s benchmark sulphur price reached $890 a tonne this summer, compared with $259 a tonne in August 2025, while freight and war-risk insurance pushed the delivered cost to China above $1,000 a tonne. Virtually no Qatari sulphur cargoes were confirmed leaving through Hormuz after 18 July. A shortage in what appears to be an obscure industrial commodity can therefore migrate through sulphuric acid into fertiliser, then into agricultural production costs and ultimately food prices.

Food supply is simultaneously being impaired by weather. Severe drought across Europe has damaged grain and animal-feed production. Britain is experiencing what is expected to be its worst cereal harvest since comparable records began in 1984, while French maize production may fall towards its lowest level since the 1970s. In parts of central Europe, farmers have already begun consuming feed that would normally have been reserved for winter and reducing livestock herds. India’s monsoon is meanwhile on course to be its weakest in nearly two decades, threatening soybeans, maize, pulses and the soil moisture required for subsequent winter crops, while heat and flooding have damaged corn, soybean and cotton regions in China. These pressures are arriving at precisely the same time as higher diesel and fertiliser costs, meaning that weather, energy and chemical-input shortages can reinforce one another rather than remaining separate inflationary shocks.

Industrial metals exacerbate the situation. Copper prices are at record highs as US tariff policy diverts metal towards American inventories, mine and smelter disruptions restrict supply elsewhere, and electricity-grid expansion and data-centre construction create additional demand for power transmission and cooling infrastructure. Silver is entering a sixth consecutive structural supply deficit while demand remains elevated from solar generation, electronics and, increasingly, AI-related infrastructure.

The result is an unusually broad set of bottlenecks spanning refined fuels, transport, agriculture, fertiliser and industrial metals. There may also be a slower monetary consequence from the geopolitical fragmentation itself. Sanctioned Iranian oil sold into China is already frequently settled in yuan, while geopolitical antagonism gives Iran, Russia and China continuing incentives to develop trading and payment mechanisms that reduce their exposure to the dollar. To the extent that a more fragmented commodity system gradually reduces at the margin the amount of trade requiring dollar settlement and dollar reserves, one longstanding source of demand for dollar assets weakens at precisely the moment the United States needs the rest of the world to absorb an increasing quantity of Treasury debt.

AI as an inflationary accelerator

Andro’s useful contribution in his essay earlier this year was to distinguish between the financing phase of an investment boom and the expenditure phase. During the first, investors exchange money for equities, bonds, private credit and other claims on future profits. Much of the capital is therefore absorbed into financial valuations. During the second, those claims are converted into actual orders for land, chips, electricity, construction, copper and other physical inputs. The monetary claim can be created almost instantly; the productive capacity required to satisfy it cannot. In that sense, financialisation can initially postpone the pressure on physical goods before releasing it later when financing becomes expenditure.

The scale of it is huge. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta planned capital expenditure of roughly $725 billion in 2026, potentially reaching $1 trillion by year-end, principally associated with AI and data-centre infrastructure. This expenditure coincides with physical shortages that cannot be solved by creating additional financial claims. US utilities are already struggling to secure transformers, circuit breakers and switchgear, with lead times for some high-voltage transformers extending towards three years, while data-centre power requirements are projected to rise enormously during the remainder of the decade.

AI therefore matters to the inflation argument even if every dollar invested ultimately proves economically justified. A sufficiently productive AI industry may eventually increase the economy’s supply capacity and lower costs, but the infrastructure required to reach that future productivity must be constructed before those gains are fully realised. In the meantime, hundreds of billions of dollars are competing for electricity, metals, industrial equipment, skilled labour and construction capacity whose supply responds much more slowly. The investment boom can therefore be disinflationary in the long run while simultaneously adding to inflationary pressure during the build-out at exactly the wrong time. Until productivity gains materially improve the fiscal outlook, bond markets will not be so forgiving.

It also competes with the government for savings. Increasingly, the AI build-out is being financed not simply from the enormous cash flows of the largest technology companies but through debt and increasingly elaborate capital structures. AI-related debt issuance has already exceeded $220 billion in 2026, roughly twice last year’s level, adding to an already enormous volume of American corporate borrowing. JPMorgan has argued that AI-related issuance could become comparable in scale with Treasury issuance by the end of the year. Private capital committed to financing a data centre, cloud provider or power project is capital which cannot simultaneously absorb a Treasury security at the same price. The AI boom can therefore contribute directly to the competition for savings that is already placing upward pressure on sovereign borrowing costs. In other words, sovereign and corporate debt demands are increasingly crowding each other out.

The industry’s financing illustrates how far this process has progressed. Nvidia has helped launch financing platforms targeting more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure and has agreed to provide guarantees of as much as $105 billion in connection with OpenAI’s enormous Ohio data-centre project. It has also experimented with providing credit support to smaller cloud companies purchasing Nvidia hardware while offering to rent unused computing capacity back from them, before pausing parts of that programme amid concern about increasingly circular financing relationships. None of this proves that the underlying demand is fictitious. It does demonstrate, however, how deeply the AI investment cycle has become intertwined with the continued availability of credit.

That creates the second way in which AI could become important. Transformative technologies routinely produce both genuine productivity gains and excessive investment. Railways, telecommunications and the internet all changed the economy while simultaneously bankrupting investors who financed too much capacity at the wrong price. After the dotcom bubble popped, the vast majority of internet and telecommunications companies went bust; Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, whose values also collapsed by 60% to 90%, were among the very few survivors. AI may eventually go through the same painful process, because investors are far from perfect at identifying in advance which companies will ultimately capture its value.

When a market correction becomes a monetary crisis

The upshot of this is that, in this scenario, the government may need to borrow more at precisely the moment investors may already be demanding higher compensation for holding its debt. This could produce a paradoxical recovery. Equities might rebound because liquidity returns, and investors become less willing to remain in cash or fixed-rate government securities. The nominal stock market would therefore recover even though the underlying economy remained weak. The sovereign, already more indebted than before, becomes still less able to tolerate high yields during the next downturn. The next rescue must therefore be larger or more intrusive, and the expectation of that response gives investors still greater reason to escape nominal government claims before it arrives.

A crisis which begins in an overextended private market can, through repeated intervention, become a crisis of confidence in the public liabilities used to rescue it. Investors cease asking only whether Nvidia, the S&P 500 or the property market is overvalued. They begin asking whether the asset used to price all of them is itself being systematically diluted. Once that question becomes widespread, the speed with which capital can respond becomes crucial and potentially devastating. That issue, and the question of how states might respond to it, will be the subject of part two of this essay.

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

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‘You’re not alone. Don‘t be afraid.’ These were the ‘motherly’ words uttered by one of Die Linke’s most notable figures, Heidi Reichinnek, on the election night in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany’s state broadcaster ARD. But who did she mean specifically? ‘Many young people here are now frightened: Those with immigration history, queers, those identifying with the left in some ways, those with disabilities, those looking for a job.’ For her, this was a remarkably calm tone: In January 2025, Reichinnek, as Die Linke’s Bundestag faction leader, chanted a rallying cry to those wanting to resist ‘fascism’ in the country: ‘To the barricades!’ This call became necessary after the CDU successfully pushed through a non-binding Bundestag resolution calling for stricter immigration policies with AfD support.

Reichinnek is, in fact, one of the friendlier faces of the party. Die Linke has notably backed the anti-fascist alliance, ‘Widersetzen’ (‘To Resist’), in organising several protests to disrupt AfD party conferences — which, unlike in Britain, are mandated to take place as federal party law strictly enforces a democratic party structure and bi-annual leadership elections. This did not dissuade Antifa militants from blocking the roads leading to the conference sites or physically attacking AfD delegates and journalists reporting on the protests. One of Widersetzen’s speakers, Noa Sander, also declined to distance herself from the latest violence in Erfurt, openly stating that ‘fascists with a press card are still fascists’. None of this has seemed to harm Die Linke’s electoral success: At the 2025 federal election, it secured its third-best nationwide result with 8.8% of the vote. By this point the party was already propping up two CDU-led state governments — the same CDU that had secured many of its electoral victories with ritual ‘red scare’ style campaigning found itself in bed with Antifa car-burners in Leipzig-Connewitz.

How did it come to this? The success of Die Linke is noteworthy on the grounds of the party’s roots alone — legally speaking, a successor to the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which ruled the communist GDR, erected the Berlin Wall (and, like the Brandmauer today, was also dubbed ‘antifascist’) and ordered soldiers to fire at those fleeing the ‘workers’ and peasants’ paradise’ to West Germany. After the 1989 revolution, the SED began to reinvent itself under the leadership of an influential lawyer named Gregor Gysi and changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Though it only half-distanced itself from the SED era, it now aimed to become the primary leftist opposition within the democratic system.

Fueled by anti-immigrant riots and far-right murders in several Eastern cities, it quickly sought punctual cooperation with ‘civil society’ alliances and local far-left groups. Young radicals from other far-left organisations, disillusioned communists from the West, post-1968 movement pacifists and reform-minded leftists all flocked to the party. This ideological diversity quickly built a mountain of internal conflict. More often than not, the successor party’s national and state conferences ended in chaos — over condemnation of the SED dictatorship, political strategy, how far bans on military exports should reach, the Israel-Palestine question, and so on.

Regardless, it slowly entrenched itself into national politics, coasting on the widespread resentment over the economic downfall in the former GDR states. In 1994 — ironically enough, in Saxony-Anhalt — the SPD secured a historic confidence-and-supply agreement with the PDS to replace the incumbent CDU-led state government. In 1998, the post-communists entered their first state cabinet with the SPD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and again in Berlin four years later. In 2005, the party made its breakthrough riding anger over the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s pro-market welfare and labour policy reforms. Schröder’s former Finance Minister chose to leave the SPD and join the breakaway ‘Electoral Alternative for Social Justice’, which quickly secured a list arrangement with the PDS for the subsequent federal election. The two parties formally merged two years later. Over the next two decades, the party joined the governments in the Western city of Bremen and the Eastern states of Brandenburg and Thuringia. In Thuringia, they also pushed through their first Chief Minister with the backing of the SPD and Greens. Notable electoral successes in Western states have followed as well.

What of the ‘new’ Left’s old conflicts? As late as 2021, after only narrowly escaping their ousting from the Bundestag and losing seats in Western state parliaments, it looked as though their habit of reopening old sores could finish off the party. But in an ironic twist of fate, the friendly face of GDR nostalgia and self-proclaimed critic of mass immigration, Sahra Wagenknecht, seemingly aided their comeback albeit involuntarily. She left the party in 2023 to create the BSW, taking several MPs with her. Since then, Die Linke has seen unprecedented growth in its ranks from just 50,000 to 123,000 members in just three years. One of their new MPs and former migrant rescue NGO activist, Lea Reisner, told the former party newspaper that she had never publicly admitted her party membership so long as Wagenknecht played a part there: ‘My friends that are affected by racism would lose their minds’.

Leaving the old ‘Streitigkeiten’ behind, Die Linke has built and sustained a new coalition of voters akin to the British Greens or the French La France Insoumise. The party won over generally precarious, urban, and somewhat more schooled and female voters with targeted campaigns for rent control and, in Berlin, the expropriation of major private housing corporations. It also mobilised ethnic voting in immigrant-dominated areas like Berlin-Neukölln with their candidate Ferat Koçak, securing Die Linke its first FPTP mandate outside of the former GDR. In the former East, several Linke figures have strong ties to unions like IG Metall and are on good terms with the traditionally SPD-aligned DGB union confederation. At the last federal election, it led the polls with voters under 25 with a quarter of the vote, slightly ahead of the AfD.

Thanks to the CDU’s strict anti-AfD stance, Die Linke has been able to establish itself as the main beneficiary of the firewall — in Saxony and Thuringia, it has secured a veto on several budget cuts, including the ones to the friendly NGOs combatting ‘racism’ and ‘right-wing extremism’. The BSW part of the CDU-BSW-SPD governing coalition in Thuringia, meanwhile, is in a state of chaos over Wagenknecht’s approach to the AfD and top-down leadership. 13 of 15 BSW Thuringian state MPs have left the party, 10 of whom forming a breakaway ‘Just Thuringia’ parliamentary group to remain in government. As the coalition only has 39 of 88 MPs, Die Linke is now a crucial partner. The Left’s state leadership already demands ‘fixed agreements’ beyond the existing tacit confidence-and-supply to ensure ‘stability’ amid the crisis.

Despite only getting 8.6% in the recent Saxony-Anhalt election, it seems likely to become a central force there once the AfD and BSW fail to reach an agreement. The AfD’s candidate for Chief Minister, Ulrich Siegmund — ‘the most dangerous man in Germany’ — has already managed to irritate his potential partners. In the old pacifist tradition, the BSW had campaigned against the construction of an Israeli arms factory in Sangershausen. Siegsmund’s response was characteristically provocative: ‘We do not condemn the production of military equipment in itself, because we will, of course, need the necessary resources for future remigration and deportation campaigns’. Despite a deep enmity, Wagenknecht’s party already offered Die Linke a joint opportunity to block the factory. To add to the paralysis, the BSW’s insistence on a ‘cross-partisan’ Chief Minister thus deprives Siegmund of this function despite the AfD’s commanding lead. While Die Linke has rejected the idea so far, the looming threat of new elections — only this time with an absolute AfD majority on the horizon — could quickly change that.

And then there are the two other states that voted last week. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the humiliated CDU fell below the 5% threshold and is set to be ejected from the state parliament. The AfD achieved a historic 39% of the vote, but the ruling SPD’s Manuela Schwesig was able to exploit the polarisation to her benefit, retaining 35.5%. With the remaining left combined above 11%, a left-wing governing coalition will tick on in the state. In Berlin, Die Linke has made history with its first post-unification mayor, Elif Eralp — for whom the Greens had made clear they would prefer a Left-led state government, and the CDU’s incumbent candidate was weakened by a long list of gaffes (including playing tennis during a major far-left terror attack on the city’s energy grid and then shamelessly lying about it).

The remaining challenge for Die Linke is to tighten its grip on the CDU. Despite internal turmoil after its debacle in Saxony-Anhalt and the SPD trying to block several welfare reforms, the Christian Democrats’ commitment to the firewall remains strong. This should be a tough pill to swallow given the historic enmity and the ideological differences. To keep Die Linke out of the negotiations over its record one trillion euro debt scheme (euphemistically called ‘special funds’ for the infrastructure, ‘climate protection’ and the rearmament) that required a constitutional change, the CDU and CSU had pushed through a parliamentary session of the outgoing Bundestag, where the SPD and Greens secured a sufficient number of votes.

But with the ‘Brandmauer’ against the AfD still standing and an increasingly fragile party environment, Die Linke can’t be ignored for much longer. CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz, despite losing control over the increasingly disgruntled party base, recently attacked the AfD once more, comparing its ‘remigration’ proposals to ‘ethnic cleansing’. His prospective competitor Hendrik Wüst, Chief Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, called for an examination of an AfD ban — just as the Left has done. The latter, on the other hand, had already thrown Merz two lifelines: once after his first chancellor vote failed and a constitutional amendment was needed to enable a second vote on the same day (just weeks after the ‘special funds’ roll call) and during a CDU dispute over pension policy.

While the prospect of having to compromise in the CDU to save the country from ‘fascism’ isn‘t attractive to many Linke members either, it is trapped by voters’ own expectations as well. Its current co-leader Luigi Pantisano had claimed in Bild, Germany’s Axel Springerite equivalent to The Sun, that there is no difference between the CDU’s ‘fascist policy’, the AfD and the fascists themselves. But within less than a day, he apologised for it during Die Linke’s national conference — and received only 53 per cent of the delegates’ votes. Among Die Linke’s voters in Saxony-Anhalt, 78 per cent would support a confidence-and-supply deal to keep the AfD out of government, as mentioned in an analysis by the party-affiliated Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The same applies to 63 per cent of the CDU voters. In an essay for the foundation’s magazine Zeitschrift Luxemburg, a long-time Left leader Bernd Riexinger had warned that right-wing governments across the West would set up an authoritarian state architecture that would have consequences ‘beyond their government phase’, serving as a ‘blueprint’ for the AfD.

But right now, it is Die Linke dictating the long game. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Die Linke successfully pushed for a GDR apologist Barbara Borchardt to become the state constitutional court justice in 2021, with the CDU ditching its protest after weeks. In Saxony-Anhalt, it has recently backed a controversial constitutional reform aiming to prevent ‘extremists’ from ‘capturing state institutions’ like courts and the state Political Education Centre. Unless the Brandmauer falls (which looks unlikely), Die Linke’s leverage over the state will only continue to tighten. Good news for its allies: ‘You’re not alone, don’t be afraid.’ Those who are not should watch Die Linke’s next moves with caution.

This article was written by Kuba Kruszakin, a Pimlico Journal contributor and an editor for Junge Freiheit, a German conservative weekly. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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In the last few months alone, we have witnessed several such events: the murder of Henry Nowak, the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie, the Belfast riots which followed, and the political assassination of Ann Widdecombe. The surprising character of these events, which puncture the public’s assumption of normality, naturally produces an overcorrection, transforming denial into catastrophism. A response which has become more common in recent years in Britain and elsewhere is the suggestion that we (alongside other Western countries) are headed towards ‘civil war’.

Before the present decade, talk of sustained political violence was entirely absent from the mainstream, and those who partook therein would have been dismissed immediately as cranks. It is telling, then, to see the extent to which this conviction has taken root since. Premonitions of conflict are echoed by the many prominent, orthodox figures on the right. Even Kemi Badenoch, in a BBC Radio 4 interview, warned that ‘community tension’ and ‘fracturing’ could lead to civil war ‘in the long term’. Nigel Farage has voiced similar concerns, raising the possibility of widespread civil disorder if not full-blown civil war. Large swathes of the country are also convinced: a YouGov survey on the heels of the riots that followed the Southport murders in August 2024 found that 32% of Britons believe that a civil war will occur in the next decade.

It was during those heady weeks that David Betz, previously a little-known lecturer at King’s College London, became an overnight (e-) celebrity as one of the first British academics (and one of the first respectable people in general) to seriously advance the case that civil conflict in Western countries is not just a possibility, but an overwhelming likelihood, in the near future. In particular, Betz suggests that either Britain or France could be the first modern Western countries to face the coming deluge, which would then be prone to spread elsewhere. He introduced these claims in his two-part article ‘Civil War Comes to the West’, perhaps one of the most widely circulated long reads in recent years, and has continued to make the same arguments during various podcast appearances and public speeches.

These concerns are also felt in other Western countries, facing the same fundamental challenges: economic stagnation, declining international power, the retardation of the state, and most crucially the existential threat of demographic replacement. They have found cultural expression in various places, perhaps most notably in Alex Garland’s 2024 film ‘Civil War’, which depicted a full-blown military conflict in the contemporary United States (and, in an ironic demonstration of 21st-century frivolity which repudiates the film’s own premise, has been remembered in the form of a single meme and little else).

Perhaps it is understandable to raise such concerns in the aftermath of the kind of serious race riots which are becoming more and more common across Western countries. In other moments, however, these fears seem more obviously absurd, with recent suggestions by X engagement farmers that mass protests in Ireland against fuel tax hikes represented the beginning of a cataclysmic shutdown being an obvious example.

In some ways, these forecasts are an understandable outgrowth of talk of the ‘culture war’; an example of a metaphor becoming not-so-metaphorical. But they also scratch a certain itch: a vision of catharsis in a great struggle, a moment when the unknowns and possibilities of this age of transition crystallise and resolve, when all one opposes is swept away, and a new world is born. Furthermore, they offer a path towards resolution of our seemingly intractable problems, however unpleasant that path may be. The dark intonations of these predictions are therefore often peppered with titillation on the part of the prophet.

These ideas are ultimately misguided. This is not to dismiss the seriousness of the issues mooted as potential causes of civil unrest. Indeed, one cannot overstate the threat posed by mass immigration and demographic change, phenomena which threaten the very existence of Western countries as Western countries and which will, if left unaddressed, lead to the disenfranchisement of their native peoples and the loss of their ability to shape their own destiny through ordinary political action. No circumstances in history have more commonly ignited internal conflict than multi-ethnic societies beset by growing lists of grievances on both sides.

Nevertheless, misunderstanding the nature of this problem in our own countries does little to help those of us who wish to see our problems addressed. Failing to define the scope of political possibilities accurately can only increase the risk of relying on poor strategies, and the expectation of a more straightforward – if messier – solution takes energy away from the pursuit of real change. If nothing else, wargaming the possibilities (in a way that Betz and others have yet to fully do) presents an interesting set of thought experiments.

Part one of this series will discuss the entirely unprecedented conditions of ‘liberal modernity’, and their implications for the possibility of civil violence, revolution and the imaginative horizons of dissident forces, dealing mostly with the notion of civil war proper – a prospect which Betz does not suggest, but which many others do. The second part, which will follow soon, will explore the idea of ‘Ulsterisation’ (the proliferation of less organised and more narrowly tribal violence, to which ‘Ulster’ is still a wanting analogy) and consider what an informal civil conflict could or could not involve in the absence of serious state breakdown and the inability of the general population to meaningfully coordinate violence towards political goals, providing a more direct response to the specific claims made by Betz himself.

The problem of domestication

The immediate question facing any analyst of civil violence is whether and to what extent modern Western populations are even capable of the kind of sustained violent activity that a civil war fantasist might hope for. As Betz notes, the literature on civil conflict has historically assumed that it is not a problem which presents itself in rich countries with deeply embedded democratic legitimacy. Rather than refuting that point directly, Betz accepts this assumption, but suggests that these qualities rest on deeper foundations which are the actual barrier to civil conflict and which are presently being eroded in Western countries (most notably demographic homogeneity). Both of these positions are wrong. The United States had been a democracy for 85 years when its civil war began, more than three and a half decades longer than Spain has today – and nobody would suggest that Spain has markedly less entrenched democratic legitimacy than any other European country, nor that Spain is more vulnerable to civil war than its peers. But though the reasoning is flawed, the conclusion of established literature – that modern Western populations are uniquely incapable of violence – is correct.

What neither Betz nor those from whom he deviates consider is the way in which our liberal modernity shapes our psychological horizons, our desires and capabilities, and even our physical stature, from which political possibility cannot be disentangled.

To commence with a violent political strategy, whether a civil war or a more direct coup, requires two things. Firstly, it requires a willingness to commit the violence itself. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it requires the ability to psychologically break from the institutionalised practice of politics. The events of January 6th demonstrate the difficulty here. Of course, most of those who entered the Capitol were unwilling to deploy any kind of violence. But what truly renders attempts to paint those events as an ‘attempted coup’ farcical is the image below.

America is a country which has always taken the design of institutions seriously, as is demonstrated by the extensive discourse around how to structure the Constitution in the period of its founding. Yet its foundational population was entirely capable of political action outside of those institutions if they felt it necessary. The 1789 Constitution itself was enacted without reference to the rules of the Articles of Confederation, and similar examples of institutional irreverence continued to occur throughout the next several decades. America’s founding stock understood that ‘you can just do things’, and that institutional constraints on how politics should be conducted can simply be disregarded when they conflict with desired outcomes. That understanding no longer pertains. Today, to ‘act politically’ is by definition to act institutionally. A population which would not presume to walk outside the lines cannot unconstitutionally force the resignation of Congress, let alone overthrow the constitution itself.

The first test of the possibility of revolutionary violence — and, indeed, the true test of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis in The End of History and the Last Man — will be whether the official mechanisms of legitimacy and political activity within modern ‘liberal democratic’ capitalism are even contestable within the imaginations of Western populations themselves, or whether the domestication of our political instincts has progressed beyond recovery.

To begin to explain the problem introduced by modernity for revolutionary action, we can look to Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, in which he describes the way in which democratic society transforms the psychological character of the people and shrinks their political horizons:

‘I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.’

Tocqueville fits into a broader tradition of civilisational pessimism that emerged in response to the visible changes during the early stages of Europe’s journey into modernity: ‘liberalism’, capitalism, the rupture of ‘organic’ social bonds and the establishment of the centralised modern state evidently produced great economic, technological, military and intellectual dynamism; but in this new mode of human life something was clearly being lost.

For Tocqueville, it was the combination of the social baseline of modernity (characterised by materialism and the equality of conditions in abstracted social relations — more on which later) and democratic government (which could legitimise a kind of state even more ambitious in its management of everyday affairs than the administrative absolute monarchy of Ancien Régime France) which provided the structural explanation for the transformation in mores and enervation of political energies in America (and, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, eventually the West as a whole). His explanation renders these conditions rather contingent: liberalism competed against alternative visions of modernity, and had history played out differently it could have lost that struggle to fascism or communism, or indeed the persistence of various regimes in a more politically heterogeneous Western world. Nor is it obvious that the victory of liberalism alone would arrest the ability of the imagination to conjure alternatives, especially given that both of its most prominent alternatives in the twentieth century emerged out of the same intellectual genealogy that produced liberalism itself.

Others, of whom Nietzsche is perhaps most prominent, suggest that the particular conditions of our modernity have a more fundamental (and therefore perhaps more historically irrepressible) basis. Nietzsche believed that the prevailing intellectual instincts of his time — and indeed the psychological character of his contemporaries — were more full and honest expressions of Christian morality, and as a result saw it as a natural and logical end state of Christian civilisation. Nevertheless, he also recognised the proximal importance of these structural factors. Even more pessimistic than Tocqueville of the egalitarian impulse in liberalism, Nietzsche identified its levelling institutions and doctrine of individual (and later human) rights as a cancer on mankind’s thymos (lit. spiritedness) in much the same manner:

‘My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich] — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: or in other words, herd-animalization.’

This fear would ultimately be echoed by Fukuyama, who did not share Nietzsche’s conviction that the victory of liberalism was necessarily caused by the triumph of these aspects of our nature and tendencies in our thinking, but shared his fear that its ultimate consequence might be to facilitate the rise of the Last Man.

The problem of specialisation

The debate over the effects of modernity on the human condition was already in full swing by the mid-eighteenth century. Whilst Tocqueville and Nietzsche primarily considered the political and philosophical transformations of their time, one particular eighteenth-century theorist was more concerned with developments in the economic sphere.

Adam Ferguson, responding to the ideas of his contemporary and more famous namesake, Adam Smith, did not challenge Smith’s core observations on the division of labour and the economic gains which result. He recognised that the individual pursuit of private gain and the ever-increasing specialisation of labour inarguably advanced the commercial wealth of society and the aggregate power of the state. As a result, these phenomena would facilitate exponential progress across every realm of human endeavour. Rather than disputing these premises, Ferguson sought to introduce sociological and anthropological concerns into Smithian analysis of economic progress.

Ferguson’s interests, much like Nietzsche’s, were in the character of the people and the nature of the lives they lived. Ferguson’s interest was in the possibilities of liberty in the face of the revolution of commercial society in Europe — and, like Nietzsche identified the psycho-physiological constitution of the population or citizen body as inextricable from an intensely political understanding of liberty which is synonymous with sovereignty — the power to see one’s will realised in the world, or at least within one’s own life. For Ferguson, this kind of freedom underpins man’s existence as a political agent, a central aspect of the human experience.

His concern, however, was that the ever-intensifying commercial specialisation that enabled this historically unprecedented generation of surplus entailed the narrowing of the capacities of the individual in all spheres of life in which they were unspecialised. The result is an individual with radically diminished independence, far greater reliance on others, and thereby significantly weakened sovereignty. One wonders if even Ferguson could have imagined the extent to which this process would develop by our time, in which most people below a certain age lack even the skills to perform basic home maintenance (and in many cases even outsource such things as cooking and cleaning).

Moreover, commercial society constructs for the first time a superstructure over which no individual or organisation exercises any agency whatsoever. Individual commercial decisions are made by consumers and producers in order to maximise the satisfaction of their desires (for goods and profit respectively). These decisions are not (and cannot be) made with any reference to the political preferences we might have with regard to the organisation of society, yet the economic superstructure which shapes so much of our lives and directs all of our productive efforts emerges from them. Nobody came to the conclusion that outsized social rewards for investment banking would produce a better society, nor did anyone choose to structure today’s British economy around financial services. Instead, they made billions of individual purchasing decisions with reference only to those economic desires with relevance to that discrete choice, and these facts of our society emerge as the entirely unchosen consequences of those petty decisions.

Life ‘in nature’ is necessarily mostly unspecialised; a hunter-gatherer must possess a great variety of skills and faculties: the capacity for violence, physical strength and endurance (both for hunting and for war), a range of productive and artisan skills (for toolmaking and maintaining living environments), a wealth of knowledge about the natural world, as well as social and proto-political skills for maintaining cohesion within the group and organising against external threats. It is easy to see how this diversely competent type of man would have a wholly different relationship to sovereignty, and therefore a far deeper capacity for independent political engagement.

Ferguson’s idealised classical republican model of politics accounted for this in the suggestion that the farmer-citizen-militiaman was the bedrock of political liberty (perhaps in our post-agrarian society we could generalise this notion to the producer-citizen-soldier). Only through such a collective model could individuals on the whole expect ‘non-domination’ — a circumstance in which no superior power exists which can impose itself on the citizen. This sensibility that a polity seeking to maintain a politicised citizenry must guard against the excesses of specialisation would later find a different expression in the work of Jacob Burckhardt in ‘The Greeks and Greek Civilisation’, where, speaking of the Greek republics, he says: ‘the polis… starts with the whole, which precedes its parts’. Like Ferguson, Burckhardt suggested that political agency depended upon the citizen retaining a breadth of capacities irreducible to any single social function.

Specialisation in general, then, reduces an individual’s range of competence and makes them weaker in all sorts of ways. It also changes the nature of their relationship to society, by binding them up in one small corner of a highly complicated web. The idea of imposing oneself upon society as a whole is far easier to entertain when one contains all of society within oneself and when one exists on equal terms with one’s compatriots; far harder from the constrained viewpoint of a specialised worker entangled in one small corner of a complex economic and social web. Specialised competence encourages staying in your lane, a psychological orientation which extends beyond the workplace and into one’s engagement with political society.

The problem of demilitarisation

There is one form of specialisation in particular which has an outsized impact on the prospects for revolutionary violence, and it is hinted at in the formulation of farmer-soldier-citizen found in Ferguson. Whilst generalised competence is required for non-domination, martial competence in particular is crucial for reasons that will be quite obvious. Physical force and the dispersed ability to exercise it is the ultimate backstop of the free state, and the fundamental basis of the citizen’s status as a political agent. This was, of course, recognised by the American founding fathers, who held it of sufficient importance that only the right to speak freely would be codified with higher precedence in the Constitution.

Needless to say, the ability to exercise force goes well beyond the mere right to bear arms (though that is not itself an insignificant factor). For the American millionaire enjoying his suburban life in ‘Liveable Austin’, his collection of AR-15s is little different to his socially challenged son’s collection of Funko Pops. No matter how much the firearm may have democratised warfare, it comes to nought if it is psychologically unfathomable for Austin Man to use the force of his arms as intended in Jefferson’s vision of the agrarian republic, which sought to institutionalise not the Constitution but its generative principle of popular sovereignty in the ability of American citizens to take extra-legal, violent action against the risk of subordination.

The full set of reasons for the diminished psychological and physiological constitution of populations in our aged (and quite literally fat) liberal democracies range from the obvious to requiring closer dissection beyond the scope of this essay. But one part of this puzzle is that the modern(ising) state and the progress of specialisation eventually resulted in the professionalisation of armies. This kind of specialisation, and the end of the militia which it brought, represented the gravest danger for Ferguson. Shorn of the necessary exposure to violence and the martial training to partake in it effectively, the overspecialised subject of a state in commercial society would, generationally, lose the faculty entirely (indeed, much of military training, after all, is simply the accustomisation of soldiers to regular violence).

The professional soldier, whose sole craft is the practice of violence, would become no different to the mercenary — separate from his fellow citizens, who are nonetheless entirely dependent on him. Ferguson constantly drew analogies to the Roman Republic-turned-Empire, describing the kind of state whose violent capacities were divorced from the broad base of its citizenry in this way as ‘Praetorian’ (divorced from the society it sits over, and in equal parts parasitic upon and the guardian of the people at large). Though military-praetorian states would only be a short-lived experiment in Western modernity, governments since the 19th century onwards assumed ever greater responsibilities, in which the condition of dependence of the ordinary person (and corporate entities like businesses, or capital as a force in itself) on the central authority not only for security, but in the provision of public goods, coordination of private interaction and exchange has increased exponentially. Under these conditions of dependence upon the state, it is not only the physical capacity to extra-legally resist or ‘Exit’ which diminishes, but also the directly antagonistic orientation towards it which would motivate such resistance (as opposed to working for change within the system), precisely because any extra-legal action becomes unimaginable.

This process was interrupted by the total ‘people’s wars’ of the twentieth century, in which conflict between European powers with roughly equivalent levels of economic and military sophistication (and bottlenecks in military technology) demanded mass conscript armies. The experience of these wars delayed the atrophying of the psychological constitution and the technical and organisational abilities necessary to engage in non/counter-institutional coordination of violence within the broader population. Conscription ensured the organisational memory which would later facilitate paramilitarism, most notably during the mid-century. Under various political conditions, from Germany in the 20s to Ulster and Italy in the 60s and 70s, these potentialities did indeed manifest to varying extents. The rupture from these conditions is easily visible in the latter half of the century — for example, in observing American civilian and conscript responses to the Vietnam War compared with earlier attitudes towards similar conflicts in Korea and elsewhere.

It is finally worth noting that exposure to violence is not solely the preserve of military involvement. For essentially all of human history, some level of interpersonal violence coloured the lives of men in a near-universal fashion. The extent of this transformation in the nature of life cannot be understated. In Britain, 79% of men have never been in a fight as an adult. Around half have never been in a fight at all. To most of our ancestors, the prospect of a 40-year-old man who had never experienced violence would presumably be about as laughable as a 40-year-old virgin was to the audience of the eponymous film, and would carry similar connotations of fundamental incompleteness. As an aside, it is interesting that we recognise the ways in which the suppression of sexuality can lead to perversions of character and distortions of our nature — yet we pay no attention to the total absence of this equally fundamental experience in our lives and the consequences thereof.

The problem of de-corporatisation

Ferguson was, however, unaware of a new vector for political action which would rise and fall following the period of high modernity. The highly specialised modern economy would introduce new vulnerabilities for states, which popular movements and non-state actors could exploit. Furthermore, the openness of democratic states to entry facilitated the rise of organised efforts to capture office within them. The two great institutions of democratic political action which arose in this context were trade unions and political parties, which at their foundation had a character very different to the hollow echoes of them which exist today.

Trade unions acutely understood their relationship to the economic processes (such as the provision of public goods in transportation or energy) which underpinned the state. At critical junctures over the century following the Second Industrial Revolution, unions were able to leverage labour power both in revolutionary moments (such as the Russian Revolution) and non-revolutionary ones (across the Western world and especially in Britain), where they were able to extract political concessions within the democratic framework chiefly by the shock use of labour ‘Exit’ in strikes. In their earliest period, unions were de facto extra-legal political organisations (at least in the relevant sense here, and sometimes straightforwardly according to the law) because of the threat of this kind of Exit.

The term ‘political party’ describes a range of institutional structures. In British political history, the term is first applied anachronistically to describe groupings in Parliament that tended to vote together, such as the Whigs or the Tories. Following the Representation of the People Act 1867, which doubled the franchise to include all male heads of household, both the Conservatives and the Liberals became true political parties in the modern sense, with memberships open to the public. But it was elsewhere that the form was taken to its maximal extent, in America, in two very different forms with the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and the political machines of the Democratic party; and in Europe, with the revolutionary parties of fascism and communism. Sometimes more so even than the unions, these parties were able to organise every political effort of their membership, and in many cases even exercised a great deal of control over their everyday lives. Many of them even established semi-professionalised military means of their own in the form of party militias (readers will be familiar with the Blackshirts, the Red Front and the original Antifaschistische Aktion, but may not be aware that Lincoln had his own militia in the lead-up to his election). Even without formal party militias, the expectation in other countries that political affiliation included some level of ‘muscle’ and exercise of street power as part and parcel of political life made British ‘democracy’ a remarkably violent affair through the late 19th-mid 20th century by our standards.

What both of these forms of organisation shared was the capacity to formalise and institutionalise extra-legal political action, which could then feed back into the official, legitimate power contest. This greatly extended the scope for political action: organised in these forms, the economic and social conditions of modernity were transformed into an asset, as the same kind of domestication and reliance on broader social structures which reduced each citizen’s individual political agency encouraged them to corporatise and thereby recapture sovereignty by exploiting vulnerabilities in a hyper-specialised world.

Those who imagined revolutionary change from the mid-late nineteenth century onwards were therefore able to develop a far more institutionalised mode of delivering a rupture, through the total capture of the existing institutions of state and the use of state power to direct society. Germany, Italy, and the United States all saw transformative political movements succeed in the interwar period, yet all at least ostensibly continued to operate broadly within pre-existing constitutional frameworks of legitimacy, securing their desired change by replacing officeholders with party members throughout the state. Even the March on Rome was followed by Mussolini’s appointment as Prime Minister, and in most cases modern revolutionaries began or concluded their conquest of the state by winning an election.

Since the middle of the century, however, and especially in the last two decades thereof, these forces have diminished greatly. The unions were in many cases folded into the official decision-making procedures of the state, where their influence withered as the Western economy shifted towards types of labour less conducive to unionisation and the process of specialisation further divorced individuals from the productive process as a whole (making it harder to leverage the chokepoints that they had previously controlled). Political parties, too, saw a decline in membership and general salience as the scope of political contestation shrank and more and more decision-making rights were outsourced to permanent bureaucracies. In many countries, including most of Europe and de facto the United States, parties have become semi-official organs of the state, their activities regulated and controlled within a centrally determined framework. Whilst it may still be possible to construct an organisation on the same basis as these great organs of democratic power, which abrogates the problems of modernity by providing a legitimised framework through which individuals can act outside of the official structure, no such organisation truly exists today.

The problem of exit

Ultimately, any possibility on the civil war spectrum requires competing factions exercising leverage in order to coerce the state or the political body as a whole into concessions (or indeed total surrender). A breakdown into civil war proper requires an inability to resolve these conflicts resulting from bargaining friction — usually the consequence of incomplete or inaccurate information on one side or both. How might this pattern of escalation play out today?

In his book ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’, Albert O. Hirschman typed three ways in which dissatisfied members of firms, organisations and states may raise their objections. We have already referred to the use of Exit (the temporary withdrawal of participation in a system or the attempt to permanently detach oneself from it), and Voice (the raising of grievance or proposals for change through officially sanctioned mechanisms). Hirschman, a left-wing economist writing at the height of post-war corporatism, feared Exit as an anti-democratic capitalist discipline to overcome the power of labour, and narrowly defined it as a market-based mechanism operating primarily through the flight of Capital across national borders. Per Quinn Slobodian’s account in Globalists, Capital, F.A. Hayek, and the Austrians in Geneva, presented with the losing hand against the dominant position of labour (and national) power through the exercise of Voice after the Second World War, turned to an institutionalisation of Exit in what became known as neoliberalism. Yet a more expansive understanding of Exit may be warranted to provide a full account of its historical impact. Beyond the mass of physical bodies, is a strike meaningfully different from the temporary withdrawal of Capital, insofar as it is an attempt to extract concessions from the state through the threat of the withdrawal of labour? If not, then we can rightly describe unions, for most of their history, as operating under the exact same modus operandi that Hirschman feared Capital would deploy.

During a period in which conceptions of revolutionary change were defined in strictly economic terms, these modes of Exit were highly impactful. Yet, today, both Capital and especially Labour have become denuded of their political heft. Whilst the weakening of these strategies may have particular historical and policy roots, in broad terms it should not surprise us that neither tool seems a plausible route to political change today, since, at least in Western countries, we can no longer speak sensibly of Capital or Labour as coherent political interests. The divergence of Corporate America in 2024 provides obvious evidence for this, as does the swing of much of the working classes behind the right across the West despite the continued official support of most unions for the left. Fleeting glimpses of newly relevant exercises of Exit have been seen — most notably the strikes of truckers and farmers in Canada, the Netherlands, and elsewhere — but all so far have come from niche sections of society which lack the leverage to escalate conflict sufficiently.

In the absence of any obvious options here, and as a response to the tyrannical nature of democratic society upon individual freedom described by Tocqueville, a radicalised concept of Exit has captured the imaginations of highly divergent figures on the right sharing an elitist bent, from Ayn Rand to the Bronze Age Pervert and many in the American tech sphere. These ideas forego the possibility of domestic change, and instead seek complete separation from existing states and structures of governance. Proposals have ranged from the establishment of private cities or microstates, to Patri Friedman’s ‘Seasteading’, to the exploitation of growing global disorder to initiate a new golden age of piracy by Western PMCs which promises (at least for a lucky few) the negative liberty of Robinson Crusoe over the sovereigntist classical freedom of Cicero. Yet all these proposals rely on further breakdown of the global system, and with it the ability of states to assert authority. Even in the multipolar future that many expect, the balance of power between the world’s national and regional governments and these kinds of non-state actors will continue to be highly unequal. The experience of perhaps the only somewhat successful private city so far in Honduras, Prospera, which is in the process of being shut down by hostile courts and politicians, is instructive. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt at Exit in recent years has been Elon Musk’s mission to leave the planet entirely — a mission he no longer seems to believe in.

Regardless of whether any of these efforts may bear their own fruit — and it would be wrong to entirely deny the possibility, or indeed to denigrate the attempt — forms of Exit which abandon the attempt to leverage political change cannot contribute to the escalation of political conflict, and the tendency of those seeking Exit to look in that direction dampens the possibility that such conflicts will boil over.

A very similar dynamic can be seen in expressions of Voice. Hirschman’s description of Voice belies the fact that it too, to be effective, must have an assertive character. An argument’s power lies in the support that argument can muster, and it is the necessity of demonstrating this that has meant the protest has emerged as the dominant expression of Voice across the West over the past several centuries. The possibility of protests boiling over into civil conflict is deeply engraved in our political imaginations. Indeed, today’s understanding of regime change is intimately bound up in the symbolism of ‘the people’ marching on the corrupt dictatorship to wrest power for themselves. Yet for this to actually occur requires that same pattern of escalation to be met with bargaining friction which results in a breakdown. Typically, this involves a state meeting protests with force, miscalculating their level of support, and being overwhelmed by the response. Yet whilst protests once carried an implicit threat as a result of the violent capacities of the mob, today they have no such power. As a result, protest — and with it, the power of Voice itself — has become an entirely symbolic phenomenon. The past two summers saw as many as 100,000 protestors attend the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rallies, yet neither the state nor the demonstrators themselves had any reason to fear that the marches could escalate towards revolutionary action (as, for example, protests in England following the Napoleonic Wars could have done). This mutual understanding therefore precludes the possibility of the escalation spiral which would lead Voice to produce a breakdown into conflict.

The problem of globalisation

There is one final condition of modernity which deserves brief consideration in this discussion: the historically novel condition of a genuinely global system. The often trite adage that, if one strikes at the king, one had better be sure not to miss, provides a warning against any attempt at political change — which can only meaningfully be pursued at the level of the state, which is broadly speaking to say at the level of the nation — when many important centres of power lay beyond its borders.

An obvious example of this situation is the imperial power of the United States — a hegemon which more than any before cares deeply about matters of internal governance regarding its ‘allies’, and will act to enforce those concerns. Equally, the structures of global governance which regulate international affairs impose various conditions upon each and every country.

It’s easy to wave away these concerns on the basis that a revolutionary party could withdraw from various international organisations if they presented a barrier to their ambitions. Yet it is by no means obvious that pressure from external states — and, perhaps more importantly, international opinion more broadly — can be so easily disregarded.

To take a relatively minor example, consider the currently contentious issue of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility in Britain, which many readers will have been disappointed to learn will not be abolished under a future Reform government. The relevant facts in this decision are entirely divorced from the political preferences and even the analytical opinions of those making it. Whether one believes it is desirable to depoliticise budgetary decisions politically or sensible to do so for fiscal reasons is not the point — the fact that international financial markets do creates the reality that abolishing this organisation would incur a cost paid through increased yields on government bonds. Whether or not that cost is sufficient to force a government into certain choices, it is certainly sufficient to influence any potential regime’s choices, constraining their freedom and thereby reducing the attractiveness of revolutionary action.

This again returns us to the difficulty of Exit. Much of that which imposes on us from outside in an international context is entirely depersonalised, much as is the economic superstructure which imposes on us as individuals (as previously discussed). There is a historic tendency to believe in the power of the state to overcome economic forces and external actors and enforce its will through physical might — a power which the state did indeed possess throughout most of history. Yet today, that power has never been weaker. The mobility of capital as well as international tax and regulatory competition have constrained the ability of states to effectively restructure economic life, whilst the spread of global media and communications has limited their ability to direct cultural life at a national level.

The experience of Viktor Orbán in Hungary is telling in this latter regard especially. Despite his strong grip over the Hungarian state and his commitment to promoting a cultural alternative to Western liberalism, he was ultimately unable to do so. That is in part a particular failing of his model, which contained little to attract or excite the kind of talented young people that invariably determine the direction of cultural trends. Yet the problem was perhaps insoluble regardless of this: the Hungarian state, which would once have held a commanding position within the psychological landscape of Hungarians from which it could exercise great cultural power, simply cannot do so in a world in which Hungarian youth have such a broad window on the world through the internet and other means. Individuals adopt cultural trends largely out of the conviction that doing so will elevate their own status. If internal status within a group and external status outside of it are in competition, internal status can only be preferred if the group is powerful enough that it is better to be a bigger fish in that smaller pond. Hungary is a small nation; any Hungarian cultural project will be small as a result — and the world is so much bigger. Yet, we have to ask, barring perhaps the two global powers of America and China (and even the latter has yet to truly make its mark in this regard), is any country big enough to offer its best citizens greater satisfaction of ambition through the rejection of everything outside its borders?

Conclusions

There is perhaps one argument in favour of the possibilities we have refuted which remains somewhat compelling: that civil conflict is a capacity which exists within our unchanging human nature, and that any circumstances which preclude it can therefore only ever be fleeting. Yet the arguments above make clear that, regardless of the extent to which we are the same animal that fought so many wars before, the social, economic, political, and psychological conditions of modernity are genuinely novel in ways which fundamentally reshape the scope of political possibilities.

Given the atrophied capacities of any one faction to develop leverage over the society as a whole – or in other words, real political power – and the gradual closure of physical horizons which has only become more acute since the victory of ‘liberal democracy’ and capitalism in the Cold War — it should be no surprise that the ability to imagine revolution, or the fundamentally different mode of life which might inspire it, has more or less disappeared in any mass sense. This should be the first question that presents itself to any party interested in ‘regime change from below’. This article has discussed the limitations of Western populations in regaining the muscle memory to confront state power. Ultimately, considering the constraints on mass action, those who hope for it will likely be disappointed — and those who fear it fear in vain.

Yet, whilst acute civil conflict which results in fundamental political change might well now be impossible, another kind of simmering unrest could still arise. It may be the case that Western populations’ realisation that increasing vulnerabilities can be exploited by organised actors continues to develop, as it did in the aftermath of incidents such as the Southport riots. Though none of this will come to the cataclysmic ends prophesied by some online, the question remains open as to whether this more limited exercise of real political power by non-state actors may eventually begin to reshape the ambitions of those who have learned to act. What exactly that initial exercise might look like, and how it can exist beneath the official mechanisms of democratic legitimacy, will be explored in the following part of this article.

This article was written by Francis Gaultier, Commissioning Editor, and Harry Jee, Managing Editor. Special thanks to Edward Howard. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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Saturday Night Live UK, the domestic iteration of the long-running US sketch show, must be understood as a success. Despite a modest broadcast reach, many of its sketches enjoyed social media virality. That it was recommissioned for a second series, which launched Saturday, evidences the rationale behind a £2mn-per-episode outlay – SNL UK will, for now, retain its position as Sky’s flagship comedy offering.

It’s not surprising that a well-funded spin-off of a well-known franchise should succeed – especially in the hands of writers and cast members drawn from the upper echelons of the stand-up circuit and social media alike. Yet SNL UK’s obituaries were penned even before its first broadcast. Some critiques were reasonable – such as questioning the efficacy of investing millions into live sketch comedy (itself a declining medium) while VoD viewership approaches parity with linear broadcast television. Others, however, rubbished the show for being distinctly un-British. Whether flouting this normative Britishness by virtue of its US sister show, its mere format, or something far more nebulous entirely, the now-disproven consensus was one of scepticism.

Given that these naysayers likely hold less stringent views on other metrics of national belonging, this does not evidence an emergent comedic nativism. Beneath this charge, though, lies a faint shred of patriotism – one entirely rooted in the notion that we alone can arbitrate what is and isn’t funny. In the US, this notion of a distinct British humour still carries weight – a key soft power lever when the White House sees London ablaze and our reputation is decimated by weekly migrant atrocities. This is a far cry from the early 2010s, when teenage girls with an internet connection and a >5 IELTS score were routinely inculcated into Anglophilia by way of Sherlock and Dan and Phil. With our PR at a historically low ebb, our panicked cultural commentariat can still retreat into a Blairite ‘England’s Dreaming’ – come what may, at least we are still funny.

This presupposes that British comedy is in rude health. Our lengthy back catalogue feels its age – neither Monty Python nor the Carry On films elicit more than a pity laugh. Repeating even the lightest of Bernard Manning’s material would now merit a knock at the door. The doddering, reheated Spitting Image reboot grappled with politics beyond satirical puppetry’s scope, and now finds itself reheated again to satirise the Gary Lineker-backed The Rest Is podcast series (a more fitting subject). That our better output from the bygone days required woke cosmetic surgery in 2020 can be blamed on concurrent events – but by and large, our pre-2000s canon does little to support our enduring claim to being uniquely funny.

On Legacy Panel Comedy

In recent decades, this reputation likely stems more from a robust standup circuit than yesteryear’s campy films. For the Fringe’s most prodigal sons and daughters, though, the advent of the panel show would prove far more lucrative and offer greater exposure. Have I Got News For You, first broadcast in the 90s, presaged the early-2000s boom period and informed the format of its progeny. HIGNFY would soon be joined by Mock the Week as both standard-bearer and perfect exemplar of the political panel show, though it would be remiss to exclude less overtly political shows such as QI and 8/10 Cats from this category. To maintain this article’s focus, and to spare your author from Stephen Fry, this section will concern itself with those expressly concerned with current affairs.

That Ian Hislop, perhaps the archetypal panellist, cut his teeth writing for Spitting Image illustrates the “closed shop” nature of British television comedy. This extends to comedians as well as public figures. There was much overlap between guest comedians in the panel show’s heyday – perhaps owing more to the Edinburgh Fringe pipeline than some shadowy plot to exclude right-wing comics. It was no accident, though, that the panel circuit became rigidly left-wing. Have I Got News For You would, by its nature, often feature a token right-leaning figure – platforming Farage three times, all before his elevation to arch-populist demagogue following the 2014 European elections. Again, without wishing to suggest conspiracy, this suggests that those on the right were only welcome should they not pose a threat. Geoff Norcott, a self-professed Tory, was the most transgressive guest invited (just twice) onto Mock the Week. This hardly inspired much pearl-clutching despite occurring during the Conservatives’ late 2010s ebb.

This was a rare moment of even-handedness. Inversely, a more palatable cabal would cycle weekly between shows. Any TV purchased after 2018 will, inevitably, have James Acaster’s likeness burned into the screen. The likes of Josh Widdicombe, Rob Beckett, and Katherine Ryan enjoyed sustained success after a stint professing safe-edgy on the panel circuit. Of the regulars, Nish Kumar would fly too close to the sun – his show being cancelled by the BBC, ostensibly for its egregious left-wing posturing. Frankie Boyle, once the closest thing to TV comedy’s enfant terrible, pivoted his career to penning political op-eds, in some bizarre sort of struggle session. His recent output seems far tamer, its vitriol outpaced by the algorithm.

Their audience

Younger readers may be forgiven (and envied) for not knowing these names, but the panel show once enjoyed a privileged position in the cultural canon. Scarcely a decade ago, clips of The Last Leg enticed millions of viewers with titles like “Westboro Baptist Church Rant”. Such was comedy before right-wing politics entered the English-speaking mainstream – the worst excesses of pre-Trump conservatism afforded left-leaning comedians ample material for their assumedly left-leaning audiences. There was an implicit raised eyebrow at those “crazy yanks”, and a relief that such overt right-wing politics could never find favour here. In hindsight, this all looks rather naïve.

This is not to say that panel shows were progressive prolefeed – they necessitated at least basic knowledge of current affairs, and conferred some degree of cultural capital upon their viewers. At least in the provinces, Have I Got News For You was seen as more commendable weekend viewing than Britain’s Got Talent or anything with Keith Lemon. By the time I started sixth form, I’d moved on to somewhat more niche political entertainment but was shocked to see Mock the Week listed as a learning resource for Politics A Level. Why bother with dreary broadsheet think-pieces?

It was as if, for a time, the panel show carried a vestigial coolness. News (but funny), for the left-leaning, young, and the in-the-know (but not in a wonkish way). It must be understood that peak panel show coincided with the mid-2010s zeitgeist with its so-called “youthquake”, “Milifandom”, et al. The Tories were at their then-lowest ebb with young voters: Brexit had stolen a whole generation’s future by requiring marginally more paperwork to study abroad. While the Glasto crowd chanted Jeremy Corbyn’s name, Theresa May recalled her halcyon wheat field days. Naturally, panel show comedians saw chance to make hay.

Today, their natural audience has drifted somewhat – more closely resembling the panellists themselves rather than a younger, cooler target market of days gone by. The now-residual circuit forms part of the Centrist Dad starter pack. The times have changed, making yesterday’s men out of once-transgressive panellists. Seven years ago, just 9% of 18-24-year-olds had read a copy of Private Eye, and one would not expect there to have been a post-Covid resurgence. There was once a time when Ian Hislop turned heads, but he and his diehard readership will soon pass into history. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair!

Comedy for yuppies?

The panel show’s dislocation from its audience owes a great deal to media fragmentation – no longer are there TV shows which have cross-demographic, national appeal. Rather than traditional comedy, young people more readily turn to the FYP’s algorithmic offering. Downstream of this is the emergence of a new set of cultural touchstones and sensibilities exclusive to Gen Z. This is not wholly cross-demographic (BAME Britain has its own cadre of influencers), but a particular element of this mood finds expression in SNL UK. Its humour is that of the urbane, university-educated, under-35s. Those who are downwardly-mobile in an economic sense, but retain the cultural trappings of a middle-class background.

So too are they Online. This is best illustrated by the fourth episode’s “Mr Bagley” sketch, the first forty-five seconds of which imitate, frame-for-frame, Ian Wright’s reunion with his former teacher. The original clip routinely circulates Twitter – winning it a far greater (and younger) audience than received by its original early 2000s broadcast. This streak is further demonstrated by the season finale’s British Pork sketch, which parodies a government-backed advert from the 80s. SNL UK’s target audience are unlikely to recall ever watching the source material – it inspires mockery of the absurd and archaic, instead of calling upon any nostalgia. As with the Ian Wright clip, the source material is transmitted online, after the fact. Of the show’s cast members, the eldest are at best late millennial and therefore young enough to be social media natives – which lends itself to comedy more relevant to the Gen Z lived experience than anything mustered by Acaster, Kumar, and Widdicombe (41, 41, and 43 years old, respectively).

Of the first season’s non-political sketches, the most dated makes reference to Mr Blobby, a character from 1992’s Noel’s House Party. This aside, the show’s touchstones predominantly date from 2000 onwards – spanning teleshopping, sensationalist women’s magazines onto e-scooters and so-called “brat summer”. This may (perhaps rightly) put readers off from tuning into the new season, but these are recognisable and current for the young and metropolitan. It’s hard to imagine the likes of Dara Ó Briain or Angela Barnes mustering a five-minute segue on situationships, nor is it likely that it’d land with their present audience. The merits of such jokes aside, they are dislocated from the twenty-and-thirty-somethings who once formed their target audience.

Without saying that SNL UK is the last stand of implicit whiteness, the lack of BAME-pandering is striking. For a start, that none of the twelve-strong cast are of South Asian heritage excludes the RS3-racing, balloon-huffing part of our shared national experience. SNL UK is touted as “Live from London!”, not the Balti Triangle. In fact, the show’s geographic remit stretches no further than the Banana. There are scant olive branches extended to the capital’s young scholars – in fact, the closest thing to a portrayal of roadman/”ends” culture is the second episode’s pirate radio sketch. Pirate radio may once have been a fixture of yesteryear’s Black British experience, but is now so archaic that its parodying here merely retreads old ground. The writing room may be littered with rejected gags about clean-up crews and Ghanaian aunties, but Black British lived experience finds little representation beyond a few interjections from Ayoade Bamgboye (who is almost fit enough to get away with it). SNL UK caters not to Croydon, but to Fuckinghamshire-on-Thames. That it makes no effort to ground itself in BAME lived experience is (obviously) not a political statement, but it perhaps demonstrates that whining about representative entertainment is old hat. One critique levelled against the panel show was that, in its glory days, it was an aggressively male space – in amending this, some of the humour was lost along the way. That a broadcaster’s flagship comedy offering has yet to be skewered for insufficient “representation” perhaps demonstrates that something has changed. At last, we can stop pretending to enjoy Afrobeats, and get back to tossing the pill about with Chuggsy.

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From Mock the Week to Mock the Woke

If Nick, 30 ans sees his lived experience reflected in SNL UK, it extends to his politics. It should be understood that the cadre of Reform-voting grad schemers is a small one, as is the supply of right-coded comedy on display here. Trump, Palantir, and Israel are routinely the bêtes noires of the current affairs-centric Weekend Update segment, taking over from the Leave-bashing which once dominated panel shows. This time around, though, the jokes are usually funny enough to elicit a laugh from your jaded right-wing author.

In a recent interview, Dara Ó Briain noted that the 2010-2024 Conservative governments accelerated Mock the Week’s boorishly left-wing tilt. This incumbency factor explains why SNL UK punches left as often as it does right. George Fouracres’ portrayal of Keir Starmer featured heavily. The end of Andy Burnham’s honeymoon will likely coincide with this season’s run of episodes, and should provide ample material for George Fouracres’ impression. The first season’s only broadside against Farage was neither funny nor made a strong point. While we’re some way from this journal’s editor taking over Mr Hislop’s seat on the HIGNFY panel, the existence of TV comedy which (even reluctantly) punches left is remarkably refreshing. Gone are the days when TV comedy was wholly populated by early-stage Steve Brays.

For want of Al Nash revealing his power level, SNL UK cannot be understood as /ourshow/. Nor is it the harbinger of a decidedly more right-wing comedy circuit. It is, however, subversive enough to merit study. Weekend Update’s recurring Hand in Hand segment strikes me as rebutting the faux sentimentalism which predominated during the pandemic. While falling flat, the first episode’s Paddington Experience was a welcome jibe at the bear’s recent apotheosis. Poking fun at this sort of thing is nothing new, of course – case in point pre-woke Frankie Boyle – but the present national mood is markedly different than, say, twenty years ago. A volatile patriotic groundswell butts against a crumbling establishment, the dispossessed against those who insist that everything is fine. This latter camp have overplayed their hand over this decade – proffering mass lockdown hysteria before insisting that adding five million to the population has but positive consequences. They smell their own blood in the water, and are mooting how best to buttress their position – be it changing the voting system, or promoting state broadcasters at the expense of independent journalism.

These same broadcasters commissioned the aforementioned slew of panel shows, where blooded-in interlocutors could hawk the safe-edgy humour which set the terms of debate and shaped conceptions of our side. The dismissive classism embodied best by Russell Howard’s “muslamic ray guns” bit is now widely condemned, but such jokes framed anti-migration attitudes as low-status. Any self-deprecating humour was naturally verboten, as was anything which overstepped the mark and threatened the consensus. It would be folly to pretend that SNL UK operates without Ofcom’s oversight. However, a soft touch moves the needle as well. A major factor in the show’s success is that its sketches perform well on social media – likely by design. Readers of a similar demographic to the author will likely find that more of their Instagram mutuals follow the SNL UK account than those of any BBC/Channel 4 offering. If, as we’re led to believe, prolonged exposure to the Algorithm turns people into far-right extremists, there is some value in anti-government satire winning hundreds of thousands of views in an as-yet-unregulated public forum. It’s not unthinkable that these clips could send future readers of this publication down the alt-right pipeline.

I will not beseech readers to watch the second season. Not everyone shares this guilty pleasure, and those expecting truly cutting political satire will be better served by the timeline. I would, however, affirm that it has single-handedly improved the health of TV comedy. Peter Kay is yet to play Nick Griffin in a six-part comedy-drama about the BNP, but we’ve moved beyond the worst excesses of the 2010s.

More importantly, though, a generation which lost two years of freedom (and will pay £400bn for the pleasure) now has something close to representation in the media. Britain’s would-be yuppies are owed far more than this. Yet until Reform unwinds decades of sclerotic economic policy, and Zia Yusuf requisitions all dessert shops on behalf of Blank Street, this is a welcome reprieve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carni: a brief history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘social value’ of Carnival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YIMBYism from Gove to Starmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mansardism: YIMBYs on crack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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