It appears that severe economic strain and crippling energy prices are now baked into the near future. I am a pessimist by nature; studying Spengler’s The Decline of the West merely formed an intellectual and philosophical underpinning for what I felt in my gut. Why were great works of art and musical symphonies a thing of the past? What was the eerie hollowness inherent in a zeitgeist that only concerned itself with money?

A difficult question arises if one forms one’s worldview on the premise that things will only get worse, not better. Namely, what is to be done? Or what can be done? Are there no political solutions? What if we were all materially better off?

A few years ago, I wrote an article asking whether the West was an elephant tottering around on fragile stilts. While my focus was primarily on internet cables rather than energy supplies, the disconcerting truth that our technological marvel of modernity is propped up on flimsy balsa-wood foundations has re-emerged amid the war in Iran.

Never a platform to shy away from hyperbole, the Daily Mail carried this headline:

It is impossible to say whether this doomsday forecast will come to fruition, but at least some degree of pain seems unavoidable at this point. What the article will not mention, of course, is that the population is now highly “diverse” and, given enough strain, likely to fracture into ethnic and identitarian lines, drastically compounding the stress on society.

Here, we witness the agonising folly of creating a multicultural society lubricated with debt-wealth and childish ideals conjured up in focus groups. The truth of it is that multicultural Britain has never been stress-tested, not really. A homogenous country can withstand famines and wars, economic collapse, and cold, but a society divided against itself by government decree? A nation comprised of rival tribes and the wandering waifs and strays who washed up on the shore for lucre?

I’m a pessimist, but not a nihilist. To return to the question of what must be done if gradual decline is inevitable, like the changing of the seasons, the answer I came to long ago was that the damage and suffering must be mitigated as much as possible.

Pro-immigration advocates, such as Zoe Gardner, have already made it clear that no numbers of murders and rapes offset the alleged advantages of mass immigration, as she states here:

Drill down through sanctimony, and what Gardner is essentially arguing is that we must import foreign human biomass because we are not sufficiently replicating our own human biomass. If we fail to do so, then the “system” comes under duress. Fundamentally, the system of infinite growth and neoliberal economics must prevail, not distinct ethnicities. In this frame, humans are no different from the energy supplies currently burning in the sands of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, a resource or capital that greases the Globalist Tower of Babel.

Yet, we now see that the system is cracking at the macro level, regardless of how many immigrants we have paying for pensions and acting as human quantitative easing for the bond markets.

The already highly dubious merits of the pro-immigration argument become untenable if the raw infrastructure is in flames. All that remains are minority white towns and cities, poisoned with seething sectarianism and resentment. All for nought.

The argument that “you may not like immigration, but it keeps the system running” assumes that negative outcomes can be offset, but they now seem to be arriving anyway. The multi-ethnic tinderbox has thus created a situation worse than simply being poor, worse than facing “hard times”; it is a force multiplier of misery and strife.

It is true that a white-only UK would have too many old people relative to the young. It would be a challenge, it would be a struggle, but eventually, thanks in no small part to the housing stock being easily affordable due to a declining population, people would settle, and the situation would improve. There are worse things than being poor. There are scenarios that are infinitely worse than returning to the diets our people had in the 1950s; it’s just that so imbued are we with the spirit of progressivism that spells of hardship have become unthinkable.

The satanic bargain our civilisation has been built upon is that we can inhabit an eternal summer, the days will be forever long, the harvests rich, and the honey sweet. All it has cost us is our land, our future, and our souls. The very idea that we should lower expectations, make do, and retreat to restore our energy, is anathema.

Hard times are coming, whether because of the latest madness in the Middle East or some other, as-yet-unknown factor. What would have been hard times in a high-trust, homogenous society will instead be hard times alongside foreigners gaming the systems and the handouts based on their own tribal, in-group loyalties that have been expunged from the natives.

So what is to be done?

The answer that I have given for years is localism and trust networks.

A few years ago, I spent a few days clearing brambles and undergrowth from an old man’s garden. I knew him from the local pub. It wasn’t a big job, cutting back with shears, strimming and rough turning over of the modest patch of soil. A few weeks later, he suddenly appeared at my door with cardboard boxes stuffed with seed potatoes ready to be chitted. So many, in fact, that I didn’t have the growing space for them all. I could call it even here, a favour for a favour. Instead, I intend to bring him a basket of leeks, beans, and tomatoes in midsummer when I go to the pub.

Rather than wax lyrical about localism or growing vegetables, let us instead consider what has taken place between men entirely outside of the system.

1. Firstly, the isolating shackles of atomisation must be severed, and contact must be made with other men in the area

2. A common ground has been found through conversation, and a favour offered

3. The favour is subsequently reciprocated by the delivery of an abundance of goods

4. The foundations will, in the future, be built upon by a further exchange

5. With trust now established, further favours and services can be arranged. For example, the old man has a friend who is a retired mechanic, and he has a son who knows a lot about fixing computers.

Nothing grandiose is taking place here. There are no grand unifying theories or ideologies. It is instead the awkward, tentative steps back away from the isolated individual reliant on systems and the embryonic emergence of trust networks. It is what will bolster the native population in the face of imported tribalism (who are doing the same), what will survive when the stilts crack and splinter under the bloated bulk of the elephant.

It is what will remain when politics and everything else fail.

Subscribe now

Two different worlds have occupied my thoughts recently. One is a world in which amoral, degenerate elites treat those under their vassalage as mere objects to be tortured and exploited. The other is the latest Game of Thrones spin-off.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is currently receiving rave reviews from both mainstream and movie-critic YouTube channels. Set 80 years before the main Game of Thrones saga and based on the book The Hedge Knight, the new series is being lauded as post-woke and a return to traditional heroic archetypes and morality.

The story is centred on a big strapping lad who has a heart of gold and fancies himself as an honourable knight. Duncan the Tall (Dunc) is the antithesis of what we’ve come to expect from Westeros and its cynical view of power and human nature.

We’ve been here before, of course. This is essentially the Ned Stark arc.

Seven Kingdoms is far more concerned with life from the perspective of the smallfolk commoners than previous sagas, and Dunc strives to be their idealistic champion. The plot gets rolling properly when a psycho Targaryen prince breaks the fingers of a girl enacting a story on stage in which a dragon (symbol of House Targaryen) is slain. Dunc, disregarding the hierarchy of Westeros entirely, gives the prince a damn good hiding.

Thus, Dunc is upholding the values of the knight by protecting the innocent, and those values are now at odds with the powerful people who rule, and he now faces being executed for it. Luckily for Dunc, his companion is a young Targaryen boy called Aegon (Egg) who can speak up on his behalf.

The stories, then, are a newer incarnation of the good man in a bad world trope with his sidekick, similar in theme to Don Quixote or Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. A somewhat grimmer version is Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

As of writing, the show is not finished, though it does appear to be gaining in popularity by the week as people realise it isn’t just more misery and cynicism wearing woke lipstick.

Yet, it is interesting to juxtapose the popularity of The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with real-world political and cultural trends at the beginning of 2026. The show everyone is talking about is philosophically rooted in the heroism of a good man defending the innocent at great risk, while in the real world, our world, we are deluged daily by the latest horrors and sordid details of the Epstein files. Every day is a new revelation of the degree to which our elites despise us, more often than not, a tribal, ritualistic contempt.

When the original Thrones saga aired in the 2010s, people had the luxury of enjoying the spectacle of schemers and cynical players interested only in personal gain. There’s a ruthlessness that can be admired in an abstract sense. We could place ourselves in the role of this or that ruler and mull over the dastardly deeds we could justify, and if that resulted in a few hundred smallfolk being raped and butchered, well, they just have to suffer as they must.

In 2026, however, it’s pretty obvious that we are the smallfolk, and it is demanded of us that we suffer at their pleasure, and for their pleasure, and they’ll video it, and gloat about it in poorly written emails.

Moreover, our tormentors don’t have aura, or charisma, aren’t sharp intellects, and don’t deserve to rule or hold any power at all.

We do not get Tywin Lannister; we get a giggling, lying, moronic sleazeball like Howard Lutnick. We get Peter Mandelson in his crusty undies and Bill Gates’ warty penis. We get a political class that tries to woo us over with promises to put a penny extra in our pockets, while the masses speculate over whether the rumours about eating babies are true. We get pledges to fix the potholes in the roads, while the Palantir surveillance grid they used on the Palestinians is rolled out at the behest of those vacationing on Epstein’s island.

Ours is a society so corrupt that benign words such as pizza, hotdog or jerky come wrapped in an ominous cloud of foreboding and dread.

We have arrived at the meat and pulp-stained gates of suffering as we must.

Small wonder, then, that the cultural psyche has shifted from revelling in cynicism and amorality towards crying out for simple, good old-fashioned moral groundedness. We ask ourselves who the “good ones” are, and more often than not these days, it creates strange bedfellows that transcend traditional political camps that now seem increasingly redundant. Sincerity and authenticity are becoming lucrative forms of social capital because, in an age of unbridled corruption and cynicism, ideology has become the carrot dangled before the eyes of the easily duped.

People will downplay or minimise the grotesqueries of the elite class in the vainglorious hope that in doing so they can eke out a few concessions from them. If you turn a blind eye to your rulers calling you goyim cattle, you could possibly be rewarded by more illegals being deported.

Park your purity spiral and your morals; this isn’t how the game is played.

Yet, despite it all, it feels as if we live in a time when the system has never been more exposed and vulnerable. It turns out that truth actually is a powerful weapon, more powerful than ideology.

In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Dunc is told that he will face a “Trial of Seven” which amounts to a duel between himself and House Targaryen. Essentially, this means that Dunc has to assemble a ramshackle coalition willing to fight the powerful and highly trained warriors of the ruling class, and unsurprisingly, few wish to do it despite being knights with oaths. Fight for truth, against the odds, or kneel before cruel and corrupt power.

Dunc, in his innocence, expects the other knights to rally to his side, and when they refuse, he asks if there is a single true knight among them. There they sit, in their expensive garments, resplendent in their pomp and ceremony, yet they are revealed as frauds and cowards by the man with integrity.

I am of the opinion that there is a synchronicity between where the political discourse is heading, and the popularity of this most recent sojourn in Westeros.

What drives a man such as Thomas Massie onwards to uncover the horrors of Epstein Island, and why hasn’t he succumbed to Zionist money? Why does Rupert Lowe choose to wade through the filth and sadism of Britain’s so-called “Grooming Gangs” and the mass rape of English girls by mainly Pakistani men, when he could retire to his farm?

Perhaps it is related to why I trust leftists such as Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian more than Nigel Farage these days. Fundamentally, we’re all just bored with the bullshit and want truth, even if spoken by people with whom we disagree on other issues, such as demographics or economics.

The currency of the future is honesty and integrity, not spin and narrative.

Contemplating the nature of the Epstein scandal recently, I noticed that, beyond the Jewishness of it all, there was also the total dominance of Baby Boomers. Elon Musk, despite his best efforts, was shunned by the clique, and he’s Generation X. Yet, is it feasible that Millennials would engage in these acts? Somehow, I do not think they’ll be inclined to as previous generations have.

In the often derided Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, the Millennials are allotted the “hero” archetype. They are the generation that will restore trust in institutions. Personally, I’ve often regarded Millennials as a humourless, overly serious and po-faced generation. Yet, perhaps the shift toward sincerity that we may be witnessing is a symptom of them settling into institutional positions as the Boomers finally wither and fade.

As it stands now, we witness only a few hardy souls demanding truth and exposing untruth and venality.

Spenglerian Perspective recently touched on this theme, concluding somberly:

They tripped up Musk while keeping Thiel; they will do the same to Reform as they did to Trump 1.0. Fighting against this purely with an ideological narrative of our own is futile because 1., the age we are entering into is a post-narrative age, and 2., when the establishment is exposed, it only leaves the people to create a million conspiracy narratives of their own which all point to a gnostic second-religiousness that tells us “It’s all too futile to stop them”. This leaves future history back in the hands of elite factions, which steadily consolidate in individual men who are powerful enough to dismantle the system and “restore the republic” through empowering themselves and their families alone, regardless as to how many of us it will hurt. In that grain of knowledge is the path forward.

The prospect of elites of the calibre we have now in the West ruling over us as Caesars, shuffling us into a Palantir digital panopticon forever, is too terrible to contemplate. Yet it is happening while they’re being delegitimised and exposed as never before, and one can’t escape the feeling that it is a race against time.

Truth alone is a mighty weapon; truth with power to back it up is even better.

We will always be ruled by power, but is it really too much to ask that the power that rules us isn’t the scum of the earth?

Share

This Christmas, I finally relented after years of pressure and agreed to go out for a night on the drink in Newcastle with an old friend, Alex. I stipulated that we stay away from the Bigg Market and linger around the Haymarket, which is more suitable for our age group, and the deal was done.

As the day approached, I began to ponder the chances of me becoming a viral video on X depicting an immigrant stabbing me to death. This is a sort of morbidly meta view of social media dynamics and virality, in which there’s an iPhone, CCTV footage, clickbait, and 12 hours of rage awaiting every one of us.

Still, exaggerated as it may seem to envision one’s untimely death at the hands of an immigrant and becoming viral content in the process, it does speak to the general aura lingering over perceptions of English cities. It’s a perception that certainly wasn’t there back in our glory days of hitting The Toon.

I took the bus from Blyth to Newcastle around 5.00 pm, just in time for the evening rush. The buses exemplify the hyper-regulated aesthetic common in third spaces these days, which has scraped out all frivolity and humanity, leaving only a purely functional vehicle. Long gone now are the woollen tartan designs on the seats, often with an ashtray on the back.

Instead, we have a heavy grey rubber substance, presumably complying with some health and safety diktat. The spaces allocated to the disabled seem to encompass half the seats on the bus, and the décor is a series of woke corporate ads and myriad handles and railings, also grey, to ensure that slipping or falling is an impossibility.

Halfway to Newcastle, in Benton, the bus begins to fill up with Indians, presumably working in the recently built “Business Park” nearby. A utilitarian workforce boards utilitarian public transport, while outside in the gloom, LED street lights create a permanent liminal landscape.

Regardless of the passengers’ ethnicity, everyone stares at their devices until we reach Newcastle.

The Haymarket bus station seems colder and shabbier than I remember. There are more foreign faces, and a single homeless man is white. The foreigners are waiting for buses to take them to relatively obscure corners of the North East like Dinnington and Seaton Burn, which still startles me after all these years.

I cross the road to Percy Street and make my way toward the Three Bulls Heads, where I will be meeting Alex.

There’s a large and seemingly plush and swanky Chinese restaurant on the way, as well as bizarrely, a large Somali barbershop. I make a mental note of the barbershop for conversation later in the evening. Percy Street is prime real estate in Newcastle. I find the idea that a Somali immigrant can establish a business cutting hair between such local landmarks as the Three Bulls Heads and the Hotspur to be ludicrous. Besides, everyone is suspicious of all these barber shops popping up everywhere like mushrooms.

Not much has changed at the Three Bulls; the décor is a bit brighter than it once was, and their beer selection has been (thankfully) expanded. I glance over to the corner on the right, beside the disabled toilets. It was there, in the late ‘90s, that 8 or 10 of us would gather every Saturday afternoon. It was there that I watched rolling news coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the fallout. I remember the faces present, the packets of Lambert & Butler cigs on the table, the horribly crude banter that seemed funny, the arguments and gossip, the vitality. All in that corner.

My friend Alex arrives shortly after, and I point over to the corner. He, too, remembers it and jokes about the abuse the disabled toilets got. Still, though, where once there were ten of us, there are now just two.

Despite my personal recollections, neither Newcastle nor its pubs are mere dusty relics of bygone days; on the evening in question, it’s rowdy, and there’s a football match on, Newcastle vs Aston Villa. I have no interest in the football, and never did, and that too gets rolled into the conversation.

Upstairs in the Three Bulls, I notice an attractive barmaid who is a perfect rendition of the archetype of the Geordie barmaid. Long brown hair, pulled into a ponytail, dressed all in black, terse school teacher mannerisms, an attempt to downplay her accent, which doesn’t quite work, the features of the actress Anna Friel. Again, things may change, but others remain the same.

We settle in to drink rounds of an IPA called “Neck oil”, which is a bit too fruity but goes down well.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation turns to politics, particularly immigration. Alex has two young daughters, and the relentless churn of migrant-related sex crimes against English females is turning his hair grey and keeping him awake at night. This sentiment is everywhere, as I’ve noted in other writings and broadcasts. All of my family shares it, and everyone they talk to does. Where is all this heading? What will it be like when X becomes a teenager? Has the government become demented?

What, for example, are the processes that led to a bus in Benton filling up with Indians? Or, for that matter, the ability of a Somali to open a barbershop on Percy Street right alongside some of Newcastle’s most iconic pubs? How does all this work?

Ten years ago, I was regarded as hysterical, and my diatribes were met with rolling eyes and sarcastic yawns, but not any more. Now I find myself the centrist, the cooler head.

The framing of these discussions is in and of itself interesting because family and friends will concede that “Newcastle is not as bad yet as…” but implicit within such a statement is that mass immigration is inherently harmful.

Over the course of the Christmas season, my father had railed that English football fans would be violently antagonistic against each other over a stupid sport, but were seemingly blind to something such as the grooming gangs. It is a common criticism of Englishmen, and looking around the bar and hearing the yells and swearing at the football, it is tough to refute or not take seriously.

We venture to the next bar down, formerly the Goose & Garden, now called The Magpie. It’s an expansive space like a barn, and men in their 40s and 50s yell and jeer at the multitudinous flatscreens showing the game. Curiously, there’s a younger generation in the mix who pay no attention to the football because they’re engrossed in their own screens. Neither are the Zoomers wearing Newcastle FC regalia; instead, they wear the baggy, androgynous uniform they seem to wear all the time.

Looking at the scant presence of anyone under 25 and the heavy (literally) presence of men in their 40s and 50s makes me realize that the same people are propping up Newcastle’s pub scene in the 2020s as were doing so in 1997, which is to say, my generation.

Six pints down, and we loop back up toward Haymarket and enter the Percy Arms. Colloquially called “The Percy”, the old pub is far smaller and more intimate than what we’ve seen so far. Long sofas along the walls, people sitting at the bar, and groups all within earshot of one another cram into what is an excellent example of an old-fashioned English pub.

Newcastle always had an array of obscure backstreet pubs frequented by the working class coming in from the West End and areas such as Cowgate. I had wrongly assumed that such pubs, along with their customers, would never have survived the changes of the previous decades, yet they were thriving in the Percy, as if preserved in amber set in 1999.

If I were to do the night over again, I’d have spent the whole evening in the Percy, but 7-8 pints down, I was beginning to reach what I can take these days, so we decided to get a greasy pizza for old time’s sake.

Walking through Haymarket bus station once again, I noted that the number of homeless people preparing to spend the night in borderline freezing temperatures had now swelled to four.

All of them were white British natives.

Thus, it is impossible to ignore the grim realities and twisted juxtapositions inherent in British life. You can try and push it out of mind all you want, but there remains that little bell tinkling away, demanding that you mention something about migrant hotels and HMOs (Houses of Multiple Occupancy). Are the same processes at play that led to a Somali having a barbershop on Percy Street? Or the Indians boarding the bus in Benton?

Of course, I can and often do speak at great length about managerialism, the institutionalised anti-whiteness, the rotting incentive structures, and general trends within the culture and politics that create such outcomes. But the point is, this is normie street, this is me and everyone in the real world witnessing it with our eyes. You do not need to be schooled in the dark arts of online right literature to understand the injustice and sheer brutality of the current system.

The pizza shop was owned by some stripe of Europeans from the south-east, such as Bulgarians or Macedonians, or perhaps Turks or Kurds; it’s hard to tell. The place was dominated by a leathery-faced patriarch who looked like an older Leonard Cohen, and the food was a bland but spicy slop. The exterior was a gaudy display of yellow neon lighting, and a constant churn of activity bustled around the place - taxis, foreigners wandering and shouting something, then wandering out, and takeaway drivers picking up orders.

It was a network of sorts whose real activities I could only imagine, though in fairness, I did not intuitively get the worst gut feeling I’ve ever had. Still, though, our people were sleeping in the cold in a bus station while these people were thriving.

After we left the pizza shop, Alex made for the bus, and I had twenty minutes to kill, so I went for a final quiet pint at a bar on the corner of Haymarket called The Junction, though it used to be called Old Orleans. Unusually for me, I’m hit with a genuine wave of nostalgia for the first time. I came here many years ago on a date; a barmaid I’d pestered for weeks finally relented, and we agreed to meet at the Old Orleans. She turned up wearing sluttish see-through lace pants. She, too, was that archetype of the Geordie barmaid.

Feeling tired, drunk, and mildly sick from the pizza, I ruminated over my night back out in Newcastle. I didn’t get stabbed, at least. In fact, it didn’t seem to be very dangerous or even very lively at all. It was both reassuringly familiar and yet strangely cold, oddly hollowed out or exhausted, in an intangible way. Not in the drastic, shattering manner in which other parts of the country have shifted in terms of identity.

When I went on the date in Old Orleans, it seemed richly designed and high status; it was certainly expensive. Yet now it seemed worn out and shabby, I wasn’t sure whether it was just me or the old town.

In truth, I think it is probably both.

Britain has undergone such profound social change within a short time that it is perfectly reasonable to speak of it in terms of a before-and-after in the same manner we would describe before the French Revolution and after, before World War I and after, before the Great Plague and after.

Liberals would either accept or deny that something had happened t…

Read more

Autumn has arrived to call time on my third growing season at the veg patch. I still have some hardier brassicas, such as cabbage, sprouts, and broccoli, in the plot. Still, the good times are indeed over, and my decidedly unexciting overwintering crops, such as leeks, onions, and garlic, are almost ready to go in. Looking back on the growing season, I can recount my successes and failures.

I planted tomatoes for the first time and found them to be an astonishingly weak and needy plant. First, as seedlings, there wasn’t enough daylight; then, as plants, it was too cold; then they had too much water; then they demanded expensive fertiliser. During the summer heatwave, it was too hot.

Conversely, a great success story this year was the scarlet runner beans. As the tomatoes cried out for attention in the greenhouse, the scarlet runners happily climbed a makeshift trellis and delivered copious numbers of foot-long (!) pods.

I had a huge potato harvest, though the peas turned out to be a complete disaster as I once again didn’t account for how tall they would grow.

Sitting alongside my onion and leek seedlings are a few rarer, more unusual plants that I’m experimenting with.

And there’s a story behind that…

Unsurprisingly, the YouTube algorithm pushes gardening “content” quite aggressively onto my video feed. Earlier this year, I was recommended a video titled 15 Forgotten Vegetables Medieval Farmers Grew That NEED to Come Back. The video, which I suspect was primarily AI-generated, listed numerous herbs and vegetables from the Middle Ages that have since fallen out of our daily diets. Despite the “slop” nature of the content, I was intrigued by the premise and investigated further.

I have to admit I hadn’t given much thought to how our food has changed over the centuries. If William Shakespeare saw a potato at all, it would have been considered an oddity, perhaps an aphrodisiac. The Romans never knew what a tomato was. Neither did Leonardo da Vinci.

As European men sailed on into the uncharted, untamed wildernesses of the world, they returned with novel crops that slipped into our daily diets until we no longer recognised them as foreign. Traditional crops that would have been familiar to a medieval monk or peasant were pushed to the edge of the plate, so to speak, then forgotten about entirely.

Who today has heard of Good King Henry? It was also called “Poor Man’s Spinach” or “perennial goosefoot”. Another is lovage, a relative of parsley and celery. Tansy is a pretty aromatic plant with bright yellow button flowers and a wide array of uses, some of which seem decidedly dubious, if not downright dangerous. Then there’s skirret, a relative of the carrot and parsnip that forms a thick mop of nutritious bulbs. Another root vegetable we don’t hear much about these days is salsify, which is said to have a seafood taste.

The list of foods we no longer eat, grow, or even remember is long. The administration of Emperor Charlemagne produced a document titled The Capitulare de villis which, among many other administrative edicts, prescribed which plants were to be regarded as beneficial to the people and the Empire more generally.

The further I read about the changing tastes and culinary habits of Europeans, the more I felt as if I were in a murder mystery. Why, for example, had I never even heard of lovage, never mind seen it in a supermarket? Was skirret really an inferior potato or carrot that had to be tossed into the historical and cultural phantom zone? Was it a conspiracy? If Good King Henry is a poor man’s asparagus and spinach, why wasn’t it readily available?

The first clue dawned on me when I realised why I suddenly wanted to order seeds and try to grow some of these forgotten plants: they were perennials.

(A plant that is sown and goes through its entire lifecycle within a year is called an annual. A tomato or a bean is an annual. A plant that sits in the ground for years and years, delivering crops seasonally, is called a perennial. Rhubarb or an apple tree is a perennial.)

As we head deeper into the mystery, we discover that it is not so much the case that tastier foreign crops displaced and replaced older, native ones, but that herbs and vegetables began to be chosen for their growing cycles. For a medieval monk or peasant, the incentive was to grow reliable crops that required minimal effort and were as close to the kitchen as possible. Therefore, a tough, hardy crop such as skirret or lovage was ideal as, once planted, it delivered year after year.

It is, quite literally, a matter of rootedness.

To be sure, the Middle Ages gardener did not only grow perennials, but also annuals, which fit into a more rhythmic existence where core crops were settled and the plot merely needed to be tended.

The problem is that such a system does not replicate or survive well in a mass, scale-based civilisation. Indeed, during the Industrial Revolution, the peasantry was mainly shuffled off the land and into the mills, mines, and yards. Food staples became rationalised; the incentive was toward scalability and efficiency.

A landowner or a market shareholder needed to be able to assess costs and benefits across the entire year. The market needed to adapt quickly to weather, rotted seeds, or problematic supply chains. Workers needed to be supplied with nutritious food at ever greater volume. Here, a crop such as a potato outstripped the skirret on almost every metric except durability and hardiness.

The deep roots were severed and replaced by a more transient, market-friendly model. Europeans ceased to be part of the natural order, no longer bringing it forth into life but commanding it through technique. Nature became a uniform standing reserve, its rhythms subordinated to production schedules and profit margins. That transformation shaped more than crops; it shaped our senses.

We never truly decided that celery was tastier than lovage — it isn’t — we simply had our choices made for us by a mechanised system that required mildness, uniformity and speed.

It is a story of the triumph of the “Reign of Quantity” regardless of culinary tastes and aesthetics. Technique favours the generic, the Disneyfied, and the bland, which is why so many people would view the clumpy mass of gnarled roots of the skirret plant as hideous, and the childlike orange demeanour of the carrot as comforting and familiar.

Yet, as this society of mass and scale slips ever further into outright madness and nihilism, we yearn for an off-ramp, a bolt-hole that will take us back to rootedness and belonging. How often have we unknowingly wandered past a clump of Good King Henry by a crumbling old wall? Or a tangle of lovage nestled in a hedgerow?

My interest in these vegetables began because they were perennials, because they’d be there regardless of other conditions. The definition of perennial is:

lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.

It is a glimpse into another, older world, where time operates differently and independently of the demands of digitised processes; it is of the past, and very probably of the future too.

In a world that has passed beyond uniformity —the standardised, the generic —perhaps they will have their revenge.

The first time I ever saw the term “multiculturalism” was in a Sunday Times article around 2003, either written by Gordon Brown or featuring him, and I intuitively knew I was being lied to. I disliked the vagueness of the term, which felt entirely made up. Phonetically, it was ugly, with too many consonants cluttered too closely together. The sentence containing the term stated with insistence that multiculturalism was a fact, an objective lived reality, and that it had been for a long time. Multiculturalism was not something that was to come, but something that was already here. Britain was multicultural, and would not become so at some point in the future. This I knew to be false. Having spent almost my entire life in the North East of England, I knew that there were not many cultures or peoples; there was just us.

The general impression I had was that England was in the process of being terraformed by something similar to a science fiction World Engine. Moreover, I knew that we had never been asked, and that there wasn’t even much discussion about it. A question haunted my thoughts: if Britain was to become many cultures, then what would happen to us?

I was a grown man in my twenties, and that meant I had already accumulated decades of life experience before the term “multiculturalism” became formalised. I saw the Britpop band Pulp at Gateshead Stadium in 1995, and Britain was not as multicultural back then. I had spent years drinking in Newcastle and all across the North East, and nowhere was it multicultural. Bank Holiday Mondays in Whitley Bay were not multicultural, and the awful, backbreaking job I had in North Shields, surrounded by violent chavs, was not multicultural.

It was just us.

We didn’t have to discuss multiculturalism or immigration much because it didn’t matter to us. Places like London and Birmingham were known to have immigrant populations, but the perception was that they were static, an outlier not to be overly concerned about. The ethnic minorities were actual minorities, comprising 5% of the entire population, and even then, they were concentrated in a few areas.

In my adulthood, we have moved from a situation where immigration and multiculturalism were hardly discussed or even considered, to a situation where we discuss almost nothing else. The terraforming of England has cast into shadow every other facet of life; there is no escape from it, no outside of it. So all encompassing has it become, so normalised, that we hardly even remember what it was like not to be confronted by it every day.

There’s only so much mental energy, psychic dynamism, that a country has at its disposal, and in Britain, multiculturalism and mass immigration consume almost all of it. Right-wing conservative-minded people expend energy attacking it, liberals defending it. The power structure funnels colossal resources into managing, protecting, and expanding it.

In the name of multiculturalism, we have rewritten our history to place black and brown people in our past, choked ourselves on censorship, and strangled ourselves on regulation to ensure the wheels of the project keep turning. There is the core issue of raw numbers coming in, and the results of that in a physical sense in the real world. Then there’s the energy poured into the secondary effects and unending expanse of managerialist solutions to problems created by the initial act.

An issue such as Two-Tier policing exists because multiculturalism exists. Racial Equality Laws that form the foundation upon which Two-Tier policing occurs exist because multiculturalism exists. This disparity then sparks an intellectually charged debate regarding the problem, or whether the problem even exists. Statistics are required to prove the case one way or another, and then the reliability of the statistics is brought into question.

The perceived injustice of Two-Tier policing then gnaws away at the legitimacy of governance, thus creating further problems and discursive dynamics on the nature of government.

An organisation such as the BBC may hide from view the ethnicity of a murderer or rapist. Their logic in doing so is to keep greasing the wheels of the project, but in so doing, they merely open up another avenue of distrust and anger. To state boldly that an immigrant from, say, Africa, committed a terrible crime would play into the hands of “the far right”, so they play fast and loose with the facts to keep the metanarrative stable. This then creates a new dialogue.

Every single day, the country's political life is consumed by one issue or another related to multiculturalism. An entire conversation can take place around the chronic lack of housing, with one side arguing that there’s too much regulation and the other that there are too many people in the country. The same debates occur about NHS beds, traffic on the roads, available schools, the job market, or the lack thereof.

What may or may not be said or revealed. Who may or may not appear in a historical drama, or what the drama is about, and whom it offends.

The core of the regime, its spokesmen and water carriers, feign an ignorance in the face of these developments. In their framing, Britain is ticking over just fine except for a few outliers here and there. Nothing has changed, and if you point out a discrepancy, such as the ethnicity of Anne Boleyn, you’re inflating a minor issue of no importance.

The Death of Satire

The English comedian, Harry Enfield, made a return to the BBC between 2007 and 2012. Compared to his more observation-based comedy in the early ‘90s, there was clearly a more reactionary turn in his 2000s work. Targets included a multitude of establishment celebrities and pompous television presenters, Eastern European immigrants, the band U2, and, most brutally of all, upper-middle-class liberals.

Enfield was doing what all court jesters should do: delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power. The jester’s often painful or embarrassing jibes can be taken in good faith and acted upon, ignored, or worse. The idea is to convey what everyone outside the court is thinking and how the ordinary person perceives those with power and influence. While Enfield’s work of this era certainly merits a more focused analysis, here I’d like to zoom in on one sketch based on a favourite Enfield target, the show Dragons’ Den.

Enfield excoriates the ludicrously pompous panel of wealthy, high-status business owners and their seeming right to supreme arrogance justified simply by their wealth. In one skit, Enfield and Paul Whitehouse arrive to pitch an idea as bumbling English entrepreneurs trying to get the “Dragons” to invest in their concept called “I can’t believe it’s not custard”. The Dragons, also played by Enfield and Whitehouse, sneer and spit venom at the Englishmen and their stupid idea, swiftly sending them away with no investment whatsoever.

The two white men later return, adorned in black-face and Jamaican accents with a pitch called “Me kyan believe it nat custard” and the Dragons fall at their feet, showering them with money. They then begin to compete with each other in sycophantically grovelling, fearful that the least enthusiastic of them will be deemed racist.

The sketch hits like a thunderbolt because Enfield holds up a mirror to a particular class of people, saying, “This is what you are!” We, as the common folk, take great delight in this lampooning because we know it to be a painful, somewhat grotesque truth. In an ocean of noise, it is a clear, bright signal that something is not right.

It is both a commentary on multiculturalism and a critique of those with power and influence. Yet, for some reason, this sketch lands harder than, say, a Spitting Image sketch in the 1980s targeting Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. There is a sense that an agreed-upon lie is being teased out into the glare of daylight and unceremoniously prodded and kicked about. The morality of the pretentious Dragons is a sham, and as such, their status is deflated before us.

Enfield revealed, in that single clip, the inherent fragility of the managerial classes dedicated to propagating via “virtue signalling” the values of the multicultural state. The millionaires of the Dragons’ Den panel adopt the attitudes and worldview of brutal free-market meritocrats, with the only subject of interest to them being whether or not a product or service is worthy of investment. Enfield implied that this worldview was a lie, a charade, and that they were no more outside of the central multicultural metanarrative than a Guardian journalist. The Dragons’ Den panel, and therefore neoliberalism, was not an alternative or competitor, but rather subordinate to the politically correct dogma of the age.

From the perspective of Britain’s liberal elite, Enfield committed a multitude of sins against them and their values, which probably explains why, after his show was shuffled off to BBC 2 to die, they never allowed themselves to be confronted with such lampooning ever again. The external frame from which people can gaze back into the general narrative would be kept permanently locked out.

Yet, this also marked a transition from a Blairite neoliberalism, in which the justification for mass immigration was to infuse British society with fresh energy and dynamism, into a more stagnant form wherein the upholding of the multicultural order became its own justification.

Strength In Division

Almost twenty years after Harry Enfield’s show aired, the narrative has been hermetically sealed for a generation and can only reference itself when attempting to make sense of British society.

Our diversity is our strength, but we must be ever vigilant against those who would seek to divide us.

After a recent terrorist attack in Manchester, in which an Islamic radical attacked a synagogue, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood warned the country against becoming too divided over the issue. Yet, just a few days before the terror attack, Shabana Mahmood was herself at the heart of the discussion because she insisted that she was English. Many people disagreed.

Indeed, the entirety of the previous week had seen the Labour Party make stern speeches about the “Far Right” and Nigel Farage’s party Reform. The week before that, everyone was arguing about whether migrants were eating swans, and the week before that, the media machine whirred away in disbelief that Farage was changing the rules around migration settlement and proposing deporting up to 600,000 people. The week before that, a giant Tommy Robinson rally flooded into London to protest for free speech and an end to mass immigration.

Before the Robinson rally, a campaign of English flags was hoisted across the land, serving as a form of ethnic territorial marking. There was the story of the Scottish girl wielding an ax, and before that, the long, drawn-out saga of protest and betrayal of the Epping migrant hotel.

These stories were national news stories that leaped clear and free of the Xitter timeline.

The State and the establishment media like to paint a picture where unrest, acts of barbarism, or disputes are minor outliers to what is overwhelmingly a positive experience.

Obviously, this isn’t the case.

We do not merely “rub along” while an aloof state attends to economics and foreign policy; the primary activity of the state and media is desperately attempting to hold together the society it has created. Multiculturalism has become the axis around which everything revolves and shifts.

We can imagine Dutch society in the Middle Ages, driven by the impulse to reduce flooding by the sea, to wall off the flow, obsessively drain marshlands, and dig out dykes. Water, the sea, would have occupied the thoughts of every burgher and peasant, farmer and painter. Society would have been warped and buckled by the threat, and driven by a Faustian will to overcome it incrementally.

Japan’s unfortunate location atop tectonic fault-lines that routinely result in earthquakes tearing apart its cities could also be comparable.

I am often reminded of a curious Japanese anime from 1995 called Cannon Fodder. The story takes place in a fictional city, entirely walled, that dedicates itself to firing cannons across its defensive lines into the wasteland beyond. The basis of the entire social order and all of its resource management is to keep the cannons firing at the same rate, forever. The need to keep the cannons firing undergirds its education system, career paths, and intellectual life. There is no outside of the frame of firing the cannons, merely arguments about how best to keep them firing. Similarly, there is no real indication that an enemy is being hit, or even if an enemy exists. It is a society built on an absurdity. Yet the absurdity has become so normalised and entrenched in the city’s life that nobody can remember anything else.

There will be more atrocities in Britain because of multiculturalism. There will be more people going to jail for speech. There will be more hollow statements about unity being found in division, while division is also a threat to society. And every time it happens, the regime will insist everything is fine, and we’re bound to have a few bumps in the road before we can cruise along in normality.

But normality never actually arrives. Or rather, the unrest, the existential angst of the natives, the censorship and rapes and knife crime, and the alienation are the normative state of things, not, as we are told, bumps in the road.

An alternative timeline was possible. There would have been too many old people relative to young working people; the precious GDP would have collapsed. There would have been abundant housing, which might have resulted in easing the strain on family formation. In all probability, a different economic model would have become necessary. There would still have been a gravitational pull on society, in all likelihood centred on an ageing population.

In the here and now, though, in our timeline, it is demanded of us that we keep those cannons firing.

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, but of more serious ones they cannot.”
- Nicollo Machiavelli

The aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination has moved the Trump administration to clamp down hard on its adversaries, though it remains to be seen just how hard. Thousands of leftists are said to have been fired from their jobs, with Vice President JD Vance actively encouraging the base to report anyone celebrating Kirk's murder, or just being too much of a repulsive leftist in general. Left-leaning social media tech platforms such as Stream, Reddit, Twitch, and Discord have been summoned to appear before Congress to explain themselves. It is commonly held that these platforms are essentially factories for producing left-wing lunatics with insane ideologies and a nihilistic outlook that amounts to a societal cancer.

The day of writing, Jimmy Kimmel was fired from his comedy show for spreading the false information that it was people on the right-wing who killed Charlie Kirk. Horror writer Stephen King has been forced to apologise for also spreading lies about Kirk’s views. The message is increasingly and refreshingly clear: bend the knee or else!

At the legislative level, the wheels seem to be gradually grinding into motion that will result in leftist networks being declared terrorist organisations, with Antifa being the first placed on the chopping block. Across the West in the post-9/11 world, being called or said to be associated with terrorism is a byword for being an enemy of the state.

As somebody who saw the online right purged for years and eventually clinging on to Telegram as a last redoubt, I of course have no sympathy whatsoever with the Left or remorse that the tables are finally being turned. Indeed, seeing some of the most loathsome shitlibs on earth being reduced to squealing “Whatever happened to the tolerant right?!” is pleasantly cathartic.

Read more

The few remaining “Classical Liberals” who make defending free speech their main activity have a few comforting bromides they enjoy telling themselves. When it comes to the suppression of right-wing ideas, they like to say “sunlight is the best disinfectant” or make warnings that ideas will be driven underground to fester and stew in a broth of hatred, never truly being defeated. The assumption is, usually, that the supposed liberal centre is an undefeated heavyweight champion of rational argumentation and empirical thought that can stand toe-to-toe with any other worldview and emerge victorious.

It is rarely, if ever, introspectively investigated that perhaps censorship is necessary because, in truth, the liberal champion has feet of clay and a glass jaw. The daily churn of radio talkshow manure sets up this dynamic perfectly by supplying itself with untrained sluggers and marks that the host can run rings around before decking them or simply cutting them off. You’ve had your say and, surprise surprise, left-leaning liberalism has won once again in the marketplace of ideas.

Nonetheless, the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant or that a point of view could be driven underground to fester in a swamp of hate is worth interrogating, as this has been the situation in the United Kingdom for some time. Around 2017-18, Hope Note Hate pretended to mull over the ethics of censoring opinions they didn’t like, then moved in tandem with the Government to initiate full-bore removal of platforms and silencing of people with politically incorrect sensibilities.

Censorship does indeed work. If one’s goal is to propagate a set of thoughts and opinions that one wishes to see adopted by a wider audience, then there’s little doubt that censorship works by simply cutting the transmission. If there’s no longer a signal, there’s nothing for an audience to detect. However, what actually took place on a platform such as YouTube was an evolutionary pressure being placed upon content creators. Or rather, a “tall poppy” effect in which those who were setting off the alarm systems loudest were cut down. Those who survived had to adapt or be culled, but this did not mean that the ideas went away; it simply meant that how they were expressed changed.

The offending words or terminology were given substitutes. People spoke of “mid-century Germans” or “a certain group”. Often, the language of the liberal centre itself was adopted and deployed ironically, such as diversity, urban youth, or “religion of peace”. There was a noticeable lag in audience response, with many lamenting the passing of a more overtly edgy age. However, there was also a degree of buy-in by people who enjoyed deciphering the coded language and jargon.

There was, then, some truth to the Classical Liberal premise that ideas they disliked would thrive in the dark, festering and growing stronger. The British Government’s censorship apparatus even considered further regulatory pressure, using the draconian “lawful but awful” descriptor for content.

A question then arises when we move away from the microcosm of the internet and scale up the speech codes and censorship to encompass the entirety of British society. The digital and the real no longer inhabit spheres disconnected from one another, and one cross-pollinates the other. But in the real world, social pressures apply that do not exist online, such as how to navigate the HR department at work or a suffocating relative. People did not change their perception of the world; they just weren’t able to express it with honesty. Thus, similarly to the online world, in the real world, the ground has not been salted by censorship, but made fertile.

It is worth dwelling on our post-censorial intellectual landscape because it informs the reality of where we, in Britain, find ourselves in the current moment.

Censorship and speech codes are not coming; they are already here and have been for years. Yet paradoxically, the country feels as if it’s lurching further rightward. This is primarily because the material conditions and brutal realities of post-Boriswave Britain have resulted in multiculturalism being nigh on inescapable.

However, in terms of discourse and the airing of political ideas and agendas, the censorious landscape has produced the odd outcome of the Regime no longer knowing who thinks what or what their true aims are. Jonathan Bowden once remarked that he pitched his speeches and talks with an eye on going over the heads of censors and state actors, not just in the moment, but also in the future when more legislation was passed. This is what has taken place in recent years on the British right, not just in terms of form but content. The British State accidentally imposed an incentive structure that rewarded slickness, high status, professionalism, and speaking above the heads of officialdom and activists.

The ability to “hide your power level” drastically lowers the bar to entering institutions, thereby increasing the individual’s influence and enabling them to assist like-minded friends also to enter institutions. Furthermore, the relatively high-status environment attracts more talent from professional classes because the plausible deniability of not being tied to a particular dogma or banner decreases the potential costs.

Twenty years ago, the BNP was an overt enemy in plain sight that the Regime could fully unload on. Then they replaced it with their own, more palatable version of nativist discontent: UKIP. The successor to UKIP, Reform UK, is under attack both internally and externally, not from a consolidated bloc, but from individuals further to the right than they are. Yet herein lies the nub of it: are these people individuals? Or are they an organised network? The post-censorship political landscape resulted in a post-structural political landscape with a stochastic aura.

In their typically imbecilic investigation into the Basketweavers, Hope Not Hate claimed:

The Basketweavers could be the most important far-right network you have never heard of. Operating in the shadows, it is an interconnected group of extremists who want to build their own society away from the mainstream.

Despite their secretive nature, the Basketweavers may be among the largest far-right networks in Britain, with chapters in London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, and beyond. There were approximately 1,300 vetted members in the UK Basketweaver network as of September 2024. Estimates on Basketweaver turnout vary, but according to one senior figure, approximately a fifth of vetted members regularly attend events.

The Basketweavers are breaking no laws, running for no elections, and drafting no policies. Yet the state apparatus goes after them anyway because what they fear is a version of the Fabian Society emerging from the dissident right-wing sphere. Suddenly, the paranoia and often unhinged mindset of the British State is revealed. Not only do they fear mass uprisings and a collapse of social cohesion from the working class, they now have to worry about clandestine networks of schemers, plotters, and infiltrators, hidden agendas by optics-friendly dissidents quietly pulling levers and opening doors for like-minded individuals; in other words, doing exactly what the Regime did while constructing the current paradigm.

The irony is, of course, that it was the present system that created the exact conditions for such networks to come into being. It isn’t by chance that the name “Basketweavers” is deliberately benign and dull.

Is the Regime justified in its concern about individuals operating covertly with a wink and a special handshake? Well, as a humble blogger, I would not know of such activities. However, I, as well as you, have watched an interview or heard a debate and asked myself “Is he one of ours?”

Yet this “movement without a name” is simply another version of everyday mundane reality. In these real-world interactions, people assess the opinions of their co-workers by dropping the name of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage into the conversation. It is a litmus test of friend and enemy. When operating within institutions, however, it appears to the system like a mortal threat, which, according to Hope Not Hate, they think of as S.P.E.C.T.R.E. from James Bond, or the wreckers of Stalin’s USSR. An enemy that is everywhere and nowhere, gnawing away at the fabric of society, like the Fabian Society once did.

In the obscure and calming world of glaciology, there is a phenomenon called a “moulin” which is a body of water sitting atop an iceberg that gradually trickles into the superstructure, undermining it incrementally. All seems well, externally, until one day, a cliff-sized chunk of ice cracks off the face and collapses into the sea. The British State’s increasing paranoia and incoherence are attempts to protect itself from the moulins appearing on its surface. Are the crevices and cracks connected or controlled? Is this or that protest a psy-op by the state itself, or has it been hijacked? Is somebody such as Matt Goodwin still a state asset, or has he actually “gone native”? How far can state assets go before they actively facilitate and not contain the “far right”?

It is both tragic and exhilarating that the discourse in Britain has descended into a macabre hall of mirrors. Yet, I’m also cautiously optimistic about the potential that “we” have people everywhere.

I have, of course, no idea how far and deep this process has so far reached; I am, after all, a humble blogger.

I have a long and sentimental history with Scotland, yet despite that, I hadn’t visited since the late ‘90s. Many of my earliest memories are of making the seemingly long and arduous journey from the North East while gawping out of a car or bus window at the increasingly desolate and rugged landscape. An uncle had moved to the Western coast, outside of …

Read more

Earlier in the year, the Roger Scruton Foundation organised a conference that was attended by a variety of figures from right-wing and conservative circles. In attendance as speakers were Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe, Robert Tombs, Thomas Skinner and Danny Kruger. The audience featured Carl Benjamin and a collection of the “Based Zoomers” such as Connor Tomlinson and Charlie Downes, who are now becoming prominent features of the British right.

Many such conferences take place during the British summer now, some more public-facing than others. What marked out the Roger Scruton Foundation’s get-together, though, was the significant overlap between the younger, more edgy and online right and an older and more establishment Tory-leaning generation. The conference (which can be viewed in full here) went smoothly enough until the final segment when the audience were invited to ask questions. The questions were pointedly focused on identity, demographics, and what it means to be English in a multicultural Britain. Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) pointed out that if anyone can claim to be English, then the authentic English could not claim to be threatened with becoming a minority in their own homeland.

Similarly, another question from a young man in the audience highlighted the futility of advocating local politics in an age of ethnic bloc voting in areas such as Rotherham. When panellist Robert Tombs responded by arguing that education, not ethnicity, is what matters, the contempt and weariness of the audience with such a tepid response are audible in the video. The dividing line is stark and clear. The younger generation of the British right wants answers from the mainstream British right to existential problems, in large part created by the mainstream British right, and they’re not getting them. However, the very fact that they’re present, suited up, and openly demanding such answers seems to rattle and scare the mainstream. And rightly.

The incident did not go unnoticed. An article appeared in The Spectator titled “Demographics is the new dividing line on the right” and more recently, Robert Tombs himself has responded with an article in The Telegraph called “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry” which is a more fleshed-out rebuttal of the remarks at the event.

What I find fascinating about all of this is that the emerging generation of young men on the British right often appears like an elite in-waiting. This, even though they’re intellectually aligned with more traditional, working-class nationalist movements. Suddenly, from the perspective of the Old Guard, the radical element is not wearing a bomber jacket outside a Greggs in Burnley, but right there in the conference room with a well-fitting suit and clipped “posh” accent.

In his Telegraph article, Tombs writes:

“You can’t teach someone to be English”, called a heckler at the end of a conference last month on How to Save England. “Of course you can,” I replied. “That’s how we all learn it.” “Rubbish,” he replied: for him, Englishness seemed to be (I couldn’t quite hear) about “ancestry”.

This brief debate was unfortunately stopped by the chair so that we could go to the pub. But the day’s discussion got huge numbers of viewers on YouTube, a longish report in The Spectator, and a rather overwrought follow-up article in The Critic magazine accusing me (along with other “self-identifying conservatives” such as Fraser Nelson and Niall Ferguson) of being a defender of multiculturalism, and by implication of mass migration.

The problem is that Nelson, Ferguson, and Robert Tombs are defenders of and advocates for multiculturalism. There’s hardly a single post on Nelson’s X timeline where he is not holding the line on behalf of mass immigration in one form or another. In a recent interview, Ferguson argued that Europe would die without African immigration. But the purpose of Tomb’s article is to respond to the points raised at the Scruton Foundation shindig, so he continues by invoking the Tory-whisperer-in-chief, Katharine Birbalsingh:

Frankly, I thought this was laughable, and have been joking with friends about being a Lefty. But in the present fraught climate, the issue needs to be addressed. I should explain that my intellectual sins had been to praise Katharine Birbalsingh (invariably though inadequately described as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”) and to have commented that to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that “becoming English was possible”, on the condition that it was encouraged, taught, and indeed required.

By this criterion, my mother would not be English, but a ten-year-old girl from Somalia who had had lines from Kipling drummed into her would be. Yet the question that is never answered is, should we deport all the children and families of those who fail to meet the educational standards of the Birbalsingh model?

Tomb’s article is infused with a sense of urgency that would, perhaps, be lacking in a more left-leaning essay covering the same issues. He writes:

But the question of integration and eventual assimilation is no less urgent. There are now, and in the future will be, many children in England who were born elsewhere, or who are descended from a foreign-born parent. Many will have darker skin than mine. We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, “ethnic minorities” in a tribalised England.

None of these arguments are new, and have been the centre ground of British politics for nigh-on thirty years, at least fourteen of which were under a Conservative government. Usually I’d make arguments rooted in the ethnic interests of the English people. However, let us consider what exactly is being touted here as the more “humane” course of action. The people we think of as “English” are simply expected to fritter themselves away in the bottomless oceans of the Third World. Indeed, this is insisted upon as part of the integration process.

Moreover, despite the lip-service paid to conservative bromides such as individualism and limited governance, when scaled up, the Birbalsingh model would amount to a colossal technocratic beast engaged in brainwashing up to 30-40% of the population, with that percentage increasing over time. The desired outcome, as stated by Tombs, is a process of replicating Englishness through social engineering. Leaving aside the obvious problem that such a scheme could simply be voted away, the final vainglorious cope for the centre-right is to create a vegi-burger incarnation of the English, a “Beyond English” identity akin to Quorn or Uncle Bill’s Franken sausages made out of 3-D printed slurry.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the entire multicultural enterprise is based on lies and coercion, and any corrective will by necessity appear authoritarian and unpleasant. Take, for example, the trend of inserting non-white people into historical roles or period dramas. Yes, that is a “woke” manoeuvre to unmoor the majority population from their rightful claim to their own history and identity, but it also serves to make newcomers feel “at home”. Presumably, under the Tombs/Birbalsingh scheme, the children of foreigners will be told that their ancestors are not represented in the Dickens and Shakespeare they’re being forced to learn by rote. In most cases, their connection to England does not even precede Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome or Coldplay’s Yellow being in the charts. None of this is anything more than a lazy attempt to peddle water and do nothing while Enoch’s funeral pyre grows ever larger.

It is complete nonsense.

It is not my purpose today to rehash all of the arguments against Civic Nationalism, but rather to engage in a rare bout of optimism. In a post last month, I wrote:

Race-thinking is thus an inevitability. The question then returns to the discourse surrounding the swiftly changing demographic situation in the UK, and the question must be addressed now, with all of its awkwardness and potential minefields, or it will take place later, when the situation and any remedies become even more draconian or unfeasible.

This, then, is what is beginning to take place - not on the streets with placards, not just in the pubs or online, but in person and straight to the faces of the right-wing establishment. What’s more, the editors and MPs, focus groups, and think-tanks are also aware that something has changed.

The gates, finally, are being breached, and the keepers are going to have to adopt new tactics.

Tombs finishes his piece with:

England has long balanced change and continuity. But several times it has changed suddenly and uncontrollably. The Norman Conquest destroyed its society and eclipsed its culture. The Reformation overturned its beliefs. The Industrial Revolution made it a different place. We may be facing comparable transformation today. A future government – led by people with “a sense of gratitude” towards their home country – will need unprecedented means to bring us together. Ancestry is not enough.

To which I would say, on the contrary, ancestry, or rather kinship and ethnicity as the basis for forming bonds and brotherhood, is precisely why his convoluted technocracy of indoctrination will fail, whether by the hand of the immigrants or ourselves.

The demise of his worldview was staring him in the face in that conference room. If he can’t convince them, then he can’t convince anyone else.

I’ve been trying to pin down and encapsulate what the feeling or atmosphere is in Britain in the summer of 2025. It isn’t a happy one, but then again, it never is these days.

A new Superman film hit the cinemas, which was colourful and vibrant, optimistic in its tone and attitude. I considered writing something about it, but nobody cares about “capeshit” and the accusation of dwelling on escapism would be apt. Still, the new Superman seemed intended to be post-woke, post-doom-and-gloom culture wars. Let’s relax and have fun, stop taking everything so seriously for a few hours.

Commentators, including myself, have speculated on what the new Trumpian age of populist victory would herald in terms of “vibe shift”. Would Hollywood return to Lethal Weapon buddy movies where the wounds of the last ten years had the balm of civic nationalism dabbed across them? Would the black cop say to the white cop “ya know, buddy, you crazy white folks ain’t so bad after all!” In the end, it doesn’t matter because social media has long since replaced the old media as wellsprings of cultural creation. The black mirror replaced the large screen, and the mirror prefers 30-second snippets to 2-hour slogs. We didn’t move on toward a new consensus; there is no consensus. Or rather, there is a multiplicity of narratives and hermetically sealed domes.

There was a brief few days this summer when Oasis started their comeback tour, and everyone felt a mixture of optimism and nostalgia. It doesn’t matter whether you like Oasis or not; they were a symbol of a collective past like some archaic runestone being thrust through the earth. People not born in 1997 had parents who were there, and if their parents disliked Oasis, perhaps they liked Blur, or maybe they loathed the entire Cool Britannia era. If so, they still had an opinion, still carried an imprint. The Oasis reunion was a signal of the before-times - not just the past, but a different country. The circuitry and synapses, or spirit if you prefer, of millions of Brits lit up with the hauntology of what was, and could have been, but wasn’t.

Oasis played out with Champagne Supernova, and more than a few people remarked on the lyrics:

How many special people change?

How many lives are livin’ strange?

Where were you while we were getting high?

Indeed, where were we? And more to the point, where are we now? The 2025 Desert of the Real reasserted itself ruthlessly as we scrolled past Roll With It and onto soundbites and headlines of civil war, mass sectarian violence, and routine allegations that the government was committing treason.

Are you okay, babe? You slept for a long time and were rambling about the Civil War, foreign rapists, and the Yookayification of England?

The Before-Times spectres evaporated before our eyes like a cloud of cheap vape as we braced ourselves for the squalor and depravity of 2025 once more. It’s been 14 years since I first noticed people saying “we can’t go on like this” during a grooming gang scandal reported on the Daily Telegraph website. But go on, we did.

In the summer of 2025, the Telegraph is sending out newsletters such as this:

It reads like the parody news segments in a Paul Verhoeven film, such as Robocop or Total Recall “Fifty Colonists on Mars were shot for going on strike yesterday…” There’s hyperreality and absurdity, a tinge of exaggeration mixed with the Telegraph’s usual Colonel Blimp bluntness. Yet the use of the word “febrile” to describe the mood of the country this year is not only accurate but also all-pervasive.

Britain is a “tinderbox” because the government seems hell-bent on stacking up dry wood that merely needs a mild spark, and then the country will explode because it’s reaching its boiling point. Everyone has their favourite metaphor for it, and it always seems to involve kindling or fires, combustible solids, and the odd pan left to boil over.

The final straw broke the camel’s back last year during the Southport massacre and riots; this year, we’re dousing the straw in petrol and stacking it up in preparation for that single atrocity committed by a foreigner. It’s easy to be glib, but the fact is that the country does indeed feel like something is about to erupt.

One gets the sense that the workshops and nudge units have been downsized, or that the material reality of the Yookay is beyond the sophisticated application of psychology to correct the thinking of the outliers. The exacerbating factor, from Ballymena to Essex, is the housing of unwanted migrants of one hue or another, who then proceed to fulfil every single negative stereotype the locals had of them, resulting in protests and unrest.

Again, it cannot be stressed enough that the government seems to have given up entirely on trying to anesthetise the public to the effects of their policies by way of propaganda or nudging. No grand visions or ends to justify the means, no counter-propaganda campaigns. When the treachery of the Afghan data breach was revealed to have resulted in billions of pounds and as many as hundreds of thousands of Afghans coming to live in the country, there was no attempt whatsoever on the part of the regime to promote it in any palatable way, to try and convince us it’d be fine.

No, we get the tooth pulled raw now.

Horribly out of touch talkshow hosts hector the public calling in and mock them as dinosaurs for their outmoded opinions that, say, Afghans are the highest ranking in the shitlist of foreign sex offenders. Yet it is simply true. Indeed, it is the media punditry that appears to be stuck in a bygone era, the era of Tony Blair’s first term, to be precise. The shorma is still a curiosity, the demographics are still 95% white, and the real threat of urban violence comes from chavs called Wayne. At least Coldplay also has a reunion tour going on, though, to the punditry class, they probably never disappeared from their playlists.

Recently, after an illegal immigrant from Ethiopia was alleged to have touched up a teenage girl, protests erupted in Epping. Many people noted that Essex and Epping were where the old East End Cockneys fled to after being ethnically cleansed from London. Epping is the northeastern terminus of the Central line on the London Underground, which is to say, they’re quite literally at the end of the line; there is nowhere left to flee to. You may think that local law enforcement might get a sense of the poetic tragedy of a tribe of natives being pushed to make a Last Stand in their leafy suburbia; instead, they escorted left-wing activists to counter-protest them.

There exists a class of people in the UK on stand-by, like firemen, who are on call to defend the pro-foreign sex-pest side of the argument. Suppose any uppity natives have the temerity to protest that the foreign men in hotels touch up their daughters. In that case, there’s an emergency goon squad of astroturfed leftists ready to be deployed with special protection from the police.

It’s a remarkable scene to behold. Foreign men who came into the country are given our tax money, they’re housed in comfortable hotels on our tax money, the police outside warding off the natives are paid for with our tax money, and there can be little doubt that the leftists they’re ferrying home are in some receipt of our taxes as well. The only people not on our dime are the poor bastards with the homemade placards saying “protect our kids!”

And the unending flow of foreign men continues regardless. The Government carries out its task with neither great enthusiasm nor great ideological zeal, but neither do they show any reluctance. The anger and frustration grow, but so does the confusion and bafflement at what is clearly a destructive path. As noted earlier, there is no explanation, no justification, just a dimwitted managerial doggedness. Is there a plan in motion? If so, what? We have passed beyond the malice or incompetence debate and entered a similarly framed “are the Government trying to foment unrest?”

Matthew Goodwin, also using the word “febrile”, questions why a “crisis” is being imposed on the British people, and warns that the social contract is falling apart, with the very glue of society dissolving. Some people have long held the belief that the government is importing a force to suppress the natives, like janissaries. Others claim that a problem is being created for Digital IDs to solve. Then, of course, there’s the Great Replacement line of reasoning, or, still more incendiary, the “White Genocide” argument.

This, then, is the nature of the kindling being heaped up on British society. Profoundly unpopular, often incomprehensible policies, and an establishment that ploughs on regardless of the unrest, the rapes, the cost, the political capital, and legitimacy of the Government.

Much as I’ve derided figures such as Nigel Farage, he’s correct to ask whether the Government is deliberately stoking up sectarian tensions in the country.

Neil O’Brien recently published an interesting piece that illustrates how the native population is voting with their feet and leaving the cities, despite the economic incentives. This deserves a post of its own, but suffice it to say that if families have taken a financial hit to escape the misery of the urban centres, there’s undoubtedly going to be a sense of despair setting in when foreigners are planted in their rural enclaves.

More dry sticks, more tinder, the matches and fire lighters moving ever closer. One senses an inevitability to it; we can run the numbers and view it simply as a game of roulette, and everyone knows that sooner or later we will land on the red slot designated “atrocity”.

In the summer of 2025, these are cultural tropes that inform our perception of the world around us; this is what inhabits the space once occupied by Britpop, cinematic blockbusters, and Breaking Bad. The establishment can rail against the excesses of social media and misinformation, but ultimately, they are responsible for the inputs.

For now, we look toward the autumn rains and gloom, like a finish line. If we can make it through riot season without too much violence and burning, it’ll be a win. This is delusional, of course, squinting and staring at each other as the tension reaches its pinnacle like a Sergio Leone film.

Yet this maelstrom-in-waiting, this abyss, is our collective cultural experience.

I had avoided watching The Devil Wears Prada for the best part of twenty years because I implicitly knew that a “chick-flick” set in New York that had something to do with fashion did not have me as its target audience. I had duly reciprocated that sentiment until now, when, due to factors beyond my control, I was forced to sit through it.

The Devil Wears Prada was directed by David Frankel, based on a novel by Lauren Weisberger, produced by Wendy Finerman, and scripted by Aline Brosh McKenna. Given that its main character is named Andrea Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway), it could be inferred that we’re witnessing a glimpse into the inner workings of the New York fashion industry and journalism, or perhaps just New York High Society in general.

The story begins when fresh-faced would-be journalist Sachs lands a job at the lucrative and extremely high-status fashion magazine Runway. Perhaps the most iconic element of The Devil Wears Prada is Meryl Streep's portrayal as the tyrannical editor-in-chief of the magazine, Miranda Priestly. Streep’s queen of the barbed put-down character was based on the real-life editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour. Hathaway’s somewhat frumpy Sachs character is cynical about the pretentiousness of the fashion industry. Yet, she swiftly finds out that holding the job will require her to submit entirely to the dictatorial and often unhinged demands of Priestly.

In one stand-out scene that could be used as a perfect primer of elite theory in practice, Priestly dispels Sachs’ cynicism that she is above and beyond the whims and pretensions of the fashion industry by explaining that the frumpy, bargain basement sweater she’s wearing has its colour (cerulean) because it’s a knock-off of a knock-off of what was fashionable in Milan a few years ago. We can delude ourselves that we have free will, but the choices placed before us are there because of people like Priestly herself, not idealistic notions about individuality (which we shall return to later).

Emily Blunt also appears in the film as Emily, Sachs’ co-worker and rival. Indeed, the name “Emily” is given to all the young women who join the office at Runway as a way to demean them and let them know they’re all replaceable. Anne Hathaway’s character is simply the “new Emily”.

The plot of The Devil Wears Prada involves Sachs having to overcome Priestly’s acerbic barbs and demands, and in the process, losing her individuality in the pursuit of success. She replaces her dour attire with Jimmy Choo shoes and Chanel, enjoys the champagne and prestige of New York’s socialite scene, and wins out against Emily Blunt. She even manages to secure a Harry Potter manuscript for Priestly’s children before the book is published. Despite living on nothing but a cube of cheese a day in preparation for the prestigious annual trip to Paris, Emily is sidelined, and Sachs is chosen over her.

However, success comes with a price, and the further Sachs’ career advances, the more she burns through her relationships, the rosier her career is. Thus, the title of the film could also be interpreted as a message that climbing the corporate ladder requires one to sell one's soul. Sachs alienates her friends, breaks up with her boyfriend, hurts her father, and becomes subsumed in the role of being the new, improved Emily, until Priestly eventually validates her by deigning to use her real name, Andrea.

Having slept with a publishing tycoon in an absurdly romanticised Paris, Sachs eventually finds her path back to her true self when she gets a glimpse of the nature of the cut-throat industry she’s involved in.

The Millennial Female’s Journey

Given that I’m neither a woman nor a millennial, nor have I been to New York or have any knowledge of fashion, I knew I’d be very much an outsider looking in on the world presented in The Devil Wears Prada. Still more confusing is that I have no idea what the film wants me to think about this world or the women in it. The high-pressure environment of Runway is damaging all three women in their personal lives and relationships.

Emily’s identity is entirely dependent on Miranda as if she’s a suckerfish loitering around the mouth of a shark. She appears to have no man in her life, no friends, and no family.

Miranda has outsourced the rearing of her twin girls to their grandmother and is on the cusp of another divorce. She laments that her children have had a succession of father figures come and go, and the latest is on his way out because her workload makes it impossible for a normal family to exist.

As the film’s protagonist, Andrea Sachs’ whole arc is one of steadily alienating her boyfriend, family, and friends as she pursues career opportunities and loses her identity, trading it in for a superficial one rooted in status.

All of which is to say, The Devil Wears Prada is a film that tells its audience of (then) young millennial women that having a career will destroy their hopes of having a fulfilling family life — a surprisingly reactionary sentiment, given the film’s setting and production team.

As I watched I began wondering how the writers were going to write themselves out of what could be seen as a trap of their own making, or perhaps the cathartic moment at the end would feature Hathaway’s Sachs character sitting on a porch reading to her infant child with another baby bump visible in her well-toned belly. Was I watching a searing anti-feminist diatribe? No. The writers had foreseen the hazard and allowed themselves the equivalent of a plot-device insurance policy.

A common rule in storytelling and narrative creation is known as “Chekhov’s Gun” and follows Chekhov’s line of reasoning that:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don’t put it there.

An example of Chekhov’s Gun is the pressurised scuba-diving canisters in Jaws. The writers signpost the canisters earlier in the movie, making sure the audience will remember them. The problem faced by the writers is that they know later in the film the shark will chew up the boat, and there has to be something aboard to allow the shark to be defeated while also incorporating a sense of catharsis.

In The Devil Wears Prada, Chekhov’s Gun is not an object but a mindset. It was signposted for the audience from the outset that our main character’s true ambition was to work as a writer or journalist, not a dog’s body in the fashion industry. Thus, the off-ramp for the production team that allowed them to steer away from critiques of feminism was “baked in” from the start.

The film concludes with Miranda endorsing Andrea for a job with a prominent New York newspaper. Yet, given everything we’ve seen so far about the soul-crushing drudgery of a corporate career, there’s no reason for us to suppose that Andrea Sachs’ family life will in any way be improved. Moreover, she returns to her boyfriend after cuckolding him in Paris with a tycoon, and he happily takes her back because she doesn’t tell him about it.

Female-centred fictional narratives often become weird inversions of the Hero’s Journey. Hathaway’s character did not reluctantly take up the call to adventure; she insisted upon joining Runway against the advice of her family and friends, and after crossing the threshold, she alienated these allies. However, the corporate fashion world does indeed make for a decent alien world, and she does face trials. Her version of the final confrontation was sleeping with a multimillionaire in a prestigious Parisian hotel, or saving Miranda’s (the antagonist’s) job, depending on how you look at it. Her return/resurrection was to become exactly who she was at the beginning of the film, except in a different workplace. All three women are exactly where they were at the start of the film.

The Devil Wears Prada is, then, a movie that catered to millennial women who would have been in their early 20s when it was released. Anne Hathaway was 24, and Emily Blunt was 23. The movie pretends to be their friend, acknowledging that the office is a humiliating slog, that a career can strain personal relationships, and, yes, you may have to adopt a fake persona to survive. Yet there are no escape hatches; the best young women can do is find a niche that they don’t despise.

In Strauss and Howe's generational theory, millennials are assigned the archetype of “Hero”, similar to the World War II generation. They are the stalwart defenders of a system during a great unravelling. They are stoic and unquestioning, facing one calamity after another. Despite some reservations about generational theory, I have some sympathy with that perspective.

However, one can’t help but return to Miranda’s famous monologue on the cerulean sweater.

The essence of Miranda’s monologue is that human agency is essentially a comforting fantasy; what really exists is people making decisions and engineering an array of choices that trickle down into public consumption. Human agency is, for most people, choosing between pre-selected options organised by an elite. Andrea believes that she is outside, and above, the superficial and materialistic fictions the fashion industry obsesses over, and Miranda explains why she is not.

Subscribe now

Yet, could the same argument not be made for Hollywood itself? The Devil Wears Prada was a product being sold to young women, and while it sympathised with them, it ultimately insisted that they all wear the cerulean blue sweater. The choices made available in the film are either soul-crushing, meaningless tedium, or the same with less intensity.

Yet one can’t help but wonder if the scriptwriters were aware of this meta-joke, and that perhaps, the devil was not just wearing Prada, but moulding the ambitions of a generation of women.

The Reform Party’s Richard Tice was recently asked by GB News journalist Steven Edginton whether or not he was concerned with the white British becoming a minority in a few decades. The question came off the back of Matt Goodwin’s work on demographics that projected the date to be 2063. Tice reacted to Edginton’s question with a mixture of awkwardness, evasiveness, and derision, finally quipping, “I’ll be long gone by then”. He also claimed that Edginton was “obsessed with this stuff” presumably thinking of a previous Edginton interview with Nigel Farage. Farage was similarly dismissive of Edginton’s questioning and, like Tice, earned the ire of the online right.

People tend to quibble too much about the minutiae of the white British tipping over into minority status. Perhaps it could be as early as 2030 in schools, 2045 for people under 30, and possibly 2050 for the general population.

The primary issue is not the date but the trajectory of demographic change, and recently, that trajectory has had an unusual degree of attention in the British press.

The problem for people like Richard Tice and Nigel Farage (they are by no means alone) is that they face a binary, and whatever answer they offer will offend or alienate many people. Moreover, the discourse on demographics and the prospect of the British natives being reduced to a minority in Britain is hurtling toward the mainstream, whether or not the correct framing and argumentation surrounding it is understood.

The question, fundamentally, is: Should the white British be prevented from being reduced to a minority?

I use the term “white British” because that, and not “indigenous” or “native”, is how it stands on the census, which, ultimately, is the source of the whole discourse. Nigel Farage is not entirely new to the discussion on demographics. In 2022, he posted a video to X in which he expressed alarm at white British people becoming a minority in various cities across the country.

As we can see, Conservative Party MP Savid Javid demanded to know why it matters. Oddly, this is essentially the position Farage himself has adopted since. Yet, Javid has posed an interesting question to Farage which, in my view, he can’t actually answer in full. My own answer would be that it was a result of the greatest betrayal in our history, and that the long-term effects of it will be catastrophic for our people. I would define the white British not as a statistic but as the native inhabitants, and I would define native inhabitants as being those people who are here organically and not as a result of bureaucratic processes — unlike Savid Javid, who is.

Both Farage and Javid hold to a civic definition of what constitutes a people, which is to say, one rooted entirely in bureaucratic procedures. Within the context of such thinking, Javid has a point. Why exactly was Farage concerned when, presumably, the vast majority of people in the cities he mentioned have their passports and paperwork in good standing with the Home Office?

I feel as if I should point out here that, for once, I’m not launching an attack on Farage but instead using him as an avatar of a mindset within the British right that, in my opinion, is redundant.

The civic, or procedural approach to demographics would be to argue that “integration” becomes untenable when the numbers are so massive. Yet, this merely begs the question of what integration means — what values and principles does one need, and who or what are they intrinsic to?

The political centre has for decades been able to use an endless and tedious discourse around integration and values as a comfort blanket to foot-drag and obfuscate in the face of changing demographics. People further right in the Nationalist scene have long used dates as doomsday deadlines that herald a disaster of unprecedented scale.

The problem posed by the question of the white British being reduced to a minority is that it is not rooted in values, but in ethnicity and tribalism. There is no Goldilocks zone of Quango-generated talking points about it being British; there are just two paths: either we become a minority or we do not.

If a political party such as Reform UK were to concede that the natives should not become a minority, then logically it follows that policies would have to be drafted to prevent that outcome. And this is the problem. People such as Richard Tice and Nigel Farage know that if they were to concede that it should be stopped, they would have to explain how that would be achieved. Preventing the white British from becoming a minority would spell the dissolution of their civic understanding of peoplehood and lead to ethnicisation, which is to say, race-based advocacy.

It goes without saying that a political party that is explicitly rooted in the racial interests of the white British would face harsher scrutiny and be less well-received by the mainstream, to the degree that it may very well be illegal. Or rather, policies of mass deportations or prioritising one group above others would be extraordinarily radical from the perspective of Hampstead dinner parties, and perhaps even the general population itself. Thus, it can be argued that a degree of Machiavellian pragmatism is needed to become effective. Yet such pragmatism, if it exists, would be publicly disowned the instant it was questioned, and the people opposed to becoming to a minority would once again find themselves without representation.

Professor David Betz has stated that, as the demographic noose begins to tighten, so too will resistance to further demographic change as a form of “fight or flight” kicks in among the population.

The other scenario, of course, is that the discourse surrounding demographic change remains “locked” in the sense that those opposed will be brushed aside, exactly as Farage and Tice brushed aside Steven Edginton. Notably, such a response was more easily digested by the public in, say, 2002, when the claim seemed outlandish and paranoid. In 2025, with the natives already minorities in many cities and towns, and more importantly, seeing and feeling the difference on their streets, waving away the doomsday date seems weak and perhaps even treacherous.

Again, either it is to be accepted that the white British, as they stand on the census, become a minority in their only homeland, or they do not. The political class as a whole will, in the coming years, have to confront this epochal change regardless of what they think about it. To enact policies now in order to prevent it would inevitably be regarded as racist, the gravest of sins. Yet, despite what we’ve been told our entire lives, the liberal mainstream assumes that race won’t matter when white people are in the minority — without a shred of evidence, of course.

When discussing the shifting demographics in the West, it is crucial to understand and emphasise that it is not how Europeans view others that matters; rather, it is how they themselves are viewed that matters. Let us take, for example, the Equality Act that legislates in favour of “protected characteristics” of “vulnerable groups”, essentially allotting special favours to the State’s client groups. The assumptions baked into the legislation are of a society constituted upon a white majority as the norm. Yet, as that majority becomes a minority, will the legislation be repealed or amended? If so, then what does that conversation look like, and who or what would be responsible for it?

The fact is, it won’t happen because it would be absurd to give every spectrum in society a protected identity classification. There will be no legalistic protections for the white British as a minority, and if there were, it would be entirely dependent on the empathy and ideals of other groups.

The Equality Act, as well as mountains of other legislation, laws and protocols, reveal an uncomfortable truth about the multicultural society: it isn’t actually race-blind as it stands now, and it never has been in the past. Neither will it be in the future.

Race-thinking is thus an inevitability. The question then returns to the discourse surrounding the swiftly changing demographic situation in the UK, and the question must be addressed now, with all of its awkwardness and potential minefields, or it will take place later, when the situation and any remedies become even more draconian or unfeasible.

We currently find ourselves in an unstable holding pen, or containment, if you will. The incentives of the system all point away from discussing the most seismic population change ever seen on these islands. Yet, despite the news cycle offering daily distractions and juicier intellectual morsels to mull over, ultimately, it is all that matters.

I am something of an absolutist on the issue in the sense that, without a secure place to call home, a people is just flotsam being tossed around on the tides of history. Having a home transcends economic systems, material needs, intellectual abstractions, and universalist ideals.

It is, in the end, all that matters.

On the 26th of May, 2025, Liverpool city centre was flooded with rapturous Liverpool football fans celebrating their latest premiership victory when a car ploughed into them, injuring 75 people, with 55 needing hospital treatment. Thankfully, there were no fatalities, but how the institutions reacted is emblematic of the chronic levels of distrust between Power and People in the United Kingdom. For the second time in a year (the first being the Southport outrage), the national attention span fell upon Merseyside Police during what appeared to be the cusp of another tinderbox about to meet the spark.

During the Southport affair the authorities appeared to the public to be wilfully concealing the identity of the killer. To the public, this confirmed their suspicions that the murderer was of foreign extraction, perhaps Muslim, but at least belonging to a client group of the British State. Thus, the strategy deployed by Merseyside Police became an exacerbating factor rather than a mitigating one.

Let us then take a moment to place ourselves in the shoes of the authorities when news began to trickle in that a car had rammed into Liverpool’s streets full of football fans. The fact is, such an “incident” is coded within the minds of almost everyone as “Islamic terrorism” though such acts are far more common in a country such as Germany than in Britain. Moreover, the institutions know that such an event is coded in the minds of the public as “Islamic extremism”.

For a few moments, the people within the institutions of governance are themselves unsure as to who or what is responsible for the barbaric images of people catapulting over a car windshield, the screams and panic now spilling over onto social media.

As it turned out, to the relief of everyone in positions of authority, the driver was a 53-year-old white man. Somebody somewhere made the call, and within minutes, the description “white man” appeared on statements by the police and the media.

It isn’t difficult to see the play here. Merseyside Police were obviously terrified of having to deal with “another Southport”, meaning mass unrest and riots. Headlines and statements featuring racial descriptions of the arrested driver served the purpose of a wet blanket being placed over a flame before it could reach the leaking jerry can. However, it is also a tacit acknowledgment by the authorities that they’re aware of the fractured, us vs. them mentality inherent within multiculturalism. It also served only to highlight how often the ethnicity of a criminal is not released to the public, thereby reinforcing the “two-tier justice” trope.

Adopting the public relations strategy of “thank Christ he’s white!” after a horrific crime makes long-term sacrifices for short-term gains. The next time the authorities are forced to deal with an atrocity or mass casualty event (and there will be a next time!), the natives will infer, from the description or lack thereof, the background of the perpetrator. If a description is provided immediately, then the biases of the natives are confirmed, and the Government is distrusted for importing the problem. If information is withheld, then the accusations of two-tier justice are confirmed.

Former Boris Johnson advisor, political strategist, and somewhat rogue insider Dominic Cummings wrote this week on the catastrophic relationship between the British natives and their government.

According to Cummings:

Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs.

…In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.

Cummings paints an amusing, if depressing, picture of careerist civil servants, bureaucrats, and political spivs hunkered down in their London stronghold, forever suspicious and increasingly paranoid about the activities of the natives in the wider country, particularly in the North. In their eyes, Britain is not a politically correct surveillance state but a hotbed of scheming reactionaries and racist networks conspiring against the Centre, presumably from strongholds in Yorkshire and the North East. The North must be harried once more, except with DEI female police officers, imported client groups, and HR managers replacing the Normans.

Cummings continues:

These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire.

The depiction of the British deep state as a dysfunctional entity unto itself is reminiscent of Suella Braverman complaining that she found it quite literally impossible to enact policy that would in some way stabilise the unending flow of immigrants entering the country. We do not have a government; instead, we have unaccountable grey suits who have locked the country onto a destructive course while at the same time becoming fearful of the forces being unleashed.

The references to “civil war” probably allude to the work of David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Betz has been doing something of a podcast tour in recent months discussing his view that many Western nations, especially the United Kingdom, are heading towards severe sectarian strife, if not outright civil war. In his most recent article, Betz claims:

On the other hand, perhaps I have been rather conservative? As I have argued previously the perception of ‘downgrading’ of a former majority which is one of the most powerful causes of civil war, is the main issue in all of the cases at hand.[v] Objectively, one must conclude that there is ample cause for concern about a worryingly large possibility of a form of war occurring in the West, to which it has not thought itself vulnerable for a long time.

Betz then claims that the advent of “feral cities” and rigid distinctions being drawn between the rural and urban centres, combined with perceptions of two-tier justice and scant regard for the wishes of the majority, will prove too much for civil society to contain. Betz even goes so far as to offer advice to military commanders on the need to secure infrastructure and “safe zones”.

Reading Betz is like reading a form of right-wing catastrophe porn. I do not believe that the United Kingdom is heading toward its doomsday scenario precisely because it is a heavy-handed surveillance state in which a paranoid centre keeps tabs on every Telegram chat, organisation, and, as I recently discovered, a conference discussing civilisational entropy. Stranger still is that Betz seems to actively suggest targets for any nascent network of disillusioned natives agitating against the system, which I find curious and, to be honest, suspicious.

Nevertheless, we do seem to be heading into a new era of discourse regarding the worries and woes stacking up in Britain. There is the inner core of civil servants and bureaucrats, NGOs and politicians who appear increasingly demented and an emerging outer ring of thinkers and rogues attempting to raise the alarm that the country is on course for a calamity of one sort or another. It is less a romanticised great overthrowing and cathartic victory and more akin to a John Le Carré novel. It is a kind of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, DEI” in which boring managerial types whisper and slip each other notes on what the enemy is up to, except the enemy is no longer the USSR but Brits out in the provinces.

This, in turn, leads to a feedback loop in which the majority population becomes ever more alienated and distrustful of the centres of power in London, and the cycle continues. Betz’s analysis assumes that sooner or later, this situation will blow. I remain unconvinced and certainly do not advocate for it.

Yet, the fact that Betz and Cummings are expressing these views is in and of itself significant because one has to wonder what other conversations are taking place within the outer periphery of power. The residents of Hampstead Heath may not be discussing civil war and revolution over their veal and Montrachet Grand Cru, but people they know are.

The farcical attempt by Merseyside Police to defuse a potentially explosive situation, which only served to compound the problem, is symptomatic of a political structure that has become unmoored from its populace.

One is reminded once again of John le Carré’s George Smiley in The Honourable Schoolboy:

I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole life in terms of conspiracy.

It seems increasingly likely that the paranoia and madness of the British deep state have resulted in it becoming mired in its own conspiratorial phantoms. If the enemy of the country is the country itself, then maybe it’s time for a rethink, and maybe there are people closer than the far-flung Northern hinterlands starting to have similar ideas.

After all, somebody is talking to Dominic Cummings just as somebody is amplifying David Betz.

The latest trend on Xitter is for every post to feature a reply asking the in-house AI “Grok” to verify the main post with “@Grok, is this real?” It hardly seems to matter what the content is: the grainy footage of an Indian air defense system in Kashmir, the rubble heap of a leveled Palestinian building, or those “satisfying” videos of a man jet-washing his drive. People cast adrift in the unending tides of roiling garbage and content engagement trash cleave to Grok like a piece of flotsam to keep them from drowning in the digital soup.

As a devout Techno-Pessimist, I’ve argued for years that the real issue with automated and AI systems is not so much that they rule within their cyber-realms but that they increasingly sever their bounds and impose themselves upon us in the real world. Or rather, in the age of the AI chatbot, they are called upon by other humans to do so.

A short personal anecdote should serve to illustrate this point.

Making full use of the glorious spring weather we’ve been blessed with, I recently decided to plant some runner beans, primarily to distract from my disastrous attempt to grow tomatoes. I built an archway for the plants to climb up and began arranging borders for the seedlings to be planted in. While down on my knees, sifting through fine topsoil and mixing in mulch, my nearest and dearest (entirely uninterested in gardening) appeared and promptly told me I was doing it wrong. She asked if the border I had constructed was 30cm deep. It was at most 10cm deep. I then demanded an explanation as to why I should be digging a trench 1/3 of a metre deep to plant runner bean seedlings and was informed that “ChatGPT says so”.

ChatGPT wasn’t incorrect, either. Bean root systems can indeed reach 30-40 cm. The problem was that the input had assumed the roots could not pass through the mulch layer and into the topsoil beneath. Nevertheless, in the mundane setting of my modest vegetable patch, I was confronted with a 1000-IQ authority with access to everything ever written about planting beans. Moreover, I had to justify using my own agency over meekly submitting to an AI that could be whipped out of a back pocket within seconds. The keen-eyed gardener might spot that I was deploying Charles Dowding’s “No Dig” method. I haven’t read any of Dowding’s books; I merely watched his YouTube channel. But ChatGPT has read every word he ever wrote.

Is this just the way things are going now?

A fictional scenario comes to mind, also within a humdrum setting, that does not require the invocation of Skynet AI takeovers and singularity doomsday scenarios.

A customer in a pub complains that the barmaid does not allow the head on a pint of ale to settle before topping it up, making the pint more gassy than he thinks is optimal. The barmaid replies that she’s been pouring pints like this for years, and nobody has complained so far. The customer whips out his phone and sets ChatGPT or Grok to work on how exactly a pint of that particular ale should be poured, and the result is that she is indeed in the wrong. The barmaid now has a choice: either she continues pouring the ale in a manner that she knows is incorrect or bows before the higher authority of the customer’s iPhone and submits. However, the landlord arrives, and he, too, has an iPhone with Grok installed. He begins reeling off efficiency statistics in pouring pints and highlights how much it would cost his business if every pint were poured according to the specific recommendations.

Thus, a Mexican stand-off ensues, with individuals holding each other’s phones as representatives of the God-like authority of the AI within. Rather than using their own agency and intuition, relations will be mediated by the All-Knower.

Digital tech billionaire Marc Andreessen said on the Joe Rogan podcast that the world the tech moguls were building would be more like the Middle Ages for the masses because they would exist in a world of higher powers they could not comprehend. The framing lingered in my mind, yet I assumed Andreessen was referring to self-guiding drones whizzing overhead or gadgets that could assemble themselves. Now, a year on, I see that he was not being hyperbolic and that artificial intelligence's omniscient nature will, in effect, begin to resemble an ever-present God-like form, and it will sit comfortably in your pocket.

Unlike the reassuring glow of a medieval church on a gloomy, pre-power grid landscape, the iPhone is an entirely dead form scraping lifeless data from frigid algorithms. The so-called intelligence is merely a canny linguistic parlour trick where data is reconstituted into words a human can understand. Yet, the hollowness of AI does not mean that we will not be forced to confront age-old theological questions of free will and human agency. How much free will do we have if every decision is processed through digital intelligence?

This is already manifest in our social media feeds. As I write, I’m listening to Game of Thrones Music & North Ambience Winterfell House Stark Theme. I chose it in the sense that I clicked play and found the sombre ambiance relaxing. Yet it belongs to a wider selection of audio soma YouTube bombards me with on my home page.

The ubiquity of AI in our daily lives means that a higher authority will be present; it’s not a God but a void, and it will increasingly inform our decisions regardless. Why would you not want to pour a pint correctly? Why would you not want to plant beans at the proper depth? And besides, if you aren’t using AI to optimise your outcomes, others will be, and you’ll not be able to compete.

You may notice that there’s something vaguely familiar about all of this. Here, we’re confronted with an intelligence of nigh-on infinite capacity that asks us to submit some of our free will for access to unlimited knowledge…a bargain, if you like. You can retain your free will, but you will get things wrong and have worse outcomes.

However, the more you come to rely on the Higher Authority, the more you lose the capacity to think independently. And it is all done quite voluntarily and enthusiastically.

We seem to be witnessing the death of human agency, a grander version of the parts of our brain that could do mathematics shrinking after the calculator was introduced. If people now struggle to read maps or road signs after the advent of satnav, what will be the impact of pocket AI telling them everything?

There is no need to invoke a self-aware AI supercomputer when we can simply invoke the tendency of people to take the path of efficiency and least resistance. Technology, after all, is supposed to make life easier. When manual labour was taken over by machines, men began “working out” at the gym to compensate for the lack of muscle tone and strength. What will people resort to when thinking itself is done for us by machines? Perhaps even more crucially, how will a brain that has hardly adapted for 50,000 years and is prone to pattern recognition and mythical framing begin to think of a device that does their thinking for them, comforts them, and is always ready-to-hand in their pockets?

Given that AI systems have already digested every religious text and theological musing that Man has ever written and recorded, there’s no reason to suppose that, if requested, the AI could not speak to the individual with the authority, mannerism, and tone of God himself. Is this what Marc Andreessen was referring to?

The ideal seems to be a Techno-Theocratic priesthood that requires only that you have faith in the data-scraping. You have no idea how it works, just as you have no idea how your devices communicate with each other to target you for pop-up ads. But that’s fine because you don’t need to know anything. All the thinking is done elsewhere anyway. It will become a world where things “just happen” like standing on a shadow was bad luck or spotting a black cat late at night would be seeing the devil in a familiar.

To be blunt, it is no longer a world of Enlightenment but of obscurantism due to an oversaturation of knowledge information. We will become appendages to the tool, having ourselves once elbowed aside God to fill the space He vacated. A world once incomprehensible, guided by the almighty, will become so once more as our ability to think independently shrivels like the wings of a parrot stranded on an island without predators. It will simply be the “way of things”, and there’s no rolling it back now because there’s too much money involved, and people are excited about the ability of AI to crack cancer cures sometime soon.

It will be weird but not wonderful, and many a head will be scratched while pondering Faust’s lament in Goethe’s masterpiece.

I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.

Despite my criticisms of Nigel Farage, I knew that the Reform Party would surge in the polls because I had been feeling the tremors of normie discontent for at least a year now.

At last week’s local elections in England, Reform gained a whopping 677 seats, pilfered eight councils from the Tories and two from Labour, and landed themselves two mayors. For …

Read more

I’ve been relatively quiet for the last week because my wife and I took a spring break to Ireland’s majestic West Coast and the “Wild Atlantic Way”. The older I get, the less interest I have in visiting farther, less known regions of the world, and I decided a few years ago to focus on what has always been on my doorstep. Technically, the Irish Republic is “abroad” but in reality, it isn’t abroad like France or Bosnia, and those countries are not abroad in the sense that Japan, Nigeria or Brazil are. Besides France, I’ve never visited any of those places, and it is very doubtful that I ever will, and I have no issue with that. Yet, I do regret that I have not seen the Welsh valleys, Scotland’s Northern coastline, the Isle of Man, and, until recently, Ireland.

According to my DNA test, I’m 100% of Great Britain and Ireland, with 30% Welsh, 28% Irish, 10% Northern Irish and Scottish, 7% Northumbrian, and the rest a mix of places around England, primarily the North. Long before I took the test, I had been fascinated by and drawn toward the periphery of the British Isles, or to be mildly politically correct, the archipelago of islands off the coast of continental Europe north of France.

Yet, regardless of these blood and soil yearnings, there’s an element of the bucket list about it. One thinks of Douglas Adams’s book Last Chance To See, in which Adams traverses the globe seeking out creatures destined for extinction. Such sentiment can be viewed as unnecessarily doomerish or pessimistic, but few would argue that the feeling of places is at least threatened. Naturally, I would think that much more than that was threatened.

If the United Kingdom had been reduced to the “You-Kay” would Ireland have become Aye-Lan? The processes of de-territorialisation weigh down upon us like The Great Nothing in Wolfgang Petersen’s NeverEnding Story. There are not only suffocating demographic changes but also the hollowing out of spaces that once denoted solidness, identity, and validation of Being. I think of the endless and largely futile hours of fishing I’ve spent by Blyth and Whitley Bay; ultimately, the draw was simply to be where I truly belonged.

De-territorialisation has resulted in people searching out meaning or the transcendent outside of formal institutions precisely because those institutions were hijacked and reconfigured to uproot and dispossess. Within this context, the landscape itself becomes a signifier, a symbol of permanence and grounding. For me, Hadrian’s Wall, the North Sea, and tributaries to the River Tyne occupy such space. It may not be precisely spiritual, but it comes close enough in the metaphysical wasteland of postmodernity and late Globalism. We’ve become numb to the churches being reconfigured to spread leftism, but we view the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree as an act of heresy and blasphemy.

A Small Country With A Big Landscape

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. William Butler Yeats

Journeying from East to West across Ireland’s gently rolling hills and boggy centre toward Connemara, one notices how sparsely populated Ireland remains relative to England. The weather blessed us with an unusual glare of spring sun and warmth that dissipated the ubiquitous mist and fog. Once in County Galway, the clear weather allowed a glimpse of the distant, rapidly approaching mountains as the journey continued. Being more familiar with Northumberland and the Cheviots as a frame of reference, Connemara startles and imposes itself upon you, whereas the hills of the English border country creep up on you gradually. Connemara juts and struts in the distance, as if it’s too big for the landscape, like ancient giants that have invited themselves to a picnic of fairies, elves, and leprechauns.

The Lovecraftian aura remains as the ant-like traveller enters the labyrinthine intricacy in which valleys fold into lochs that drift into cul-de-sacs of glacially crafted raw rock. An aloof timelessness emanates from the grand monuments of prehistory, which, in a typical Lovecraftian manner, are entirely indifferent to your existence. Small pockets of houses, utterly dominated by the vastness of the landscape, serve as reminders of the fleeting lot of the residents, and, for that matter, of us all. Every corner spoils you with a new vista of grand lochs featuring islands, bare-faced granite surfaces, and delicate waterfalls trickling like tears under old stony bridges. It is easily among the most majestically sublime places I have ever been.

Heading from Leenaun toward Clare Island, you pass an odd, pyramid-shaped mountain known as Croagh Patrick. A waitress told me that St Patrick is alleged to have stayed atop the pointed mountain for forty days, where he was harassed by various demonic entities, including a female serpent he banished.

“If you believe that sort of thing,” she said.

“Oh, I do!” I replied, in quiet rebellion against everything being deconstructed and disenchanted.

Connemara seems surprisingly “untouched” and commercialised. Of course, I was keenly aware that I was but a tourist, yet the grandeur of the scenery and sprawling landscape did not make me feel like part of an endless procession of human cattle profanely trampling upon the place, hunting for the next selfie. Still, heading out to the farther reaches of the coastline facing Clare Island, I became conscious of how the locals could be irritated by outsiders using their homes as backdrops for social media posts.

During my trip across North East England last summer during the riots, I pondered at quiet areas such as Alnmouth, which, despite the doom and gloom about the country’s state, seemed oblivious to the sense of existential emergency felt by so many of us. Does the remaining white population in Birmingham view those hunkered down in native enclaves as fortunate? Do they think about them at all?

Like England, rural Ireland has been no stranger to the government in Dublin dumping immigrants in remote, supposedly “safe” parts of the country. Then again, with housing so sparsely peppered and the communities so remote, one has to wonder how that would be achieved in this part of the world. Regardless, my impression was that the enrichment had been spared for now.

Of Quiet Men And Fields

Read more

One day, in my late teens, my father burst into my bedroom, frog-marched me down to the dole office, and made me sign up for a litany of courses and training schemes over which I had no say whatsoever. Leaving school and lazing around for a while was one thing, but if the situation continued, I’d be entitled to “Job Seekers Allowance”, which was beyond the pale. In the days before the Blairite revolution, claiming the dole was referred to as “signing on” because the applicant had to stand in line with a little book, adding a signature to a slip provided by a snooty bureaucrat. To be “signing on” was a marker of extremely low status and even suspicion. More consequentially, for me, it meant my mother could no longer tell the “girls at work” that I was taking some time out after leaving school; no, signing on was quite different from that.

And so, my care-free days of roaming ended before they had really begun.

I was enrolled in a full-time plastering and construction training course in North Shields. Technically, I was not signing on, and my parents no longer had to feel embarrassed in the club when asked by their friends what I was doing. Moreover, I had an opportunity to traverse North Tyneside with scuffed, dirty workboots and a bag of tools with a spirit level poking out that signalled “grafter” and made me proud as a rooster.

Growing up in North Tyneside, post-Thatcher’s de-industrialisation program meant that the dole queue was never entirely alien. My attitude toward “benefits” is somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, I’m well aware of the symbiotic and even parasitic relationship between short-term agency work and the ease with which companies quickly fire workers precisely because they get fast-tracked back onto the government payment system. At the same time, it is clearly the case that millions of people are robbing the system, and hard-working taxpayers are being played for suckers and fools.

To get a sense of the colossal amount of government (taxpayer) money funnelled into the benefits system, consider that the average taxpayer stumps up £2000 per year for it. Indeed, there are 25-28 million claimants and only 31-32 million taxpayers.

With the annual bill of the welfare state now landing at just under £300bn (!) and the emerging geopolitical turmoil and talk of radically increasing armaments spending, the government has recently decided to finally take a chainsaw to the system to carve off some of the blubber.

Yet, in recent years, I’ve often considered the odd paradox of the government’s attitude to the welfare state and its social programs, dedication to multiculturalism, and general neoliberal ethos. The seismic change in cultural mores that have occurred since I was in my teens has amounted to the question no longer being “Why are you on benefits?” but the more nihilistic “Why not just get whatever you can?”

There is an assumption on the part of the government and cultural institutions that the social contract would remain intact despite it being abolished with what often seems like a seething malice.

My parents’ attitude was, essentially, that in order to keep up with the Joneses, I would not be allowed to linger around without direction or work. It was not simply a matter of financial incentives but one of social status. Yet the system’s logic for the last few decades has been driven by pure individualism and an underlining contempt, even hatred, for settled community and familiarity. In the 2020s, the Joneses are often Jamals or at least total strangers whose respect or approval is of no consequence or importance.

Consider this observation by a Channel Four pollster who recently visited the English city of Grimsby.

Their outlook for the country was nothing short of apocalyptic. They spoke of hundreds of homeless Britons on the streets, while “floods” of illegal migrants are housed in hotels on the taxpayer. A carer spoke of children hobbled with mental health problems, the long hangover of the Covid pandemic still biting. The stay-at-home mum talked of criminals and junkies living above her, with politicians and local police powerless to stop them.

Not one of the Labour voters could name an achievement by the party they voted for. The most recalled action was Labour’s cutting of the winter fuel allowance, described as punishing Brits to siphon more money to immigration. The non-voting group spurned the election deliberately, feeling there was no option that represented them. The mainstream parties’ alien values had pushed them away: “there’s no democracy in the UK anymore”.

The modern welfare state must function within this backdrop of decay, neglect, and treason. For working-class natives, the peer pressure and social stigma of “claiming” has ceased to exist because the foundations upon which a high-trust, empathetic society once stood are reduced to mud and slime.

The welfare state emerged after World War II, ostensibly offering a safety net to those who had fallen on hard times. In 1948, Britain was one of the most self-assured, cohesive, and homogenous societies on earth. It seemed perfectly reasonable that those workers should not become destitute if somebody’s business folded or a factory went bankrupt. Not least because, from a purely Machiavellian perspective, harder-line socialists were waiting to take advantage of such inherent instabilities within the system.

Workers who were unable to “stand on their own two feet” were instilled with a sense of shame because others, namely, their brothers, cousins, neighbours, and friends, were supporting them. It was inherently emasculating and demoralising for a man to have the state put the bread on his table.

Implicit within these assumptions is that the relationship between man and state was reciprocal and honest. Taxes and National Insurance were all paid into a collective pot; anyone taking advantage of the situation was, naturally, a bad actor. The social incentives were to have as little to do with the state as possible.

It is my opinion that Thatcherite neoliberalism undercut the pervading ethos by advancing the hyper-capitalist, individualist mindset of a Nation of ruthless go-getters. The claim that there is “no such thing as society” but mere competitors within a market had the long-term effect of dripping acid onto the country’s social bonds. Yet, by and large, the state relied on social pressure rather than implementing sanctions to ween people off its largesse. However, the pressure was easing in an increasingly atomised and individualistic culture.

An instructive sign of where things were heading is to be found in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Muslim yoof spoof character “Ali G”. In 2000, Cohen adopted his Ali G persona and interviewed staunch old-school socialist Tony Benn. Cohen asked Benn what the point of working was at all when he could simply “hang out with his bitches”. Benn’s reaction was a mixture of incredulity and disdain at the idea that somebody would choose to live on benefits.

Benn did not know it, but Cohen undermined the universalist assumptions baked into his worldview. Cohen’s character, Ali G, explicitly repudiated the high-trust morality undergirding the welfare state Benn treasured so profoundly. He was here to cheat because it wasn’t his people he was cheating. Such tribalism is, of course, anathema to leftist thinking; the determining factor is not ethnic identity but class. As such, a second-generation Pakistani immigrant should be forged in the same proletarian crucible as his working-class English neighbours. Yet, when Cohen conducted his parody interview with Tony Benn, the multicultural project was only beginning to accelerate.

Thus, if Thatcher’s self-centred individualism was acid to the bonds of Britain’s high-trust society, then multiculturalism amounted to its scouring. Long before migrant men were housed in hotels, the Daily Mail churned out a never-ending broth of outrage targeting benefits cheats and dole-spongers. Unable to do anything about the now rampant abuse of the system, millions of working-class British natives asked themselves “Why bother?”

Moreover, to say the incentives were “perverse” was to understate a system in which a 50-hour week could result in somebody earning minimum wage only taking home £50 more than they’d get from the dole — once tax, National Insurance, and rent were deducted.

Unlike the rich or the self-employed, the poor could not fiddle their taxes, so they fiddled the benefits system instead.

To hear the government speak on the issue is to be transported back to the past, to an era before they had waged war upon the fabric of Britain. We hear bromides of people “paying their fair share” and “contributing” as if there were still cohesive ties by which peer pressure and status could be applied.

Subscribe now

From Safety Net To Cage

I last had contact with Britain’s welfare state in the early 2010s, when I endured a year of poverty and extreme deprivation due to being bounced between the dole and a carousel of short-term agency jobs. The so-called “Bedroom Tax” introduced by the Tories penalised me further, resulting in my having to survive on £20 per week. My father, who by this time viewed the benefits system as a free-for-all, concluded that I was being punished for being white and having a long history of employment. This new, disillusioned mindset was a stark contrast to the earlier days of “any job being better than no job”.

In actual fact, the private sector and the state had colluded to reduce working-class white British to a ready supply of cheap labour that could be hired and fired at will. Thus, the implicit social status gained from full-time employment evaporated because there was hardly any difference between being in or out of a job.

All of which is to say that the decaying social fabric of the nation is reflected directly in the bloat and grift of the welfare state. Like England itself, a once noble ideal and “envy of the world” reduced to a managerial meatgrinder tending to a population devoid of higher ethics, robbed of a country based on compassion and kinship, betrayed at every turn by the venal political class.

The descendants of the working men who interacted with the dole with a sense of shame and relief have no proper answer to the question “why not sponge off the state?” because most of the time, there isn’t an answer that transcends raw financial incentive, and often that isn’t sufficient either.

Like the NHS, the future of Britain’s mammoth dependency state will probably reduce people to data points, with selected client groups allotted less grueling criteria to meet than the natives. A raw gamified system scraping out the final vestiges of compassion to create a hollow UBI cathedral of basic sustenance without meaning or reason other than doing something with the redundant population.

And I pity those who are doomed to remain trapped within it.

I recently listened to a clip of journalist Whitney Webb discussing the implications of AI for human creativity. I found it fascinating because, in an age when Tech Bros are cool and getting a pass from many on the right, Webb offered a cold splash of realism in the face of what they’re pushing forward with. Of course, the discourse surrounding Artificial Intelligence usually descends into doomsday scenarios of Terminators or supercomputers seizing control of critical systems, often through an inversion of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics that hold that, to save humans, machines have to remove agency from them.

Less frequently discussed, perhaps because it isn’t as sexy, is the effect the mundane time-saving data-scraping AI will have on the human soul. Naturally, this assumes that humans have souls of one sort or another in the presence of Artificial Intelligence questions. After all, aren’t we all simply biological systems? Webb points to the introduction of calculators into schools in the 1980s as a primitive version of AI, or rather, a labour-saving device that, from a purely utilitarian perspective, makes eminent sense. However, the outcome of the calculator was that children swiftly became mathematically inept, and their ability to use their own minds, or even a piece of paper and pencil, was drastically reduced. It is a matter of “use it or lose it”.

If we accept that the introduction of calculators reduced children’s ability to perform basic maths, then surely the effect of introducing time and labour-saving AI into every facet of life should be questioned at a higher level than mere efficiency outcomes. Likewise, now that everyone types more than they use handwriting, is that even a problem? Does it matter that, in a generation, nobody will be able to use a fountain pen to write a letter? Or use an encyclopaedia? What does a civilisation look like when even the most basic tasks are outsourced to Artificial Intelligence?

The question, “Why not do it the easy way?” is hurtling towards everyone who creates anything, leaving many people nervous and hesitant. It is coming for podcasters, bloggers, novelists, painters, filmmakers, musicians, researchers, historians… almost all pursuits that require time to create something worthwhile. For example, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones has already been completed 10,000 times by now, not formally, and not by humans.

Obviously, there is a general discourse around these issues; for example, if AI can produce a new version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, with even better music and cinematography, and can do so in two minutes, questions arise as to whether it even is better, or is it simply the case that most people won’t mind? What we can be sure about, however, is that there will be a dearth of new film directors willing to lay on sand dunes in a desert overnight, waiting for the sun to rise. Moreover, the onus would be placed upon the filmmaker to explain why he insists on doing something “the old way” when financial incentives, time constraints, and safety concerns weigh down the project in the case of a Middle Eastern desert.

On a personal note, I happen to enjoy writing and have been blogging for eleven years. I like the video-editing process far less and streaming even less than that. I also have a larger fictional project that I work on sometimes, which currently runs to 60,000 words. Alas, if it ever graces the printing press, the market for fiction could very well be annihilated by the overwhelming amount of AI-generated “content” and total saturation of the literary scene.

Such content is already being unflatteringly referred to as “slop”. Slop is generic, unfulfilling, massified, and results only from a process to maximise outcomes rather than expressing something from within a creator. As my friend Dave Green recently pointed out, we are in the age of slop. The movies are slop, the music is slop, the books are slop, the politics are slop, and soon, AI will ensure the slop tsunami overwhelms everything.

Slop is an amorphous mass that oozes outwards. It lacks boundaries or containment and does not respect difference, meaning, or coherence. Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate slop force-multiplier because it can regurgitate previously created forms, even its own.

The “Yookay” represents a slop country because its identity has been pulped down and reduced to a generic, non-descript pastiche of its former self. It is a story of the same decaying sameness replicating itself from Carlisle to Canterbury.

The creation of the Yookay was a technocratic process. There were inputs and desired outcomes, and there is a debate about whether the desired outcomes were purely malicious or incompetent. The Yookay is to the British Isles what the prompt “Show me a romantic painting in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, Harry Potter on a mountain” is to creating AI art. Let us assume the Yookay came into existence because the Government was desperate to boost the GDP by inflating the population. To facilitate that, they needed to create a soul-crushing surveillance state.

The antithesis to free-form slop is borders, barriers, constraints, and limitations.

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is a majestic film about a man who discovers he cannot transcend the boundaries and limits placed upon him. Yet, Lean faced constraints and hard stops in creating the film relative to what can be done today, and it is in this space that both the artist and individual can thrive and find meaning.  

Organic Borders

It is common for people discussing entropy to use gardening metaphors. The gardener inhabits a Sisyphian role of driving back slugs and weeds; victory is fleeting, and a new wave of unwanted chaos appears in the garden again within days.

As I write this, I look at my window ledges crammed full of seedlings as I attempt to get ahead of the seasons and have peas, potatoes, and beans to plant as soon as the risk of frost has gone. I have no reason to do this from the outcomes perspective. Last year, I planted six broad bean plants, and when all was said and done, the crop would have fit into a pint pot. Many people who grow vegetables enjoy framing their pastime in terms of self-sufficiency, and while this is not impossible, this is somewhat of a justifying rationale. Spending months investing time and energy in what will, in my case at least, result in relatively modest harvests is not very easy to explain from a purely utilitarian perspective because vegetables, despite the best efforts of the British Government, are not that expensive.

One must consciously avoid taking the easy path, which is against the current zeitgeist. Like Elon Musk, who justified his trip to Mars so humanity could be spread like a virus, many people who grow vegetables explain it by “preparing” or by saying that the produce is healthier than that in supermarkets (which is probably true). The argument that the soul is nourished is common but often comes with a rationalistic caveat.

The same can be said of the few people remaining who insist on writing letters by hand, brewing beer, going bird-watching, or fishing. The world where all such pleasures exist without an easier option to attain the outcome no longer exists, and so it falls upon the individual to embark on a quiet rebellion of exerting their own agency over the entropic forces of ease, efficiency, and the resultant slop.

The fact that there still exists today people who choose freely to rebel against the “Age of Quantity” in their various modest ways gives me some hope for the future. It means that, within the ocean of generic automated trash, there will always exist pockets and islands of authenticity and “the Real”.

I recently caught myself on a geopolitical binge-watch. I listened to podcasts and streams, analyzing geopolitical trends from every wing of the political field until I gave myself a splitting headache. Then, I switched off all the devices and read a beautiful old hardback of Edgar Allan Poe’s collected stories and poems for a few hours. I read Poe knowing that, unlike consuming geopolitical content, I would not have a “take” on it beyond my own enjoyment, and that was sufficient to justify reading it.

Moreover, Poe’s sublimely beautiful prose, peppered with symbolic allusions and layers, was written by hand, with a quill or primitive pen. Today, the idea of writing a book or story by hand seems astonishingly archaic and redundant. Yet, even with spellcheckers, keyboards, and automated saving, nobody is writing as well as Edgar Allan Poe. Artificial Intelligence could reproduce it, of course, but would anyone read it? Thus, like David Lean, we find once again that art with meaning results from constraints and limits being placed upon the creator, not an infinite expanse of possibilities that descends into an amorphous flat meridian.

It could be argued that the Neoliberal massification of everything that preceded the AI-driven slop epoch was a foreshadowing. After all, the Yookay is not a result of AI, but of managerial mass and scale, spreadsheet approaches to “Human Capital”, and the abolition of barriers, borders, and particularism. Neoliberalism allowed us to commodify ourselves with consumer-driven identities tailored to our whims. Social media algorithms compound this individuation even further by serving precisely what we like in infinite confirmation feedback. The AI girlfriend is an emotional crutch and the logical continuation of the “For You” tab on Xitter, YouTube home page, and personalised ads.

But where can meaning and authenticity be mined within this miasma?

A trend I’ve noticed in the gardening world is the rise in popularity of artisan and bourgeois shops, which proudly display organic produce and products of all kinds. Strictly speaking, there’s not a great deal that can be bought in these shops (usually attached to a farm) that cannot be purchased in a B&Q; it’s just that they feel further removed from a Chinese sweatshop. What they do confer, however, is a degree of status.

This is why, in the end, I’m not entirely pessimistic about the prospect of AI reducing all humans to dead-souled automata. A world of digitally generated, slop violin music will naturally create an incentive for people to be able to play live for a crowd, and attending a live performance will become a sign of high status. Similarly, sitting in a studio while a portrait artist depicts you in charcoal will differentiate the individual from the masses, albeit at an extortionate cost.

These trends were already apparent within Neoliberalism. As noted above, Artificial Intelligence is but a force-multiplier for the age of mass and scale, driving toward its conclusion.

Yet, thinking back once again on Edgar Allan Poe, striving away with his quill by candlelight, perhaps he is not merely part of an incomprehensibly sophisticated past but also the future, not because of formal rebellion but because it is life-affirming.

Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy classic Time Bandits is not officially a Monty Python production, but it involves most of the team, and much of the humour is obviously “Pythonesque”. Monty Python has, in online right spaces, developed a reputation as the quintessential baby boomers, gleefully and ignorantly hacking away at the foundations of Western Civilisation, unknowingly and uncaringly stacking up civilisational losses that would have to be dealt with by generations to come.

In films such as Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen and Time Bandits, Gilliam dials back the more egregious and bawdy traits of the Python team and instead plays with metaphysics, re-enchantment, and fantasy. The banal, tedious realm of the material plane is contrasted with the whimsical, magical, and unbounded potential of imagination. If Monty Python in full detonated the symbols that gave meaning to life, then Terry Gilliam seems, in the 1980s, to be asking, “so now what?”

The protagonist of Time Bandits is an 11-year-old boy named Kevin. He lives in a nondescript suburban sprawl in England. His parents ignore him and prattle about consumer products and how to achieve higher status based on sofas, toasters, and two-speed hedge cutters. Kevin spends his time reading history books and admiring ancient warriors and tales of derring-do. Kevin’s “call to adventure” emerges through his wardrobe in the form of six dwarfs who appear on the run with a map. A terrifying Being of extreme power emerges and chases the company through a portal, and Kevin’s adventure begins in earnest.

It turns out that the dwarfs were the Supreme Being’s assistants and employees, and they had borrowed his map of the cosmos. This map contains the flaws in His creation, such as portals and holes in the fabric of the universe that the company falls through and escapes into. Gilliam does a splendid job of off-loading exposition on the fly, as it were, and uses Kevin’s inquisitive nature as a means by which the dwarfs can be made to explain just what is happening.

The leader of the dwarfs, Randal, wants to use the precious map to travel across time, looting and stealing as he goes to acquire wealth and treasure. Each of the eras the gang arrives in is worthy of commentary.

Napoleonic France

After escaping from Kevin’s bedroom, Kevin and the dwarfs land in Napoleonic France. Napoleon (Ian Holm) is depicted as a tyrant, and mass executions are taking place around his camp at the Battle of Castiglione. Napoleon is obsessed with the height of other great men of history and feels sympathetic toward the gang because they’re all small. During this era, we cut to the main antagonist, Evil ( David Warner), an overly dramatic and pretentious incarnation of Satan, who we shall discuss later.

Napoleon fires his high command and promotes the dwarfs to replace them. This swiftly results in a maudlin Bonaparte drinking himself to sleep, and Randal orders the dwarfs to rob him blind. They then escape through a portal, taking the treasure with them.

Sherwood Forest

The gang falls through a portal centuries earlier in Sherwood Forest, landing on top of Michael Palin, who is hamming it up as a ludicrously effeminate toff wooing a damsel. John Cleese arrives as Robin Hood, who smugly steals the gang’s loot and generally adopts the airs and graces of an elitist conman who despises “the Poor”. Unsurprisingly, the Sherwood Forest section is the most Pythonesque of them all. In this telling, Robin Hood is no better than the bandits who seek to steal for their own gain. The Supreme Being arrives once again, causing the gang to panic. Worse still, two portals open instead of one, and Kevin jumps through one alone.

Thus far, Kevin has met two famous men of history, Napoleon and Robin Hood. Napoleon was an insecure sociopath, and Robin Hood was a grinning swindler.

Mycenaean Greece

Kevin arrives alone in Mycenean Greece, dropping out of the portal just in time to save King Agamemnon (Sean Connery) from defeat at the hands of a minotaur. Agamemnon is wise, brave, and noble and brings Kevin into his house, imparting his wisdom and teaching him life lessons. Despite being a king, Agamemnon places virtue over material wealth and honesty over deceit. For the first time since the film began, Kevin has a heroic archetype and father figure to invest in. He tells Agamemnon he never wants to see his parents again, and the King accepts him as his son and heir.

Unfortunately for Kevin, the dwarfs arrive once more, ruin everything, and rob Agamemnon before abducting Kevin and disappearing through time again.

The Titanic

The gang arrives on the Titanic and swiftly begins enjoying Agamemnon’s loot. Kevin starts to interrogate Randal’s motivation for stealing the map. After all, the Supreme Being’s map offers infinite potential for attaining knowledge and endless possibilities for adventure, but Randal cannot think beyond mere wealth and lucre. By this point in the narrative, Evil has revealed his plans and busied himself, scheming to get the map. Evil thinks that the way the Supreme Being has constructed the world is a farce, that men having nipples is stupid, slugs are pointless, and so many species of butterflies existing is ludicrous. Instead, forms should only exist for their utility, functionality, and efficiency — calculators and computers over poetry and trout wriggling in summer streams.

Evil's scheme is to trick the gang into entering the Time of Legends to attain the “most fabulous object in the world”.

Aboard the Titanic, Randal asks a waiter to fetch him another champagne with “extra ice”.

The Time Of Legends

After the Titanic sinks, the gang enters the mythical Time of Legends, which can only be entered by “believing in it”. They are quickly hauled out of the brine by an ogre with a bad back and brought aboard his ship. Eventually, after taking command and leaving the ogre and his wife bobbing in the sea, the ship is revealed to be on the head of a giant who walks ashore.

After being set down by pumping the giant full of tranquilisers, the gang are ready to find the most fabulous object in the world.

The Most Fabulous Object in the World

The gang’s pursuit of the most fabulous object in the world is, of course, a ruse by Evil to bring them into his clutches, where he can get the map. Or, to put it differently, the pursuit of shallow materialism is leading the company, quite literally, to Evil. Within Evil’s fortress, Kevin is confronted with a warped replica of his parents and their devotion to the mind-rot of dumb quiz shows and the offer of consumerist trinkets. The irony is, for Evil, the most fabulous object in the world is the Supreme Being’s map, which would allow Evil to remake the cosmos in his own horrifying and utilitarian vision.

In the third act of Time Bandits, Gilliam draws together and interweaves the various subtexts and narrative arcs into a single tapestry. The path of the Last Man is to lose sight of the transcendent, to forlornly and obsessively chase after the low, shallow, and material. At the end of that road, metaphysics will be waiting, re-entering as Evil, having been neglected as a higher ideal. It is surprisingly reactionary terrain for a former member of Monty Python to tread. It is, of course, smothered with irony, deconstruction, and bawdy jokes, but as noted above, the question remains, “so now what?”

Within this story, Kevin has, from the outset, represented the frustrated Higher Man cast into hollow postmodernity, yearning for heroes, kings and nobility. The world, as per Max Weber, has become disenchanted. Mechanisation, industrialisation, and rationalisation have scraped modernity clean of mysticism, magic, myth, and meaning. This is the world Kevin was born into and to which he does not truly belong.

Yet, Gilliam’s depiction of the Time of Legends is, besides the creatures, an extraordinarily sterile and barren place. Moreover, Evil, as the ultimate incarnation of that realm in his fortress, talks at great length, lauding the world of Weber’s disenchanted spreadsheet. Indeed, modernity, as depicted at the beginning of Time Bandits, appears every bit as profane as the world Evil wishes to create.

Enter The Supreme Being

The final confrontation with Evil involves Kevin and the dwarfs deploying various military forces from across the ages, from knights to cowboys, archers to tanks, all to no avail. As Evil prepares to kill Kevin and his friends, the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson) calcifies Evil, who then falls apart in a cluster of lava-like rocks. The Supreme Being is an eccentric and mildly cantankerous old man. It is revealed that He orchestrated everything that occurred to test His creation for flaws. Kevin asks the deity why so many people had to die. He replies flippantly, “it’s to do with Free Will or something.” The usual Pythonesque trait of belittling more significant existential questions is on display here. Yet, in a sense, the question of Free Will has been at the core of the entire narrative from the beginning.

Of all the characters in Time Bandits, Kevin has the least agency. After all, he neither chooses to be sent to his bedroom nor dragged along with Randal and the dwarfs, nor does he decide to end up in Evil’s lair. Yet, despite this, he chooses to act heroically and honorably at every turn. Kevin’s life-changing decision is to reject his real parents and select Agamemnon King as his father figure — and even this is snatched away from him.

Conversely, Randal decides to steal the map and travel across history, robbing whenever possible. He also chooses to flee from the Supreme Being whenever he is asked to return the map. Randal was not forced into greedily seeking out the most fabulous object in the world that turned out to be Evil; he did so freely and enthusiastically.

Similarly, Kevin’s parents choose a life of dead-eyed consumerism over affirming life and vitality. In the final scene, they also ignore Kevin’s warnings about the rock of Evil inside their microwave and are blown up as a result. Connery’s reincarnated King Agamemnon saves Kevin from the burning family home; his parents cared more about the household appliances. Kevin may not have Free Will like everyone else, but he does have a purpose.

Here, Evil’s techno-optimist, utilitarian worldview becomes more apparent and less shrouded in fog. Since his introduction and throughout the film, Evil’s diatribes have argued against whimsy, beauty for beauty’s sake, and the wonder of life more generally. Kevin’s parents, as the result of the dehumanising drive of technology and materialism, are interchangeable with Evil’s dimwitted minions. In squeezing out the wonder of life, technology, efficiency and consumerism are paving the road to hell. It is an assault on the design of the Supreme Being. And here’s the kicker: people will freely choose it.

Time Bandits asks big questions but does so in a manner that does not trigger our postmodern cynicism. As Baby Boomers synonymous with casually tossing aside the inheritance of Western civilisation, Monty Python lampooned the big questions rather than confronting them. To ask questions about the meaning of life, God, and the nature of evil, became associated with being pretentious, overly serious, and pompous. We became Kevin’s parents, busying ourselves with inanities to block out viewing life as anything more than an entertainment product. An earnest meditation on profound issues must occur second-hand, with plausible deniability. In this way, a film such as Time Bandits allows the postmodern cynic to engage with Big Questions while always being able to backtrack and claim it is a silly kid’s fantasy film. Terry Gilliam, of course, knew this.

In an age when few have read Gibbon, but everyone has seen Star Wars, pop culture has become a rapidly dwindling mine from which to extract the ore of meaning. We cannot indefinitely delay existential questions. Instead, we decide whether to become Kevin or his parents.

Like Terry Gilliam, it is to ask “so now what?”