The Most Serene Republic of Venice was, at its zenith, one of the most admired nations in Europe. Its form of governance was wildly complicated, but afforded it a level of both stability and entrepreneurship that allowed it to become one of the richest cities the world has ever seen — the city became dominant in commerce, finance and banking. The citizens of the Republic thought themselves and their system, not without reason, as uniquely fair-minded and just. Her empire, acquired through maritime exploits, afforded dominance in the Mediterranean, and her fleets (manned by free citizens, and not galley slaves) were feared. She led the world in manufacturing — the Arsenale was an early form of a kind of mass industrial process, with galleys built in sections in parallel to allow for rapid ship production. For a while, it seemed like her power would never wane.

So what happened?

What is undeniable is that the world changed. Larger, once backwards, states simply caught up. A catastrophic war on the continent ended the Republic’s status as a premier power — in spite of the extraordinary pluck and resilience her people showed throughout in preserving their city. That spirit helped give rise to a new self-conception, in the ‘Myth of Venice’, that despite their near-total defeat, their unique sense of justice granted them divine favour and fortune.

Such moments do occur in history, as we know well ourselves — but the charge that indicts a state or its governance is the inability to respond to a changing world. We can point in this case to Venice’s constitution to demonstrate how she became incapable of responding to the myriad new challenges she faced in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The great fear of the Venetian aristocracy was that any one person or family would become too powerful and overrun the political system. As a merchant republic, they elected their leader, the Doge, to a lifetime tenure, but worried the position would effectively become hereditary. Therefore, they devised a kind of Parliament with complex voting systems and drawing of lots to ensure the great families were represented but to avoid the concentration of political power in one man. It was also expected that young men from such families would climb a cursus honorum of sorts, as in the Roman Republic, teaching them the various aspects of governance and economics that gave Venice her strength.

Fear of destabilisation, particularly after the attempted coup against the government in the Tiepolo Conspiracy of 1310, led to the fragmentation of political power and authority. The Council of Ten, initially a temporary measure to monitor the exiles in that failed attempt, became a permanent feature, taking much power for itself. Membership of the Great Council itself had been closed and made hereditary in 1297, making the structures of power increasingly both diffuse and ossified.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t some successes even in that period. Decline is seldom so linear. The great military success against the Ottomans at Lepanto, reminiscent of the Falklands for Britain, occurred long after Venice had reached her peak. Nevertheless, even then the golden age was over. Shifting trade patterns towards the Atlantic nations had eroded her economic power, while the Ottoman juggernaut ate away at the Stato da Mar, her maritime empire. Venice, which once had the most dynamic ruling classes and had responded to all manner of external and internal threats, had accumulated so many checks and balances in her constitution that any meaningful difference in direction became impossible to countenance. Most damningly, the unassailable Myth of Venice — which carried the city through the darkest days of the War of the League of Cambrai — began to make questioning the slow drift of the system into decay verboten.

Whatever one might say about the value of historical parallels, I have seen far worse drawn than the Most Serene Republic and another larger, colder, and rainier archipelago that risks a similar fate.

Britain today stands at a constitutional crossroads — the accumulation of laws and state bodies, especially post-Blair, has left it sclerotic and motionless. There are occasional spasms: during the COVID years, the state could genuinely marshal huge resources under emergency powers and to great effect in locking up young people and the productive economy. But by and large, a judiciary with a much stronger litigating culture, armed with a fully-equipped arsenal of primary legislation and common-law principles, can thwart almost any meaningful policy commitment.

To list them all would run this article into the hundreds of pages, but we all know the legislative story in the Human Rights Act, Equality Act, and Climate Change Act, which forced the British state, once famed for its flexibility and ability for ministers to act with political will, into an iron cage. Our own mythologisation of vague ideas that once found root in worthwhile principles and historical experiences — the ‘Rule of Law’, sense of fair-play, ‘our reputation as an international leader’ — has become a fetish that saps institutional flexibility or action. No more can ministers, empowered by a democratic mandate and the national interest, pursue policy without considering statutory duties towards equality, vaguely defined concepts of ‘human rights,’ and climate targets. In an attempt to ape the Americans, the concept of ‘Separation of Powers’ was introduced by the backdoor — no such concept existed for our forebears. The Constitutional Reform Act of 2005 created a Supreme Court in a pale imitation of that American institution, and successful Blairite depoliticisation efforts have given it an aura of grandeur in the minds of twee Britpoppers.

Power, which used to be the responsibility of Cabinet, has now been diffused away to quangos, devolved governments, NGOs, and judges. Like La Serenissima before us, it seems impossible for the government of the day to do anything meaningful about the structural problems facing us. As the world changes around us still, Britain is currently powerless to act domestically or internationally. This was the tragedy of Venice. She had not forgotten how to be grand nor rich nor even how to administer — only how to act. Venice did not collapse overnight. She became a museum slowly, then all at once.

Britain need not follow the Serene Republic. But to do so, we must give up the pretence that politics as usual will get us out of this. Winning an election is not the same thing as possessing power. We must have politicians who are willing to understand how the existing system functions so they can begin to cut the Gordian knots of the restraints that bind us to managed decline. As this will necessarily involve wresting power back from the endless sea of quangos, NGOs, and other veto players which have enjoyed a comfortable existence under this new settlement, a plan for institutional resistance must be prepared. All the things that have been quietly removed from the political arena must be put back into play. Our own version of The Myth no longer serves us — and so it must be discarded. We are not favoured by the divine, nor do any of the quasi-religious mantras of the legalistic class provide us any fortune.

The lessons from La Serenissima are simple enough. A country can possess great wealth, prestige, and even an array of impressive military victories, but still lose the ability to shape its place in the world. The outward appearance may be of splendour, but the column can be rotting from the inside. Britain is not yet Venice, but if we continue on our present course we will end up in the same place: admired by tourists (in what is left to admire), studied by historians, and irrelevant to the future.

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

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Last weekend, we joined tens of other right wing luminaries at the inaugural CPAC GB, hosted by former Prime Minister and current national embarrassment Liz Truss. The event came less than a month after another conservative conference hosted in London and funded by American evangelicals, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Today, we’ll review both events, asking what this kind of conference really achieves and exploring how the right might do better at organising large events.

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It is also less than 140 days out from the Victorian election, and her party One Nation is still without a state leader. This disorganisation is exactly why no reasonable person would have bet with any semblance of confidence — even as late as mid-2025 — that in 2026 One Nation (ON) would be consistently tied in polling with the Labor government, not just in Victoria, but across the country. Even less conceivable is that its leader, Hanson, would become the de facto leader of the opposition.

With the exception of just under 9% at the 1998 federal election, national support for One Nation has generally hovered around the 3-6% mark, at least whenever the party was active and under Hanson’s leadership (during her 14-year absence from the party, support was so negligible it bordered on zero, that is, when it bothered to contest at all). These long-contained embers of single-digit support smouldered until late September last year, when what initially seemed like a cyclical and fleeting 1-3% poll boost to ~9% from June to August consolidated as a new baseline in the low teens, providing a launchpad for the party to ascend into the high teens soon after.

From that point on, Australian voters have hardly looked back, with momentum in the electorate propelling One Nation from ~17% on the eve of the Bondi Attack to as high as 31.5% in late June, and since consolidating around 27%.

This growth was so unanticipated we are still left searching for a comprehensive answer to the basic question, ‘How did we get here?’

Indeed, we can only properly account for this drastic transformation of Australian politics by first travelling back in time and then returning to the present to consider the factors that have positioned voters en masse to be suddenly receptive to the woman who has long stood as the very face of ‘racist’ politics in Australia.

I. Fish and Chips, Parliament and Prison

From Ipswich to Canberra

The political rise of Pauline (as most Australians simply refer to her) has not been exponential. At times chaotic and volatile, almost inarguably so. Though the history of One Nation equally lends itself to a certain predictability, and while some of these patterns have contributed to Pauline’s longevity, others must be defied if the party is to capitalise on the unprecedented support it currently enjoys.

Hanson was born Pauline Seccombe in Brisbane in 1954, where she went to school until dropping out at age 15. During this early period of her life, she also worked at her parents’ fish and chip shop in Ipswich, just southwest of Brisbane. At 16, she married a postwar Polish immigrant eight years her senior and had two sons with him; however they divorced after a few years. A timely article featured in the Sydney Morning Herald some weeks ago, an attempted hit piece and obvious exercise in divorcee resentment which fell flat, dragged out the ex-husband in question, who described her as “the most dishonest person [he] know[s]” and affirmed he will not be voting for One Nation.

Pauline went on to remarry Mark Hanson, whose surname she has borne since, working as a bookkeeper for the trades business they ran together. They had two children, one of whom is now involved in the party (daughter Lee), before divorcing in 1987. Whilst subsequent relationships of hers have been known to the public, Hanson has no other children and remains unmarried. Here, we form the image of Hanson as the hardened high school dropout, a dual divorcee on mutually bitter terms with her exes, a mother of four now estranged from some of her children, and an administrative worker. This is by no means an uncommon story in the collective biography of late twentieth-century lower-class Australia, where divorce rates in 1976 had increased almost fivefold from a year after Pauline’s first marriage.

We then encounter the iconic image of the pre-political Pauline Hanson: the Ipswich fish and chip shop owner. Shortly after her second divorce, Hanson ran a chippie with her romantic-turned-business partner until it was sold in 1996 in the wake of her election to federal parliament. Anna Broinowski, writing in The Conversation, credits this time in Hanson’s life with solidifying her opposition to progressive pro-Aboriginal and multicultural policies (spearheaded at the time by the Keating Labor government), and that she was “hearing all sorts of grievances about how her customers were feeling left behind by globalisation”.

Hanson then tested this growing political instinct in the Queensland local elections of 1994, where she was elected as a councillor for Ipswich City with a rather banal agenda headlined by opposition to the construction of a new library. Amusingly, this inadvertently flagged what would grow into Pauline’s sustained ‘war on woke’ and the rather lowbrow anti-intellectualism that continues to colour her unwavering anti-elitism.

Her turn to federal politics followed soon after. It didn’t take long for Hanson to be disendorsed by the party that preselected her in the Ipswich seat of Oxley. Normally, one would expect this to relegate a Liberal candidate to a position of irrelevance, especially in a Labor safe seat, but not for Pauline. Instead, the anti-Aboriginal letter she submitted to her local newspaper, which was the reason for her disendorsement by then-Opposition Leader John Howard, became a national spectacle. As Margo Kingston writes in Off the Rails, ‘Hanson was thrust onto the election campaign stage by the media to test Howard on race’.1 Pauline more than passed a test of her own, securing a 23% primary vote swing and gaining Oxley from Labor with 54.6% on a two-party-preferred basis.

If she wasn’t already worthy of the label after her election victory, Hanson indisputably went from ‘momentary public spectacle’ to ‘national figure’ in the wake of her maiden speech. Her speech, in addition to the infamous “swamped by Asians” line, included a charge that the government was “encouraging separatism” with its Aboriginal policies, a stated desire to see multiculturalism abolished, and a reference to the last major political party leader to support the White Australia Policy, Labor’s Arthur Calwell, on anti-white sentiment in Asia and Africa. To her credit, and notwithstanding any evaluation of the merit of the policies themselves, she has hardly deviated from this original populist credo: a revival of national industry and employment, state-funded national development projects, immigration restrictionism, and an opposition to internationalism.

As a product of media hyper-fixation, Hanson enjoyed the most notoriety of any politician in the 38^th Parliament, perhaps other than the Prime Minister John Howard. Peter Nicholson perfectly conveyed the extent to which she shaped the political landscape at the time in a cartoon depicting Hanson, then an independent, seated at the cabinet table with a stature as prominent as any other minister depicted, and noticeably larger than ‘Little Johnny’.

Despite her newfound celebrity, it is important to understand the entrenching of a certain persecution complex born of the Liberal Party’s abandonment of Hanson. It is no stretch to consider the Liberal Party’s throwing of Pauline to the media wolves as the psychological cornerstone of her political personality.

The early days of One Nation

Pauline rode the wave of momentum through to the formation of One Nation in 1997, with the help of David Oldfield — formerly an adviser to Tony Abbott — and his friend David Ettridge. Together, Kingston writes, the three ‘owned and [ran] the party as a private fiefdom’.2 The results of her 1998 contests were impressive: 23% of the vote and eleven MPs elected to the Queensland state parliament in June that year, and ~8.5% nationwide at the federal election (making ON the third most popular party by primary vote) in October, though with only one senator elected and Hanson herself failing in a bid to be returned to parliament.

While the primary vote of One Nation at the 1998 federal election was sizeable enough, Pauline’s personal defeat precipitated a period of great tumult in the party. 1998 was also the year that former adviser and speechwriter John Pasquarelli released a damaging book that levelled harsh critiques at Hanson and primarily targeted Oldfield, the man who replaced him. However, Pasquarelli confirmed in The Australian that as of 2016, he and Pauline were once more on good terms.

In late 2000, Hanson moved to expel Oldfield from the party and drove to the head office in Sydney, locking herself inside and negotiating with Oldfield through a keyhole – he says she was motivated by nothing other than hiding a “suspect expenses claim”, and regardless of how near to the truth this might be, it is epitomises the party of quarrel and instability that was post-1998 One Nation.3 After this, Oldfield registered One Nation New South Wales, described by The Saturday Paper as an ‘engineered split’ to take control away from Hanson.

Things only deteriorated more in 2001, and by the time the next Queensland election came around in February, not one of the eleven MPs elected to the Queensland state parliament remained a One Nation member. The final blow to Hanson’s leadership was a poor showing at the November federal election. She resigned in its wake.

Amidst all the chaos and conflict, this five-year timeframe offers the clearest of insights into the Pauline Hanson who emerged post-1996: a young woman burnt by her own party and forced to run an independent campaign, a politically naïve fish and chip shop owner pursued relentlessly by a media intent on inflaming public sentiment and claiming another ‘racist’ scalp, a figure of newfound national celebrity emotionally pierced by the loss of her seat in 1998, and a leader ever-suspicious of those around her. This is the Pauline Hanson that Australia has known since — a personality equally and in many ways contradictorily distrusting, resolute, vindictive, tenacious, principled, simple-minded, psychologically complex, and crowned with a self-centredness that can still glimmer a markedly feminine compassion.

What The Guardian’s Jeff Sparrow describes as a characteristically ‘Hansonite paranoia’ persists, and not entirely without reason, for Pauline has long been the target of plots to bring about her political downfall. For one, the Australia-Israel Review doxxed a list of 2,000 One Nation members in 1998, an action that well-known progressive Jewish activist and lawyer Mark Leibler defended without reservation.

Then, future Prime Minister Tony Abbott led the campaign, both from parliament and through legal action bankrolled by the ‘Australians for Honest Politics’ slush fund, that ended in Hanson’s imprisonment in 2003. The two had seemingly resolved their personal conflict by 2018 when Abbott spoke at the launch of Hanson’s book of collected speeches, Pauline: In Her Own Words, saying that adversity had made her ‘a better, deeper person’. Elected unopposed as federal president of the Liberal Party in May this year, Abbott now appears set for deeper cooperation with the woman he once derided as the face of, in his own words, the ‘Feral Right’ as both parties share the aim of defeating Albanese’s Labor.4 Such collaboration will proceed in a largely clandestine manner, while in the public eye Liberal leader Angus Taylor continues to deride the prospect of a One Nation government, lest Australia experience an ‘eternity of pain’.

The wrongful imprisonment of Hanson stands as yet another one of those pivotal events in her political life, alongside her first election victory and subsequent loss: a three-year sentence for electoral fraud — she and Ettridge were found guilty of submitting a fraudulent member list for registration — that was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court after she spent eleven weeks in the Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre.

II. The Comeback and the Man (barely) Behind the Curtain

In the years that followed, Hanson mostly oscillated between attempted political comebacks and reality television appearances. She also planned in 2010 to permanently relocate to Britain, which she cut short as an extended European holiday after discovering that the “English are losing their way of life because they’re controlled by foreigners”. Similar to Nigel Farage with his I’m A Celebrity! appearance and subsequent launch of GB News, Hanson was a ratings driver on television, finishing runner-up on the inaugural season of Dancing With the Stars in 2004, appearing on The Celebrity Apprentice Australia in 2011, and a regular guest commentator on the morning show circuit. It is not quite accurate to describe this 2004 to 2012 period as a retreat into the political wilderness, because Pauline did unsuccessfully contest four different elections (usually as an independent) before her return and resuscitation of a dying One Nation in 2013, followed shortly thereafter by her appointment as leader in 2014.

The subsequent six-month window of late 2014 to early 2015 is as significant in the history of One Nation as perhaps any other. It is this time when Hanson narrowly lost the race for the state seat of Lockyer by 114 votes, a campaign that laid the groundwork for her eventual comeback in 2016. But most importantly, it is when James Ashby emerged on the scene.

There is no debate — other than Hanson herself, Ashby is the most controversial and powerful figure to feature in the One Nation story to date. Originally a local radio host in Queensland, in 2011 he became House Speaker Peter Slipper’s media adviser, a role that, along with Slipper’s speakership, ended after just a few months in allegations of sexual harassment by Ashby and an ensuing legal battle which was not resolved until several years later.

Whether Ashby was always destined for politics remains unclear. At face value, the expedient self-destruction of his own staffing career undermines the thought that he had long set his eyes on political power. But Ashby’s time in radio exposed and hardened him to controversy quite early — his co-host was a victim of proto-cancel culture, and he too came into trouble, fined for harassment of a rival broadcaster in 2002. One could mount an argument that he was therefore mentally, if not strategically, prepared for the media attention that would come of his allegations against Slipper less than a decade later.

The new business pivot into signwriting after his departure from Slipper’s office is also, at the very least, inadvertently convenient, for it provided Ashby the negotiating capital (an offer of at-cost printing services) to request access to Hanson in late 2014. What exactly happened in the months that followed is unclear, but he then took it upon himself to accompany Pauline at polling booths on state election day in January 2015, armed with a video camera to capture footage for the party, something that, despite his vast range of responsibilities, he still hasn’t outsourced to another staffer. Their purely political marriage (after all, Ashby is openly gay) was consummated in 2016, when Hanson made Ashby her Chief of Staff — a position he continues to hold — after a much-publicised political second coming that saw her elected to the Senate alongside three other One Nation candidates.

Together, they run the party as a formidable duo: a dynamic that some equate with King Theoden and Wormtongue, but more readily finds its analogy somewhere between that and the relationship between Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Duke of Buckingham. A few weeks ago, journalist Myriam Robin labelled Ashby an ‘apex power player’. In June, The Australian’s Geoff Chambers reported descriptions of Ashby from unnamed politicians and staffers as ‘One Nation’s Svengali and an evil, right-wing Machiavellian genius’, and credited him with taking the party to new heights. Of his political talent, we are mostly left to speculate, for Ashby is a notoriously inaccessible operator.

The Hanson-Ashby era of the party has attracted as much scandal and scrutiny as it has success. From the 2017 ABC Four Corners episode depicting a party allegedly run dictatorially and as a money-making vehicle, to the 2019 Al-Jazeera secret recordings of Ashby and then-Queensland state leader Steve Dickson seeking millions in donations from the NRA. The former touches on a theme of criticism of Hanson and One Nation recurrent amongst its defectors; the latter ended in Dickson’s resignation.

More recently, ex-Labor Leader turned One Nation NSW state parliamentarian Mark Latham accused Hanson and Ashby of misusing and redirecting NSW taxpayer funds to the Brisbane head office, referring under parliamentary privilege to ‘the Ashby scam’ allegedly symptomatic of “a pattern inside PHON, under the direction of Hanson/Ashby.”

On a state and federal level, all but two of One Nation’s parliamentarians elected between 2016 and 2024 have left the party. The only two to remain from this cohort are the dutiful, regularly viral federal senator Malcolm Roberts and the insipid moderate Victorian upper house MP Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell – whose only standout mention of the party’s cardinal issue was to defy the federal executive and call for a ‘HIGH IMMIGRATION = RENTAL CRISIS’ party billboard to be removed in her electorate because the rhetoric was ‘unsuitable’.

The reasons for the repeat cycle of election and defection amongst One Nation politicians of this period are manifold, but often centre on personal criticisms of the Hanson-Ashby rule, perhaps most sensationally put in 2018 by former senator Brian Burston:

“Senator Hanson has declared herself president for life, just like the president of China. James Ashby told her to, because Jimmy controls her 24/7—the not-so-faceless man of One Nation. She is the only Australian, and One Nation the only political party in Australia, that follows the dictatorship model. There is no election for the leader or president of the party, no election for the national executive and no election for the state executive. What you see is what you get, forever, unless president for life decides otherwise. ‘Jimmy told me so.”’

Whatever the case, two things are undeniable: the self-admittedly cold Ashby is undyingly loyal to and protective of Hanson, and this contentious model of party governance is nevertheless the one that persists in the context of unprecedented popularity for One Nation.

Hanson and Ashby have weathered a decade of political storms, and in this respect their resilience and determination cannot be questioned. Given their resounding byelection victory in Farrer in May, the election of two new senators last year (bringing their total to 4 of 76), recent state seat gains in both Western and South Australia, and the defection of former Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, headlines like “‘Doomed to fail’: is this the end (again) for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation?” now seem laughable as the party approaches an almost six-month streak of outpolling the Liberals.

III. Explaining the Wave: The Great Southern Trendkill

To understand why the hitherto prevailing trends of Australian politics and its electorate — long resisting anything resembling Australo-Trumpism (see: Clive Palmer) — have been upheaved, we must look to the country’s contemporary political ecology. Yes, it is remarkable that One Nation now stands firmly in the place of the Liberal-National Coalition as Opposition-presumptive. However, the mistake both the public and One Nation can all too easily make is to think that the polling surge has been caused primarily by Hanson and Ashby themselves, as though they conducted a monthlong Thelemite ritual deep in the Gold Coast hinterland to bring about a thousand-year Hanson reign. To hold this would be to gravely misread the political landscape, and on the part of One Nation, risk committing serious campaign missteps. Hence, we turn our attention to the economic and social plight of the Australian people to more adequately account for this.

The reality is that the insurgence of populist-right anti-immigration politics in Australia is almost entirely due to factors external to One Nation itself. And while it is true that on a macro level these factors generally align with those sustaining Reform UK’s popularity, there are a multitude of differences that distinguish the Australian situation and arguably render the potential ceiling of the Australian Right higher in the medium term. However, it must be said that there remains plenty more water to flow under the bridge before any Antipodean optimism can purge itself of the intermittent wavering that accompanies regular exposure to the Auspol news cycle and One Nation’s social media.

As of this week, and taking into account their most recent dip, One Nation are polling at an average of 26.9%, Labor at 28.1%, the Liberal-National Coalition at 18.9%, and the Greens at 12.8% (per aggregator The Poll Bludger). Just like countries experiencing similar Populist Right gains, two obvious factors make for the most straightforward of causal explanations: (1) the sheer rapidity and scale of migration-facilitated demographic change; and (2) the relative economic downturn and diminishing social mobility predominantly experienced by the native (white) population. We will deal with these first before turning to factors more unique yet just as integral to the Australian experience.

After long moving in tandem, the formerly lawlike correlation between GDP per capita growth and GDP growth in Australia has ruptured, with per capita rates recently in recession for seven consecutive quarters from 2023 to 2024, and once more turning negative in the March 2026 quarter. Directly linked to this are the record-breaking migration rates which have seen Australia’s foreign-born population rise to 8.8 million, almost 1 in 3 residents (granted, a sizeable segment of this are British or New Zealand-born). Australia has taken in a net ~1.553 million migrants since 2022 and boasts a population growth rate roughly double that of the UK in the same period.

It is worth pausing here to emphasise the fact that the Boriswave actually lagged behind Australia’s per capita migration rate at the same time (except for 2021, when Australia was still subject to the neuroses of COVID policy). While the UK’s anti-immigration campaign centres dually on the Boriswave and illegal immigration, with many critics erring on the rhetorically safe side by making everything about illegals, the horror of the Australian situation is that this has been the natural and legal function of a system built up since the late 1990s.

This is not an exaggeration either. Martin Parkinson, one of the most senior bureaucrats in modern Australian politics, a man who served at different times as secretary of the Department of Treasury and the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, admitted in a podcast this year that while presiding over the 2023 Migration Review, he and the Department of Home Affairs were not able to identify any clear objectives of the migration programme from the late 1990s onwards.

Whether it be the Howard-driven mass immigration and embrace of the international student grift, Rudd’s pursuit of a ‘Big Australia’, the influx under the Liberal prime ministerial trifecta, or the recent Albowave — the truth is that Australia has been subject to 30 years of inexplicable immigration that has changed the face of the country.

At the same time, and it often strikes other countries as quite bizarre, Australia has almost no illegal boat arrivals, the result of a strict Stop the Boats policy implemented by Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2013 (yes, the same Tony Abbott who sought Hanson’s political demise). While there are around 100,000 migrants who remain in the country illegally with either expired visas or rejected asylum claims, and the student/work visa to asylum seeker pipeline is inadequately impeded, illegal immigration has hardly surfaced in Australian politics since 2015.

The benefit of this, and indeed a critical difference in immigration politics between Australia and the UK, is that the case against immigration in Australia is prosecuted exclusively against legal migration. Despite having an immigration rate that would still measure up as one of the world’s highest even if halved, the qualitative difference in immigration has offset the volume of immigration. Unlike America, the UK, and continental Europe, in Australia there is no possibility for the milquetoast conservative to hide behind ‘legality’ as the test by which to judge the acceptability of migration.

Likewise, the migrant profile of Australia — heavily weighted in the last 15 years towards Indian and Chinese arrivals — constrains the potency of ‘migrant crime’ as a justification for immigration restrictionism, notwithstanding the disproportionately African string of machete-wielding robberies in Melbourne and the ongoing predominantly Middle Eastern ‘tobacco war’ fire bombings. Consequently, many of the euphemisms and niceties that often distract from the core problem with mass immigration are not at the rhetorical disposal of Australian politicians, establishing a sharper dichotomy in the debate. This, in part, is why the immigration debate in Australia is now being fought through the nexus of multiculturalism. Very quickly has a debate about ‘the numbers’ become a debate about the composition of the country itself, and both Labor and One Nation alike are bringing this confrontation more expediently to a head.

Late last month, Pauline Hanson stood in front of a packed National Press Club and declared multiculturalism a failure that was imposed on the Australian people without their consent, introducing into the local political vernacular its antithesis in ‘Monoculturalism’. Though the term is intuitively unattractive and One Nation have subsequently failed to cogently defend it in the media, causing some to interpret it as too extreme and others too shallow, it demonstrates the relative speed with which the Australian immigration debate has progressed in such a short timeframe.

Exactly how the multiculturalism debate will proceed in the public sphere over the electoral cycle is unclear, for the conceptual sword of Monoculturalism has, to a certain extent, already been blunted. First, there was Hanson’s unreflective reference to the Socceroos as a perfect example of monoculturalism and the rather embarrassing dismissal thereof by African-born Australian player Awer Mabil. More notably, there was the complete failure of One Nation to do so much as comment on the recent Narendra Modi rally in Melbourne that provoked widespread public outrage, including a now viral protest by local activist and influencer Hugo Lennon. It should go without saying that the Liberal Party offered no criticism either and instead posted an image attending the event, their faces embellished with the most shameless of grins.

One Nation’s omission to offer any timely commentary on the event is a source of great confusion. Speculation that the motive was to avoid controversy is undermined by the fact that, within days of the rally, Hanson met with Tommy Robinson in Luton and was given a tour of the town, recorded on camera, lamenting the demographic situation. Surely, hanging out with a figure of such disrepute is far more likely to generate public condemnation than a comment on what was effectively a mass foreign rally in Australia. The three possible answers, all of which indicate vast room for strategic improvement, are either (a) ON are making the same mistake as the Liberals by believing they can win the Indian vote; (b) ON are recalibrating their stance on immigration to scapegoat the Muslim population à la 2016; or (c) ON are incomprehensibly unreactive to the political news cycle.

Despite these tactical shortcomings, the important point is that the appearance of multiculturalism as a topic for debate in mainstream Australian political discourse demonstrates a significant shift from the words of NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns who, last year, in his typical school principal-like tone, declared that it is “not up for debate and not up for change”.

It may be puzzling that the world’s third richest nation — Australia fares better than the UK on general and youth employment, average weekly earnings, purchasing power parity, government debt to GDP, and tax burden to GDP — has been the seat of one of the most rapid polling rises of a populist political party in modern history. Reform’s growth from 6% to 30% was spread out across a period of approximately 17 months, whereas One Nation’s equivalent rise occurred in just 11. Why, then, would a wealthier country that has both a fiscal and economic advantage over the UK be home to a segment of voters who have more quickly — and on aggregate more widely — taken to a party and leader perceived as more vulgarly to the right of Reform? Moreover, why has this happened in the context of a party not yet as logistically competent as Reform (to think Reform has been criticised for a lack of professionalisation!)?

On the economic front, the cumulative effect of negative real wage growth over a period of five years and a much higher level of household debt to GDP in Australia has exacerbated the impact of interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank (RBA). While the recent monetary policies of the Bank of England and the RBA have not been too dissimilar, Australians, being much more indebted on average, are more exposed to the effects of interest rate increases. Combined with negative real wage growth that exceeds the UK, the perceived rate of decline in Australian living standards post-COVID is arguably greater than the UK. As such, even with a generally more prosperous economic backdrop, the Australian experience of economic downturn is more pronounced on a relative level, provoking a degree of political resentment disproportionate to the economic and fiscal position.

It may surprise readers who associate Australia with vast plains and ‘the outback’ that Australia is more urbanised than the UK (~87% vs ~85%). Not only that, but the concentration of the population in a narrower range of cities is much higher. For instance, Sydney and Melbourne swallow up just shy of 40% of the Australian population. Add Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide to that, and you now account for almost two-thirds of the population. In contrast, if you combine Greater London, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and Glasgow, you only account for a quarter of the UK’s population. A consequence of Australia’s urban concentration is that in states like Victoria, where ~77% of the population live in Melbourne, the experience of mass immigration is even more an ‘everyone issue’ than post-Boriswave Britain.

To put it more straightforwardly, the higher concentration of the population in a smaller number of cities means the effects of mass immigration are more widely experienced. The (not quite) universality of outer suburban life across these cities also lends itself to a certain shared experience that produces a correspondingly similar political sentiment. This is undoubtedly why a recent Fox & Hedgehog poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs showed that 60% believe that there are ‘too many migrants in Australia’, at the same time support for multiculturalism is sharply declining in other polls.

The cultural factor most unique to Australia’s political situation is, for want of a better term, the collective fatigue that many Australians suffer at the hands of the institutional promotion of Aboriginal culture at the expense of a purely Australian identity. ‘Peak Woke’ hit Australia in 2023 in the Voice referendum — which sought the approval of a constitutionally entrenched Aboriginal body attached to the parliament — and returned a decisive 60% ‘No’ vote, without a single state returning a majority ‘Yes’ vote. The Voice referendum’s place in the contemporary Australian story is far less that of a political catalyst when compared to Brexit, which of course had an immediate fallout whose consequences continue to shape UK politics today. Rather, the referendum is better understood as a plebiscite on the Aboriginalisation of Australia’s political expression, a checkpoint that marked a growing bitterness amongst the electorate that cannot be simply reduced to ‘the economy’.

This budding resentment only simmered beneath the surface in the lead-up to the 2025 election — after all, Labor increased their majority. But it now appears to be rearing its head as Australians become increasingly impatient with the political class, with now only 17% believing that Aboriginal ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies are not divisive and a string of public ‘booings’ of the ceremony heard across the country at ANZAC Day services this year. Though not a singular event, this gradual force has only fuelled the rise of One Nation, whose policies include the abolition of the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the barring of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands flags on public buildings, and an opposition to ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies at events.

In addition to the Voice, some might argue that the world’s worst COVID lockdowns and mandatory vaccination policy, particularly in Victoria, contributed to a growing distrust in government and radicalisation of the citizenry. However, about 80% of Australians were still possessed by political Stockholm syndrome in 2022, affirming that the government had responded ‘well or fairly well’ to the pandemic, while 60% viewed the UK’s less draconian response to the virus as ‘poor’. Yes, the anti-lockdown rump that formed about 10-15% of the vote in the 2022 elections may have had some impact from thereon via social media conspiracy theory content which has since captivated many a Gen X’er, but it is impossible to quantify. It is fair, then, to dismiss COVID as a factor in most newly orange voters’ embrace of Hanson.

So, if neither the Voice nor COVID were the singular catalysts of the One Nation surge, what was? Well, the best way to understand the rise of One Nation is to see the general material and social conditions as the trainer that led the racehorse to the gate. The trigger that sprung the gate wide open was the tragedy of the Bondi Attack in December last year, where two Islamic terrorists killed 15 people in an anti-Jewish attack — Sajid Akram and his son Naveed, the former having come to Australia on a student visa. From that point on, one can observe an almost vertical rise in early 2026, from polling numbers in the high teens all the way up to 30% in a short period. Of course, there is the shock and horror that violence of this sort — which is extraordinarily rare in Australia — aroused in the minds of Australians. But the second aspect of the Bondi Attack that prompted so many voters away from Labor and Liberal, and into the arms of Hanson was the response of the established parties themselves.

The response of the One Nation leader to the attack was to say:

“I’ll keep fighting about mass migration, it is about mass immigration that’s happening here, and it’s destroying our standard of living, our way of life and access to services that everyone Australian has a right to, but the government brings them in purely for the vote,”

“And the fools out there who keep voting for them, you’re going to suffer, you will suffer. You keep voting for these bastards who actually don’t have pride for our country and our Australian flag, then be prepared to get what we’re going to get.”

The response of Anthony Albanese was just as heavy-handed but directed instead towards (1) tightening gun laws; (2) talking about “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”; and (3) drafting new hate speech legislation. Unsurprisingly, with the support of the Liberal Party, the new hate speech and gun reform laws were passed in January this year.

Yes, in the aftermath of Australia’s worst terrorist attack, a horrifically brutal event with such widely circulated footage and the clearest of motives, the government decided to focus on hate speech laws. It is obvious how this was received as nothing short of gaslighting by much of the voting public, who questioned how exactly the doubling of ‘hate speech squads’ by the Australian Federal Police and an even harder crackdown on Australians’ already restricted freedom of expression would address the obvious root cause of the shooting. One Nation’s policy of a free speech referendum has legs for precisely this reason.

This is only one of many Labor government actions that have infuriated Australians over the last 10 months. The abysmal record of the Albanese government includes regular stories like the Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke reversing the deportation order on a Chinese migrant convicted of possessing child abuse material, the same minister’s comments on an Indian podcast that he would like to open a pathway to citizenship for the 2.9 million migrants on temporary visas, or the taxpayer-funded return of ISIS brides to Australia (who were given free pizza and hotel accommodation on arrival).

The optics are terrible for a government already losing the faith of the people, and it beggars belief that the response of the state has been to double down at every turn. It is especially reckless in the context of a social media landscape where millions have instant access to incensing stories that would otherwise go unreported. Of course, the government’s solution, just like in the UK, is to restrict social media access and foreshadow an assault on online anonymity.

In this sense, the rise of One Nation very much accords with the rise of Reform. Both have only been made possible by the actions of the state.

And while the failures of the state have created a similar opportunity for both parties, there remains a stark difference between the leaders themselves, who recently met in London after encouragement from Barnaby Joyce. Hanson, whose character has already been described at length, lacks eloquence, but this is the exact reason that so many Australians have taken to her — one will commonly hear remarked, “I like Pauline because she says it like it is”. The oratorical skill and wit of Farage, on the other hand, is much more expansive. Why, then, is Hanson’s unrefined ‘say it like it is’ manner popular in Australia, if at the same time it would be inconceivable for her to be the leader of Reform?

Though a sociological foray is far beyond the purview of this piece, it is worth remarking in brief that the historical explanation is likely found in a more thorough analysis of the differing class structures of Australia and England. England’s lower classes still possess a certain residual class deference that harkens back to a society much more stratified along said lines. The lower classes of Australia do not carry class baggage in the same way. As such, it could be argued that the ideal of the ‘polite society’ does not loom as prominently in Australia today. Historian Keith Hancock, in his 1930 work Australia, touches upon this difference:

‘Liberated from the congealed ice-forms of convention and class which are packed so tightly in a small northern island, the vigorous flow of Australian life cuts ever-changing channels for the irrigation of limitless virgin plains. Society in Australia is not yet fixed and formalised. Men do not find it difficult to change their house or town or class. There is no class except in the economic sense. In each State there are perhaps a dozen families who have possessed wealth for two generations or more; but they have no more authority than other rich. Men, and have not imposed upon the Australians standards of conducts and culture.’5

In another sense, the development of Australian English reflects a characteristic pragmatism identified by early travelling and colonial writers, and this could partly explain the Australian appreciation of Hanson’s rhetorical simplicity. This same pragmatism is perhaps an originating cause of Australian anti-intellectualism, and one may dare postulate the consequent resentment towards their own country that more ‘cultured’ or intellectual Australians carry to this day. Not being bound by the norms of a class-ordered society, it can be contended that local language conventions developed differently, creating a vernacular that was less serious and ‘rougher’ in its discourse, making possible a preference for someone with the communication style of Hanson. This is something explored further in the ethnopragmatics of linguists Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, but again is beyond the scope of this article.6

By now, it is clear that the external factors far outweigh any party-internal factors in the rise of One Nation. It almost seems that given the party’s continually delayed response to professionalise and expand their operation beyond the Queensland core, the rise of One Nation has occurred in spite of themselves. That said, the party must be given due credit for its recent electoral successes, and the addition of the likes of Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi to the team leaves one with the hope that the party is becoming more responsive to the counsel of people with experience and better judgement.

To depict the party as a rabble without qualification is inaccurate, for their rhetoric at important points over the last year has struck a chord with a large segment of the voting public. Of course, they have benefitted from inadvertently riding the wave of Australian decline thus far, but a degree of action has always been necessary to channel the public’s discontent into support for a party. This is simply to state the basic fact that there is a certain reciprocity between voter and party in the procession of politics, and therefore One Nation is owed recognition. In that sense, no one can fairly say they have failed to set a single foot right.

One can recognise the shortcomings of One Nation while at the same time accept that it stands as the only viable option in Australian party politics. Fighting against the current of momentum that propels One Nation is a fool’s errand. No one individual can reduce a party polling in the mid-to-high 20s back down to 3-6% overnight, and to think otherwise betrays a severe lack of political tact. Moreover, when a party to the right of the Liberal Party holds such a large share of the vote, it precludes the possibility of another party making substantial inroads into the vote of either. This is why Restore Britain has been a failure and was better served remaining a non-party community advocacy group. It is also why the creation of yet another political party in Australia would be absurd, at least in the current electoral cycle. That hypothetical party’s vote ceiling would, on the most generous of estimations, sit around 4-5% (more likely <1%), and the electoral system would neutralise this accordingly.

In light of the wisdom the UK experience offers Australia, the One Nation supporter and critic alike would be best advised to approach things cautiously and pragmatically. Whether it is an attempt to participate in the party, constructive criticism through auxiliary organisations, or a period of political agnosticism waiting in the wings. In any event, the Australian Right, to the minimal extent that it is a unified political bloc, should weigh the significance of their shared political situation much more heavily than they do the petty disputes that characterise X feeds, mainstream media, and party politics. This, too, applies to One Nation themselves, for whom overcoming an endemic paranoia and inefficient centralisation ought to be non-negotiable.

History tells us it is not beyond the realms of possibility that One Nation descends into dysfunction before the 2028 federal election. Some might say it is more likely than not. After all, the party is not yet close to internally resembling Reform and cynicism has always been cheap. But the Orange Wave does not crest or break on the whim of a few individuals. The Australian political system is more complex than that, and the media and voters will cause this wave to swell for some time yet. So in the meantime, ride the wave in whatever way you can.

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

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During the early stages of the Mutiny, in the summer of 1857, two hundred British women and children were taken hostage at Cawnpore by the mutineers. When the British relief force arrived on the 16th July 1857, they found every hostage murdered. The troops found horrors: a hook which had been used to hang a child from the wall; bloodstained shoes and dresses. A room where so many had been killed that the floor was flooded with blood ankle-deep. In the courtyard, a tree, smeared with the brains of children and infants who had been smashed against the trunk and then thrown down the nearby well^.1 That well itself, full of corpses. Some had been thrown down alive. A Highlander vomited at the sight.2

That morning discipline broke down. The troops became depressed and started drinking heavily. They began looting. Brigadier General James Neill, in command, restored discipline by buying up all the alcohol in the town and making it clear that any man who looted would be hanged.3 Once order was restored, the British went mad with vengeance. The reprisals were terribly severe, Neill made sure of it.

‘Whenever a rebel is caught he is immediately tried, and unless he can prove a defence, he is sentenced to be hanged at once: but the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first to clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood’.

Other captured sepoys were executed by being strapped across cannons which were fired. Remember Cawnpore became a battle cry for the British troops. Reparations became ever more brutal. The Highlanders set fire to one village and killed every single person trying to escape. All of this is, to the modern eye, utterly barbaric. We would use terms like ‘war crimes’ to describe actions like these. Yet there is something entirely explicable in it. When men find their women and children violated and slaughtered, a deep and terrible rage rises up.

As Neill wrote, ‘One cannot control one’s feelings. Who could be merciful to one concerned? Severity at the first is mercy in the end’.

There was great wisdom in this observation. Neill was evidently a severe man— he restored order to his own troops by threatening to hang them, and he pacified the region with exemplary and brutal violence. What he understood is that we often do great harm when we are too concerned with being merciful, or kind in the first instance, rather than doing what must be done. In many ways, this tendency, this preference for being ‘kind’, ‘decent’, ‘fair’, this refusal to say ‘no’, is the universal failing of the British state.

The most obvious example of this is the justice system, where, contrary to popular belief, we jail far fewer people than we did even 15 years ago. Quarterly ‘first receptions’ — the first arrival of an inmate within the prison system — were 18,379 in Oct - Dec 2025. In Oct - Dec 2010, there were 30,242 first receptions — despite significant population growth since 2010. Part of the reason for this is, no doubt, that the police’s ability to solve crimes has collapsed. In 2013, the earliest year for which figures are available, almost 22% of crimes resulted in a charge or a caution, or in other words, 78% of crimes went unpunished. That was bad enough, but according to last year’s crime outcomes data, now a mere 6.3% of crimes with a victim result in someone being charged. Today’s bleak statistic, however, is an improvement on the even darker days of 2022, when just 4.6% of such crimes resulted in someone being charged. This all means that the average criminal has only about a 1-in-20 chance of being charged when they commit a crime. The decline in proactive policing is no doubt part of this, and something James Neill would decry.

Of course, even if they are charged and convicted, most criminals will not be jailed. Partly this is because of a culture which endeavours to avoid prison for all but the most serious crimes, and partly it’s because we simply haven’t built enough prisons. Sentencing policy, as a result, is driven not by goals such as punishment, public protection or rehabilitation of offenders, but simply by the constraints of capacity, which exists because the state is unwilling to override planning law by enacting primary legislation ordering that prisons are built. For any normal state this would be a matter of emergency, but our politicians’ refusal to be ‘severe’ has resulted in a system that is no longer concerned with justice. The new Sentencing Act accelerates this process. Under it, prison sentences of under a year will be suspended in almost every case. Even sentences of up to three years can be suspended. Prison, for many, has been replaced by what the government likes to call ‘tough sentences in the community’, which will almost always require the person to wear one kind of electronic monitoring device (‘tag’) or another.

Unfortunately — but unsurprisingly — that system is not functioning properly. According to a National Audit Office (NAO) report published this month, the Prison and Probation Service does not ‘have an accurate understanding of the number of individuals that should be monitored and are not’, nor does it know how many breaches of tag conditions result in ‘enforcement action’, but the NAO does tell us that those breaches they observed were not taken seriously — ‘where outcomes are recorded nearly half result in no further action’ and ‘both serious and minor breaches’ are ‘treated in the same way regardless of severity’. All of this chaos is exacerbated by the apparent incompetence of the Prison, Probation, Police and the outsourced tagging company, Serco.

This report comes almost two years after I discovered that Serco were failing to tag many released prisoners. I understand that this was news to ministers and senior civil servants, and resulted in many angry calls. And yet, two years later the system is still, according to the NAO, ‘creating public protection risks’.

A Neillian state would have sacked the company which was so manifestly failing in its contracted duty, and had even failed to communicate this failure to the government. Such merciful tolerance for manifest failure does great harm. Severity would force improvement.

This softness is even written into our Sentencing Guidelines. They define ‘aggravating’ and ‘mitigating’ circumstances. Many of the mitigating circumstances are ones which objectively mean the criminal poses a higher risk. An offender with low IQ, an inability to understand that what they did was wrong, so impulsive as to have committed the crime without planning, and who is easily led, will serve a significantly shorter sentence. This is despite every single one of those traits indicating their greater risk to the public and increased likelihood of committing more serious crimes.

The result of all this is that we do our very best not to jail dangerous men, and when we do have to, it is for as little time as possible. Even within our prisons, rules essentially do not exist — obvious drug-taking is ignored, as are breaches of dozens of smaller rules. I also often discern, within the Ministry of Justice’s higher echelons, a discomfort with the very idea of jailing people, as though it’s somehow all a bit brutal and distasteful. So instead, we have chaos.

A severe state that recognised its duty is to deliver order and protect the law-abiding majority would take a very different approach. The death penalty would be used broadly and appropriately, and jail sentences would be determined on the basis of public protection, not out of a misguided desire to be merciful to young men.

Similar unwillingness to be severe is found across the Yookay state. Mental health detention is often adjacent to justice. There, we are committed to reducing the rate at which we section black men — NHS psychiatrists are ‘under pressure not to section psychotic Black patients to avoid appearing racist’. None of this is secret: it is made explicit in the NHS’s own policy documents, such as the ‘Patient and carer race equality framework’ (PCREF). The whole document is full of concern for those people who are sectioned, but has not a word for the terrible harm which can and has been done by psychotic people such as Valdo Calocane, Zephaniah McLeod, Joshua Jacques, and, it seems, Wayne Broadhurst’s killer, Dawood Safi, whose plea of diminished responsibility due to psychosis was accepted last week. Again, an unwillingness to be severe is causing great harm, and indeed, the murder of innocent British people.

Similarly, our migration policy is functionally a rape- and violence-maximising policy because we are unwilling to intern all illegal migrants on arrival and deport them. Asylum decision makers (ADMs) are told they can’t reject applications if they notice obvious lies and deceptions in claimants’ stories, and even when they are reciting almost word-for-word a story which the ADM has heard many times before (which I have confirmed with ADM sources). The current debate about whether the Boriswave should be allowed to settle is between those who recognise they would financially ruin the country, and those who seem to think that it would somehow be rude or unkind to cancel visas and send people home. Similarly our refusal to deport foreign criminals is a manifest rejection of severity, and makes us all less safe. We don’t even screen new arrivals for diseases, and as a result we have seen a significant increase in cases of TB, and are now close to losing our ‘low incidence status’.

A Neillian migration system would be ruthlessly self-interested, offering work permits only, with no path to settlement or citizenship. Only those who are all but certain to be an asset to the country would be allowed to come here, and there would certainly not be any asylum system.

The squeamishness has even infested the Ministry of Defence. Amongst senior civil servants there is a clear distaste for the idea that the department exists to kill people. Instead, terms like ‘keeping the peace’ are preferred. This culture, I think, is also part of the reason we’re now three and a half years into the interminable Haddon-Cave inquiry. Haddon-Cave is pursuing current and former British special forces soldiers for potentially violating the ECHR Article 2 rights of the terrorists they were lawfully ordered to kill in Helmand between 2010 and 2013. This is, quite naturally, destroying morale in the SAS, causing soldiers to quit, and damaging the operational effectiveness of our forces — men are much less willing to pull the trigger if they’re worried about being pursued by MOD lawyers for the rest of their days.

Neill himself died during the Mutiny. He fell on the 25th of September 1857, while leading his men to break the siege of the British Residency at Lucknow. After his death it was announced that he would have been made a Knight of the Bath, and this honour was bestowed upon his widow Isabella, along with a generous pension. Memorials to Neill were erected in India and his native Scotland.

Today we live in a country which has forgotten the value of severity; we would prosecute and shame a man like James George Smith Neill. As we imagine what a new British state might look like, we must remember his wisdom — that severity at the first is mercy in the end.

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

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This year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States of America’s declaration of independence, and much has changed for America and Britain between John Hamilton’s time and ours. In 1776, the Thirteen Colonies had a smaller population than Ireland, and together exported less than the Crown’s Caribbean holdings combined. Yet America came to possess perhaps the most resource-blessed territory in the world, combining the largest expanse of highly arable land on the planet with a more extensive network of navigable waterways than every other country combined, and discovering underneath that land more or less every resource known to man, including latterly one of the world’s great untapped supplies of oil and gas in the shale fields of Texas and the heartlands. It is unsurprising, then, that — as Benjamin Franklin accurately forecast within a century of the revolution — the United States came to overtake the British Isles in terms of population, and the British Empire as a whole in terms of economic production and exports.

It was not until 1917 that this world-historic usurpation was first demonstrated, as Britain languished in the stalemate of the Western Front. We may have been on the victorious side of the First World War, but it was only America that truly won, Britain finding herself debt-laden and exhausted by its end. With the stroke of a pen, British naval dominance was ended in the Washington Naval Treaty. It was the Second World War, however, which sealed the Empire’s fate, as Britain mortgaged her holdings to secure American aid — the final blow served shortly after in the form of America’s intervention in the Suez Crisis.

It is often commented that this rapid fall from grace drove remarkably little reflection among the British over their place in the world, the period of decolonisation in particular overlapping with domestic strife over the fate of the post-war socialist economy. Indeed, for several decades following our emergence from that misguided dalliance, one could easily forfeit concern over our reduction, for our position still seemed relatively strong. At the time of the Hong Kong handover, the United Kingdom had a GDP greater than that of India and China combined. We possessed a respectable and combat-ready military even into the early twenty-first century, and, in 2007, British GDP per capita was measured higher than that of the United States. In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, however, the United States’ figures have continued to improve, whilst ours have stagnated. China’s rise relative to the US over the past two decades has masked the resurgence of American dominance, financially and militarily, over the rest of the developed world.

That America has a tremendous cultural influence is well understood, and it would be unnecessary to provide a full explication thereof. Nevertheless, one can still be surprised at the extent to which this process has developed, particularly over recent decades. A young Brit or American travelling to Sweden, Denmark, or the Netherlands for work or tourism will find learning the language of either nation superfluous, so widespread is English fluency among the young and urban — but even in Poland, 75% of people under the age of 30 can hold a conversation in the global lingua anglica. In fact, a small but growing fraction of well-off urbanites in places as far-flung as Malaysia now grow up learning English as their first language in preparation for attendance at prestigious ‘international’ schools. This anglicisation in itself is a big change, but it carries the potential for much more, as a common language serves as a vector for other forms of cultural homogenisation.

Indeed, on holiday in Jordan earlier this year, I found in Amman a city which felt more excitement about and placed more status upon the symbols of Americanism than any other I have been to. Fifty meters down the road from my AirBnB in the mansion district, a ‘traditional’ café stood wedged between a knock-off Costa Coffee, a Krispy Kreme, a Mexican restaurant, and a Hamleys. The café’s menu was written entirely in English, and no woman inside wore non-Western clothing, let alone had her head covered. Of the reading material adorning the bookshelves of the knock-off Costa, all but two books were in English (the remaining pair were Dutch). Whilst Britain and western Europe ostensibly tires of Americanisation, the rest of the world continues its charge theretoward apace.

Beyond the trivial, American influence is reflected across the world in changing political cultures. It has been fashionable for some time on the right to lament this fact, but for much of the world, it has been a positive development. Travelling to places on the earliest edges of this process reveals that fact in interesting ways. In Baghdad, for example, pockets of Westernisation exist across the city, from individual cafés and hotels to small complexes of shops and restaurants. It is a select few who fully indulge in the opportunity such places offer to live differently from their ancestors and fellow countrymen, yet there are many more who dip their toes, looking nervously but eagerly towards their more Westernised neighbours. Whilst we begin to revise aspects of our own liberal social settlement, we should not forget why this is the case, especially for young people trapped by the crushing weight of tradition and familial obligations. Whatever downsides individualism may bring, its alternatives can be devastating to contend with in a personal context, and it is easy to understand the inexorable diffusion of the American ontology in that context.

In fact, many of these places benefit greatly from a certain inevitable distance from America, which allows them to adopt those aspects of American political and broader culture without seeking to imitate it holistically. Perhaps it is the lack of that distance that makes Americanisation more damaging in Britain, and nowhere has it been more damaging than on our conception of ourselves and the nature of our polity. In 1988, US President Ronald Reagan said ‘You can go to live in Japan or Turkey, but you cannot become Japanese or Turkish. But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.’ Reagan’s understanding of Turkish identity may have been somewhat confused, but that is besides the point.

Only two decades beforehand, Britain’s understanding of its own nationhood had far more to do with Japan’s (or Turkey’s) than with America’s, yet in the following decades we have gradually adopted that same understanding of ourselves — that Britishness is a solely civic identity, acquirable by any passport holder, defined by values or ideals instead of ancestry, and that Britain has always been ‘a nation of immigrants’. It’s often suggested that mass migration as a political project was embarked upon for reasons of commercial interest or political transformation, but in truth — at least for Tony Blair, its principal architect — multiracialism was simply modernity, as defined by the American example, adopted in an attempt to more faithfully build America in England’s green and pleasant lands.

It is interesting, then, that it is often those who most closely adhere to these thoroughly Americanised conceptions of nationhood who most vocally lament the ‘Americanisation’ of our politics and culture. During the protests and vigils that followed the murder of Henry Nowak, many on the left took to X to bemoan the ‘yankification’ of British politics, which was supposedly exemplified by the unprecedentedly racialised terms in which the event was discussed. The same kinds of criticisms have been levelled by the same kinds of people against flag-raising, public Christianity, and ‘debate culture’. Yet this supposed anti-Americanism is in fact as American as apple pie — reflective precisely of the attitudes of America’s left-wing establishment. This has been an entirely native cultural trend to the US since before FDR conquered Europe, stemming partly from antipathy towards those aspects of America which symbolise the left’s domestic opposition, and partly from the ideal of more perfect union. To be American is, in many ways, to lament that America is not yet American enough — that it does not yet live up to its ideals, and that it has not yet realised its promise.

One of the more pervasive exports of American culture has been the decision to elevate Africans in media and politics. This is understandable for the United States as, by the time of independence, around a fifth of the Thirteen Colonies’ population was made up of enslaved people of African descent. Through the issues of emancipation, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans have not only been a significant part of the population, but of American political culture. Despite (as of the 2021 census) Black people constituting less than five per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, Black people have been found to feature in about 50% of all television adverts, around 25% of which had them in a lead role.

In 2017, in response to the Manchester Arena Bombing, where 22 concertgoers were killed, and over 200 were physically injured, the Oasis song ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ proved to be a popular local anthem in the aftermath, with the Guardian calling it the ‘symbol of Manchester’s spirit’. In 2020, when one Black felon met his end as a police officer knelt on him three thousand miles away in a country not even part of the commonwealth, we were encouraged by our media outlets, charities, celebrities and political mouthpieces to take to the streets and look very much back in anger. In the ensuing London protests, Churchill’s statue outside Parliament was defaced, and a mixed-race child attempted to burn the Union Flag on the Cenotaph. This was despite the culture of policing having been, and currently being, totally different in Britain and the US, not only in the number and presence of armed officers, but also in the deaths of civilians at the hands of police officers. Despite the lack of mass importation of African slaves to the British Isles, and the Imperial War Museum estimating the total Black population of the United Kingdom to have been around ten thousand in 1939, countless Black politicians and media personalities proudly claim that Black people ‘built Britain’. This has led naturally to the Windrush myth, with a few thousand Caribbean immigrants (not invited by the government) supposedly having ‘saved’ Britain after the Second World War (one always wonders as to how Britain needed ‘saving’ when the U-Boats were no longer patrolling and the Luftwaffe no longer overhead).

One notable remnant of the Summer of Floyd (as some call it) was ‘taking the knee’, started by African-American sportsmen in 2016. Taking the knee was quickly adopted in 2020 among football teams in the UK (and a few other countries), as players from the Premier League to the UEFA Championship proceeded to take the knee before kick-off, usually to a chorus of boos from the crowd. This continued for UK teams well after other countries had stopped doing it. Something the COVID-19 Pandemic revealed about British society was not only a fanatically slavish devotion to, and enforcement of, rules present among many folk (pensioners reporting children playing in the street to police etc), but an energetic servility in wanting to be the best standard bearers of the new, hot and fashionable movement; to be (and be seen by others as being) just as morally righteous as those brave protestors in America. In perhaps the best visual encapsulation of the British political class’s relationship with states, at the England versus USA game in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the England players took the knee before kick-off (at the instruction of their manager, Gareth Southgate) while a puzzled American team stood. The ideological molestation of 2020 seems to have sunk its roots deep — certain vigils for Henry Nowak this year saw some of their attendees taking the knee, posing for photographs. Though clearly an inversion, the motif itself is here to stay.

The Black Lives Matter protests of that year spanned over sixty countries, in which nearly all non-English (native) speaking countries saw signs emblazoned with English slogans. Equally odd was the mere presence of said protests in countries such as India, Georgia and Fiji, but more notable were the gatherings in South Korea and Japan. The Republic of Korea saw protests condemning ‘US imperialism’ outside the American Embassy, while a vigil was held outside the American Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan (the largest US air base in East Asia). The approval ratings the United States enjoys in South Korean polls hover around 50%, while the American military presence in the ROK has continually generated protests about a so-called ‘occupation’.

Even if American geopolitical hegemony fades over this century as the country itself continues to turn inwards, its economic and cultural power will take longer to abate. English is not only the international language of business, it is the language of music, film, and television, with American audio-visual products dominating across the globe. There is no more an international competitor to Hollywood than to the English-language internet, and anyone with a TV or an internet connection will continue to turn their attention West for some time to come. Much can be said of ‘stuck culture’, the fragmentation of the ‘mainstream’ and ‘the normie’ as a dying breed for the generations raised on the internet. But thus far, the common frames of reference are still set by Atlantic discourse, and particularly for the developing world, even a globalised American ‘slop-culture’ represents genuine novelty. It may be that Americanisation has yet to reach its zenith as billions across the global south come online for the first time.

Given the extent to which we live in an American world, it is remarkable how weak an understanding of how the country came to be (and how this should inform our understanding of its nature today) most people in Britain have. A Briton in 1880 would have been forgiven for their ignorance of the Thirteen Colonies’ journey towards independence: America’s was not even the most important revolution of its century, having been overshadowed by France’s and the Napoleonic Wars that followed, and the United States had yet to establish a substantial global footprint. I would argue that today, this is no longer the case, and yet — whilst the American Revolution is on the national curriculum for Key Stages three and four — I could not find a single friend, acquaintance, or work colleague who was actually taught about it. Few have heard of the Townshend Acts, the Coercive Acts, or even the Stamp Act. Episodes like the Boston Tea Party and perhaps the Boston ‘Massacre’ are usually vaguely remembered, but few among the general public have much understanding of who the founding Americans really were and why they embarked on the path that would eventually lead to today.

Today, ‘New England’ is just a place name like any other, but in 1776 it was a far more literal description of what had been constructed along the north-eastern seaboard of North America. Before the cities of the northeast were inhabited by the Irish, the Italians, and other groups of varied heritage who came to America via Ellis Island in the nineteenth century, their denizens were Englishmen in every way, including their own self-understanding. Conflict with the imperial state was rooted not in the birth of a new nation but in the assertion by colonists of their rights as Englishmen, at least as far as they understood them. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was such an ardent Anglo-Saxonist — Anglo-Saxonism being associated strongly at this time with certain conceptions of English liberty, supposedly crushed by the Norman yoke — that he proposed Hengist and Horsa be put on the seal of the United States.

Despite Britain’s attitude of what Edmund Burke called ‘salutary neglect’ towards its transatlantic possessions, the American colonists were not alienated exiles, cast off or running away from their home country. Before 1776, nine members of the Royal Society came from New England, and three from Virginia. The English Civil War saw six first-generation New England settlers return home to serve as colonels in the Parliamentary Army, and eight made the same journey to serve as MPs before the end of the interregnum. Downing Street itself is named after Sir George Downing, a Massachusetts settler born in England who returned home and served as Scoutmaster-General under Cromwell. During the colonial period, roughly one hundred American-born students attended the University of Edinburgh, with around seventy attending each of Oxford and Cambridge. During the crisis years of 1763-83, five American-born MPs sat in the House of Commons.

Contrary to the nineteenth-century myth, when riding to alert the Massachusetts militiamen of incoming royal troops, Paul Revere did not exclaim ‘the British are coming’, but rather ‘the regulars are coming’. The vast majority of even the rebellious population of Massachusetts would still have considered themselves Englishmen when he did so. Even after Britain recognised American independence, there was still a strong sense of kinship felt by American leaders. Senator Thomas Pickering, after leading militia in 1775 to trap retreating British soldiers, lobbied to support Britain during the Napoleonic wars and described the British Isles as ‘the world’s last hope’ for liberty.

It has been interesting to see the re-emergence of this conscious Anglo-Saxonism throughout the Trump Administrations, especially the second. In 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson visited Britain and met with King George V, he explicitly instructed a British official not to refer to Americans as cousins or Anglo-Saxons. Yet, during King Charles’ visit to Washington earlier this year, President Trump spoke of the Continental Army and militia in 1776 as having had ‘Anglo-Saxon courage’ running through their veins, and said of them that ‘their hearts beat with an English faith’. As America reckons with its second great demographic transition, becoming a majority non-white country after it long since ceased to be a majority Anglo-Saxon one, some of its leadership is rediscovering the importance of that heritage in shaping the nature of their country.

But if these connections run so deep, why did the Anglo-Saxon people find themselves cleaved into two 250 years ago, and could it have been otherwise? Many excellent books tell the full story, but there are a few points worth touching on here which are interesting as historical curiosities and perhaps offer lessons either on how moments of revolutionary potential can be effectively handled or on the historic nature of Britain, America, and the relationship between the two.

The first is an oft-ignored point regarding the relationship between taxation and representation. The famous phrase came about largely in response to the implementation of the Stamp Act, the first incidence of direct taxation on colonial subjects, which required a tax to be paid on every piece of paper used. This imposition was justified by the Prime Minister at the time, George Grenville, on the basis that Americans were ‘virtually represented’ in Parliament, as all MPs were expected to act in the interests of the whole nation, not simply those who had elected them (or indeed their constituency as a whole). This understanding of Parliamentarians’ responsibilities has largely faded now, and the sectionalism that results renders us all the poorer for it, but at the time, it was very real, and indeed, the vast majority of subjects living in Britain itself were represented in this way, with only 5% of the population directly enfranchised.

What defenders of this argument fail to recognise is that, if the Thirteen Colonies had been granted seats in Parliament under the same electoral standards as Britain, the American electorate may have rapidly come to dwarf Britain’s own. In order to vote in 1765, one needed to be propertied and have a yearly income above a certain threshold. Around one-fifth of the adult male population in Britain owned land at the time, compared to around two-thirds in America. Despite owning more land and having a higher yearly income than some Barons in England, George Washington was represented in Parliament only on the same basis as the tenants who tilled those Barons’ fields (even if one does buy into the principle of virtual representation).

‘No taxation without representation’ is often repeated now as a rallying cry for democracy, and used to justify the claim that all people subject to a state will inevitably demand the direct representation of their own sectional interests in policymaking. This runs contrary to the notion that representatives should act in the interests of the whole nation, on which the notion of virtual representation rests. It is the former point that is more damaging, as it reduces statecraft to a struggle between internal factions, rather than the pursuit of the strength of the nation as a whole. What the above demonstrates is that this is the wrong lesson to learn. The cause of the extreme reaction in the colonies was not the fact that people in general were deprived of political participation, but specifically the failure to integrate newly emergent men of talent and high standing into the state. It is this failure that led to political rupture in 1776, and similar dynamics lie behind most revolutionary or secessionist moments. In many ways, the pursuit of the opposite approach — the opening of the state to new blood as it arises — neutered the British socialist movement in the early days of the Labour Party, whilst the failure of the current British state to provide participation and routes for advancement to those who are (and understand themselves to be) deserving of it is a source of great weakness.

The second misunderstanding relates to the intentions of the parties at war, and, therefore, the inevitability of the war’s outcomes. As regards the colonists-turned-rebels, nobody was talking about (let alone seriously preparing for) independence, save perhaps Samuel Adams, until less than a year before July 1776. Adams and the Sons of Liberty (the foremost agents of violent resistance in the years between the Stamp Act and the outbreak of war) swore their continued loyalty to the King throughout the 1760s, making Parliament their enemy — not the Crown, let alone the British state as a whole. As late as 1774, Thomas Jefferson was writing publicly that the King should have the right to refuse Royal Assent confirmed and returned, so as to end the ever-hated Parliamentary tyranny. That same year, at the first Constitutional Congress, Georgia refused to send a delegation because the gathering was seen as too radical. Even so, the toasts of the event’s dinners were made to the King and the ‘continued constitutional connection with Great Britain’.

Even after hundreds had been slain at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, the Second Continental Congress drafted the Olive Branch Petition as one final attempt to seek a peaceful resolution from Parliament. Even after the Proclamation of Rebellion (which announced that all thirteen colonies were in open revolt and would be militarily suppressed), the Invasion of Quebec and all other rebel military moves were made to gain a better seat at the negotiating table, not to annex Quebec into any of the colonies. It was not until Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense was published in January 1776 that the first serious discussions about independence started to take place. Even on that fateful day in July, the New York delegates abstained on the measure to declare independence, and John Dickinson (author of the Olive Branch Petition and a delegate for Pennsylvania) refused to attend the vote.

Contrary to what the rebels feared, the King and Parliament were not planning to reduce the Americans to helpless servitude. Lord Dartmouth had thrown around the idea of a federative plan for the thirteen colonies in a similar vein to Benjamin Franklin’s Albany plan (drawn up in the 1750s) and Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union in 1774. The Prime Minister, Lord North, had drawn up his ‘conciliatory proposal’ that redressed the vast majority of colonial grievances. Despite Benjamin Franklin’s witticism that ‘we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately’, that was not the case for those who fell into royal custody. Richard Stockton, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, was kidnapped by a loyalist militia in November 1776 and dragged into royal custody. Rather than being summarily executed or transported to England for trial, he was offered a full pardon if he merely swore an oath of allegiance to the King and promised not to take up arms against him in the future. This he did, and he was let go, even though he had willingly and publicly put his name to a document of insurrectionary treason. In the final peace feeler Britain made during the war, Washington was even offered a dukedom.

Why, then, if there were compromises that both sides were willing to make, did political disagreement result in revolution? Beyond what has already been discussed, one reason is the mistaken belief by many in Parliament that the colonies could be militarily forced to accept terms of their design. It does not require hindsight to recognise the folly in that — William Pitt (the Elder), architect of victory in the Seven Years’ War, spoke in Parliament throughout the period between the Stamp Act’s passage in 1765 to his death in 1778 about the illegality of Parliament’s measures against the colonies and the impossibility of militarily subduing them. Edmund Burke (one of the colonists’ foremost defenders in the Commons) would deliver a speech in 1775, laying out clearly why the colonies could not be bullied into submission and why turning the screw on them would only bring more trouble. That same year, the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden, explained to the House of Lords that, for geographic and demographic reasons, any war with the colonies was unlikely to be winnable.

Some may believe that the loss of the American colonies was inevitable in the eighteenth century, but I would contend that there were possibilities they could have been retained, even if it was more likely they were not. Pitt the Elder was made Prime Minister shortly after the Stamp Act’s repeal, and had a long record as a voice of reason on the American question. Almost immediately upon his appointment, he suffered a mental collapse and was bedridden for virtually all of his Premiership (which lasted little more than two years). During his incapacitation, Charles Townshend — a notable hardliner — drafted a series of duties almost solely designed to spite the colonists and whip up conflict again (which they successfully did). Had Pitt's illness been less severe, shorter, delayed or non-existent, there was no chance the Townshend Acts would have been passed, and his Premiership — however long it would have been — would have undoubtedly found some other way of extracting revenue from the colonies without incurring massive trade boycotts. Alternatively, had Britain lost the Seven Years’ War whilst retaining its North American colonies, the threat of living under Catholic, French governors may have meant far less resistance to Parliament’s attempts to raise revenues to fund defence. These are just two possible routes, and as always with alternate histories, infinitely more are available.

The lesson to be drawn from Britain’s loss of the American colonies is one of understanding how your opponent really thinks, outside of the caricature constructed through the prism of your own interpretations. It is also a reminder of the necessity to allow expedience to trump the assertion of a principle. Suppose that Parliament had the full right to tax the colonies (and it probably did). Parliament also, in the United Kingdom, has the ‘right’ to enforce a £1,000 fine on every utterance of the phrase ‘should of’. Should such a thing be done simply because Parliament has the right to do so? The path towards reconciliation with the colonies, whilst it was still possible, could plausibly have avoided the renunciation of those rights if only they had not been exercised in the first place. Doing something to prove that you can is often the quickest way to ensure that that ability is taken away from you —but reserving a power for when it is truly justified can often be its best defence.

Even 250 years on, the American Revolution looms large in the political imagination not just of Americans, but of Brits as well. In particular, the mythology of popular resistance against an overbearing government feeds into right-wing thought of various stripes, from libertarians to conservatives to nationalists and beyond.

That rebelliousness, however, was not unique in spirit to the Thirteen Colonies at the time, nor is it unique to (or even particularly present in) America now. During the same decade where Westminster’s focus should have been fixed on the Americas, it was distracted year after year from 1763 onwards by Wilkesite (radical Whig) violence in London. The devastating Gordon riots took place during the war of independence itself. America has never in modern times seen right-wing direct action like the riots that followed the 2024 Southport stabbings in Britain, nor the recent reaction in Northern Ireland to an immigrant’s attempted beheading. As we have already detailed, the story of the American Revolution as a popular uprising is not quite right, and the notion of American rebelliousness often serves to keep the American right in a state of dangerous self-satisfaction, safe in the (mis)calculation that if things get bad enough, the people will rise up.

A closely related comfort blanket comes in the form of the Second Amendment, often toted by right-wing Americans as a great bulwark against tyranny and governmental overreach, with gun-wielding American patriots contrasted against ‘cucked’ Europeans who ‘gave up their guns’ and surrendered to the powers that be. Of course, this notion is farcical.

This is not because a heavily armed population cannot asymmetrically resist a more powerful military of the global hegemon, per se — indeed, America’s track record in counter-insurgency overseas has been weaker than that of Britain. The idea that American servicemen (many likely to have ties of some kind to the imaginary conservative revolt) could necessarily be relied upon facing widespread domestic insurrection with a certainty of loyalty is shaky at best. The complete non-starter, though, is the idea that overly comfortable, and mostly over-aged and overweight Americans would ever consider the sustained personal physical costs of this course of action (as opposed to episodic acts of resistance like Jan 6th). And thus, mass firearm ownership has done nothing to prevent the depredation and disenfranchisement of the American people.

Never mind issues of unconstitutional taxation and regulation — no fight was ever put up against the flood of tens of millions of illegal aliens across the Southern Border in the decades leading up to 2024, nor was there any armed resistance to the near-expulsion of Anglo-America from most of New York, Boston, and many other of New England’s major cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would not suggest that such a response would have been justified, but if American conservatives truly believe that armed resistance is ultimately an acceptable political route, under what circumstances should it be deployed if not these?

A more relevant inspiration to draw from the Revolution for western political dissidents in our own time would not be the viability of protest, resistance, or direct action, but the necessity of organisation, coordination, seizing the initiative and dictating the pace and course of events by going on the (proverbial) offensive. Time and time again, from the passage of the Stamp Act to the beginning of the war, the colonies displayed a marked ability to work together and coordinate. The Stamp Act Congress, which coordinated resistance, was attended by delegates from nine colonies. All but two of thirteen upheld boycotts against British trade in response to the Townshend Acts, and only Georgia failed to attend the First Continental Congress which organised opposition to the Coercive Acts.

Dissenting Patriots did not start their own rival congresses out of petty personal resentments of other Patriot leaders. The Committees of Correspondence in the colonies exchanged intelligence, circulated news of military movements, coordinated boycotts and street action, and operated almost as a political police force during the war. At almost every stage, both in the lead-up to and during the war, the Patriots consistently outmanoeuvred Loyalists in organisation and execution of plans. In the southern colonies, where Loyalist sentiment was highest, gatherings and marches of Loyalist militias were consistently disrupted and dispersed by Patriot militias before they could link up with royal forces or start effective ground campaigns against Patriot governments. The will for change is visibly more than present among the British population; it merely requires organisation among the masses.

Equally, Patriot organisations were not suspicious and exclusive, and they ensured that every man of talent was given the full opportunity to utilise that talent in the service of shared goals, channelled with effective coordination. We can and should criticise those who cast off on their own, especially where their independent efforts are in direct conflict with the primary current of our efforts. But we should also recognise that this is inevitable where people with the will and talent to act are not given opportunity to do so. The failure to identify and fold in talent was the crucial failure of the British government that led to the loss of the colonies; success in doing so was the Patriots’ ultimate weapon. Finding useful positions for allies with merit should be a top priority for any dissident leadership — because allies ignored can easily become opponents.

What of that Patriot Republic now? All of its founding fathers would lament the current state of the United States in one way or another. Indeed, the way that the country is governed has little to do with the state that they founded, nor the constitution that they wrote. No longer a loose federation of states touching lightly on the lives of a population of freeborn Englishmen, it has become the most powerful military force in history with imperial ambitions broader than any predecessor, governing a population drawn from every corner of the planet and exercising a degree of control over their lives and livelihoods that would have been unimaginable not just at the time of the revolution, but at any time before the twentieth century. It is perhaps unsurprising that America does not have the same government it had at its birth — after all, it is, for the most part, not the same country.

As for the 250th anniversary celebrations themselves, they offered a pithy encapsulation of the country’s current state. Half the country indulged in splendid (if empty) celebrations, with fireworks displays hosted by state and citizen alike, and the administration extolled the virtues of a tale of revolution which exists more in their minds than in their history. The other half shied away from participation lest it constitute an endorsement of the current leadership — taking the opportunity instead to sermonise on the original sins of the nation and admonish their fellow countrymen for their failure to live up to their ideals. If the latter response could be described as unpatriotic, it is nonetheless deeply American.

Whilst America may not be universally popular at home, it retains an admiration of some kind abroad. On the night of the fourth, an enormous fireworks and drone-lights show was conducted over the skies of Tokyo in celebration of the American partnership. The British Red Arrows flew red, white, and blue over the skyline of New York. Despite recent political and geopolitical disagreements, the world is still compelled by America and what it represents — for better and for worse.

For all of America’s political troubles, there is no sign of any economic or technological slowdown. Of the roughly 18,000 active satellites in orbit, around 11,000 were launched from US territory (of which 10,000 belong to SpaceX). The United States similarly dominates in AI. There can be no doubt that, when the first man sets foot on Mars, he will be an American. Whilst the rest of the world slumps towards recession, the American economy continues to grow at pace. Whatever assessments we may have about America’s recent adventurism, it has shown a level of technical military sophistication that even the United States itself could only have dreamed of mere decades ago.

But deep troubles there are. America’s government has metastasised much like ours into a sclerotic and wasteful giant, squatting on top of its society and squeezing as much prosperity out of it as possible. It is tangled in a confused web of international obligations, unsure of how to press its advantages and manage its threats. It is facing great technological and socioeconomic transformations that its state, as currently constituted, will not be able to effectively handle. Bigger than all of these, it will soon be the first country to complete the demographic transition from majority to minority white — a transformation which will, for all intents and purposes, put an end to the nation that has existed these past 250 years, and give birth to a new one in its place.

If, on the night before Trenton — as the Continental Army was reeling from the defeats at Long Island and Manhattan, before any sign of significant French or Spanish support had appeared — Washington had been granted a vision of America today, he may indeed have been thrown into despair. Yet a part of him, despite his concern, would swell with pride in the knowledge that the society he would go on to found would carve a place in history surpassing not only that of Britain, but of the Roman Republic itself, from which he drew so much inspiration. And as he gazed up towards the stars, then so seemingly far away, could he ever have imagined that the first flag on the moon would be the Republic’s?

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

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Like the Apostle Paul, the Republican establishment had been interrupted on their way to Damascus, although it would take longer for them to be converted. Their Ananias was to be Trump’s primary opponent Lindsey Graham (1955-2026), the late US Senator for South Carolina and a convert to Trumpism (or at least to Trump) himself. Graham, the hawk’s hawk, ran a primary campaign bizarrely centred on foreign policy that put him at odds with the comparatively isolationist Trump, whom he spared no floridity of tongue in condemning and for whom he demonstratively refused to vote at the general election.

By 2017, Graham had had the good sense to recognise that the winds had turned, becoming one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the upper chamber and a reliable vote for the President’s legislative agenda. Graham’s patience finally paid off when, on February 28th of this year, the President launched an unprecedented campaign of aerial strikes against the South Carolina Senator’s peculiar Erbfeind, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Though the final victory over the mullahs remains elusive, one may presume that Graham, who passed away on Sunday of an apparent heart attack with the Ukraine War heating up and Trump poised to launch renewed strikes on Iran in breach of the Memorandum of Understanding, died with a smile on his face.

Who was Lindsey Graham? Eloquent, but hardly an intellectual; uncompromising, but with no apparent worldview deeper than the usual Republican platitudes — this son of working class descendants of Ulster Scotsmen who rose from humble origins in the Appalachian foothills to become Israel’s firmest friend on Capitol Hill was always an enigma to Washington. Conspiratorial explanations for the life and legislative record of this septuagenarian confirmed bachelor readily suggest themselves, but fall short for a man so intensely under the influence of his time and place. The only way to understand Graham is as a South Carolinian, whose long Senate career brought the gradual South Carolinification of American politics in the 20th century to a successful close.

Not unlike Graham’s beloved Israel, South Carolina in the 19th century was an old land on an important modern commercial route, its politics traditionally dominated by a militaristic landowning aristocracy. Though the United States had won its independence from Britain, Charleston remained something of a trojan horse for British interests in the union, the planters being reliant on British markets and not seldom in debt to London’s banking houses. Reactionary, globalist, militarist, and anglophile — a homegrown neoconservatism flourished in South Carolina long before anyone had ever heard the names Podhoretz or Kristol, and its great exponent was John C. Calhoun, who as James Monroe’s Secretary of War laid the foundations for the modern department that bears that name.

Though the old elite was supplanted towards the end of the nineteenth century by the democratic movements of poor whites to which one could trace Graham’s political genealogy, if not his policy positions, its spirit persisted in the statehouse in Charleston, leaving South Carolina elites well-suited temperamentally to thread together the disparate strands of the mid-20th century American Right: free trade, traditional values, and an aggressive, globally-oriented foreign policy. Graham embodied this catholicity, and his great achievement in the conservative movement’s internal politics was to reconcile its mainstream to its prodigal son Donald Trump, although whether this particular ceasefire holds will depend on the outcome of the war that he so passionately championed.

The Right’s post-Trump disdain for ‘forever wars’ makes it easy to forget that American conservatism was from the very beginning a martial undertaking. The conservative movement that Graham joined was in large part the brainchild of former officers in the Air Force (Graham’s own service branch), who dreamt of a vast empire of democracy stretching across the Pacific and beyond. Soul-searching over the communist takeover of China — a ‘sister republic’ with whom the old East Coast elite had enjoyed extensive commercial, cultural, political, and personal ties — provided the impetus for the creation of early conservative lobby groups like the Committee of One Million, a pro-Kuomintang pressure group which provided the organisational backbone and a testing ground for the campaign methods employed by the Goldwater campaign in 1964.

Anticommunism was not the kind of cause that could be spun to the capitol’s newshounds as responsible, principled conservatism — the men who fought it were social pariahs, pilloried by a hostile, Democrat-aligned media establishment as paranoid kooks or deranged warmongers of the kind satirised by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove (a film not so much about the army as about the eccentricities of Air Force men specifically). Yet theirs was an unmitigated success, won within the span of the movement’s first real shake at the presidency under Reagan (Nixon, whose staff was largely drawn from the old Rockefeller men who had previously run the party, was still too much a man of the liberal age).

With no more battles left to win abroad, conservatives might have turned their attentions to cultural and institutional renewal at home. Though the conditions were auspicious — in 1994, in the midterm wave that swept Graham to Congress, Republicans took control of the House for the first time since 1952 and held it until the 2006 midterms — Graham’s generation of conservatives dropped the ball, abandoning the culture wars at home in order to wage them on behalf of liberalism in Iraq and Afghanistan. These expensive sorties, whose explicit justification was the social and political reordering of distant lands according to an abstract ideological template with little root in the soil, were rather far indeed from the defence of the ‘American way of life’ — and contradictory to its basis: the right of free peoples to live as they will — that conservatives had understood to be at stake in the struggle against communism.

The movement’s embittered ‘paleoconservative’ veterans suspected foul play, and pinned the blame on their old Reagan-era rivals, the neoconservatives, who had indeed mustered their intellectual powers to steer conservatism behind the Iraq escapade, behind American Nibelungentreue to Israel, behind an Iran War, and away from bread and butter issues of national security, like rising immigration or the loss of America’s industrial puissance. But the neocons were not in power, and Graham, not being a poor Ashkenazi Jew from the outer boroughs of New York who went to City College in the 1930s, was not a member in their club, but favoured these causes for other reasons.

Graham’s political patron was the Cold Warrior par excellence — Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951 and US Senator for the state from 1956 to 2003. It was with Thurmond’s endorsement and logistical support that Graham was first elected to Congress; it was Thurmond who handpicked Graham as his successor in the Senate upon his resignation in 2003. Thurmond, who set the ball rolling on the Republicans’ ‘Southern Strategy’ when he crossed the Senate floor in 1964, who endorsed Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in protest against the Civil Rights Act, and whose fervour in opposing the ideas of the 1960s was matched only by his zeal in the fight against communism, was the many spirits of American conservatism gathered together in a single body.

His Senate office was a revolving door for the Air Force deep state’s more eclectic figures. Philip J. Corso, who served in a number of extremely sensitive OSS postings during WWII and later wrote a memoir asserting that the United States had recovered extra-terrestrial technologies at Roswell (there are, in fact, obvious terrestrial origins attributable to any technologies of which the US armed forces suddenly came into possession around 1945, but Corso was a man in full command of his senses, and his book appears to have been successful in bolstering a longstanding belief in the paranormal in certain high-ranking military circles at the expense of other, somewhat more disconcerting explanations), was a Thurmond aide at the time of his defection to the GOP. So too was Victor Fediay, an even more mysterious figure about whom little biographical information is available in spite of his long and colourful career in the fight against communism, which involved interpreting for Alexander Solzhenitsyn during his stateside visits, organising an ultimately aborted coup attempt in the Azores during the Carnation Revolution, and coming up with the idea for the Heritage Foundation.

It is worth pointing out that US Air Force intelligence, according to Richard J. Aldrich, enjoyed better relations with its British counterparts during the early Cold War (and there is no reason to believe anything has changed) than it did with other American agencies — an odd historical consonance with Charleston’s older ties to London (to be renewed if, as rumour has it, Soros Fund Management old boy and South Carolina native Scott Bessent runs for Graham’s empty seat). To say any more on this point would be to leave the firm ground of facts for the province of speculation, although it must conceded that ‘sticking to the facts’ is not a particularly useful interpretative heuristic for understanding South Carolina politics.

The South Carolina elite naturally had other predilections beyond Cold War shadow fighting; predilections of a quainter, more rural sort. Thurmond and Graham’s campaign manager Richard Quinn, an eclectic figure and kingmaker in South Carolina politics until his recent fall at the hands of a corrupt probe, was founder and for many decades editor-in-chief of Southern Partisan, a niche journal of ideas that nevertheless provided a reliable outlet and source of funds for paleoconservative luminaries like Sam Francis, Mel Bradford, and Thomas Fleming, as well as contributing to the postmodern revival of the southern agrarian tradition more generally. None of this precluded Quinn from enjoying the full respect and confidence of the Republican mainstream, having been hired by none other than John McCain to manage his presidential campaign in the South in 2000 and 2008. This was the double life of the American conservative movement, which, in defence of interests as concrete as those of the South Carolina political class, could be neo- or paleo- as suited the occasion, or even both at the same time. Graham’s turn to Trumpism was a reactivation of this old dualism, trampled on the national stage by the less syncretic, more missionary northern neoconservatives in the late Reagan years, but still alive in his swampy homeland.

All this should be borne in mind when assessing Graham’s defence of the State of Israel and his hawkishness vis-a-vis Iran. Graham inherited a political economy that had been transformed by Thurmond’s long tenure as chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, in which role he used his oversight over the Department of Defence budget to channel untold billions in defence contracts to South Carolina, today the 8th largest state recipient of DoD funds as well as an important USAF logistical node. The armed forces’ presence in South Carolina accounts for 11.2% of state GDP according to an estimate by the state’s Department for Veteran Affairs, with the Air Force providing the lion’s share. Graham’s successor need not have any service background himself to be the Air Force’s man.

In other words, Graham owed his continued presence in the Senate to the organisational power of the old Thurmond/Quinn network and the structural power of the Air Force in South Carolina; if his advocacy for the Jewish State or regime change in Iran was displeasing to these authorities, it would have been no small matter for them to primary him. Though the deep politics of the US military are beyond any outsider’s ability to decipher — some of these people believe in aliens, after all — it requires no great mental feat to see why the Air Force would favour a quick campaign of punitive bombing in the Middle East, which will cause demand for military industrial production to soar and allow it to reward its clients. Graham’s successor will continue his political line; whether he does it with quite the same results is another matter entirely.

In the end, Graham was a nonentity, a hollow vessel for the past to enter and wreak havoc with the present — in short, the perfect conservative. A telegenic but profoundly strange man who parachuted into politics during a profoundly strange period in American history as the smiling face of normality, only to spend his days fantasising about killing people; Mr. Bateman goes to Washington. We will surely see his like again.

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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The latest INDEC figures (the Consumer Price Index) are unequivocal. The Minimum Vital and Mobile Wage stands between 357,800 and 363,000 pesos (approximately £185–£187), while the Total Basic Basket for a typical family exceeds 1,469,000 pesos (approximately £799). This implies that a minimum wage covers less than 25% of the basic basket, representing a gap of over 310%. Despite liberalisation of labour laws earlier this year, a majority of Argentine workers are now in some form of informal employment, suggesting that these conditions are even worse than meets the eye. The Basic Food Basket has seen year-on-year variations nearing 36%. Although year-on-year inflation has decreased significantly from the hyperinflationary peaks of 2023–2024, it remains at approximately 33.2% in the opening months of 2026. Argentina will record an annual inflation rate of around 30% finishing this year.

Milei did not create this economic and social reality. He inherited a nation scarred by decades of macroeconomic imbalances, Peronist clientelism, and a deeply rooted parasitic statism. His administration has achieved significant milestones: the attainment of a primary surplus — an exceptional feat in recent Argentine history — and a notable reduction in inflation. These advances were considered improbable by much of the political and media establishment at the start of his term. Foreign exchange reserves have been stabilised by interventions from the US Treasury, international banks and the IMF, and the growth outlook, though weak this year, shows tentative signs of long-term promise.

Nevertheless, the political sustainability of the adjustment depends largely on the middle class perceiving a credible path toward the recovery of their purchasing power, stability, and a growing sense of institutional order. Argentines have proved themselves willing to endure ‘necessary pain’ — but the leadership has thrown their project into risk by falling into the same traps that have lured in politicians throughout our history. That these issues are long and storied does not soften the blow to public morale. Rather, an outsider falling into ‘the caste’ only feeds the pervading sense of utter despair. If Argentina is to emerge from her century-long malaise, it will be by the hope and resolve of the middle class.

The rise of the Lion

Javier Milei ascended to power as an atypical outsider, a contemporary Quixote facing the windmills of a consolidated political and economic establishment. His rise was no accident. He connected profoundly with the industrious character of the average Argentine — reflected in his own middle-class origins — and with a rebellious aesthetic that evokes both the tradition of national rock and the generous sideburns of the heroes of the May Revolution, which marked the break with a Spanish Empire then in decline under the Bourbons.

His formative years were shaped by the 1981 economic crisis and the hyperinflation during the final months of Raúl Alfonsín’s government. At university, his personal experience merged with the study of the Austrian School of economics. This classical liberal tradition provided an intellectual foundation that allowed him to identify the State — not without justification, given Argentina’s particular history — as one of the primary obstacles to liberty and prosperity.

Milei built his career as chief economist at Corporación América, the conglomerate owned by businessman Eduardo Eurnekian. Strategic connections, high ratings on television and radio programmes, and his subsequent leap into politics catapulted him forward. Communication coaches helped him channel his natural histrionics into high-impact messages. With effective communication techniques, he capitalised on widespread social exhaustion — especially among young people unburdened by heavy prior ideological inheritances — who embraced change driven by what Max Weber would have described as an ethic of conviction and will. Milei successfully replicated the formulas for translating media success into political success previously employed by figures such as Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky.

His first major breakthrough came in 2021, when he was elected deputy for the City of Buenos Aires with La Libertad Avanza, securing 17.04% of the vote and finishing third. During his two years in Congress, he honoured his promise to raffle his deputy’s salary monthly among citizens registered on a web platform — a practice he maintained until assuming the presidency in December 2023. The rest is well-known history. Milei pushed to the limit his discourse against ‘the caste,’ embodied particularly in the Peronist-Kirchnerist left represented by the grotesque figure of Alberto Fernández and the crook Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The exhaustion of that political force and the galloping inflation of Fernández’s final year ultimately propelled him to the presidency.

His arrival at the Casa Rosada was accompanied by an unusual resilience in Argentine public opinion. For months, broad sectors of the electorate tolerated what the government itself termed ‘the largest adjustment in history’ under the promise that it was the necessary toll toward economic normalisation. That patience, however, is proving not to be infinite. It was a blank cheque with an expiry date, which, faced with the initial deterioration of real incomes and the persistence of problems such as economic insecurity, corruption, and a negligible capacity for saving, is showing signs of exhaustion.

A history of Argentina’s middle-class participation and the problem of talent drain

Argentina’s problems do not begin with Perónism. To understand the gravity of the present challenge, it is necessary to look back.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Argentina could count itself amongst the most prosperous nations in the world. Its economy was driven by agricultural exports, with developing secondary and professional sectors that had already produced (and pulled in) a highly literate, European middle class in the country’s metropoles of Mendoza, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires. Argentina’s GDP per capita had become comparable to that of France and Germany. Buenos Aires was a city during these same years that was mirrored with its contemporary Vienna — cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and at its zenith. The country, governed by the liberal-conservative oligarchic National Autonomist Party (PAN), was politically febrile. Despite its relative prosperity, it remained fraught with issues of land ownership and distribution (the inheritance of latifundio from Spanish rule being a problem across Latin America), nationalist demands to assert control over foreign-owned infrastructure and capital (mostly by British investors) and electoral suffrage and political participation.

The oligarchy broke down with the Sáenz Peña Law, which heralded the first elections with universal manhood suffrage held in 1916, bringing the nationalist revolutionary Hipólito Yrigoyen and the Radical Civic Union (UCR) party to power. Yrigoyen led a programme of nationalising foreign assets, social reform and democratisation. The fundamentals of the economic model remained strong alongside broad political participation across social strata. Argentina continued to boom through the ‘radical republic’ — averaging an annual growth rate of 8.1%, and for her newly empowered, burgeoning middle class, the future had never seemed brighter. However, the revolutionary tradition and opposition to the oligarchy also further pronounced the country’s personalistic politics. Yrigoyen lent into the region’s historical caudillo-style leadership and applied it to the same mass democratic personalism that Perón would later perfect.

The democratic order was sent into disarray by the Great Depression and ended by military coup under José Félix Uriburu. The initial Nacionalista regime was a cheap imitation of Mussolinian corporatism, married to the Catholic nationalism of Spain, France and Portugal. Uriburu’s regime would barely last over a year due to his ailing health, and soon gave his blessings to the Concordancia governing alliance made up of old PAN party figures and more conservative ‘antipersonalist’ UCR members who understood themselves as antagonists to the demagoguery of Yrigoyen. The years of the Great Depression in Argentina under the Concordancia were harsh; farmers and rural workers were ruined, flocking to the cities and creating shanty towns. In response, the state experimented with new economic and monetary ideas (particularly import-substitution industrialisation), which ended the old export model and exacerbated the recurring problem of foreign exchange constraints that plagues the country to this day.

In the following ‘decade of imfamy’, the new dirigiste state governed by electoral fraud and its officials were constantly implicated in new political and financial scandals. Corporatism did not go particularly far beyond the wider trends in global economic policymaking — but the state’s involvement in new spheres of economic management entrenched new avenues for corruption in a country already prone to this disease. The infamous decade is perhaps best remembered today in two incidents: the assassination of a Senator, on the floor of the Upper House itself (for investigating malpractice in the meat trade), and the CHADE scandal. The electricity supplier, CHADE’s bribery of government officials had become so widespread that the recipients became known as an identifiable bloc, the ‘chadístas’.

Another coup and another dictatorship would end the Concordancia, from which Juan Domingo Perón emerged out of the Nacionalista milieu. Many Peronists are uncomfortable acknowledging that their old leader was one of the officers who accompanied Félix Uriburu in the overthrow of the democratic Argentine government in 1930. They prefer to focus on 17 October 1945, the foundational act of Peronism, when Perón capitalised on his strong links with the world of labour (forged at the Secretariat of Labour), and thousands of workers marched to the Plaza de Mayo to demand his release from imprisonment on Martín García Island. The Radical Civic Union (a party of various ideological shades, whatever one might think of them) remained a middle-class vehicle in resisting Nacionalismo and then Peronism.

The concept of a self-conscious ‘middle class’ in Argentina was further consolidated during the first Peronist period, in an attempt to bridge the historic divisions between ‘the plebs’ and ‘decent people.’ The University Reform of 1918 gave this sector its own identity, opening the possibility that the son of immigrants could aspire to professional degrees in medicine or law. Perón later capitalised on these aspirations for upward social mobility with his formula of ‘social justice,’ inspired in part by the corporatism he observed during his postings as a military observer in Fascist Italy between 1939 and 1941.

Today, the old meritocratic (or more accurately, pseudo-meritocratic) ideal that was gestated but never fully realised under Yrigoyen, then captured by Perón, is under pressure. ‘The Chainsaw’, much like Trump’s ‘Drain the Swamp’ mantra, was a revolutionary declaration that suggested far more than the rejection of the old policies. In the minds of ordinary Argentines who voted for Milei, it was a rejection of a long and tired history — the old systems of patronage, political rent-seeking, corruption and clientelism which removed avenues to advancement for all but the favoured groups of one ‘caste’ or another. The chainsaw and ‘meritocracy’ were understood in part synonymously.

This was, and always had been, a naive hope. Such is the condition of the nation. Milei, meanwhile, has reduced budgets for public universities and openly criticised their politicisation and low efficiency — a position that does have solid foundations. However, a policy that has been reduced primarily to budgetary asphyxiation without comprehensive reform — including accountability and competition between institutions and rigorous evaluation of their results — now weakens one of the few remaining mechanisms for social mobility. Without an effective social elevator and facing entirely bleak prospects otherwise, many in the middle class see only one visible exit: Ezeiza Airport.

The work of keeping Argentina on sound footing requires a publicly minded demographic base — our history is already one of repeatedly taking the same first step on the road to course-correction. The ‘gradualist’ strategy of President Macri (2015-2019) delicately sought to restructure the economy and modernise the state through the existing institutional frameworks, only for his work to be undone by a second bout of Kirchnerism under Fernández (with Cristina de Kirchner returning to power as his Vice-President). This was a problem understood by Milei himself, who has referenced the need to maintain public support through necessary pain. It was partly this dilemma that led him to reject the gradualist strategy in the first place.

Although there are faint signs of an incipient ‘reverse brain drain’ in certain sectors, the reality is that numerous graduates and professionals end up serving drinks in Ibiza, working as tour guides in Malta, or trying to make their way in Spain, Italy, or the United Kingdom. The flight of human capital remains massive, and its cost for the country’s future is considerable. No democratic Argentine government has managed to tackle this drain structurally. On the other hand, the country’s net migration figures remain slightly positive, drawing large flows of labour to the informal sector from even more unfortunate parts of the continent. The end result is a sociological melancholy that leads many to suicide: suicide rates now exceed the record highs during the 1998-2002 economic depression. Perhaps if they do last, the results of Milei’s reforms will begin to ease the flight of human capital — but nothing has discredited the viability of ‘the chainsaw’ more than his apparent assimilation into the caste itself.

Corruption: the problem of credibility

The reluctance of many young people to ‘fight in the mud’ can be explained largely by a cold assessment of reality: foreign debt, commitments to the IMF, and endemic corruption are inherited burdens that many prefer not to shoulder. Most worrying has been the observation that, in certain cases, the promised chainsaw has been transformed into a tool for the benefit of those close to power. Allegations of preferential procurement processes (which were not necessarily counts of corruption) early in Milei’s premiership, nonetheless, began to take the sheen off the once untouchable President. This is something I observe directly: many of my students over the age of 16 voted enthusiastically for Milei, yet today, disillusioned, they are renewing Spanish or Italian passports with the intention of emigrating.

The $LIBRA scandal, also known as Cryptogate, erupted in February 2025 and proved particularly damaging. From his official account, the president recommended a token that soared to nearly five dollars only to collapse below one within hours. The pump-and-dump scheme is estimated to have generated losses exceeding $100 million for investors. It was not an isolated case: in 2021, he had already recommended CoinX — classified by the CNV as a possible Ponzi scheme — and Vulcano Game ($VULC), whose tokens collapsed shortly after his public endorsement. In the face of criticism, his habitual response has been “I only gave my opinion”, although judicial investigations have uncovered calls and recorded audio suggesting deeper involvement by his inner circle, including his sister Karina.

The case of Manuel Adorni illustrates the contradiction well. A preacher of fiscal austerity, he has turned parts of the State into something resembling a family SME: he appointed his brother, Francisco Adorni, as a Defence advisor with a salary of five million pesos despite a complete lack of relevant experience. The situation has since escalated; in June 2026, prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan requested Francisco’s indictment (indagatoria) for alleged unlawful enrichment and malicious omission in his asset declarations. Investigations revealed that Francisco’s net worth doubled in a single year, reaching 80.5 million pesos — a growth that appears incompatible with his official income. Furthermore, a significant discrepancy has emerged: while Francisco declared an inheritance of 21 million pesos, Manuel claimed to have received $200,000 (roughly 180 million pesos at parallel rates) to justify his own exponential wealth growth and Bitcoin investments. These conflicting versions sit uneasily with previous recordings in which Manuel expressed distrust of volatile cryptocurrencies.

The turning point has been his recent resignation and immediate appointment to the board of directors of YPF, the nation’s most significant state-majority-owned enterprise and its crown jewel. This move represents a ‘revolving door’ practice typical of democracies with weak institutions, where high-ranking officials jump from public service to key positions in strategic companies without a sufficient cooling-off period. This practice reinforces the perception of a ‘patrimonial state’ that has not rid itself of the inner-circle privileges that Milei himself promised to eradicate.

Unfortunately, these episodes add to other scandals in the National Disability Agency (ANDIS) and the Ministry of Human Capital, where alleged bribes and irregular contracts are currently under investigation. Compromising audio recordings involve figures close to Milei, such as Diego Spagnuolo, Milei’s sister (Karina Milei), and ‘Lule’ Menem, in alleged bribe solicitations. In the Ministry of Human Capital, withheld food and irregular contracts through the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) have fuelled new investigations.

Corruption in Argentina is not a detail; it is a structural problem tied to the customary practices of politics and the State. This corruption is systemic rather than incidental. Despite the massive Italian immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the mafia never managed to control the streets of Buenos Aires as they did elsewhere. This suggests that the ‘cake’ of corruption already had a historical owner: a patrimonialist State which, although formally emancipated from Spain, never fully freed itself from the corrupt practices of Bourbon political culture. Unfortunately, this land, like many, lives in twilight morality and invincible corruption.

Prognosis

From a European perspective, Milei constitutes a political phenomenon of great interest: the first serious and radical attempt to apply libertarian principles in a major Latin American country. Notwithstanding the drama and gesticulation, he has proven it is possible to break the statist consensus and survive electorally, for now.

However, he also illustrates the limits of purely economic minarchism when it collides with deep cultural, institutional, and anthropological realities: low social trust, a historical preference for a protective state, combined with chronic failures to exercise state power judiciously. Milei has just abolished the Ministry of the Interior, but he will find it difficult to abolish the internal problems of his ministries.

Milei is not an infallible messiah. His greatest virtue has been his disruptive drive and political realism in a country that desperately needed both. Yet that virtue can easily become a vice if it is not accompanied by ironclad institutional discipline, far more rigorous and less indulgent selection of political cadres, and a compelling narrative capable of convincing the middle class that today’s sacrifices will ultimately build a future of genuine prosperity — not merely endless austerity.

Not even a strong footballing result in the World Cup — that reliable placebo for so many national frustrations — will be able to mask this underlying pathology forever. The crowds in the stadiums can quickly become crowds in the streets. Milei is only one part of the story; even as president, he does not — and cannot — pretend to be ‘everyone.’ In this sense, the apocryphal Platonic insight does ring true: the first act of corruption by an official is to accept a position for which one is not prepared.

The opposition remains divided, lacking convincing core ideas and burdened by figures such as the convicted Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, wearing an electronic ankle tag and playing a self-referential farce as a new Evita Perón. An immediate mass return to Kirchnerism is unlikely, but an increase in the ‘blank vote’ — that tremendously political vote with incalculable effects explored by José Saramago in Seeing (Ensayo sobre la lucidez) — is probable. In reality, many of those who lived through the Argentine collapse of 2001 feel despair when they see they are still governed by people who played leading roles in that institutional collapse, such as Patricia Bullrich (former Minister of the Interior and now current Leader of the Libertad Avanza bloc), Federico Sturzenegger (Minister of Deregulation), Luis Caputo (Minister of Economy), or Diego Santilli (recently appointed as Chief of Cabinet to replace Manuel Adorni). A period of just over a quarter of a century only serves to certify a kind of ‘eternal return’ by other means.

Julio Cortázar, the celebrated Argentine writer, left in Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962) countless delightful instructions for everyday actions, yet unfortunately included none for governing Argentina, stabilising its economy, or strengthening its middle class. However, the message from Argentina is clear: we want no more poverty, and do not need populism. Instead, we require a solvent and bold middle class with a clear future.

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

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The most recent national population projection from the ONS has the population of the UK hitting 71 million in 2034 and peaking at 72.5 million in 2054, then declining afterwards. This increase in the short term to 2034 is the result of a projected 6.4 million births, 6.9 million deaths, 7.3 million people immigrating to the UK and 5.1 million people emigrating from the UK, an overall increase of 1.7 million.

The white British share of the population in England and Wales has declined from 87.5% in 2001 to 80.5% in 2011 and 74.4% in 2021. That figure will have declined further since the 2021 census, particularly given the unprecedented level of immigration between 2021 and 2024 (the ‘Boriswave’). We won’t get the full picture until the next census in 2031, and what we see then will depend on how many of the Boriswave end up settling.

Several population projections based on census data show that the white British are set to become a minority sometime in the 2050s or 2060s. The census is, however, merely a snapshot in time and is not a leading indicator for what the future of the country might look like. This is because the census captures a lot of older people, whose numbers have less, if any, bearing on the future demographic make-up of the country. This point was echoed by demographer Paul Morland in an interview with Steven Edginton; the demographics of younger cohorts matter more, and they are on track to fall below the 50% threshold much sooner. The two leading indicators for demographic change are births and school entries. It can be argued that neither are as accurate or encompassing as the decadal census, which is considered by statisticians, demographers and researchers to be the gold standard. Nonetheless, the trends are clear and all moving in the same direction.

I have explored births previously in Pimlico Journal, covering the data between 2007 and 2023 here, and providing an update on 2024’s revised fertility rates here. Recently released ONS data for 2025 shows that 53.1% of births in England and Wales were white British, a slight decrease from 53.7% in 2024, down from 58.9% in 2021 and 66.3% in 2010. Birth statistics have some limitations; there is no way to account for internal migration (e.g., someone born in Scotland who moves to England or vice versa), those born here who emigrate, or those born in foreign countries who immigrate to the UK, often the dependants of migrants on work visas, or those arriving via family reunification or immediate settlement visas.

School statistics are another avenue that gives us a look into what the future of the country might look like even without large amounts of future immigration, assuming no major reversal of trends in the birth rate. Crucially, school statistics allow us to capture younger cohorts who have immigrated to the UK with their parents and who would therefore not be captured in birth statistics. The ethnicity of pupils is collected and published yearly as part of the annual school census. From what I can find, the ethnicity of pupils has been recorded in England since 1996, in Wales since 2004, in Scotland since 2003 and in Northern Ireland since 2006. If any earlier data is available, I have not been able to find it, or it does not exist on any record that is digitally accessible. With this information, we can map the change over time and create a time series.

The following statistics cover Government funded schools in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The headline pupil figures from these releases include those in hospital or independent (private) schools, however characteristics such as ethnicity are only recorded for those in state-funded schools or those with state-funded placements. These other school types only submit aggregate level returns, though in practice this makes little difference as the vast majority of pupils attend state schools. For example, in England when the most recent census took place in January 2026, there were a total of 8,920,227 pupils enrolled in schools in England. 8,359,455 out of 8,920,227 (93.7%) were in state-funded schools or had their placement funded by the state. The remaining 560,772 pupils were in independent, hospital or other miscellaneous schools. This closely matches the roughly 6-7% of the UK pupil population who are educated outside of state schools, most of whom will be educated in independent schools. 8,129,871 out of 8,359,455 (97.3%) were in a state funded primary or secondary school. The number of pupils outside state-funded primary and secondary schools is small and would not meaningfully impact headline figures or overall trends. As these releases cover England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and span over two decades, the terminology has changed over time. In some of the releases you may see references to state-funded, maintained, grant funded, grant aided etc. In essence we are talking about schools which are, wholly or partially, funded by the Government or local authority. I have included some data at the end for independent schools, which should act as a suitable proxy for the 6-7% of the UK pupil population who attend independent schools, however the data here is less detailed than what is provided for state schools.

For England, I have separated out primary and secondary schools. I have also created two maps showing the white British and ethnic minority percentage of total school enrolment by parliamentary constituency, as the Department for Education have provided this information for the first time in the 2025/26 academic release, which is backdated to 2024/25. It’s not possible to provide a parliamentary constituency breakdown for Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, as no breakdowns are provided by the respective Governments or statistical agencies.

For Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the figures are for total pupil enrolment. This is sometimes referred to as all-sectors and encompasses both primary and secondary schools, as well as any miscellaneous schools like grammar or special schools which recorded ethnicity, though the numbers of pupils outside primary and secondary schools are very small.

I will start with schools in England, as this is where the bulk of demographic change has occurred and will continue to occur in future. The releases covering schools in England are also the most fragmented and hardest to locate, as the names for these statistical bulletins have changed on multiple occasions and many are no longer hosted on the Government website and have been migrated to The National Archives.

All the charts and maps below are interactive Datawrapper charts. I would recommend viewing this article on a PC, as they might not format correctly on a phone or tablet. For links to all the sources used, notes and additional explanations for where this information has been collated from, please see here.

Schools in England

The Department for Education (DfE) publishes schools, pupils and their characteristics releases once a year. This allows you to create a table showing the ethnicity of pupils from the 2015/16 to 2025/26 academic year, which will be referenced as January 2016 and January 2026 going forward, as the school census takes place in January.

White British pupils comprised 69.3% of enrolment in January 2016, falling to 59.7% in January 2026. This figure is for total pupil enrolment (all sectors) though you can break it down into state-funded primary or state-funded secondary if you wish.

The releases page has the earliest release going back to January 2010 (2009/10), which showed white British pupils comprised 73.8% of primary school enrolment and 77.3% of secondary school enrolment. However, starting from 2010 doesn’t tell the full story. The ethnicity of pupils has been recorded as part of the school census since 1996 and The National Archives has releases in digital format that are readable from 1998 onwards. The DfE don’t link any of these archived releases, which makes them harder to track down as the National Archives is poorly indexed and harder to search. When contacted, even the Schools and Pupils Statistics Team were unaware that releases including ethnicity existed before 2002.

I will use the 2003 school census results as the starting point. This is because the 2003 census added a plethora of ethnicity categories to align with the 2001 census, including the introduction of the ‘White British’ category, alongside several mixed ethnicity categories. The ethnicity categories added in the 2003 school census are still used today and remain unchanged over 20 years later. Ethnic minority is defined as all ethnicities excluding ‘White British’ and excluding pupils who don’t have an ethnicity stated. This aligns with how the DfE produce these statistics and the accompanying summaries.

White British pupils comprised 79.5% of enrolment in state-funded primary schools in 2003, decreasing to 70.8% of enrolment in 2013 and 62.6% of enrolment in 2023. As of January 2026, they have declined further to 59.8% of enrolment. Ethnic minority pupils comprised 17.3% of enrolment in state-funded primary schools in 2003, increasing to 28.5% of enrolment in 2013 and 36.1% of enrolment in 2023. As of January 2026, they have increased further to 38.9% of enrolment. Pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated aren’t shown to improve chart readability. They comprised 3.2% of enrolment in 2003, 0.7% of enrolment in 2013 and have increased slightly to 1.3% of enrolment in January 2026.

White British pupils comprised 80.3% of enrolment in state-funded secondary schools in 2003, decreasing to 74.7% of enrolment in 2013 and 62.6% of enrolment in 2023. As of January 2026, they have fallen further to 59.4% of enrolment. Ethnic minority pupils comprised 14.8% of enrolment in state-funded secondary schools in 2003, increasing to 24.2% of enrolment in 2013 and 35.4% of enrolment in 2023. As of January 2026, they have increased further to 38.7% of enrolment. Again, pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated aren’t shown. They comprised 4.9% of enrolment in 2003, 1.1% of enrolment in 2013 and have increased slightly to 1.9% of enrolment in January 2026.

Given that white British births have declined noticeably since 2021 and that most children start primary school at age five, the white British percentage is pretty much guaranteed to fall further in the coming years, even before one factors in the enrolment of children of Boriswave migrants who were born overseas and thus not captured in birth statistics.

The January 2026 school census was the first in which the DfE published ethnicity breakdowns by Parliamentary constituency, rather than just local authority or region, as was the case in previous releases. Below I have created two maps showing the white British and ethnic minority percentage for each constituency using the current 2024 boundaries. These percentages are for total school enrolment and have not been broken down for primary or secondary school pupil enrolment.

Note that constituencies may not sum to 100% if you were to add the white British and ethnic minority percentage together. This is because I have rounded the percentages to 1 decimal place to improve map readability and excluded pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated to align with DfE practice.

The constituency with the highest white British percentage is North Northumberland, where 92.5% of school pupils are white British. The constituency with the lowest white British percentage is East Ham, where 2.3% of school pupils are white British.

The constituency with the highest ethnic minority percentage is East Ham, where 97.1% of school pupils are from an ethnic minority background. The constituency with the lowest ethnic minority percentage is Torridge and Tavistock, where 6.1% of pupils are from an ethnic minority background.

There are 142 constituencies in England where white British pupils made up less than 50% of enrolment, up from 137 the year prior. Percentages have been rounded to 1 decimal place to improve map readability.

Schools in Wales

The Welsh Government publishes annual school census results on their website. The releases cover January 2014 to January 2025, though the January 2014 release contains data from January 2010 onwards. An archive release was found on the StatsWales website covering January 2004 (2003/04) and January 2005 (2004/05), though no census results could be found after these dates to cover the period prior to January 2010. The StatsWales website has since been migrated, and the two older releases are no longer accessible. The Welsh Government school statistics team were contacted to ask if they could produce a single release covering the ethnic background of pupils from 2004 to 2025, covering the number of pupils and percentage of enrolment by ethnic group, which they kindly did. This ad hoc release (Pupils aged 5 or over by ethnic background, 2004 to 2025) can be viewed here.

White British pupils comprised 92% of enrolment in 2004, declining moderately to 90.5% of enrolment in 2014 and 84.1% of enrolment in 2025. The ethnic minority percentage of pupil enrolment has increased from 5.1% in 2004 to 8.9% of enrolment in 2014 and 15.3% of enrolment in 2025. Pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated aren’t shown. They comprised 3% of enrolment in 2004, 0.6% of enrolment in 2014 and 0.7% of enrolment in 2025.

Schools in Scotland

The Scottish Government publishes pupil census supplementary statistics on their website. The releases are labelled as covering 2007 to 2025, though Table 1.12 in the 2007 release has the ethnicity of pupils from 2003 to 2006. It’s possible to separate primary and secondary schools, but as Scotland has seen lower levels of immigration and less demographic change, I didn’t deem it necessary; therefore, the all-sectors figures for total pupil enrolment have been used.

What complicates the Scottish statistics is that the Scottish Government have used three different ethnicity classifications between 2003 and 2025. Scotland also doesn’t use the same ethnicity classifications as England and Wales, making long-term comparisons harder. I have broken down the Scottish releases into three separate charts covering the time periods under which different ethnicity classifications were used. From 2003 to 2010, ethnic minority is defined as all ethnicities, except ‘White - UK’ and excluding pupils whose ethnicity was not known or not disclosed. From 2011 to 2019, ethnic minority is defined as all ethnicities, except ‘White – Scottish’ and excluding pupils whose ethnicity was not known or not disclosed. From 2020 onwards, ethnic minority is defined as all ethnicities, except ‘White – Scottish’ and ‘White – Other British’ and excluding pupils whose ethnicity was not known or not disclosed.

White UK pupils comprised 91.3% of enrolment in 2003, decreasing modestly to 89.7% of enrolment in 2010. The ethnic minority percentage of pupils increased from 4.4% of enrolment in 2003 to 7.8% of enrolment in 2010. Pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated aren’t shown. They comprised 4.3% of enrolment in 2003 and 2.5% of enrolment in 2010.

White Scottish pupils comprised 87.6% of enrolment in 2011, decreasing to 78% of enrolment in 2019. The ethnic minority percentage of pupils increased from 10.6% of enrolment in 2011 to 20% of enrolment in 2019. Pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated aren’t shown. They comprised 1.8% of enrolment in 2011 and 2% of enrolment in 2019.

I suspect many white British pupils who were previously identifying as ‘White UK’ were identifying in the ‘White – Other’ category, as they didn’t identify as being Scottish; over this period, the ‘White – Other’ category increased from 4.8% of enrolment to 9.1% of enrolment. These students, including white British students who chose not to identify as Scottish, are therefore confusingly included in the ‘ethnic minority’ category here, which explains the decrease in that category between 2019 and 2020.

From 2020, Scotland changed ethnicity classifications again, adding both ‘White Scottish’ and ‘White Other British’ categories, which I have combined into ‘White Scottish & British’ for the purpose of these charts. White Scottish & British pupils comprised 83.3% of enrolment in 2020, decreasing to 77.5% of enrolment in 2025. The ethnic minority percentage increased from 14.6% of enrolment in 2020 to 19.9% of enrolment in 2025. Pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated aren’t shown. They comprised 2.1% of enrolment in 2020 and 2.6% of enrolment in 2025.

Schools in Northern Ireland

The Department of Education (DoE) publishes school enrolment statistical bulletins that cover 2005/06 to 2025/26. There is no ethnicity information from the 2023/24 census due to industrial action, so this year has been left blank. These releases allow you to disaggregate school types, however as with Wales and Scotland, the figures for total pupil enrolment have been used. Northern Ireland, much like Wales and Scotland, has experienced much lower levels of immigration and less demographic change as a result.

The mainline Northern Ireland school enrolment statistics do not include the number of pupils who don’t have a stated ethnicity. The number of unclassified pupils is remarkably low in Northern Ireland, consistently below 1,000 a year and sometimes as few as 7, so would not impact headline figures. In the mainline release, ethnic minority is defined as all pupils other than ‘White (excluding Irish Traveller)’.

White pupils comprised 98.3% of enrolment in 2006, declining modestly to 92% of enrolment in 2026. Ethnic minority pupils comprised 1.7% of enrolment in 2006, increasing modestly to 8% of enrolment by 2026.

Independent (private) schools

Independent schools are not mandated to report data on pupil characteristics, such as ethnicity or religion. They are only required to report total enrolment. There are around 650,000 pupils who are educated in independent schools, comprising 6-7% of the total UK pupil population. The best metric available comes from the Independent Schools Council (ISC), who have published ethnicity information as part of their annual school census since 2009. As with Government funded schools, their census also takes place in January. You can find a list of ISC census reports here.

There are some caveats with the publicly available ISC census releases:

• Pupils whose ethnicity isn’t stated are completely excluded. The 2026 ISC census notes that ethnicity was only recorded for 25% of pupils in Scotland, so Scotland is completely excluded. Previous ISC census releases have excluded other regions due to low counts.

• Not every school collects ethnicity data. The 2009 ISC census notes that 74% of schools reported ethnicity data and the 2026 census notes that 85% of schools reported ethnicity data, covering 74% of ISC pupils.

• Not every independent school is a member of the ISC, though according to the ISC themselves, their membership encompasses 85% of the total number of pupils who are educated in independent schools in the UK, so their data will be mostly representative.

• ISC censuses from 2009 to 2014 excluded boarding schools when it came to producing ethnicity figures, whereas all ISC censuses since have included them, provided the boarding school reported ethnicity data. This did not meaningfully change any of the figures or overall trend as you can see by hovering over the 2014 and 2015 results.

The ISC census only offers two ethnic groups in the public releases; these are ‘White British’ and ‘UK minority ethnic’. The latter is sometimes worded as ‘Ethnic minority’ or ‘Minority ethnic’ in some of the ISC census releases. For the purposes of the chart, I have coded them all as ‘Ethnic Minority’.

White British pupils comprised 77.2% of ISC enrolment in 2009, declining to 66.2% of enrolment in 2019, 64.9% of enrolment in 2021 and 57.8% of enrolment in 2026. Ethnic minority pupils comprised 22.8% of ISC enrolment in 2009, increasing to 33.8% of enrolment in 2019, 35.1% of enrolment in 2021 and 42.2% of enrolment in 2026.

There may have been some suspicion that independent schools would be less ethnically diverse; however, ISC census results show the opposite is true. Independent schools, at least those that are members of the ISC and report ethnicity data, are more ethnically diverse than state-funded schools in England, at least at the national level. This is something the ISC even highlight in their recent 2026 census.

‘ISC schools educate a diverse pupil population. Among pupils for whom ethnicity is recorded, 42.2% are from minority ethnic backgrounds, a proportion which has increased substantially over time and is higher than in the state‑funded sector in England.’

The decline of white British pupils has slowed in recent years, declining 0.1 pp between the 2025 and 2026 censuses. The slowdown in the decline is likely due to lower levels of immigration and the introduction of VAT on private school fees, which has led to the number of foreign students at boarding schools falling 10% in a single year.

I suspect that for both state-funded and independent schools, there are high levels of ethnic clustering and segregation, mimicking what we see on the ONS census map, where places like London, Birmingham, Manchester and the surrounding areas are highly ethnically diverse, but where most areas of the country remain majority white British. In September 2025, a study was published which examined ethnic clustering in state funded secondary schools in England between 2010 and 2018. The study notes that many white British pupils attended schools with limited ethnic diversity and that when an area experienced an influx of ethnic minority pupils, there was a drop in white British enrolment. Even in areas where white British pupils were a minority overall, such as Birmingham (where they made up only 25% of the secondary school population) there were individual schools at which white British enrolment approaches 90%. Similar trends were observed in other areas and for other ethnic groups. The study also noted that Asian pupils comprised 25% of London’s secondary school population, yet there were schools where Asian enrolment was 40-50%.

Conclusions

It is all too easy to dismiss population projections that reach decades into the future, and to argue over methodological differences when it comes to assumed levels of net migration and fertility rates. Often, this dynamic reduces conversations surrounding our demographic situation to a futile argument over the precise year in which white Brits will become a minority in our own country. Of course, it does not much matter whether this will occur in 2053, 2061, 2066, or any other year. It will either happen, or it will not.

The more damaging consequence of discussion in these terms is the reinforcement of the idea that demographic replacement is a threat looming in the future, rather than a reality of the present. Not only does that lessen the urgency that many feel, it also shapes the responses. If we understand replacement as something that may occur in the future as a result of immigration, our attempts to prevent it will naturally be centred around changes to immigration policy. But what these figures show is that the disaster has already occurred. Even if we were to put a complete halt to all immigration tomorrow, white Brits will be reduced to at most ~55% of the population as older generations pass away and those currently in their youth replace them. At that level, only a very marginal difference in fertility rates by ethnicity will ensure our minoritisation.

If we wish to ensure that Britain continues to exist in the future, and that the British people are capable of self-determination within a unified political community to which they feel any kind of connection, these figures show beyond any reasonable doubt that we must do more than simply control who is allowed into our country. To galvanise support on that basis, the public must be given an accurate impression of the current situation. The census, helpful as it is, must be seen as a lagging indicator — and those of us who wish to highlight the extent and pace of demographic change in a way which produces the necessary and commensurate political response must focus on metrics which paint a more accurate picture of where we are now.

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

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Inter Alia, by Suzie Miller (National Theatre Live Encore, Ritzy Cinema, Brixton)

This review contains extensive spoilers for Prima Facie and Inter Alia.

Around the corner from Globe House, the international headquarters of British American Tobacco, past a wrought-iron, card-locked gate, sits a skew-whiff little building clad in a yellowish stone that never quite looks clean. This is Blackstone House, home to the eponymous Blackstone Chambers, undoubtedly one of the most renowned associations of lawyers anywhere in the English-speaking world. Until fairly recently, it was also the working home of Dinah Rose KC.

Rose is the kind of barrister to whom words like ‘distinguished’ seem to spring unbidden like shrapnel to an MRI machine. Her chambers page at Blackstone, where she is still a door tenant, repeats client feedback that describes her simply as ‘The most naturally gifted advocate one has ever seen.’ In December 2024, she was appointed to the panel of chairmen of the Competition Appeal Tribunal. This is a glittering career if ever that word were appropriate, and like many glittering careers in Britain, its latter years (as with its early days) feature a spell at Oxbridge: Dinah Rose is now President of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Yet nor was her career at the Bar ever the only string to her bow. Dinah Rose first came to public prominence overseeing an independent review of the BBC in response to the Savile scandal. That secondment produced a report called Respect at Work, whose remit rapidly broadened from responding to the systematic rape of children, enabled and covered up by the highest ranks of the British establishment, to more quotidian concerns (emphasis added):

In the wake of the Savile crisis - a period which shook the BBC to its core - many of our people asked the question “How could this have happened here?” This was swiftly followed by another question: “Could it happen at the BBC today?”. Whilst we believed, as a management team, that the BBC of today is not the same environment as that in which the sexual abuses of Savile went undetected, we did not wish to be complacent in making that assumption. Originally, therefore, this review was focused on the specific question of the extent to which sexual harassment is an issue in today’s BBC. We quickly expanded the focus, however, to include broader issues of behaviour in the BBC workplace. The reasons for this were, first, that Dinah Rose QC, who has overseen and provided independent challenge to the review, was of the view that any consideration of sexual harassment should also investigate the broader issues of bullying and the inappropriate use of power of which sexual harassment is only one manifestation. Secondly, the BBC is undergoing significant change both as a result of a need to save money and to keep pace with the ever increasing demands of being a multi-media organisation. Some managers, staff and the trade unions, have suggested that this is leading to increased stress and in some cases inappropriate behaviour as a result.

Stern stuff. Respect at Work concluded that the proper response to the crisis was (among other things) a refreshed Bullying and Harassment Policy and ‘further training in the circumstances in which suspension is or is not appropriate’ when a member of staff is accused of sexual harassment. BBC insiders are, of course, welcome to get in touch to tell us how that has turned out.

The 2010s saw Dinah Rose developing an active Twitter presence (which has since receded), but also saw her accept a brief she may well have come to regret. Two citizens of the Cayman Islands wished to enter a same-sex marriage and challenged the territory’s marriage law (which provided only for opposite-sex marriage) as being incompatible with its constitution. The Cayman Islands is a Commonwealth jurisdiction, and its law is mostly a close cousin of English law. As such, as an eminent silk, Dinah Rose was instructed to represent the government of the Cayman Islands before the Cayman Court of Appeals, securing a win for the government (and a loss for the disappointed Cayman homosexuals).

Following her election as Principal of Magdalen in 2020, Rose’s involvement in the Cayman case came to the attention of one Edwin Cameron, a gay rights and HIV/AIDS activist who also happened to be a retired justice of the South African Constitutional Court, a body established as part of the transition from apartheid. Mr Cameron is not a Magdalen man (he was, in fact, Chancellor of Stellenbosch University until last year), but that did not put him off issuing a ferocious broadside against Dinah Rose and her ‘homophobic case’ through the Oxford Human Rights Hub in January 2021.

Mr Cameron argued that under Magdalen’s equality policy, Rose had a duty to hand back her brief (i.e. resign from the case): to do otherwise would be to “actively reinforc[e] the continuum of violence against LGBTIQ people throughout the Caribbean”, and “sen[d] the same damaging, humiliating and stigmatizing message to the LGBTIQ community of Oxford and Magdalen: you are not equal, and I will not protect and defend your right to dignity.” If she would not do so, she should instead resign from Magdalen, and should do so “in the interests of Magdalen, in the interests of her own dignity and self-respect”.

Her response, published alongside Mr Cameron’s original statement in the South African lawyers’ magazine Advocate, was stiff-necked and entirely unrepentant. Not only would she not resign, she said, but the pressure being exerted upon her was actually illegitimate. Rose cited the “long-standing principle, essential to the maintenance of access to justice and the rule of law, that a lawyer is not to be subject to pressure to reject an unpopular brief.” It was this principle, she went on, that underlay the hot topic of the ‘cab rank rule’, which “prohibits barristers from refusing a brief which they are qualified and available to undertake on the ground that they or a section of the public disagree with or disapprove of the opinions or position of the client.” The rule applies to Privy Council work, and so she “was obliged to accept it”.

January 2021 was, if not Peak Woke, at least somewhere near the summit. It is perhaps surprising in that context that Rose survived: she refused to resign either from Magdalen or from the Cayman case, and indeed carried the latter right up to the Privy Council (where she won). In fact, to say she ‘survived’ would be rather to understate the position. To the extent that the Bar can be said to have wagons, they were decisively circled around her. Lord Hendy KC (now the rail minister under his fellow barrister, Sir Keir Starmer KC) supported her argument as to the cab rank rule, citing rather bathetically the fate of John Cooke, who was executed after the Restoration for accepting the brief to prosecute Charles I for treason. Joshua Rozenberg of the BBC wrote a fawning article for his Substack in which he said she “refused to be intimidated”, saying it was “extraordinary that Dinah Rose, of all people, should be accused of supporting homophobia” and reproducing her Advocate statement in full.

In perhaps the most remarkable coup, Rose sued the Times for defamation for, among other things, claiming that the Bar Standards Board (the Bar’s statutory regulator) had ruled against her. It had not. In fact, the BSB had sent a five-page decision document that Rose had not seen or had a chance to comment on to the Cayman campaigners, which she alleged had itself been defamatory—and for which the BSB later apologised, its statement ending with the now-familiar bromide about how it is “wholly unacceptable for barristers to be subject to abuse or harassment for carrying out their professional duty to act in unpopular cases”. The Bar Council (effectively the trade union for the profession) joined in the fun: the BSB’s actions were “unacceptable and inexcusable”, and it must review its processes —“root and branch”, of course.

The following year, Rose secured an apology in open court from the Times, along with agreed damages and costs: in other words, a total victory. Mollified, her reputation secure, Dinah Rose returned to Magdalen and occasional private practice. Nowadays, videos of her advocacy before the Privy Council in the Cayman case are used on training courses at some of the Inns of Court, teaching would-be barristers the finer points of the appellate jurisdiction. The present author is unaware of any controversy about this practice. The author is also unaware of whether the BSB did indeed dig up those roots and prune those branches.

The ‘Posh Turn’ of the 2010s (set out in three parts in J’Accuse) was not coincidentally a highly productive time for the public profile of women lawyers in Britain. Besides Dinah Rose, this was also the time of Charlotte Proudman appearing on podcasts about catfishing, Jessica Simor’s splenetic Twitter account, and above all, Lady Hale and her now infamous choice of jewellery. The spider brooch and the woman wearing it assume Acromantulan proportions in the memory of that fevered time. Her memoir, Spider Woman, is well known, but for younger readers we might recommend the hagiographical Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, by Afua Hirsch. Yours for £17.99 RRP, although the present author understands the Supreme Court’s gift shop sells it a little cheaper.

It was in that period that the playwright Suzie Miller hit the London stage. Miller — improbably, an Australian — is a lawyer by training but became a full-time playwright in 2009, when she was offered a year-long residency at the National Theatre. Her list of credits betrays a preoccupation with the Majesty of the Law: she has written plays about subjects as diverse as the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Indigenous Australian experience of prison, and a steamy affair between two jurors on a murder trial (called, thrillingly, Reasonable Doubt).

Her best-known play, Prima Facie, had an award-winning run at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022: it picked up Best New Play at the Olivier Awards, and its star Jodie Comer took home the Best Actress award as well. Veterans of London transport may remember it for its striking, if emo, poster that plastered Oxford Circus and Waterloo for months:

Prima Facie is about rape. Comer plays Tessa Ensler, a criminal defence barrister whose stock in trade is defending men accused of sexual assault. The play begins with Tessa poised in her room in chambers, lined with an impossible number of files and folders, reaching high into the ceiling of the theatre. The lights fade up, and Tessa is seen eating a Pot Noodle, looking around her as if she’s forgotten what she came in for, before pronouncing the single, baffling word, “Thoroughbreds!”

Our confusion is quickly cured, though, as Tessa launches into a stylised retelling of a criminal trial. Comer plays her laddishly, in her native Liverpudlian accent, yelling that the jury “love it!” and pantomiming out what she did in court to secure an acquittal for her client. After she says the words, “For me, the witness [i.e. the complainant] is just a witness”, attentive viewers will simply sit back, check their watch and wonder how long it will take before, with lumpen narrative inevitability, Tessa is herself raped, and finds herself on the sharp end of the system she loves.

Of course, it happens at the end of Act 1, but not before the audience is treated to all the hits of lawyer mythmaking: the cab-rank rule, the presumption of innocence, and the requirement for a defence barrister to ‘test the case’ of the prosecution even where the barrister suspects her client is guilty. There is a distinct feeling of boxes being ticked, of the playwright reminding herself occasionally to make sure there is a reference to this maxim, that catchphrase, the other argument she’s had in the pub (or, as Tessa says, almost in capital letters, at “every dinner party”).

With the play’s opening making it quite clear what is going to happen, we enjoy a parlour game of Guess The Rapist throughout Act 1. Initially, the play throws out a red herring: we meet Adam, a male chambers colleague, who conducts a gentle cross-examination of a sexual assault complainant. Adam is described, preposterously, as able to “recite whole sections of the Criminal Justice Act”. Good for him, we suppose, although why it would be necessary to recite that Act in particular is not entirely clear (and the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 is, in any case, far more pleasing to the ear). Ultimately, however, the plot settles on the rapist being her other chambers colleague Julian, who commits the pivotal crime. Eagle-eyed audience members get a big clue early on: Julian is posh and sexy, but bookish Adam’s class background is not stated. It is not hard to work out which of them is the baddie.

Tessa begins by sleeping with Julian on a strictly casual basis, having worked late in chambers; they “fuck on the corner sofa in his office”, Tessa tells us with orgastic delight. Later, they have sex again after a proper date, which includes prodigious drinking. After one spirited round of intercourse, Tessa goes to the bathroom to vomit (having had rather too much to drink), and is thereupon carried back to bed by Julian, who climbs on top of her and penetrates her: she is, it is clear from her telling, too drunk to consent, and he does not exactly ask first anyway. In one of the play’s only really successful moments, Comer dissociates from what is happening to her while Julian tells her nauseatingly to “just lay there and let me make love to you”. It is truly flesh-creeping, and it is well done. It is a shame about the rest of Act 1, but credit where credit is due.

It is to Suzie Miller’s credit as a playwright that we do not have to endure an entire Act 2 about Tessa plucking up the courage to report the rape. Instead, rather unexpectedly, Tessa goes immediately to the police. Act 2 – which begins with a two-year time-skip, because of court backlogs (yeah!) – depicts Julian’s trial. There is a striking and effective scene where, placed in the dock and giving evidence, Tessa gives only her answers, and we never hear the questions: Comer’s performance has her being battered from all sides by quickfire cross-examination, although inexplicably, she launches into a lecture from the witness box about how badly rape victims are treated by the courts. It is hard to imagine any judge in England permitting this.

Over time, an inconsistency emerges in Tessa’s testimony about where her hand was during the assault. The play harps on about the unreliability of memory of minor details (something that all law students and trainee lawyers are taught repeatedly), and of course, it is this minor inconsistency that is the tripwire that undoes the prosecution. Despite all of the very strong evidence against him — the consistent story from the complainant, the immediate report to the police, the clear picture of severe intoxication — Julian is acquitted. We should, I suppose, be grateful that there is no suggestion that the old boys’ network got him off; that would be a little too far even here. Instead, the play ends with Comer turning to the audience and delivering a further monologue about rape in the criminal justice system. There is a vague call for ‘change’, and the audience leaves feeling faintly depressed.

Inter Alia is a sort of spiritual successor to Prima Facie, a variation on the same themes. Both were directed by Justin Martin, and both are ostensibly about rape. Rosamund Pike (charismatic and subtle where Comer can be leaden and didactic) plays not a practising barrister, but a criminal judge called Jessica Parks. Unlike Prima Facie, the play is not a one-hander, but a three-hander, with Jessica’s husband and son played by Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot respectively (alongside two child actors, and other parts played by Pike taking both sides of a conversation).

The similarities make themselves known with obnoxious alacrity. Like Prima Facie, Inter Alia opens with a ridiculous fantasia on the court process. Rather than Comer’s simple monologue, the somewhat higher-rent production of Inter Alia has Pike’s Jessica rising out of the floor into billowing dry ice, poised with a microphone while a yowling rock soundtrack erupts from the live band behind her, as she screams “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” at the top of her lungs. I was watching the cinema broadcast at the Ritzy in Brixton, and found myself contemplating every penny of the £23.35 I had paid for the ticket. Cheaper than the actual show, but more expensive than throwing myself down the stairs.

Dreadful as this sounds (and it really was), it is at least more visually interesting than Jodie Comer munching on noodles and wittering about thoroughbreds. There is, in any case, a distinct air of knowing self-parody about the whole affair. Jessica’s liberal feminism commits her to using her position to “change how things are done”. So she says: but recounting her experience on the bench, Jessica says regretfully that she “has to allow” a certain line of questioning, “unfortunately”, or makes specious remarks about one of her cases being one of the “very few times” juries return a guilty verdict in rape cases (the conviction rate at trial is in fact around half).

As Jessica’s boilerplate feminist bona fides are subjected to the reality of her professional obligations, so too does the reality of her home life crash headlong into her ethics. In Inter Alia, it is not our protagonist Jessica who is the victim of rape. Instead, her 16-year-old son Harry encounters Amy, a girl he has a crush on, at a party. Late at night, while she lies on a sofa insensate from alcohol, he rapes her. Mercifully, we do not see this; it is instead told in half-truths and self-justifications that morph gradually into an admission of the truth.

As the story spreads on social media and Jessica realises with mounting horror that Amy’s experience is not a simple misunderstanding, Jessica is torn between defending her son as a mother, seeking justice for the victim as a woman, and carrying out the process of the courts as a lawyer. This is best expressed in a tense scene in which Jessica, discussing Henry’s defence with his barrister, finds herself repeating the very lawyer clichés that Tessa said at the start of Prima Facie: Harry is allowed to test the case, she tells herself, and test the complainant’s recall (she remembers her attacker wearing a different kind of top: maybe it was mistaken identity?). There is no need to cross the Rubicon and call Amy a liar, is there? We can still believe the victim is sincere, even if we believe only that she is sincerely wrong.

All so familiar, but this proves unsatisfying and disgusting for Jessica, as indeed it does for most laypeople. It also appears to slightly bore the writer. There is no repeat of the final few minutes of Prima Facie, where Comer’s Tessa monologues vaguely to the jury and then to the audience about how “we must change” because of “the lived experience of sexual assault” and that “we have got it all wrong”. Rosamund Pike is really very good with often quite thin material (cf. Die Another Day), and Suzie Miller is too plugged into the fashions of the moment to waste her on a mere retread.

It is the siting of the penetrative, violent male sexual impulse within Jessica’s own home that makes the play more interesting than its predecessor. The rape comes at the culmination of a potted life history for Henry, the edited highlights of his childhood and pubescence played out on stage through his mother’s eyes. The spectre of sexual threat is invoked early. We see the child Harry being taught two things by his mother: that he should be kind to women, and how to scream in the event that anyone ever tries to kidnap (and, implicitly, molest) him: an ominous early scene recounts an incident when Jessica becomes convinced the child Harry has been abducted.

The potential victim in this telling must ultimately become the actual malefactor, and in Inter Alia, the serpent in the garden is the internet. When Harry is 12, Jessica thinks she catches him watching pornography. She tries to give him a Talk, and he responds with canned lines that he has clearly learned at school, and reveals that he was not watching porn at all. But in the course of Act 2, we learn that Harry does in fact have a taste for porn – rough, violent, degrading porn, at that – and then with crushing inevitability Jessica learns through his carelessly left open laptop that he’s “in the fucking manosphere”. Surprise! Check the calendar: it’s 2025, and it’s hit ‘documentary’ Adolescence all over again. We should perhaps be grateful that there is no walk-on role from Stephen Graham.

Although the word is never actually said in Inter Alia, Harry is implied to be the hobgoblin of the modern imagination, the incel. In the course of a blazing row with her husband, Jessica demands to know why he failed to guide Harry properly, and her husband says ominously, “The rules have changed … we’re all scared of someone from our past”. He could have taught him how to treat women properly despite his own implied misbehaviour, but he admits, “I don’t know how to teach him about this.” The ‘this’ in question is, implicitly, Andrew Tate and manosphere Reels, although it is a note of perhaps unconscious ambivalence in the play that the “very rare” ^[sic] conviction over which Jessica presides in the opening scene is only secured because the rapist filmed the assault on his smartphone.

When Harry goes to the fateful party — established, significantly, to be the first proper party he’s ever really been invited to – his parents enjoy a night together and fuck in the kitchen, but Jessica’s flashbacks to the footage from that traumatic rape case put her off her stroke, and she is obliged to fake an orgasm. The re-emergence of the marital sexual dynamic in the absence of the son — frustrated, at least for Jessica, by images of violent sexual domination mediated by technology – brings the Oedipal tension to boiling point. The following morning, Harry confides that he “had sex” with a girl at the party, and Jessica feels a “strange pride” and asks whether she enjoyed it. It is, of course, irrelevant that he is only sixteen. The internet has re-sexualised Jessica’s marriage, but also sexualised the adolescent Harry, to disastrous effect.

Let us not dwell on whether there is a deliberate echo of Jocasta in our protagonist’s name. The play is troubling enough without that. Anyway, the Theban tragedy falls rather flat as a theme, because the playwright is not particularly interested in men (which is, of course, her prerogative). Harry the junior rapist remains an enigma, and his reasons for raping Amy are obscure. It is not that we do not get any explanation. Many are given: he’s not very popular; he didn’t plan it; he “thought she wouldn’t know”; “everyone is having sex” and he is the only one who isn’t; she was there, and he did it because he could.

To the extent he is an incel rather than just a marionette for the playwright, all are wrong. In fact, as anyone who has encountered the incel online knows, their most fervent desire is not simply to penetrate a woman – anyone can do that if they’re willing to pay — but to be desired by a woman. Even their more sinister ideas about women ‘secretly wanting’ sex must be understood as a way to satisfy the desire to be desired, not simply to obtain sexual release.

Instead, Harry’s crush on Amy is established early on. But that crush is never actually established as his reason for doing what he did. The play depicts them as having had a connection, but really, she could have been anyone. He doesn’t rape her because he sexually desires her; he rapes her to prove a point or to have had sex. This is a necessary part of the sociopolitical commonplaces we all hear now: we are all expected to believe that a rapist carries out his crime for every reason other than sexual desire, and that his victim is a stand-in for Woman as victim. Jessica tells us that in her court, she “practises listening”, but as ever, no one is particularly interested in the incel’s point of view: he stands in for something else.

This strange denial of Harry’s motivations stands in contrast to the far more realistic rape in Prima Facie: Julian simply wants to have sex with Tessa regardless of her condition, and does so. Yet this crime goes acquitted, despite Tessa being in every respect an ideal victim. At the same time, the Lifetime Original rape of Inter Alia — with many perfectly logical ways out for the defendant — culminates in a confession and a guilty plea. Indeed, the reality of rape as crime can only be touched in this artistic mode by misrepresenting its relation to the criminal justice system around it: either the rape stretches credibility, or the system around it does. Thus, a modish 2020s heteropessimism is reified as glum truth-telling about a monolithic yet ‘broken’ system of dopey male ignorance and contempt. Women in this telling are little more than butterflies to be broken on the caterpillar treads of modernity.

It is, however, somewhat reductive to suggest that the plays are ‘about rape’ or ‘about the manosphere’. Visions of grisly kitchen sink dramas should be put aside. The core concern of both plays is instead the ambivalence of the role of the woman lawyer. In England, women are now a majority in the lower ranks of both sides of the profession, and are rapidly being promoted into positions of enormous power in the system. England now has a Lady Chief Justice, and its first woman President of the Supreme Court stepped down only a few years ago; the head of the King’s Bench Division is a woman, as is the deputy head of civil justice. I do not know if Dinah Rose KC is the first woman barrister to have successfully sued The Times for defamation, but it seems probable.

Real or fictional, women lawyers tend to pay lip service to the broad feminist worldview encoded in Lady Hale’s coat of arms: omnia feminae aequissimae – women are equal to everything. (I leave it to more learned readers as to whether that is good Latin.) But what precisely is this ‘everything’ to which women are said to be ‘equal’?

Equal to the “male-defined truth” that Tessa tells us does not fit women’s “lived experience of sexual assault”; equal to a system that we are repeatedly told is not capable of doing justice, and will always protect the privileged and the wealthy? Women must drink, to be fun, to equal the men, but the drink presents a terrible danger to them, making them vulnerable to the predation of arrogant men or corrupted boys. Women must be sexy, maybe even promiscuous in the case of Tessa Ensler, but in doing so are liable to be devoured. Even the purely professional sphere offers no way out: in Inter Alia, Jessica jokingly writes off her own promotion to the bench as positive discrimination, and is shocked when her husband agrees and says he should have been picked first. Equal to what, exactly – and equal in whose eyes?

Neither play attempts a coherent answer. Tessa’s closing line that “somewhere, sometime, somehow, something must change” captures the mood: all are actors in this system, and all are tasked with upholding the principles of fair trial and due process even though it is clear that Suzie Miller’s characters do not really believe in those principles when they apply to sexual assault. Tessa states baldly during Julian’s trial that “this is not a car accident or a burglary”, and the same principles do not really apply. Well, let us accept with Tessa for argument’s sake that “we have got it all wrong”: the play seems to know that any other method will get it wronger still, but leaves that point unspoken and unresolved. The audience leaves convinced of the need for ‘change’, but none the wiser as to what that change should be – save for, presumably, gradually chipping away at the rights of the defendant. There are, of course, no risks of credulity.

Inter Alia is the wiser play because it does not chicken out of those contradictions. Jessica has to be a professional who believes in the system and in the protections for the defendant, and a feminist, and a good mother. In the end, Jessica, like Dinah Rose, finds herself upholding her part in a system that requires professional beliefs of her that contradict her stated beliefs. Unlike Tessa, though, she does choose a role at the last: the play ends with Jessica in a dreamscape, looking around for the phantom of her son in his innocence, a little boy in a yellow coat; she finds him among the trees and ushers him gently off stage, to his manhood and his penalty. She chooses to be the dutiful mother, yet not the mother who protects her son come what may, but who embraces him as he chooses to do the right thing. Perhaps all her lessons sank in somewhere — just somewhat too late for his victim.

There is a toy question on Twitter that does the rounds sometimes: what is the profession whose reputation has been most damaged by social media? Barristers usually win those polls, with academics and journalists usually running them pretty close. What really seems to be happening is that under a system of perpetual, public-facing performance, it is no longer really possible to maintain the other, court-facing, client-facing performance all lawyers must carry on to do the work at all, and to live with themselves afterwards.

Women lawyers, who already wear more masks than men, seem to struggle the most with this. They might say out of one side of their face that LGBT equality is an urgent crusade of our time while defending a country’s right to maintain marriage as a heterosexual union out of the other; they might likewise insist that everyone deserves a defence — even terrorists! even murderers! — while wondering aloud whether the presumption of innocence has had its day for crimes of sufficient gravity for women as a class. As in the plays, there is unlikely to be any kind of resolution for this. We all must get through the day somehow. We all must live with the compromises we have to make — or rather, the compromises made on our behalf by those with uneasy hearts.

Suzie Miller understands this, perhaps better than even she realises, because that is what her plays are really about: the ethics are part of the ‘modern woman’ package deal, but upholding those ethics without compromise is a far greater fantasy than the triple threat of adoring children, supportive husband and demanding career. You can ‘have it all’. Lots of women lawyers do. But what you cannot have, Suzie Miller seems to say, is ‘it all’ plus being able to sleep well at night. In this, she is probably right.

Unless, perhaps, you are Dinah Rose. I am sure the President’s Lodgings at Magdalen are very comfortable.

The National Theatre’s production of Inter Alia, starring Rosamund Pike, ran from 10 July to 13 September 2025 in the Lyttelton Theatre, and a revival ran at Wyndham’s Theatre from 19 March to 20 June 2026. Both plays are regularly available on National Theatre at Home and in cinemas nationwide through National Theatre Encore. A recording of the National Theatre’s production of Prima Facie is available on the Internet Archive.

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

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By way of historical background, Moldova (alternatively, Moldavia) was one of the two so-called ‘Danubian principalities’, the other being Wallachia. These principalities (along with parts of Transylvania, controlled by the Kingdom of Hungary) were populated principally by Romance-speaking peoples, claiming their origins from Trajan’s legions in Dacia, first known by foreigners as Vlachs (an exonym), and later as Romanians.

Moldova — like Wallachia — existed with varying degrees of sovereignty in the medieval and early modern period. It was wedged between the Carpathians to the west and the river Dniester to the east, meaning it sat at the historical intersection of Ottoman, Polish, and Russian interests.

After a long struggle, the Ottoman Empire firmly established Wallachia and Moldova as tributary states by the sixteenth century. Although neither was ever annexed, Ottoman interference in internal politics only grew over the next two centuries, with endless cycles of coups funded by Istanbul, followed by the new ruler reneging on their commitments, followed by another coup funded by Istanbul. From the early eighteenth century, the Ottomans tired of this circus and instead sent Greek Christians (the Phanariots) to rule the principalities; unfortunately for the Ottomans, the Phanariots were only marginally more reliable than the Romanians themselves, and soon went native.

The main foreign sponsor of the Danubian principalities against the Ottoman Empire was the Russian Empire. Needless to say, this did not come without a price. In 1812, the eastern part of this region was annexed following the Russo-Turkish War of 1806-12, the bulk of which now forms the Republic of Moldova. The Russians, despite their assistance against the Ottomans, opposed the growth of national (and unificationist) sentiment among Romanians and even briefly occupied the two principalities in 1853, which helped trigger the Crimean War. The western part of Moldova, which is divided from the east by the river Prut, unified with Wallachia in 1859, forming the basis of modern Romania.

At Trianon in 1920, Romania gained Transylvania, previously a majority Romanian province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But more importantly for our purposes, in 1917, a pro-Romanian local assembly took control of Bessarabia amid the breakdown of Russian imperial authority in the region. The following year, Romania took the opportunity to formally occupy and then annex the territory.

Just two decades later, though, Bessarabia was once again signed away to the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with the bulk becoming the new Moldavian SSR and the remainder being absorbed into the Ukrainian SSR. One result of this was that virtually the entirety of Bessarabia’s long-standing German community, who were separate from the much more well-known Transylvanian Saxons, was resettled in Germany. After Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Romania regained control of Bessarabia, but the Soviet counter-offensive again restored Soviet control from 1944. In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Moldavian SSR became the independent Republic of Moldova, but did not choose to unify with Romania. Reunification remains an open question today (and is supported by the current President), but only a minority of Moldovans are in favour.

Transnistria, on the east bank of the Dniester, followed a somewhat different path. Controlled by Russia from 1792, it was never historically part of the principality of Moldova. From 1924, it was administered as an ‘autonomous republic’ within the Ukrainian SSR, with the aim of later expanding to regain control over the rest of Bessarabia. Transnistria was then attached to Soviet-controlled Moldova in 1940. There is some fairly strong circumstantial evidence that this decision was a deliberate attempt to dilute the Romanian character of the Moldavian SSR by increasing the Moldavian SSR’s Russian-speaking population. Transnistria, being strongly Slavophile, broke away from the Republic of Moldova (which now had a Romanian-dominated government) amid the collapse of the USSR. A war followed in 1992, with Transnistria, supported by Russia, becoming de facto independent, although it has never been recognised by Moldova — or indeed, any UN member state at all. Interestingly, Russia does not recognise Transnistria to this day.

Our route therefore moved through three related but distinct political worlds: Romanian Moldova, the Republic of Moldova, and Transnistria, an autonomous territory on Moldova’s eastern edge.

Iași

We flew into Iași from Luton, and our arrival was without any problems. Our hotel was a converted apartment block, clean and spacious enough, but humorously overstaffed with an extra person at the desk, and another sitting and chatting. Of Romania’s five major cities (Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara, Constanța, Iasi), Iași is the poorest. Probably the main economic driver here is the city’s large (and, by Romanian standards, prestigious) university. Partly for this reason, as well as the important role of Iași in Romanian history and culture, the city has certain pretensions (and especially cultural pretensions) in spite of its relative lack of wealth.

We headed first to the city’s Palace of Culture, the city’s best-known symbol: a late neo-Gothic pile inaugurated in 1925 as the Palace of Justice and Administration. Inside, incongruously, a coffee fair of some kind was underway. Right next to the Palace of Culture is an enormous development (initiated through a controversial public-private arrangement involving land right next to the Palace) by Iași’s (probably) richest native, Iulian Dascălu, who, after operating large shopping malls elsewhere in the country, has made a big bet on the city’s growth.

The city centre had very striking communist-looking architecture: impressive in a way, and quite monumental. We then followed the Carol I Boulevard northwest to the more affluent part of town, leafier and less touched by Communist redevelopment. The road was flanked by bicycle lanes on each side, neither of which seemed used at all. Somewhere in this part of town, we passed a building with a connection to the French military mission in Romania during the First World War. We also saw a couple jogging — one of the great indicators of a certain level of socioeconomic development.

That evening, we went to a couple of places of some note. The first was a bar called Vipard, recommended by the European Bar Guide. It was a slightly more refined version of a shop where one can also sit and drink. In this case it had a little more pretension to being a bar, in that it only sold booze and had tables laid out. Some older men sat chatting, and the TV played a YouTube playlist of folk music videos with imagery of rustic milkmaids. A man with a sort of hunchback was helping behind the bar, cleaning and moving things about. They had a beer tap, but there was no beer in it, so only bottles were available. It had a wonderful ambience.

We ate at Bolta Rece, a traditional Romanian restaurant with some historical significance. The restaurant was strongly associated with Iași literary culture, especially the Junimea circle and the friendship of Mihai Eminescu (whom both Romanians and Moldovans compete to claim as their national poet) and Ion Creangă. It’s the sort of place for grilled meats, pickles, polenta and borsch, and this was more or less what we had.

The second place we ended up that night was a funny subterranean development in the Communist-era city centre called Piațeta la Cub – ‘The Cube’. The origin of this curious development is that archaeological ruins studied in 1982 were largely covered with concrete, and that the underground space was supposed to become a museum. The museum plan was never completed; the galleries instead later held shops, and after 2000 gradually acquired a rock club, then pubs and nightlife venues. It was effectively a small student bar zone catering to the city university. (The Romanians, like many Europeans, seem to only ever go out drinking on Friday and Saturday, so be warned that the entire place will probably be deserted, if it is even open, on other nights.) Our party got talking to some medical students: Romanians, one from Cluj and one from a small town outside Iași, and also an Iranian girl studying medicine. We drank too much and went to bed.

The next morning, after breakfast, we headed to the bus station, an open-air place tucked away in what felt more like a parking area than a formal terminal. We asked about buses to Bălți. In any case, we found the right bus, and the driver, who had a very friendly and pleasant disposition, had to write down all our foreign names for the tickets, which was mildly comic. For those not interested in Bălți (which is probably rational), there is also a charmingly old-fashioned night train (the ‘Friendship Train’) from Bucharest to Chisinau. However, it takes over thirteen hours, partly because of the need to change from the European standard gauge to the Soviet broad gauge at the border.

Before leaving, we bought a beer at the bus station and drank it while waiting for the bus to fill up. It did so gradually: students and people working on the richer Romanian side of the river Prut, now going back home. At the border crossing, the guards took our passports and checked them quickly. Another official came on and asked whether anyone was bringing in exports. He specifically asked whether anyone had a rolled-up carpet; the logic behind this is that a carpet is the perfect smuggler’s device, concealing whatever is rolled up inside it. The border checks here are relatively slow, apparently as a consequence of Romania’s entry into Schengen (which has meant much more scrutiny of its border control). This means that while Iași is very close to the border, doing business between the two countries can be tedious.

Bălți

Across the Prut, the country became visibly poorer almost at once. Rural Moldova looked like rural Romania in its basic foundations, with the same village layouts, houses and garden smallholdings containing fruit trees and chickens. But in Romania, even in an average village, the older rusted bungalows are usually interspersed with houses that have clearly been developed with two-storey buildings from newer materials, the signs of remittances or accumulation or simply of a country moving gradually upwards. In Moldova, by contrast, the peasant bungalow type seemed almost universal, with very little sign of redevelopment.

We arrived in Bălți and headed to our hotel. Walking from the bus station to the centre, we passed what looked like a derelict games arcade, now fallen apart and full of rubble. There were also little markets, pharmacies, and shops selling basic shoes and children’s clothes. There were stray dogs, too; although stray dogs are still present in Romania, the problem is now much more under control. The streets were rather poor: potholes everywhere, various muddy stretches and bits without paving. The name itself, in Romanian, appropriately enough, means something like ‘puddles’ or ‘ponds’. It’s a city that has clearly fallen on hard times since the end of the USSR and the decline of Soviet industry. Today, Bălți has a population of 94,000, which is down from a peak of over 160,000 in 1989.

Our hotel was called Elite Hotel, which was at the top of a shopping centre. By the time we arrived, the November darkness had already drawn in. The shopping centre itself was somewhere halfway between a bazaar and a mall. There were demarcated shop units, but really, it was a warren of little rooms.

The hotel was barely signposted. We found a side staircase and climbed into the darkness. On one landing, two security guards sat at a desk with the lights off; in the lobby, another guard sat in the dark with a torch. Eventually, a young woman with a professional demeanour appeared, turned on the lights from somewhere, and checked us in. There seemed to be three security guards in the upper part of the shopping centre, all sitting in darkness to save money.

We wanted to find somewhere to have a drink. This proved surprisingly difficult. Bălți, despite being a fairly big town, had very little in the way of bars. More generally, this was a city without much of a consumer economy; it simply did not have the money to sustain one. On Google Maps, many of the plausible venues turned out to be event restaurants, mostly wedding places. This made sense: even those who leave Bălți for work elsewhere may still return for weddings, birthdays and funerals.

Wandering as we did through the dark city streets (darkness, along with the namesake puddles, became quite a theme in this town), we made it to the one vaguely modern bar. This was Beermaster, a somewhat hipsterised brew pub. It served a variety of different beers and beer snacks. Folk musicians were playing. It was very cheap — I think a pint was about 50p. We drank up.

There was also an annex attached to Beermaster, a kind of shop where one could buy takeaway plastic bottles of beer and kvass. The shop seemed to be doing healthy trade. Bălți was definitely one of those places where home was a much more common place to drink than any bar.

For dinner, options were also very limited. The most sensible choice seemed to be La Plăcinte, a Moldovan chain restaurant serving Romanian-Moldavian fare, the same as the food we had eaten in Iași: soups, meat, pastry, polenta, all the rest of it.

One thing that was evident from the restaurant, but really reflected across the whole country, was its bilingualism. Moldova may be the most thoroughly bilingual country in Europe, if not the world. Nearly everyone seemed to have some command of both Romanian and Russian. Reportedly, a relatively small number of young middle-class Romanians and some Russian hicks do not speak the other language particularly well, but these people, if they do exist, are very much an exception to the rule. Most people you encounter, even drunks, seem to switch effortlessly between the two languages.

Nonetheless, official and printed signage in the country was always in Romanian: documents, billboards, bus stop names, or indeed anything with an official quality — one sign, among many, that nowadays the Romanians are in charge, and not the Russians. In the Soviet times, Romanian was written in Cyrillic, but not any more. More informal signage was sometimes in Russian, although even this has become increasingly uncommon. Very recently, the pro-EU government took the step of restricting the use of Russian in the Moldovan Parliament. And yet, despite the big (and growing) political divide between the Romanian-speaking population (who mostly, but not overwhelmingly, favour closer ties with the European Union) and the Russian-speaking population (who overwhelmingly oppose this), there is little obvious sign of the ethnic tension that one would expect from this situation.

There were two birthday celebrations in the restaurant that evening, one for a younger girl and one for an older lady. The staff came out with cakes and sang happy birthday, as restaurant hosts do everywhere. For the younger girl, they sang in Romanian. For the older woman, they sang in Russian. Presumably, this reflected the language used by each table.

Within our travelling group, I could speak Romanian, and one of my companions could speak Russian. This meant that both of us could address people, but only one of us would understand the reply, depending on the language chosen, which was occasionally funny. No one, in any case, asked why we had come to Bălți as tourists. Perhaps they were quietly bewildered anyway.

We fancied another drink and headed east through the darkness in search of somewhere else. We walked through the main square, Piața Independenței. In front of the City Hall stood a large bronze statue of Ștefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), the medieval ruler of Moldavia, celebrated today on both sides of the Prut as a figure of Romanian and Moldovan historical memory. The central area was enormous and rather empty, almost North Korea-like: a wide pedestrian road, a Soviet tank, an eternal flame, the obligatory ‘I Heart Bălți’ sign, and what looked like an abandoned, half-finished commercial building.

We continued towards a Google Maps listing called ‘Public House’, somewhere near the edge of the core town, around a cluster of Soviet housing. On the way, we were propositioned by a haggard prostitute. ‘Public House’ itself, however, was shut, as dark as the streets around it.

Disappointed, we turned around and started walking back in the direction from which we had come. As luck would have it, we passed an actually functioning bar called Randevu. Inside, we found six locals in their thirties and forties, who seemed to be friends with the barmaid. They were mostly speaking Romanian with one another. We sat down, instantly conspicuous as the only other group in the place. They were listening to pop-folk with a beat, drinking vodka and beer, moving in and out, shouting, dancing, and randomly heading in and out to take phone calls and smoke cigarettes (the inside oddly still smelled like smoke). It was a chaotic scene. I ordered drinks, and suspect we were slightly conned (we certainly paid more than we had at Beermaster, despite Beermaster being a far nicer place).

During a strange lull where many of the group had inexplicably left, one of the men, who had almost no teeth, asked where we were from. He then began talking about jiu-jitsu and martial arts, and about how he was a fighter. Moldovans, he told us, were fighters. Moldovans loved to fight. The insinuation was that it might be fun to fight with us, too. We did our best to smooth over the awkwardness.

After a while, more of the group returned to the bar. One man, who was pleasant enough, with a deeply haggard face and weathered skin, told me about the time he spent working in Romania. Another large man simply stared at us silently, frowning with his arms folded, not saying a word to the group he was with (one of them told us that he ‘did not speak Romanian’, which is hard to make sense of, given that’s how his group was communicating). They put more music on through an AUX cable. During one dance, another one of the men (a gypsy; they are much less common in Moldova than in Romania, but are present nonetheless) comically thrust himself at one of the women in the group and began dry-humping her and ululating barbarically.

When you read about homicide in this part of the world, it basically comes from people like these: ne’er-do-wells hopped up on hard spirits who take the communal fire-axe and butcher somebody because of a perceived slight, banter gone wrong, or a small trigger which unleashes long-simmering tensions caused by an ex-girlfriend, or money. Some readers may remember the occasional stories of Lithuanians and other such people in Lincolnshire in the early 2010s killing each other in this way. We might also remember the strange bemusement of English people from the refusal of Polish builders to drink from beer glasses in a pub rather than from cans of Tyskie in the park. There is no doubt that, as incomes have increased in Eastern Europe, the steady transition from ‘vodka culture’ (which hardly even deserves to be described as such) to ‘beer culture’ has been a beneficial, civilising force — with far less murder as a result.

My two travelling companions went outside for a cigarette. I was, for a few minutes, held hostage by sociability and made to dance more with the group. They did strange peasant jigs on the spot, which I had never really seen before; an old village culture surviving inside a decaying post-industrial city. Eventually, I found a moment to excuse myself, got out the door, and we legged it the hell out of there. We agreed that Randevu was probably the roughest bar any of us had ever been to.

After that, we walked back through the town to Beermaster. Our experience had confirmed that it really was the one proper bar in Bălți. We reflected on how many places in post-Communist Europe of the 1990s must have broadly resembled the Bălți of today (albeit with far less depopulation) in its quiet dilapidation and lack of consumer economy. We had a few more drinks at Beermaster, listened to the folk band playing loud music, and then returned to Elite Hotel to sleep.

The next morning was Sunday. Sunday morning in Bălți was much livelier than Saturday night — perhaps a sign of the average age here. The night before, the streets were hardly trafficked at all. Now there were people seeing friends and family, people going to church, and elderly women selling old possessions and produce to supplement their meagre pensions.

After a coffee, we made our way to the bus station where our drivers were handily shouting ‘Chișinău, Chișinău’ over and over. We bought tickets. The driver, realising that we were westerners speaking English to each other, began speaking to us in German. Perhaps he had worked there.

We got on and sat at the back. My two companions decided to go smoke. One of them made the mistake of smoking in the sheltered bus station area, where there were no-smoking signs (though not especially conspicuous ones). A policeman lurking around the corner made a beeline for him and started demanding a €200 fine. My companion rather cleverly said he needed to go back onto the bus to get his wallet and the money. He went onto the bus and stayed there. There were still twenty minutes before departure, during which we waited for the policeman to reappear. As the bus pulled out, the driver stopped and spoke to him. For a second, we thought we had been caught; then the bus moved on, and we were clear.

The bus ride itself was fine enough. That said, Moldova has no motorways, only strange three-lane A-roads where the extra lane alternates between the two directions of traffic. In the countryside, the quality of the roads is especially appalling, probably matched in all of Europe only by Ukraine. Moldova’s low wages also mean that, at least outside of Chișinău, there are many very old, beaten-up cars on the road that — if you want to get anywhere in a reasonable time — you have to constantly overtake because they are so slow. This often leads to worrying driving amongst those who do have newer cars. We passed more humble villages of single-storey old bungalows in the traditional style, often painted with green motifs. There was one hair-raising moment when the van came very close to rear-ending a car; thinking back, I don’t think the brakes were working especially well. But we arrived in Chișinău in one piece.

Chișinău

Chișinău, with a population of over 700,000, is not a small city. The metropolitan area has a population of nearly 1 million in a country of only 2.4 million. According to the census, around half of the population speak Romanian as their first language, 28% ‘Moldovan’ (which is simply Romanian by a name with different political connotations), and 20% Russian — making it significantly less Russian-speaking than Bălți.

For its size, Chișinău is a quiet city. Nonetheless, you can get the sense that there is a growing consumer economy and, indeed, some level of actual wealth here — albeit clearly unequally distributed. There are even some bars and restaurants that cater to the country’s oligarch class, such as La Sarkis, which sells seafood pasta at London prices in a country where the GDP per capita is just $9350. This is a city on the up: Moldovan growth has been very strong over the past decade (nominal GDP per capita is now more than three times higher than in 2016), and there is no question that Chișinău has been at the centre of this.

And yet this is still, fundamentally, a poor city. We got into the bus station at the greyer, more proletarian end of the city. From there, we walked alongside a busy road for some time before reaching Chișinău’s Central Market: a tarp-covered bazaar where taller men had to stoop to avoid hitting their heads, where anything from veg to plastic tat could be bought, along with the numerous money-exchange booths of the kind we had seen in Bălți.

We stopped for Georgian food at a rather nice restaurant, outside which a sign advertised a set-menu ‘business lunch’ (бизнес-ланч) of the kind seen across the Russian world. Two besuited men at the table next to us spoke in Russian over espresso and had the appearance of ‘power brokers’.

We continued, passing the rather diminutive Triumphal Arch. There is an obvious comparison with the larger Romanian arch in Bucharest, although the Moldovan one is older. The Chișinău arch dates from 1840 and commemorates Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. The Romanian arch, by contrast, was built after the First World War and the enlarged Romania that followed. Opposite the Chișinău arch was the rather more overwhelming Government House of Moldova.

We walked on to our accommodation. Our place was near the Nicolae Sulac National Palace, a 1970s concert hall on Pushkin Street — that mainstay street name of the post-Soviet world. A girl met us outside the building on behalf of our ‘host’. We were brought up close to the top; it must have been one of the tallest buildings in the city! The flat was large and decked out in a faux-Versailles style. We were told to cancel the booking on Booking.com and pay directly (thus cutting out the platform fees). She confirmed the payment with the landlord on the phone, interestingly in English, suggesting that he was perhaps not local. Looking closer, I could see that the name of the recipient of my Revolut payment was an Arabic one.

We set out to drink. We went first to a relatively generic bar, then to a branch of Piana Vyshnia, the Lviv-origin Ukrainian bar serving cherry liqueur. It was fine, but horrendously expensive by the country’s standards. It is a bit of a girly place and you can take the missus there, but the price of those cherries left a bad taste in the mouths of three blokes. In between, we had dinner at an Uzbek restaurant in full Central Asian-style booths.

We concluded the night at the agreeable Brothers’ Pub, where we knocked back the £2 pints. It was here that we encountered the first and only British tourists of the trip: a father-and-son duo, I think, from the Midlands, with a third companion, in search of something ‘a bit different’. We also decided to have a Călărași Divin, a local type of brandy, in cognac style. I cannot say that it was at all good. I initially thought it was from the Romanian town of Călărași, but it was in fact Moldovan, from a town of the same name; the word means ‘horsemen’. Most of the people out and about at night seemed to be speaking Russian; during the day, more Romanian seemed to be spoken.

Our night was less restful than we might have hoped. Twice in the night, there was furious banging at the door, though I slept through the first instance. Awoken by the second, I initially thought it was unusually early building work; by the time I got myself together and opened the door, the hall was empty. Disgruntled neighbours? I don’t think we were loud at all, but it is possible they were tired of a dubious foreign slumlord stuffing his flat with boozy tourists week after week and wished to nonetheless make their feelings known.

The next morning was gloriously sunny. After breakfast, we walked down to the Valea Morilor lake and park, with its Cascade Stairs, the water shut off for winter. The park was established in 1950 at the behest of Leonid Brezhnev, who was then First Secretary of the Communist Party in Soviet Moldavia. From there, we walked around the evidently more well-to-do neighbourhoods near the park. This was a very pleasant area, something like a smaller and lower-density equivalent of the lakeside north of Bucharest. I would happily live there. It confirmed that Chișinău had so much more going for it than Bălți — the second city of the country, if one discounts Tiraspol — it is hardly worth making the comparison.

This was all very nice. But we were not here to see a steadily developing Eastern European capital city which, while certainly still rough around the edges, will — in time — presumably be filled up with bike lanes, expensive coffee shops, and all the rest. You can already see that across much of Eastern Europe. It’s hardly unique to Moldova. No: we were here to travel back in time. And so, having had our fill of Chișinău, we made our way on foot back into the centre, and then to the bus station, with our final goal now to cross into Transnistria.

Transnistria

I must admit to a certain tension on the bus to Tiraspol. We didn’t really know how the procedure would go, or even where the border strictly was — it isn’t internationally recognised, so doesn’t appear on Google Maps. Should you lose your passport here, you’d really be in trouble, given that there is effectively no consular assistance. It’s not a long journey, not far at all from Chișinău, maybe an hour; some on the bus were even standing in the aisle. There was a Polish guy on the bus with us — another tourist interested in seeing the Soviet Union frozen in aspic.

There was one long stretch at the end of the Moldovan side where the fields ended and fed into a forested road. Moldova itself, refusing to recognise Transnistria, operates no border checks with it. Indeed, far from pushing to reassert control over Tiraspol, it would prefer that everyone pretended that Transnistria simply did not exist, given that it (probably correctly) views drawing any attention to it as an obstacle to EU accession. The porous, one-sided border that results has caused constant trouble with smuggling (especially of cigarettes), as well as permitting Moldovan criminals to flee from justice with ease.

The border now felt close. Then it opened up, and before us stood a Transnistrian border checkpoint. There was a small white cabin. All left the bus and queued up for the cabin. An officer took our passports, asked us how long we were staying, and gave us each a little white slip, a kind of visa, stating when we entered and when we needed to leave by. We got back on the bus.

The impression is immediately of a militarised area. I think I had underappreciated this aspect of Transnistria before actually getting there. The presence of Russian military power (more precisely, the Transnistrian army under Russian officership) was visible immediately. In Bender — the first town one encounters, which we would return to — there was a memorial to the 1992 Transnistrian War, which secured the territory’s autonomy, complete with a tank used in the conflict. Bender has a historical fortress, and to this day, next to the fort stands an army garrison. Further down the road, a striking mural shows two slightly abstract, stern soldier figures, one bearing the Soviet flag and the other, the modern Russian one. The green-and-red Transnistrian flag could be seen in many places, often alongside the Russian one (which it is legally co-equal to).

Some more things were immediately noticeable as we moved into Transnistria. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the language of daily life switched over to Russian. In stark contrast to Moldova, all roadside signage was in Russian, and spoken language followed suit — barring one passing snippet of Romanian, which I heard in Tiraspol. At one time, Transnistria was relatively ethnically diverse, but presumably, by now, many of the Romanians have left.

The standard of life, at street level, did not seem so radically different to that of Moldova. In Tiraspol, which has a population of around 130,000, public street buses were old, hulking great Soviet-era things; but on the other side of the ledger, there were some rather nice new residential buildings for the wealthier residents of the city. There certainly was much more life to it than there was in Bălți. We saw billboards for a barbershop named ‘Hooligans’ and a clothing brand called ‘Billioneire’.

The country — and its government — is largely controlled by just one oligarch (and, allegedly, a former KGB officer), a man named Viktor Gușan, who originally provided security to private firms. Soon enough, though, he went into business himself, founding the Sheriff Group, which was first involved in smuggling, before then expanding into other sectors, often via dubious means. According to the Financial Times, he now owns a cognac factory, supermarkets, petrol stations, banks, a textile factory, a caviar and sturgeon farm — among other things. But best known by far is Sheriff Tiraspol, the local football team which he bankrolls, famous mostly for defeating Real Madrid in the Champions League in 2021. Presumably, they are behind most of these new developments.

Indeed, at one time, Transnistria was actually significantly wealthier than Moldova. It had more industry (including one of the largest barbed wire factories in Europe) and, most importantly of all, could skim off huge profits from supplying Moldova with natural gas that it was given by Russia virtually for free at a big mark-up — a situation that was permitted by the fact that Moldova’s most important gas pipeline goes straight through Transnistria. Things were already changing even before then, but since the beginning of 2025, Transnistria has been cut off from Russian gas. This plunged Moldova into an energy crisis, requiring Romania to bail it out; however, for Transnistria, the consequences were far more severe. Even aside from the fiscal crisis that followed, most of the country’s industry soon shut down and unemployment skyrocketed. To make things even worse, since 2022, Ukraine has also cut off access to the port of Odessa, meaning that Transnistria’s main other lucrative business activity — smuggling — has become far more difficult.

Our bus moved along the main west-east road, Karl Liebknecht Street, stopping now at fairly small intervals. We got off. The first order of business was to acquire Transnistrian Rubles — something that wasn’t possible in advance at the multitude of currency exchange shops in Moldova proper, given that the territory is unrecognised. The lower-denomination notes feature Alexander Suvorov, the paramount national figure whose legacy is widely glorified in Transnistria, visible in statues and placenames. Suvorov was the general who founded Tiraspol in 1792 (the city name, like several other Russian cities around the Black Sea, founded after their campaigns against the Ottomans, was given a Grecian ‘-pol’ suffix; the first part comes from the nearby ancient Greek town of Tyras).

Cash in hand, we then headed to that mainstay of every Transnistrian tourist itinerary: the ‘Back in the USSR’ Restaurant. You guessed it: it was a Soviet-themed restaurant, of which ample photos can be seen online. We had pelmeni and other Russian things. And beer, and vodka. While there were a few other tourists present, there seemed to be locals too, and the prices were in fact very reasonable. Despite the Soviet theme, the music piped through the venue speakers was a mixture of Y2K Russian pop, and the western equivalents, like Britney Spears.

Then it was time to head to our accommodation. With a few drinks in our bellies, the odd apprehension of being in a breakaway republic on the edge of a warzone disappeared. Everyone on the street was, after all, evidently just a normal person going about their ordinary life.

We stayed at a simple Khrushchyovka flat, and arrived greeted by our host. ‘First time in Transnistria?’, he greeted us with. I can only wonder how many times that is answered in the negative. We walked up the rather tired, simple concrete stairwell to the apartment. It smelled of old people — I suspect that the middle-aged landlord’s parents had lived here before. But it was warm and just what we needed. I enjoyed my Louis Vuitton bedsheets and original Soviet-era wallpaper.

We went out in search of a drink and started wandering again through the streets at night. What stood out about Tiraspol was that it had a string of ‘prestige’ buildings, decked out in the Transnistrian flag and lit up. One example was the House of the Soviets.

One place we stopped at was La Tocana, an otherwise ordinary restaurant that turned out to be quite interesting. It was much like La Placinte in Bălți. A bit of research later confirmed that it used to be owned by the same chain; La Plăcinte ended up in financial difficulties, and I believe that what we now saw was a ‘localised’ version of it, not unlike how McDonald’s restaurants in Russia became Vkusno i Tochka (albeit here in a manner unrelated to the political situation, as far as I could tell). The interior was decked out in Transnistrian green and red, yet it played Romanian music. I still didn’t brave speaking Romanian in this territory in the interest of keeping my head down, but it says something interesting about how there is still a nod to the ‘local’ Moldavian culture even here, where it is seemingly situated as the folk culture of the countryside.

On to the next one. We spotted a bar named ‘Craft’ on the map. We remarked at how appropriately named such a bar was at soothing the median Western normie’s fears that it would be anything other than acceptable. We took a taxi there (the driver applauded our Russian speaker for being an Englishman who spoke the language). Craft was, indeed, a fine place, and not unlike Beermaster in Balti. Furthermore — perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised — their beer selection included drinks from numerous EU countries, including Belgium, Germany, Czechia, and Romania. We nonetheless stuck to the local house beer from Tiraspol, also called ‘Craft’.

We then went in search of another bar, and found one in the middle of town. To my regret, I forgot its name. It looked like the kind of place that was actually quite upmarket in the early ’00s, and then frozen aesthetically (but well-maintained) for another twenty years. The wall behind the bar had a small poster dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. A group of men — and one woman — occupied another alcove of the bar. It must have now been past 1 am, so we wondered what exactly they were doing. But unlike our experience in Randevu, this group left us well alone, and the atmosphere felt much more controlled.

And so to bed.

We woke up to a morning in Tiraspol. Our apartment overlooked a school building (named, as is common here, simply by a number, although I don’t remember which one). Emerging from my bed, I could peer out the window to see the teenagers reading and writing in the classrooms across the road from us.

We headed down to take in the city centre in daylight. There are, famously, many fine Soviet-painted murals and mosaics still in place on the sides of buildings, and in reasonably good condition too. There was a mighty statue of Suvorov, flags of the five raions of Transnistria, flags of Transnistria itself, and of course, of Russia (as well as, notably, Gagauzia, which is an autonomous region of Moldova, mostly occupied by Turkic-speakers, that also sought independence, but, unlike Transnistria, was successfully restored to Moldovan control).

We then hopped on a bus to Bender, from where we had entered the territory the day before, on the west bank of the Dniester still under Transnistrian control. The main attraction was the fortress which we headed straight to. Walking from the bus on foot, we saw a roadside billboard commemorating Tsar Nicholas II and his family decked out in the imperial yellow and black. This, the Suvorov imagery, a statue we had seen early of Catherine the Great, and in a way the fortress itself, were all part of the visual landscape and a reminder that while Transnistria is widely viewed as the most ‘Soviet’ country in the world, there is an imperial Russian foundation that sits beneath this.

There was hardly anyone else around at the fort. This definitely felt like a frontier, not least because there was an active military base next to it, and the wide river formed a natural boundary. This was of the westernmost advances of the Russian world, and it was very obviously perceptible.

One particularly memorable sight was of this sign (image below), setting out why one should say Pridnestrovie and not Transnistria. This issue was something I was conscious of when first entering the territory. In 2024, the use of the term Transnistria was banned, with the argument that this was the word used by ‘fascist Romania’, with a risk of a fine or arrest. Pridnestrovie, for what it’s worth, means the exact same as Transnistria: across the Dniester. But one word evidently means twentieth-century murder, genocide, destruction, and the other means colour, joy, and stock images of happy families.

Leaving the fort, we wandered around Bender market a bit, where we saw a couple of older army officers walking around in their fatigues. We then found another Soviet-style canteen, this one somewhat more authentic and less self-consciously a tourist spot than the one in Tiraspol. We ate wholegrain rice and beef in sauce with salad. Like the other restaurant, the music choice was distinctly post-Soviet; I seem to recall that Not Gonna Get Us (2003) by the Russian girl group t.A.T.u was one such example.

Our time in Transnistria had come to an end. We looked around for a minibus from Bender back to Chisinau. Arriving at the bus station, we realise we had just missed it. But helpfully, there was a taxi driver at the bus station (middle-aged, as they all are) mopping up those unfortunate souls who had missed the bus, and we secured a journey with him for £6 a head. A female passenger (age about 40) joined us and sat at the front, with the three of us offering to squeeze in the back.

We chatted with the taxi driver a bit at the start. He told us that a nephew of his worked in Bucharest. His default language was Russian, but he was able to speak Romanian too, as could the lady at the front. After niceties with us the two locals at the front proceeded to chat away for the rest of the journey in Russian (more accurately, it was mostly the driver chewing the poor lady’s ear off for the whole journey as he had found a captive audience). His monologue to the woman consisted of a fairly standard set of TV-informed Soviet Citizen tropes about how the USSR was the good old days and a more stable world. Presumably, these views are shared by the (fairly large) number of Romanians in Moldova who continue to vote for pro-Russian (or at least anti-EU) political parties.

After getting back into Chisinau, we hung out at a nice restaurant and had a drink while waiting for our flight. We grabbed a taxi to the airport (this time, driven by a Romanian-Moldovan from Orhei, a town right on the border with Romania, himself with a son working in Bucharest; he had more pro-Western views) and caught our flight back to London Luton with no issues.

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

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At midday today, Nigel Farage announced on X that he would be making a 2pm speech on his ‘future in public life’. After the longest two hours in history, Farage delivered a stinging rebuke against the attempts of the media and the political establishment to smear his reputation on the basis of spurious financial allegations, rejecting their right to judge him and offering the chance to do so to the people of Clacton by resigning as a Member of Parliament in order to trigger a by-election, in which he intends to stand.

What to make of this speech? Will Farage return to Parliament triumphant? And what does this mean for Reform’s future prospects?

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It’s been a few weeks now since the Makerfield by-election, which returned Andy Burnham to Westminster (if only on a part-time basis) and cleared the path for his succession to the Premiership. Whilst that result was primarily a victory for Burnham and a defeat for Keir Starmer, it has nevertheless caused some re-evaluation — and, to some extent, recriminations — within Reform, and not entirely unreasonably.

Makerfield is a seat that Reform will need to win at the next general election — which could now come sooner than previously anticipated, although we think many commentators are vastly overstating the likelihood thereof — if it is to form a government. Even if the by-election result does not tell us much about the public’s view of the party, now is the right time to take stock and consider what comes next.

Today, we’ll look at how Reform is responding to recent events, and check in with the ongoing buildout in HQ.

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Burnham’s struggle (and my own)

Much like Mein Kampf before it, the first half of Andy Burnham's (who has now also found a penchant for sartorial messaging) and Steve Rotheram’s soft manifesto, Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain (2024), begins as a biography of its authors. Also eerily similar is Burnham and Rotheram’s decision to follow on from biography with an outline of a plan for the destruction of the country — and possibly Europe with it. Nevertheless, much like that first infamous book, perhaps it is incumbent upon us to read it to discover what drives our soon-to-be Dear Leader. I have done so myself, so that you don’t have to.

They begin, of course, at a Liverpool pub, discussing football while listening to The Smiths. I would be quite interested to learn what Morrissey — a man who has supported Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Party and is an avid fan of the nationalist commentator Morgoth’s Review — thinks of Andy Burnham. Naturally, Hillsborough (the great Northern ‘stab-in-the-back’) is the hinge upon which much of the book rests. Both authors see the event as central to their political and personal identities, and bring up the fact that it was ‘man-made’ and that ‘the powers-that-be — the establishment — fought tooth and nail to cover [it] up in the years that followed.’ Perhaps Andy and Steve, both Mayors of Metropolitan Areas (with responsibilities extending to, for instance, the functions of a local Police and Crime Commissioner) could have dealt with another man-made tragedy that occurred extensively in the North which the powers-that-be covered up. Fortunately for them, no such events ever happened. We are blessed indeed.

The rest of the first half is mostly trite, explaining their upbringings and how they entered politics. But I suppose to the authors’ credit(?) there are some astonishing moments of candour, such as Burnham’s admission that his girlfriend, now-wife, ‘disappeared to Gibraltar’ with a fellow participant of the show Blind Date. You couldn’t waterboard that out of me, but perhaps I was never cut out for this business. There are also some fantastic nuggets about how Burnham’s attendance at a The Smiths concert gave him an advantage over his fellow students at Cambridge, ‘who went to much posher schools’. Your humble reviewer must confess that by the time we are halfway through the chapter on their SW1 careers, he gave up and skipped to Part 2, ‘Our Vision’. Though I couldn’t take any more navel-gazing, I thought the good readers of Pimlico Journal deserved at least some engagement with the ideas driving the next Prime Minister.

Devo Max++

Burnham and Rotheram appear to have the idea that federal systems are just bloody brilliant, and point particularly to Germany as the ultimate expression of this perfection. Burnham is effusive about Germany’s ‘written constitution and basic law’ (seemingly not understanding that these are the same thing), especially the provision that stipulates that ‘there must be equivalent living standards’ between the German Länder. According to Burnham, to achieve this, wealthier states pay into a central pot, which is then redistributed around the country to ensure poorer regions have the same standards as richer ones. This love affair with our sauerkraut-eating cousins leads our authors into the maxim that total devolution and a federalised Britain is the way forward.

And here it is straight from the horse’s mouth — Devo Max++ will not lead to London retaining a greater percentage of its tax revenues. This was always obvious. But since some journalists have already begun to obfuscate the narrative — perhaps sensing that the regional sectarianism in the new government will exhaust itself with voters quickly — by suggesting that with greater devolution, London will ‘keep’ a greater percentage of the tax revenues it raises, we thought it worth engaging with.

The steelman of this argument relies on devolved governments dedicating a greater percentage of their expenditure to local infrastructure, which will, in the long term, improve the growth and dynamism of the respective regions. This would work in tandem with the ability of local authorities to compete with each other for investment, the movement of labour, and all of the policies alongside infrastructure alone underpinning those decisions. If we want to be maximally generous to the devolutionist vision, this is already reflected in the looser planning and licensing laws of Manchester vis-à-vis Sadiq Khan’s London. This could enable regional specialisations across a wider span of the country and diversify the national economy. It could, hypothetically, produce a healthier political and economic dynamic with London — if its services exports can also find a larger domestic market. The capital may then be able to retain a greater proportion of its tax revenues, which are currently spent predominantly on paying the state’s welfare and public service obligations to the rest of the country. In essence, this version of the pitch is an appeal to an older, more laissez-faire period in British governance.

This would work only on a completely blank political canvas. Local government in Britain was once free to make its own decisions about taxation (collected on domestic and business property in ‘the rates’) and spending. Over the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these authorities were given a growing remit of duties to the public by Parliament — but crucially, funds were to be collected from the rates or local borrowing that was not underwritten by the central government. These responsibilities included the provision of public goods as well as the much older system of Poor Law distribution. Towards the turn of the century, councils successfully borrowed large sums from private lenders to build sanitation, transportation, electricity, and gas infrastructure — and paid off the loans from new revenues generated by resultant growth. By 1905, local government expenditure reached its peak at one-third of total state expenditure.

This system also led to huge divergences in the quality of services to residents across county, municipal, or borough councils, in an extreme form of the ‘postcode lottery’. The local Labour Party’s Poplar Borough Rates Rebellion in 1921 saw the council (in a highly deprived area) accrue huge debts to pay a significantly higher rate of Poor Law in response to the post-war unemployment crisis. This was an intentional effort to present the Coalition Government with a fait accompli to force a bailout and reform of the welfare system. Though Poplar’s leading councillors were sent to jail, the rebellion spelt the end of service provision funded by local revenue. It is for this reason that since 1929, Britain has only ever been more involved in the business of redistributing local revenues around the country. Today, over two-thirds of local spending is covered by Westminster grants.

In present-day British political culture, the implications of this model of local governance are unfathomable, especially to those who are currently the strongest advocates of devolution. Given there is absolutely zero chance that the national government — and a Labour Government, least of all — would ever entertain the possibility that the decisions of local functionaries should lead to seriously negative consequences, such as genuinely ruthless cuts to service provision (higher rates of tax being a singular exception) for residents particular to one region. This would both be unacceptable within the region in question and, given that England (broadly speaking) thinks of itself as one, would probably also be unacceptable to many people living elsewhere. The trade-offs between infrastructure investment, local welfare spending, and tax cuts will never have to be seriously considered by local authorities in this country.

It is already the case that councils and local governments find themselves heavily indebted and making persistently bad investments to try to cover their impossible obligations. Birmingham City Council’s terrible decision to cover 25% of the costs of the Commonwealth Games led to a budget shortfall that had to be made up from contingency funds, sharpening an already fragile fiscal situation. Thurrock Council has similarly found itself in dire straits on the back of frankly stupid borrowing decisions and risky commercial investments, and getting itself embroiled in one of the largest local government financial scandals. Many other councils that borrowed heavily (often investing in commercial property) following the loosening of restrictions by the Conservatives — who were, of course, themselves partisans of devolution — may find themselves in trouble in the next few years.

A devolutionist may argue greater local control leads to greater local responsibility, which in turn leads to superior outcomes for both the local area and the country as a whole. This may be so in theory, but in practice no central government will actually make local residents — regardless of whether or not they made poor political choices — seriously suffer from the irresponsibility of their local representatives, which means that the second part of this equation will never come to fruition. And of course, Burnham himself would be the first to bail out on highly generous terms any irresponsible council that managed to bankrupt itself. Thus any form of devolution in Britain will only ever lead to a greater extraction from the metropole for next to no reward. Without an incentive structure that will reward a greater proportion of investment spending towards long-term revenue growth, the impulse of devolved authorities will remain the same — mostly spaffing London’s money at the wall.

Burnham, however, at least judging by the contents of Head North, seems to have no awareness of this history or answer to how the perverse incentives in local government could be changed (outside of more, that is). He also seems to have only a very superficial understanding of the country he idolises (which, as it happens, had its star fading even as the book was being written). The Basic Law, Burnham claims, is why German towns and cities have such excellent public transport systems, public spheres, and a wider geographical distribution of wealth. Astute (or indeed, basic) pupils of German history might wonder whether the fact that Germany spent much of the last eight hundred years as a loose confederation of independent states — each with their own urban agglomerations and internal networks of trade and governance — would feature in this analysis, or indeed, even more obviously, the fact that half of the German capital was occupied by Communists for forty-five years. No: this singular element of the 1949 Constitution drawn up by the Allied Powers (who, as it happened, had a great interest — and not an economic one — in promoting a federalised Germany) is the reason Germany is the prosperous country it is today.

Of course, this entirely ignores the fact that Germany is, in fact, a deeply unequal country, despite its stark redistributive efforts. Most obviously, the former East Germany, in many ways, functions as their very own North. Regional incomes are far lower than their Western counterparts, and this has fuelled a huge amount of resentment. It is unsurprising, then, that much like the North has been turning into a strong bastion of Reform support, East Germany functions in much the same way for their own populist right-wing party, the AfD. Meanwhile, even in the former West Germany, in which the scars of Communism cannot be used as an excuse, large parts of the Rhineland have increasingly suffered from deindustrialisation; there is little sign that this will be changing any time soon.

Burnham and Rotheram essentially want the central government to hand over money to federalised regions and local authorities to spend the cash as they like. Given the billions lost by local government every year to waste (and in some cases fraud), many might hesitate to implement such a suggestion in this country. Burnham and Rotheram, however, are undeterred. They invite the reader to imagine how Britain would look if we had adopted a codified constitution with a Basic Law; the result is that ‘Liverpool would certainly have a tram system.’

Other proposals include proportional representation and aptly emotionally-named laws such as a ‘Hillsborough Law’ (already introduced to parliament) and a ‘Grenfell Law’. As per the bill introduced to Parliament, the ‘Hillsborough Law’ would supposedly make it harder for public authorities to cover things up. Speaking of cover-ups, it is strange, then, that at no point are the grooming gangs mentioned at all in this book. One should think that champions of the North might want to, even briefly, mention one of the most horrifying events that occurred on British soil, many of the worst cases having occurred in places like Rotherham (which Rotheram, admittedly, is not actually from), Bradford, and Oldham — which is part of Greater Manchester itself. But not a peep. When confronted about the issue outside of the book, Burnham has claimed to be ‘proud’ of his grooming gangs probes, meaning the decision not to include them in his book can only be described as strange.

They laze through some fairly bog-standard Blair-adjacent reforms, like abolishing the House of Lords to create a ‘Senate of the Nations and Regions’, and some changes to the education system. This ties into Burnham’s recent proposals that any economic decision made in Westminster must take into account its impact on ‘regional inequality’ and seek to reduce it. As if Westminster didn’t have enough statute to consider already. On the other hand, going exactly the opposite direction of Blair, they also wish to weaken or end the party whip system. However, this seems to be more a question of party machinery than law. It will be interesting to see whether Burnham holds himself to account here and never issues any whips.

We round off with a suggestion that smashes its head against reality. Net Zero, the authors say, can be used as an industrial strategy to create growth and jobs in the North, and lead to a reindustrialisation of the region. Green Industrialism — rather appropriately, a policy slogan of the Biden Administration — is now curiously absent from Burnham’s pitch to the public, presumably because absolutely no one actually believes in it in 2026. Again, much like his worship of Germany, Burnham’s book was becoming stale even as it was being written.

Unbeknownst to our authors, it seems, much of the country already acts as a tax-farm for vibes-based ‘left behind’ regions. Burnham has no plans that can seriously fix the persistent issues we have been facing — low productivity, high levels of immigration, chronic underinvestment in infrastructure — because he doesn’t even agree on what the problems are. He would rather add more bars to what we could call the cage, the system of laws and procedures which have prevented central government from doing anything, than actually tackling the problem. He would tie us down permanently and lock in the status quo.

All in all, the book does give us an excellent insight into what drives the ‘King of the North’ who has made his way down to the snake-pit of Westminster. We can only hope that the structural issues any government he will form will no doubt face will prevent him from imposing some of his more insane ideas upon the populace.

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

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The excellent recent report, Breaking the Blob by Cambridge Circus Research provides a timely examination of how parts of the UK non-profit ecosystem operate as unelected and unaccountable arms of the state. Parts of this ecosystem routinely seek to frustrate democratically-sanctioned government agendas in politically contentious areas such as migration.

This has, of course, been a problem even under Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Starmer took office understanding himself and his party to be the natural helmsmen of a system they believed to be correct and proper, and took the view that governance had only become dysfunctional because of Tory mismanagement and culture-warring. He began his premiership with the apparatchik Sue Gray as his chief of staff, offered substantive pay rises to civil servants for having been ‘on-side’ and took to increasing engagement with the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector in the development and implementation of public policy.

Early on, the government announced the Civil Society Covenant, expanding consultation between departments with over 1200 charities, social enterprises, faith groups, trade unions and other civil society organisations alongside mechanisms for ongoing engagement in the Joint Civil Society Covenant Council. By late 2025, however, the narrative had flipped, cue the many complaints from the Starmer team via the New Statesman that the system was unwieldy and that the ‘levers pulled’ did not produce the desired outputs.

Under a Reform government, which can only begin with an outright hostility to these frameworks, the scope for friction in the legislative and implementation processes will reach new heights. Large parts of the non-profit sector promote ends and means that the Labour-Conservative Party consensus of the past three decades supported, but that Reform rejects.

Under current guidance, charities can take part in political activity that supports their purpose, but ‘political activity must not become the reason for the charity’s existence’. The boundaries of the political, and therefore of what counts as political activity, are obviously not static. Much that was touted as part of a ‘common sense’ political consensus just a few years ago turned out to be political and contentious through and through — Net Zero being a chief example.

There are genuinely difficult issues about what charities are for and how they justify the privileges that the state confers upon them. Regardless of one’s position on their legitimate place, it should be uncontroversial that non-profit activity that frustrates the goals of the democratically elected government should not receive public support.

One difficulty for a reforming government would be deciding where to begin in tackling the problems that Breaking the Blob identifies. This article proposes a starting point that would be relatively straightforward, principled, and that would send a clear message: Nesta (formerly the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts).

Nesta is rather unusual in that it is a private charity funded not by private philanthropy but, in large part, by a public sector endowment, more like a university than a charity — or the scheme by Viktor Orban’s government to fund the Fidesz-aligned think-tank Matthias Corvinus Collegium with shares in Hungary’s largest oil and gas company.

Per its own (and the current government’s) claims, Nesta has been effective at seeking and exercising influence over government policy, particularly on climate and energy. While Nesta is not a party-political organisation, it is self-evident that its priorities and the policy agenda it pursues would be thoroughly at odds with those of a Reform government.

The reassertion of control of the Nesta public sector endowment by a reforming government would be a relatively straightforward and principled first step to remedy the issues that Breaking the Blob identifies.

Nesta’s origins: more money than sense

What is Nesta, and where did it come from?

David Miliband (who is central to our story) fondly recalled in 2023 the moment of Nesta’s conception. During the draft of Labour’s 1997 election manifesto, he excitedly realised there was extra money to spaff up the wall: “The proceeds of the millennium lottery had not been allocated. So we suddenly thought, right, what are we going to spend this on?”

Labour’s answer, per its 1997 Manifesto, was the creation of a National Endowment for Science and the Arts, which would ‘sponsor young talent’. It even expressed the extravagant hope that successful artists would ‘donate copyright and royalties’ to the organisation. As it turned out, this never happened.

As an arms-length government agency squarely within the public sector, Nesta had from its launch the backing of an endowment of (initially) £250 million, funded by National Lottery ticket sales. Nesta would use the return on this endowment to fund its activities. It was thereby protected — by design — from normal government budget-setting and accountability, despite being a public body.

In its original incarnation, Nesta’s overarching goal as set by Parliament was consistent with the Labour manifesto and seems rather sensible: ‘to support and promote talent, innovation and creativity in the fields of science, technology and the arts’.

But mission drift was already evident by 2005, when Nesta changed its focus to ‘improving the UK’s capacity to innovate’. This pivot, coincidentally, synchronises almost perfectly with the enduring collapse in the UK productivity growth. Reading Nesta’s history, one has the sense of an organisation encumbered by its own existence by virtue of its endowment, lurching from idea to idea in search of a reason to exist.

Creative accounting

It is now often forgotten — in large part thanks to the other arm of the operation — that following the Conservative election victory in 2010, David Cameron and George Osborne promised a ‘bonfire of the quangos’. The idea was that the Blairite public bodies burdening the public purse should be out; some of the most notable cases include the UK Film Council, Regional Development Agencies, General Teaching Council for England, Health Protection Agency, the Competition Commission and British Waterways, which were either abolished, directly merged into government functions, or replaced by ‘independent trusts’. The reforms assessed public bodies against the metrics that they should only exist if they: a. provided a technical function, b. required political impartiality or c. needed to act independently to establish facts.

Cameron’s government imagined a ‘leaner and meaner’ Blob by taking down the total number of public bodies from 901 to 648. This was to complement the Big Society and Open Public Services agenda, which simultaneously institutionalised the decentralising impulse of the time. The state-led Blob 1.0 gave way to the Cameronite successor model we are now more familiar with.

Despite some fat trimming, by the Cameron team’s own criteria, Nesta had very little to show from its 12-year record. It should have been an obvious target for the quango pyre.

So it was. But jump forward to 2026, Nesta is still with us, now a private charity with a headcount of over 500 people and continued access to a public sector endowment. The Cameron government was clearly set on removing Nesta from the public sector, but for rather inexplicable reasons, it also saw Nesta’s continued existence as valuable. Perhaps it needed something to point to in the sparsely populated ‘Big Society’.

It also must have known that Nesta could not survive without its endowment. But transferring the endowment to an independent Nesta risked creating a minor fiscal headache: it would trigger an immediate hit to public sector net debt, hardly consistent with the aims of the quango cull. So, how to square the circle of getting Nesta out of government while keeping its endowment on the government’s balance sheet?

The solution was that the endowment would be held by a Nesta Trust, with a new independent charity, Nesta, as the Trust’s sole trustee. The government defined the Trust’s charitable objects (which might have set an appropriate purpose for the endowment) extremely broadly. Government would have no role in appointing the Nesta board, and therefore in the management of the Trust and its endowment. The only remaining formal tie to government would be a Protector appointed by ministers to ‘ensure the integrity of the administration of the Trust and the propriety of its procedures’.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the Nesta Trust remains to this day in the public sector as a ‘government-controlled charity’. Perhaps you expect that a ‘government-controlled charity’ would be controlled by the government? Or perhaps that there would at least be accountability to government and Parliament for how it uses its assets? In the Nesta Trust’s case, at least, you would be wrong.

The upshot of the arrangements was to secure Nesta’s exclusive access to the endowment and to keep the endowment assets on the government’s books while severing all Nesta accountability to its (public) funders. It was a small but egregious act of administrative vandalism.

What about the Protector, the tenuous remaining thread of accountability to government? Remarkably, no Protector has been in place since April 2022, meaning that this mechanism, promised to Parliament to ensure ‘integrity and propriety’ in the administration of the Trust, has been absent. One wonders what lies behind this delay, as even by government standards four years is a long time.

Charity begins at home

How does Nesta use its extraordinary privileges today?

Nesta’s current avatar has taken shape under the leadership of Ravi Gurumurthy, appointed by the Nesta board in 2019. Before leading Nesta, Gurumurthy worked for David Miliband, whom we met earlier, at the International Rescue Committee in New York. Before this, his career had already tracked the protagonist of our tale, David, across different roles in the UK government, from DEFRA to the Foreign Office. The Independent reported him flouncing off from his civil service job in 2013 to rejoin Mr Miliband in New York, in high dudgeon at ‘Treasury meddling’ in energy policy.

With Gurumurthy’s appointment, Nesta came full circle, from a twinkle in an excited David Miliband’s eye in 1996 to his long-term associate taking the helm. He took over from former Blair advisor Geoff Mulgan, who had held the reins since 2011, thus maintaining independent Nesta’s unbroken line of New Labour-linked leadership.

According to Nesta’s accounts, one change since 2019 is that salaries have risen rather healthily, with the number of staff earning more than £100,000 increasing from five to thirty. The CEO’s salary jumped by a handy 27% the year Gurumurthy was hired, from £164,000 to £209,000. The 2025 accounts show Nesta’s top earner taking home over £260,000, significantly more than the British Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary, but Nesta’s annual report has coyly declined to state outright who its top earner is since 2021.

A BIT late, and a BIT much

Since 2019 Nesta has also dabbled in mergers & acquisitions.

In 2021 it paid £15.4 million – funded from the Trust endowment – for 70% of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). Nesta already owned the remaining 30%. BIT was a government-incubated consultancy organisation founded in 2010 as a vehicle for advancing ‘behavioural science’, also known as ‘nudge theory’, in government. Nudge theory reached its peak as a fad in the public sector in the 2010s by promising cash-strapped governments cheap ways of achieving difficult public policy goals. Its foundational policy triumph (pre-dating BIT’s creation by several years) was pensions auto-enrolment — rather low-hanging fruit. Nudge theory has failed to achieve a policy success remotely on a par with pensions auto-enrolment, and the ongoing replication crisis undermined the credibility of the theory’s underlying research base.

The coronavirus epidemic seemed to promise a salvific opportunity for nudge theory. Instead, the BIT’s CEO at the time somehow became the government’s mouthpiece for the controversial, and chaotically abandoned, herd immunity strategy.

Did a canny Nesta use these circumstances to negotiate a bargain-basement price for BIT? It seems not. According to Nesta’s accounts, since its acquisition BIT’s accumulated profit in the years to 2025 is a little over £400,000. In valuing BIT at £22 million, Nesta appears to have paid very handsomely indeed for such earnings.

What does Nesta actually do?

Perhaps none of this would matter if Nesta were doing valuable apolitical work that benefits the UK. So what is it achieving? Does Nesta deserve the extraordinary privilege of its public endowment? Although the Conservatives did their best to sever all Nesta accountability to government, the question remains valid.

As we consider this, a possible test to have in mind is whether we could reasonably expect the National Lottery ticket buyers who provided Nesta’s endowment to approve of how their money was being spent. Another is whether governments of different political persuasions would be likely to consider Nesta’s work valuable.

According to Nesta, its work today focuses on three self-appointed ‘missions’, or what in less religious terms we might call goals:

• that by 2030, every child has the same chance of developing to their full potential in the early years

• to halve the prevalence of obesity in the UK by 2030

• to reduce home carbon emissions in the UK by 30% by 2030.

And what reasonable person could object to such goals?

The first, in particular, just seems really nice. It may also be exceptionally broad and ambitious, even for an organisation with Nesta’s privileges. But hey, Elon Musk is ambitious and look at him! When you think about the specific words — which presumably we are meant to take seriously — understanding what this goal actually means becomes less, rather than more, clear. Why ‘the same chance’ instead of simply that ‘every child will develop to their full potential’? You might conclude that we are left with little more than vibes.

Perhaps it is rude to nit-pick about such a worthy goal, it’s for the children after all. But if Nesta is going to realise its vision of universal justice in three years’ time, then it probably needs a strategy built on clear ideas. If Nesta does have them somewhere, they are certainly keeping them close to the chest.

Instead, we find on Nesta’s website scores of sub-scale, incremental, seemingly uncoordinated projects that keep its people busy. Will any of these have any discernible effect separable from the government’s own early years strategy? Who knows! What has Nesta actually achieved in the years since setting itself this goal? Nothing much. Anyone rooting for children to face an unfair start in life probably needn’t worry.

Regulation nation

What about goal number two, halving obesity prevalence? That’s certainly clearer and more measurable. And for this goal, Nesta is firmly committed to a theory that guides its action: ‘the most effective way to cut obesity is to change our food environment’. From this it follows, as the night follows the day, that Nesta’s solutions demand government regulation to reshape our ‘food environment’ to our benefit.

Nesta’s specific solution is that the government should impose mandatory data reporting, ‘healthy’ food sales targets and punitive fines for non-compliance on businesses selling food, starting with supermarkets. It calls this a ‘healthy food standard’. The standard is market-friendly because the government would not tell supermarkets how they should meet the targets imposed on them. (If they need help to meet their targets, they could buy the services of a ‘behavioural science’ consultancy organisation.)

It is here that Nesta has achieved its greatest success of the past six years, with the Labour government committing to adopt the ‘healthy food standard’ in 2025. What did the supermarkets, who may have useful insight to add to this idea, make of it? It seems neither Nesta nor the government consulted them. It was apparently ‘not Nesta’s job to consult with industry’. Stakeholder Engagement in action.

Putting aside the rights, wrongs and implications of such a radical expansion of the government’s regulatory footprint, presumably somebody did a rigorous analysis of the economic impacts before announcing the policy? It does turn out that Nesta commissioned a 26-page assessment of its own proposal (which is nevertheless ‘independent’) to a former regulator, Daniel Gordon. The economic case for health targets on grocery retailers showed that the economic cost will be small and supermarket prices probably won’t rise much. If I am in any way qualified to give word of professional advice to the good people of Nesta, an independent assessment of policy costs and rewards can seem less even-handed when it is called ‘The economic case for…’.

One wonders what departments other than the Department for Health and Social Care have made of it, given the government’s commitment to cut the regulatory burden on business by 25%. Fortunately for those of us who sense something problematic about the policy, the government seems to have had cold feet or is too distracted by its own collapse to drag it forward. One year after the announcement, an impotent Nesta is left to huff petulantly that ‘we are still waiting for a formal consultation’ and to lament that ‘the policy risks slipping down the agenda and not being implemented at all’.

Let them eat heat pumps

Perhaps the strangest of the goals in practice is the third, about reducing carbon emissions from home heating. Nesta has a theory underlying this ambition, and it is a simple one: the British people must install heat pumps in their homes.

In pursuit of their goal, Nesta has effectively become the propaganda arm of the heat pump industry and an outrider of Ed Miliband’s Net Zero department, whose 4,500 staff you might think already had it covered. As with the other two goals, there are lots of projects keeping Nesta staff busy, and there is a bit of something for everybody:

• If you are lonely, you can join Nesta at the Heat Pump Unconference 2026 on 22 June

• If you have already read everything else on the internet, try Nesta’s hot takes on the energy market, each of which comes with a preordained solution (you guessed it – heat pumps!)

• If you simply want to cry yourself to sleep, try some Nesta-funded heat pump comedy sketches.

Putting aside all the noise, Nesta’s one substantive policy proposal in this area is to reliably change the relative price of electricity and gas faced by households, i.e., to keep turning the financial thumbscrews on the British people until heat pumps become attractive.

Based on the revealed preferences of UK householders, this would require a lot of intervention with extensive secondary consequences for government, consumers and businesses. But like the paperclip maximiser of AI lore and the Net Zero department that it seeks to influence, Nesta’s attitude to anything beyond its target appears to be: ‘Consequences be damned!’ In the context of a government instinctively sympathetic to Nesta’s dirigiste mindset and unusually vulnerable to bad ideas, some might consider this positively dangerous.

Putting Nesta to rest

Nesta, in its current avatar, exhibits an almost uncanny resonance with the current government’s appetite for regulation and the zero-sum economy that its actions serve to further entrench. It has become a kind of unofficial think tank for Britain’s brain-dead but hyperactive administrative state, a sickly British left’s answer to the US’s Abundance Liberalism.

Earlier, we proposed two tests for determining whether Nesta should continue to enjoy its unusual privileges: whether the National Lottery ticket buyers who provided Nesta’s endowment might approve of how their money was being spent, and whether governments of different political outlooks would consider Nesta’s work valuable.

Readers will make up their own minds about the first question. We think a likely response from many Lottery punters would be bafflement followed by weary resignation.

On the second, we venture that a Reform government (or even a pro-enterprise Conservative government) would find little of value in Nesta’s work and would likely find much of it squarely at odds with its goals and values. To the extent that Nesta is funded by the returns on a public asset, this is a problem.

The solution is that the Nesta Trust should be brought back properly into government control, consistent with its designation in the National Accounts, and ministers accountable to Parliament can decide what to do with its assets. Cameron’s Conservatives perversely tried to make this as difficult as possible, but the Trust’s designation as a government-controlled charity in the public sector provides the opportunity to correct the anomaly.

A Reform government might proceed as follows:

1. The new minister should dismiss the existing Nesta Trust Protector (if this government does finally appoint one) and appoint a Protector of their own choosing.

2. The new Protector should conduct a brief investigation into whether there are grounds for concern about the administration of the Nesta Trust by Nesta, including during the long period during which no Protector has been in place, and report their findings to the minister.

3. Should the Protector find grounds for concern, the minister may choose to replace Nesta as trustee of the Nesta Trust with a ministerial appointee and provide for an orderly wind-down of those parts of Nesta dependent on Trust funding.

Such action is hardly going to be top of the list of priorities for a Reform government. But apart from the practical benefit of freeing up £400 million of funds for alternative uses, Reform would be asserting a principle that ought to be uncontroversial:

That public money should, unless there are compelling countervailing reasons, be subject to government control, or there must at least be some chain of accountability to Parliament for the use of public money. The Nesta Trust should be considered a brief (in the scheme of things) and unfortunate experiment in what happens when this principle is disregarded.

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

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The roux in this multicultural slosh was politics, and nothing mixed the juices together like antisemitism. Where once ‘the socialism of fools’ forged bonds of unlikely solidarity between ethnic artisans and German clerks, today the Palestinian cause stitches together an equally awkward patchwork of metropolitan liberals and Mirpuri patriarchs, while in the youthful underbelly of America’s conservative movement, something closer to the old Viennese antisemitic coalition is taking shape. To understand these currents, consider the parallel lives of their two most successful exponents: Tucker Carlson, Fox News host between 2016 and 2023, and Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910.

Lueger, like Carlson, struck off into politics as an establishment man walking an established path. Born into a modest background, he managed to attend the prestigious Theresianium before graduating to the University of Vienna’s equally prestigious law faculty. In 1875, he was elected to the city council as a Liberal, then a byword for haute bourgeois respectability. No grubby Bohemian corporal, ‘the good Karl’ cut a patrician figure to the ‘little people’ whom his legal practice brought him into contact with — not unlike ‘Tucker’, who studiously cultivates the air of a jovial country squire. Lueger and Carlson might have easily followed the cursus honorum to respectable mediocrity on the Vienna city council or as a DC apparatchik had not ambition pulled them down a different road, and the need to secure advantage in a competitive field caused both men to dabble in the new political ideas and techniques developing on the fringes of society. This open-mindedness often bled into cynicism — Lueger first experimented with his antisemitic rabble-rousing tactics while campaigning for his patron, the Jewish lawyer Ignaz Mandl, while Carlson’s keen attentiveness to the moods of his audiences has often come at the cost of journalistic rigour.

Periods of intense social change often appear to their contemporaries as ages of reaction and their facilitators as reactionaries, because their departure from established mores usually entails a reappraisal of older notions dismissed by mainstream opinion as mere prejudice for reasons that these supposedly enlightened individuals can often no longer articulate. What is politically salient is that this intellectual ferment creates an organic symbiosis between the intellectually inquisitive and the primitively superstitious. Carlson’s worldview springs from a milieu of online intellectuals who used the vast new horizons of information that the internet opened up to interrogate beliefs dismissed by respectable liberals as ‘conspiracy theories’. Sometimes this opens up — although it does not typically lead down — productive avenues of inquiry, as when Carlson discusses such issues ripe for revision as twentieth-century American history or the ongoing war in Ukraine. Other times it leads into a more obvious cul-de-sac, as when he talks about demons.

Antisemitism, in late nineteenth century Vienna, was ripe for this kind of revaluation, as Jewish flourishing in banking and industry brought them increasingly into the public eye, whilst mass literacy made it possible to synchronise what had been similar, but localised, prejudices, like the multiple, hotly-debated accusations of ritual murder against Jewish communities on the fringes of the empire that regularly flared up in the Austrian and Hungarian press. Political antisemitism went hand in hand with a political revival of the quintessential folk belief, Christianity — hence why Lueger called his party the Christian Social Party; a label Carlson would hardly object to in describing his own politics.

Beyond bringing together the intelligentsia and the rabble, antisemitism helped forge solidarity between Vienna’s manifold ethnic groups. This aspect of Christian Social antisemitism, largely forgotten today, was obvious to Lueger’s contemporaries: we read polite society’s verdict on the Christian Socials in Arthur Schnitzler’s first novel, The Road Into the Open, in which the party’s rise is depicted as a symptom of a wider moral malaise accompanying the closure of the bourgeois age. Schnitzler makes the nature of his game clear when he introduces his metonym for the party: the paper merchant, newspaper proprietor, and city councillor Jalaudek, a name with connotations of Slavic churlishness comically obvious to his contemporaries. There was, of course, no real Jalaudek, although Lueger’s biographer Richard Geehr records a certain Councillor Bielohlawek — another conspicuously Bohemian moniker, although this official apparently prided himself on his clear, nearly perfect German pronunciation — who spoke through the mouth of Schnitzler’s antagonist when he proclaimed that ‘we Christian Socials are Germans through and through’. It was Lueger’s masterstroke to recognise that Vienna’s Czech community took little interest in nationalist identity politics and merely wanted to be accepted by mainstream German society, and that antisemitism, by rendering the antagonisms between Christians and Jews more salient than Germans and Slavs, provided a handy formula to defuse latent ethnic tension.

Schnitzler introduces another familiar element into his sketch of the Christian Socials in the form of Josef Rosner, a young man of modest means who takes a job at Jalaudek’s newspaper. Schnitzler spares no sympathy for this whippersnapper, whom he sketches in similar terms to those in which ‘principled conservatives’ today caricature their juvenile online antagonists — he even lives with his mother, although given her humble station, it is unlikely she has a basement. Young Josef is a fin-de-siècle Viennese version of a groyper. But there is something interesting here that Schnitzler neglects. Josef, unlike his boss, is a German; had he been born a few decades earlier, he would have found an outlet for his furor politicus in national liberalism, perhaps becoming a follower of the fiery Liberal deputy Josef Kopp, who, like an Austrian Pat Buchanan, scandalised his party in the 1870s with his strident Pan-German nationalism. But the electoral demographics of fin-de-siècle Vienna were no longer those of the national liberal high noon in Kopp’s day, and after Bismarck took Großdeutschland off the table, the Austro-Germans had to resign themselves to a battle to hold onto their leading role in a multicultural empire. Thus it was that not nationalism, but Christian Socialism, became Lueger’s credo.

This, then, is the essence of Carlson’s politics. The United States today hosts no less a confusion of peoples than Vienna then, something Democratic strategists long believed would open the door to a permanent blue majority. Republicans were more circumspect; it took no political genius of Lueger’s calibre to realise that many of the newcomers aspired to fit into American society no less than the Czech artisans did. Many were devout Christians; many, like Jalaudek, owned small businesses. Where the Republicans erred was in the received wisdom that these aspirations would naturally coalesce into a politics of limited government, respect for constitutional rights, and family values; in short, conservatism. In fact, as Lueger could have taught them, it takes much nastier medicine to make multiculturalism work.

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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It has been another big week in British politics. Today, we look at the team being built around Andy Burnham, Labour Party coalition-building, and where it all might lead.

This newsletter’s agenda: Andy Burnham’s soggy mess of chips and gravy (full feature).

Andy Burnham’s soggy mess of chips and gravy

Yesterday, amidst all of the inherent manoeuvring in moments such as these, Andy Burnham announced that he will move part of the No. 10 operation to Manchester. The hour of the Spud Bros is upon us. Manchester is, in fact, the city in which I grew up and retain a begrudging affinity for — more than anyone, I loathe what Crackadilly Andy has done to it in unleashing the horrors of the smash burger joint, men’s mental health, Bumble Bee Buses and all the rest on a city already predisposed towards mushy chips-and-gravy sentimentalism.

Pimlico Journal has been rather sanguine about what Burnhamism will mean both for the country and the prospects of the right in opposition. There has been much consternation that Burnham will cause a financial crisis via a Chancellor Miliband, go nuclear by forcing through electoral reform, or triggering an early general election on a polling high to damage the governing prospects of Reform. On a certain level, nuclear would be a wise strategy — if only Burnham and the Labour Party were conscious of the fact that this rebrand may temporarily change perceptions but will not meaningfully deliver the goods on the basic issues the public needs addressed. Issues of party discipline and ability to govern may well re-emerge faster than anyone currently anticipates.

Labour has temporarily fallen into line; there will be no leadership challenge from Wes Streeting (or Darren Jones with his half-hearted attempt to stick his head above the parapet), and everyone is now angling for a job in the new regime. As personnel goes, things are moving in the direction I anticipated — Burnham is taking tremendous caution not to spook the ‘Bond Vigilantes’, and has a strong incentive to choose a candidate from the right of the party for Chancellor. In his (car-crash) profile with Ailbhe Rea, when asked about as directly as he could be for the format — he refused to give any answer on either his prospects for a promotion to the Exchequer or even offer a positive word (being ‘open-minded’ regarding North Sea oil) on Miliband’s Net Stupid Zero agenda. Miliband will see the absence of a substantial promotion as a great betrayal, given his own manoeuvres from within the cabinet to assist Burnham’s coronation.

This development is naturally pleasing to the City, who were unsurprisingly concerned about the possibility of Red Ed in No. 11. But in a curious moment of solidarity with financiers, the Unions have also fallen against Miliband — some days ago, the General Secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham warned that a Miliband chancellorship would be a ‘noose around the neck’ of jobs creation. Some on the left may now clearly be looking for an off-ramp from the Net Zero strategy, but Miliband remains a powerful actor with many allies in the Labour Party and is resolute in his vision. It is yet to be seen if his fortunes reverse.

The direction of travel visible in Burnham’s most important staffing decision yet, bringing James Purnell on as chief of staff — a distinctly New Labour figure and current chief executive of Flint Global — has begun to worry the Labour left. He has also brought on as an advisor a former Bank of England official, associate of Prosper UK (a Tory-aligned think-tank) and Financial Times commentator, Andy Haldane, who is far from a socialist doctrinaire. Add to this Richard Hughes of the OBR, and Jim O’Neill, a crossbench peer and former Treasury minister under George Osborne. It is not fully clear what role they will have in drafting plans, but to the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) faction in Labour, all of this reeks of a coming redo of Blairism. The team currently being built out would suit a Streeting Exchequer very well indeed. We have just seen how a left-‘technocratic’ government interacts with a Parliamentary Labour Party that is fundamentally unserious and ideologically incoherent — many of the same individuals who opposed welfare cuts simultaneously opposed Reeves’ efforts to find other ways to raise revenues, made governing impossible, and then complained that they were ‘unheard’ by the leadership. Having thrown their tantrum and ground down the highest testosterone Prime Minister in living memory to tears, they seem on course to repeat similar fights with mushy Andy’s new team.

Read more

Without rehashing it in its entirety, the article proposed the wide-ranging centralisation and production of schemes of work and resources via the nationalisation of government-adjacent bodies like National Oak Academy. Make no mistake, this is the right type of policy prescription, and it would go a long way towards reducing workload and making it clear what should and should not be acceptable in the British classroom. The diagnosis and prescriptions of that piece worked on the assumption that Reform would not be able to give Education much attention on the grounds of limited fiscal and political bandwidth, and more comprehensive reforms could be left to, for instance, a second term.

However, it is the contention of this article that such recommendations do not go far enough. They are only palliative in nature, and don’t envision how the sector can be changed permanently. Its diagnostics are also only partially correct — while there is recognition of the personnel problem within the sector, there’s too sanguine an assessment of the threat posed by recalcitrant educators. Any efforts in education (and indeed outside of it in one crucial aspect) will be resisted by the vanguards of the lanyard class at every turn — by virtue of nothing more than Reform being, well, Reform. It is insufficient to try to minimise the backlash through soft-handed measures if backlash will occur with great strength anyway. Both political and real capital will very likely have to be spent. Therefore, we lay out a maximalist position for what a future meritocratic right-wing government could do to permanently change the sector for the better.

Removing politics from the classroom

The issue facing any long-term reform of the school system is that political bias is woven into the fabric of the education sector. Teachers, from the most junior to the most senior positions, track leftwards in ways which are highly unrepresentative of the pupils and families they ostensibly serve. This is an open secret within the profession and is only theoretically understood by those outside of it. Regrettably, both authors of this article can attest that the situation is worse than outside observers are aware.

Whilst completing a PGCE at a Russell Group university, I can recall a very senior figure in education openly comparing Michael Gove to Joseph Goebbels (and directly comparing the Conservative government’s 2013 reforms to the policies of the Nazi Party), declaring Policy Exchange a ‘far-right’ think-tank, and telling teachers they needed to ‘find ways around’ the recommendations of the government to ensure that the ‘correct’ interpretations of history were being put forward. Teachers simultaneously view left-wing bias in education as a far-right conspiracy theory, while also making it completely obvious that it exists and permeates the sector.

It is difficult to explain exactly why this happens — especially since other countries do not seem to suffer from this problem so clearly — but it should probably be attributed to:

1. The incredibly politicised trade unions which, through systems like the PGCE, covertly control recruitment to ensure ‘the right sorts’ enter the profession — a phrase which was once deployed against one of the authors, in fact!

2. The inherently self-sacrificial and ‘compassionate’ types who enter the sector here, as opposed to more small-c conservative disciplinarians common in countries in Asia and various parts of Eastern Europe.

3. The broader class dynamics which have, over time, moved middle-class professionals away from right-wing political opinions and activism.

The non-substantive statutory guidelines in place, which commit teachers by law to political non-partisanship, do little to guard against the practical reality of leftist narratives seeping or being explicitly incorporated into curricula. More problematically, the classroom exposition of teachers’ opinions. The groupthink present in the sector means that it has not been enforced outside of extreme fringe cases, and short of a vicious campaign of pressure from the Daily Mail, no teacher would seriously be reprimanded for saying, for example, that Trump should be shot.

Many people within Reform and Reform-adjacent circles have little interaction with the large swathes of the public who subscribe to a hard-left worldview. They therefore tend to underestimate the psychological fallout that a Reform victory has for this type, which will be profound. Colleagues simultaneously revile and fear, but also downplay the likelihood of a Reform government. Whilst Brexit and Trump mentally prepared some for disappointment, the particular significance of Farage, the ‘Gammon Fuhrer’ (I quote) and visceral embodiment of ‘Nasty Britain’, becoming Prime Minister, will be uniquely traumatising.

We should anticipate school staff bodies to be active centres of opposition to a Reform government committed not only to mass deportations but also deinstitutionalising DEI. Many teachers will, perhaps due to their perverse sense of anti-nationalism and personal heroism, salivate at the thought of trying to ‘save’ illegal immigrant pupils from a ‘British version of ICE’ so they can live out their fantasy that they would have ‘made a stand’ against Hitler and the Nazis.

The first step towards preventing this would, unfortunately, be the most difficult — the neutering and eventual dismantling of the Trade Unions for educators, namely the NASUWT (originally short for National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, a name no longer really used) and the National Education Union. While the NASUWT is more moderate than the NEU, both are hotbeds of left-wing activism. Routinely, one of these unions will dump gems like these into my inbox:

If you are not yet convinced that the unions ought to be first on the chopping block, the following excerpts from NASWUT General Secretary Matt Wrack’s speech at their annual conference earlier this year should suffice:

‘Turning to the United States, the Government sends masked and heavily armed paramilitary forces into cities to round up people. Regrettably, schools, school students and their teachers are on the frontlines of this.’

‘We have seen the unlawful arrest of various school-aged US citizens, the infamous arrest of a five-year-old carrying his Spiderman backpack. And, of course, we have seen the murder, on the streets of Minneapolis, of two US citizens: Alex Pretti and Renee Good.’

The NEU, on the other hand, is led by far-left activist Daniel Kebede, whose very presence at the top of a trade union is an indictment of their existence. Aside from being former Labour MP Laura Pidcock’s baby daddy, Kebede is a committed Palestine activist, former keynote speaker at the Socialist Workers’ Party conference, and was responsible for his union’s conference passing a motion of opposition to the politics of Reform UK. He was quoted directly as saying that he ‘would like to see all education workers, really, in a trade union, to ensure that we can mount an appropriate defence’.

The first step would be to amend existing union legislation to further tighten their right to strike across trusts where unions are recognised. It is important to note that not all trusts recognise a union, and there will be allies within the top brass of the MATs (Multi-Academy Trusts) who would covertly support Reform on this measure. To ultimately sever the institutional relationship teachers have with the left, a right-wing government would have to clamp down on political funding from unions towards political parties — namely the Labour Party — and order a full audit of their assets and spending, using the ongoing corruption investigation into Unison as a precedent.

Relaxed hiring in the teaching sector

A second step to curbing union power and left-wing influence in education would be to relax hiring within the teaching sector. Currently, all state schools must perform a lot of admin when hiring new employees for safeguarding reasons, something that cannot feasibly be changed lest the headline becomes ‘Farage puts children at risk’. The process is extremely laborious and, frankly, pointlessly difficult for both schools and prospective workers.

It is difficult to enter the sector from private sector employment due to the need for Qualified Teacher Status, the lack of job adverts for teaching in open forums, and the generally abysmal salary compared to most other skilled professionals. Teaching also, unless one is a highly qualified individual working for a top-tier private school, does not value experience from outside sectors such as technology, finance, law, or really anything short of being a prison warden. Hiring is extremely stagnant, and happens for three reasons:

1. Someone moved schools.

2. Someone got promoted.

3. Someone died.

This is not necessarily as true when it comes to STEM subjects, which have an ongoing teaching shortage and retention crisis. To reform hiring and reduce trade union influence, we propose the following changes:

• The phasing out of the PGCE within the first three years of government, to be replaced by a beefed-up TeachFirst programme (likely in the form of 1 or 2 months of ‘boot camp’ followed by full-time insertion into a school), as well as increased funding and flexibility for SCITT (School-Centred Initial Teacher Training) programmes led by MATs (likely, the starting salaries for SCITT would need to be brought in line with the £32,000 p.a. to incentivise recruitment).

• Legislation to allow teachers to be hired and fired with greater ease, alongside funding from the DfE to cover recruitment costs.

• Phasing out the teacher pay scales system, which prevents people from relocating jobs and taking a lower salary to do so, which — especially in the humanities — prevents senior staff from moving even if they are willing to take a pay cut.

How would these pay rises and wage liberalisations be funded? Reform could hollow out the teaching pension scheme. As it stands, based on the 2024/2025 report, the scheme brings £11.8 billion into the pot each year, and is currently liable for around £290.7 billion in England and Wales alone. Even headline cuts to this figure would pay for many of the policies outlined here. Indeed, this would cause a flight of many career teachers. But over time, freeing up the recruitment could transform teaching from a career mostly for the unambitious, into something talented people otherwise inclined towards the profession can enter and leave at various stages throughout their life, without having to make professional and personal sacrifices that simply aren’t worth it for many. This would, in turn, reduce some of the ‘groupthink’ and ‘glut’ the sector currently experiences, and ultimately put an end to the cottage industry of ideological self-selection through the PGCEs and the bunkum ‘education research’ job mill. It remains a problem that people who perhaps did not achieve high grades themselves (especially in some subjects, like Maths) are teaching the next generation. There are undoubtedly many more inspirational figures waiting in the wings.

Gove’s legacy and getting parents on side

The perversity of the right’s relationship with education is that the domain in which it has been most successful in pushing through reforms has been, in many respects, to its own detriment. The Goveite emphasis on knowledge-rich curricula, didactic teaching and school independence produced tangible improvements in educational outcomes by some metrics; England’s PISA scores, particularly in mathematics improved, alongside recorded improvements in early reading ages.

It’s worth stressing that, despite the original intense hostility to the proposed reforms back in the early 2010s, they are now largely accepted uncritically as having been beneficial, and indeed the ‘traditionalist’ pedagogy motivating them is normative within the state sector (and more likely to be attacked within private school discourse). Indeed, all drives towards greater autonomy for teachers and schools (outside of the context of conservative-inclined faith schools) benefit the left by default. The proposal for centralisation in the first Pimlico Journal article in question is sound, but doesn’t discuss how action by hostile elements can be embedded into a pooled national resource. Unfortunately, leftist teachers will continue to seek to undermine the moral legitimacy of right-wing views amongst their pupils.

Probably the longest-lasting impact of Gove’s reforms was the shift towards academisation and the initiation of free schools, which were and are independent of local authority control. The drive towards decentralisation was reflective of the Cameronite emphasis on social pluralism, in which non-governmental bodies would take on an increased load of the delivery of a variety of services. The removal of schools from Local Authorities enabled the greater exercise of ‘Blob’ power with unsurprising results.

Academies and free schools’ behavioural and educational model are influenced by the 2010s turn against ‘child-centred’ learning. Within the last five years in particular, we have seen a proliferation of Learning Trusts (essentially confederations of self-governing schools) implementing quasi-behaviourist school ethos aimed at maximising students’ academic outcomes whilst combating an emergent behavioural crisis amongst pupils — notoriously the Michaela Free School. We could also throw into this policy cocktail mix increasing interventions against parents’ ability to freely take pupils out of school during term time for holidays, as part of dirigiste directives aiming to minimise pupil absences.

The education system, as it currently stands, is in many respects Gove’s child, and one could construe the emphasis on discipline and ‘conventional teaching’ as being implicitly right-wing. Absent the increased SENDification of the sector, schooling in the 2020s is the product of a semi-successful program of ‘conservative’ initiatives, which overall produced better standards in education, notwithstanding the challenges the sector still faces. However, no one on the right would look at the current state of education and conclude that this is a space sympathetic to us. While there are various strands which people favour within the education sector which are seemingly favourable to right-wing beliefs (e.g., Catherine Birbalsingh of Michaela), most, if not all of them, intersect comfortably with the hostile consensus, the purpose of which is to create material impediments to the dissemination of right-wing ideas — Gove is, therefore, the accidental father of The Longhouse in education.

The behaviourist neo-disciplinarian agenda which Goveism begets aligns with post-liberal and social-democratic drives to restrict young people’s access to social media, for the purpose of protecting people’s ‘wellbeing’ and guarding against ‘radicalisation’. The panoptically restrictive measures imposed on students, involving the extensive regulation or ban of the use of mobile phones in schools, reflect the broader agenda of the state to limit access outside of the education system. ‘No Nonsense’ educational shifts align with a crackdown on a cohort which is characterised as a latent nucleus of extremist beliefs, simultaneously rendered depressed and anxious by the algorithms, but also inclined towards becoming neo-Nazis and/or incels.

Beyond this, the increased autonomy for schools brought by free schools and academisation allows schools to determine aspects of the curriculum independent of national guidelines. This means that in practice, disciplinarian and aesthetically traditional schools have established school curricula to the left of what is loosely prescribed by the DoE. In a previous place of work, the History curriculum taught at KS3 uncritically presented claims that the industrialisation of Britain was a product of capital directly drawn from the slave trade. What we might consider as right-wing virtues — discipline and organisational independence — in fact favour the left in current circumstances! The success of a ‘Patriotic Curriculum’ envisaged by Suella Braverman and James Orr can not depend on a superficially aligned third sector.

So, what should a comprehensively right-wing response to educational reform look like? Unfortunately, the proposed mandate for schools to fly the Union flag and place portraits of King Charles III (an avowed public supporter of ‘diversity’) in classrooms is unsatisfactory. We are concerned that institutionalisation of symbolic patriotism will do a great deal to antagonise and therefore mobilise our enemies within the sector, whilst doing little to address the medium of left-wing bias within schools.

It’s perfectly possible to imagine schools in which children are forced to engage in ritualistic displays of allegiance to the Crown, and for schools to overtly and covertly push Afrocentric historical narratives and the gender identification-based grooming of children. This situation becomes surreal when we factor in the reality that these Uyoku Dantai initiatives will occur in the context of schools where there might be literally no native British children. How does forcing children in places where they have zero interaction with organic British culture (i.e. ‘white British’ culture) help advance the interest of national self-preservation?

The danger we will find ourselves in is that left-wing teachers and school governing bodies can present themselves as underdog champions against an interventionist right-wing government attempting to ‘brainwash’ children. If we conceptualise the politics of the education system as a triadic relationship of the state, teachers/SLTs/unions, and children/parents, we want the former to be aligned with the latter against the second faction. Discussions for waging a serious cultural war in schools need to recognise this dynamic and think of more insurrectionary avenues to undermine the legitimacy of left-wing teachers. The thrust of remaking the culture of schooling must be liberation, from the stifling imposition of Woke by self-interested (in this case, literal) schoolmarms against self-discovery and excellence.

Initially, Reform should lean into anti-Goveite populism, seeking to reverse the least popular aspects of his initiatives. Specifically, punitive fines for parents taking students out of school term should be abolished for the intrusive anti-familial Wokery they are. New statutory guidelines should also seek to prevent the spread of more extreme behaviourist policies (for example, detaining students in whole-day reflection sessions for repeat equipment infringements), which are becoming increasingly common in certain learning trusts. There should also be further regulations to prevent the ‘chromification’ of school sites in which schools and learning trusts seek to aesthetically standardise and corporatise the interior of classrooms.

It should be stressed that:

1. The increased prevalence of the latter policies is the product of (left-wing) coalition agendas, which limited the number of expulsions schools could conduct. This has meant that the behavioural strategies of comprehensive schools have had to be tailored around the mitigation of the disruptive tendencies of the lowest common denominator, and has led to the general limitation of the liberties of pupils who have no need to suffer because of the imposition of violent and anti-social individuals upon everyone.

2. There is a classist bias in the introduction of disciplinarianism. Private schools have increasingly relaxed behavioural sanctions, and indeed their attendees can leverage the growing range of SEND diagnoses, safeguarding procedures and anonymous pupil reporting sites to undermine their teachers. No Etonian has spent 8 hours in a ‘reflection’ room for failing to have the appropriate equipment with them. Likewise, fee-paying parents can take their children at will out of school during the height of term time (this is such a problem that private schools frequently must justify absences to Local Educational Authorities). It is clearly the case that there is a two-tier dynamic at play in the educational sector. Attendees at globally oriented and increasingly rarefied independent schools are afforded privileges not extended to the rest of the country.

Additionally, there is new ammunition to attack the left with the rollout of internal school bans, which reflect the wider attempts of the Labour Party to restrict young people’s access to social media (including bans not only in lesson time but also during recreational hours). Coupling this with opposition to the broader policies of age-walling selected major news sites, and potentially VPN bans, presents a multipronged opportunity to present Reform as the party of young people’s civil liberties. It’s worth stressing that the stupidity of Labour on this front cannot be underestimated. I anticipate the mandating of dumb phones for under-18s, and no party on the left will be willing to challenge this because they don’t want to be aligned with ‘fascist’ algorithms.

In terms of specifically ideological challenges to the current curriculum, whilst there needs to be a policy of dictating lesson content, weaponising student voice is one effective way of deterring teacher bias. Probably the only instance of a school being investigated for partisanship was the impromptu inspection of Rye College after two teenagers recorded teachers referring to their views as ‘despicable’.

Having a national reporting system, analogous to a ‘Whisper’ type program currently used for pupil safeguarding, would be present in all schools, with reports being deemed creditworthy, resulting in an investigation, and schools required to hand over existing lesson resources. This might not actually require frequent practical investigations of schools, and the threat of anonymous reporting might be enough to have a serious deterrent effect on classroom practices.

The government should be willing to withhold funding from schools deemed to engage in partisanship and to follow up on relevant internal reforms. We should also be willing to mandate training, embedded within safeguarding protocols, informing teachers of what substantive non-partisanship looks like (e.g. eschewing celebration of multiculturalism/diversity/equity, etcetera). None of this could guarantee the end of left-wing political bias in education, but it would engender a hostile environment for the expression. An effective tool of enforcement would be no-notice inspections administered independently of Ofsted.

Reforming content within the curriculum

Reform of the ideological content of the curriculum requires revision of all statutory guidelines for different Key Stages. Currently, guidelines for History mandate the studying of chronological narratives of the history of Britain (e.g. medieval, early modern periods, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as a comparative study of a non-European ancient civilisation). Ironically, it is the ‘parochialism’ of Gove’s attempt to revive the study of specifically British national history which has resulted in the prevalence of an inverted ‘Our Island Story’, focused on national self-flagellation and sustained the disproportionate focus on social history. Indeed, much popular left-wing historiography is naturally introspective, focusing on constructing a narrative of an insularly British identity, in which modern migration is erroneously situated into a grand historical narrative of demographic flux alongside the ethnogenetic migrations which lead to the foundation of the English state.

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this article to fully detail what this will look like systematically in practice, it will at least involve some comparative study of non-European episodes of conquests and slave trading systems, including those targeting Europeans (e.g. both trans-Mediterranean, trans-Saharan and trans-Volga slave routes) as well as the Islamic occupations of Iberia and the Balkans, and the subsequent liberation wars these regions experienced. This is not to litigate any ‘historical crimes’ but to place European colonial history in the appropriate context. It should also mandate the exposure of students to a full spectrum of historiographical interpretation, which by revisionist, Whig, liberal, and even Marxist frameworks, makes the condition of the dysfunction or ‘backwardness’ of colonised peoples comprehensible to pupils. Some will criticise this for being on the Nigel Biggar liberal apologia end of the empire spectrum, but historical debates of this kind do effectively challenge narrowly anti-white and anti-British narratives. Most importantly, it will enable pupils to understand that history is indeed complicated.

Children should not be denied exposure to the reality of anti-white violence during the multicultural postwar epoch of British history. Questions of race, migration and the deterioration of our civic life must be handled maturely, and a PSHE-led conversation about the experiences of communities in Britain should not ignore the majority group. Bear in mind that young people whose early infant years overlapped with the original Rotherham revelations have little idea what the ‘grooming gangs’ — and the worst crimes of magnitude ever committed on British soil — are.

Further recommendations: Grammar Schools and Pupil Referral Units

There are more structural projects of educational reform that the right should pursue. These could involve the creation of a systematically meritocratic educational system, the abolition of fee-paying schools and comprehensives, and the lowering of the school-leaving age to at least 16 without restriction.

These are longer-term projects. They require infinitely more costing and detailed analysis, which is outside of the scope of this article — and likely needs a full white paper. However, the most meaningful changes would be the national reintroduction of Grammar Schools and the expansion of Pupil Referral Units.

Because of the need for physical sites (and goodness knows building in Britain isn’t possible without spending millions on a bat tunnel), this would, unfortunately, be rather expensive and likely reserved for a second Parliamentary term. Broadly, the conversion of existing high-achieving schools into Grammar Schools (their de facto operation due to the often astronomical house prices near them) should be incentivised, and the creation of a national, mandatory version of the 11+ exam for all Local Education Authorities to implement from a given year. A consultation or review into what shape it will take is highly recommended, as some forms of the exam survive in areas like Lincolnshire and Kent, although they are administered differently and take different forms. Above all, it should be a more ‘holistic’ assessment than its namesake, chiefly to prevent the grammar schools from becoming battery farms for the tiger-parented who will learn the exams by rote, or rich parents paying to brute-force their child’s way into the school.

The Pupil Referral Units (PRUs), currently, are holding cells for people deemed too antisocial to be in mainstream education or in the outside world during school hours. Largely, they do not reform pupils, but they do move them away from people who actually want to do work and succeed. They are a good idea but need to be more prominent — at least one in each local area, if not more, staffed by people who will be offered a much higher salary and a bonus if they come from the armed forces/prison/immigration control sectors. The Borstal was, at the very least, a deterrent, but the current PRUs, to my knowledge, do little to discipline students. It is one of the ghastly failures of the current system that the majority of basically law-abiding children are subjected to the need to police the lowest common denominator and keep them, at all costs, within mainstream education to everyone else’s detriment.

Each PRU would need to be run, effectively, like Michaela School — without the need for performances of patriotism. While there are substantial criticisms of the model to be made, you cannot deny that it does keep a population at high risk of crime and violence in the area in which Michaela is situated on the straight and narrow. It clearly has some degree of rehabilitative effect, which is infinitely more socially beneficial than keeping problematic individuals together for 2 years to make one another worse, then released back into the wild. Once the average school has removed its worst students and the best students are all put in an environment where they are the focus, we can eliminate a high degree of social dysfunction from one group and ensure the best possible outcomes for the other.

Together, these reforms would ensure a functional and ideologically compliant education system for decades to come.

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

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Yet in SW1, the same old four or five think-tanks of the centre-right are jostling for influence over the policies of that future right-wing Government. In fact, they boast of their influence over previous governments to add credibility to the claim that they should be involved in the next. It’s telling that Policy Exchange is proud of the inclusion of its policy recommendations in the 2024 manifestos of the Tories, Labour, and the Lib Dems.

The ‘think-tank’ is an institution that comes into its own at the particular historical moment of the Thatcherite (and proto-Thatcherite) bid to separate the market function from political control. Whatever one’s interpretation of the economic legacy of such reforms in themselves might be, the ‘depoliticisation’ and separation of policymaking outside of a systematic political platform was an expediency of that period.

Events hosted by one of these think-tanks are the very essence of Westminster institutionalism; an MP and a Senior Fellow will introduce a glossy new report to an audience of ex-Tory MPs, journalists and staffers. Speeches will include the necessary buzzwords about the size of the state, judicial overreach, the speaker’s barely concealed fetish for a strict older woman, or, my favourite, ‘institutional sclerosis’ and are followed by clapping and house wine. The rhetoric often sounds radical, but the culture is not. Considering the ‘buyers’ of the product here are, without any offence intended, of that portly portion of a generation whose moment of glory was the popping of champagne bottles following Thatcher’s Big Bang, it should be of little surprise that the offerings share an approach that also belongs in 1983.

The notion that policies can be generated in a vacuum, from which ministers and parties can pick from a smorgasbord platter, has in recent years produced incoherent politics — as well as straightforwardly bad policy. Still, the demands on MPs’ time, fixing potholes and whatnot, mean that these institutions will play some role in defining the policies of the future; it is only fair that we reflect on the fruits of their involvement in the past.

In 2022, for instance, the then Chief Executive of Legatum Institute co-authored a report criticising the Rwanda policy and calling for asylum seekers to be granted the right to work after six months. Positions such as these are presumably the reason for their successful rebrand as the Prosperity Institute — now probably the most influential think-tank on the British right, especially with Reform.

A quick skim of Policy Exchange’s website shows their proud involvement in creating Police and Crime Commissioners, implementing Net Zero, and the adoption of a sugar tax. These were inarguably big state, expensive proposals by politicians who thought little of the consequences, and left the heavy lifting to the think-tank to find the correct market-friendly Pigouvian language to legitimise it.

The Centre for Social Justice, renowned for the simplification of the benefits system to Universal Credit, has a spending tilt with reports on Free School Meals, an entire report dedicated to ethnicity and disadvantage, and has previously called for an expansion of the ‘Race Disparity Unit’.

Only the Centre for Policy Studies was actually ahead of the curve on the damaging impact of Net Zero, but even their record is not perfect. In 2022, they published the Levelling Up and Zeroing In report, taking at least a hearty gulp of the Net Stupid Zero Kool-Aid.

The Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute are still in the gloom due to their association with Liz Truss’ premiership, and it is clear from our seventy-year-high tax burden that their message of low tax, low regulation has sadly failed to cut through. The fatal impulse to generate a ‘dash for growth’ has possessed everyone from the right-wing think-tanker to the bruisers on X. We should remember that the incoherent combination of radical tax-slashing, in combination with proposals for a ‘workers’ rights bonfire’, open borders with India in exchange for minute reductions in tariffs, and the Truss government also deciding to subsidise household energy costs without cuts elsewhere — did produce a kind of ‘economic jet fuel’, assuming that the aeroplane in question was headed for the World Trade Center. Ultimately a failure of the politicians, yes, but this episode more than any other goes to show that the relationship of the policy infrastructure to political leadership needs a rethink, and far less sloganeering.

There are serious, thinking people at all of the above institutions, and most of the think-tanks in question have indeed done work of great value. Prosperity, in particular, has some very high-calibre individuals. Pimlico Journal is loath to admit that Fraser Nelson has ever been right about anything, but he was stating fact when he wrote that think-tanks will be essential to solving the problems this country is facing. But politicians should remember they are merely tools that exist within the closed Westminster circuit. They are limited by the paradigm of the day, the directions of their board and (most of them) by their charitable status which nominally means they can’t be political. A stark contrast to the American think-tank industrial complex, which is far more partisan and has far deeper pockets. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, is renowned for its revolving-door relationship with the Republican administration, the architects of Project 2025.

Reform UK is getting around this by bringing much of their thinking in-house and cherry-picking the brightest thinking talent to bring within their ranks: Amar Johal and James Graham, both formerly of the Prosperity Institute, Sam Ashworth-Hayes of The Telegraph, and, most recently, Karl Williams of the CPS. One charge levelled against Reform has been its lack of deep policy thinking. If there was truth in this, they are getting around it by bringing some of the best policy brains into their ranks — a mature approach that breaks with the stale orthodoxy of SW1.

The future holds even more exciting opportunities. Away from the ivory tower, a fragmenting media ecosystem creates new possibilities for experts to find the audience and necessary remuneration in actually shaping the political platform that will carry forward their technical aspirations. This free marketplace of ideas will enable the best to have a real opportunity to mould the future of the country.

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

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The clerics, jurists, and generals who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran form precisely such a cohesive administrative caste. They have a clear, actionable concept of the national interest, by which measure the Memorandum of Understanding signed with the American President on Wednesday — should it hold with present hitches yet to be smoothed out — represents a dearly won yet unambiguous victory. Has the United States therefore lost? To establish such an assertion as fact, it would have to be shown that the will of America’s equivalent class was thwarted. To do so would involve identifying this class, determining its preferences, and then seeing whether the Islamabad agreement had validated them.

This is impossible. The United States is not — at least not in their current form — a modern nation-state in anything but juristic pretence. They are more akin to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; a tangle of limbs held together by ancient rules and procedures that are mutually respected only insofar as they prevent any one part from enforcing its authority over the other. America’s Congress, sloshing with money from the Gulf, Israel, China, and even Iran, is no more the locus of a unitary national will than the Polish Sejm was under the szlachta’s Golden Liberty. America has no Whitehall; its national security bureaucracy is notoriously fragmented and internally rivalrous. America is not a country, but the hub of a global political and economic order, and that order’s flourishing — perhaps even its existence — depends on maintaining free passage through the Strait of Hormuz in the face of mounting tensions between two regional opponents. The question facing America before February 28th was: would the American state discover within itself a unitary will that could impose a solution to this problem against its own centrifugal impulses?

The one semblance of a unitary will in the American state is the institution of the presidency. The current holder of that office enjoys the backing of a popular movement — MAGA — with a clear and comprehensive hierarchy of values, including precise instructions for American policy towards Iran. Across three election cycles, Trump took the stump against ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East that sapped American blood and treasure and prevented it from devoting its energies to the challenge presented by a newly puissant China. To do this, it needed to lay down the law to an Israeli government with a sophisticated and entrenched lobbying operation in Washington that sought to divert America’s military resources towards imposing its own settlement on the region, with little regard for America’s global interests.

During last year’s Twelve-Day War against Iran, Trump defied this brinkmanship and forced a ceasefire on the reluctant Israelis. Many have correctly argued that the domestic costs of the most recent entanglement are irrecoverable. But the means by which Netanyahu persuaded Trump to change course on February 28th can only be left to speculation — the most important question in evaluating whether President Trump ‘won’ or ‘lost’ this war is whether, given the levers of influence at Israel’s disposal in Washington, it really ever could have been averted. After the American-Israeli coup de main in early March failed to shatter the Iranian regime, the President wisely opted to cut his losses and initiated a slow process of bellicose negotiations reminiscent of the 18th-century cabinet wars that Clausewitz coined his classic formula to describe.

Trump now has a deal that brings Iran in from the cold and makes its reconstruction dependent on funding allocated by Washington (and presumably to be put up by the Gulf states. It cannot be rejected by Congress; the consequence is that the Iranians would close the Strait again, plunging the world into economic crisis and causing not a few representatives and senators to lose office. It is a deal that truly reflects the objective balance of power as revealed through battlefield tâtonnement, and for this reason is infinitely more durable than Obama’s JCPOA, that airy diplomatic sonnet of nice, aspirational phrases grounded on no more stable reality than the temporary distribution of lobbying power within Washington. Birthed in court intrigues, the JCPOA was flimsier than the little plastic cards that hung from the lanyards of the Foggy Bottom boys and girls who spun and briefed for it. Its fatal flaw was that the Israelis and their allies in Washington could simply bypass it and try to impose their own solution through armed suasion. As long as this option remained on the table, the necessary condition for the Pacific pivot, namely the pacification of the Middle East via the diplomatic normalisation of the Islamic Republic, could never have been achieved.

Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding removes this option by de facto accepting tactical defeat in a war in which American arms have otherwise acquitted themselves honourably, and which, in confirming that the current state of military technology favours the defender, has positive repercussions for America’s force projection in crucial imperial border regions like Taiwan. If a deal can be finalised, it will be an unmitigated strategic triumph for the President, MAGA, and, ultimately, for America.

And what of the Israeli veto? The crucial test is still Lebanon, and the fact that the Islamabad Memorandum — signed over Israel’s head — imposes a ceasefire on this country’s territory is a signal that Washington is finally willing to rein in its obstreperous ally. The question now becomes one of what pressure is Trump willing to impose, versus what is necessary to impose on Israel to get an agreement based on the MoU over the line. Should Trump’s will prevail, ‘The Lobby’ once described by Mearsheimer will never again have the untrammelled access to direct American power it once enjoyed. Israel’s star has fallen in Washington in the eleven years since the JCPOA; the whole distasteful business in Gaza, the Epstein disclosures, and the current war have soured the popular mood and elite opinion among Republicans and Democrats alike on Netanyahu’s government. For the first time in decades, the political capital exists for the President (regardless of his personal disposition towards the State of Israel) to renegotiate a one-sided American-Israeli relationship that has prevented rapprochement with an Iran whose interests do not meaningfully collide with those of the popular movement that brought him to power. It is a cliché that only Nixon could go to China; by the same currency, it is only Trump who can go to Tehran.

Unipolarity, American realists have long argued, is an unsustainable position. The imperial centre invariably finds itself riven by the demands of competing players within the system, each jostling for the centre’s support against its rivals; every local conflict within this monistic world order is thus elevated to a systemic crisis commanding the centre’s attention, while rising powers, unburdened by the costs of policing the globe, are able to devote their resources more discriminatingly towards their own development. This hydraulic scheme is too neat to tell the full story — America’s relative decline vis-à-vis China may be an inevitable consequence of the structural forces inherent to the international system. Still, it has been accelerated by specific policy decisions made in Washington, and there is time to slacken the tempo to something more manageable.

The ‘American Empire’ has arrived at a crossroads where, with the Chinese threat on the horizon and its own military-industrial base atrophying, the costs of upholding the system are too heavy to bear without greater contributions by allies, both current and potential. As Britain’s Foreign Office mandarins found themselves doing during their own midcentury imperial handover, America must align itself with those local forces able and willing to guarantee the long-term stability of the system. But who is to be America’s partner in this dance? The lobbying roulette in Washington provides little useful guide; this can only be ascertained by heading onto the floor and dancing the delicate two-step of war and diplomacy. Britain delegated the management of its former empire to old antagonists who had proved themselves in anti-colonial struggle — Smuts, Nehru, and Lee Kuan Yew; not to speak of our own indispensable Levantine ally during our own long-ago Suez, a mere decade on from the bombing of the King David Hotel. Trump has already done something similar in Venezuela; if he can repeat the trick with Iran, history will not begrudge him the means of having done so.

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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It’s been a long night at the end of a long five weeks, but Andy Burnham has emerged triumphant as Member of Parliament for Makerfield and, imminently, the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. We’ll take a look at what this defeat means for Reform and Restore, and whether news from Scotland bodes well for the Tory Party elsewhere.

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