The Summer of Kindling

On the extraordinary unease and tension in Britain this summer

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.