Often, these attempts leave much to be desired. Commentators will often seek to split hairs, and groups that are racially identical or near enough are often assigned wildly different characteristics based upon the political expediencies of the person making the point. Now, with many of these groups to be found in large numbers in Britain, it is worth reassessing our understanding of their similarities and differences and updating our assumptions. The aim of this article is not to suggest any particular action, nor to paint any ethnic or religious group as universally problematic — it is to promote a clearer understanding of how we should understand different communities and how they relate to the country as a whole, based in part on my own experiences amongst South Asians in Britain.

At least until very recently, no two groups of South Asians in Britain were defined by more divergent perceptions — especially on the right — than Sikhs and Mirpuris. Whilst the former has often been valorised, especially in the context of ostensibly shared concerns over Islam (an idea promoted by, of all people, Tommy Robinson), the latter has correctly been identified as a particularly dysfunctional group.

The term Mirpuri is a demonym — it does not describe a specific race, ethnicity or caste. Mirpuris, who make up around three-quarters of Pakistanis in Britain, are ethnic Punjabis found in the border town of Mirpur (which is merely several miles outside of the Punjab and inside the territory of Azad Kashmir) and its surrounding regions. Most modern-day Mirpuris migrated to the region in the eighteenth century. It is correct to note that Mirpuris are unusually clannish, that they have high rates of cousin marriage, that they have lower educational attainment and employment rates, and that they were involved in the grooming of English children. However, this does not dissolve the responsibility of anthropologists to be thorough in their analysis. Those hailing from the town of Mirpur are predominantly from two tribal origins — primarily the Jatts (also spelt ‘Jat’ and ‘Jaat’), and secondarily the Rajputs. Both groups were historically classified as ‘martial races’ by the British, connoting physical strength and intellectual weakness, and as a result were heavily recruited into what was then the British Indian Army. Much as this classification may have been crude and unscientific, the fact that generalised perceptions of these groups have remained stable over time should be noted.

What is interesting (and potentially misleading) is the insistence on separating the Mirpuri from his cousins across the broader Punjab — whether on the Pakistani side of the border or the Indian. Sikhs provide an excellent case study here. Seventy per cent of Sikhs are Jatts, and Mirpur was home to ten thousand Sikhs before independence. It is also worth noting that Mirpur, or the wider region of Azad Kashmir, is not underdeveloped by Pakistani standards — it in fact scores second of all Pakistani provinces by HDI. If you were to perform a DNA test on a Jatt Sikh and a Mirpuri Muslim, you would find no genetic difference. The two groups have no linguistic differences either — both speak Punjabi and can communicate without the need for a subcontinental lingua franca such as Urdu or Hindi. In fact, Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born a mere 250 kilometres from Mirpur, in a time when the Jatts were still more broadly distributed across the Punjab. If the Guru were resurrected from the dead, he would be able to order a meal from the markets of Mirpur with ease. Therefore, we must ask, what is the meaningful difference between a Mirpuri and a Sikh?

The historic answer to this question has been that Sikhs and Mirpuris are divided by different perceptions of and relationships to Britain, with Sikhs commonly understood to feel great love for and connection to their host country (often thought to be a result of the close military relationship between the British and Sikh soldiers) and to have ‘integrated’ well into British life where Mirpuris have not.

The murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Singh Digwa, a Sikh — utilising a religiously mandated blade, no less — has shone a light on the facility of this analysis. The attempt by Digwa and his brother to abuse the accusation of racism to obscure their crimes is eerily reminiscent of similar attempts by grooming gang perpetrators across the country. Equally, the behaviour of Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, in taking the blade back to the family home to hide evidence, and of his father in physically detaining a wounded Nowak until the police arrived, rhymes with these past atrocities. This kind of familial loyalty was exactly the basis on which the grooming gangs operated, with cousins, siblings, and parents of the perpetrators either looking away, making excuses, or actively participating in the crimes against victims from outside of their community. A member of an inwardly-focused clan will always have a commitment and an incentive to protect their own at the expense of outsiders.

It is also clear that ‘integration’, or what we often perceive to be ‘integration’, by members of these clan structures can still prove inadequate to dissuade this kind of behaviour. Digwa’s family moved to the United Kingdom in the 1940s. His father was born in Southampton and worked a white-collar office job. His brother worked for Starling Bank, and Digwa himself worked at an accountancy firm. These were not members of a segregated underclass, understandably alienated from a society of which they were not part. Yet involvement in professional, middle-class society did not translate to a watering down of previously held values and longstanding behaviours.

This same dynamic can be seen at the political level, with the involvement of Mirpuris in the electoral system in places such as Bradford or Birmingham. These communities are highly politically active and organised, both at the council and parliamentary levels. Historically, these groups operated within and through the Labour Party, which would typically nominate a man with strong baradari (clan) connections who would entreat local clan leaders to arrange several thousand votes by order for the candidate. Clan leaders are able to deliver votes simply by calling upon the heads of families (normally the oldest male), who control the support of all their relatives. This process is made even easier by the postal vote system, as it allows for non-English speakers (mainly women and the elderly) to participate without difficulty. All in all, a Labour candidate could, in times gone by, secure the support of an entire ward with no more than a handful of meetings and phone calls. Since the outbreak of war in Gaza, we have seen a number of independent candidates begin to tear away this support, but for all the pretence of someone like Akhmed Yakoob towards ‘ending baradari politics’, the underlying political methodology remains the same, even as the beneficiaries change. Political engagement is often listed as a key signifier of ‘integration’, yet these practices show not only that it is a poor indicator thereof, but that it can, in many cases, provide a platform for imported patterns of social organisation to reinforce themselves.

The right often desires a favourable ‘model minority’ group which can be pointed to to deflect accusations of racism. This is the fundamental reason for the constant references to the services of Sikhs to the British state. The most common example of this is the notion that Sikhs serve in the British armed forces at unusually high rates. Yet, across all three service branches, there are only 220 Sikhs in employment (0.16% of the military compared to 0.8% of the population) — in contrast to 1500 Hindus (1.1% and 1.6%) and 450 Muslims (0.33% and 6%). All three groups are underrepresented, with Muslims by far the most so, but Hindus join the military at nearly 3.5 times the rate of Sikhs. It may be suggested that it is the historic service of the Sikhs, especially in the Second World War, that justifies this outsized respect. Yet, again, there were 649,900 Hindu soldiers in the British Indian army in 1945, and 447,580 Muslims, compared to only 94,270 Sikhs. As in many other cases, the narrative of the model minority is more political expediency than based on historical fact.

As part of this desire to create an ideal minority, the British government has historically engaged in rank favouritism towards Sikhs. The Kirpan is, by all means, a deadly weapon, and is actually carried explicitly with the intent of use — the religious basis on which a Sikh carries his Kirpan is that the Guru Gobind Singh ordered his followers to carry a knife in order to fight injustice. We have heard from some politically disingenuous individuals that the murder weapon in the Digwa case was not a Kirpan, but instead a different weapon. This is not true. A Kirpan is any blade that a Sikh carries in order to fulfil the ‘5 Ks’. The Nihang order that Digwa belonged to actually issue larger blades. The Pesh-Kabz, a 21cm armour-piercing Indo-Persian dagger used by Digwa, is lawful for a Sikh to carry in the UK, and it is not uncommon for Sikhs of some orders whether here or in the Punjab to do so. The gurus of the Sikhs carried the exact same knife. The left can usually be relied upon to grant get-out-of-jail-free cards whenever possible, but the complicity of the right in this case is unique. It was two Conservative governments — first in 1988, and again in 2019 — that introduced religious exemptions to knife bans for Sikhs. Would the same people ever be okay with carving out an exception to the ban on polygamy for Muslims, and if not, what is the difference?

Ironically, this rose-tinted lens seems rather one-directional. The Sikh view of Britain, contrary to popular assumptions, has always been less than ideal. Longstanding Sikh friends present to me a dim view of the 1919 Amritsar massacre, an issue which retains enough emotional strength that it inspired a Sikh militant, Jaswant Singh Chail, to take a crossbow to Windsor Castle on Christmas Day 2021 in an attempt to murder Queen Elizabeth II. Many Sikhs view the British as being responsible for the defeat of their empire in India and the end of Sikh political independence. Objectively, this is true — the British annexed the Sikh Empire following the Anglo-Sikh War of 1849. Even now, the Sikh daily prayer includes the recitation ‘Raj Karega Khalsa’ (‘The Khalsa shall rule’) in reference to this defeat and its ostensibly inevitable reversal. The perceived betrayal of partition provides further fodder for resentment, with both Muslims and Hindus given states of their own whilst Sikhs were forced into minority status within the new India. Given all of this, it should not be surprising to find that Sikhs tend to lionise their own fighters who made significant contributions to opposing British rule in the subcontinent — there is a public photo of the Mayor of Derby, Ajit Singh Atwal, holding an assault rifle whilst posing in front of a portrait of Bhagat Singh (who was hung for killing a British soldier and bombing the Delhi assembly in 1929).

Britain is not the only country to have had serious issues stem from Sikh socio-political resentments. Canada has a more significant Sikh population, and has been forced to manage both the importation of foreign political disputes alongside the related phenomena of extremist organisations and organised crime for decades now. Individuals formerly involved in or with family links to the Sikh separatist Khalistan independence movements moved in some numbers to Canada in the years following Operation Blue Star and the high mark of insurgency during the 1980s and early 1990s. This was facilitated by Canadian family reunification policies in the 1976 Immigration Act. For it, Canada received its worst terror attack in the country’s history and the second-worst act of aviation terrorism after 9/11. In 1985, the Sikh militants from the Khalistani group Babbar Khalsa killed 329 people, mostly Canadians, in the Air India Flight 182 bombing. Canada has since had to disband branches of the International Sikh Youth Federation, which had links to terrorist activity.

Most Khalistan advocacy in Canada has not been terror-related, but it remains the case that this is a persistent sore for the state to manage. There is significant overlap with Punjabi-led organised crime in fundraising (via the drugs trade) for Khalistani militants. There are substantive allegations that the Indian state has also utilised criminal gangs inside Canada to bludgeon Khalistani activism — notably with the 2023 assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an alleged militant and Canadian citizen, possibly by another South Asian group, the Bishnoi Gang. Even before Justin Trudeau decided to open Canada’s borders, the country had already become a field for intra-South Asian ethnic conflict.

Dislike of the English is equally a phenomenon which, unfortunately, crosses religious lines within South Asian communities, often out of the belief that their group was more hard done by than others either during partition or under colonial rule, or, for the more ecumenical among them, due to the conviction that the British created divisions within the subcontinent through their ‘divide and rule’ approach. These beliefs can be a unifying factor for South Asians of different beliefs and ethnicities. The ringleader of the largest Mirpuri grooming gang ever convicted, in Huddersfield, was a Sikh by the name of Amere Singh Dhaliwal. Again, this demonstrates the challenge of separating the two groups, but our focus must be broader still than this. Many Pakistanis — and many Brits, seeking to retreat from the discomfort of criticising an entire country or culture — eagerly claim that it is solely Mirpuris who demonstrate problematic tendencies, and in particular that the grooming gangs were an entirely Mirpuri phenomenon (even if cross-religious within that community). This claim does not stand up to scrutiny — the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, Shabir Ahmed, was from the town of Gujrat in Pakistani Punjab. The Telford grooming gang was run by Anjum and Akhtar Dogar — ‘Dogar’ being a solely Punjabi caste, not found anywhere in Kashmir.

A less ambitious claim is that it is simply the broader rural regions of Northeast Pakistan that produce dysfunctional or criminal cultures, and that those from the upper-middle-class urban centres are less inherently problematic. One of the cities often mentioned in these positive tones is Lahore. It is worth noting that Lahore was the site of blood-curdling violence during partition, and was the site of mass sexual violence against women in particular. In fact, many multi-century-old brothels operate in the city to this day, with little to no supervision over the age of the girls within. A Lahori couple, Ilyas and Tallat Ashar, were found guilty of trafficking a ten-year-old girl into the UK and repeatedly raping her in 2013. Obviously, we cannot say that all Punjabis are guilty of these crimes, but this does constitute evidence that barbaric attitudes towards women are to be found amongst the British Asian population as a whole, including non-Mirpuri urban Pakistanis. One of Britain’s most prominent Asian rappers and pimps, Frenzo Harami, happens to be of Punjabi extraction — he released a song called ‘Chaabian Boyz’ which featured the lyrics ‘I got 20 white girls… laying on their backs for P’. Harami’s prostitution ring operated not just across Northern England, but as far south as London.

Further evidence of Pakistanis from what would be upper-middle-class circles in their home country behaving inappropriately would be Naheed Ejaz, the Labour Mayor of Bracknell Forest, who helped her 41-year-old son hide evidence relating to his rape of a 15-year-old girl. Ejaz hails from Lahore, and is the epitome of a ‘sophisticated’ Pakistani, having graduated from the country’s oldest university, the University of Punjab, Lahore, and subsequently receiving a Master’s from the University of Sargodha in 1983 — an impressive achievement given that only 1.2% of Pakistani women were in higher education in 1980. Even amongst what we would imagine to be the country’s liberal elite, shocking examples of moral corruption abound. If the number of people from this social class immigrating to Britain were higher, it is not implausible that we could see similar kinds of semi-organised criminality among them as we see amongst their lower-class cousins.

Of all South Asian groups in Britain, Hindus are probably the least physically antagonistic and violent. This does not mean that they are exempt from all forms of antisocial behaviour — especially the practice of in-group preference. A significant number of Hindus — at least pre-Boriswave — in the United Kingdom came proximally from East Africa, and have a strong middle class background. This group did well for themselves in Africa, and have continued to do well for themselves in Britain. This may well be a laudable trait — but it has in this country, just as it has in Canada and elsewhere, created a very effective lobby group for India itself. From Parliament to private business, we see Indians promoting the interests of their mother country and its descendants wherever possible. The phenomenon of Indianisation in companies following the appointment of Indian CEOs or managers is well documented, with some companies (including Apple) even witnessing discrimination on the basis of caste. As Indians have become a larger part of the Conservative Party coalition, many Conservative MPs have made their own gestures of solidarity with the Indian state.

This is not a crackpot conspiracy theory, in 2015, the general secretary of India’s ruling party was Ram Madhav, who said:

‘They can be India’s voice even while being loyal citizens in those countries. That is the long-term goal behind the diaspora diplomacy. It is like the way the Jewish community looks out for Israel’s interests in the United States.’

Also in 2015, Modi urged the diaspora to act as an ‘extension of foreign policy’. This seems to have been a multi-decade policy with broad political consensus, as in 2003, Yashwant Sinha, the External Affairs Minister of the then ruling Congress Party, said:

‘People of Indian origin are extremely important sources of support for the Indian government in the execution of it’s policies through the influence and respect they command in the countries in which they live.’

Lower down the economic scale, a visit to any KFC, McDonald’s, Greggs, supermarket, and even many pubs will show you that there is a hiring preference in favour of Indians. Whenever an Indian is given the ability to make a hiring decision, it typically results in them hiring another Indian, and often one of the same caste. There is recent statistical evidence which shows that since 2020, there have been 27 non-EU young workers hired for every one young British worker that has been hired. Anecdotally, one will hear reports from current students or recent graduates seeking part-time employment which suggest it is almost impossible to find given the degree of competition from recent immigrants, especially Indians, who are willing to work part-time and have no intention of moving on given their limited employment prospects. This phenomenon mirrors similar processes by which Indians have come to dominate certain sectors elsewhere, notably the Patel Motel Cartel.

It is worth noting that amongst all subcontinental groups, the Hindus have the strongest affinity to caste by far. There is a clear and explicit mandate for this in Hindu religious scriptures, with Manusmriti 4:135 saying: ‘Let him not associate closely with outcastes, chandalas, or those excluded from society.’ There are further passages such as Manusmriti 1:91 which state that: ‘The duty of a Shudra [the lowest caste] is to serve the other varnas faithfully.’ It might surprise those not from the subcontinent that, even here in the UK, there are Indian organisations that have caste-based membership — for example, there are numerous Brahmin-only societies. As there are significantly more educated Indians than Pakistanis, an Indian-only organisation that aims to protect the interests of the Indian community is far more detrimental to the middle-class, white-collar Brit than a Pakistani mosque in Bradford. Indians are to the middle classes what Pakistanis are to the working classes. We should therefore ask the question, if there is a group that aims to promote its interests over others, can we really say that it has integrated — merely because they wear a suit?

It is correct to say that organised street violence is rarer amongst most Hindus in Britain. However, recent immigrants from Gujarat are much more working class and, for lack of a better word, rougher. We have seen the fruits of this with the Leicester riots in 2022, where both the Indian and Pakistani communities engaged in rioting and clashes. The recent arrivals from India did not hesitate in using street power, and in many cases dominated the local areas with proactive demonstrations – this is not unusual to South Asia, where lower-class Hindus have often engaged in violent dissent – the Gujarat riots of 2002, in which then Chief Minister and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi was heavily implicated, killed over 2000 Muslims. Selective immigration has meant that British Indians are generally peaceful and middle-class: India as a whole, unsurprisingly, is not quite so. With continued lower-class immigration from India, we may see more of the kind of disorder normally carried out by poorer communities.

This piece has touched on various misconceptions regarding South Asians in Britain. What unites all of these errors is the attempt to draw distinctions where none really exist. Most of these communities have common origins, and therefore exhibit common problems, similarly strong in-group preference, and equally hostile attitudes towards Britain and its indigenous population. Where differences seem to appear, they are sometimes mirages, or are artefacts of selective migration pressures which no longer apply, especially with post-COVID flows. Whilst one can often fail in one’s analysis by refusing to recognise distinctions between populations, the reverse can confuse the picture just as much. This is especially true when political incentives, including on the right, create the desire to shift blame or suspicion entirely onto one specific part of a broader community.

Britain faces challenges across the breadth of the South Asian community which must be addressed, and — sometimes despite appearances — integration has largely failed across the board. That problem is not just a problem of Mirpuris, or Muslims, or Pakistanis: it is the expected consequence of mass migration from a subcontinent where deeply entrenched ways of life have persisted for thousands of years. We should not expect a few decades of cohabitation to change what hundreds of years of cultural, commercial, and political interaction could not.

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

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On Tuesday, following the murder of Henry Nowak, Kemi Badenoch gave a speech at the Institute for Government announcing her plan to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), the statutory requirement on public bodies to consider equality when making decisions. The PSED, she argued, had become the legal foundation for the identity politics and DEI bureaucracy that she believes contributed to the police response on the night of Nowak’s murder. The move was a deliberate attempt to pitch the Conservatives as the ‘adults in the room’, with well-thought-out policies rather than policies based on knee-jerk reactions and political point-scoring.

Is this actually a sincere change in direction? Sadly not. Whilst preaching this change, and highlighting her own historic opposition to DEI, it appears the Conservative Party itself is at this moment still actively involved in a number of DEI initiatives.

One such initiative the Conservative Party supports is a set of exclusive ‘diversity’ internships at CCHQ. These internships are noted in the Patchwork Foundation’s annual report as ‘diversity’, with the charity itself stating that its mission is to empower young people from ‘disadvantaged and minority communities’ in British democracy and civic society.

The Conservative Party remains officially partnered with the Patchwork Foundation, and the Party’s own website is currently advertising the 2026 summer internship, which starts in late June, with the page boasting: ‘Working together with the Patchwork Foundation, we’ll help you discover the diversity of modern politics.’ (For any plucky ‘diverse’ Conservative-supporting Pimlico Journal readers, we regret to inform you that applications for this internship have already closed.)

The CCHQ summer internship is a clear expression of the DEI frameworks that Kemi Badenoch was so passionately attacking this week. The placement offers a six-week paid position at CCHQ for young people who are at least partially selected on unspecified diversity criteria. This internship is run in collaboration with the Patchwork Foundation, which again describes itself on the Conservative Party website as a charity working to ‘promote and encourage the positive integration of disadvantaged minority communities into British democracy and civil society’.

These internships have been called out in the past for the DEI agenda they promote, especially thanks to their connection to the Patchwork Foundation. The Telegraph revealed that in 2021 and 2022, the Patchwork Foundation development sessions held for interns at CCHQ included ‘privilege walks’, in which participants stepped forward in response to questions about their race, gender, sexuality, and disability, with whoever had stepped furthest declared the most privileged, all of which took place outside the Margaret Thatcher boardroom of the head office.

The Conservative Party’s position at the time was that these sessions were ‘run solely by the Patchwork Foundation and not influenced by CCHQ’, though they were held on Conservative Party premises, during a Conservative Party internship, for Conservative Party interns. While the privilege walks were dropped after the story became public, the Conservative Party has retained a close connection with the Patchwork Foundation since, and as we have shown, the Patchwork Foundation remains involved in selecting individuals for their summer internships.

Conservative Party politicians have been very vocal in their support for this internship scheme, with Lord Darren Mott (the former CEO of the Conservative Party and current Conservative peer) speaking about the importance of the internship in the Lords. Pimlico Journal readers will hardly miss just how perverse it is for such a person to be advocating for such a course action. Lord Mott, who is conspicuously ‘male, pale, and stale’, is now looking to find ways to deny the opportunities that he previously benefitted from to the ‘privileged’ young white men of 2026.

Over the week, Nick Timothy, the Shadow Justice Secretary, did admit that the Conservative Party had been influenced by the DEI agenda in the past. He points to three factors in explaining why this had happened:

1. Conservatives were intellectually slow to understand woke ideologies.

2. Some in the Conservative Party are sympathetic with woke ideologies.

3. Those who did oppose the ideologies faced an uncooperative government bureaucracy.

There is every reason to believe that Timothy’s unhappiness with the Conservative Party’s support for DEI agenda is sincere, and the factors he gives to explain why the Party had been influenced by it in the past are reasonable enough — although we might add that to understand all is not to forgive all. And yet, while he might be able to explain their many failures over the course of their their fourteen years in power, Timothy remains unable to explain the Conservative Party’s continued connection to the Patchwork Foundation to this very day, even after their landslide defeat in July 2024 and after Kemi Badenoch won the Conservative leadership election in November 2024.

The relationship goes beyond the internship scheme, with the Conservative Party currently involved in the ‘Patchwork Masterclass Programme’. This is a ten-month programme granting young people, selected on diversity criteria, private access to senior political figures, with past sessions held at 10 Downing Street, Parliament, and CCHQ itself.

Kevin Hollinrake, the current Conservative Party Chairman who wrote only this week on X about the need to ‘defeat identity politics’, hosted one such Masterclass at CCHQ for Patchwork cohorts just weeks ago.

Kemi Badenoch has claimed that ‘the Conservatives are the only party with serious plans to make sure that everyone is treated equally’ in her speech this week. On the evidence of what her Conservative Party is doing inside its own headquarters in its hiring and promotion of DEI events, that claim is frankly impossible to take seriously.

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

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As interest in the internal dynamics and personnel of Restore Britain grow — even as our internal estimation of their likely vote share in Makerfield has declined substantially — it is a timely moment for us to offer our first Who’s Who of the party. Today, we’ll take a look at the figures around Rupert Lowe, their factional alignments, and what each of them wants out of ol’ Rupe.

This newsletter’s agenda: Restore Britain: a reasonably neutral description of the people behind it (paid); Internal divisions in Restore (paid).

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‘Conservatives will scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty, removing the legal foundation that has allowed identity politics, DEI bureaucracy and ideological box-ticking to spread across public services’.

The Tories seem neither to understand the reasons for their failures from 2010 to 2024, nor do they have any real desire to undo the creep of state discrimination against the majority since Macpherson. Indeed, their governments accelerated and further entrenched the Blair-era legislation. Why would they propose to repeal Sections 149-157 of the Equality Act, while leaving the rest (which does a very great deal of harm) intact? The Tory pledge would somewhat reduce the statutory ‘equality’ duties applied to the public sector, but change nothing else.

Kemi’s statement attacks Reform, saying:

‘Reform say they would simply abolish the Equality Act altogether, which would open the floodgates to more DEI and affirmative action in workplaces and services in the public and private sectors. Once again, this shows Reform have not done the detailed policy work required before making an announcement’.

It is clear from even the most cursory reading of the Equality Act and review of the case law that it is the Tories who have not done ‘the detailed policy work’.

For starters, their changes would leave the concept of ‘indirect discrimination’ in place. The Equality Act doesn’t just define as unlawful the ‘direct discrimination’ which most people imagine when thinking of ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, etc., under which a person or organisation treats someone differently because of a protected characteristic. No: the Equality Act is the cornerstone of DEI and positive action in British law. The Act also makes unlawful ‘indirect discrimination’ in which ‘a policy which applies the same way for everybody has an effect which particularly disadvantages people with a protected characteristic’ — that is, the legal enforcement of outcomes, versus equal treatment under the law.

Indirect discrimination flows through the rest of the Equality Act, which the Tories would retain.

For example, Section 65, under which work which a court determines is of ‘equal value’, must be paid the same. It is this law which has led to ruinous pay claims against Asda, Tesco, Next and Birmingham Council, in which English courts are now responsible for determining the value of work and effectively ordering what employers must pay staff. Our courts have consistently ruled that jobs primarily staffed by men (such as bin collectors and warehouse workers) should not be paid more than jobs primarily staffed by women (administrative staff and checkout operators), even though the former occupations are obviously less pleasant and harder to recruit for. There has never been any suggestion that women are barred from the ‘men’s jobs’, nor that there is any discrimination against them. The existence of different male and female preferences has proven sufficient for our courts. These claims will ultimately bankrupt local authorities and layer vast additional costs on businesses, especially retailers, representing a major step into the ‘Judicial Command Economy’, increasingly recognised to be a catastrophe by all. No serious party of the right can retain them.

Similarly, Section 29 of the Equality Act (which requires ‘reasonable adjustments’ for disabled people) has also been used to direct the minutiae of business operations. In 2017, the Supreme Court held that a bus company, FirstGroup, had broken the law. A wheelchair user, Mr Paulley, had boarded one of their buses in 2012 and found the wheelchair space occupied by a mother with a sleeping child in a pushchair. The bus driver asked her to wake her child, fold up the pushchair, and move, in line with FirstGroup policy, but she refused. As a result, Mr Paulley had to wait for the next bus. The Supreme Court determined that FirstGroup’s policy should have required the driver to take ‘further steps’ such as choosing to ‘pressurise the non-wheelchair user to vacate the space’. It is perverse that the state now decides in its Supreme Court how companies and individuals should negotiate case-sensitive competing demands, in this incident of a man in a wheelchair and a mother with a sleeping child.

Section 19 may be even worse. It defines as unlawful discrimination, any ‘provision, criterion or practice which is discriminatory in relation to a relevant protected characteristic of [person] B’ unless it is a ‘proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’. In practice, this means almost any policy or protocol can be unlawful. If every single person isn’t treated the same, then there will almost certainly be some protected characteristic group which is treated less favourably. An obvious scenario would be a Muslim employee who complains about work drinks. An employer would be unlikely to be able to prove the ‘proportionate means’ test, and so the drinks should be cancelled.

Another horror is Section 159, which functionally codifies anti-white and anti-British discrimination in recruitment. Discrimination is allowed if candidates both meet the nebulous, easily-fulfilled status of ‘equally qualified’ and the recruiter ‘reasonably’ thinks that one group ‘suffers a disadvantage’. Given the vast efforts amongst the media, politicians, the Civil Service and every HR department in the land to insist that minorities do suffer such a disadvantage, it is trivial for hiring organisations to fulfil this requirement.

Indeed, it was the last Tory government that published guidance in 2023 on ‘Positive action in the workplace’ to help employers understand how they can lawfully use ‘positive action measures’ to ‘improve representation’ in their organisations. That publication explains that, unlike the US, which permits ‘quotas’ for hiring minorities, in the UK employers are only allowed to use ‘targets’. They explain that ‘targets differ from quotas as they are not mandatory’, when of course, if an organisation sets managers such targets, they will act to achieve them to advance their own careers. The publication provides the example of an employer offering ‘a development programme which is only open to women’ as an example of lawful ‘positive action’. It is very easy to see how this law has led to internships, development programmes and opportunities for all groups other than white men.

This is no doubt why the Bar Council felt comfortable operating its ‘10,000 Black Interns’ scheme, ‘a programme designed to support black students and graduates’ by offering them internships which ensure they gain ‘hands-on experience at the Bar’. This scheme is explicitly only open to ‘black or…black heritage (including mixed)’ graduates. It’s worth noting that nationality is defined as a protected characteristic under the Equality Act — it is a subset of ‘race’, and so it could be perfectly lawful to design a recruitment process to hire foreigners at the expense of British citizens. Any party genuinely committed to making Britain ‘a colourblind society’, as Badenoch claimed was her goal last week, would not let this stand. Again, we can only conclude that the Tories are either clueless or lying.

Of course, there will be a need to construct a replacement anti-direct discrimination law, with the original Race Relations Act (prior to the creation of the Commission for Racial Equality) potentially offering a framework to prevent more DEI, as Kemi wishes to present her argument. The 2010 Act is far too deeply compromised, far beyond the public sector. It has built a society in which judges set wages and rule on bus company communications policy, and in which it has become customary to actively disadvantage white men. The Tories’ meddling around the edges merely shows us why 2010-2024 was such a disaster, and makes it clear that they are not fit to return to government.

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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‘No more will we be ruled by men

Whose sole qualification

Is not ability and ken;

But lies in rank and station:

None shall this land

Henceforth command,

No men will we submit to,

But those who business understand;

Practical men of ditto [sic].’

—Punch, ‘Madrigal of Administrative Reform’, May 1855.

As Reform UK continues to prepare for government, one can observe a nascent infatuation with an age-old British tradition that has perhaps gone under-discussed, namely ‘business government’. Reports indicate that the party intends to appoint a string of ‘top business leaders’ to some of the most senior roles in government, including in the Treasury, where Farage hopes that such figures will begin to approach the public finances ‘as if you’re running a business’. Some sources even claim that there are plans to procure ‘up to 50%’ of the cabinet from industry and that the party is already soliciting policy proposals from firms — reported, admittedly, by a far-left publication, but hardly contradicted by the party’s own pronouncements. It is also no surprise that these ideas would command such strong support from a leadership cadre highly accomplished in the City and elsewhere in the private sector. Either way, Reform’s ambition clearly extends far beyond a simple desire to better hear the needs of the business community, envisioning the substitution of efficient administrators for inexperienced parliamentarians across the political offices of state.

It is not to denigrate the achievements of the corporate heavyweights Reform undoubtedly has waiting in the wings to note that this is a concept fraught with misguided assumptions — and indeed less of a novel hypothesis than a recurrent trend with a long and tortured history. For the structural differences between corporate and political life, insofar as the two can be separated, are such that the talents of businessmen cannot be expected to transfer effectively. Worse still, an excess of faith in business government risks actively subverting the ideological qualities that constitute Reform’s greatest asset in its mission to rescue the British state.

The most fundamental distinction between these two worlds lies in their system of incentives and the absence, in politics, of a ‘good’ that begins to approximate the paramountcy of the profit motive in corporate life. Of course, this fact does not preclude the existence of ‘politics’ (in both the ideological sense and in terms of the basic struggle for power between individuals) within firms. It nevertheless remains that profit and its increase are objectives that every member of a company has some conscious interest in. This is true, most of all, for those to whom our prospective business-politician is typically accountable: shareholders and their pursuit of returns in the form of dividends or capital gains, via a board of directors. What is relevant for our argument is that business executives are thus accustomed to their actions being graded and rewarded, principally, against a quantifiable bottom line — an unambiguous metric without which Reform would be unable to identify genuinely talented individuals in the first place.

‘Success’ in politics, however, is infinitely more elusive. To understand this problem, we must first consider the web of agents in which it unfolds. While the relationships a firm maintains are in many respects endogenous — being free to choose, for instance, which consumers to target and which third parties to do business with (exceptions notwithstanding) — government departments enjoy far less flexibility. They must serve all citizens, at all times, and inexorably in cooperation with the other departments, owing to statutory rules, inalienable state monopolies (justice, taxation), or simply the sheer scale of existing interdependencies. There are significant administrative challenges embedded in this structure itself: the impossibility of creative destruction in the provision of essential services, the presence of legally equal, rival departments in the place of subcontractors. But the most critical point concerns the preferences of its agents, which at every level, from individual voters to the Prime Minister, are informed not by the dispassionate logics of profit — again, quantifiable outcomes towards which all agents can unify — but by a kaleidoscope of differing, frequently unintelligible normative beliefs.

Whether these exist as a precursor to or post-rationalisation of individuals’ policy preferences, and regardless of whether all citizens can be said to share a common material or ‘true’ interest, what matters is the discursive reality that there will always be a degree of opposition to any political action. I refer chiefly to voters and parliament, but also to other departments which, in tandem with public opinion, will compete for the favour of the Prime Minister and/or Treasury on explicitly political terms. Administrative efficiency, or ‘value for money’, is, certainly, one such example — but by no means the most compelling one. Agents have no choice but to address and leverage (lest they be outmanoeuvred) the sentiments that dominate public discourse in spite of what appears irrefutably rational.

Let us suppose, for example, that a minister seeks to trim Britain’s entitlement state to bring the public finances more closely in line with the standards upheld in business. His policies may reasonably project a small but necessary reduction in expenditure without the risk of citizens falling below the minimum standards of assistance that a modern society requires, effected via, say, reductions in PIP eligibility or means-testing the Winter Fuel Allowance — a quantifiable administrative achievement. But how will he manage the outcry that sank such efforts under Starmer’s premiership? How will he convince the electorate that these material benefits, often held to be ‘rights’, are worth giving up? Wherever the answer may lie, it must go beyond statistical realities — which the public is unlikely to comprehend in any case—and approximate the idealism of its opponents: an appeal to patriotic duty or the welfare of future generations, for example. ‘Success’ is not self-sustaining but must be politically constructed.

What is ultimately necessary to salvage control over the state (and thereby any political victories for Reform) is its reworking — chiefly by creating porousness between a party/policy machine (a.k.a. the ‘elected government’) and the civil service and implementation apparatus (the ‘permanent government’). This is understood in Reform by Danny Kruger and is beginning to be reflected in his proposals in Preparing for Government. This article serves only to underline that while Reform’s ‘technocratic’ pitch cannot be lost, a fetish for businessmen in government alone is insufficient and in fact more likely to encounter challenges to exercising ministerial control without individuals with the experience of having developed the subtle language to goad the Walruses of Whitehall into waddling. These issues have plagued even the government most favourable to the permanent bureaucracy in decades, namely the premiership of Keir Starmer — for here the issue is not typically a question of the ‘loyalty’ of the bureaucrats in question, but their procedure-enforced languidity.

These difficulties are thrown into relief if we consider the career of Eric Geddes, a railway tycoon-cum-politician under the aegis of David Lloyd George. Despite his present reputation mainly resting on his expansion of the welfare state, Lloyd George’s war-postwar Coalition era was perhaps the most extensive experiment in business government to date.

Formerly the general manager of North Eastern Railway, Geddes first took office in 1915 at the newly established ‘Ministry of Munitions’ (MoM) as one of the several business leaders, the ‘men of push-and-go’, brought in to fix a crisis of the British state. The particular crisis in question was, of course, a failure of procurement. Britain was rapidly approaching a shell shortage that was nothing short of apocalyptic, and the war effort was effectively being sustained on the back of imports from the USA. So critical was the issue that Lloyd George, having already made his name on his ability to bust up and Get Things Done as Chancellor over the turbulent Asquith premiership, was moved to head the new ministry. The MoM would be ‘from first to last a businessman’s organisation’, believing that the moment demanded ‘great improvisers’ who could build from scratch and would not be in thrall to the War Office bigwigs held to have failed in the first place.

The ministry was, in fact, a smashing success. Geddes pushed through sweeping rationalisations and within the year, output had increased so dramatically that British shells were beginning to overflow at French docks. His work complete, Geddes was quickly moved elsewhere, first to military transportation, then the Admiralty, and with victory at last, the Demobilisation Committee. It was only in the last of these roles that he suffered noteworthy failure, with mutinies breaking out amongst yet-to-be discharged men in Normandy and Kent. These were admittedly short-lived and Geddes’ decisions largely reflected those of the other senior politicians on the committee.

It was ultimately in his leadership of the newly-created Ministry of Transport (MoT) that both Geddes and Lloyd George envisaged as the former’s peacetime destiny, and it is here that this happy tale begins to fall apart.

The plan for the MoT was one of the duo’s most ambitious yet. Driven by the view that ‘unbridled competition’ in the sector was inherently wasteful, the ministry would seek regulatory control over all elements of Britain’s transport network with a view to effecting centralisation and modernisation. It was not an entirely unfounded view, as the pre-war railways — then the dominant mode of transport — had nearly two hundred private providers, declining profits and rising costs, declining share values and difficulties coordinating investment due to duplicative projects. Amalgamation made some sense, and the numerous local providers were merged by the 1921 Railways Act into four regional monopolies aiming to modernise the network to create synergy with rationalised roads and ports. This would form one of the foundations of reconstruction and export growth. Geddes, emboldened by his wartime triumphs and animated by genuinely nationalist convictions, was confident of success in creating a modern transportation network.

It was not to be. The Railways Act did achieve efficiencies by reducing administrative duplication, through-ticketing and freight coordination and investment could now be planned on a regional basis while parallel routes and facilities were rationalised. But savings were less dramatic than anticipated, owing to large debts, ageing infrastructure, significant labour costs, and obligations to serve unprofitable routes. Over the 1920s and 1930s, road competition diminished the importance of railway transportation and the regional monopolies remained in a fragile position.

Geddes had quickly learned that the skills that had served him so well were of little use as the MoT was turned into a ‘graveyard’ before his eyes. Perhaps this specific failure could be described as bad luck, or the result of a singular bad decision, and it could be argued that we cannot dismiss business government from Geddes alone. But there were deeper reasons for the ministry’s collapse. We must first acknowledge the truly unprecedented and necessarily fleeting set of circumstances that made Geddes’ (very real) wartime achievements possible in the first place: namely, the demands of total war and the collapse of political complexity that the shared desire for victory brought about, for instance, the suspension of electoral politics, as all three parties shared in government, while economic orthodoxies were likewise abandoned or deferred.

As such, Geddes was free to succeed less on the basis of political or methodological ingenuity as the precise opposite. In munitions and military transportation alike, arguably the largest contribution to scale came from a strategy of procurement at (often absurdly) high prices to encourage supply, while the rationalisations found were generally the product of the agreement of the Unions to their own dilution was secured through a promise that it would be reversed at the end of the conflict. Such actions could only be taken thanks to the sidestepping of procedural and fiscal rules that wartime controls permitted, and the consent of the public writ large to this new purpose in the state.

By contrast, the MoT came into being under conditions of peace and the corresponding reassertion of political interest. Lloyd George and his allies may have hoped that the culture of coalition would prevail and that the transformation of the state effected by war might serve as a lasting foundation for a new socio-economic order, but many more believed that either a conflict on this scale would never happen again or that Britain’s victory had only vindicated the pre-war political settlement. As such, wartime norms came under vehement attack: state expenditure — or ‘squandermania’ — saw the government lose repeated by-elections to conservative hardliners on the issue, while industry and the Treasury alike lobbied for an end to wartime taxes and controls. The so-called ‘Geddes Axe’ (Geddes also oversaw systematic cuts across various departments) had to cut through the whole of government spending — and, while certainly successful in its immediate aim of reducing expenditure, interfered with the plans of another of Lloyd George’s ‘men of push-and-go’, Christopher Addison, Minister of Housing, who had made his own grandiose promises.

It was this pit of vipers into which Lloyd George dropped Geddes in 1919. Seemingly taken unawares by the depths of opposition his proposal to assert control over every aspect of transportation encountered, faced with accusations of ‘autocracy’, and active sabotage by the Board of Trade, he shied away from dirtying his hands with politics. He believed that the merits of his scheme would speak for themselves and refused to ‘start making political speeches at political meetings’. The MoT was subsequently cut to pieces — by both cabinet and parliament — retaining control of little more than rail, with which it effected the regional amalgamations but otherwise had no power to force other improvements. Geddes would leave politics dejected and convinced of the separateness of business and political life.

The purpose of this tale is not to taint business government as a whole with the brush of Geddes’ particular naivety. Indeed, the failure of the MoT can be broadly understood on precisely the same terms as Lloyd George’s broader reconstruction programme (embodied most famously by the failure to build ‘Homes for Heroes’ under Addison). Whether or not it might have been possible for some constellation of factions — between Labour, ‘New Liberals’ like Lloyd George, Asquith’s halfway ‘traditional’ Liberals, and the true coalitionists amongst the Unionist party — to sustain a more extensive reconstruction, what is relevant is the simple fact that this did not materialise: that there was no political leader accompanied by a political discourse capable of enlisting a sufficient contingent of opinion behind the project.

This is how we must understand other tales of business government, in the decades since. This experiment would recur, for example, with the appointment of John Davies — former director of the CBI turned Secretary of State for Trade and Industry—under Ted Heath, as well as under Gordon Brown, who brought in Digby Jones, likewise an ex-CBI director, to fill a similar role. Neither of these individuals — talented though they may have been (and all evidence suggests they were indeed talented) — were able to effect the change that could only occur through a reckoning with the political discourses of their day: Davies was compelled by the state’s capitulation to the TUC to maintain a listless policy of subsidy and nationalisation, while Jones’ tenure appears to have consisted of little more than hapless wonder at the indolence of Civil Servants.

Administrative competence is, of course, an essential quality of ministerial government, and career politicians are not necessarily better. Our own crop of politicians is undoubtedly at a low point in quality. But the point remains that possibilities are circumscribed by politics.

Fortunately, Reform’s ideological foundations are undeniably potent with the ability to sell necessary, difficult and painful decisions to the public. This lies in the fact that, as has been discussed before in this Journal, Reform is perhaps the sole genuinely national political voice in the country. Its appeal cuts across all segments of British society and its pitch is ‘technocratic’, that the basic demands of the nation which have been left unanswered, can be resolved by the introduction of expertise to accomplish political ends where the ordinary politicians failed.

All of this begs the question: so what is the risk? Why, if Reform’s ideological qualities are so strong, is it a problem for the party to see in businessmen a means of infusing a degree of administrative competence that is so often lacking in ordinary politicians? Our concern ultimately becomes one of the discursive and political risks embedded in the idea of ‘business government’ itself.

Lloyd George did not invent the idea of shipping the business brains into the government to get things done. This idea has repeatedly resurfaced in moments of crisis and state failure across British history. The Crimean War, for instance, saw the creation of the ‘Administrative Reform Association’ (ARA), a pressure group of middle-class radicals concerned with ending what they perceived, not incorrectly at this time, as an aristocratic monopoly on political and military posts, while in the twentieth century the Boer War prompted many amongst the patriotic masses to argue that successful businessmen — among whom Joseph Chamberlain loomed large in the popular imagination — should take control of the state. The turn against the boozy ‘Squiffy’ and a parliament of ‘old gangs’ over the 1914-16 period, and the enthusiasm this lent to the MoM, can be understood similarly.

In each of these instances, a similar equation can be identified. Outraged by the bungling of national interests, patriotic contingents of the public would choose businessmen as their avatar of (creative) destruction and reform at the expense of traditional elites. The groups in question were often newly-mobilised — the middle class of the ARA following the 1832 Reform Act, the increasingly ‘jingoistic’ working class in the wake of the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 — and as such sought to use ‘business government’ as a means of establishing radical new political norms. In the days of the ARA, this concerned ending a very real aristocratic stranglehold (particularly in the military) on the state’s decision-making capacity, while in the years between the Boer War and 1916, the impetus was to empower technocrats from science and industry to govern the country under a coalitionist spirit that would end the party squabbling from which only elites and foreigners could benefit. Whether or not these prescriptions proved successful is perhaps less important than the fact that they sought to open up genuinely new political terrain.

‘Business government’ in our own time, however, tends to work in the opposite direction. Nowhere is this clearer than in the semantics of a ‘war on waste’ which promises to identify spending that can be eliminated without any real cost to anybody. By asserting that meaningful fiscal savings can be found simply by excising fraud, the most blatant acts of wokery (such as Gender Studies PhD theses), or by implementing simple methodological improvements, the politics of business-like administration can serve to retard political discourse. This, certainly, was the impact of Elon Musk’s DOGE project in the United States, which had zero authority over entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid, delivered cuts below 1% of what was promised, and yet left office with triumphant claims of victory. At the same time, the discourse of the American right has degenerated from an ostensibly serious engagement with the issue of national debt in 2024 to overseeing an increase in the debt ceiling, joined with deranged commitments to some of the most lucrative aspects of state largesse.

This is not to suggest that businessmen cannot play integral or frontline roles in the changing of the guard that has to take place. Indeed, it is a part of Reform’s appeal. Reform is a more serious entity and recognises the limitations of its ambitions in the next years, but smashing the ‘uniparty’ is chief amongst them. But the essence of the Uniparty does not lie in the Commons, a particular Cabinet or even the bureaucracy alone — but rather in political culture. And to that end, there is still much work to be done.

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

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On 3 June, the New Statesman’s Ailbhe Rea wrote an interesting profile on aspiring representative for the local area, Andy Burnham. It did not go well.

This newsletter’s agenda: Andy Burnham’s car-crash profile(?) with the New Statesman (full feature).

The profile gives us very little idea of where things stand in Makerfield. But it does give us a good idea of whether Andy Burnham would make a good Prime Minister.

The first thing that immediately comes across is the fact that Burnham is extremely tetchy, and responds very poorly to any criticism — or indeed, even the lightest of push-back. Most politicians are already used to being criticised, often unfairly, hundreds, indeed thousands of times more than any normal person. It’s draining, but it’s an inherent part of the job. You just have to get used to it. Perhaps back in ancient history, when Burnham was a vaguely indeterminate New Labour figure, he also had gotten used to criticism. But in 2026, he has long since shed any such thick skin. Burnham has created a borderline North Korean media environment in Manchester, where anything other than sycophantic praise is anathema.

He even has a weekly show on BBC Radio Manchester in which listeners call in to tell him how great he is. Manchester Evening News, by far the dominant local news outlet in circulation, was known to have been an arm of the Burnham Regime. While the overall editorial line has perhaps softened (with headlines such as: ‘We spent three hours walking around Hindley and couldn’t find a single woman voting Reform’) as Burnham has reemerged as an actively political figure, rather than merely a local despot, the comments sections to some of these articles have very clearly hardened against Burnham. That is, where the comments sections are not disabled. I suppose if Kim Jong Un left North Korea to become the President of China, weeping adulation would also quite soon turn to rage. Even Starmer, himself a thin-skinned lawyer who has spent very little of his life in politics (which explains a lot), handles criticism better than Burnham.

Ailbhe Rea notes that ‘Burnham’s critics – including some of his Labour colleagues in Westminster – argue that he has been playing politics on “easy mode” in Greater Manchester’. She cites an article by Joshi Herrmann in The Mill, a relatively new Manchester-based publication (with its newness perhaps explaining why it dared to critique the Dear Leader). Herrmann argued that Burnham, while possessing a ‘remarkable ability to connect with people and understand the political moment’ (no article on Burnham on Manchester can entirely go without praise), was ‘not a details person’, and did not have any clear understanding of what had made Manchester successful. Immediately upon hearing this very mild critique, Burnham tenses up: ‘…I tell Burnham I want to put some of Herrmann’s criticisms to him and am surprised to observe I strike a nerve. “I didn’t read it”, Burnham says, abruptly. “He’s not sympathetic, so let’s start with that.”’ As if ‘sympathy’ to someone is somehow required for them to make legitimate arguments that require a response.

There is absolutely zero evidence that Burnham will be capable of making the leap from the mayoralty – where, in fact, he has been ‘playing politics on “easy mode”’ — to Number 10. It is telling that Burnham effectively went MIA after the news story about Henry Nowak broke, disappearing for over 24 hours (a time period during which even Ed Davey and Zarah Sultana managed to provide comment) before returning to post a video of himself campaigning in Makerfield, before finally offering an extraordinarily bland, content-free comment — not on his personal account, but on his institutional Mayor of Manchester account. This is not a man who is capable of leading; of finding the way through for Labour when communicating for the left-wing cause looks tough.

Rea continues to pull on this same thread throughout her piece, albeit in a slightly less obviously confrontational manner, asking Burnham for some examples of ‘difficult decisions’ that he has had to make, rather than just doing the things that will make him popular. Burnham, we are told, again ‘…struggles not to be tetchy when I put these criticisms to him.’ When it comes to ‘difficult decisions’, he first gives going to Hillsborough on the twentieth anniversary (a near-universally popular cause) and the infected blood scandal (a near-universally popular cause except among the people currently in government who have to pay for it). ‘Most people would say if you want to be liked, you wouldn’t take on things like that’, he says, unconvincingly. While mayor, he has ‘…dealt with terrorism, wildfires, a pandemic’, Burnham informs us. But of course, as George Spencer has observed, Burnham did not ‘deal with’ terrorism or the pandemic. He just said nice words when they happened. All the other people made the difficult decisions; he just had to make do with the consequences.

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Like Labour, the CDU has seen its ups and downs over the years. An electoral dry spell in the late 1990s and early 2000s prompted a season of soul-searching; the result was the CDU’s own Tony Blair in Angela Merkel, whose ballot box success owed just as much to the previous SPD government’s unpopularity as to her own political talents, following Gerhard Schröder’s controversial labour market reforms — the long-term dividends of which Merkel nevertheless reaped in the 2010s (does this sound familiar?). Like Blair, Merkel’s watchword was ‘pragmatism’; like Blair, hers was a pragmatism suited uniquely to the conditions prevalent at the outset of her ministry, which hardened into dogmatism and a personality cult when confronted with those new conditions that sixteen years in government bequeathed. Like Blair, Merkel wisely stepped down before she could be pushed, thus postponing the doubtless unpleasant, but purgative, internal reckoning with her legacy that a direct challenge to her authority would have occasioned. Labour has spent nearly two decades trying to banish Blair’s ghost from the attic; the CDU, having only had five years since the grey lady’s departure, has a livelier poltergeist on its hands.

Friedrich Merz was supposed to be the CDU’s Jeremy Corbyn; a paladin of the party’s old guard called up from deep within the mists of time (having been a rival to Merkel to succeed Helmut Kohl around the turn of the millennium) to turn back the clocks on the ex-chancellor’s reforms. He had the support of the CDU’s actual pragmatists; the laissez-faire wing that supports a rollback of Merkelian net zero legislation, a tougher line on immigration, and a quiet rapprochement with the AfD. These he dazzled with promises to address Germany’s creaking pension and benefits systems, first announcing an ultimately fruitless ‘autumn of reforms’, then delivering a similarly infertile late winter/early spring of change, and now hinting at a summer of transformation before the Bundestag goes into recess. Time and time again he has overestimated the cooperativeness of his coalition partner, the SPD, who, as they slide down the polls to depths not seen since Bismarck banned them at the end of the nineteenth century, have shed their former character as a big tent party and are increasingly beholden to their most radical stalwarts.

The CDU, too, is undergoing a similar radicalisation spiral as it slides down the polls (currently at an all-time low of 22%) and sheds members (a 2% decrease this year alone). The locus of this radicalisation is not the party’s conservatives, who have never been weaker, but the Merkelians. Unlike the SPD, whose materialist worldview translates neatly into concrete budget items, the CDU’s ideology under Merkel (which has no greater devotee than, quite ironically, her old opponent, the current Chancellor) became abstract and nebulous, encompassing a shallow conservatism predicated on a respect for democracy, an emotional attachment to the German state and its institutions, and a belief that these values alone are sufficient to manage the world’s third-largest economy (one is reminded of another thin-skinned solicitor who believes his country can be run solely on the Nolan Principles). The post-Merkel CDU’s raison d’être is the defence of the state; this in turn requires the state to have an enemy. This Merz and his allies have found in the AfD, which current polling suggests will be the next Bundestag’s largest party.

Like Labour, the CDU finds itself trapped between the Scylla of its base and the Charybdis of the broader electorate. A recent poll commissioned by the tabloid Bild showed that, while a hypothetical CDU/AfD coalition was the most popular option amongst all voters, 48% of self-identified CDU supporters favoured a possible coalition with the Left Party over such an outcome (27%) — a very real possibility in East Germany, where most polls place the latter just shy of a majority. The CDU, were it ready to enter such a coalition, would slip from its current ≈22% to 17.5%. Given the general right-wing bent of the German electorate and its increasing openness towards the AfD’s ideas, it is hard to see the greater freedom of manoeuvre the CDU would enjoy by looking to its right for majorities failing to translate into the broad, mainstream appeal that it currently lacks. Yet the CDU’s disproportionately elderly (even by the standards of a greying German electorate) voter base, its eyes glued to Germany’s heavily left-leaning public television and legacy media, believes the rather undifferentiated picture they paint of the AfD as unreconstructed nazis. In this they are in concord with the party’s apparatchiks, reluctant to risk the ire of their social milieu in Berlin by sealing a pact with the populists.

Here, again, one might draw parallels to Labour, whose strategists appear to have settled on minimising the extent of their predicted wipeout at the next election by forfeiting the centre ground in order to shore up their support amongst the party base. The avatar of this latest search for the party’s soul is Andy Burnham, an old Blairite with a regional accent who has built himself up as a local nabob in the Labour heartlands far from the watchful eye of the Westminster news hounds. The CDU has its own Burnham in the form of Hendrik Wüst, the affable governor of the CDU’s own spiritual heartland in North Rhine-Westphalia (or colloquially ‘NRW’). Amidst Merz’s woes, Wüst telegraphed his leadership ambitions last week with a state visit to Poland, where he took the unusual step of inviting a sizeable Berlin press delegation. This he capped off with a gesture carefully calibrated to curry favour with the CDU’s historically conscious activist core — a trip to Auschwitz, where his social media team snapped a photograph of the politician smiling his big, aspirational grin in front of the former death camp’s main gates. Wüst has thus far denied any ambition to replace Merz; my own sources in the CDU say that, while the Chancellor is safe for the time being, the party’s central office has already planned Wüst’s triumph and will airlift him in if, as is not entirely improbable, the current coalition shortly falls apart.

There is little substantial difference between Wüst and Merz on policy; where they part is on rhetoric, especially on migration and multiculturalism, where Wüst strikes a softer tone than the abrasive Merz, who has an unfortunate talent for framing the most innocuous opinions in the most offensive way possible. Like Burnham, Wüst has thus far faced little media scrutiny. This is a pity, because Wüst is a far stranger and more interesting politician than his convivial public persona suggests. Just like Labour’s great Mancunian hope, Wüst is a power hungry but intellectually vapid man who spent decades in search of his own political identity: before assuming the governorship in 2021, he had associated himself with his party’s right; since then, he has continued his predecessor (and former CDU chancellor hopeful) Armin ‘Turkish Armin’ Laschet’s neo-Merkelian line of cuddly environmentalism and showy tolerance of ethnic minorities. The strategist behind Laschet’s policy was his chief of staff Nathanael Liminski, who has stayed on as the grey eminence in Wüst’s administration. Under Liminski’s guidance, the CDU in NRW has sought to establish itself within the Turkish community and cultivated unusually close ties with Ankara — Wüst met the Turkish foreign minister (and former intelligence chief) Hakan Fidan in Berlin before departing to Poland, and has courted scandal in the past by speaking at official functions of the DİTİB, the German section of Turkey’s Directorate for Religious Affairs. There is something darker going on here than mere misguided liberal tolerance.

Liminski is an odd man to find himself a Boss Tweed to the Rhineland’s Turks. The eighth son of an ultramontane journalist and Opus Dei member, Liminski first ventured into the public sphere as a traditionalist Catholic activist who denounced premarital sex on Berlin’s political talk shows. It is easy to see in this one-time firebrand a flesh and blood version of Robert Rediger, the former identitarian in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission who converts to Islam and becomes rector of the Sorbonne under the Islamist government. Liminski’s ambitions stretch far beyond the state chancellery in Düsseldorf: he has already tried to put one former Rhenish governor into the chancellor’s office, and with Wüst he now has a more photogenic, media-friendly vessel than the gaffe-prone Laschet. Unlike Merz and his cronies, Liminski has the brainpower and the political capital to steer the party in a new direction. It would be a strange thing indeed if the final release from the Merkel years lay in Liminski’s green, Rhineland Islamodroitisme; if this heir to the old Catholic Centre Party’s final act were, as one anonymous German professor put it to me, ‘to avenge Rome’s defeat in the Kulturkampf with Mecca’s victory’.

But this fate may yet be averted, for Liminski has one very obvious achilles heel: he is a hideously ugly little man with zero charisma, whose personal views are noxious to the electorate and the media class — hence why he needs the preening Wüst, who has little mind of his own, to carry him into the chancellor’s office. It would take minimal effort on behalf of a seasoned spinner to whip up a smear campaign that would force the squeaky-clean, image-conscious governor to distance himself, leaving the mechanical Turk to carry on the game without his dwarf.

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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This month’s by-election represents a key juncture in that procession. Robert Kenyon’s victory in Makerfield would be Labour’s death knell. A historic decapitation of their PM-in-waiting would deprive them of a potentially life-saving second roll of the dice. Should Burnham take power, on the other hand, those around him will urge that he implement proportional representation. Others have noted the cynicism in this – it’s a carrot to tempt the Lib Dems and Greens into a unity ticket, a coalition of the left which could lock the right out of power and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Once upon a time, calls for a new voting system proliferated just as widely among right-wing parties, their various iterations thwarted by FPTP for decades. In 2024, this dynamic prevented a ninety-three-strong turquoise tidal wave from hitting Westminster. Today, it has reversed — offering Reform a previously unimaginable pathway not just to govern, but to do so with a majority all of their own.

Never in British political history has an insurgent party on the right truly threatened to take power. Where Labour supplanted the Liberals a century prior, and itself narrowly avoided replacement by the SDP six decades later, the Tories have long been uncontested in their own territory. On their right flank, many outfits posed a challenge, with varying offerings of radicalism before inevitably petering out. Compared to Europe, the populist right is late in coming to Britain — due not to a lack of demand, but a lack of available supply. The British system is uniquely unsuited to facilitating the rise of new parties.

Today, after Reform has dominated the polls for more than a year, it has become far easier to imagine such a transformation of the political landscape. Having witnessed the rise of one new party, it has become all too easy for many — especially those who came more recently to right-wing conclusions, and therefore have little knowledge of those years in the wilderness — to assume that the process can be reliably repeated, that an establishment which still controls more than 90% of seats in Parliament has already been defeated, and that the prize of power lies undefended. This situation is partly to blame for the growth of Restore Britain, which now stands as the biggest risk to defeating the Labour Party in Makerfield first, before taking down both major parties at the next general election.

It is therefore a prudent time to look back at the history of the British right outside of the Conservative Party, and remind ourselves just how rare this opportunity truly is. Nigel Farage is the first leader of the national-populist right to have the opportunity to supplant Britain’s oldest party — in fact, he is the first to secure more than 2% of the vote at a general election — but he was not the first person to try. It was the British National Party who, at least cosmetically, first fashioned themselves in the nationalist-populist mould (even if their politics were very different to Reform) after Nick Griffin assumed leadership in 1999. This is a fitting Year Zero for this essay — what came before has no extant point of reference in our politics.

John Tyndall: The backdrop of British Fascism

Griffin’s predecessor, John Tyndall, had dominated Britain’s fringe right since the sixties — cutting his teeth in the League of Empire Loyalists before, among other outfits, founding the British National Party (BNP) in 1982. Tyndall’s role in the right-of-right-of-centre is fascinating and laden with intrigue, but is beyond this essay’s scope. While he and Griffin shared similar views, the latter would enforce a more clandestine expression of these tendencies. Tyndall’s BNP was fascistic, where not outrightly national socialist, as were the National Front (NF) and the various outfits which splintered from the two parties before 1999.

Tyndall founded the BNP after being ousted from the NF in 1980, with the intent of reuniting the right under his leadership. Tyndall’s ironclad commitment to national socialism, which had so often undone his own aspirations, had perhaps spared the BNP from the National Front’s fate — spiralling into such esoteric and contradictory positions that left the Front unrecognisable to potentially curious voters: less preoccupied with keeping Britain white than making it Gaddafi green. Despite what might have been an advantage in that regard, the BNP were unable to capitalise, even with the disillusioned electorate of the early Thatcher years. They were bereft of success in the eighties, not because of an inability to convince voters that they weren’t Hitler worshippers, but by a refusal to attempt the task.

In the latter half of the century, this impulse towards Nazism was the fringe right’s black dog. Splinter movements were so often provoked by dissatisfaction with the parent party’s commitment to Nazism — whether they regarded it as insufficient or thought its presence toxic. Nevertheless, no moderate turn ever amounted to a disavowal, and each was followed by fascism creeping back in. At each juncture, every potential breakthrough, Tyndall was unable to suppress the tic, ‘What if we made the Sonnenrad spin?’ Despite decades without lasting success, and with Jean-Marie Le Pen providing a successful case study for moderation, Tyndall failed to connect the dots and recant that which stymied his every attempt at success.

The radical tendency’s repeated boiling over would be Tyndall’s undoing. The early nineties saw green shoots of possibility spring up, with (however minor) electoral gains won through Eddy Butler’s ‘populist localism’ campaigning in London’s East End. Combat 18 (C18), founded as the party bodyguard, became the newest escape valve for party extremists — cannibalising the grassroots after distilling its own political ambitions. Butler was attacked with a knife by C18 activists, and BNP membership dwindled. At the time, Tyndall speculated that regime actors masterminded C18 to discredit the BNP, but this did not prevent him from making overtures to party hardliners — inviting William Pierce (of Turner Diaries fame) to speak at events in an attempt to position himself between the ‘loony’ front and those who had realised that fascism was electorally toxic.

Nick Griffin, formerly of the NF’s ‘proto-terrorist’ Political Soldier wing, would come out to bat for the moderate faction. Perhaps an unlikely hero, Griffin had come to realise which way the wind was blowing via keeping company with moderates, which was hurried along by a suspended sentence for incitement. The BNP’s route to power, he argued, could be achieved through more palatable marketing of the same inherent radicalism — contrasting with Tyndall’s refusal to ‘dress up patriotism in inoffensive clothes’. This proposal appealed to party members, who lent Griffin’s leadership tilt their overwhelming support.

Griffin’s BNP: An attempt at cosmetic surgery

In remaking the BNP’s brand, Griffin looked to Europe. The success enjoyed by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National owed much to moderating their language, moreso than their ideology, reframing the party as a democratic and respectable outfit, communicating policy in ways that ordinary French voters did not find objectionable. As noted previously in this journal, pre-1997 Britain had never been comfortable with immigration and multiculturalism. The right’s earlier efforts to convert these attitudes into electoral momentum had faltered when voters caught wind of extremism — as had happened in 1999, where the BNP stumbled to 1% of the vote after the Mirror uncovered a photo of Tyndall standing next to David Copeland, the man responsible for nail-bombings which had killed 3 and injured 140.

Such baggage proved wearisome for party officials on the doorstep, yet Griffin’s stint as an avowed Third Positionist did little to sufficiently tarnish his image. That he was a Cambridge graduate from a respectable family, and a fresher face at 40 years old, made him appear more respectable than Tyndall. Griffin was at pains to assuage hardliners that his proposed about-turn would not go beyond the cosmetic. In fact, the post-1999 BNP retained its commitment to ethnonationalism and grounded its economic platform in the same romantic agrarian notions as the NF and International Third Position had done. In presenting this to the public, however, Griffin sought to exclude ‘hard talk, hobbyism, and Hitler’. Eddy Butler, meanwhile, was a persistent thorn in Griffin’s side from the ‘reformist’ camp, and was assaulted again in 2007 by a balaclava-clad BNP fixer, Tony Lecomber.

Moving to a more positive nationalism (replete with a 1999 BNP Family Fun Day) enabled the party to launch campaigns on highly salient local issues on comfortable terrain. Tackling anti-white racism in Oldham, racially-disproportionate council funding in Burnley, and capitalising on increasing concern about Islamic immigration across Britain, Griffin was able to string together successes in council by-elections through a highly-disciplined campaign machine. While extremist outbursts still abounded (albeit in lesser numbers), neither these nor concerted pressure from tabloids and anti-fascist protestors could halt the BNP’s advance as they once had in the past. The fringe right was able to win the respectability and sustained success which had eluded Tyndall throughout the years by eschewing the trappings of fascism. The BNP increasingly resembled national populist parties on the continent, such as the FN and the FPÖ.

While under Griffin, the BNP was an ethnonationalist party, explicitly ‘revolutionary’, and implicitly national socialist, its cosmetic changes truly set it apart from the fringe right before; just as its still-present extremism sets it apart from what would come after. Griffin’s BNP was, in itself, a halfway house in the fringe right’s moderation; a transitional moment between the old right, informed by the fascism of the early century, and the further-right we know today. It had found success as a national-populist party in the European mould. The modernising faction remained extremist to varying degrees, having been doctrinally inducted into and still participating internally in the various old factional divisions which had characterised the fringe right.

However ardent in their radicalism behind closed doors, the success found following the BNP’s shift away from open racialist and antisemitic discourse marked a sea change for the right. It was the proof-of-concept which put paid to overt national socialism in British politics. In the words of A.K. Chesterton, some forty years prior, ‘mouthing off about niggers and Jews’ was now the preserve of paramilitary groups. The unviability of Nazism needs no explanation, but why did racialism fall out of favour? The conventional understanding is that the black, viz. Afro-Caribbean, neighbours once feared by Britons had simply become part of the demographic furniture. A new generation had grown up accustomed to coexistence with other races — and while public opinion wasn’t unanimous, attitudes towards, say, interracial marriage, had softened since the NF’s heyday.

Islam was a far more obliging target for the BNP. In the early 1990s, the global rise of Islamic fundamentalism provided the party an easy target after the wilderness years, and its 9/11 crescendo coincided with increasing asylum claims and nascent rumours about Pakistani-led rape gangs. A growing Muslim population drew far more public suspicion than long-settled Caribbeans, and the 7/7 London bombings allowed the BNP to frame the 2006 local election as a referendum on Islam. So potent was this angle that Jewish members would now be admitted to the party to bolster its anti-Islam position. This pivot eased supply-side pressure, too: BNP top brass were well aware that, before 2010, discrimination on racial grounds carried more legal weight than religious. On the right, the BNP were the first mover on the question of Islam in Britain — a theme which is now de rigueur from the Conservative frontbench rightwards. The English Defence League (EDL) would later carry the torch for explicit counter-Jihad, before passing it on to subsequent fringe right movements. For now, though, the anti-Islam angle was a rich vein from which the BNP drew increasing support.

It would be wrong to paint this ascent as straightforward. Early in Griffin’s tenure, a feud over a by-election candidacy saw once-friendly modernisers peel off to form the Freedom Party (which would be wound up soon after its founding). A BBC documentary exposed comments from senior party figures which could amount to incitement. Tyndall, still the hardline favourite, was arrested on these charges and later expelled from the party a year before his death. The documentary also implicated Griffin and his chief propagandist Mark Collett, with both avoiding a sentence which risked reigniting the fringe right’s habitual factionalism. Local election wins sparked optimism to be dashed on a bigger stage — the BNP, outshone by a UKIP surge, failed to win seats in the 2004 European Parliament elections. When, in the subsequent election, Griffin and Andrew Brons were made MEPs, the latter’s oft-written-about Question Time appearance became (in his words) a ‘lynch mob’ instead of precipitating a larger breakthrough. A legal challenge against the party’s ‘whites only’ membership policy would spiral into a financial catastrophe and spark dissent among party officials. Among those exiled by Griffin, the careers of Mark Collett and Kenny Smith would outlast their old employer.

The 2010 general election would be the last fought by the BNP as a significant outfit. Their campaign left much to be desired; its manifesto centred on ending the Afghan War, a topic far less salient than their past immigration-focused campaigns. Likewise in Barking, the target seat, their once-impressive ground game failed to deliver Griffin to Parliament — and instead sparked the mythmaking around Morgan McSweeney. The BNP’s would-be candidate in Stoke decided to stand as an independent, then revealed that despite a decade of modernisation, Nazism and Holocaust denial still abounded at the top. The disappointing result spurred Eddy Butler to launch an abortive leadership bid, only for Griffin to narrowly win a subsequent poll against fellow MEP Andrew Brons. Subsequent local elections unwound the party’s remaining representation, and Griffin was forced out in 2014.

Eurosceptic Convergence

A clip of Nigel Farage claiming that he ‘did more to defeat the BNP’ than anyone else demonstrates, for today’s fringe right, that he and all he touches are anathema. In one sense, he did defeat the BNP, which never placed higher than sixth, and UKIP became mainstream. But the BNP’s demise was ultimately at their own hands, and under concerted pressure from the political and media establishment and their cadre of activists. Though avowedly anti-establishment and populist, UKIP did not falter under similar pressure — it was simply harder to label an eclectic libertarian party rooted in single-issue euroscepticism as ‘Nazis’ — nor did its own vicious factionalism tear it to shreds. Prior to 2018, UKIP could not be placed in the fringe right genealogy by virtue of its origins in a wholly distinct ideological tradition.

This did not prevent it from winning over former BNP voters following the party’s demise. It’s well-understood that UKIP held appeal for those in the BNP’s constituency; UKIP’s right-wing euroscepticism left room for the same voters left behind by globalisation and concerned by immigration. In their death spiral, the BNP shed no viable successor party to UKIP’s right — thus, its voters naturally converged on the most right-wing option. So too could UKIP attract voters who would never consider a party perceived as extremist. In 2014, these right-wing voters united to deliver twenty-four UKIP MEPs to Strasbourg on 26% of the vote. Farage won four times the votes that Griffin could in 2009, further evidencing the theory that the populist right performed better when unencumbered by extreme baggage.

UKIP’s Brexit-focused platform was, naturally, a far cry from the BNP’s avowedly nationalist manifesto in 2005. That Europe, as an issue, was far less salient than immigration in the early 2010s raises questions as to how UKIP came out on top in this period. It goes without saying that UKIP were, of mainstream parties, the furthest right on immigration. So too was the Brexit referendum, their crowning glory, best understood as an immigration poll — sparked by ongoing migration from Eastern Europe, with a refugee crisis and looming Turkish accession provoking far more concern than visions of a free-trading Global Britain inspired joy.

In Ford and Goodwin’s Revolt on the Right (recommended reading for a history of UKIP), it is noted that the EU came to symbolise all which drove voters to the right. An out-of-touch foreign elite was foisting hundreds of thousands of migrants on Britain to undercut wages, in exchange for sublimating British sovereignty into a continental body in which it never comfortably fit. Thus, the loci of the fringe and Tory right vote converged on UKIP’s key issue. In the wake of the referendum, however, the nature of our exit supplanted immigration as the focus of our political discourse. The EU’s position as a proxy for immigration was now so cemented that, on immigration, the debate centred on how it could be controlled after Brexit, instead of scrutinising the ongoing influx.

The Tories fought general elections in 2017 and 2019 on a Brexit manifesto which, understandably, drew right-wing voters into their coalition. UKIP, robbed of its raison d’etre, endured their own death spiral. By the time our terms of exit were settled, immigration had declined so drastically in salience that the usual suspects declared multiculturalism a solved issue. They opined that race was excluded from their conclusion that Britain had never been more divided. Britain was to go its own way from Europe, but it would go guided by Marcus Rashford, Mo Farah, and Michael ‘Stormzy’ Omari.

Interregnum – UKIP’s decline

Brexit was the crest of the 2016-18 populist wave. Subsequently, right-wing administrations took power in the US, Brazil, and the Philippines, and hard-right parties performed well in legislative elections across Europe. Any optimism that this wave would travel back to our shores soon evaporated, however, as the Conservative Party recaptured voters on the right. By 2017, UKIP fell to 1.8% of the vote — a shade lower than the BNP had won in 2010. It was expected that they would falter after the referendum, given that their sole policy aim had, in effect, been accomplished, and it’s doubtful whether even Farage could have forestalled the decline had he remained in post. By virtue of holding power, a vote for the Tories was a vote for getting Brexit done. With immigration slipping out of voters’ priorities, UKIP’s potential reconstitution as an anti-immigration party seemed unviable. With MEPs and councillors leaving the party en masse, the question had to be settled: what is post-referendum UKIP?

Following Paul Nuttall’s resignation, three distinct answers emerged. Henry Bolton’s pitch was that UKIP must be the guard dogs of Brexit, waiting in the wings should the Tories falter. For those opposed to kicking the can down the road, David Kurten and Anne Marie Waters promised salvation in a pivot to ‘Christian values’ conservatism or counter-Jihad respectively. So dire was UKIP’s predicament that neither path was expected to deliver close to the successes of old. Bolton won the leadership election and reneged on his promise to elevate Kurten to the deputy role. Waters’ campaign, which had received the endorsement of UKIP bête noir Tommy Robinson, was lambasted by UKIP’s remaining MEPs who feared that she could steer the party into waters vacated by the BNP. Bolton, Waters, and Kurten would all eventually leave UKIP to found their own parties.

For Britain

Waters, scorned, would move first, establishing For Britain as an explicitly anti-Islam, anti-immigration outfit. Occupying the space immediately to UKIP’s right, For Britain eschewed the ethnonationalism of the still-extant BNP but was, by virtue of its hardline stance on Islamic immigration, its closest successor. Overt fascism had faded from the radical right. None of the party successors on the part of the political spectrum to the right of the Conservatives believed in anything resembling it or shared an intellectual genealogy.

In the early 2010s, street protest movements had elevated anti-Islam into the fringe’s new lodestar. Foremost amongst these was the English Defence League — the latest guise of football hooliganism’s interweaving with right-wing street protest. The EDL and its successor, the Football Lads Alliance, could count on support from token ethnic minorities with their own axes to grind over sectarian tensions. The outsized role given to ‘based Sikhs’ helped shift the extreme right away from ethnonationalism and into a narrower, more palatable ‘Islamosceptic’ position. These outfits were also often aggressively pro-Israel, which made claims of anti-Semitism far less plausible.

In the EDL, Tommy Robinson and, of all people, Morrissey, Waters found high-profile allies to bolster their movement’s profile. Its primacy on the fringe right was further aided by its absorption of Liberty GB, an older UKIP splinter group associated with the EDL, and an influx of BNP supporters (including oft-assailed Eddy Butler). While Waters’ national profile was small, a broad coalition coalesced around her party, which faced fortuitous circumstances — the reemergence of Islamic terrorism in Britain. Four years after the killing of Lee Rigby, Islamic terrorists had committed attacks in London and Manchester. Despite saccharine pleas not to look back in anger, these incidents focused the mind more than a still historic-high net migration.

Among supporters, there was some expectation of success. The online right had fallen behind their unlikely champion, an Irish lesbian, and the diverse coalition behind her appeared marginally more palatable than the BNP. At the time, a then-significant right-wing influencer/creator insisted to me that the party’s supporters were increasingly optimistic that Waters would find success in 2018’s Lewisham East by-election. In a seat which is today majority-minority, she limped home with 266 votes — placing behind UKIP’s David Kurten. For Britain fared worse in subsequent polls and would wind up in 2022.

UKIP under Bolton and Batten

For Britain’s failure could have vindicated the rejection of counter-Jihad by UKIP’s top brass, if only their party fared any better. Bolton’s tenure as leader never truly got going. After four-and-a-half months, it emerged that Bolton’s lover, Jo Marney, had sent texts claiming that Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry would, among other things, taint the royal family and lead to a black king. After being ousted from UKIP, Bolton would found the OneNation party, a pro-Brexit patriotic outfit which, like his stint at UKIP, never amounted to much.

In their hour of need, UKIP would turn to Gerard Batten, one of their remaining MEPs, to stabilise the ship on an interim basis. Initially, he fared well, balancing the party’s finances and ticking up in the polls amid Brexit-induced spasms in the Conservative Party. Upon securing permanent leadership, Batten immediately pivoted UKIP towards an anti-Islam platform. Calls for a national rape gangs inquiry were ahead of their time, but these stood alongside prison reform which promised to segregate followers of, in Batten’s words, a ‘death cult’ religion. UKIP gradually came to resemble the party that Anne Marie Waters had sought to create, with Tommy Robinson brought on board as an adviser to the leadership. Predictably, this sparked outrage amongst party grandees. Farage prophesied that UKIP would be ‘electorally finished’ if Batten continued down the path which had already hastened the departure of several MEPs.

Ending the firewall against, of all things, Tommy Robinson was a strange decision, but it’s easy to see the appeal for Batten. Robinson’s electoral toxicity had not yet been fully realised, and with Brexit looming, the party desperately needed a platform beyond ensuring that it came to pass — a role much more effectively played by the Conservative Party’s ERG. Batten’s next foray into the transfer market would, even now, prove utterly inexplicable. Online influencers Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan a.k.a. ‘Count Dankula’, and Carl Benjamin a.k.a. ‘Sargon of Akkad’ were unveiled as UKIP members, with the latter two to stand in the 2019 European Parliament elections.

Watson and Meechan may require some introduction for newer readers. Watson, who once kept company with Infowars’ Alex Jones, had built a significant YouTube following through his punditry on the health of Western civilisation in the 2010s. His videos covered the fringe right’s bread-and-butter issues — refugees in Sweden, ‘soy boys’, etc. — and while rather boorish, may even have shaped the younger minds of some readers of this publication. Meechan’s claim to fame was his farcical arrest and £800 fine for grooming his girlfriend’s dog into a Nazi. Carl Benjamin faced criticism from all sides, dogged then as he is now, over the hardly reassuring assertion that he ‘wouldn’t even rape’ Jess Phillips. This was simultaneous to his own battle with the American Alt-Right, debating Richard Spencer during the era of ‘internet bloodsports’ political livestreaming. Spencer, hardly a man with a spotless career but with the talents of an Ivy League humanities postgraduate, ran rings around Benjamin. Sargon’s humiliation was great enough that he declared the foundation of his own political movement and program of self-pedagogy — the ‘Liberalists’ — out of which the Lotus Eaters podcast would eventually emerge. Whatever may have been learned, it is not clear that good judgment is a trait one can develop at the ripe age of 39.

Ostensibly, bringing the nascent online right onside was intended to infuse UKIP with sorely-needed optimism and energy. A more cynical reading is that Batten sought to capture the influencers’ audiences to solidify the party’s anti-Islam credentials. Batten’s political novices were undeterred by a universally negative reaction, sharing in the prevailing optimism that this surprise European election was a great chance to bloody the establishment’s nose.

Any lingering hopes that Batten’s UKIP would have its say were dashed by one of their own. Nigel Farage had walked out over Batten’s rightward turn and established the Brexit Party — a vote for which was an unequivocal affirmation of 2016’s Leave result. From a standing start, this new outfit won 30.5% of the vote compared with UKIP’s 3.2%. Farage’s successful return from exile owes much to this election’s opportune timing and single-issue Brexit focus. Yet it must be underscored that this victory is, to date, the high-water mark for a party to the right of the Conservatives. This result, which trumped UKIP’s strong 2014 showing, takes pride of place in the right’s trophy cabinet. For any doubters, the 2019 European elections truly conferred the mandate of heaven upon Farage.

UKIP after Batten

The writing was on the wall for the Tories and UKIP alike. Boris Johnson replaced Theresa May and won the subsequent General Election, aided by Farage’s decision to scale back campaigning in support of Getting Brexit Done. Regicide was insufficient to arrest UKIP’s decline, however. Dwindling membership and continued internal feuds left Patricia Mountain (who?) with the unenviable task of leading UKIP’s general election campaign. Watching her ‘car crash’ interview on Sky News, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Mountain, who was bottom of UKIP’s South East England list for the European elections. Speaking of a non-white candidate, she said that she ‘thinks he’s Indian’. The damage was done. UKIP’s 2019 manifesto harked back to the pre-referendum days, but inoffensive policies like cutting foreign aid to pay for defence attracted a mere 0.1% of the vote on polling day.

David Kurten, still a London Assembly member, departed in 2020 to found the Heritage Party, busying himself with opposing Covid lockdowns before settling into a religious conservative anti-woke milieu. The Heritage Party is not alone in sabre-rattling for a War on Woke. Erstwhile actor Laurence Fox heads the Reclaim Party, an outfit which won coverage for its staunch opposition to ULEZ. For most of 2023, Reclaim had parliamentary representation, hosting Andrew Bridgen MP between May and December after his expulsion from the Conservative Party for comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. In this sense, it was more successful than Heritage, but neither has since risen to more than by-election rosettes.

UKIP limped on after 2019. An initial revival of ‘libertarian freedom-loving principles’ under amateur koi carp breeder Freddy Vachha (who?) quickly fell away, and the party’s wilderness years became a long, dark night of the soul. Until retirement, Neil Hamilton presided over a party wracked by factionalism. The libertarian old guard struggled against the residual anti-Islam wing — the latter buoyed when ex-BNP members were finally welcomed into the party. After seeing off, among others, Anne-Marie Waters in the 2024 leadership election, Lois Perry formed a coalition with the perennial also-ran English Democrats, before Nick Tenconi assumed power and further tied UKIP’s fate to those of Robinsons, Tommy and Calvin.

The possibility of UKIP (or its splinter movements) mounting a successful challenge to Reform is within a rounding error of zero. Reform now dominates UKIP’s former territory — working-class coastal/northern towns — and has garnered nationwide appeal beyond this. To Reform’s immediate right, UKIP are but one of many contenders; their better brand recognition is insufficient to distinguish them from newer entrants. Its splinters similarly concern themselves with niche issues unlikely to find favour on a national level. To their credit, they are not riven with feuds — Heritage and Reclaim are, in effect, their leaders’ personal fiefdoms. These narrow parties already cater to such small constituencies, and potential fifth columns would gain little from further fractalisation. These hobby horses limp on undeterred in the hope of some distant success.

Resurgent extremism

Britain First

The BNP’s own retreat beyond the margins left stragglers of its own. Jim Dowson, a former Calvinist minister and BNP fundraiser, founded Britain First in 2011. Britain First took the emergent anti-Islam strain, infused it with the trappings of Ulster loyalism, and took it to Facebook. This was distinct from today’s online right in eschewing Catholic Zoomers in favour of lukewarmly Anglican Boomers. Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen fronted viral content which owed more to growing anti-EU sentiment than latent white nationalism — although a suggested ‘clash of civilisations’ found an outlet through marches in search of morality-policing ‘Muslim patrols’. Britain First was a party (though its electoral efforts came to nought), but is best understood as a fellow traveller of the EDL.

Patriotic Alternative

While UKIP’s post-2017 attempts at reinvention frightened party moderates, some on the nascent online right lamented the insufficient radicalism of even Anne Marie Waters. It was well understood by many in these spaces that Tommy Robinson’s brand of nationalism was a wrong-end (and perhaps even state-backed). So too was it suggested that a strict anti-Islam focus was overly lenient, and that all civic conceptions of Britishness would fail to truly reverse the Great Replacement. Those of a similar vintage will recall the emergence of red squirrels as a handy metaphor in communicating this. Of the many hypothetical ethnonationalist parties pitched in sympathetic Telegram groups, Patriotic Alternative (PA) was the only one to gain traction offline.

Founded in 2019 by Mark Collett (the same man who stood trial alongside Nick Griffin), PA offered the ethnonationalist right a real-world vehicle to organise. Former BNP figures like Collett coalesced with the hitherto online right through livestreams and an offline activities programme. The latter was, in effect, ethnonationalist networking. Hikes and stickering sat alongside litter-picking, a twenty-first century iteration of the ‘community action’ pioneered by Tyndall in the 90s.

In both its ideology and approach to activism, PA was the inheritor of Tyndall’s legacy. Activists disregarded Nick Griffin’s avoidance of the ‘three H’s’ and were routinely sentenced for incitement, terror offences, and in one case, attempted murder. Of the incarcerated, the most high-profile was Sam Melia, husband of second-in-command Laura Towler. Melia served just ten months of his two-year sentence (released in the government’s drive to free up prison space), incurred for his role in the Hundred Handers — a decentralised stickering operation which disseminated print-at-home material calling attention to ‘white genocide’. As an openly national socialist movement, the immense scrutiny faced by PA culminated in various exposés from usual suspects HOPE not Hate and the BBC alike. Likewise, the party’s struggle to register with the Electoral Commission has rendered PA as something of a dead end — lamented as a social club by those who departed.

Homeland

The modern fringe ethnonationalist right is wracked by the same divisions as in the twentieth century. If Patriotic Alternative is the heir to Tyndall’s BNP, the splinter Homeland Party owes more to Griffin’s tenure. Founded by Kenny Smith (a former BNP administrator), Homeland set out to be a more ‘sensible’ and electorally viable party than PA, yet its explicit commitment to remigration placed it substantially to Reform’s right. Compared to PA, its online support was driven by ‘comparatively moderate’ figures with wider reach, including Steve Laws and Zoomer Historian. It soon surpassed its parent party’s (admittedly meagre) achievements — boasting Electoral Commission registration and an influx of recruits — and, for a time, attracted support online as a ‘viable’ outfit to Reform’s right.

Reticent to commit to a harder line, Farage had fallen out of favour with these parts of the online right. For those unwilling to give Reform time, Kenny Smith’s firm support of remigration held appeal. Homeland itself was a long-term project — reviving the ladder strategy employed by the NF and BNP whereby local election wins precede parliamentary representation. So too would they engage in community litter-picking, in a ploy to soften the party’s image.

Despite Kenny Smith’s alleged chest tattoo of a tantric good luck charm, Homeland’s hopes were dashed not long after it hit its stride. A feud erupted in 2025, sparked by a Northern Irish branch organiser moonlighting as a ‘femboy’. Among other activists, Steve Laws would exit the party before another row emerged over Smith’s personal conduct. A snapshot of a drunken brawl’s aftermath, showing Smith standing bow-legged alongside the officer resolving the scrap, is the latest entry in a series of compromising photos. Homeland had been more successful than their immediate predecessor, but they were not immune to the same pitfalls which dogged the extreme right for decades.

Final thoughts

It would be trite to say that UKIP’s referendum success sparked an inevitable demise and leave it at that. Inversely, to posit an alternate timeline where Batten didn’t rock the boat and instead kept Farage’s seat warm until May 2019 — thereby unlocking Reform’s purple shiny variant — requires more foresight of Batten than he could muster in our own. UKIP's collapse as it occurred wasn’t priced in, but its abject fate was a consequence of the innumerable unforced errors made after 2016. Pinning UKIP’s collapse on entropy alone elides crucial lessons for the right.

UKIP’s shift to the fringe right accomplished nothing. Of the three thousand-plus candidates to stand for UKIP or its splinter parties after June 2018, none were elected. Immense quantities of time, money, energy, and reputation were expended in creating new parties and pivoting old ones. Batten gambled his career on Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin — their careers have outlasted his own, and we’re worse off for it. Both walked away unscathed, in search of new hosts to feed off (namely, Advance UK and Restore Britain).

UKIP isn’t the only case study in failure that we have to hand. Those of us with long memories can point to the Brexit Party to evidence Farage’s political acumen, but its finest hour came a decade before. Griffin rightly recognised that people would like the BNP better without the periodic outbursts of fascism. He decreased their incidence but could not wholly eliminate them — this tendency was inherent to his party. Farage, campaigning on an issue far less salient than immigration, was able to make the EU synonymous with everything the right despised. Asked ‘Do you want a Reichsadler atop your closed borders?’, voters will respond as expected.

Reform’s proscription of the BNP and other extremist groups is oft-critiqued, but is expedient when one considers how often right-wing parties have been hamstrung by impulsive outbursts of Nazism. In Britain, Adolf Hitler is reviled with good reason — and short of The Greatest Story Never Told and Europa: The Last Battle featuring in an ITV1 Christmas Day double-bill, this isn’t changing. State-funded charities exist to find compromising photos. Journalists prowl parties in search of an immature activist throwing up romans after one Baby Guinness too many. In 2016, a whole generation twigged that progressives call everyone they disagree with nazis. Those whose unforced errors lend credence to these otherwise baseless smears cannot be trusted. Likewise, Adolescence has made room in our national pantheon of scaries: online misogyny is Nazism’s monster under-the-bedfellow. Just as hailing victory has torpedoed past attempts at immigration restriction, solving the crisis of fatherlessness can find more palatable expressions than banning divorce and putting women back in the kitchen.

Latent Nazism and bad-faith actors are just two contributors to the fringe right’s high mortality rate. When UKIP members snubbed Anne Marie Waters, she calculated that there was an untapped constituency crying out for a counter-Jihad party led by an Irish lesbian. History has proven her wrong, as it has for David Kurten, Henry Bolton, Paul Weston, Robert Kilroy-Silk, and other, more forgettable names. Euroscepticism is unique in being a niche battle won through founding a new party. A hypothetical Usury Kiboshing Immediately Party has a ceiling of 3%, and its constituency forms a circular Venn diagram with that of the Gaza independents. Reform has found success by not radicalising itself down unpopular niches, instead remaining a broad-church party united by a popular rallying cry. A charge levelled against Farage is that he can’t handle sharing the limelight, but in truth, Reform is a big-tent party.

Something I often seek to impress upon those who came to the right later than myself is that we’ve never had it so good. Those of a similar vintage will remember the immense sense of optimism which Brexit brought (no doubt engendering many of us to the cause), and the subsequent years of false starts and dashed hopes. In my formative political memories, Brexit plays second fiddle to the Manchester Arena bombing. Like many, I can recall the utter despair. Twenty-two young people had their lives cut short, all because successive governments believed, for some reason, that settling Salafi Libyan refugees would do more good than harm. That millions of people, in response, followed the state directive to sing songs, get along, peace and love — if you had told me then that a right-wing populist party would one day chalk up two hundred polling leads, I’d have shaken your hand off.

This is a bag which must, for the sake of the country, go unfumbled. That those short in the tooth are tempted astray because a couple of young interns are posting BASED things on an old man’s X account is wholly understandable. But history is littered with this sort of thing, and it has never worked. Farage is the only right-wing politician to win a national election, and every success that the right has enjoyed has been under his auspices. Reform is the most-rightward viable party. I hope the good, patriotic constituency of Makerfield avails us this near-miss with Andy Burnham’s Coalition of Chaos. Likewise, I hope the open-minded reader of a fringe persuasion can see where they’ve gone wrong before and take stock.

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

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‘Yeah we just been attacked by someone racially… we just got attacked racially by a white person… yeah literally I just parked up my car to come home and he’s attacked my brother.’

It has been reported elsewhere that Gurpreet went on to tell the 999 operator that:

‘He’s physically attacked my brother, we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban and he’s just attacked my brother. We’re restraining him right now because he’s just attacked my brother and took my brother’s turban off. He also, he’s verbally, he’s verbally attacked my brother racially. I’m not having this as a regular occurrence, I live here, I’m not having this a regular occurrence. He ain’t fighting people, he’s racially attacking people, that’s what he’s doing. Nah, he sees some brown people, that’s what it was.’

As a result of the murder trial, we now know that every single detail of this was false. There was no ‘racial’ attack. Perhaps Gurpreet Digwa believed his brother’s lies and repeated them on the 999 call. But he certainly lied when he claimed to have been present at the scene. At the very least, he should be prosecuted for attempting to pervert the course of justice, and depending on whether Henry’s life might have been saved if police had helped him rather than handcuffed him, unlawful act manslaughter. That this has not yet happened, alongside his previous charges for possession of offensive weapons (and six charges against their father, Moga Singh, for the same offence), is deeply concerning.

More rage will be directed at the police officers who attended the scene. From the bodycam footage we know that when police arrived at the scene, despite being told Henry had ‘a mouthful of blood’, despite Henry’s obvious confusion, despite him saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘I’ve been stabbed’ repeatedly, the police officer responded by saying ‘I don’t think you have mate’, then cuffed and arrested him. Meanwhile, Henry’s killer was left free.

Last night, Jonathan Hinder, a Labour MP who was a police officer until 2022, described the police officers’ behaviour at the scene as ‘unfathomable’ because police ‘have emergency life support training which should be deployed immediately in those circumstances — you should be treating it as a medical emergency if someone is telling you those things repeatedly. And crucially, they are not a threat, so the use of the handcuffs is just impossible to explain.’ Hinder went on to say that ‘the most troubling thing about that video for me was the apparent indifference… the casual nature with which the police officer says “I don’t think you have mate”.’

I spoke this morning with David Spencer, Head of Crime and Justice for Policy Exchange and a former Metropolitan Police Officer. He echoed Hinder’s view, but went on to say that he believes this is a much wider issue of culture and policy than just the individual officers. According to Spencer, ‘many officers are now so petrified of being called a racist that it’s the number one thing in their minds.’

Other police officers agree. One serving officer has told The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson (who will be publishing there, but kindly provided me with the comments) that:

‘For years, officers have been subjected to cultural awareness and DEI training that, in many cases, presents policing as institutionally racist by default. Guest speakers are regularly brought in to discuss their lived experiences and, regardless of individual conduct or professionalism, officers are often left feeling collectively labelled as prejudiced.

Operationally, there are clear differences in scrutiny depending on ethnicity. For example, if an officer stop-searches a person of colour, that interaction may be reviewed within 24 hours, whereas searches involving white individuals are often processed routinely at a later stage.

Many younger officers are now so concerned about allegations of discrimination that they default to the safest option administratively rather than relying on judgement, experience, or common sense. In my view, the decision to handcuff Henry Nowak reflects that environment.

The wider issue is that policing has become too politically influenced. Senior leadership teams have allowed external pressure, ideology, and optics to shape operational policing. Officers are increasingly expected to treat people differently depending on race, religion, sexuality, or perceived vulnerability, rather than applying the law impartially and consistently.’

This is correct. The callous, negligent behaviour of the officers at the scene, and the lies told by Vickram and Gurpreet Digwa are not an aberration within our current system of policing; rather, they are the behaviours we would expect given the incentive structure which has developed since the Macpherson Report in 1999 and escalated since 2020, as ‘anti-racism’ has become dominant.

It is important to remember that for the British state, racism is something which doesn’t happen to the white British. As Laurie Wastell and I wrote for Pimlico Journal, the Starmer Government’s 2026 paper on ‘social cohesion’, Protecting What Matters, gives examples of Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Roma as victims of ‘hate crimes’, but has not a word for the Pakistani rape gangs targeting white English girls, or the white victims of racially-motivated murders, such as Richard Everitt and Kriss Donald.

So ‘anti-racism’ — in this sense — must inherently mean weighing the scales in favour of ethnic minorities and against the white British. As a part of ‘anti-racist’ policing culture, police forces have produced guidelines and rules and begun a new wave of indoctrination training for officers.

Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary, the police force responsible for Henry Nowak’s arrest in Southampton, produced a ‘Race Action Plan 2024-26’. The Plan’s introduction states that:

The murder of George Floyd by serving police officers in the USA in 2020 was a pivotal moment for policing in the UK, driving the need for real change. Whilst this tragic event happened in another country, policing across the UK has over many years had a strained relationship with some communities.

This obsession with the death of career criminal George Floyd, thousands of miles away, is both odd and malignant because it has evidently imbued our police with a moral fervour to ‘solve’ another country’s problem by changing how we police.

The plan itself is remarkably contradictory. It states that ‘we will protect all of our communities’, before going on to specify that ‘we will pursue offenders and deal with offences that cause the most harm to our ethnic minority communities’, with no mention of those crimes which harm the majority population. Thus, the system shifts to being more concerned by crimes against (or claims of crimes against) ethnic minorities than against the white British majority.

This is also evident in the plan’s ‘commitments’ which include:

• Zero tolerance of racism and ensuring Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary (HIOWC) is anti-racist in all it does.

• Understanding and reducing our disproportionality using a reform or explain approach.

• Understanding the impact, trauma and history of policing ethnic minority communities.

• Improving outcomes and support for ethnic minority victims of crime.

Each of these commitments had a role to play in Henry Nowak’s seemingly inexplicable arrest. Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary’s ‘zero tolerance of racism’, and being ‘anti-racist’ means that claims like Gurpreet Digwa’s — of being ‘attacked racially by a white person’ — must be treated with the utmost seriousness. ‘Reducing our disproportionality’ means arresting fewer black and brown people, and relatively more white people.

Indeed, Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary now run a training programme, ‘Inclusion Matters’, ‘mandatory for all staff’, which they proudly state has resulted in ‘race disproportionality in stop and search’ being ‘nearly halved in the force area’.

In practice, this means arriving at scenes where a white boy is lying on the ground saying he’s been stabbed, and a Sikh man is standing nearby with a visible scabbard at his waist, and arresting the white victim while not bothering to cuff or even search his non-white killer.

Similarly, ‘understanding the impact, trauma and history of policing ethnic minority communities’ and ‘improving outcomes and support for ethnic minority victims of crime’ both lead to exactly these events. Soft-touch policing for ‘ethnic minority communities’, an unwillingness to arrest, and a tendency to believe what the judge called their ‘wicked lies’.

The result of all these policies, all this mandatory training is that the police officers in this case behaved exactly as the system demands. They believed the claim of racism. Believed the brown man. Treated an allegation of racism as more important than one of stabbing. Told the white victim he hadn’t been stabbed. Cuffed and arrested him. Left the brown killer free. This is what ‘anti-racism’ means in practice — anti-white and anti-justice.

It’s not surprising. People respond to incentives. And the career incentives for a police officer in Hampshire, or elsewhere in the country, are to care disproportionately about claims of racism by ethnic minorities, avoid searching ethnic minorities and arrest relatively more White British people.

The same incentives apply to the family. The Digwa family knew the magic incantations to summon the police on their side. Outraged claims of racism ensured that officers were primed to treat Henry Nowak as the aggressor. Indeed the Digwa family seem to have been so confident in the state’s support that they believed there was a chance of their murderous son avoiding justice.

Gurpreet Digwa lied on the 999 call. His mother hid the knife. The father’s complicity is somewhat less clear. But the shape of their behaviour is obvious — they lied to the police and did nothing to help Henry Nowak as he drowned in his own blood, because they cared more about their clan loyalty than justice, or the life of a white boy. Even at his sentencing, Digwa’s family were shouting about ‘racism’ — by which they presumably meant their murderous relative being sent down for his crime.

We can not share a society with people like this.

The regime will hope to bury this case in a lengthy IOPC investigation and to pile all the blame on the Digwa family and the individual police officers. But we must not allow that. As Farage said this morning, ‘the public must have confidence that everyone is treated equally before the law’. That confidence does not exist because British policing no longer treats everyone equally before the law. Cases like Henry’s will happen again and again.

As Nigel Farage also said, ‘I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.’ He is right. We must until the poison of anti-racist, anti-White culture is expunged from our police.

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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The origins of the concept are older, dating back the early 2000s and what Sean Gabb referred to as the ‘Enemy Class’. According to Gabb, the Enemy Class ‘exists in and around the public sector’ and comprises ‘the great majority of those administrators, lawyers, experts, educators, and media people whose living is connected with the State.’ Gabb’s libertarianism colours his particular description of the phenomenon, but his identification of a broader extra-governmental left wing political infrastructure holds true even if one wishes to pursue different ends. Since 2001, this class has only expanded in power and influence — with jobs aplenty for the boys (and girls). Others have grasped at a similar diagnosis, including Curtis Yarvin in the American context and, latterly, Dominic Cummings.

Many have mistakenly thought of the Blob as a conspiracy. It is far more durable than mere conspiracy. To coordinate a conspiracy would require secrecy and discipline, whereas the Blob operates principally on shared assumptions, incentives, and ideologies. This is why it has been effective. Beyond a shared professional sphere, they very naturally share habits, mores, lifestyles and so on. While coordination can and does happen, with the same names and funders popping up again and again on a myriad of issues, it requires no more than the same types of people being drawn into their areas of influence. ‘Class’ is a useful framework here, and throughout history, socioeconomic classes have been made, remade and ultimately dissolved by state action. Thankfully for us, dissolving our ‘Enemy Class’ insinuates nothing of the horrors of de-kulakisation — but simply the removal of state patronage and access to influence from a group that does little but gum up the legislative process and ensure that the state remains captured towards their particular political ends.

The narrower formulation of the Blob as merely the Civil Service is insufficient. The Blob is much bigger than that. The creation of a depoliticised regulatory state under Thatcher was expanded from the economic domain to the straightforwardly political under Tony Blair. These two great expulsions of power from elected politicians and the formal civil service that ostensibly serves them creates a parallel quasi-state on top of our existing constitution. Around this new constellation of regulators and arms-length bodies grew a fungal orchard of charities and NGOs, often partially funded by the public purse, which sought to influence policymaking from outside of the normal political process. This has been perhaps the left’s greatest victory in the past half century. When a minister makes a statement, it is obviously political, and is therefore treated with some incredulity. Yet a position laundered through civil society organisations, media, and consultations appears like a neutral expert opinion.

What developed under Blair was solidified under Cameron, whose ‘Big Society’ agenda sought to rebuild civil infrastructure to allow the retreat of the state from certain areas of life in a recognisably conservative impulse towards the establishment of ‘little platoons’. Naturally, though, the types of people who sought careers in the Big Society were not Burkeans, but leftists, and thus Cameron’s project only allowed his enemies to flourish all the more.

This is why Herbalis’s thick formulation remains so useful. The Blob is not merely the civil service resisting elected politicians. It is the whole environment in which certain ideas become embedded so deeply that they cease to appear ideological at all. It is the machinery by which one class’s assumptions are converted into administrative norms, charitable purposes, legal obligations, and public-sector best practice.

The charity and NGO sector is central to this apparatus. It supplies the system with its moral language. Not only that, but it actively participates in the political process, engaging with and often contracted by the state, but formally sitting apart from it. A government that disagrees with a department is playing politics. A government that tackles a charity is accused of cruelty.

The distinction between state and civil society is perhaps obsolete. The old distinction assumed civil society exists outside the state, or as a counterweight to it. This may have been true in the past, when it consisted of things like local churches or clubs. It is hopelessly inadequate to describe modern professional NGOs. These are not organic expressions of local civic life. They are funded by large foundations and by the state itself, and are now an integral part of every stage in the legislative process. They are staffed by the same class of left-wing graduates that staffs the civil service — in fact, it is entirely typical for individuals to move back and forth seamlessly across the supposed divide throughout the course of a career. Identifying clearly where the state ends and civil society begins is now an almost impossible task.

Our report will begin to untangle which particular organisations play an outsized obstructive role in our governance. This becomes more transparent when one follows the money. The data is, unfortunately, fragmented. It is scattered across GrantNav databases, Charity Commission financial statements, procurement documents, and other such places. But piecing these together begins to uncover the foundations of this component. Some of the most influential charities are not simply voluntary organisations, but connected nodes of a professional political advocacy platform.

Of course, many charities are perfectly innocent, and some provide valuable services. However, all too often, the moral authority and tax advantages conferred by charitable status are used by these organisations to build a permanent infrastructure for demonstrably political activity.

We have seen this perhaps most clearly in migration and asylum policy. There are charities in this space that genuinely provide services (such as helplines) to people in need. However, many others ‘help’ their beneficiaries not through provision of direct aid but through attempts to influence government policy, including the managing of persistent pressure campaigns, the domination of media narratives, and even bringing litigation against the state itself. Often, the same organisation will do both. A charity might receive public money to provide the state a service, only to turn around and take that very same arm of the state to court to block a policy.

The appearance of political activity can be obscured when numerous smaller organisations share common funders. These organisations will often appear as co-signatories in open letters denouncing this or that policy, or may work together in various other ways. Taken individually, each charity might seem relatively benign, its influence minimal. But understood as a whole, they form a vast infrastructure of influence not too dissimilar from the business cartels of old.

Much of this will be well-known to readers who have been in or around the ‘anon’ sphere since Herbalis wrote the original essay. Indeed, many such people now have the ear of various political leaders. Nevertheless, the current understanding of the enemy as a force within the state de jure is, whilst an improvement on previous interpretations which failed to look past elected politicians themselves, insufficient to address the problem. It is crucial that the right in and approaching Westminster develop the language to oppose it. So far, it has still been far more comfortable talking about civil servants, whose ‘officialdom’ has been a periodic target in British political discourse since the late 19th century. Those who will form the next government must become comfortable talking about the organised interests that surround, pressure, brief, sue, train, advise, and morally discipline the state. The restoration of democratic control of policymaking by Parliament is once again the central plank of this pitch.

In many areas, these external bodies are just as important as the officials themselves. They create the atmosphere in which policy is made. They define the acceptable vocabulary. They determine which experts count. They supply the human-interest story to the journalist, the briefing note to the MP, the witness to the select committee, the claimant to the lawyer, and the stakeholder response to the department.

The result is that a minister trying to change policy does not merely encounter administrative inertia. He encounters an entire ecosystem of resistance. If he reforms the asylum system, the refugee charities are ready. If he reforms policing, the activist lawyers are ready. If he reforms planning, the environmental NGOs are ready. If he reforms welfare, the poverty lobby is ready. If he reforms equality law, the human rights groups are ready. Before the policy has even been announced, the arguments against it already exist. The legal grounds have been explored. The journalists have their contacts. The parliamentary allies have their lines. The consultation responses can be mobilised. The Blob is not powerful because it is centrally commanded; it is powerful because it is permanently prepared, just as the Hydra of British trade unions were to go on strike for unsustainable pay increases in another moment of national ungovernability.

This goes some way to explain why this part of the Blob is so difficult to defeat. Unlike the trade unions, the class of the Blob rarely appears self-interested. Rather, it appeals to virtue. Of course it would never say, ‘We wish to preserve our influence, and our cushy jobs that go along with it.’ It says, ‘We are protecting vulnerable people.’ It does not say, ‘We are imposing our politics.’ It says, ‘We are following the evidence.’ It does not say, ‘We are obstructing the elected government.’ It says, ‘We are defending the rule of law.’ It mixes the good with the political, the charitable with the ideological, the expert with the activist, and the lawful with the obstructive.

This is where Gabb’s Enemy Class becomes relevant again. His phrase was harsh, but evocative: a class of people whose living, status, and identity were bound up with a state and its surrounding institutions that are fundamentally hostile to our politics and to the national interest. Since the early 2000s, that class has only gotten stronger. The result is that the ideas and agenda of the right is consistently deprived of public legitimacy. The citizen who wants immigration control is political. The charity that opposes immigration control is humanitarian. The voter who wants cheaper energy is selfish. The NGO director that wants Net Zero is an expert. The minister who wants to build is reckless. The campaign group that stops him is defending nature.

Over time, this produces a profound distortion in democratic government. Elections can change ministers, but they do not necessarily change the operating system. The civil servants and third sector workers remain, their institutional knowledge honed by decades of experience. A new government arrives and discovers that it controls the formal levers of power, but not the ecosystem through which power is interpreted and applied.

This is why we took it upon ourselves to map some of this network. We believe we have shone a light on an aspect of power, hidden in plain sight, that exercises enormous influence but is as yet unknown to most. The Blob survives because it is dispersed. No single grant or judicial review reveals the picture. The pattern emerges only when all pieces are taken together to illuminate the network as a whole.

Once seen, the central question becomes impossible to avoid. Why should democratically elected governments fund their own obstruction? Why should charitable privileges be available to bodies whose primary purpose is political campaigning? Why should we allow organisations that benefit from the standing and legitimacy conferred by public money and large grants to consistently shape public policy? Why should the public be unable to see the ways these special interests are connected?

Some might take this as an argument to abolish all charities — it is not. Charities can be a healthy part of a democratic state. We need organisations that can intervene in areas the state does not or should not interfere with. But precisely because these things matter, they should not be confused with professionalised political activism. Charity should mean something more specific than the pursuit of ideological goals by tax-privileged institutions. Public benefit should mean something more concrete than agreement with elite moral fashion.

The reform required is therefore one of boundaries. Service delivery should be distinguished from advocacy. Public money should be ring-fenced for the purpose for which it is granted. Charitable status should depend on a dominant charitable purpose, not on a political mission expressed in charitable language. The Charity Commission should not become a ministerial weapon, but it should once again become a serious guardian of the line between charity and politics. Judicial review should remain available to those directly affected by unlawful state action, but repeat institutional litigation by campaigning NGOs should be treated as the political activity it often is.

Above all, government needs to recover the habit of governing. It must stop pretending that every body calling itself independent is neutral, that every charity is disinterested, that every consultation response is expertise, and that every legal challenge is merely the rule of law in action. A government that wants to reform the country must understand the forces arranged against reform. It must know who funds them, who staffs them, who amplifies them, who litigates for them, and how they move through the state.

The Blob’s greatest strength has always been its ability to describe itself as something other than power. It is always accountability, process, or some other morally charged, fluffy term. The first task is therefore to name it accurately.

Herbalis and Gabb paved the way with their descriptions of the sociology and personality of the Blob. What is needed now is the institutional map. Any government that wishes to rule, and not merely occupy office, must begin by seeing it whole. It must understand where opposition will come from, and how. This is the first and greatest task of truly governing. There is no point in having whatever policy on immigration, crime, or the economy if this is not dealt with. A truly radical governing platform will only be defeated in detail by the Blob. It is one of the most monumental tasks any government will have ever faced. Only by being ready for this battle can anything else be achieved.

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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Mr Justice Turner of the Crown Court accepted that Calocane’s psychosis had reduced his culpability sufficiently for the prosecution to accept pleas of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. He then said, ‘But all other things are not equal. I consider that, regardless of the level of your personal responsibility, you were and remain dangerous.’ The prosecution’s own psychiatric expert, Professor Blackwood, had also established that ‘there is a significant risk to members of the public of serious harm occasioned by the commission of further offences if his psychosis is not appropriately treated’, and that how complete any recovery might be was not known.

The evidence that was used to argue for leniency could equally justify a case for indefinite caution — the court, in fact, accepted both. The sentencing framework, however, had no language for holding the two conclusions at once. The hospital order removed the case from the criminal sentencing framework, placing the public protection problem in the hands of a different institution on different terms.

Calocane’s case exposes the contradiction in stark terms, but it is by no means an isolated example. In R v Gomez [2025] EWCA Crim 342, this contradiction appeared again within the ordinary adult sentencing framework itself. A Crown Court judge treated ADHD, anxiety and depression as mitigation for an offender with fourteen convictions for twenty-two offences, including a previous sentence for GBH with intent. Despite a sustained knife attack on an intimate partner, strangulation, breach of a restraining order and a clear pattern of escalating violence, no dangerousness finding was made and no extended sentence imposed. The Solicitor General referred the sentence as unduly lenient, and the Court of Appeal increased it from four years to five — but only because he thought the offence itself deserved greater punishment, and not because he thought the offender posed an ongoing danger to the public. The Court accepted that he had calmed down, to a degree, in custody and was engaging more constructively with the prison regime.

This is obviously not the same as concluding that the underlying conditions had disappeared, or that the disposition that they produced had fundamentally changed. At most, the evidence suggested that the risks may have been temporarily lower and better managed in a tightly controlled institutional environment. If the conditions were serious enough to reduce culpability at the time of offence, the framework provides no account of when or why they stop mattering for public protection.

Stories such as these baffle the public and have eroded trust in the justice system in record time. Cases like these are maddening, and faith in the system declines with every new example. Understanding how this could possibly happen requires a brief detour into how sentencing works. Courts proceed in stages. First, they assess the seriousness of the offence (the harm caused and the offender's culpability) to reach a starting point. Second, they adjust that starting point using aggravating factors, which push the sentence up, and mitigating factors, which push it down. Mental disorder, cognitive impairment, and emotional dysregulation enter at the second stage. They enter as mitigations: diminished capacity, diminished blameworthiness, lighter sentence. This describes the default pathway for adult offenders — cases involving youth or extreme mental illness follow different routes, as discussed elsewhere in this article.

Hang on, though. An offender with low impulse control, poor emotional regulation, a personality disorder, or a cognitive profile that impairs their capacity to reason about consequences is — by the very characteristics the framework treats as mitigating — less likely to be deterred by punishment, less amenable to rehabilitation, and more likely to reoffend. If sentencing is supposed to protect the public, shouldn’t these characteristics push the sentence up rather than down?

The answer, of course, is yes. On paper, the current sentencing framework should be able to address these concerns; instead, such factors are taken as mitigating — chiefly due to a lack of clarity in the guidelines.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 listed five purposes of sentencing — now restated virtually unchanged in section 57 of the Sentencing Act 2020 — punishment, crime reduction, rehabilitation, public protection, and reparation. It does so without ranking them or explaining how to resolve conflicts between them. Public protection is the Cinderella of this framework: officially invited, consistently side-lined. The five purposes pull against each other constantly. The guidelines built on this foundation inherit the contradiction without resolving it. Pair this with the tendency amongst the establishment to view mental health conditions as grounds for endless patience and conferring irreproachable victimhood on their sufferers (or, as Neil O’Brien has discussed, the worrying tendency to avoid addressing dangers posed by individuals with mental health conditions in particular communities because of ‘anti-racist’ concerns), and we have a recipe for incredible injustice and massive risk to public safety.

The public has been outraged by this state of affairs for years now, and correctly identifies it as rotten to the core. Look at the close parallel offered in the youth justice system last week in the grim case at Southampton Crown Court that met with furore. Judge Nicholas Rowland sentenced three teenage boys — convicted of gang-raping two schoolgirls on separate occasions, filming both attacks, using a knife in the second — to youth rehabilitation orders. He cited their low IQs, ADHD, anxiety, and limited understanding of consent. He told them: ‘I have to think how likely you are to do serious things again, and I need to make sure you do not do serious things again in the future.’ He then sent them home. The characteristics he treated as grounds for leniency are precisely the characteristics any sensible criminologist would identify as predictors of serious reoffending. The judge saw the public protection problem. The framework gave him no clear route from recognising the danger to choosing to do something about it. The Youth Sentencing framework Judge Rowland was obliged to apply does not include the five-purpose structure that governs adult sentencing. Its primary aim is to prevent reoffending. Even where prevention of reoffending is the stated primary aim, the framework provided no mechanism for translating acknowledged risk into protection measures.

North of the border, the Scottish Sentencing Council introduced guidelines in January 2022, making rehabilitation the primary consideration for all offenders under twenty-five, on the grounds that the human brain is not fully mature until the mid-twenties — despite, according to critics of the proposal, a majority of consultation respondents rejecting it. In April 2023, a Scottish judge sentenced Sean Hogg to 270 hours of community service for repeatedly raping a thirteen-year-old, saying an adult over twenty-five would have received four to five years. The brain immaturity which is used to justify leniency is the same brain immaturity that any risk assessment would flag as an aggravating factor. This absurdity also met with derision among much of the Scottish public.

The most straightforward path to restoring public faith in the sentencing system would be to clear the ambiguity left in the 2003 Act and give public protection real and proper consideration.

There is a serious objection to this approach, and it deserves a proper hearing. Retributive justice requires that we sentence people for what they did, not what they might do. Reducing a sentence for reduced culpability is not merely permissible but required, however dangerous the person may be, so long as retribution is the primary consideration in sentencing. A system that sentences people for anticipated future acts has ceased, in any meaningful sense, to be sentencing at all.

That objection is entirely correct within a purely desert-based framework. It is available only to those prepared to accept its full implications: that public protection is simply not a purpose of sentencing. Retributive constraints are available only to those who accept public that public protection has no place in sentencing at all. The framework’s architects destroyed that answer the moment they wrote public protection onto the statutory list. You cannot invoke retributive constraints against the risk argument while simultaneously claiming public protection as a co-equal statutory purpose. The framework wants both. It provides no honest mechanism for having both. That is a failure of design.

Parliament has already accepted, in limited contexts, that desert and protection are distinct questions requiring distinct answers. Extended Determinate Sentences, introduced in 2012, allow courts to set a custodial term on desert grounds alongside an extended licence period of up to eight years, with release gated on a Parole Board finding that continued confinement remains necessary for public protection. Sentences of Particular Concern apply a similar structure to terrorism and the most serious child sexual offences. Parliament’s instinct in both cases was right.

But both tools require a formal dangerousness finding and are triggered by offence type – not by the scenario where mental health evidence simultaneously reduces culpability and elevates risk. And when that evidence produces a hospital order rather than a custodial sentence (as in Calocane’s case), the dangerous offender provisions are bypassed altogether. The Mental Health Act route removes the case from the sentencing framework entirely. The Sentencing Act 2020 disapplies the five-purposes framework where a hospital order is made — handing the protection question to the Mental Health Act provisions and ultimately the Mental Health Tribunal which operates on different principles and a different timetable. The cases where the problems of this inversion are most acute are, by design, the cases where the tools made available by Parliament are unavailable.

What is stopping us from taking a broader approach? Imprisonment for Public Protection, introduced by the same 2003 Act, was this logic in statutory form: a desert tariff, then an indeterminate tail, released only when the Parole Board was satisfied the risk was manageable. Only a few hundred cases per year were anticipated. By the time of abolition in 2012, it had been imposed on 8,711 people. As of September 2024, 1,095 had still never been released. Its architect, David Blunkett, expressed his own regret over this many years ago.

IPP was not wrong in principle. It failed on two specific counts. First, the indeterminate tail: a reviewable, fixed-term protection measure would have been more legitimate and more defensible. Second, and more fundamentally, the state demanded prisoners demonstrate their safety and then denied them the means of doing so. The courts looked dimly on that – even while comparable systems elsewhere in Europe survived legal challenges by offering greater therapeutic support. England built none of this. It announced a purpose and declined to fund it. We have been allergic to serious institutional investment in the detention and treatment of dangerous people since Enoch Powell began to close the Victorian asylums in the 1960s.

Reform then requires three things. First, rank the purposes of sentencing: desert primary, protection a close second but structurally separate, rehabilitation legitimate, incapable of overriding the primary purposes. Second, prune the mitigation framework accordingly. A condition that reduces moral blameworthiness operates at the culpability stage. At the protection stage, the same condition may justify significantly longer detention than the desert element alone. The characteristics that reduce culpability should actively trigger the protection measure, not merely excuse the crime. Finally, close the gap that EDS and SOPC leave open: the protection element must be available in cases where the mental health route has reduced the charge category or produced a hospital order, precisely the cases where the evidence of ongoing risk is most acute. But the deeper reform is not merely to plug gaps in an existing structure. It is to make the two-track principle universal: wherever diminished capacity is accepted as a mitigation, the same evidence must be assessed for its risk implications, and where it crosses the dangerousness threshold, a protection measure must follow, regardless of the offence category that mitigation helped reduce.

This requires investment that successive governments have refused to make: specialist settings, forensic risk review, a genuine institutional obligation to work toward release. And the burden at each review must sit with the state – to prove the risk remains unacceptable – not with the prisoner to prove they are safe.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 built a framework on a contradiction it declined to resolve. The same characteristics that reduce culpability elevate risk; the framework registers one and is blind to the other. The system can recognise diminished culpability. It can also recognise danger to the public. It cannot do both at the same time. Ian Coates, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber were killed because that failure persisted. They will not be the last.

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

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Former Education Secretary Michael Gove alluded to this in response, stating that ‘the current curriculum has more British content’ than the 60% number talked of by James Orr when referring to exam requirements. The problem lies not necessarily with what is being taught, but how it is being taught, which Braverman calls ‘a progressive lens’. Schools up and down the country are all taught about the things Braverman thinks Britain should take pride in. But some school teachers will present the facts of our heritage with pride and love, whilst others will frame everything around an axis of racial resentment, gender politics and class warfare — with half-truths spun towards those ends.

To Braverman’s credit, she identifies that many issues stem from the curriculum being too flexible, allowing for left-wing teachers to insert their bias into otherwise benign lessons. The lessons which many parents find divisive, whether that is in History, PSHE or in other non-core subjects, make their way into the classroom through said flexibility. This either comes from loose, non-statutory guidelines or very open-ended objectives set out by the National Curriculum. PSHE, for example, is not even a statutory subject and only has a single line in reference to it in the Key Stages 1 and 2 framework.

The truth is that much of what is taught is not set by the state, or independently generated by teachers, but by private scheme providers. A handful of companies have become seen as the default option which schools pay to provide their services (such as digital resources, planning documents and printouts). An argument can be made for these companies being an example of entrepreneurial success, but they nevertheless hold huge, unaccountable power over what is taught in our schools.

It is possible to achieve greater results towards a patriotic education system by changing the workflow for teachers, rather than by expanding and shifting statutory and non-statutory requirements. Given the competing budgetary demands — tax cuts, increased defence commitments, public services and infrastructure spending — for a Reform government in the next Parliament, it will be difficult for Education to receive much serious attention at all in either resources or political bandwidth. Any improvements to schooling will have to come at the margins.

The Cost of the Lesson Plans System Currently in Place

Of a Department for Education (DfE) core schools budget of £64.8bn for 2025/2026, Learning Resources (not ICT equipment) and Educational Learning Resources combined account for around 2.5% to 4%, totalling between £1.62bn and £2.59bn. Almost all of this goes towards critical necessities for schools such as books, pencils and other stationery supplies. It is difficult to quantify what percentage of this is spent on schemes on average, but looking at the subscription pricing of a number of commercial curriculum providers could suggest that anywhere between £30m and £300m is spent nationally by DfE on private educational schemes per annum.

That is a tiny cost vis-à-vis the whole budget, yet it is still tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds a year going from taxpayers to private companies. In many cases, these companies act as oligopolies, with low marginal costs for expansion of use and guaranteed consumers in the form of schools made comfortable with a de facto standardised format. One example is phonics, where, in spite of dozens of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) systems being validated, only a handful of companies dominate the market. The same story is seen in almost every subject across our education system.

Since these subscriptions are funded from individual schools’ general budgets via the local authority — or in the case of Academies, from the General Annual Grant (GAG) — this leads to duplicate spending in individual licensing agreements across trusts and local authorities. Large academy trusts are at an advantage in this regard as they can centralise their resource budgets, leading to lower costs per pupil. This is indicative of what a state-led policy response should look like.

To cut this funding would either:

1. Require a public alternative to be built beforehand.

2. Require teachers and schools to be reskilled as independent producers of their own lesson content.

The former option would be much more frictionless and could provide the changes which voters want to see in education.

The Status Quo in Practice

Schools pay private companies to provide teaching resources and lesson plans for a variety of reasons. Standardising lesson formats across a school or Key Stage helps children become comfortable with a rhythm of teaching. They broadly ease the burden on teachers and provide clarity and support where knowledge gaps may exist for teachers. Yet despite teachers’ self-reporting curriculum schemes as primarily assisting with workload, 84% of teachers do not feel that they can complete their assigned workload during contracted hours. As the National Education Union put it in their report on the impact of standardised curricula, ‘Teachers who use standardised curriculum packages (SCP) reported no better workload than those who don’t, whilst also reporting having less of a say over what is taught, and how it is taught. In other words, these packages relate to reduced teacher autonomy, for no meaningful workload gains.’

Education is increasingly a standardised, digital operation — besides bespoke lessons which will always require unique physical resources for engagement with children. Working from the premise that it is inevitable that education is heading in this direction, it is logical to conclude that the state should have a greater say in how lessons are standardised. That way, through consultation and active dialogue with school leaders and classroom teachers, the right balance between teacher autonomy and standardisation can be reached, which takes these issues into account.

There are teachers every year who create great lesson resources for their students, irrespective of what alternative might exist to exploit instead. An opportunity exists to give schools across the country an easy way of sharing their lesson plans. After all, they teach the same national curriculum, teachers would just have to determine whether a resource is right for their students and the requirements set by the school (which they already do).

The Proposal

A potential solution to all of the issues outlined could be a combination of democratisation and centralisation.

Democratisation — A National Resource Forum

A national forum system where schools can upload and share their versions of lesson resources with other schools could become a self-perpetuating system with very little overhead costs. Such a system could be created entirely by the Civil Service or by the state approaching Google, Microsoft, or another company.

The potential exists for this internal central database to essentially make private scheme provision redundant. A rating and comments system could exist so teachers can see which resources were well regarded by other schools, with the ability to filter files by subject, topic, year group, or exact lines from the National Curriculum the resource is intended for. Creating a market system without financial incentives could encourage schools to allow their teachers more autonomy to create curated resources. Teachers have fun creating their own lesson materials when given the opportunity. It feels good to have personal ownership of lessons, and providing an accessible outlet to share that with other teachers and schools could compound that fulfilment.

To the ends of the ‘Patriotic Education’ desired by Reform, this in isolation raises the challenge of the left-wing preferences of teachers. Without a wider remit to begin to change the nature of school staffing, reforms can only operate at the margins. Working within these constraints, the careful selection of the assessment metrics for resources in value-subjective disciplines provides a ‘nudge’ to teacher behaviour without the extra noise of introducing ‘anti-woke’ statutory guidelines. One example of such a metric could be ‘well-balanced interpretations’. Teachers would have subtle incentives to play along.

Centralisation — A National Scheme Provider

If the goal is ultimately to replace the role the aforementioned private resource/scheme providers play in our education system, it would be wise for the state to provide a baseline option for schools to work with. Besides some subjects which require specialised digital and physical resources, and may be more appropriately produced by private companies, there is no reason to believe the state should not be more directly involved in the provision of lesson content.

In a small way, the state already began this process with the creation of Oak National Academy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organisation provides free educational resources for pupils aged from 4 to 16. In 2023, around 25% of secondary school teachers and around 17% of primary or special school teachers used Oak National Academy. For some perspective, note how much pushback the government received for turning it into an independent public body. The British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), which represents commercial curriculum agencies, called the move an ‘unlawful state subsidy’ which threatened ‘market collapse’ and sought judicial review to prevent its continued existence. Oak National Academy currently represents only a supplementary tool, but this could be expanded into a legitimate alternative to commercial schemes, which schools are otherwise comfortable with and used to.

Enabling the state learning resources scheme to become the default source of lesson planning would enable ministers to exercise more sensitive handling of questions of ‘bias’ along the lines of a ‘well-balanced’ or ‘knowledge-based’ curriculum. Most teachers engage simply with what is directly in front of them.

What would it cost?

With funds currently being funnelled to private companies, it is possible in the short term for a version of the policy described to be cost-neutral. Allocation of this portion of school budgets would have to be redirected in a targeted way to avoid misinformation and paranoia regarding ‘budget cuts’ to schools.

In the medium-long term, it will save money by being a static archive of lesson content and eliminating duplicate spending by schools to buy the same services. Funds which would otherwise be going to commercial scheme providers year on year could be used to continually update and replenish content, with costs-per-pupil lowered. This would save taxpayer money leaking out for private (often international) profit to renew license access to mostly recycled, copyright material.

The Political Equation

Returning to the primary motive of Education Policy as seen in Reform UK, it is important to evaluate the proposal from a political or ideological perspective and to assess its efficacy through this lens.

A poll of National Education Union (NEU) members from December 2025 found that 23% supported the Green Party and 18% supported the Labour Party. At the 2024 General Election, 60% voted Labour and 10% voted Green. Union membership inherently skews the result, but it is nevertheless indicative of the political sensibilities of teachers generally.

People who work in the public sector, union members, young women and mothers all tend to be more liberal or left-wing. However, rarely does this express itself as overt or intentional partisanship in workplaces. Most people are not political in that way, but they often incidentally push their politics by ingrained assumptions and general sensibilities. Trying to impose an explicitly ‘right-wing’ curriculum will only radicalise people who would otherwise be content to teach lessons in the easiest, most efficient way possible, which gets the best out of every pupil.

To achieve in this environment an expression of the national curriculum which right-wing voters and politicians would be happy with may seem impossible, but it is not. Tweaks could be made to the National Curriculum, like removing certain statutory lines or changing non-statutory nudges, but otherwise the real change will arrive through the promotion of a state option — one which is not mandatory but one for which adoption is incentivised.

Nationalisation of specific companies and their absorption into Oak National Academy could also increase the incentives to opt in. This would be entirely feasible given the scale of the DfE budget and the relatively small size of these companies. Making the state-provided option the most appealing one for quality of service and resources would naturally improve voluntary adoption, and with it, apathy towards content which would otherwise be deemed ‘right wing’. An argument could be made for BBC Bitesize to be taken into ministerial control under the same premise, especially given how often it is used by educators.

Likewise, taking Britain’s five exam boards into a single public body would accomplish a similar outcome. Currently, they are outside of governmental control but have huge influence on what topics are taught nationwide through the papers they write and the questions they set (with discretion granted to them by the National Curriculum). The DfE (and ultimately the Secretary of State for Education) could control this aspect of education, without heavy intervention in the minutiae of day-to-day lessons.

Closing thoughts

Implementing some or all of these would put school leaders and teachers in a position in which they are encouraged to create their own resources, and therefore be more accountable for what turns up within their lessons, whilst also providing them a helpful, state-approved default baseline to build upon and work from. For the parts of our education system which would come under greater control from Whitehall, the same story emerges.

There are real concerns about ‘standardisation’ stripping the soul out of education in Britain. A bipartisan consensus could be reached on a new formulation for teacher autonomy, one in which what is taught in schools is more directly decided by parents and voters. An education system which ensures that lesson content is more the responsibility of the teacher and state, rather than the purview of private companies relied on for ease, is one which Reform UK could build for mutual benefit to teachers across the country.

All of this would be a legitimate push for government efficiency and waste in the public sector. It could be argued along the lines of restoring democratic accountability that voters should have a say in what is being taught to their children. The justification does not have to be distinctly right-wing in character, even if the intended outcome is.

If you remove the incentives and are subtle in your approach, you can achieve far more change than crashing into your ideological enemies, demanding explicit surrender — as most governments, especially those as preoccupied as the next, may not be able to incur the costs of such an approach. Where successes can certainly be found is quietly creating a few barriers for ‘woke’ teaching, whilst also saving the taxpayer some money. You can get a patriotic education system, one which truly lives up to the statutory requirement found in the Key Stage 1 and 2 framework document of ‘increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage’.

It will be hard to argue against any of what has been proposed without sounding like a very partisan, ideologically-obsessed individual more concerned about politics than educational standards. Otherwise, it is Reform UK’s Shadow Education and Skills Secretary who will be characterised as such.

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

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Manchester has certainly changed over the last two decades, and mostly for the better. In spite of its serious lack of parks or pleasant walks, it’s safe to say it has become one of the best places to live and work outside of the capital. Well-paying jobs are easier to come by, and large areas of the city’s suburbs are being transformed into pleasant commuter towns. Much of ‘Manny’ (as the locals are want to call it) has been completely rebuilt in recent decades, to the point of being unrecognisable to its older natives, with a smattering of its industrial heritage preserved as venues to watch the football with a plastic pint in hand.

Manchester’s inhabitants, watching the march of progress before them, cling on to the city’s former glory as the gritty home of post-punk and acid house by selling overpriced reprints of The Stone Roses’ eponymous album. Go to several shops in the Northern Quarter, and you’ll find a concocted ‘Manchesterism’ that has little bearing on the city’s radical departure from the past. Nine years after the Ariana Grande Arena Bombing, endless trinkets plastered with bees sit next to Joy Division t-shirts and posters of Liam Gallagher’s face. What had once been the logo of Boddington’s Bitter has become a trite response to tragedy. Since even the bloodiest of events slink from the popular consciousness with ease, remembrance has found a new home as little more than a civic moniker like ‘I Heart NYC’. With each passing year, Lowry’s flat-capped workers feel more out of place.

Andy Burnham, a master of reinvention, has managed to take hold of this nostalgic sense of the city, whilst also taking credit for its transformation and improvement. Long gone are his New Labour suits, replaced with an Umbro jacket and a plain shirt. His Liverpudlian accent has softened to a vaguely Northern lilt, and he talks incessantly about football and abolishing VAR. The bee has been fitted on every bus and tram, complete with a bright yellow makeover. Refusing to be pigeonholed into an identifiable party faction as he plots his return to national politics, Burnham has downplayed his Brownite origins and instead blithely appropriates the term ‘Manchesterism’ to define his project in front of the baying Parliamentary Labour Party.

For all the drug dealers, spiceheads, and creeps videoing women on nights out in the city centre, Burnham has cleverly used Manchester’s leap towards modernity as his own vision of a wider ideal for the country. But Burnham’s cynicism has left George Osborne, the man responsible for the city’s noticeable development, lost to the cruel nature of political spin. Unlike Cameron, Osborne — the MP for Tatton, a constituency in Cheshire — was a passionate and true believer in ‘levelling up’ areas outside of England’s South East. His aim was to develop ‘core cities’, primarily in the North, to act as micro-Londons: centres of productivity which would radiate growth outwards across the country.

An ardent advocate of HS2 against a slew of bickering rural Tories and an unsupportive Prime Minister, Osborne was the first British politician of any real stature to attempt the transformation of underdeveloped and unproductive population centres into fully functioning hubs of economic activity. In the wake of painfully slow productivity growth after 2008, this was the Chancellor’s primary method of boosting growth in Britain, and his motivation in showering the North’s fledgling cities with cash lay in his desire to stand them on their own two feet and end the cycle of dependence on Southern subsidy, rather than in the jealous whinging of Northern MPs that were the primary proponents of ‘levelling up’ both before and after his tenure.

To understand Osborne’s staunch commitment to this idea, you need only look towards his desperation to summon the words ‘Northern Powerhouse’ from the mouth of Xi Jinping during his state visit to Britain in 2015. After succeeding in this personal coup, Osborne accompanied Xi to Manchester City’s grounds, a club that had come to dominate the Premier League after an inflow of Arab cash, to the financial benefit of the city. It would be incredibly unfair to credit anyone other than Osborne for being the singular pioneering character behind Manchester’s growth, long before ‘Manchesterism’ entered the pages of The New Statesman, or Andy Burnham showed up in town.

The decision to use Manchester as the seminal focal point of the Northern Powerhouse came after MediaCity had relocated plentiful London jobs from the capital, and after redevelopment projects had been carried out to repurpose late Victorian industrial spaces for residential purposes. It must be remembered that bare brick mixed with glass, stitched together with neat bits of steel, was immensely fashionable in the early 2000s, and Manchester benefitted from this aesthetic disposition towards the post-post-industrial. Osborne wasn’t plucking Manchester out of thin air; he was building on development that trundled on since rejuvenation projects had first begun in Ancoats in 2004.

But what Osborne did truly begin was the massive injection of cash into the home of New Order and Bernard Manning — cash that was spent with great glee by the Labour-controlled council on highly visible (if practically useless) projects. Before Osborne was Chancellor, the Metrolink tram connected Bury in the North through Piccadilly to Altrincham in the South. With the Treasury’s gift, it was greatly expanded in ‘Phase 3’ (or the ‘Big Bang’) to swarm outwards, swallowing up the airport, East Didsbury, Rochdale, and Ashton. All of this was completed within Osborne’s time as Cameron’s right hand man, and he should receive much of the credit for every obnoxiously yellow tram that hurtles past St Peter’s Square.

Twinned with this was Osborne’s eagerness to improve Mancunian infrastructure and encourage building development with a mixture of direct government funding and international assistance from China, in keeping with Cameron’s desire for greater entanglement with the emerging superpower. At a cost of £800 million, Manchester Airport was expanded along the lines of Frankfurt’s own impressive outfit, an initiative supported greatly by Chinese investment. In 2014, he proposed plans to link Leeds and Manchester with high-speed rail, an episode forgotten by many YIMBY developmentalists who now harp on about the same idea years later. In the same year, he allocated £300 million for the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Fund, which led directly to the city’s boom of residential and office skyscrapers that have sprung up dramatically in the last decade. Even in the arts, Osborne’s Treasury was willing to cough up £78 million for The Factory, a venue named, of course, after Tony Wilson’s record label.

Osborne’s antics in Manchester also tied with the Cameron government’s most successful display of garnering private investment. Just as they were able to help change Manchester’s skyline, they also expended a lot of energy getting companies either to relocate or to invest in new premises as the city continued to grow. Immediately after leaving office, Osborne continued to work with economist Jim O’Neil (the brainchild of the Northern Powerhouse) in order to campaign for further national funding, and convinced both British and American firms to open offices in the city.

In the light of these truths, Burnham’s attempt to claim responsibility for Manchester’s success becomes even more unbearable. Becoming Mayor in 2017, he has enjoyed the fruits of work started many years earlier simply by squatting in office as projects come to completion, building an undeserved reputation as the new Joseph Chamberlain in the process. Of course, much of this is politicking, and we should expect little else. But it becomes utterly contemptible when one compares Burnham’s willingness to take credit for Osborne’s successes with his own comments on the former’s Chancellor’s agenda for the North at the time. Any appreciation for the government’s large-scale investment in the region was downplayed in favour of whining about austerity and cuts to the metropolitan council’s budget. That Burnham has spent his tenure as Mayor cutting ribbons in front of developments he had no part in making happen and attacking those who did as uncaring negligents is risible hypocrisy.

The green shoots of modernity now pockmarking Manchester were not nurtured by retaking public control of the buses to construct the hopelessly twee ‘Bee Network’, nor by the City Council’s plans to ‘reindustrialise’ Salford. They certainly were not midwifed by ‘Manchesterism’ — a strange Frankenstein pitch which combines tepid enthusiasm for the fruits of liberal Britain with deep cultural resentments against that same phenomenon. No: the Manchester of today was the passion project of a Tory Chancellor who funnelled a great deal of money into the area with the twin support of private equity and the public purse. If I was George Osborne, I would be screaming this from the (seventy-two storey) rooftops until the ungrateful beneficiaries raised a statue in my image up outside Victoria Station.

‘Manchesterism’, much like his affected accent and quirky style of dress, is simply yet another attempt by Burnham to position himself as something excitingly different from every other Labour politician. It plays well to the resentful fantasies that still plague Northern politics in part, and which must always find ways to valorise the lack of prosperity which has come to define it even as it ostensibly seeks its solution. Yet the idea that Burnham will enter Number 10 and set about turning every mid-sized town north of Watford into little versions of cyberpunk Chongqing is pure fantasy. Manchester’s prosperity did not stem from the opportunity, at long last, to impose its revenge on the South and reconstruct Westminster in its own image: it was delivered by Gideon of Paddington, an eighteenth-generation petty nobleman and former member of the Bullingdon Club. Burnham’s claims to the contrary are a thin mirage, set to break under the slightest scrutiny.

My only hope is that, should he vacate the Mayoralty, the future Baronet Osborne puts his name forward as a candidate — if only to waltz down Deansgate pointing at every building in sight, repeating the mantra: ‘I did that.’

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

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In the last week, the battle lines for the Makerfield by-election have been drawn, with parties announcing their intentions and their candidates. Today, we look at who has been chosen to stand, how the campaigns will be run, and the prospects for fighting Manchesterism in Manchester, so we don’t have to fight it elsewhere. Plus, we’ll take a look at Rupert Lowe’s curious decision to endorse an Andy Burnham Premiership.

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Tip 7, a 111-foot-high pile of waste mining materials sited about 700 yards north of Aberfan Village up the valley slope, had liquified, flowing down the hill like an avalanche. Tip 7 had been sited over several springs and watercourses. It was known by the National Coal Board (NCB), the Attleeite body that ran the Merthyr Vale Collier and every other coal mine in Britain after the 1946 nationalisation of the coal industry, that spoil tips were liable to undergo liquefaction when sited over watercourses. Indeed, there had been three such ‘flow-slides’ on spoil tips in Aberfan in the twenty-five years which preceded the disaster. In 1939, a tip slide five miles up the road from Aberfan at the Albion Colliery at Abercynon had blocked a road, a canal and a railway line, causing £10,000 of damage without loss of life. This prompted the pre-nationalisation pit-owners, the Powell Duffryn Company (who also owned the Merthyr Vale Colliery at the time) to commission an investigation, and a memorandum was issued recommending that spoil tips should not exceed a height of 20 feet. Nonetheless, the NCB had begun Tip 7 in 1958 after Tip 6 had been stopped following a complaint from a farmer that it was spilling over onto his land. It quickly piled higher and higher. The looming mountain of coal spoils squatting above the village did not go unnoticed by Aberfan’s residents. The Town Clerk for Merythr wrote to the NCB in 1959 expressing fears of slips. The letter was ignored. In 1960, the NCB received a deputation from Merythr Council and assured them that fears of a tip-slide were ‘groundless’. A slide from Tip 7 occurred in 1963, but the NCB did not act. The increasing concern of Merythr Council was met with haughty indifference from the NCB, who dismissed their fears with assurances from ‘experts’.

News of the disaster reached the glitzy Grosvenor Place headquarters of the NCB quickly. An NCB board meeting that morning led by the NCB’s chairman, Labour grandee and former cabinet minister Lord Robens, was briefed on the scale of the destruction and loss of life. Robens had personal use of an executive aircraft to enable him to travel quickly to the remoter outposts of his nationalised empire of coal. He chose not to use it to travel to Aberfan, instead attending his investiture ceremony as Chancellor of the newly founded University of Surrey in Guildford that evening. His subordinates lied to the Secretary of State for Wales, telling him that Robens was personally directing relief efforts on the ground in Aberfan.

In the days following the disaster, Robens sought to protect the NCB by making a series of misleading remarks to the press. In particular, he claimed on television that no one could have known that there was a spring under Tip 7. In fact, several springs were marked on Ordinance Survey maps, and the springs were one of the primary causes for concern expressed by Merythr Council to the NCB throughout its increasingly worried correspondence in the years preceding the disaster. In the aftermath of the disaster, a relief fund for the families of the victims was established by popular subscription. The NCB succeeded in shamelessly raiding this fund in order to defray the costs of removing some of the remaining spoil tips in Aberfan. When left-wingers talk of the cruelty of capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, remind them that Aberfan is what socialism looks like.

Lord Justice Edmund Davies was commissioned by the Secretary of State for Wales to investigate the disaster. His report (from which the facts in this article are largely derived) laid the blame for the disaster squarely with the ‘arrogant’ NCB, with Robens receiving severe personal criticism. Nonetheless, Robens was not sacked and did not resign. He remained chair of the NCB until 1971, following Labour losing power in the 1970 general election. Shockingly, in 1969, that darling of ‘Lexiteers’, post-liberals, and SDP twitter alike, Barbara Castle, commissioned Robens to chair a committee on occupational health and safety. Old King Coal (as he was known) issued his report in 1971, which led to the passing of Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 when Labour returned to power that year. The man whose spoil tip crushed 116 children to death is the man responsible for the creation the Health and Safety Executive.

This little episode from the peak of British socialism is now remembered only by women who have watched the Netflix show The Crown, in which the Royal Family’s bungled reaction to the disaster provides a source of drama for the third series. Beyond this, Aberfan has largely faded from memory, with one prominent local politician of Welsh descent recently admitting that they had never heard of it until asked. It is the sort of working class tragedy that could easily have been sacralised into the folk memory of the British left, much as the Hillsborough disaster decades later was, were it not so inescapably obvious that socialism itself was to blame.

For these reasons, Aberfan has played little role in shaping the psychological world of the left. But what does it have to tell us about Andy Burnham, and his personal political doctrine of ‘Manchesterism’?

Alf and Andy

Lord Robens was born plain old Alf Robens in 1910, in Chorlton-on-Medlock, a small Lancashire town that was slowly being absorbed into the Manchester conurbation. 50 years later, and 30 miles away, Andy Burnham was born in Aintree, another Lancashire village consumed by the suburban creep of a big city, this time Liverpool. Alf and Andy are popularly supposed to be of working-class origin; however, like many northern grandees of the Labour party, they were in fact raised within the provincial petite bourgeoisie: Alf’s father was a cotton salesman; Andy’s a telecoms engineer.

Here the order of Alf and Andy’s live becomes jumbled. Alf, who had joined the Cooperative Society as a clerk and quickly risen to become a director, was elected to Manchester City Council, now part of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority over which Andy presently presides as Mayor. Whilst Alf began his political career in the city politics of Manchester, it was national politics to which he aspired. In Labour’s landslide election victory of 1945, Alf was elected MP for a Northumbrian constituency he had no prior connection to, and rose rapidly through the ranks of the parliamentary Labour Party. Serving in government positions almost as soon as he was elected, his Parliamentary career culminated in a brief period of service in Attlee’s cabinet as Minister for Labour and National Service before Labour lost office at the 1951 general election. In opposition, he served as Shadow Foreign Secretary but was demoted by Attlee’s successor, Hugh Gaitskell, to Shadow Minister for Labour. Seeing no prospects for advancement under Gaitskell, in 1960 he accepted the well-remunerated position as Chairman of the NCB, resigning from the Commons and accepting a peerage.

Andy, on the other hand, came to Manchester politics only after his time in national politics. Graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English in 1991, he spent a couple of desultory years plugging away at trade-journalism (his sole job outside of politics), before landing a position as researcher to Labour MP Tessa Jowell in 1994. He remained as Jowell’s staffer until the Labour landslide in 1997, after which he took up a series of parliamentary roles before being appointed special adviser to Culture Minister Chris Smith. In 2001, he was rewarded with the safe Labour seat of Leigh to contest. Leigh, another ex-Lancashire town near Wigan now organised within Greater Manchester, was (like Alf’s Northumberland seat) a place with which Andy had no prior connection.

Andy’s ascent within the Parliamentary Labour party was no less rapid than Alf’s had been fifty-five years earlier, fulfilling a number of PPS positions almost immediately after entering Parliament, and achieving ministerial rank in the re-shuffle which followed the 2005 election. It is here that Andy’s career echoes Alf’s most resoundingly.

Attlee’s government, of which Alf had been part, created more than one three-lettered nationalised industrial behemoth. A little less than a year after the NCB was created, the NHS was born. Like the NCB, the NHS assumed control over a pre-existing infrastructure (of hospitals rather than mines) and sought to subject it to top-down control as part of the post-war socialist command economy. Whilst most of the nationalised institutions of the Attlee state did not survive the Thatcher-Major governments, the NHS endures. In an attempt to modernise that institution, the Blair government introduced a flagship policy of NHS Foundation Trusts — essentially, networks of hospitals which enjoyed greater autonomy from local and central government control. Andy, as a Minister of State for ‘Delivery and Reform’ at the Department of Health, was tasked with pushing the last remaining NHS hospital trusts towards ‘Foundation’ status.

During this time, the senior management of Mid-Staffordshire Hospital sought to build up cash surpluses in their budget in order to meet the financial requirements for Foundation status qualification. They did so through cutting staffing and services. Soon Mid Staffs was seeing mortality levels dramatically in excess of those to be expected in a hospital of its size. The relatives of patients raised concerns. Those concerns were haughtily ignored.

Andy was then promoted to the cabinet as Health Secretary. Between him and his predecessor in the position, 81 requests for an inquiry into mortality levels at Mid Staffs were rejected. Under mounting political pressure, Burnham eventually commissioned an independent investigation, but the appointed QC, Robert Francis, complained about the restricted scope he was given. It took the incoming Coalition Government to upgrade the investigation into a full public inquiry. Reminiscent of the Edmund Davies Report into Aberfan, the Francis Report was scathing of a secretive, imperious and unaccountable body, which was able to repeatedly ignore concerns expressed by the public, or bat them away with officious platitudes.

Following Labour’s defeat at the 2010 election, Burnham ran for the leadership of the Party. He achieved a pathetic 8.7% of votes (just one percentage point more than Diane Abbot) and was eliminated in the first round. He sat in the victorious Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet until Labour were defeated again at the 2015 election. He ran again as leader. This time he was trounced by left-wing firebrand Jeremy Corbyn, coming second with just 19% to Corbyn’s 60% of the vote. That might well have been the end of Burnham’s Prime Ministerial ambitions, if not his career as a whole. A Shadow Cabinet position under Corbyn kept him relevant, but such a platform rarely provides opportunities to overcome a reputation as a two-time loser. (Un)fortunately, the Tory Party, in its wisdom, established the Metro Mayors for several English Combined Authorities, giving Burnham a new lease on life as he took office in Greater Manchester. It was from this position, and especially during the COVID pandemic, that Andy found his calling: the King in the North; and his credo.

Manchesterism

In a superb recent article by anonymous Uranian writer and friend of Pimlico Journal ‘The Marquis’, the vacuity of ‘Manchesterism’ — an ostensible theory of political economy developed by Burnham as mayor of that town — is brilliantly exposed. ‘The Marquis’ is correct that Burnham’s achievements amount to him spending vast amounts of money within Manchester which were raised as taxes outside of Manchester. Burnham’s popularity in Manchester is akin to Father Christmas’ popularity among children. Unlike children, however, who eventually learn that their presents were really bought from shops by their parents rather than made by elves, Mancunians show no sign of growing up.

One of the great ironies of Burnham’s ‘achievements’ in Manchester is the extent to which they are simply the result of Tory policy. Regional devolution, and even the mayoralty he himself occupies, was a creation of George Osborne, as part of his long-forgotten ‘Northern Powerhouse’ strategy for regional development. The vast sums of money Burnham has deployed in Manchester were allocated by Tories, convinced of the belief that Manchester had to be artificially supported to ‘rebalance’ the British economy. It was under the Tories that the English National Opera was bullied into relocating to Manchester. Most notable, however, are the Tory fingerprints found on his flagship ‘Bee Network’ of bus and tram services. Manchester was granted the power to commission its own bus franchises (as Transport for London does) by Chris Grayling’s Bus Services Act 2017. Burnham’s singular contribution to Manchester’s transport network seems to be the decision to paint all the buses yellow.

Manchester itself provides a perfect encapsulation of the wider ‘devolution’ project of the British state: Potemkin units of local, regional or national government are created, with little or no power to raise revenue, but are allocated funds to spend by central government. The effect of this is to elevate local politicians as fonts of central government cash. They are popular with the public because, even if it isn’t their money, it is their name on the cheques. Any problems in their local, regional or national fief can be parsimoniously blamed on Westminster “austerity”. This game has been played very well be the SNP, by Welsh Labour, and by Sadiq Khan in London. But few have played it better than Burnham, who turned extraordinary Tory largesse against them, whilst using COVID as a means of extorting even more money from the centre, under the threat of refusing to implement lockdowns when demanded.

But is there anything to ‘Manchesterism’ besides spending other people’s money? There is — although not much. It is claimed by the prestige press that Burnham is the living incarnation of Labour’s ‘soft left’, as opposed to the more right-wing ‘Blue Labour’ as represented by the polytechnic lecturer Lord Glasman. The reality is that it is hard to distinguish between the two of them in policy terms. Burnham claims a desire to see re-industrialisation of Britain, and an increase in ‘democratic’ control over the British economy. He has specifically mentioned water, electricity, and the railways as targets for such extended controls. Yet his frequent citation of his silly yellow buses as a model to follow shows the hollowness of Burnham’s ‘left-wing’ agenda. All bus services in Manchester are privately operated, with their services regulated through franchises commissioned by Albert Square. Burnham does not advocate nationalisation, which would be disastrous, but would at least vindicate his claim to have broken with the Labour consensus of the past thirty years — instead, he believes private companies should deliver the state’s goals in a regulated environment — a position he shares with Glasman, Wes Streeting, Tony Blair, and basically every other Labour politician since 1995, with the exception of Jeremy Corbyn and five or ten of his closest comrades.

This is all insubstantial stuff, but no matter. ‘Manchesterism’ need not offer compelling solutions for real problems when it can instead offer a marginally alternative vibe to a party nauseous at the prospect of three more years of Starmer. Here, Burnham offers the same empty, nostalgic aesthetics adored by the Glasman tendency. Both men have a fixation with the gloomy, soot-caked Britain of the 1960s. Glasman, with his shabby demob suits and roll-up cigarettes. Burnham, with his (doubtless very expensive) imitation National Health spectacles, posing gloomily in black-and-white outside the Salford Lad’s Club in ‘unpretentious’ working-man’s dress.

Where Kier Starmer has no favourite poem, Burnham cites Philip Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’. Initially appearing an odd choice, it is in fact perfectly apposite for Burnham. It is a poem about a desiccated, empty man, who after his death leaves nothing behind for posterity but the dated paraphernalia of the post-war era: football pools stubs; a preference for sauce over gravy; a souvenir ashtray. It may seem strange that two key figures on both sides of Labour’s internal divides should look back with longing on the era in which Britain was transformed from the world’s second military and economic power to a sick and diminished backwater; to the era of Aberfan. But then, of course, in that era, whilst Britain was at her weakest, the left was at its strongest. There was white wine and smoked salmon at No. 10 for the union grandees (or, as the press credulously reported, ‘beer and sandwiches’), there were plenty of ministries in Whitehall from which to order legions of civil servants about, and there were many more appointments as captains of (nationalised) industry for those with the right politics who played their cards right. Our blob runs conferences and seminars and talks of ‘online harms’; their blob ran steelworks, shipyards, and car factories. That, of course, is what ‘democratic’ control of the economy means: industry consolidated into unaccountable public behemoths, run by the beneficiaries of a system of political patronage.

The Labour Party has run to the end of a long experiment in a style of doing politics which has been found lacking. If there is one thing on which the entire Labour Party agrees, it is that being part of a Labour government — at least in the beginning — should feel a certain way. It should involve getting things done to make life better for your constituents, and it should produce some kind of adulation (or at least good feeling) among those constituents. But with no ideas left, and seemingly no power to make change happen, being part of this Labour government has felt very wrong indeed. Impotent, and feeling it, the attraction from these very different factions towards a moment in which, for better or for worse, politicians really had the power to determine outcomes rather than sitting stupidly as global events and technological change transform society around them, can be easily understood.

The problem, though, for Burnham — and, for that matter, for Glasman — is that these politicians did not simply want to be in control. Whatever you might wish to say about Attlee’s government and its failures, the people who built Britain’s socialist economy had definite ideas about how it should be run. The process of nationalisation itself was not the end — running the nationalised industries was, and every Labour minister had thoughts aplenty about how their sector of the economy should function in the interests of workers and the nation. Twenty years later, those heady days had faded, and those burning convictions had ebbed. By the time of Aberfan, Lord Robens, along with the rest of Britain’s socialist aristocracy, had come to view ‘democratic control’ as the independent end, forgetting the actual reason for pursuing nationalisation in the first place.

‘Manchesterism’ begins at the end. Even now, when it has yet to be born, it has nothing to say on how the various new levers of control it hints at should be deployed to improve outcomes; instead, it simply desires the moment in which they are established. The notion of ‘public control’ is fetishised, the purpose of it lost. And so, if Burnham does win his seat in Makerfield next month, and if he does launch and win a leadership challenge against Starmer, then perhaps that is what we should expect to see from his Premiership: a rapidly blooming constellation of oversight boards, working groups, and devolved administrations which understand that their role is to establish ‘business-friendly socialism’, but have little more idea than its progenitor what any of that actually means in operation. Aim for 1945, and even if you miss, you’ll end up in 1978.

Should one of these (business-friendly) socialist grandees, stumbling around in the dark as they seek to understand just what it is that makes Manchester so great, make a mistake and unleash an avalanche of coal on a primary school, to whom will they be accountable? To Andy? Not likely. No, there’s only one man who can serve as the people’s headsman here — and for the sake of the country, let’s hope he decapitates the snake in one month’s time, so he doesn’t have to deal with the hydra in three years.

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

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When leftists — like Lewis Goodall (having interviewed Akhmed Yakoob) and Aaron Bastani, who did the rounds recently by calling Birmingham ‘vital’ — insinuate that Birmingham is fun, youthful, and dynamic, they know exactly what they are doing. This framing of the city is, of course, in bad faith, and you can imagine Bastani’s smug grin anticipating the reaction to such a ridiculous claim.

Outside of being a good Troll, the other interest of a journalist in presenting such a narrative is that it serves their self-image as bohemian scribblers, like Baudelaire, observing the beauty in decay. This was evidently the motivation in Will Lloyd’s foray into the Birmingham discourse:

Birmingham’s decay does indeed make it interesting (although it would be very difficult to claim it is beautiful). But as with any attempt to ‘aurafarm’, the only way one can point out the absurdity of the effort is by making the implicit explicit. For those of us who are not full-time scribblers and are mainly interested in the business of making the country a better place to live, this type of curiosity in our national life offers little consolation.

Let’s begin with what was left unspoken: Birmingham is a place that was recorded as less than 50 per cent white British at the last census (42.9%), a number that will have declined further in the five years since. This is far removed from England’s overall figure of 73.5%. The idea that Birmingham can be more representative of Britain, or of a British future, than other cities when the people who live in Birmingham (and especially inner-city Birmingham) are so demographically different from the rest of the country, even by the standards of 2026, is farcical.

To return to Bastani’s claim that Birmingham is ‘vital’, this seems to be supported by the fact that Birmingham has, by some definitions (city-level statistics are always somewhat dubious due to the boundaries being basically artificial), Europe’s most youthful city population, with 40% of its population being 25 and under. The youth population is considerably less white British than the national average, but this is particularly true of Birmingham, where 35% of 16-24 year olds are Asian, and it is from this cohort — very alien to most of the rest of the country — that the phenomenon of Akhmed Yakoob spawned. This demographic repatterning, of course, took place against the express will of the general British public.

Akhmed Yakoob, interviewed for a pre-election documentary last week in a ‘dessert shop’ — a very much foreign institution that serves as a Pakistani halal alternative to the British pub, something which most English people would not be aware exists as a staple in inner-city Birmingham — began with a discussion about Yakoob rising to prominence as a ‘TikTok lawyer’. You could be generous and say that Bastani genuinely had no idea what this actually entailed. Years before Gaza became a contentious issue, Yakoob rose to fame amongst the youth of inner-city Birmingham as the lawyer in the city who could get people off drug charges, driving offences, ‘joint enterprise’ gang charges, and much more. From this, Yakoob has become a celebrity who, admittedly, has a certain charm — much like that of the protagonists of Four Lions — and carries an entourage with him everywhere he goes (which never extends beyond inner-city Birmingham and his house just outside Birmingham, near leafy Aldridge).

The fact that even someone as tuned in to the Birmingham scene as Bastani could not accurately tell you how, exactly, Akhmed Yakoob first came to prominence (or, worse still, actively chooses to hide it) is indicative of the true nature of the city. Other than political obsessives, Yakoob — the man who is objectively the face of the city’s ‘vitality’ — is also completely unknown outside of inner-city Birmingham. This means that the city is far from somewhere that can seriously be considered ‘the real capital’ of England. It should now be clear that an honest conversation about Birmingham first requires us to use language that is less euphemism-laden.

Yakoob building a profile from behaviour which most would see as pro-crime and pro-criminal, and then converting this into significant political capital, is something that the British people as a whole would find utterly reprehensible. The fact that Sadiq Khan is arguably the single most hated politician in all of England speaks to this: the mere perception that Khan does not do enough on crime is enough to make millions upon millions of people froth at the mouth at the mere mention of his name — yet Akhmed Yakoob is the representative of a culture so unknown that even Novara Media’s fans would not be able to explain how he came to be, despite them interviewing him only last week.

One of the things Bastani was most enamoured by was learning that Akhmed Yakoob is, in fact, opposed to the biraderi (i.e., clan-based) method of politics, which Labour used to capture the votes of first-generation Pakistani migrants in Britain. Biraderi (sometimes also spelt Baradari) is the Urdu word for ‘brotherhood’, which in a political context refers to bloc voting that is organised by community elders, who usually then direct people to lend their votes to councillors and MPs who were also selected via kinship ties. During the interview, Yakoob’s right-hand man, Shakeel Afsar, states that his first ancestor to step foot on English soil — his grandfather — could not speak English, but through the biraderi system still knew exactly who to vote for every election day.

Virtually all Britons would be baffled if you asked them what ‘biraderi’ means and what effect it has on politics in Birmingham. And yet, here we have Bastani taking Yakoob’s comments as a huge piece of evidence that the system’s supposed abolition — not for something that the rest of us would recognise, but instead for something which looks suspiciously like the next generation’s version of it, but to the advantage of Yakoob rather than the Labour Party — is proof that Birmingham is showing some kind of ‘vitality’, and is therefore ‘fascinating’. What, exactly, the abolition of tribalistic practices which have not existed in the rest of England for centuries, in favour of new tribalistic practices which also have not existed in the rest of England for centuries, has to do with England in general rather than Birmingham in particular, and how it makes Birmingham ‘vital’, is not explained. The vast majority of Brits would also opt for a far less polite word than ‘fascinating’ if the situation were explained plainly to them.

Bastani’s day out in Birmingham concludes with an interview with a Green council candidate for an area which includes Dudley Road, one of the most notoriously Pakistani-dominated areas of Birmingham. The Green candidate complains of the aggressive leafleting that the Yakoob-backed independents have been carrying out outside of his local mosque, and also complains that they have been homophobic throughout the campaign by ‘exposing’ Polanski’s behaviour and the company which he keeps. His response is to trot out tired (yet familiar) lines about how discrimination against one group means that discrimination against all groups will become inevitable, and so on and so forth.

This interview serves to show just how completely and utterly divorced from the reality of everyday British life the political conversation in Birmingham today truly is. In Birmingham, we have the Green candidate — that is, the same party that partly won in Gorton and Denton through brazenly appealing to Muslims with foreign-language campaign literature — complaining about the conduct of his political opponents near the local mosque, behaviour which all Britons know to be alien (even aside from the religious institution itself being alien). The Green candidate is also aware that the attack line which the Yakoob-backed independents were using is ‘not allowed’. He therefore decides to wave his hand, hoping that an umpire will come and adjudicate for him. Sadly, in twenty-first-century Birmingham, that umpire left the field many years ago and is simply not there.

And, in part, the umpire is also not there because no one really pays attention to what is actually happening in inner-city Birmingham, not least the journalists who have been breathlessly praising the city over the last few days. Because why would you bother? Inner-city Birmingham’s politics is simply foreign to the rest of us, both literally and figuratively. It tells us virtually nothing about the country as a whole — and as the nation discovers what the city has become, it has one resounding answer. Birmingham is not its future: it is the future that the British people are choosing to reject.

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

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Much to get to this week, as the fallout from the local elections continues with plenty of twists and turns. We discuss Streeting’s last minute step back from the brink, the prospects of another Manchester by-election, and how Reform can strangle the Burnham Premiership in its crib.

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What has changed is how this spending is allocated. This change in allocation is not found in day-to-day public services spending: over the last seventy years, public services spending has remained relatively stable at around 22% of GDP. Neither is this change to be found in spending on the depreciation or debt interest burden, which together have consistently averaged around 6%. Rather, the change has been in the two other categories of government spending. On the one hand, there are entitlements: cash transfers to the public, including benefits and pensions. On the other hand, there is public investment: spending on new infrastructure, utilities, and facilities.

Between 1955 and 1975, there was a general equality in the entitlement versus investment allocation. Each represented an average of around 5-6% of GDP per annum. However, from the mid-1970s onwards, this general equality vanished. By the middle of the subsequent decade, entitlements stood at around 10.2% of GDP and public investment at 1.9%. This allocation has remained roughly the same ever since:

This cannibalisation of public investment by entitlement spending is a fiscal paradigm that we shall label the entitlement state. In this piece, we will explore:

1. The harms of the entitlement state;

2. How the entitlement state came to be; and

3. How we might construct an alternative.

The costs of the entitlement state

The main costs of the entitlement state are reflected in its opportunity cost, since it is financed by spending that was previously reserved for public investment.

Before 1975/76, public investment represented a major source of British net investment. Net investment is essential for long-term economic growth — it represents growth in equipment, plant, and infrastructure that reduces the requisite time and labour to produce a given output. Growth in labour productivity is ultimately the main driver of growth in wages and living standards, and the size of an overall economy.

Thus, a fall in public investment must reduce growth in wages, living standards, and economic output unless it is substituted by a corresponding rise in private investment. However, this has not happened. Public and private investment are not interchangeable.

This is because the role of public investment is to direct capital towards low-return or non-rivalrous goods and services, which often prove difficult to finance or profitably operate under private ownership, but generate significant returns across the whole economy.

This can be via:

1. Improving the productivity of individual workers, such as by giving them access to more efficient and reliable transport infrastructure.

2. Raising the return on capital for private investment, such as by reducing the electricity bills for factories through investment in power stations and transmission infrastructure.

Critically, then, this means that a fall in public investment does not merely have a direct impact on the livelihoods and productivity of individual workers. In the long run, it discourages private investment by reducing its return on capital.

The data shows that this is exactly what has happened since 1975:

The above chart shows public and private investment since 1955 on the left axis, and on the right axis shows the ten-year average for productivity growth — what we’ll refer to from now on as ‘structural’ productivity growth. As the chart shows, structural productivity growth has marched in lockstep with net investment. The fall of public investment in the second half of the 1970s saw it collapse from 4.4% in 1973 to 2.2% in 1981.

Private investment and structural productivity growth both stagnated for the subsequent two decades, apart from the brief spike of the Lawson Boom. However, private investment then began to collapse between 1999 and 2003, with net investment levels only stabilised by a slight restoration of public investment under Blair. Aside from the shocks of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Covid Pandemic, this net investment composition has remained in place for the past two decades. Under it, structural productivity growth has fallen to its current dismal low of roughly 0.65% per annum.

In short: productivity growth and private investment rose in lockstep with public investment growth between 1955 and 1975, and then stagnated once it fell. At almost exactly the time that most public investments began to reach the end of a typical 25-year depreciation schedule, private investment began to fall off, and structural productivity growth fell to its current low.

How much has the collapse in public investment cost Britain? We can perform a simple regression to estimate this:

Across the post-1955 period, a 1% rise in net investment as a share of GDP is associated with an increase in structural productivity growth of 0.38%. This correlation is quite strong for a macroeconomic relationship, with an R² value over 0.7.

If, as we have claimed, the low-return and non-monetisable nature of public investment means it does not have a crowding-out effect on private investment, then a 1% fall in public investment as a share of GDP reduces structural productivity growth by 0.38%.

Compared to 1955-75, average public investment during the 1975-2025 period represented a 3.6% lower share of GDP. This suggests a reduction in structural productivity growth of around 1.37%.

On the other hand, we can see that entitlement spending has a broadly negative relationship with productivity growth. On the face of it, a percentage point rise in entitlement spending as a share of GDP reduces structural productivity growth by 0.46%. In a best-case scenario, this suggests greater entitlement spending is productivity-neutral, aside from its role in cannibalising public investment — although there are reasonable grounds to believe there may in fact be a slightly negative relationship.

Even if we assume this generous productivity-neutral interpretation of the effects of entitlement spending, however, a reduction in structural productivity growth of 1.37% is grave for the nation.

In 2023 prices, actual output per hour was approximately £45.20 as of 2024. With higher per-annum productivity growth of 1.37% since 1975, per hour would have instead stood at around £87.11:

That is to say, according to this analysis, that output per hour is nearly half of what it could have been had public investment not collapsed in the 1970s. Of course, any projection like this should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the idea that British productivity could have reached these levels is not at all unreasonable. At £87.11, our output per hour would be roughly in line with that of Denmark, the Netherlands, or Belgium today — instead, it is closer to that of Spain.

In terms of Gross Value Added (GDP before taking the net effect of product taxes and subsidies into account), this represents a reduction from around £4.9tn to £2.5tn.

If we assume our more productive Britain had the same output-to-wage ratio, then we can illustrate the effect of this lower productivity on incomes: whereas the median 35-hour income today is £34,500, it would instead be £65,630 in a world with higher post-1975 structural productivity growth.

We are all poorer because of the collapse in public investment post-1975. While economic cycles happen, while individual debates on particular spending items keep going, this structural change has inexorably played itself out.

The causes of the entitlement state

One of the primary architects of the post-war economic system was Sir Stafford Cripps. Between 1942 and 1945, Cripps had served as the Minister of Aircraft Production, where he had overseen the transition from fighter to bomber production. Even before his start in this role, Cripps believed fervently that real economic growth was intrinsically tied up with questions of material production. But oversight of the strategic bombing campaign and its role in shortening the war — and his successful doubling of deliveries of bombers through a relentless focus on productivity and efficiency — had solidified this conviction and laid the groundwork for a new vision of economic management.

As President of the Board of Trade from 1945 to 1947, Cripps focused most of his energies on developing a state planning capability to consistently deliver such productivity growth. This continued with even more vigour when he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1947 to 1950, as he said to the House of Commons:

‘I cannot emphasise too strongly that, however we manipulate our trade or finance, whatever political system we follow, and whatever arrangements we make with other countries, the fundamental fact must always remain that our standard of living as a people will and must depend upon the volume of our own production, and nothing can give us a higher standard than we can support by our own efforts.’

‘In order to get this increased production, we must carry out our planning in an orderly way. We must secure raw materials and sources of power first of all for producing things like coal, steel, transport, agricultural production, and those primary things that are the basis of the whole of our industrial life, and, having secured a sufficiency of those primary things, we can then turn to the semimanufactured goods of importance, and finally to the completely manufactured goods.’

The concept of medium to long-term planning was at the heart of Cripps’ vision — and the idea that it was the role of governments to direct the long-term direction of economic development. The intuition behind this was simple: a modern industrial economy requires multi-decade coordination of capital and labour, which neither capital or labour alone can reliably provide themselves. Public investment and long-term state planning were required to increase structural productivity and nurture these modern industries.

Ultimately, the seeds of the system’s destruction were sewn when this idea of long-term planning failed to outlive Cripps and his government. Instead, starting in the 1950s, Britain fell into a pattern of reactive economic management that came to be derided as the ‘stop-go’ system owing to the frequent changes in the economic weather it produced.

Under stop-go, governments aimed to maintain near-full employment and low inflation while maintaining a fixed exchange rate. During a ‘go’ phase, governments sought to stimulate demand by cutting taxes, increasing spending, and slackening the bank rate and credit controls. Inevitably, the inflationary pressure combined with the fixed exchange rate would see foreign exchange reserves run down over time during the go phase. When the reserves were sufficiently run down to threaten the flow of imports, governments then entered a ‘stop’ phase where taxes were re-raised, spending was cut, and the bank rate and credit controls tightened.

This system was inherently unstable, principally because the proximate metrics with which it measured success — unemployment and inflation — were decoupled from structural productivity growth. This meant that long-term strategies to allocate capital and labour to productivity growth were not possible, owing to frequent changes in market conditions and investment priorities.

Perhaps the reactive stop-go system’s biggest problem was the way in which it encouraged political cynicism: governments could try to manipulate the timing of the stop-go cycle to gain political advantage. Completely divorced from productivity growth, serving governments had an incentive to ensure that elections lined up with transient spikes in growth during a ‘go’ phase.

This came to a head during the Heath government. Keen to produce the most impressive surge in growth on record ahead of elections anticipated for 1974/75, Chancellor Anthony Barber delivered a budget in 1972 that targeted a growth rate of 10% per annum. Barber’s targeted growth rate was 2.5 times that of on-trend improvements in productivity, which was then at around 4%. To achieve this surge in growth, he targeted a turbocharging of consumption via a dramatic liberalisation of bank lending and a wave of tax cuts. Inevitably, this resulted in the economy beginning to overheat and a rate of CPI inflation of 9.2% in 1973. The late 1973 global energy crisis saw this cynical gamble blow up in Barber’s face, with inflation hitting 24.2% by 1975.

This utterly broke the premise of the stop-go system. While much of the world struggled with high inflation, the inflationary premium from Barber’s 1972 measures meant that Britain’s foreign exchange reserves were depleted far faster than anticipated, and a ‘stop’ was urgently needed — one that was more severe than any that had come before. The attempt to implement this stop, particularly through stemming the wage-price spiral by capping public sector wage growth, was what brought down the Heath government.

It was then left to the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan to attempt to find a solution to this general crisis. This culminated in the 1976 IMF loan, whose conditions included significant cuts to public spending — with capital spending and public investment being the most politically viable immediate candidates for the cuts. In addition, the inflation controls demanded by the IMF also required renewed wage suppression by the state to stop the wage-price spiral. The latter point ultimately doomed the Labour government, and the post-war economic order.

In 1979/80, Margaret Thatcher inherited a budget that allocated just 2.5% of GDP to public investment, down from 6.3% in 1970/71. Most of the investment cuts had already been made, albeit under the belief they would be of a temporary nature. What changed under Thatcher was entitlement spending. She inherited a budget that allocated 8.4% of GDP to entitlements — slightly above the pre-1975 average, intended temporarily to offset the worst cases of economic dislocation produced by the drawdown of public investment and the closure of unprofitable state enterprises. By 1986/87, this share had risen to 10.2% of GDP.

Aside from her temporary attempt to reverse this trend from 1987-91, entitlements have been above 10% of GDP ever since. What caused this? It was not the intention of Thatcher herself, who was sincere in her belief that state spending should be limited to 30-35% of GDP: if levels of spending on public services and debt/depreciation held constant, as they have, this would have limited her to 5-8% of GDP for entitlements. Entitlements came to plug the investment gap out of political expediency — heightened entitlement spending became a key tool to paper over the economic dislocation produced by the end of the post-war economic settlement.

An apt example of this phenomenon is the explosion in disability benefit in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These benefits saw an exceptionally high claimant ratio in deprived regions dealing with the impacts of deindustrialisation. In practice, these benefits allowed governments to disguise unemployment and underemployment and avoid making difficult decisions about the future of regional economies and their inhabitants.

While initially an expediency in dealing with difficult challenges associated with the economic dislocation under the new order, the moral status of such entitlements evolved. For much of the public, entitlements are no longer seen as a safety net or an insurance policy, but as a key obligation that they expect from the state. The electorally ‘smart’ response for politicians has increasingly been to cater for these expectations.

This has become especially true considering a post-2008 phenomenon. Most people now live in households that take more in benefits than they pay in taxes:

If most people live in net beneficiary households, an electorate’s proximate interest ceases to be aligned with the long-term viability of the system. Instead, it becomes about securing access to their own entitlement transfers, since net beneficiaries are not exposed to the costs of financing their benefits. The rest is, sadly, simple arithmetic. In a competitive party system, electoral success will come to those who promise to continue — or even heighten — the transfers.

This is an unsustainable arrangement, because it ultimately means an ever-smaller share of the population is responsible for keeping the system solvent. Today, if you count cash benefits and benefits in kind, just the top thirty per cent of households remain net taxpayers. And, for the most part, the entire system is propped up by the top decile:

Capital flight and/or emigration would be disastrous for the public finances. And it is a real risk, since they are offered little in the way of an incentive to continue to subsidise the system.

We should find this deeply troubling because such a collapse in the public finances and loss of credibility on the bond markets would inevitably cause a sovereign debt crisis. This would not just invite a revision of the more egregious spending habits of modern British governments, but would lead to a deeply disruptive and unplanned overnight collapse of the social democratic state, its protections, and the services it provides. The necessity of fiscal readjustment does not mean that the damage caused by such a forced shock transition would not be real. The question, then, is not whether the entitlement state can be preserved. Instead, the question must be whether we choose to dismantle it on our own terms, or allow an uncontrolled explosion which will scar generations of Britons.

The promise of an alternative

Winding down the entitlement state would once again free fiscal headroom to restore public investment and drive productivity growth. A rough restoration of the pre-1975 pattern of spending would imply, as a long-term average, 22% of GDP on public services, 6% on debt and depreciation, and an equal 6% split between entitlements and public investment. Crucially, a restoration of this pattern of fiscal allocation does not necessarily mean a restoration of pre-Thatcher economic management. Public investment should not be used as a reactive tool to manage the impact of economic cycles. Instead, public investment must be treated, first and foremost, as a tool to raise structural productivity growth.

Such an approach would not only avoid the kind of challenges that the post-war system ran into in the 1970s. One can also reasonably expect the productivity gains from public investment to be higher under a system which regards precisely that as the end of investment, rather than a pleasant by-product of investment directed according to other, competing concerns. A reasonable estimate would be that a return to a 6% allocation of GDP to public investment would increase structural productivity growth by 1.71%, to 2.36% per annum (from 0.65% today).

The result, within thirty years, would be an increase in output per annum from its real on-trend level of £54.23 to £79.25. This would represent a roughly 50% increase in gross value added nationally. For the median person working 35 hours per week, this forecasts a salary rise from £41,160 under the current trend to £59,700.

As discussed, to finance this renewed public investment, we cannot afford to raise taxes, given the current risk of capital flight and the magnitude of the present burden on the tax base. Neither can we significantly increase borrowing, given that our credibility is already tested on the bond markets. And so, we must cut entitlements. To achieve the desired level of public investment, the total reduction in the entitlement budget will need to be at least £128.2bn per annum. How those savings can be achieved is a subject for another article.

Conclusion

While most readers will recognise the necessity of this proposal, many might consider it electorally unviable at present. After all, it does require much of the electorate to renounce many of the benefits they receive under the entitlement state. However, I do not believe that voters are naïve automatons. In the past, the British public has shown itself willing to make short-term sacrifices to make long-term gains, so long as they are properly convinced.

Democratic politics does not have to result in a tragedy of the commons. Sectional interest does not have to prevail over the common good. The public can choose the national interest, if they are convinced — it is the task of political leadership to convince the public that such a national interest exists, and that it aligns with their enlightened long-term interest.

British political, economic, and social life has suffered greatly from our abandonment of productivism, which grounds us in the real and gives meaning to our daily activities. If we do not believe that our work makes a difference both to our individual prospects and the strength and prosperity of the nation, it should not be a surprise that our willingness to work has declined. Restoring Cripps’ understanding of the purpose and promise of labour as the basis of investment, and therefore of progress, is a necessary step towards restoring our understanding of its fundamental meaning in our lives. In this endeavour, the state must lead the way.

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

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The introduction to his first article describes folk beliefs as ‘sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact’, and says that ‘much of the upper-normie worldview [is] a collection of these folk beliefs’. The system of folk beliefs of postliberals differs only from those of ‘upper normies’ in that these beliefs originate in a diffusion of tweets, podcasts, articles, and blogs originating from a small group of authors in the last ten years rather than ‘academia, the media, the cultural industries, governments and NGOs over the long twentieth century’.

Postliberalism — a heretical post-Marxist innovation of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre — found its first political manifestation in Britain in Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’ movement. Blue Labour seeks to reform the Labour Party towards a communally-orientated socialism, which combines the bonds of reciprocity within traditional institutions like the church, family, and nation, with the solidarity of the labour movement and local political institutions. The belief in the complementary nature of socialism and tradition offers a critique of the right’s alloy of individualist capitalism and social conservatism.

Postliberalism has become a popular ideology on the British right since the migration of working-class voters from Labour to the Conservative Party (and now Reform) since the political realignment. The postliberal right is conservative and comfortable with forms of inegalitarianism, but maintains a critical stance towards capitalism and it perceives that both right and left have prioritised individual autonomy at the expense of our common bonds and the welfare of the working class.

Postliberalism’s purest expressions are found in UnHerd and Spiked. But it has become an influential ideology found in the pages of every right-wing publication in Britain. It claims to speak for the voters responsible for the convulsions of Brexit, the 2019 election, and the rise of Reform, and is the obvious ‘successor ideology’ to Thatcherism, whose adherents have either converted or become irrelevant. Thus, the postliberal worldview deserves the utmost scrutiny, and my motivation for writing this series is that its ideologues often fall short of the rigour one should expect.

In practice, the ideology pushes a less coherent form of woke in which class inequality is assumed to be evidence of classism, but racial or gender inequality is not assumed to be evidence of racism or sexism. Postliberals believe there is a snobbish metropolitan elite lurking around every corner, and that sincerely held left-wing beliefs are motivated only by hatred of the (white) working class. The belief that society is suffused with classism is often the mirror of the woke belief in the miasma of racism.

Postliberals have often had a poisoning effect on discourse because they tell their audience ideologically convenient lies, which serve as deradicalisation memes. The nativist movements across the West are recast as working-class movements in a class conflict. Postliberals claim globalisation impoverishes the working-class but enriches the elite, who benefit from cheaper labour while retreating behind walls and barbed wire into white enclaves (even though this is only infrequently applicable to wealthy Labour or Green voters in Britain). This can be fixed, however, by electing a sensible centre-left (or centre-right) mainstream political party like the Danish Social Democrats, who will cut immigration while avoiding the noise and mess of radical populist parties. This is particularly objectionable because it avoids the correct — but repugnant — conclusions about the nature of population replacement in favour of flimsy but printable myths that this problem can be solved without paradigmatic change in politics.

The first myth I will challenge in this series is the idea that British police forces have adopted an imperial model of policing to deal with inter-ethnic conflict between the native British and ethnic minority groups.

This view has been advanced by Ed West, Louise Perry (also here), Tom Holland, and many others who breathed the miasma of postliberal received wisdom. They argue that British police forces prioritise the prevention of inter-communal violence and the preservation of harmonious inter-communal relations, rather than the pursuit of justice, and this explains police inaction against, and collusion with, Pakistani rape gangs, as well as other examples of so-called ‘two-tier policing’. Bringing the perpetrators of the rape gangs to justice would have inflamed ‘community tensions’ and led to reprisal attacks on Pakistanis, tit-for-tat violence, rioting, and ultimately a much more challenging policing environment. It is unclear whether proponents of this theory believe Britain arrived at this mode of policing through imperial boomerang or environmental convergence.

I should say for the avoidance of doubt that none of the people I mention approve of this method of policing. Most have done good work on immigration and would have been opposed to the immigration of Pakistanis in large numbers. At most, some may accept higher levels of immigration alongside authoritarianism to ‘integrate’ Pakistanis into the British nation. But all of them imply in this narrative that there is an understandable and partially defensible logic to the way British police and local government responded to Pakistani rape gangs.

This theory of police behaviour fails for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that racially-motivated rape constitutes inter-communal violence in and of itself, so any police force which prioritised the prevention of outbreaks of inter-communal violence would show a greater priority in policing these crimes, rather than ignoring them. It’s a category error to exclude the crimes of the rape gangs when calculating the state’s approach to inter-communal violence. Leaving the crimes unpunished also provided a justification for vigilantism, which risked a spiral into anti-Asian violence as occurred in Oldham in 2001 and in parts of the country in the summer of 2024. If ignoring the rape gangs was intended to prevent inter-communal violence, it clearly failed.

But the more fundamental, and theoretical, reason why this explanation fails — beyond the fact that this supposed ‘strategy’ clearly did not actually work in practice — is that ‘imperial policing’ or ‘managing community tensions’ allows latitude with intra-communal offences, not inter-communal offences. This is the exact opposite of the approach taken by the authorities to the grooming gangs crisis. A hypothetical imperial police force overseeing a multiethnic province East of Suez would clamp down hard on any inter-communal crimes before the victimised group felt the need to take the law into their own hands. There would even be a temptation to suspend the operation of impartial justice to find someone from the offending group guilty in order to satiate anger from the other community, even if the person held responsible was in fact an innocent scapegoat.

Under multicultural or imperial policing, there is usually a contrasting latitude shown to intra-communal law, whether formally or informally. In Singapore, Muslim men (i.e., Malay men) are allowed to marry up to four wives under the Administration of Muslim Law Act, so long as the women are also Muslim. The marriages are registered at the Registry of Muslim Marriages, a public body established under the same Act. Indian, Chinese, and European men in Singapore are limited to just one wife. This might uncharitably be considered ‘two-tier justice’, but this legal peculiarity applies only to members of the same community.

This, of course, is an example of actual legal particularism. But even where the law itself is identical for all communities, this model of policing often assumes that communities can substantially police themselves. This may imply different standards and rules between groups — a decision that could be criticised on numerous grounds — but it does not imply that those different standards and rules may be used as an excuse to abuse, exploit, or even offend people from other groups. In countries with large Roma populations, illegal child marriage within Roma communities has often been treated by the authorities as an internal communal practice rather than as an ordinary criminal offence. Yet if such a marriage involved a child from the ethnic majority, the response would almost certainly be very different (that is not to say that the differing standards in the case of the Roma in these countries have not, in practice, permitted Roma to exploit people from other groups; it is merely a comment on the typical response of the authorities to child marriage).

Attributing the decision of the British police to turn a blind eye to Pakistani grooming gangs to so-called ‘imperial policing’ is especially galling when this form of policing does, in fact, currently exist within the United Kingdom’s borders today. Northern Ireland is an actual (and very striking) example of policing to prevent inter-communal violence, and it bears no resemblance to the policing of English towns like Rochdale or Telford. Nor does it apply to the one-sided repression of British national sentiment during the riots of 2024. In Northern Ireland, the leaders of formerly active paramilitary terror groups are given leniency in offences against the state and offences against others from within their own communities. The South Armagh PIRA is one of the most profitable criminal organisations in the UK and Ireland. One estimate (albeit from 2013) suggested they evade €150m in diesel taxes owed to the Irish government every year. On the other side of the sectarian divide, every month six UDA brigadiers collect the yearly salary of a Championship footballer in ‘membership dues’ from ‘members’ of their organisation who are not allowed to leave under threat of assassination. Senior politicians meet with these figures, thus turning a blind eye to the violence they inflict (or threaten to inflict) on their own community, while privately abandoning the pretence they are ‘community leaders’.

But the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) directs enormous resources into preventing the outbreak of inter-communal violence and solving hate crimes. According to a 2014 estimate, 34% of the PSNI’s budget is spent on matters relating to sectarianism. The PSNI would not turn a blind eye to a theoretical Republican or Loyalist grooming gang sexually exploiting vulnerable girls from the other community. This would be obviously stupid, just as it would be obviously stupid to not arrest members of a Pakistani grooming gang in Rochdale or Telford if your aim was to prevent inter-communal violence. This is what ‘imperial policing’ or ‘managing a multi-ethnic empire’ looks like in practice. Crimes within communities or against the state are overlooked in order to prevent crimes from taking place between communities.

The correct explanation of why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to abuse white girls is that anti-white racism pervades society. The ideology is highly sensitive to the mistreatment of non-white groups by white people, but refuses to admit any instance of mistreatment of white people by a non-white group. For example, the In Our Time episode on the Haitian Revolution did not mention the slaughter of almost all of the remaining white population on the island in the aftermath of the revolution. On another episode, there was similar reticence to concede any racial element to the Barbary slave trade, with much apologism made for this form of slavery in particular. The murder of Stephen Lawrence is a large fixture in our national folklore, and Lawrence’s mother was made a peer of the realm, while the racially-motivated murders of Richard Everitt, Ross Parker, and Kriss Donald would be familiar to few people outside of right-wing X.

Regime ideology views the ethnic British as a coherent group when considering historical injustices relating to colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade, or when defining the native population in a negative image in referring to ‘BAME’ people or ‘ethnic minorities’ when it wants to engage in racial and ethnic discrimination. But where the interests of this group are asserted, for example, against demographic change caused by mass immigration, its very existence is denied. This is eerily similar to how chauvinistic and even genocidal regimes treat minority groups alternatively as citizens of an errant province astray from the nation or an eternal enemy, depending on political utility.

The police are no exception when it comes to the influence this ideology has over our institutions. During the August 2024 riots, a ‘police liaison officer’ in Stoke negotiated an amnesty with a group of armed Muslim men outside a mosque, telling the men that if they left the weapons they had inside the mosque, the police would not arrest them. There is footage from what appears to be earlier in the day of armed Muslim men attacking unarmed white protesters. One white female protester says, ‘they’ve got knives, they’ve got knives’, before turning and running away from the Muslim mob. Fourteen people were imprisoned for their role in the riots, thirteen of whom were white and one of whom was Muslim. The article notes that some members of both sides carried weapons — which I have no reason to doubt — but it’s clear from the footage that white protesters were less likely to be armed, but have been prosecuted more harshly despite this.

A more well-known example of this phenomenon occurred in Birmingham, where false rumours of a far-right protest in Pakistani East Birmingham caused Muslims to pour out onto the streets with weapons, attacking a Sky News crew and marching eastward until they could find a white person to attack at the nearest pub. The West Midlands police refused to confront the mob, and a senior police officer defended this approach on the basis that they had coordinated with ‘business and community leaders’ who were ‘policing themselves’. It does seem that the intelligence gathered at the protest led to at least one arrest and further investigations of criminal damage. But as the Sky News journalist suggested, it is unlikely an armed EDL protest would have received this degree of latitude. It’s also likely many more arrests would have been made (whether immediately or in the aftermath), and much criminality would have been prevented in the first place, if the police had treated the group the same way as they would an armed mob of white men.

It’s hard to integrate these examples from the riots into a model in which the police consider the minimisation of inter-communal violence to be their greatest priority. The anti-white racism theory is much more consistent with police behaviour. So it’s no surprise that the authorities would allow the sexual exploitation of white girls by non-white men to persist for so long, and to be so obstinate in refusing to ascribe a racial motive to anything that took place once they had conceded prosecutions needed to take place.

A senior police officer in the South Yorkshire Police described the child sexual abuse which took place in Rotherham under his watch as ‘Paki shagging’ and said, ‘With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.’ He also claimed that the police failure was informed by a desire not to inflame ‘racial tensions’. But what episode in post-war British history has poisoned race relations more than the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal? Councillors were reluctant to report abuse for fear of being seen as racist, and one social worker who did was then told by police she was ‘going against the perpetrators’ human rights… rocking the multicultural boat… [and] being racist’. Extreme ‘anti-racist’ ideology — a refusal to concede white people can be racially victimised by non-white people, a desire to preserve the racial mythology of ‘white people evil, non-white people good’, and a wish to suppress the group instincts of white people — all of this explains why the police and other authorities were so permissive of the ‘grooming gangs’ which took hold across so many towns and cities. The need to preserve harmonious community relations is just a convenient alibi.

Proponents of the imperial policing model make one persuasive counter-argument. Being by far the largest group, white people (or the native British) cannot be treated as a community with its own ethnic interests, similar to how other ethnic groups are treated. If they were, their interests would completely dominate all others. Superintendents ‘listening’ to the ‘concerns’ of white ‘community leaders’ would mean allowing the white majority to set policing policy in every town and city in the country because of the weight of population those views would hold. So instead the state pursues ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’, which differs substantially from the imperial policing model that most postliberals invoke.

But there’s no evidence or reason to believe Britain’s majority would demand racialised policing that would come close to the injustice perpetrated against white girls in Rotherham and other towns. There’s a value judgment being made that a European ethnic group being ‘supreme’ in its titular nation state is an offence against mankind. Another defence of the ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ model is that the state needs to prevent the white population from rioting more than it needs to prevent other groups from doing the same because of the unique costs white rioting can impose. This explains the refusal to recognise the existence of the native British as a means of dampening ethnic consciousness. But would authorities seeking to obstruct the formation of militant white identity groups not police without fear or favour, rather than acting with brazen discrimination?

The contradictions contained within the imperial policing model and the parsimony of the anti-white racism model urge us to ask why the postliberal theory ever became consensus on the right. The answer being that, despite its flaws, the belief is adaptive, even if it is untrue. Journalists like to come up with novel explanations of phenomena to set themselves apart from the crowd. To explain the state’s failure to prosecute Pakistani rape gangs targeting white girls as simply another instance of the anti-white racism we have become familiar with since the 1960s would be too obvious and too simple. Comparing Britain to the Ottoman or Habsburg empires is much more original, and allows the journalist to portray themselves as a historical guru perched above the fray, watching the forces of empire inevitably turn in on themselves.

Postliberal folk beliefs also play an important role in the discourse as deradicalisation memes. If rape gangs were allowed to persist because of anti-white racism, that would seem to suggest that we should embrace a certain degree of white racial consciousness in response. If rape gangs were allowed to persist because of an ‘imperial model of policing’, that would seem to suggest we should more honestly strive towards a true liberal colourblindness. Journalists understand this, and their moral opposition to the acknowledgement of white ethnic interests is why there is so much stigma against the correct view, in the same way there is a stigma against hereditarianism.

The postliberal safety valve is a crucial part of the Overton cage. UnHerd, Spiked, and even The Spectator can now escape punishment for saying truths which were punishable by public disgrace fifteen (or even ten) years ago, which has admitted a measure of public catharsis. But to avoid the consequences of ‘naming the issue’, they have to wrap the truth in a regime-stabilising myth. Instead of accepting that the localised prevalence of grooming gangs is related to the number of Pakistanis (with all of the unsettling implications that would raise) and supporting an immigration moratorium and a policy of repatriation, they call for braver policing. Our responsibility is to break free from the cage and tell the truth.

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

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