Dear friends,

June has felt like one of those months where events arrive faster than anyone can properly process them. Every day seems to bring a new escalation and another piece of evidence that politics across much of the West is becoming increasingly detached from reality.

As writers, we spend a great deal of time trying to understand the forces shaping the moment we’re living through. Increasingly, those forces seem to revolve around a handful of recurring themes: extremism, political drift, and the growing fragility of democratic institutions as a consequence of the damage done by neoliberalism.

The Enemy Within

One of the themes we have found ourselves returning to repeatedly is the growing normalisation of far-right extremism. In recent weeks we published two essays examining this phenomenon from different angles: The Enemy Within: Dehumanisation and the Road to Authoritarianism and The Belfast Pogrom: Meanwhile, in Civilised Britain... Neither piece was easy to write, and both emerged from the same underlying concern: that language matters, and that the dehumanisation of groups of people rarely ends where its advocates imagine it will.

We are increasingly alarmed by the role played by figures such as Tommy Robinson and his billionaire — recently trillionaire — benefactor Elon Musk. One agitates. The other amplifies. Together they help manufacture a political atmosphere in which prejudice is recast as patriotism and cruelty is presented as common sense. We have more to say about both men in the coming weeks.

The challenge, as always, is that extremism rarely arrives announcing itself as extremism. It arrives wrapped in the language of concern, identity, security, and grievance. By the time people recognise what they are looking at, considerable damage has often already been done. History rarely repeats itself exactly, but it certainly does rhyme. At the moment, we do not much like the tune.

Same Wine, New Bottle

Meanwhile, Britain remains trapped in what increasingly feels like an endless political doom loop. Keir Starmer remains at the wheel but often appears not to be driving the car. Labour’s instinct continues to be caution, triangulation, and managerialism at precisely the moment when many people are crying out for imagination, vision, and leadership. The result is a government that often appears to be reacting to events rather than shaping them.

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There are moments when the polite language of politics becomes part of the violence. It arrives after the fire, smashed glass, screaming in the street, and tries to protect the people who prepared the ground for it. It calls a pogrom “disorder”. It calls racial terror “unrest”. It calls men going door to door looking for foreigners “community anger”. It wipes the soot from the sentence and asks us to discuss “legitimate concerns”. This is the moral trick at the centre of the whole performance. Violence by the foreigner is treated as proof that outsiders do not share British values. Violence by white people is translated into anger, patriotism, grievance, or something the country is asked to understand. The violence only travels in one direction because the sympathy only travels in one direction. That language serves as a mop and bucket brought in after the arson.

We should refuse it completely. We do not need permission from politicians to say what the facts already show. Homes and vehicles were set on fire after a knife attack in north Belfast. Residents were targeted because of skin colour and perceived foreignness. Men went door to door asking to get “foreigners out”. Families were driven from homes. At least 27 people were made homeless because mobs searched for foreign nationals (BBC News, 2026; CBS News, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026). No policy debate explains that. No protest contains it. No phrase about concern can launder it. The name for it is pogrom.

Yesterday’s article, The Enemy Within: Dehumanisation and the Road to Authoritarianism, examined the political work done before the fire starts: ranking people, lowering whole groups in the public imagination, and the way culture becomes a polite word for suspicion (Plague Island, 2026). Belfast is the next stage. It is the moment the category becomes a target, the target becomes a door, and the door becomes a fire.

The Target

CBS reported masked men on the Lower Newtownards Road carrying bottles and bricks, shouting “foreigners out”, banging and kicking doors, and smashing windows (CBS News, 2026). The same report described men trying to burn a car until a woman told them it belonged to a “local and not a foreigner”, at which point they stopped (CBS News, 2026). That detail is the whole story in miniature. The violence was not random. It asked a single question: who counts as one of us, and who can be burned out?

SDLP MP Claire Hanna said the same thing plainly. She called the scenes a “race-based pogrom” and said men were going door to door asking to get foreigners out “based exclusively on the colour of their skin” (BBC News, 2026). This confirms the visible truth, not because the truth needed permission. A pogrom is collective violence against a marked minority, usually justified by revenge, rumour or some story of communal defence. Belfast carried those marks openly. The mob did not know who was legal, illegal, refugee, citizen, worker, student, neighbour, settled resident or recent arrival. It knew only what it could see and what it had been taught to hate.

One Man, One Crime

The original crime was real and brutal. Stephen Ogilvy was seriously injured in a knife attack in north Belfast, suffering the loss of one eye and injuries to his face and back. Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese man, was charged with attempted murder, possession of a knife in a public place and making threats to kill (BBC News, 2026; NPR/AP, 2026). The horror of that attack need not be minimised for the pogrom to be condemned. It was a grave crime. It was also the act for which one man was charged. A legal process exists because guilt belongs to individuals, never to races, nationalities, accents, skin tones, or families living behind doors that a mob decides to kick.

The far right exists to destroy that distinction. It takes one charged suspect and turns him into a whole people; it takes one victim and turns grief into a weapon. It waits for pain and then supplies a target. Stormont ministers said the rioters were “weaponising the genuine hurt, concern and anger” created by the stabbing (The Guardian, 2026). That is exactly what happened. The violence in Belfast did not spill naturally from sorrow. It was sorrow processed through the machinery of racial politics until it came out as arson.

The phrase “foreigners out” is a threat, not an immigration policy. It makes no request of Parliament and offers no change to visa rules. It tells a person standing in a doorway that they are prey. It has no interest in asylum decisions, housing shortages or public services. It searches by face. It judges by skin. It asks the mob to act as border guard.

That is why the excuses offered afterwards are obscene. We will hear, as we always hear, that people are worried about housing. We will hear that communities feel ignored, that there is anger about immigration, pressure on services and a sense that the political class does not listen. These arguments are dragged out after every racist convulsion like furniture rescued from a burning house. They are meant to make the arson look sociological, but a family’s home does not become a housing policy because Black people live in it. A baby carried away from a burning street settles no argument about asylum numbers. A man kicking a door and shouting “foreigners out” is a thug carrying a political permission slip, however many commentators try to dress him up as an unheard citizen.

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The reports from Belfast destroy the alibi. The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service handled 256 calls and attended 62 incidents between 7pm and midnight, mostly in the Greater Belfast area (BBC News, 2026). Multiple homes were set alight; a bus, cars and bins were burned; and police used water cannon during a second night of violence near Sandyknowes and Newtownabbey, where a crowd of about 300 burned a truck and threw bricks and other missiles (The Guardian, 2026; BBC News, 2026). A pastor helping people whose houses had been targeted said members of his church were being forced out “just because they’re black” (BBC News, 2026). This is the record. This is what happened. Anyone who continues to call it merely “unrest” is helping to bury the victims under vocabulary.

The Rehearsed Pretext

Belfast did not stand alone, and Southampton did not begin the pattern. Both were recent eruptions of something already rehearsed. A crime is seized as pretext. A suspect is turned into a symbol. A local tragedy is stripped of its actual facts and fed into the machinery of invasion politics. Then the same men who spend their lives telling people that the country is being stolen tell them to gather, march, protest, confront, make themselves heard. Days before Belfast, protests and clashes followed the sentencing in the Henry Nowak murder case. NPR reported that demonstrators marched in Southampton and that protesters stood outside a hotel that had housed asylum seekers holding signs saying “Illegal Migration Is Destroying Our Civilisation” (NPR/AP, 2026). CBS reported that the Nowak case had already sparked anti-immigration protests and clashes with police (CBS News, 2026). The case was immediately fed into the same machine that later turned Belfast into fire.

The facts of Southampton show how little the machine cares about truth. Henry Nowak was white and was murdered by Vickrum Digwa, a British-born Sikh. Digwa falsely claimed to police that Nowak had racially assaulted him, and he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years (NPR/AP, 2026; CBS News, 2026). Both victim and killer were British, yet the far right seized the case as proof of migrant invasion (NPR/AP, 2026). The point is not to deny the possibility of police failure. If the police handled the case badly, that failure deserves scrutiny on its own terms. But the right did not pause there. It converted a possible institutional failure into the myth of “two-tier policing”, then converted that myth into racial currency. A dead young man became usable because rage could be extracted from him. The facts did not produce the story. They were bent until they served it. The pretext can change from town to town. The method does not.

JD Vance helped push that poison across the Atlantic. CBS reported that Vance claimed Nowak would still be alive if European elites had stood against what he called the “mass invasion of migrants” (CBS News, 2026). NPR likewise reported that Vance blamed immigration for the Southampton violence (NPR/AP, 2026). Let us call this out for what it is: incitement dressed as civilisational analysis. It teaches people to see neighbours as invaders. It tells them the death of one person is evidence against millions. It exports the diseased language of Trump’s America into British streets: invasion, betrayal, weakness, enemies within.

The Men Who Sell the Fire

This is the road Britain keeps pretending it is not walking. America reached Trump town by treating cruelty as common sense for long enough that violence began to look like policy. “Invasion” came before family separation. “Rapists” came before raids. “Enemies” came before the crowd. The warning for Britain is not that it will copy America exactly. It is that the same moral permission structure is already here: the same excuses, euphemisms, and the same performance of shock when language does what it was built to do.

Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk and JD Vance are the engineers of this climate, its amplifiers and beneficiaries. CBS reported that Hanna named Musk, Farage and Robinson as prominent figures who spread the Belfast stabbing video and called for mass protests (CBS News, 2026). Al Jazeera reported that Musk reposted messages blaming migration for violence in the UK and that Robinson called for more protests amid the Belfast unrest (Al Jazeera, 2026). Vance had already dragged the Southampton case into the same language of migrant invasion (CBS News, 2026; NPR/AP, 2026). These men operate at different levels of the same pipeline. Robinson supplies the street theatre. Farage supplies the television respectability. Musk supplies the platform and the billionaire megaphone. Vance supplies the American state-power accent. The sequence is always the same: find the pretext, hype the threat, summon the crowd, watch the violence, then step back and claim that no one could possibly have foreseen where the rhetoric would lead.

Their role is not mysterious. Far-right incitement rarely needs to say, burn that house. It says: your country is being invaded, elites hate you, migrants are dangerous: they despise the West. No one is protecting you — enough is enough. Protest while making the protest feel like a last stand against national extinction. Then, when men with covered faces go looking for foreign families, the same figures retreat into the cowardly distinction between words and consequences. They condemn “violence” in the abstract while preserving the lie that made the violence feel righteous.

Robinson’s own mock-apology after criticism of his role shows the mechanism in miniature. In a post headed “A PUBLIC APOLOGY - I AM SO SORRY”, he did not apologise in any meaningful sense. He sneered at politicians, mainstream media and the left, then sarcastically “apologised” for alleged crimes by what he called “imported engineers” and for “40,000 or so Muslims” supposedly being on the UK terror watch list (Robinson, 2026). The claims matter here as rhetoric rather than fact. They turn migrants into sexual threat, Muslims into security threat, and criticism of incitement into a persecution drama in which Robinson becomes the victim. It is the arsonist beside the smoking street saying, with a smirk, that the real scandal is being blamed for fire.

This is the politics of the thrown match and the clean hand. The influencer supplies the rage. The platform supplies the reach. The politician supplies the story. The mob supplies the petrol. Afterwards, everyone important claims innocence because no one can prove who lit the first flame. Belfast shows that the first flame can be verbal: a phrase repeated until a person becomes a category, a video shared until a crime becomes a race, a recent trillionaire reposting dehumanising bait while real families prepare to sleep somewhere else.

Musk’s role deserves particular contempt because it reveals trillionaire politics in its purest form: power pretending to be rebellion. He presents himself as a champion of free speech while his platform rewards fear, humiliation and racial panic. Al Jazeera reported that Labour chair Anna Turley said online platforms were playing a role in driving the unrest and suggested Musk was among the “bad faith actors” inflaming tensions (Al Jazeera, 2026). The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, condemned “incitement” on social media and said the dehumanisation of whole groups was “totally unacceptable and frankly despicable” (Al Jazeera, 2026). That is the correct frame. The platform is an accelerant when it turns human beings into engagement material.

The old rumour had to walk through a pub, a church, a leaflet, a whisper, a newspaper column. The new rumour travels at the speed of a repost. A graphic video becomes an international weapon before the facts have settled. Men who will never live beside the burned homes or comfort the frightened children push the story into millions of feeds and watch the consequences from a safe distance. This is the modern pogrom economy: outrage extracted from suffering, monetised by attention, laundered by politics, and paid for by people whose names the mob never bothers to learn.

The Respectable Alibi

The respectable right then arrives to perform disgust while keeping the engine running. Richard Tice condemned the violence in Belfast, but when asked whether Reform UK’s call for all visas for Sudanese asylum seekers to be banned was proportionate, he said it was “absolute and proportionate” (BBC News, 2026). That is collective punishment with a press office. The mob says: punish the foreigner in the house. The politician says: punish the foreigner in the visa category. One uses bricks. The other uses policy. Both transfer the alleged guilt of one man onto people who did nothing.

This is where yesterday’s argument meets today’s fire. Before people can be removed, they have to be ranked, and Belfast shows that ranking system entering the street. The men at the doors were, crudely and violently, doing what the politics of removal asks the state to do cleanly: decide who belongs and who can be pushed out.

This is why the phrase “legitimate concerns” has become so rotten. It is used as a bridge between ordinary hardship and racial blame. Yes, there are real shortages. Yes, public services are strained and housing is broken. But migrants did not sell off social housing, starve councils, gut public services, suppress wages, deregulate landlords or build a country in which working people are forced to fight over scraps. The arsonist is being handed the wrong address. The men who profit from Britain’s decay point to the newest, poorest, most visible stranger and say: there, blame them.

Nigel Farage has made a career out of that gesture. He offers the politics of the pincer: Britain pulled away from Europe, pulled toward Trump’s America, pulled into the cold theatre of authoritarian nationalism where every problem is blamed on an outsider and every solution makes the rich safer. He does not need to throw bricks to help build the conditions in which bricks are thrown. He only needs to keep saying that the nation has been betrayed by foreigners and their elite protectors. The street will translate the rest.

The centre makes this worse by treating Farage as a weather event rather than a political arsonist. He is interviewed, platformed, normalised and then discussed as if he merely reflects public feeling. But this “public feeling” is being manufactured in real time by men who know exactly which fears to press and which wounds to reopen. Every soft-focus discussion about “anger in the community” gives the far right another inch of respectable ground. Every presenter who asks whether migrants are the “real issue” after homes have been burned helps move the conversation away from the victims and toward the mob’s preferred grievance.

Labour’s response is also too thin if it stops at condemnation. Starmer said he would not tolerate violence against people because of their background, and that statement is correct as far as it goes (BBC News, 2026). But it does not go far enough. The state cannot condemn the fire after years of accepting the terms of the argument that produced it. If mainstream politics keeps speaking of immigration chiefly as a burden, a pressure, a problem to be “controlled” for the reassurance of people already being courted by racists, then it leaves the moral terrain to the far right. It tells the public that the premise is correct and only the method is regrettable. Anti-racism requires more than regret with better manners.

Water Cannon After the Fire

The police response matters, and it came too late for the people already terrorised. Police used water cannon in Belfast during the second night of unrest, and extra officers were deployed as the violence spread (The Guardian, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026). Public order had to be restored. Yet water cannon after the fire offers no protection before it. The harder question is why the crowd believed it had a political right to gather, identify homes, test doors and decide whose presence was intolerable. That belief was cultivated long before the first missile was thrown.

A liberal state loves the language of response because response lets it arrive late and still look responsible. It can deploy officers, issue statements, open investigations and praise calm. But the families burned out of homes do not live inside a press release. Security means little if it begins only after the first window breaks.

The deeper failure is political. A society has failed when residents can be made homeless because a mob decides they look foreign. A state has failed when belonging can be challenged by masked men at the door. A media culture has failed when it spends years turning migrants into a threat and then pretends to be surprised when someone takes that threat literally.

The most morally devastating intervention came from Stephen Ogilvy’s family. They appealed for calm, said migrants make a valuable contribution to the country, and insisted that the tragedy should not be used to divide people or fuel hostility (Al Jazeera, 2026). That statement shames the agitators. The people closest to the victim refused the politics of collective punishment. The far right ignored them because it never cared about the victim except as raw material.

This is what the far right does with victims. It consumes them instead of mourning them. It turns a wounded man into a symbol, a murdered student into a slogan, a video into a recruitment tool, a court case into proof of invasion. Justice is too specific for this politics. Justice names the accused, hears the evidence, protects the innocent, and punishes the guilty. The far right wants revenge because revenge can be made racial. Revenge never asks who did what. It asks who can be made to pay.

What the Pogrom Reveals

Belfast tells us something ugly about Britain now. The country is being trained to misrecognise pogrom politics as democratic expression. We are told that mobs outside asylum hotels are concerned citizens, that men shouting “foreigners out” are expressing anxiety, and that collective punishment is a policy option if it is spoken in a television studio rather than screamed in a street. We are gaslit to believe that the problem is always the migrant and never the men who turn fear into power.

There is a bleak irony here. The right repeatedly tells us that the people it marks as foreign do not share “our values”. Then its own crowds set towns on fire, smash windows, hunt families from door to door, and call that civilisation defending itself. If these are British values, then the phrase has been emptied of every decent meaning it ever claimed. If they are not, then the first threat to those values is coming from the men who shout loudest about protecting them.

This is how authoritarian politics grows inside ordinary life. It does not begin by announcing itself as fascism. It begins with a story about safety. It says women are unsafe, children are unsafe, streets are unsafe, the nation is unsafe, and then it identifies a visible enemy. It tells people that the law is too weak, the courts are too slow, the police are compromised, the elites are traitors, and the invader is already inside the gates. Then the mob appears. Then the house burns. Then the same men who fed the story ask why everyone is so emotional.

Not emotional, but exact: Belfast was a pogrom because people were hunted as foreigners. Southampton was a rehearsal because grief was twisted into anti-migrant mobilisation before the smoke rose in Belfast. Farage, Robinson, Musk and Vance belong to the same agitation system because they turn local crimes into racialised stories of invasion. The respectable right condemns mob violence while feeding collective punishment through policy. Platforms do host and profit from the spread of this poison.

Those burned out of their homes owe no explanation to the people who hate them. No human being should have to stand before a mob and produce paperwork for their own safety. No family should have to hope that a neighbour can convince masked men that the car they are about to burn belongs to a “local”. No child should learn that home is conditional on the mob’s ability to recognise you as belonging.

To name a pogrom is to choose moral accuracy over polite evasion. If we call Belfast “unrest”, we hide the target. If we call it “anger”, we hide the victims. If we call it “concern”, we help the arsonists write their alibi. The word matters because it forces the question that polite Britain wants to avoid: who was being hunted, and who taught the hunters to see them as prey?

Belfast showed precisely what “foreigners out” means once the slogan reaches the street. It showed what happens when billionaires, demagogues, street agitators and racists hiding behind respectable veneers spend years telling people that strangers are the enemy and then act shocked when the lesson is learned. It was a pogrom. We should treat every man who helped prepare the ground for it with the seriousness reserved for those who know exactly what they are doing.

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References

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘Police in Belfast use water cannon as anti-immigrant unrest continues’, 11 June. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/11/police-in-belfast-use-water-cannon-as-anti-immigrant-unrest-continues[Accessed: 11 June 2026].

BBC News (2026) ‘What we know about Belfast attack and disorder’, 11 June. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0d13e4geo [Accessed: 11 June 2026].

CBS News (2026) ‘Violent anti-immigration protests erupt in Belfast after brutal stabbing attack’, 10 June. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/belfast-immigration-protest-stabbing-attack/ [Accessed: 11 June 2026].

NPR/AP (2026) ‘U.K. leaders call for calm as protests break out after Belfast street stabbing’, 10 June. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5852968/uk-anti-immigration-protests-belfast [Accessed: 11 June 2026].

Plague Island (2026) ‘The Enemy Within: Dehumanisation and the Road to Authoritarianism’, Notes From Plague Island, 10 June. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/the-enemy-within-dehumanisation-and [Accessed: 11 June 2026].

Robinson, T. (2026) ‘A PUBLIC APOLOGY - I AM SO SORRY’, X post, 11 June.

The Guardian (2026) ‘Police use water cannon against rioters in Northern Ireland’, 10 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/10/police-use-water-cannon-against-rioters-in-northern-ireland[Accessed: 11 June 2026].

Veidlinger, J. (2021) In the Midst of Civilised Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. London: Picador.

“Some cultures are MUCH better than others.”

There it is. Seven words, one capitalised sneer, and a whole politics of hierarchy placed on the table as if it were merely common sense. No careful argument. No distinction between people and practices. No defence of rights. No attempt to say which culture is being judged, by whom, against which standard, or for what political purpose. Just the sentence, polished for circulation — short enough to travel, crude enough to excite, vague enough to deny.

The post appeared on the verified X account of Zia Yusuf on 9 June 2026, under the handle @ZiaYusufUK: “Some cultures are MUCH better than others” (Yusuf, 2026). Yusuf is not an anonymous crank in the digital sewer. Reform UK identifies him as its Shadow Home Secretary (Reform UK, 2026a). The BBC has described him as central to Reform’s operation, a former banker and technology entrepreneur, and a figure Nigel Farage credited with much of the party’s recent success (Mason and Rhoden-Paul, 2025). The sentence therefore matters because of where it came from: inside a political project that has already placed immigration, policing, deportation, conditional settlement, and national grievance at the centre of its offer to Britain.

This is not an article about one social media post as though a single sentence can carry all the guilt of a movement. That would be too easy, too shallow. The sentence matters because it reveals the moral weather around that movement. It shows how a politics of removal prepares its ground. Before people can be placed in camps, databases, raids, commands, flights, and legal categories of expulsion, they have to be placed somewhere else first. They have to be placed lower in the public imagination.

That is what cultural ranking does. It tells the audience that equality is sentimental nonsense. It suggests that some ways of living may be different, or even wrong in specific respects, and then slides into the darker claim that they are inferior. It gives permission to stop thinking about people, and start thinking about civilisational grades. Some people become the products of “better” cultures. Others become the products of worse ones. Once that idea settles, everything else becomes easier. Rights become conditional. Belonging becomes a probationary status. A neighbour becomes a test case. A family becomes a file. A settled life becomes something that can be reviewed, revoked, and removed.

Our previous pieces on Plague Island have already followed two parts of this road. Wake Up Call: The Echoes of Weimar examined the fragility of democratic institutions and the historical pattern through which legitimacy is eroded, crises are exploited, and democratic safeguards are hollowed out from within (Plague Island, 2025a). Britain’s Dark Turn: How Farage’s Deportation Theatre Echoes Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook examined the machinery Reform UK wants to build: detention capacity, data systems, removal flights, legal exemptions, surveillance powers, and the spectacle of state cruelty presented as administrative competence (Plague Island, 2025b). This piece starts in the gap between those two arguments. It asks what has to happen in the public mind before the machinery of removal can be sold as national rescue.

The earlier deportation article looked at the hardware: camps, databases, warrants, planes, police powers, legal carve-outs. This article looks at the software. It looks at the ranking system installed before the raid, the moral code that tells the public who belongs, who is suspect, who is merely tolerated, and who may be pushed out when the political weather changes. If the deportation plan is the hand reaching for the door, cultural superiority is the voice whispering that the person on the other side was never really one of us.

The Permission Slip

Authoritarian politics rarely begins by saying exactly what it is. It begins with permission. It asks the public to accept one smaller cruelty, then another. It asks people to stop seeing certain groups as fully human in the ordinary, daily, unremarkable sense. It asks them to imagine that rights can be earned by resemblance, that belonging can be measured by usefulness, that dignity can be withdrawn from those who fail the mood of the majority.

The line deserves attention for this reason. It is not a policy paper because it does not need to be. Its purpose is not to explain, but to authorise. It tells followers that they may say the quiet part more loudly, provided they place it under the apparently respectable word culture. They do not have to say race. They do not have to say religion. They do not have to say migrant, Muslim, foreigner, asylum seeker, traveller, neighbourhood, class, accent, dress, food, prayer, or family. They can say culture, and the audience can fill in the rest.

That is the trick. Culture sounds softer than race. It sounds learned, sociological, almost polite. It allows a speaker to insist that no one is talking about biology, skin colour, or blood. Yet in the political marketplace, culture is often a container into which all those older hatreds can be poured. Religion becomes culture. Ethnicity becomes culture. Class becomes culture. Migration status becomes culture. A person’s postcode, surname, clothing, language, diet, or mosque can be folded into the same accusation. The word becomes a mask because it lets hierarchy keep its emotional force while changing its vocabulary.

A democratic society can criticise practices. It can and must condemn misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, racism, sectarian coercion, caste oppression, forced marriage, authoritarianism, and political violence. It can defend secular law, equal citizenship, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of conscience, and the right of every person to leave a community that seeks to control them. There is no serious democracy without that moral clarity.

But that is not what Yusuf’s sentence does. It does not name a violation. It does not defend a right. It does not say that a practice is wrong because it crushes the freedom of an individual. It ranks cultures. It invites a scoreboard. It moves the argument away from conduct and toward origin. The authoritarian move is to take guilt, which belongs to an act, and attach it to an origin.

Once that move has been made, people associated with the “worse” culture become permanently suspect. Their innocence is provisional. Their citizenship is conditional. Their children inherit suspicion before they have done anything at all. Their success is treated as proof of exceptional escape, while their failure is treated as confirmation of collective defect. The individual disappears, and in their place stands the category.

This is how the language of civilisation becomes a permission slip for cruelty.

When Hierarchy Calls Itself Equality

Zia Yusuf’s sentence did not fall from a clear blue sky. It arrived amid Reform UK’s recent messaging around policing, race, migration, and grievance. Reform’s own article on Yusuf’s BBC appearance, published on 8 June 2026, framed him as attacking “two-tier policing” and quoted him saying there was “nothing more divisive” than such policing (Reform UK, 2026b). The party presented his remarks as a defence of equal treatment under the law, while also accusing others of politicising the death of Henry Nowak (Reform UK, 2026b).

We should be careful here — we are not making unsupported claims about the Nowak case. Rather, we are examining Reform’s public framing because that framing is the engine room of the politics. Equality is taken apart and reassembled as grievance. Any attempt to discuss racism or unequal treatment can be recast as discrimination against the majority. Anti-racism becomes racism. Concern for minorities becomes contempt for ordinary people. Recognition of social inequality becomes evidence that the system has been rigged against those who are told they are the real victims.

This is the translation machine of reactionary politics. It takes a demand for equal protection and turns it into an accusation of special treatment. It takes a request to look honestly at who is most exposed to state power and turns it into a story about the majority being humiliated in its own country. It tells people who already feel insecure that their insecurity has a culprit, and that the culprit is the person asking to be treated as fully equal.

The line works inside that mood. If the country is being betrayed by elites who allegedly favour outsiders, minorities, migrants, Muslims, or politically protected groups, then cultural superiority can present itself as restoration rather than contempt. The audience is invited to hear superiority as truth-telling.

This is where “two-tier” language does its work. It provides the bridge between grievance and hierarchy. The public is told that equality has gone too far, that law has been bent to appease minorities, that the majority has become subordinate in its own country. From there, cultural ranking begins to feel like correction. The hierarchy is advertised as common sense returning from exile.

The danger lies in that reversal. A politics that ranks cultures does not have to announce itself as hatred. It can call itself fairness, realism, law and order. It can point to crimes, costs, housing queues, police failures, and genuine public anxiety. Then it can fuse those things into a single moral story: we are weak because we have treated the wrong people as equal.

That is where the authoritarian imagination begins: the claim that equality itself has become the problem.

The Useful Mask

There is another reason Zia Yusuf matters so much to Reform UK’s politics. Yusuf is a British Muslim whose parents were first-generation immigrants from Sri Lanka, and he has presented himself as a British Muslim patriot (Akhtar, 2025). He has been described as a figure who embodies a strand of established ethnic-minority politics that takes a hard line toward newer arrivals (Akhtar, 2025). The same account noted that he faced Islamophobic abuse from parts of Reform’s online orbit, and that Farage acknowledged some of the abuse directed at him (Akhtar, 2025; Mason and Rhoden-Paul, 2025).

None of this requires us to speculate about Yusuf’s private motives; we do not need to peer into his head. We only need to look at the political function his role performs.

For a party repeatedly accused of racialised politics, a minority messenger is useful. He allows the party to point at his biography and say: how can this be racism, when he is saying it? How can this be hostility to minorities, when one of our most prominent figures is himself from a minority background? How can the politics be exclusionary when the messenger seems to contradict the accusation?

But the identity of the messenger does not settle the content of the message. A hierarchy does not become less hierarchical because it is defended by someone who can be used as evidence against the charge of prejudice. The old sales pitch becomes easier to hear. Cultural ranking can be presented as standards rather than bigotry, discernment rather than prejudice, patriotism rather than exclusion.

This is a familiar pattern. Movements of exclusion often search for legitimising figures who appear to launder the ugliness of the project. The figure does not have to be cynical. The useful function is enough. If a party can say that its harshness is endorsed by someone who appears to stand outside the old stereotype of the reactionary bigot, then the harshness gains a new costume. It can walk into respectable rooms and ask to be treated in seriousness rather than spite.

The sentence is revealing for exactly this reason. “Some cultures are MUCH better than others” is not made safer by the biography of the person who wrote it. If anything, the biography makes the sentence more politically useful. It allows Reform’s wider project to present cultural hierarchy as an insider’s verdict, a form of tough love from someone whose presence is supposed to disarm criticism before criticism has even opened its mouth.

Yusuf is not the origin of this politics. He is one of its current translators. Farage gives it the party vehicle and the deportation spectacle. Lowe and Restore show how the same appetite can be pushed even further right, with Al Jazeera reporting that Restore’s manifesto pledged the “most ambitious programme of mass deportations ever seen in Britain”(Mohamed, 2026). Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, gives it the street-level theatre of menace, where the language of invasion moves from the screen toward the door (Hooper, 2026). Yusuf’s role is different, but no less useful. He gives the hierarchy a cleaner accent. He helps turn an older politics of suspicion into the language of culture, standards, and seriousness.

The Machine in the Background

The Guardian reported in February 2026 that Yusuf, introduced at a Reform press conference in Dover as the party’s “shadow home secretary,” described migration as an “invasion” and set out plans for a UK Deportation Command. According to that reporting, Reform’s proposals included detaining 24,000 people at any one time, deporting up to 288,000 annually, operating five flights a day, scrapping indefinite leave to remain, replacing it with renewable visas, and pursuing expanded surveillance powers (Syal and Walker, 2026). The BBC later reported Yusuf saying that if a foreign national lives in social housing at taxpayer expense, they “automatically fail our economic test and will be deported”(Wheeler and Forsyth, 2026).

Those facts demonstrate the connection between rhetoric and administration. The sentence about culture sits beside proposals for conditional settlement and large-scale removal. It sits beside a politics that imagines the Home Office as a sorting machine, the border as a permanent internal condition, and belonging as something that can be withdrawn according to tests of worth.

The earlier article examined the hardware. Here the question is simpler and uglier: what kind of sentence makes that hardware feel acceptable?

The answer is that cultural ranking supplies a moral sorting code. If some cultures are much better, then some people are implicitly closer to the standard and others further away from it. Those further away can be subjected to more suspicion, more monitoring, more conditions, more demands to prove themselves. Their rights can be made to look like indulgences. Their permanence can be made to look like a clerical error. Their removal can be made to look like tidying.

Here, a human being becomes an administrative inconvenience. A tenant becomes an economic test. A family becomes a removal target. A child’s classroom becomes the place where politics arrives as a rumour about whose parents may have to leave. A state may one day knock on the door. The sentence has already knocked. It has already told the neighbour, the classmate, the landlord, the employer, and the passer-by to see a settled life as something provisional.

A letter published by the Guardian in response to Yusuf’s deportation plan captured the human consequence from the other end of the telescope. A secondary-school student wrote that immigrants were not what made them feel unsafe. What made them feel unsafe was the thought that politicians could break up communities and encourage harassment of people who do not look or sound “British” (Name and address supplied, 2026). That is the lived meaning of the sorting code. It does not remain in Westminster. It enters classrooms, streets, friendships, workplaces, and families. It tells some children that the country around them is debating whether their lives here count.

The cruelty of this politics lies in what it would do if given power, and what it does now, while seeking power. It teaches the public to rehearse removal, invites people to imagine their neighbours as temporary, and makes suspicion a civic habit.

The point became brutally visible in Belfast this week. The BBC reported that residents fled their homes as houses and cars burned amid disorder after a knife attack, with the Police Service of Northern Ireland calling for calm as “sporadic pockets of disorder” broke out across Northern Ireland (BBC News, 2026). The Guardian reported that the suspect, Hadi Alodid, had been charged with attempted murder, threats to kill an NHS radiographer, and possession of a knife, and that the victim, Stephen Ogilvie, had lost his left eye, according to court proceedings (Sparrow, 2026). Those criminal allegations must be treated carefully, precisely because live proceedings are not raw material for political fantasy.

But the reaction is politically instructive. Farage posted that the authorities should reveal the attacker’s “identity and status” immediately, and Reform then republished that demand in an article asking how the suspect came to Northern Ireland and whether he had leave to remain (Farage, 2026; Reform UK, 2026c). Those are not the same words as an instruction to riot. They are, however, part of the political grammar through which an alleged individual crime is quickly pulled toward border status, migration, secrecy, and official betrayal. Keir Starmer said people had been targeted because of their background and condemned those who encouraged the disorder “online or elsewhere” (Sparrow, 2026). Naomi Long, Northern Ireland’s justice minister, said disorder had been fuelled by online commentators who would have “struggled to find Belfast on a map” (Sparrow, 2026). Claire Hanna, the SDLP leader, described what she was seeing as a “race-based pogrom”, with men going door to door demanding to “get the foreigners out” based on skin colour (Sparrow, 2026).

This is the dehumanising move. An alleged crime is recoded as the expression of an entire ethnicity and culture. The accused does not stand alone before the law. He is made to carry a whole population on his back, and that population is then told to answer for him. This is how the old language of the enemy within returns in newer clothes. It does not need to say that people are less than human. It only has to teach the public to see them first as a source of contamination, danger, burden, or invasion, and only afterwards, if at all, as neighbours, workers, parents, children, patients, citizens, or human beings.

The more explicit version of that translation appeared in the far-right ecosystem around the disorder. Metro reported that Tommy Robinson had organised protests after the attack, shared updates from Belfast, and captioned protest images by saying that “the whole of the United Kingdom” would take to the streets after “yet another invader attack on our people” (Hooper, 2026). That phrase is the whole mechanism in miniature. A suspect becomes an invader. A criminal allegation becomes an attack by a class of people. A public is invited to feel not horror at a crime, but siege by a population.

A second register of justification then appeared around the language of rage itself. In a tweet, Ben Graham wrote that Nigel Farage’s call for “cold rage” had captured how millions felt, before describing Belfast and Southampton as examples of “hot rage” after years of frustration and political failure had “boiled over into violence” (Graham, 2026). The formulation matters because it gives disorder a moral biography. Violence becomes the temperature of neglected democracy. The street becomes a thermometer. The riot becomes the proof that the people have been ignored.

That is the social life of cultural ranking. It does not stay attached to the person accused of a specific act. It migrates; attaches to the neighbour with the wrong accent, the family with the wrong skin, the child whose home is suddenly made frightening by men outside who think politics has given them permission. Language about superior and inferior cultures cannot be treated as harmless provocation. In the wrong political weather, it becomes a map for intimidation.

The Cowardice of the Unsaid Target

Part of the power of Zia Yusuf’s sentence is that it does not say which cultures he means. That omission is the design. If challenged, the defender can say the sentence only refers to liberal values, democracy, tolerance, equality before the law, or the rejection of violence. But if that was the argument, it could have been made clearly. A person can say that women’s rights are non-negotiable, or that gay people must be protected from persecution. A person can say that antisemitism, racism, religious coercion, sectarian intimidation, and political violence are wrong. And a person can say that every individual must enjoy equal protection under the law.

Yusuf did not write that. He wrote: “Some cultures are MUCH better than others.”

The vagueness does the work because it allows every supporter to supply the target privately. One hears Islam. Another hears migrants. Another hears asylum seekers. Another hears inner-city Britain. Another hears Roma communities, or Africans, or South Asians, or whoever the day’s grievance has placed under suspicion. The sentence does not need to name them. Naming them would create accountability. Leaving them unnamed creates atmosphere.

This is the cowardice of coded politics. It wants the emotional reward of bigotry without the burden of specificity. It wants to stir the people who know exactly what they think is meant, while preserving the escape route for the people who want to deny it. It is politics by smirk, by raised eyebrow, by algorithmic wink.

Social media rewards precisely this form. It rewards compression over thought, certainty over honesty, contempt over explanation. The capitalised “MUCH” is not a serious word in a serious argument. It is a shove. It is there to create the feeling of obviousness. It says: do not overthink this, do not ask hard questions, do not distinguish between practices and persons, just accept the ranking.

The post shows how digital politics turns hierarchy into a shareable object. A policy paper would have to face questions. A speech might have to sustain an argument. A seven-word boast only has to move. Outrage, applause, disgust, and denial spreads it. The sentence does not have to persuade through logic because the platform has already taught people to treat emotional force as proof.

This is the small machinery beneath the larger machine. Before the detention centre comes the post. Before the legal category comes the insult. Before the command structure comes the moral permission. The Belfast disorder shows the speed of the transfer. Online atmosphere becomes street atmosphere. A suspect’s background becomes a neighbourhood’s danger. The category begins to answer for the individual.

The British Mirror

The civilisational boast always depends on bad memory. It asks Britain to look outward, to judge other people’s cultures, and to forget what its own culture has tolerated, normalised, excused, hidden, and repeated.

If the test is how a country treats minorities, Britain has Windrush in the mirror. The scandal exposed how people who had lived legally in the UK for decades were wrongly classified, denied work and healthcare, detained or removed under the logic of the hostile environment (Williams, 2020). If the test is how a country treats the poor, Britain has food banks and child poverty in the mirror. The Trussell Trust reported distributing more than 3.1 million emergency food parcels across the UK in the year to March 2024, including more than 1.1 million for children (Trussell Trust, 2024). The Child Poverty Action Group has reported that 4.3 million children were living in poverty in the UK in 2022 to 2023 (CPAG, 2024).

If the test is how a country treats vulnerable people in state custody, Britain has its prisons in the mirror. Official inspection and monitoring reports have repeatedly warned about overcrowding, decay, violence, self-harm, and failing conditions across parts of the prison estate (HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2024). If the test is accountability after disaster, Britain has Grenfell in the mirror. The final report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry concluded that the deaths were the result of decades of failure by central government and other bodies, including dishonesty by companies and failures of regulation and oversight (Grenfell Tower Inquiry, 2024).

This is not an argument that Britain is uniquely wicked. That would only invert the same stupidity as the civilisational scoreboard is a lie. Every society contains cruelty and courage, domination and resistance, hypocrisy and sacrifice, as well as people who defend the vulnerable and people who profit from their abandonment. And every society tells flattering stories about itself, because every society would rather remember its rescue boats than its locked doors.

The danger of ranking cultures is that it turns moral life into national vanity. It suggests that the failures are elsewhere, that barbarism is imported, that cruelty wears foreign clothes, that oppression speaks with another accent. It lets the majority imagine itself as the judge rather than one more defendant in the dock.

A democratic society should have no patience for that smugness. The task is not to pretend every practice is acceptable, but to defend persons against domination wherever it appears. That includes domination inside minority communities. It includes domination by the state. It includes domination by employers, landlords, police, prisons, religious authorities, family structures, mobs, newspapers, algorithms, and majorities. If equality means anything, it cannot be granted only to those whose culture has passed a political loyalty test. It has to apply even when the mirror is ugly.

The Older Ladder With Newer Labels

Returning to Weimar does not mean dressing Britain in someone else’s history. Britain in 2026 is not Germany in 1933, and the argument does not require pretending otherwise. The useful lesson is sequence. Democracies are damaged when a law is passed or a court is defied. They are also damaged earlier, when enough people accept that some groups deserve less concern.

Authoritarian politics requires unequal human worth. Sometimes that inequality is described through biology. Sometimes through religion. Sometimes through nationality. Sometimes through culture. The vocabulary changes because old words become embarrassing, but the ladder remains. The phrase “Some cultures are MUCH better than others” belongs to that ladder. It is not a complete programme, a manifesto, or the whole story, but it points in a direction. It says there is an above and a below. It says there are those who may judge and those who may be judged, and that some people arrive in the political conversation already carrying an invisible charge. They have done nothing, but the culture others attach to them is treated as evidence enough.

The distinction between criticising practices and ranking cultures matters for this reason. The first is necessary to freedom. The second is useful to power. When we condemn a practice, we name the harm and defend the person harmed. When we rank a culture, we create a shadow around everyone associated with it. The state can then move through that shadow with fewer questions asked.

This is how conscience is softened. People are not always asked to approve cruelty directly. They are first asked to accept a premise: these people are different in a deeper way; their claims are weaker; their belonging is thinner; their pain counts for less; their removal is less tragic; their fear is less real. Once that premise is accepted, cruelty no longer has to announce itself. It arrives as paperwork, procedure, enforcement, policy. It arrives wearing the clothes of normal government.

They will always need someone to blame. That is the part polite commentary keeps missing. The fantasy is that once the culture has been purified, and the wrong people have been pushed out or put back in their place, peace will return. But the politics of purification does not produce peace. It produces appetite. When the migrant has been used up, the unemployed appear. When the unemployed have been punished enough, the single parent appears. Then the disabled claimant, the striking nurse, the protesting student, the tenant, the traveller, the teacher, the council estate, the city, the region, the class fraction that can be made to look lazy, decadent, disloyal, parasitic, or insufficiently grateful. The target changes because the machine requires a target. The ladder is never dismantled. It is only relabelled.

What Democracy Has to Refuse

A democratic answer to this claim cannot be cowardly. It cannot retreat into a lazy relativism that refuses to criticise anything done in the name of culture. It must say clearly that universal rights are universal or they are nothing. Women do not belong to cultures. Children do not belong to patriarchs. Gay people do not belong to clerics. Dissenters do not belong to states. Believers do not belong to mobs. Non-believers do not belong to families that demand obedience. No one’s freedom should be crushed because a custom, a priest, a minister, a father, a newspaper, or a majority says so.

But precisely because those rights are universal, they cannot be defended through cultural hierarchy. We do not protect women by declaring whole peoples inferior. We do not protect gay people by turning Muslims into suspects. We do not protect Jewish communities by tolerating racism against migrants. We do not protect secular democracy by making equality conditional on national vanity. We do not defend freedom by building a scoreboard of civilisation and placing ourselves at the top of it.

The democratic answer is simpler and harder. It says that every person is entitled to equal concern and equal protection, and that harmful practices should be named, opposed, and stopped because they harm persons — not because they prove the inferiority of a people. It says that Britain has no right to use the language of liberty while abandoning the vulnerable at its own border, in its prisons, in its tower blocks, in its schools, in its asylum system, or in the ruins left by austerity.

That answer will not trend as easily as a seven-word sneer. It is too demanding, and it does not flatter the crowd. It requires people to hold two thoughts at once: that universal rights must be defended without apology, and that the defence of those rights must never become a licence to rank human beings by culture.

Reactionary politics hates that distinction because it depends on collapsing it. It wants every criticism of cultural hierarchy to sound like a defence of every harmful practice. It wants to force the public into a false choice: either accept the civilisational ladder or surrender all moral judgment. The answer is to refuse the trap. We can judge harm without judging peoples. We can defend freedom without building a hierarchy of belonging. We can protect rights without turning culture into a caste mark.

Before Removal Comes Ranking

The danger here is not simply that the sentence is offensive. Britain is drowning in offensive sentences. The danger is that it does political work. It makes inequality sound like, and contempt sound like standards. It makes the first step down the ladder feel like no step at all.

That is how the road is prepared. First, institutions are weakened. Then the machinery is proposed. But before the machinery can run smoothly, the public must be taught who belongs inside the circle and who can be pushed outside it. That teaching does not always arrive as a manifesto. Sometimes it arrives as a sentence on a phone screen, a little blast of superiority between the day’s outrages.

We should not pretend not to understand it. The sentence is clear enough. It says that some cultures are better, and therefore some people stand closer to worth than others. It invites the public to think vertically, to look down, to imagine human beings arranged on a ladder and to mistake that ladder for moral clarity.

Democracy has to kick the ladder away. It has to do so before the database, before the detention centre, before the raid, before the flight, before the legal exemption, before the moment when cruelty has acquired enough paperwork to call itself law. It has to refuse the first ranking, because that is where the later violence begins to look reasonable.

Before people can be removed, they have to be ranked. The migrant today. The unemployed tomorrow. The single parent after that. The dissident whenever required. This is where the echo of Weimar returns, not as costume drama, not as a claim that Britain is Germany in 1932, but as a warning about political appetite. A democracy is softened when it learns to sort people before it sees them. Once that lesson has been learned, the target can change endlessly. The hierarchy survives by changing names.

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References

Akhtar, P. (2025) ‘Zia Yusuf turned Reform into an election winner, his angry resignation leaves Nigel Farage weakened’, The Conversation, 6 June. Available at: https://theconversation.com/zia-yusuf-turned-reform-into-an-election-winner-his-angry-resignation-leaves-nigel-farage-weakened-258382 [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Child Poverty Action Group (2024) ‘Child poverty facts and figures’. Available at: https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Grenfell Tower Inquiry (2024) Phase 2 report. Available at: https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/phase-2-report[Accessed: 10 June 2026].

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2024) Annual report 2023-24. Available at: https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmipris_reports/annual-report-2023-24/ [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

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[Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Graham, B. (2026) ‘Nigel Farage’s call for “cold rage” last week perfectly captured how millions of British people feel’, X, 10 June.

Hooper, S. (2026) ‘How social media encouraged destruction in the Belfast riots’, Metro, 10 June. Available at: https://metro.co.uk/2026/06/10/social-media-encouraged-destruction-belfast-riots-28717408/ [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Mason, C. and Rhoden-Paul, A. (2025) ‘Zia Yusuf returning to Reform UK two days after quitting’, BBC News, 7 June. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyv040rnqzo [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Mohamed, E. (2026) ‘Does UK’s new far-right party, Restore, pose a threat to Farage’s Reform?’, Al Jazeera, 3 June. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/3/does-uks-new-far-right-party-restore-pose-a-threat-to-farages-reform [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Name and address supplied (2026) ‘Immigrants aren’t our enemies, Zia Yusuf’, The Guardian, 2 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/02/immigrants-arent-our-enemies-zia-yusuf [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

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Reform UK (2026b) ‘Zia Yusuf: “There’s nothing more divisive than two-tier policing”’, Reform Daily, 8 June. Available at: https://www.reformparty.uk/news/zia-yusuf-there-s-nothing-more-divisive-than-two-tier-policing [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Reform UK (2026c) ‘We must know the truth about the attempted beheading in Belfast’, Reform Daily, 9 June. Available at: https://www.reformparty.uk/news/we-must-know-the-truth-about-the-attempted-beheading-in-belfast [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Sparrow, A. (2026) ‘Belfast knife attack victim lost his left eye, court told, as suspect named as Hadi Alodid: UK politics live’, The Guardian, 10 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2026/jun/10/belfast-riots-knife-attack-northern-ireland-sdlp-keir-starmer-kemi-badenoch-pmqs-uk-politics-latest-news-updates [Accessed: 10 June 2026].

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[Accessed: 10 June 2026].

Born After the Future began in an odd, almost cinematic way. It was later at night than we would normally still be watching anything. The room had that particular stillness that comes when the day has already ended but the television remains on, carrying voices into the half-dark. The discussion, at least at first, was not even the thing this piece became about. We were watching something involving the then-upcoming local elections. The subject was interesting enough, but it had not yet altered the atmosphere of the room.

Then Michael Walker turned the conversation towards China and put a question to Aaron Bastani. What followed had the strange feeling one sometimes gets in films, when the camera seems to move towards the television, when the room recedes, and the screen becomes the only source of gravity. It was as though everything else fell away for a moment. Bastani spoke about Britain as a Ponzi scheme. Bam!

It landed as a diagnosis. Not because it explained everything, or because any single phrase can carry the full weight of a country’s decline, but because it gave shape to something that had been sitting there for years, half-felt and half-understood. A mood; a sense that the bargain had changed before some of us were even old enough to know there had ever been a bargain at all.

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“For within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp.”

— William Shakespeare, Richard II (Act 3, Scene 2)

There is a specific kind of tragedy reserved for the man who believes that the office itself confers authority. He fights for the crown, schemes for the crown, purges his rivals for the crown, and finally places it upon his head, only to discover that the power he sought was an illusion. He has the title, but he has alienated everyone who might have sustained him. He is the king of an empty room. This is the tragedy of Richard II. It is also the tragedy of Keir Starmer.

As the Labour Party fractures under the weight of catastrophic local election losses, ministerial resignations, and a Prime Minister who refuses to accept that his mandate has evaporated, the collapse of the Starmer project feels more like the final act of a play that was doomed from the prologue. Starmerism was built on a foundational lie: the belief that you could win power by pretending to be one thing, govern by being another, and that the electorate would simply accept the bait-and-switch as the price of competence.

But competence is a fragile shield when the winter fuel allowance is cut (BBC News, 2025), the Muslim vote collapses over Gaza (Bylines Supplement, 2024), and when the Prime Minister is forced to admit to Parliament that he made a “wrong judgment” in appointing a man with ties to Jeffrey Epstein as the UK’s most important diplomatic post (AP News, 2026). When the illusion of competence shatters, what is left? Only the hollow crown.

Waiting in the wings, ready to inherit the wreckage, is not a new generation of visionary leaders, but Nigel Farage: the Fortinbras of British politics, a man who has built nothing, governed nothing, and solved nothing, but who stands ready to claim a kingdom of corpses simply because everyone else has failed.

The Foundational Betrayal

In 2020, Keir Starmer ran for the leadership of the Labour Party on a platform of ten socialist pledges (Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, 2020). He promised to increase income tax for the top 5%, abolish universal credit, and bring rail, mail, energy, and water into common ownership. He pledged to defend free movement, oppose a two-child benefit cap, and scrap tuition fees. He presented himself as the unity candidate, the man who could retain the radical energy of the Corbyn years while adding a veneer of forensic, prosecutorial competence. He would be the left’s best chance of power.

He knew exactly what he was doing. The Labour membership, traumatised by the 2019 election defeat, desperately wanted to believe that they did not have to abandon their principles to win. Starmer offered them that comfort. He wore the pledges like a costume. Then, once the leadership was secured, he systematically dismantled every single one of them (The Big Issue, 2024). It was a purge rather than a pivot. The left of the party was humiliated, expelled, and told that its very existence was an electoral liability. Starmer’s allies briefed the press that ditching the pledges was proof of his “real politics” (Politico, 2023), a necessary shift to win over the centre ground. The message was clear: the left had been used as a vehicle for his ambition, and now that the vehicle had served its purpose, it could be discarded.

In Shakespearean terms, this is the moment Richard II seizes the lands of John of Gaunt to fund his Irish wars. It is an act of supreme arrogance, a belief that the king can do whatever he wants because he is the king. Richard does not consider the consequences, or ask who will remain loyal once the compact is broken. He simply takes, because he can. Starmer believed that the left had nowhere else to go. He believed that the electorate would reward his ruthlessness. He did not ask who would remain loyal once the betrayal was complete. The answer, as it turned out, was almost no one.

The Sandcastle Majority

For a brief, intoxicating moment, in July 2024, it looked as though Starmer had been right all along. Labour won a landslide majority of 412 seats (House of Commons Library, 2024). The Conservatives were routed. The headlines declared a new era. Starmer stood on the steps of Downing Street and spoke of “national renewal.”

But the numbers told a different story. Labour’s 33.7% vote share was the lowest of any party to win a majority government in modern British history (Electoral Reform Society, 2025). Two-thirds of the electorate did not vote for Labour. The victory was not an endorsement of Starmerism; it was a desperate, exhausted rejection of the Conservative Party after fourteen years of austerity, corruption, misery, and chaos. The electorate did not choose Starmer; they simply had nowhere else to go.

This is the crucial distinction that Starmer never grasped. Richard II, too, inherited a kingdom that appeared stable. He had the crown, the court, and the symbols of power. What he did not have was the genuine loyalty of the people who sustained the system. His authority was wide but shallow and when the first real test came, it evaporated. Similarly, Starmer’s majority was a sandcastle built at high tide. The question was never whether it would be washed away, but when.

The Manager Who Could Not Manage

The central promise of the Starmer project was not vision or transformation. It was management. After the chaotic psychodrama of the Johnson, Truss, and Sunak years, Starmer offered the quiet, joyless prudence of a technocrat. He would balance the books, make the hard choices, and be the adult in the room. He would not be exciting, but he would be competent. But when you offer nothing but management, you cannot survive a crisis of management. Starmer’s government has been a series of management crises, each one chipping away at the one thing he had to offer.

The unravelling began almost immediately. In September 2024, the government announced the abolition of the universal winter fuel payment, stripping support from 10 million pensioners (The Independent, 2025). It was framed as a necessary sacrifice to fill a “black hole” in the public finances — a classic symptom of what commentators called “Treasury brain,” the notorious syndrome by which chancellors demand savings that look ingenious in a spreadsheet but prove disastrous in the real world (The Guardian, 2024). The policy was cruel and politically illiterate. It told the electorate, in the starkest possible terms, that the government’s first instinct when faced with a difficult choice was to take from one of the most vulnerable groups.

The optics were catastrophic. Here was a Labour government, elected on a promise of change, cutting support for pensioners in its first months in office. The party that had spent fourteen years attacking Conservative austerity was now implementing its own version. The message to the electorate was unmistakable: there is no alternative. There is only management of decline.

Then came the collapse of the Muslim vote. Labour’s equivocation over a ceasefire in Gaza, and Starmer’s own disastrous LBC interview in which he said Israel had the right to withhold power and water from the civilian population, alienated a core constituency that had voted Labour for generations (MCI Maps, 2024). The party lost heavily in Muslim-majority areas during the general election, and the bleeding continued. By early 2026, Labour sources were privately acknowledging that the party had not been forgiven for its stance on Gaza, and that the damage was structural rather than temporary (The Guardian, 2026a).

Starmer had calculated that he could afford to lose these voters. He had calculated that the centre ground was more valuable than the left flank. He was wrong on both counts. The centre ground, it turned out, was not a stable political base. It was a temporary coalition of people who had voted Labour in the absence of anything better. And the left flank, once lost, did not come back.

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The Mandelson Catastrophe

In February 2025, Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as the UK ambassador to the United States. It was a classic Starmer move: a signal to the establishment that the adults were back in charge, that New Labour’s most formidable political operator was once again in service to the nation. Mandelson was a controversial choice, but Starmer was confident. He had done his due diligence. He had followed the process…

Except he had not. Mandelson had failed his security vetting. The Foreign Office had overruled its own vetting officials and approved the appointment anyway, allegedly without informing the Prime Minister (The New York Times, 2026). When a trove of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents was released, revealing supportive emails that Mandelson had sent to the convicted paedophile, the appointment became untenable. Starmer fired Mandelson in September 2025 (Reuters, 2025), but the damage was done. By April 2026, as the full extent of the vetting failure became public, Starmer was forced to address Parliament and admit he had made the “wrong judgment” (AP News, 2026).

The Institute for Government was blunt: “The initial failure of judgement was Starmer’s choice to make Mandelson ambassador” (Institute for Government, 2026). The forensic prosecutor had failed to ask the most basic questions. The competent manager had overseen a catastrophic failure of governance. The king who had promised to restore trust in public life had appointed an Epstein associate to the country’s most prestigious diplomatic post.

This is the moment in the play when Richard II’s divine right begins to look like arrogance. He has convinced himself that the crown protects him from consequence, confusing the symbols of authority with authority itself. Now the consequences are arriving, and the crown offers no shelter.

Starmer’s response to the Mandelson crisis was, characteristically, to blame everyone else. He accused Foreign Office officials of deliberately withholding information from him (BBC News, 2026). He fired the top civil servant, Olly Robbins, within hours of the revelation. He ordered reviews, made statements, and did everything except acknowledge that the fundamental problem was his own judgment — the same judgment that had led him to appoint Mandelson in the first place, and led him to believe that the establishment’s approval was a substitute for the public’s trust.

The Kingdom of Corpses

In Hamlet, the play ends with the stage littered with bodies. The Danish royal family has destroyed itself through betrayal, hesitation, and revenge. And then, marching through the doors, comes Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway. He has done nothing to earn the throne. He has not fought for it or suffered for it. He has simply waited for his enemies to annihilate each other. He surveys the carnage and claims the kingdom.

Nigel Farage is the Fortinbras of Plague Island.

In the May 2026 local elections, Labour suffered heavy losses, losing over a thousand municipal seats, while Reform made sweeping gains in working-class areas in the north of England that had been solid Labour territory for decades, as well as former Conservative strongholds in Essex (AP News, 2026). In Wales, Labour’s unbroken twenty-seven-year run in power came to an end, with the party dropping to third place behind Reform. The scale of the collapse was historic.

Farage has not built a coherent political movement. He has not offered a credible plan for governing the country. He has not proposed serious solutions to the structural problems of the British economy, the NHS, or the housing crisis. What he has done is position himself as the beneficiary of other people’s failure.

His personal conduct tells a story that his supporters prefer not to examine too closely. He has spent his time flying to Abu Dhabi at the expense of the United Arab Emirates to attend events and meet officials, despite building a political brand centred on opposition to immigration from the Middle East (Al Jazeera, 2026). He attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States, flown there by a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire donor, at a cost of £55,000 (Al Jazeera, 2026). He has claimed Russia was “provoked” into invading Ukraine, blamed NATO and the EU for the war, and described Putin as the world leader he most admired (The Guardian, 2024).

His party’s finances tell their own story. Reform UK’s treasurer and three of its largest donors are all linked to One Hyde Park, a London apartment block whose residents and buyers have included at least five individuals associated with sanctioned Russian or post-Soviet wealth (Byline Times, 2026). A parliamentary debate in February 2026 heard that Reform’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, had been convicted and sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for taking Russian bribes.

This is the man who stands to inherit the kingdom that Starmer has destroyed, and this is the crucial point that the Fortinbras analogy illuminates so precisely. In Shakespeare, Fortinbras does not win because he is better than Hamlet — he wins because Hamlet has failed. The tragedy of Hamlet is not that Fortinbras is triumphant; it is that Denmark’s own dysfunction has made his triumph inevitable. The kingdom does not fall to a conqueror. It falls to a scavenger.

Starmer’s tragedy is that he created the conditions for Farage’s triumph. By abandoning his pledges, by purging the left, by offering a joyless, managerial centrism that failed to improve the material conditions of the country, Starmer further drained the political landscape. He told the electorate that there was no alternative to his brand of prudence. When that prudence failed, the electorate turned to the only man who was offering something different, no matter how dangerous that alternative might be.

The geopolitical risks of this are not abstract. Farage’s links to Trump, his positive statements about Putin, and the persistent questions about Russian money in his party’s finances are not incidental details mark a broader pattern that we have explored elsewhere on Plague Island: the deliberate fragmentation of the Western alliance, the weakening of NATO, the project to pull the United Kingdom away from Europe and into the orbit of an authoritarian axis. If Farage inherits the kingdom, he inherits it as part of a network that has been working for years to make exactly this outcome possible.

The Final Act

Keir Starmer now sits in Downing Street, facing a split cabinet, ministerial resignations, and demands from over 80 of his own MPs that he step down (Al Jazeera, 2026). He insists that the “fundamentals are sound,” that he will fight on, that he will not resign (Reuters, 2026).

It is the desperate delusion of a man who still believes in the power of the hollow crown. He cannot see that the authority he thought he possessed was always an illusion, built on a foundation of broken promises and shallow mandates. He alienated the people who sustained him, and now, in his moment of crisis, he finds himself entirely alone.

Shakespeare’s Richard II has a moment of terrible clarity near the end of the play, when he finally understands what he has done. He has been so consumed by the performance of kingship — the rituals, the symbols, the divine right — that he has never understood the actual substance of power, which is the loyalty of the people around you. “I have wasted time,” he says, “and now doth time waste me.” It is one of the most devastating lines in the English language, because it captures the precise moment when a man realises that the life he has lived has been a performance, and that the performance is over.

Starmer will have his Richard II moment. It may come in the form of a leadership challenge, or in the form of a general election that delivers the country to Farage. It might come in the form of a quiet resignation, a statement about spending more time with his family, a dignified exit from the stage.

But it will come. The tragedy of Starmerism was always structural, not incidental. It was not caused by bad luck, or hostile media, or the cruelty of the political cycle. It was caused by the foundational decision to build a political project on a lie. To tell the left what it wanted to hear, take the power, and then govern for the establishment. To mistake the crown for the authority it was supposed to represent.

We are witnessing the end of a political project that was dead before it even began. Starmerism was a Ponzi scheme of competence, a promise that the adults in the room could manage the decline of the British state without ever addressing the structural rot at its core. It was a promise that the system could be made to work again without changing the system. It was, in the end, a lie, and like all lies, it could only be sustained for so long.

The tragedy of Keir Starmer is that he knew better. He knew what he was doing when he made those ten pledges, and he knew what he was doing when he abandoned them. He made a calculated, cynical choice to trade his principles for power, and now he has neither. The crown is hollow. The stage is littered with the wreckage of the British political centre, and Fortinbras is at the gates.

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References

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘Follow the money: How far-right Reform UK built a global network,’ 6 May. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/6/follow-the-money-how-far-right-reform-uk-built-a-global-network [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘Starmer to face split cabinet as demands for his resignation mount,’ 12 May. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/12/starmer-to-face-split-cabinet-as-demands-for-his-resignation-mount[Accessed 12 May 2026].

AP News (2026) ‘Partial results show losses for Starmer’s Labour in UK polls,’ 8 May. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/britain-elections-labour-starmer-reform-farage-f17a122a0cfcc3595ef01f142517b0b6[Accessed 12 May 2026].

AP News (2026) ‘Starmer says Foreign Office hid Mandelson’s failed security checks,’ 20 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/starmer-mandelson-epstein-parliament-statement-1f434ae174c37ae8a1a0c11204573f83[Accessed 12 May 2026].

BBC News (2025) ‘Keir Starmer defends winter fuel cuts in face of calls for U-turn,’ 7 May. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxnx43kk9ko [Accessed 12 May 2026].

BBC News (2026) ‘Officials deliberately withheld Mandelson vetting result from me,’ 20 April. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2wllel54no [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Byline Times (2026) ‘Reform UK Treasurer and Donors Share London Address with Sanctioned Russian Oligarchs,’ 7 May. Available at: https://bylinetimes.com/2026/05/07/reform-uk-treasurer-and-donors-share-london-address-with-sanctioned-russian-oligarchs/ [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Bylines Supplement (2024) ‘Labour Needs the Muslim Vote to Stabilise its ‘Sandcastle Majority’, 2 September.’ Available at:

Byline Times

Labour Needs the Muslim Vote to Stabilise its 'Sandcastle Majority'– Here's How it Wins it Back

The 2024 General Election brought the Labour Party to power for the first time in over a decade. Yet even a cursory look at the numbers of votes accrued by Labour and the other parties is enough to make one thing obvious: Keir Starmer is sitting on top of a very precarious house of cards…

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2 years ago · 8 likes · Byline Times

[Accessed 12 May 2026].

Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (2020) ‘Keir Starmer’s 10 Pledges,’ 12 October. Available at: https://www.clpd.org.uk/resource/keir-starmer-10-pledges/ [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Electoral Reform Society (2025) ‘How many votes did Labour get in 2024?,’ 25 September. Available at: https://electoral-reform.org.uk/how-many-votes-did-labour-get-in-2024/ [Accessed 12 May 2026].

The Big Issue (2024) ‘All of Keir Starmer’s u-turns and abandoned policy pledges,’ 16 May. Available at: https://www.bigissue.com/news/politics/keir-starmer-broken-promises-tuition-fees-nationalisation-u-turn/ [Accessed 12 May 2026].

The Guardian (2024) ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war,’ 21 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/21/russia-was-provoked-into-ukraine-war-claims-nigel-farage[Accessed 12 May 2026].

The Guardian (2024) ‘Why did Starmer cut the winter fuel allowance? It’s called Treasury brain,’ 11September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/11/why-did-starmer-cut-the-winter-fuel-allowance-its-called-treasury-brain-and-that-spells-trouble [Accessed 12 May 2026].

The Guardian (2026a) ‘Labour anxiety and accusations after big shift in Muslim vote in Gorton and Denton,’ 28 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/28/labour-green-party-muslim-voters-gorton-denton[Accessed 12 May 2026].

Hansard (2026) Russian Influence on UK Politics and Democracy, Volume 780, 9 February 2026. Available at: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-02-09/debates/F9F28AFA-E1F3-449C-B18B- 63DDCABC411E/RussianInfluenceOnUKPoliticsAndDemocracy [Accessed 12 May 2026].

House of Commons Library (2026) ‘General election 2024 results,’ 3 March. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10009/ [Accessed 12 May 2026].

The Independent (2025) ‘Starmer rules out winter fuel allowance U-turn despite local election losses,’ 6 May. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-winter-fuel-allowance-payment-starmer-streeting-b2745455.html [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Institute for Government (2026) ‘The Mandelson vetting blame-game is causing serious damage to Starmer,’ 20 April. Available at: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/mandelson-vetting-blame [Accessed 12 May 2026].

MCI Maps (2024) ‘The Labour Party Collapse Among UK Muslim Voters,’ 8 July. Available at: https://mcimaps.substack.com/p/issue-188-the-labour-party-collapse [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Mowat, B.A. and Werstine, P. (eds.) (2023) Richard II. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Simon & Schuster.

The New York Times (2026) ‘Mandelson Became Britain’s Ambassador to U.S. Despite Failing Vetting,’ 16 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/world/europe/peter-mandelson-epstein-starmer-security.html[Accessed 12 May 2026].

Plague Island (2026) ‘Born After the Future: The Strange Death of British Politics,’ 11 May. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/born-after-the-future-the-strange [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Politico (2023) ‘Keir Starmer revealed his ‘real politics’ by ditching left-wing pledges, ally says,’ 30 June. Available at: https://www.politico.eu/article/keir-starmer-uk-labour-revealed-his-real-politics-by-ditching-left-wing-pledges-ally-says/[Accessed 12 May 2026].

Reuters (2025) ‘Britain’s Mandelson fired as US ambassador over Epstein links,’ 11 September. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/britains-mandelson-fired-us-ambassador-over-epstein-links-2025-09-11/ [Accessed 12 May 2026].

Reuters (2026) ‘Starmer vows to fight on after Labour punished in polls,’ 12 May. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-labour-party-suffers-heavy-early-losses-reform-gains-elections-2026-05-08/[Accessed 12 May 2026].

Dear friends,

It’s been quite a month on Plague Island.

So much so that we recently noticed a rather morbid trend in our own headlines. Within the space of a few days, we published two articles featuring variations on the words dying and death:

• Labour Is Dying of Starmerism

• Born After the Future: The Strange Death of Tomorrow in Britain

Not exactly the stuff of springtime renewal. Still, the repetition felt revealing rather than accidental. There is a palpable sense — politically, culturally, psychologically — that something is ending. Or perhaps more accurately, that systems long sustained by inertia are finally beginning to sag under the weight of their own contradictions.

Britain in particular feels suspended in a strange state of managed decline. The language of ambition has vanished from public life. Nobody speaks seriously about building a better future anymore, only about stabilising collapse, patching holes, or choosing which public service gets lowered into the ground next.

For those of us born after the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, this creates a peculiar feeling: of having inherited a country that no longer really believes in itself. A country surviving administratively, but not imaginatively. That was the spirit behind Born After the Future, inspired by Aaron Bastani at Novara Media. We wanted to write about that eerie and sad sensation of living in a place where the horizon itself seems to have shrunk.

On Our Retun to X

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The other night, we were watching Aaron Bastani talk about China when he said something that sounded like a diagnosis of an illness we had already learned to live with. Britain, he suggested, was no longer really a country in the old sense. It was a Ponzi scheme. Not literally, not in the narrow legal sense of a fraudulent investment operation, but structurally: a system organised around protecting the claims of those who arrived earlier by extracting more from those who arrived later (Novara Media, 2026).

It was a strange thing to hear said plainly, because some of us have never known anything else. Born after 1979, we have no memory of a Britain that believed in the future. We have only inherited the afterlife of that belief: the municipal buildings, rail posters, council estates sold off, utilities privatised, universities marketised, houses transformed into pension plans, the language of national renewal repeated by people who cannot clean a river, staff a court, restore a dentist, or imagine a child born today living better than their parents.

That is the peculiar ache of being born after the future. It is not the feeling of having watched something die. It is stranger than that. It is the feeling of having been raised among monuments to a promise nobody remembers making.

Every generation is tempted to mistake its own disappointments for historical tragedy, so we should be careful about that. Britain before 1979 was not a pastoral republic of fairness and municipal wisdom. It had racism, sexism, imperial aftershock, bad housing, class brutality, and all the rest of it. The point is not that the past was good — nostalgia is one of the diseases this country uses to avoid thought. The point is that the post-1979 settlement did something more profound than change economic policy. It changed the country’s relationship with time.

Before the neoliberal turn, Britain still retained institutional memories of collective provision, public ownership, industrial strategy, municipal capacity, and mass social improvement. After 1979, during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership that oversaw a period of immense social and economic change, Britain shifted from centralised, state-controlled institutions towards privatisation and economic reform (BBC News, 2013). The future was increasingly reimagined as a private balance sheet: home ownership replaced social housing, shareholder value replaced public utility, debt replaced grant, rent replaced security, and managerial politics replaced historical movement. The national imagination narrowed until the only futures on offer were technological consumerism, property inheritance, border panic, or decline with better branding.

This is why Bastani’s phrase lands so hard. A Ponzi scheme is a temporal arrangement. It does not simply steal money; it steals tomorrow. It survives by using new entrants to honour promises made to earlier ones. Post-1979 Britain has done something similar with housing, pensions, rents, privatised infrastructure, student debt, suppressed wages, and the slow deterioration of the public realm. It asks the young to pay more for worse housing, worse services, weaker security, and smaller hopes, while protecting the asset values and accumulated claims of those who got in before the drawbridge lifted.

The official language for this is prudence, but the lived experience is enclosure. Britain’s deepest crisis is therefore more than economic, though the economics are bad enough. It is temporal. The future has stopped arriving as a collective promise and now arrives mainly as a bill.

The Country That Lives Off Itself

The Resolution Foundation and the Centre for Economic Performance described Britain in 2023 as being “a decade and a half into a period of stagnation”. Their final Economy 2030 Inquiry report argued that prosperity requires “a resolve to invest in our future rather than live off our past” (Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance, 2023). That sentence names the whole sentiment. Britain is not simply failing to grow. It is living off the residues of an earlier version of itself.

The facts are bleak, and they are significant because they give structure to a mood that might otherwise be dismissed as melancholy. Labour productivity grew by just 0.4 per cent a year in the twelve years after the financial crisis. The UK’s productivity gap with France, Germany and the United States doubled after 2008. Real wages, which grew by 33 per cent per decade from 1970 to 2007, grew by less than zero in the 2010s. By mid-2023, wages were back where they had been around the financial crisis, and fifteen years of lost wage growth had cost the average worker £10,700 a year (Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance, 2023). These failures are time made material, for they are the delayed child, the missing holiday, and the mould in the rented flat.

Housing is the central parable because housing is where the post-1979 settlement made itself intimate. Right to Buy was sold as liberation, and for many tenants it was. Millions gained an asset and security they might otherwise never have had. But the social meaning of a policy cannot be measured only by the first beneficiaries; it must also be measured by the world it leaves behind. Common Wealth’s 2025 report estimates that 1.9 million council homes in England have been sold through Right to Buy since 1980, at an average discount of 44 per cent. Those homes now have a combined market value of around £430 billion. The report estimates that about 780,000 former council homes, worth £176 billion, have entered the private rented sector (Hayes, 2025). That is the story of Britain after the future. Public assets became private wealth; yesterday’s political triumph became today’s rent bill.

The cruelty is that the country can still look rich while becoming less capable of renewal. The Office for National Statistics estimated the UK’s net worth in 2024 at £13.1 trillion. Household net worth stood at £10.8 trillion. Non-produced assets rose to £7.1 trillion, driven largely by land values, while household non-produced assets stood at £4.6 trillion, with land-value growth accounting for £176.7 billion in 2024 (Office for National Statistics, 2025). Britain’s balance sheet swells as its future contracts.

This is the difference between wealth and futurity. A country can become wealthier because the land under existing houses becomes more expensive, scarcity is capitalised, and the young are forced to bid against one another for access to the basic conditions of adulthood. But that is not the same as becoming a society that is building anything. Land is not a dream. Rent is not a future.

The post-1979 settlement is supposed to have shrunk the state, but that is the flattering version told by people who like to imagine neoliberalism as an argument about efficiency. It transferred public wealth into private claims and public imagination into market discipline. It told us that the state was the problem while ensuring that the state remained strong enough to create markets, protect assets, discipline labour, rescue finance, and make alternatives seem childish.

This is why the word “Ponzi” is useful, even if it is not literal. The older story of Britain was that each generation would inherit a country made more liveable by the last: better homes, better wages, better services, better transport, better education, cleaner air, fuller lives. The newer story is that each generation must work harder to preserve the paper wealth accumulated before it. The promise of improvement has been replaced by the obligation to service the past.

Public investment tells the same story in institutional form. The Resolution Foundation has argued that weak and highly volatile public investment has helped make Britain a low-investment nation. Investment has been too low and repeatedly cut when the public finances come under pressure, because capital spending is easier to postpone than political promises made to existing voters. The planned increases after the 2019 election were cut after the 2022 mini-budget, reversing more than 80 per cent of the gains that had been planned (Odamtten and Smith, 2023). That is Britain’s political economy of cancelled time. Maintenance is deferred. The bill is moved forward, and the future is asked to pay interest.

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The Cancellation of National Time

Mark Fisher understood that capitalism does not only organise work, culture, and consumption. It organises the possible. In Capitalist Realism, he described a world in which capitalism presents itself as the only realistic political-economic system, a “lived ideological framework” in which free-market neoliberalism appears as a fact of nature (Repeater Books, n.d.a). In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher’s concern turned to the futures that failed to happen: the cultural and political possibilities that haunt the present precisely because they were never allowed to arrive (Repeater Books, n.d.b).

This is the most useful way to understand Britain now. We are governed by bad policy and restricted imagination. The old injunction was that there is no alternative. But after enough years, that phrase becomes an atmosphere. It enters the body. It becomes the caution of the parent advising their child not to expect too much; the graduate’s acceptance that debt is normal; the renter’s learned helplessness before another rise; the public’s weary assumption that every service will be worse next year and more expensive to access; the Labour politician explaining that transformation must wait until the markets are reassured, and the Conservative politician explaining that nothing can be afforded except tax cuts for people already insulated from consequence.

The future is not abolished in one dramatic act. It is cancelled slowly. A rail line is delayed. A hospital is postponed. A council sells land. A library closes. A university course is cut. A bus route disappears. A young person leaves the town that raised them because there is no work, no housing, and no reason to stay except love. Each decision is presented as temporary, necessary, regrettable... Together they form a civilisation.

This is why Britain feels less like a failed state than a state of permanent afterlife. The uniforms remain. The acronyms remain. The ceremonies remain. The royal pageantry, the parliamentary rituals, the press conferences, the “world-leading” announcements, the consultations, the reviews, the taskforces: all continue. What disappears is not the image of authority but its substance. The country can still stage the performance of itself and issue statements about delivery while repeatedly proving that it has lost the power to deliver.

Bastani’s language about simulacrum and mirage is useful here because the post-1979 state is present in a peculiar, spectral form. It is everywhere as demand and nowhere as care. It can chase, sanction, charge, outsource, procure, surveil, and brand. It is less capable of building durable public goods, though. It retains the negative powers of the state while losing, or refusing, many of the positive ones.

This produces a distinctive kind of politics. Not hope versus fear, but nostalgia versus management. The right offers a past it cannot restore: borders, empire, deference, discipline, a fantasy of national homogeneity, the imagined moral clarity of a Britain before decline. The centre offers a present it cannot improve: fiscal credibility, institutional respectability, consultation, stability, small efficiencies, a politics of lowered expectations. The left still carries fragments of the future, but it is constantly instructed to behave like an adult by people whose adulthood consists of making peace with decay.

To be born after 1979 is to have grown up under this emotional regime. We did not experience neoliberalism as heroic modernisation. We experienced it as inherited common sense. We were told to be flexible, entrepreneurial, resilient, realistic. We were told that public goods were unaffordable, that unions were anachronisms, that housing wealth was aspiration, that debt was investment, that politics was the art of the possible, and that the possible was whatever the bond market, the landlord, the developer, the water company, or the inherited homeowner would tolerate.

The result is a common feeling of grief without an object. We mourn something we never had, are homesick for a country we did not inhabit, and suspicious of that homesickness because we know the past was never innocent. We are told we are nostalgic if we want public ownership, unrealistic if we want cheap housing, naive if we want industrial strategy, reckless if we want wages to rise, divisive if we want wealth taxed, and extreme if we think a society should be judged by the future it makes possible for those who arrive after it. That is the emotional genius of capitalist realism. It does not persuade us that the world is good. It persuades us that no other world can be built.

China As the Disturbing Mirror

This is where China enters the argument. Any honest comparison has to begin with the obvious: China is an authoritarian state, ruled by a party that suppresses dissent, censors public life, and subordinates civil liberties to party power. It faces serious economic problems too: weak consumption, real-estate fragility, demographic pressure, local-government debt, unemployment, industrial overcapacity, and export dependence. The Congressional Research Service notes that China’s Fifteenth Five-Year Plan acknowledges structural problems including weak demand, economic imbalances, unemployment, real-estate risks, and high debt in local governments and financial institutions (Congressional Research Service, 2026).

None of that should be minimised but nor should it be used as a comfort blanket. The unsettling thing about the comparison is that a repressive state can still appear historically dynamic, while a liberal capitalist democracy can become stagnant, privatised, nostalgic, and incapable of collective construction. China can still say, however brutally and imperfectly: this is what we are building. Britain too often says: this is what we used to build.

The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan is a useful symbol because it shows a state still organised around forward motion. The Congressional Research Service describes it as a high-level national document setting policy priorities through to 2030 and long-term goals to 2035, with emphasis on science and technology independence, industrial upgrading, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, software, semiconductors, digital infrastructure, and supply-chain control (Congressional Research Service, 2026). China Briefing’s account similarly emphasises technological self-sufficiency, industrial upgrading, emerging industries, and targets for research and development, patents, and the digital economy (Huld, 2026).

While plans can fail and industrial policy can produce waste, repression, corruption, overcapacity, surveillance, and environmental harm, a plan is also a statement about time. It says the future is politically imaginable, and that the state has some conception of direction. This is what makes the contrast painful. Britain still has plans, of course — white papers, review panels, growth missions, industrial strategies, infrastructure pipelines, net-zero pathways, levelling-up funds, delivery boards — the machinery of planning has not disappeared. What has disappeared is confidence that any of it will survive contact with Treasury caution, party management, lobbying, judicial review, land markets, institutional fragmentation, short electoral horizons, or the next round of fiscal theatre. Britain announces futures, then it value-engineers them into disappointments.

The Chinese state’s futurity is morally compromised, while Britain’s absence of futurity is morally compromised. It is just compromised in a more familiar way: through rents, delays, degraded services, privatised monopolies, fiscal cowardice, and the endless instruction that there is no money for the things that would make life less small.

One of the comforting myths of liberal democracies is that authoritarian societies are trapped in history while we are open to the future. Britain now suggests a more disturbing possibility. A society can hold elections, celebrate individual freedom, and still lose the collective ability to decide what it wants to become. It can have formal liberty without historical agency. It can be free to choose between varieties of managed decline. This is why the China comparison should make us uneasy. Chiana reveals the poverty of our own temporal imagination. It shows that the end of history did not mean the triumph of liberal democracy. In Britain, it meant the draining of politics into asset management.

The Children of Managed Decline

What happens to people raised inside no future? They become fluent in diminishment and learn the language of lowered expectations before they learn the language of power. They know that owning a home is unlikely without inheritance, and that work may not bring security. They understand that a degree may bring debt rather than mobility. They recognise that public services exist, but increasingly as queues, forms, eligibility tests, phone lines, and apologies. They are aware that the planet is heating, that wages stagnate, that rents rise, that the old are anxious and the young are tired, and that politics mostly arrives as a request to be sensible.

Often this produces exhaustion over radicalism. Sometimes it produces conspiracy, because conspiracy at least restores agency to a world in which official politics seems to deny cause and effect. Sometimes it produces cruelty, because if the future cannot be expanded, the remaining political temptation is to ration belonging. Sometimes it produces nostalgia for periods never lived through, because nostalgia is the counterfeit of hope.

But beneath all of that there is grief, which is difficult to name because it is personal, generational, and atmospheric all at once. It is there in the knowledge that the life script sold to our parents has become a historical artefact. It exists in the strange humiliation of adulthood without solidity, and the way Britain still speaks to its young as if they are irresponsible for failing to thrive in conditions designed to extract from them. It is present in the demand that we celebrate resilience, when resilience often means adapting to forms of social vandalism that should never have been normalised.

A society that cannot promise a future becomes cruel in subtle ways. It asks the young to be grateful for survival and tells them that wanting stability is entitlement. It informs them that expecting public goods is nostalgia. It tells them that exhaustion is maturity; that anger is extremism. They are to admire entrepreneurs, landlords, investors, and homeowners, while treating nurses, teachers, carers, cleaners, rail workers, and renters as costs to be disciplined.

The tragedy is not that nothing works. It is that enough still works to keep the arrangement alive. For those born after 1979, Britain’s future has always appeared in diminished form. We have known it as a warning, a debt, a housing ladder with the bottom rungs removed, a climate target, a graduate repayment schedule, a closed youth centre, a river one should not swim in, a landlord’s portfolio, a politician’s slogan. We have grown up in a country that tells us to look forward while forcing us to live among the proceeds of what was sold behind us.

Despite all of this, we must not end with despair. The point of naming the cancelled future is to refuse the lie that this is maturity. A country that sells tomorrow and calls it prudence is not grown-up. A politics that protects asset values while abandoning children to insecurity is decadent. A state that can rescue banks, subsidise landlords, underwrite private contracts, police borders, and guarantee inherited wealth can also build homes, own utilities, plan industry, repair services, and make promises that do not depend on the desperation of the next generation.

The future is a material arrangement. It is housing, wages, energy, transport, schools, hospitals, time, care, clean water, public beauty, and the confidence that collective life can be made less humiliating. It is not enough to denounce decline. We have to recover the right to expect. But still, there is a sadness here, because something has been lost even if we never touched it. We were born after the future, but not after the need for one. We inherited the ruins of a promise and were told they were the limits of the possible. We were asked to become adults in a country that had converted its tomorrow into collateral.

Bastani’s phrase made audible the thing beneath the statistics: the suspicion that Britain has been living by consuming the future of those not yet powerful enough to refuse. Those of us born after 1979 have no memory of a time before there was no future. But memory is not the only source of politics. Sometimes politics begins in the ache of absence, in the refusal to accept that the world we were handed is the only one that can be built. Our country has forgotten how to promise. That does not mean we must forget how to demand.

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References

BBC News (2013) ‘The Thatcher years in statistics’, BBC News, 9 April. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-22070491 [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Congressional Research Service (2026) ‘China’s 15th Five-Year Plan: S&T and Economic Priorities’, Congress.gov, 16 April. Available at: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13204 [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Hayes, C. (2025) ‘Wrong to Sell: How Right To Buy Gave Away Billions in Public Wealth’, Common Wealth, 3 August. Available at: https://www.common-wealth.org/publications/wrong-to-sell [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Huld, A. (2026) ‘China’s 15th Five-Year Plan: Key Insights for Foreign Investors’, China Briefing, 13 March. Available at: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-15th-five-year-plan-key-insights-for-foreign-investors/ [Accessed 11 May 2026].

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Office for National Statistics (2025) ‘National balance sheet estimates for the UK: 2025’, Office for National Statistics, 18 December. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/bulletins/nationalbalancesheet/2025 [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Repeater Books (n.d.a) ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?’, Repeater Books. Available at: https://repeaterbooks.com/audiobooks/capitalist-realism-is-there-no-alternative-2/ [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Repeater Books (n.d.b) ‘Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures’, Repeater Books. Available at: https://repeaterbooks.com/audiobooks/ghosts-of-my-life/ [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance (2023) ‘Ending Stagnation: A New Economic Strategy for Britain’, The Economy 2030 Inquiry, 4 December. Available at: https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/reports/ending-stagnation/ [Accessed 11 May 2026].

Labour did not inherit loyalty in 2024. It inherited exhaustion. That is the stark fact Keir Starmer has never understood or has understood and chosen to ignore because the alternative would require him to become a different kind of politician. Britain did not look at Starmer and see a movement or a moral project. It did not see a government-in-waiting animated by a deep hunger to change the lives of people who had been ground down by fourteen years of Conservative vandalism. It instead saw the end of something unbearable, and it took the exit.

Now the bill has arrived. The local election results are more than a normal mid-term warning or bit of rough weather for a new government. They are the sound of Labour’s borrowed voters breaking apart. The BBC reported Labour losing more than 280 seats while Reform had won more than 400 and taken control of councils including Newcastle-under-Lyme and Havering (BBC News, 2026a). Chris Mason’s BBC analysis described Labour losing around half the seats it was defending, including catastrophic results in places such as Tameside, where Labour defended 17 seats and lost 16 to Reform, and Wigan, where it lost all 22 seats it was defending to Reform (Mason, 2026). The Guardian’s mapped analysis called it Labour’s worst local election result on record and showed the party losing ground in different directions: to Reform on the right, to the Greens on the left, and in Wales to Plaid Cymru as Labour fell into third behind Plaid and Reform (The Guardian, 2026a).

That last point is significant because this is not simply a Reform surge with just right-wing voters drifting from the Conservatives to Farage. It is Labour being abandoned in several directions at once. The party’s problem is therefore much deeper than “messaging”. While voters have often heard about change, too many of them cannot feel any change in their own lives. The rent is still the rent. The NHS waiting list is still the NHS waiting list. The bus still does not come. The dentist is still not taking new patients. The bills still land before the wages do. A government can survive the charge that it has inherited a mess, but it cannot survive forever on the promise that managing the mess more calmly is the same as ending it.

Starmerism has confused the want to remove the Conservative party with a belief in his Labour party. That mistake was always going to be dangerous. It is now becoming existential.

The Country Asked for Change and Got Management

The great conceit of Starmer’s Labour was that Britain wanted to be reassured more than it wanted to be transformed. The theory was simple enough: Sound serious. Stand in front of flags. Speak in careful sentences. Avoid frightening anybody with money. Promise stability. Say “country first, party second”. Present politics as a kind of repair service for institutions. Let the Conservatives collapse into the pit they dug for everyone else.

For a short moment it was successful because the Conservatives had made themselves unendurable. It worked because the public had watched the Johnson circus, the Truss experiment, the Sunak afterthought, and the general spectacle of a governing party that had gone feral in office. Labour did not really need to inspire. It needed to be available.

But availability is not loyalty. Exhaustion is not consent. This is the central failure of Starmer’s government. It looked at a country that had crawled out of a burning building and assumed gratitude would be a permanent political settlement. It then governed as if nothing was urgent. The point of the 2024 election, in Starmer’s mind, appears to have been permission to administer decline with better manners. There would be discipline, fiscal rules, grown-up conversations, institutional respect, and a carefully rationed quantity of hope. The country would be told that the work of change had begun, even if the actual experience of change remained deferred into some permanently distant future.

This is not how people live. They do not experience “missions” in the abstract. They live through broken public services. They withstand housing costs. They endure wages that do not stretch. They live out the feeling that nothing works unless you are rich enough to buy your way around the failure. And then they hear Starmer talk as if the great moral task of politics is to avoid disturbing the people already comfortable with how Britain is arranged.

That is why Reform has room to breathe. Farage only needs to make the failure feel named. This is the danger we warned about in our earlier piece on Labour opening the door to Reform (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). The door is not hypothetical anymore — it is open and the draught is in the room.

Technocratic Triangulation Has Left Labour with Nothing to Say

There is a kind of politics that believes the public is a problem to be managed. It does not begin with people’s lives, but with risk. What can be said without alarming donors? What can be promised without upsetting the bond markets? What can be offered without giving the right-wing press a week of headlines? What can be focus-grouped into something that sounds like conviction without requiring any conviction to exist?

This is the politics of technocratic triangulation. It is human beings choosing to empty politics of danger and then congratulating themselves on their discipline. Starmer’s Labour has become very good at sanding down every edge until nothing can cut through. Every answer sounds rehearsed. Every moral question is converted into a process point; every crisis is treated as an exercise in message discipline. The result is a party that looks controlled… but not alive.

That is the governing logic of the project. Labour’s right learned how to conquer the party machine by disciplining MPs and reassuring business. It recognised how to signal to the establishment that the danger had passed. Ultimately, it understood how to defeat the left inside Labour.

But defeating your own members is not the same as winning the country. That is the hinge of the whole disaster because Labour has haemorrhaged members. The BBC reported in August 2025 that the party had lost almost 200,000 members over five years, falling from 532,046 at the end of 2019 to 333,235 at the end of 2024 (Morton, 2025). Labour’s own accounts put the end-2024 membership figure at 333,235, down from 370,450 a year earlier (The Labour Party, 2025). The official annual report for 2023 had already recorded a fall from 407,455 in 2022 to 370,450 in 2023 (The Labour Party, 2024).

This is the very foundation supporting the party. Members are not decorative or an embarrassing legacy of a time before professional politics. They are the people who knock doors in the rain, and who explain a candidate to a neighbour. They are the people who notice when a local issue has become a national feeling. They provide the connective social tissue of a party, and are the difference between a political movement and a brand with an email list. That is why the video matters so much:

In February 2023, Starmer said Labour had “changed permanently” under his leadership, adding: “if you don’t like that, if you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave” (BBC News, 2023). This is the method, spoken plainly. It is the sound of a leader addressing a party as though politics were a tenancy agreement and dissenters were troublesome occupants.

Then came the uglier echo. During the Gaza crisis, Labour NEC member Mish Rahman wrote in openDemocracy that an unnamed party official had allegedly described Muslims resigning from Labour as the party “shaking off the fleas” (Rahman, 2023). Because that phrase was reported as an allegation from an unnamed source, it should be treated carefully. But the reason it travelled was that it sounded like something many members already suspected about the leadership’s view of them: that people with inconvenient principles were contaminants to be removed, not human beings to be persuaded.

Consider the two moments together. “If you don’t like it, you can leave.” “Shaking off the fleas.” One is on camera, the other is reported as an allegation. They are not identical, but they belong to the same political reflex: a leadership culture that hears dissent not as a democratic warning, nor as evidence that part of Labour’s moral coalition is in pain, but as something to be cleaned out.

The brutal irony is that the fleas are not there to knock the doors anymore. Labour spent years showing activists that their politics, anger, local knowledge and sometimes their very presence were disposable. It shifted its emotional centre away from the people who gave the party voluntary labour and towards the people who could give it cheques.

Politico reported in 2023 that Starmer told a business roundtable he wanted those present to help “mold” Labour’s plans and have their “fingerprints” on what the party was doing, according to people present (Boscia and Bloom, 2023). The Independent reported that Lord Sainsbury returned to Labour with a £2 million donation after cutting ties during the Corbyn era, while business figures were asking how to “get on board” with the party (Forrest, 2023). So yes, the money came. Labour’s own 2024 accounts report donations of £39.427 million, up from £16.509 million in 2023, while the treasurer’s report says the party achieved “notable increases in high value donations that far exceeded the previous year” (The Labour Party, 2025). During the 2024 general election campaign, the BBC reported that Labour declared more donations than all other parties combined, raising more than £9.5 million between dissolution and polling day; Lord Sainsbury alone gave £2.5 million, and more than £8 million came from ten sources (Wainwright, 2024).

Of course, parties need money. Campaigns, organisers, offices, leaflets, staff, compliance, technology and election material all cost money. The question is not whether Labour should raise funds, but what kind of party it becomes when its deepest anxieties are organised around donor comfort and institutional reassurance, rather than member energy and public need.

Large donors do not canvass for you. They do not stand outside a polling station with a rosette in the cold or spend a Saturday persuading a disillusioned voter that the party still cares about their school, their high street, their hospital. They do not rebuild trust in towns where trust has been broken over decades. Money can buy adverts, glossy leaflets, data, consultants, events and access. It cannot, however, buy a living party.

Labour’s own annual report boasted that during the short 2024 general election campaign the party spoke to three million voters, made 300,000 phone calls, delivered 70 million pieces of print, and saw more than 34,000 people volunteer for the first time (The Labour Party, 2024). Those numbers tell their own story. Even in the age of data dashboards and targeted ads, campaigns still depend on human beings physically and socially carrying politics into the world.

So, what happens when those human beings stop believing the party wants them? We are now seeing the answer. The machine can still produce leaflets, but the living connection is fraying. The people who once defended Labour in workplaces, WhatsApp groups, school gates and family arguments are tired of being treated as disposable. Some have left and found other homes, while others are waiting for a reason not to give up.

A donor can fund a campaign office. A member gives that office a reason to exist. This is the floor Labour kicked out from beneath itself; now it is discovering gravity.

Reform is What Walks into the Vacuum

Reform’s rise should not be treated as sorcery. Farage is not some irresistible force summoned from the deep history of the English psyche. He is just a skilled political opportunist operating in a country whose institutions have failed to defend their own legitimacy. He understands something Starmer does not: anger is political material.

Sir John Curtice’s BBC analysis described British electoral politics as “highly fragmented”, with Reform averaging 26% in sampled wards and doing best in heavily Leave-voting areas (Curtice, 2026). Labour’s vote was down 16 points compared with 2022 and 19 points compared with 2024, with the party especially weak in previous Labour strongholds and in wards where many people identify as Muslim (Curtice, 2026).

That is the pattern of a party losing its ability to hold together a coalition. Reform takes one kind of anger. The Greens / Plaid / SNP / Independents take another. The old Labour calculation was that the left had nowhere else to go and the right could be pacified by hardening the language on migration, flags, policing and fiscal restraint. That calculation is now collapsing because voters to Labour’s left do have somewhere else to go. Voters in places Labour once considered safe have shown they are willing to punish the party directly. Muslim voters, younger voters, renters, climate voters, anti-war voters, public-sector workers, and communities that feel morally insulted by the leadership’s choices cannot simply be rounded up at election time with a lecture about responsibility.

Nor can Labour out-Farage Farage. That path leads only to humiliation. When Labour accepts Reform’s emotional frame, it grants Reform ownership of the problem. It tells voters that Farage is asking the right questions, then pleads to be trusted with softer answers. That is surrender.

The danger of Reform is not that it wins councils or parliamentary seats. The danger is that it reorganises British politics around the idea that every failure of the state is really the fault of someone weaker than you. Migrants. Muslims. Refugees. Trans people. The left. The human rights lawyer. The foreign court. The woke council. The enemy changes, but the structure remains the same. Economic pain is redirected downward and outward, away from the people who actually possess power.

That is why Labour’s failure is so grave. A social-democratic party exists, at minimum, to stop that redirection. It exists to say: your life is hard because power has been organised against you, not because someone poorer than you has taken your place. It exists to turn private despair into collective politics. When it stops doing that, the right does not need to invent the wound; it only needs to infect it, and Starmer’s Labour has left the wound wide open.

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Burnham is the Last Off-Ramp

This is why the leadership question cannot be avoided. The argument for Starmer staying now depends on a fantasy: that the same political method that produced the crisis can somehow solve it if only it is delivered with more urgency. It cannot.

The BBC reported that Labour MPs were openly blaming Starmer after the election blow, with some publicly calling for him to resign or set a timetable; one MP told the BBC there had been “one issue on the door and it was Keir”, while another said voters did not hate Labour but “they did hate Keir” (BBC News, 2026b). The Guardian reported that Starmer’s leadership was on the line after the disastrous results, including Labour losing every council seat it contested in Hartlepool to Reform (Stacey, 2026).

Beyond personal unpopularity, Starmer now embodies the failure. He is the face of the promise that change could be postponed, managed, narrowed and still believed. He is the politician who told the country that seriousness would be enough, then discovered that the veneer of seriousness without material improvement curdles into contempt.

And what did he reach for when the pressure came? He reached backwards, to a politics incapable of admitting that the New Labour spell has worn off. Starmer appointed Harriet Harman as an unpaid part-time adviser on women and girls, and Gordon Brown as a special envoy on global finance, after the election mauling and amid growing pressure over his leadership (Ali, 2026). Brown is not some neutral technocrat descending from the clouds. He was chancellor for a decade under Tony Blair and then prime minister after him.

It is not that Harman and Brown know nothing or that their experience is useless. It is that Starmer appears unable to imagine political repair except as a return to the personnel, habits and emotional grammar of the Blair-Brown years. He keeps trying to solve a crisis of trust with the faces of the world that helped create the distrust. He thinks people are asking for more competence, reassurance, and more grown-ups in the room. But many people have had a room full of grown-ups for decades and still cannot get a dentist, a secure home, a decent wage, a bus that arrives, or a government that seems to understand the scale of their anger.

This is why he does not get it. He hears rejection and translates it into a staffing problem. He sees Reform rising, Labour members leaving, voters splintering and activists exhausted, and his instinct is to call in the old household gods of neoliberal Labour management. But the country is not pining for another New Labour tribute act. The public mood is not nostalgia for 1997 staged by consultants who have mistaken memory for mandate. People do not want to be told that the same political family will somehow feel different this time if only the branding is refreshed.

Andy Burnham is not a saviour. There is no messianic fix for a party that has gouged its own base and allowed Reform to become the loudest voice in the room. Burnham would not automatically repair trust with Muslim voters or easily win back the left. He would not spontaneously defeat Farage. He is not magical, but he is the only plausible off-ramp inside Labour’s existing universe.

The Guardian reported that Labour MPs had turned to Burnham as Starmer came under pressure, with allies preparing a manifesto and exploring possible routes for him to return to Westminster (The Guardian, 2026b). Another obstacle is that he cannot become Labour leader unless he is an MP (BBC News, 2026b). A Guardian report on a Compass poll of Labour members found 45% wanted Starmer to step down, 51% did not believe he could turn the polls around, and 42% ranked Burnham as their first-choice successor, although the poll’s political context should be treated with care because Compass is linked to Mainstream, a Labour caucus backing a Burnham bid (Elgot, 2026).

The point is not that Burnham is perfect but that he speaks a language Starmer cannot convincingly learn. He sounds rooted in place and civic rather than managerial. He appears to be someone who understands that public services are not abstract delivery mechanisms but the daily architecture of dignity. He has a regional base and a political identity not wholly manufactured in Westminster. He can talk about buses, housing, work, care and belonging without sounding as though the words have been cleared by six advisers and a donor-facing risk committee.

That is important because Reform’s appeal is emotional before it is administrative. People move to Farage because he offers them a story in which their anger has a target. Labour needs a leader who can offer a better story with a material offer behind it. Burnham could take the air from Reform’s sails because he could make Labour sound human again. Success wouldn’t be a guarantee, but it would mark a rupture with the dead language of Starmerism; a sign that the party understands the emergency is not presentational but existential.

Parties Die When They Stop Meaning Anything

The Labour Party is now in danger of becoming an institution whose main argument for existence is that something worse might happen without it. That is not enough. It is insufficient to tell people to vote Labour because Reform is dangerous, even though Reform is dangerous. It is paltry to tell people to be patient, even though rebuilding a country takes time. It is inadequate to blame the Conservatives, even though the Conservatives bear enormous responsibility for the damage Britain is living through. A governing party has to do more than point at the arsonists who came before it. It has to put out the fire.

Starmer’s Labour has failed to grasp the emotional meaning of its own victory. People wanted the country to feel different. They wanted proof that politics could still reach into ordinary life and make something less humiliating, less anxious, less cruel. They wanted wages that stretched further, services that answered, homes that could be afforded, streets that felt cared for, and a government that spoke to them like citizens rather than stakeholders. Instead, they got management.

The existential danger for Labour is not simply that it may lose the next general election. It is that people may stop seeing it as necessary. That is how parties die. Not all at once, and not always with one dramatic defeat. They die when their old voters can no longer explain what emotional or material purpose they serve. They die when their activists no longer feel wanted. They die when their leaders mistake access for power, donors for roots, caution for seriousness, and office for meaning.

Labour can still thwart Reform. Britain is not condemned to Farage, but it will not happen by pretending the local election results are just a communications challenge. It will not happen through another relaunch, another grid, another set of lines about delivery. And it certainly will not happen while Starmer remains the embodiment of a politics that has already failed its central test.

The party opened the door to Reform by offering a country in pain almost nothing it could feel. Now Reform is walking through it. If Labour wants to close that door, Starmer has to go. And if the party still has any instinct for survival, it should understand that Burnham is not the luxury option, but the last available proof that Labour might still remember how to sound human, to organise hope, and become something more than a donor-funded machine for administering decline. Labour has not just stumbled. It has spent years tearing up the very ground that once held it in place.

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References

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The demand that critics of Israel first affirm its “right to exist” before their arguments may be heard is, as the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said once noted, a formula previously unknown in international or customary law (Leary, 2024). No other state on earth is subjected to this specific precondition. France does not require it. Germany does not require it. China does not require it. The United States — built on the genocide of indigenous peoples and sustained by the labour of the enslaved — has never once demanded that its critics first affirm its sacred right to exist before they are permitted to speak. The phrase is not a legal concept. Instead, it is a political instrument deployed to pre-empt debate, to conflate criticism of a state apparatus with a desire for the destruction of a people.

Does Israel have a right to exist? Does any country have a right to exist? Does existence bring responsibility? And does the neglect of that responsibility remove a country’s right to exist? These are real questions, with bodies buried beneath them. They demand we look directly at the machinery of state power, strip away the mythology that protects it, and ask what, exactly, gives it the right to operate while the people it governs bleed.

The Myth of State Rights

States do not possess an inherent, moral right to exist. Only people possess rights. A state is an instrumental apparatus — a bureaucracy, a military, a set of laws, a flag, a monopoly on violence — whose legitimacy is derived entirely from its capacity to protect and represent the people under its authority. When a state fundamentally violates this responsibility, whether through sustained occupation, mass atrocity, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, it forfeits its moral legitimacy. The question of its continued existence in its current form becomes not only permissible but necessary.

States possess no original, moral rights. Whatever standing they have is drawn from the rights and interests of the people they serve (March, 2025). The assertion that a state has a right to exist is categorically different from the assertion that the people living within it have rights to security, culture, and life. The state is not the people. The state is a tool. And tools can be broken, replaced, or redesigned when they fail in their purpose.

States come into and pass out of existence constantly. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, all ceased to exist. In most of these cases, no wrong was committed against the state itself by its dissolution. The people survived; the regime did not. This distinction is critical: to question the right of a specific state apparatus to continue in its current form is not to call for the annihilation of a people (March, 2025). It is to question the machinery, not the lives.

The phrase “right to exist” is used asymmetrically and selectively. It conflates the dissolution of a political regime with the destruction of a people, making it a near-perfect rhetorical trap: deny Israel’s “right to exist” and risk being accused of denying Jews the right to live; accept it, and risk endorsing whatever interpretation the phrase’s users choose to attach to it at any given moment (Leary, 2024). It is a loyalty oath disguised as a question. It demands that before you are allowed to point out the blood on the floor, you must first swear allegiance to the knife.

This rhetorical manoeuvre is particularly insidious because it preys on historical trauma. By linking the survival of the state apparatus to the survival of the Jewish people, it weaponises the memory of the Holocaust to shield a modern nation-state from accountability — a phenomenon Norman Finkelstein has extensively critiqued as the instrumentalisation of Jewish suffering for political immunity (Finkelstein, 2000). It suggests that any structural change to the state, any move toward true democratic equality, is a precursor to annihilation. This is a profound manipulation of history, one that serves the interests of the powerful while silencing the oppressed.

The Asymmetry of Existence

The “right to exist” collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy the moment it is applied to the Palestinians. How is it that a state apparatus is granted an inviolable right to exist, while the indigenous people it displaced are systematically denied that exact same right? How is it that a country should have the right to exist, but the Palestinian people do not?

This asymmetry is the core ideological function of the phrase. As Steven Salaita has argued: “I am happy, eager even, to affirm the right of Jewish people to live in peace and security, wherever that may be, a right all humans deserve in no particular order of worthiness. But I won’t ratify Israel’s bloody founding or its devotion to racial supremacy. Ultimately, when Zionists demand that you affirm Israel’s right to exist, what they really seek is affirmation of Palestinian nonexistence” (Salaita, 2019). To grant the state an absolute right to exist in its current ethnonationalist form is to retroactively legitimise the ethnic cleansing required to create it, and to validate the ongoing dispossession required to maintain it.

The denial of Palestinian existence has deep historical roots in Israeli statecraft. It was famously articulated by Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 when she declared: “There was no such thing as Palestinians... It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist” (The New York Times, 1972). If the Palestinians existed as a distinct people with a right to self-determination, the moral architecture of the state would fracture. And so, they had to be defined out of existence — not killed, necessarily, but erased from the category of peoples who count.

The demand to recognise Israel’s “right to exist” is therefore a demand to accept a hierarchy of human worth. It insists that the political structures of the coloniser possess a sacred, untouchable status, while the physical lives, homes, and national identity of the colonised are entirely disposable. It asks the displaced to endorse their own displacement, the occupied to validate their occupier, and the dead to sign off on the killing.

This is the fundamental anxiety of the settler-colonial project. The settler state knows, on some level, that its foundations are built on theft. It knows that the land was not empty. Consequently, it requires constant, obsessive validation from the outside world, and most perversely, from the very people it dispossessed. The Nakba, in 1948, was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, detailed in military blueprints like Plan Dalet, designed to ensure a demographic majority for the new state (Pappé, 2006). The destruction of those 400 villages was the deliberate erasure of a society. To demand that the descendants of those expelled affirm the “right to exist” of the state that expelled them is an act of profound cruelty. It is a demand that they participate in their own erasure.

The Symmetry of Self-Determination

Self-determination is either universal or it is a mechanism of supremacy. If Israel has a right to exist as the expression of Jewish self-determination, then by the exact same logic, Palestine has a right to exist as the expression of Palestinian self-determination (Shama 2025).

The denial of Palestinian statehood while demanding the recognition of Israeli statehood is a legal contradiction and a moral obscenity. The right to self-determination is a fundamental principle of international law, enshrined in Article 1(2) of the UN Charter (United Nations 1945). To argue that Jewish people require a sovereign state for their security and cultural expression, while simultaneously denying that same necessity to the Palestinian people, is to establish a hierarchy of human worth dressed up as geopolitics. It is to say, quite literally, that one people’s safety requires another people’s permanent subjugation. Both peoples possess an equal claim to self-determination, independence, and sovereignty (Shama 2025).

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The international community, for all its flaws, has increasingly recognised this reality. As of September 2025, 157 of the 193 UN member states — over 81 percent — recognise the State of Palestine (Al Jazeera 2025). The world has spoken. It is only the powerful, primarily the United States and its closest allies, who refuse to listen. They cling to a dying vision where international law is not a universal standard, but a weapon to be wielded against enemies and ignored when it inconveniences the geopolitical interests of the empire’s final form.

This refusal is more than diplomatic inertia; it is an active complicity in the ongoing denial of rights. By blocking Palestinian membership in international bodies and repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that demand accountability or a ceasefire (UN News 2024; PBS 2025), these powerful states ensure that the asymmetry of existence is maintained. They provide the diplomatic cover necessary for the continued expansion of settlements and the entrenchment of the occupation, all while mouthing platitudes about a “two-state solution” that they actively work to render impossible. And when that occupation is resisted — a right explicitly recognised by UN General Assembly Resolution 3103 as “legitimate and in full accordance with the principles of international law” (UN General Assembly 1973) — the resistance is immediately branded as terrorism, ensuring that the violence of the occupier is framed as “security” while the violence of the occupied is framed as an existential threat. The symmetry of self-determination is the one thing the current order cannot tolerate, because true symmetry would mean the end of supremacy.

The “Other Arab States” Retort

The assertion that “there are other Arab states for the Palestinians, but only one Jewish state” is historically illiterate, unscrupulous, and relies on a racist conflation of distinct identities.

It relies on the false premise that all Arabs are interchangeable; that a Palestinian from Jaffa is the same as an Egyptian from Cairo or a Lebanese from Beirut, that their languages, cultures, histories, and identities are a single undifferentiated mass. The Arabisation of the Levant was a linguistic and cultural process that occurred over centuries, not a mass replacement of indigenous populations (Decolonize Palestine, n.d.). Palestinians possess a distinct national identity, history, dialect, cuisine, and cultural heritage tied specifically to the land of historic Palestine, a consciousness that long predates the establishment of Israel (Khalidi, 1997). Suggesting they should simply move to another Arab country is akin to suggesting that the Irish could simply move to England because both speak English and share a landmass. It is an argument that could only be made by someone who does not regard the people in question as equivalent.

This argument also ignores the brutal reality of the Palestinian experience in neighbouring Arab states. Arab governments have frequently treated Palestinian refugees as political pawns, denying them basic civil rights, citizenship, and the right to work. In Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain stateless, barred from dozens of professions including medicine, law, and engineering, and confined to overcrowded camps where the state has prohibited expansion, forcing residents into illegal and unsafe construction (Human Rights Watch 2002). In Kuwait, tens of thousands of long-term Palestinian residents were expelled after the 1991 Gulf War. In Egypt, rights were progressively stripped after the 1978 peace treaty with Israel (Human Rights Watch, 2002). The existence of other Arab states has not provided security or self-determination for Palestinians; it has often resulted in further marginalisation, exploitation, and suffering.

Finally, the “only one Jewish state” argument is an explicit defence of ethnonationalism. It claims that the necessity of maintaining a demographic majority for one specific ethnic or religious group justifies the permanent dispossession, occupation, and denial of rights to another group living in the same territory. This logic is fundamentally incompatible with modern democratic principles and human rights. If accepted as a universal standard, it would justify every ethnonationalist project in history: every forced population transfer, every act of ethnic cleansing ever carried out in the name of demographic purity. It is the logic of the ethnostate, one that inevitably leads to apartheid and atrocity.

The insistence on a demographic majority requires a constant, violent policing of boundaries, both physical and legal. It requires laws that discriminate based on ethnicity, such as the Nation-State Law of 2018, which explicitly states that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people” (Knesset, 2018). It requires a system of control that ensures the subjugated population can never challenge the supremacy of the dominant group. That is not democracy; it is ethnocracy, maintained by force.

Sovereignty as Responsibility

A state’s authority is not divine or inherent. It is granted by the consent of the governed in exchange for the protection of their fundamental rights and security. The philosopher John Locke argued explicitly that when a government turns against its own people, or when it systematically violates their fundamental rights, it forfeits its legitimacy and the people have a right to alter or abolish it (Locke, 1689). A government that perpetually subjugates a population under its control has broken the foundational bargain upon which its authority rests.

The state is a means, not an end. It exists to serve human beings. When it ceases to do so — when it becomes the primary instrument of terror against those it governs — its justification evaporates.

This is not a philosophical position, but an internationally adopted norm. At the 2005 UN World Summit, all member states unanimously endorsed the principle that sovereignty is not a license for absolute power, but a responsibility. The first pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) establishes that each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (United Nations General Assembly, 2005). When a state manifestly fails in this responsibility, the international community has not only the right but the obligation to respond.

The R2P doctrine reframes sovereignty entirely: it is not a shield behind which a state may do as it pleases, but a conditional grant that depends on the fulfilment of duties to the governed. When a state exercises military and administrative control over a population — as Israel does over millions of Palestinians — it assumes responsibility for their welfare. Occupation is an exercise of power that carries with it the full weight of legal and moral obligation. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a historic advisory opinion declaring Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful, and that the state bears responsibility for wrongful acts committed under the occupation (International Court of Justice, 2024).

There is a painful and necessary cynicism to be maintained here. For powerful states and their allies, international law often functions as a selective instrument which is applied rigorously to adversaries, but ignored entirely when inconvenient. The ICJ, the ICC, UN resolutions: these mechanisms exist, but their enforcement depends on political will that powerful states routinely withhold. The moral framework of responsibility, however, does not dissolve because enforcement is obstructed. The law’s impotence does not make the crime disappear. The fact that a murderer is not arrested does not mean the murder did not happen.

The failure of the international community to enforce these norms does not invalidate them just exposes the hypocrisy of the global order. When powerful nations supply the weapons used to commit atrocities — ignoring repeated calls from human rights organisations for a comprehensive arms embargo (Amnesty International, 2024a) — while simultaneously preaching about human rights, they are actively dismantling the law. They are demonstrating that the rules-based international order is a fiction, a set of guidelines that apply only to the weak.

The Forfeiture of Legitimacy

When a state commits mass atrocities against a population under its control, it shatters the social contract and violates the foundational premise of R2P. In doing so, it destroys the very moral foundation upon which its claim to legitimacy rests. Following its investigation into the assault on Gaza, Amnesty International concluded that Israel has committed acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention (Amnesty International 2024b). The genocide scholar Omer Bartov has explicitly warned that Israel’s conduct is destroying the moral foundations of the Israeli state itself. “When the state decides that it’s not going to be a normal state, it’s not going to have a constitution, it’s not going to define its borders... then its nature changes,” he writes (Gell, 2026).

When a state loses its legitimacy, the demand is not for the destruction of the people, but for the dismantling of the structures of supremacy and violence. The transition from apartheid South Africa to a multiracial constitutional democracy is the clearest modern precedent: the apartheid state ceased to exist; the people — all of them — did not. A new, more just state was constituted in its place, enshrined in the 1996 Constitution (UN Press Release, 1996).

The white South Africans who were told that equality would mean their annihilation discovered, as they always do, that the apocalypse they feared was simply the end of their privilege, not the end of their lives. The settler colonial anxiety that frames any loss of supremacy as an existential threat is a powerful political tool, but it is a lie. Equality is not genocide. The dismantling of an apartheid system is not the destruction of a people; it is the liberation of all people trapped within it, including the oppressors who have tied their own humanity to the subjugation of others.

This transformation requires a profound reckoning with the past. It requires acknowledging the Nakba as an ongoing process of dispossession that must be halted and reversed. It requires a commitment to justice that goes beyond political compromise, a justice that addresses the root causes of the conflict: the denial of Palestinian rights and the structural inequality of the state. It requires the state to finally answer the question of its own legitimacy equality instead of violence.

The Refusal of Indifference

The “right to exist” is a phrase that has done enormous damage. It has been used to silence, deflect, and launder atrocity. It has made the simple act of bearing witness to suffering into a political act requiring pre-approval. It has demanded that the critic first curtsy before the state before being permitted to speak about what the state does.

The only absolute right to exist belongs to human beings. Israelis have it. Palestinians have it. No state has it — not Israel, not the United States, not any of them. States earn their continued existence through the quality of their conduct toward the people they govern. When they fail catastrophically and deliberately in that conduct, they lose both their credibility and their claim to moral legitimacy.

The question is not whether any state should be violently dismantled — a framing weaponised to shut down all serious analysis. The question is whether a state apparatus built on occupation, dispossession, and the systematic subjugation of a people can claim any moral right to perpetuate itself in that form. The answer is no.

What replaces it is the harder question, and the more honest one. But there is hope in that honesty. Every colonial regime in history has believed itself permanent, and every one of them has ended. Not because the powerful chose justice, but because systems built on the denial of humanity carry within them the seeds of their own collapse.

The moral rot of these systems is structural. It is patient and terminal. When a state relies on the permanent subjugation of millions to maintain its demographic purity, it gouges its own democratic institutions. It transforms its citizens into wardens. It makes violence the only language it can speak. But this violence is not a sign of strength; it is the desperate flailing of a system that knows it cannot survive equality. The end of such regimes is rarely pretty, and it is often violent, but it is inevitable. The arc of history does not bend toward justice on its own; it is bent by the refusal of ordinary people to accept the intolerable.

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References

Al Jazeera (2025) ‘Which are the 150+ countries that have recognised Palestine as of 2025?’, Al Jazeera, 23 September. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/23/which-are-the-150-countries-that-have-recognised-palestine-as-of-2025 [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Amnesty International (2024a) ‘Global: Governments’ brazen flouting of Arms Trade Treaty rules leading to devastating loss of life’, 19 August. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/08/global-governments-brazen-flouting-of-arms-trade-treaty-rules-leading-to-devastating-loss-of-life/ [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Amnesty International (2024b) ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Decolonize Palestine (n.d.) Myth: Israel (or any other state) has a right to exist. Available at: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-or-any-other-state-has-a-right-to-exist/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Decolonize Palestine (n.d.) Myth: Palestinians are Arabs that arrived in the 7th century. Available at: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-are-arabs-that-arrived-in-the-7th-century/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Finkelstein, N. G. (2000) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso.

Gell, A. (2026) ‘What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’‘, The Guardian, 21 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/21/omer-bartov-israel-zionism-genocide [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Hamid, S. (2026) ‘Does Israel Have a “Right” to Exist?’, Wisdom of Crowds, 25 March. Available at:

Wisdom of Crowds

Does Israel Have a "Right" to Exist?

I’m surprised more pro-Israel advocates haven’t made the argument I’m about to make. It’s not a particularly complicated one. But it requires conceding things that most pro-Israel advocates would rather not concede, which I suppose is why they haven’t…

Read more

3 months ago · 93 likes · 67 comments · Shadi Hamid

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Human Rights Watch (2002) Treatment and Rights in Arab Host States. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/israel/return/arab-rtr.htm [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

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Khalidi, R. (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Leary, J. P. (2024) ‘Israel’s “Right to Exist” Is a Rhetorical Trap’, The New Republic, 3 January. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/177768/israel-right-to-exist-rhetorical-trap [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Locke, J. (1689) Two Treatises of Government. London: Awnsham Churchill.

March, A. F. (2025) ‘What exactly does it mean to say a state has a right to exist?’, Aeon, 24 February. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/what-exactly-does-it-mean-to-say-a-state-has-a-right-to-exist [Accessed: 04 May 2026].

Pappé, I. (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

PBS (2025) ‘U.S. again vetoes UN Security Council resolution demanding Gaza ceasefire’, 18 September. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-again-vetoes-un-security-council-resolution-demanding-gaza-ceasefire-hostage-release [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Salaita, S. (2019) ‘How to answer the question, “Do you recognize Israel’s right to exist?”’, Mondoweiss, 10 December. Available at: https://mondoweiss.net/2019/12/how-to-answer-the-question-do-you-recognize-israels-right-to-exist/[Accessed: 04 May 2026].

Shama, A. (2025) ‘Palestinians deserve a state now for the same reasons Jews did in 1948’, The Hill, 20 August. Available at: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5459576-palestinians-deserve-a-state-now-for-the-same-reasons-jews-did-in-1948/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

The New York Times (1972) ‘A talk with Golda Meir’, The New York Times, 27 August. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/27/archives/a-talk-with-golda-meir.html [Accessed: 04 May 2026].

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UN General Assembly (1973) Basic principles of the legal status of the combatants struggling against colonial and alien domination and racist régimes, A/RES/3103. Available at: https://www.refworld.org/legal/resolution/unga/1973/en/12693[Accessed: 07 May 2026].

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The exchange lasts barely a few seconds, but it contains within it the entire architecture of how power, identity, and credibility are negotiated in modern British media — and, more precisely, who gets to decide which identities count.

On Sky News, Trevor Phillips, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is interviewing Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party. The context is politically charged, but the mechanics of the conversation are what demand our attention. Phillips is pressing Polanski on the Macpherson inquiry’s definition of a hate crime: that an incident is a hate crime if it is perceived as such by the victim or any other person (Home Office, 1999). He is using this definition to argue that because many Jewish people perceive the pro-Palestine marches as hate marches, they must be treated as such.

Polanski counters by invoking his own identity. “But why is my Jewish identity being erased from this conversation?” he asks. He then states: “I’m a Jewish identity of so many people on those marches.”

Phillips’s response is immediate: “No, no, no. Don’t try that one on me.”

We should think about that phrase for a moment: “Don’t try that one on me.” Not, “I disagree with your characterisation” or, “that’s not the point I’m making.” But, “try that one,” as though Polanski’s invocation of his Jewishness is a trick being attempted. The phrase dismisses the argument and impugns the authenticity of the identity itself. It says: your lived experience is a rhetorical device, and we both know it.

What the Phrase Actually Does

This is where semiotics becomes indispensable. A semiotic analysis asks the meanings of words and what they do in context: what social relations they enact, what hierarchies they reinforce, what they permit and close down.

“Don’t try that one on me” performs several functions simultaneously. First, it positions Phillips as the authority who can determine whether an identity claim is legitimate or tactical. He is appointing himself the judge of Polanski’s sincerity. Second, it reframes Polanski’s testimony — the testimony of a Jewish man speaking about his own experience and his own community — as a rhetorical manoeuvre rather than a statement of fact. Third, and most consequentially, it signals to the audience that this kind of identity claim is available for dismissal. It normalises the gesture of waving away lived experience when it becomes inconvenient.

The philosopher Miranda Fricker has a precise term for what is happening here. In her landmark work on epistemic injustice, she describes “testimonial injustice” as the harm that occurs when a speaker receives an unfair deficit of credibility from a hearer due to identity prejudice (Fricker, 2007). The hearer does not engage with the content of what is being said; instead, they discount the speaker’s authority to say it at all. The testimony is not admitted as testimony.

What makes Phillips’s dismissal particularly striking is that it occurs in the very same breath as his invocation of the Macpherson principle. Macpherson’s central contribution to British race relations law was precisely the validation of subjective perception; the recognition that the experience of the victim must be taken seriously, that their account of what happened to them cannot simply be overridden by an authority figure who was not there. Phillips had just finished arguing that thousands of Jewish people who feel intimidated by the marches must be believed. He then immediately refused to believe the Jewish man sitting in front of him.

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The Hierarchy of Acceptable Perception

Phillips was applying the Macpherson principle selectively, to the Jewish perceptions that served his argument, and suppressing the Jewish perception that did not. The result is a hierarchy of acceptable perception, a ranking of which minority experiences are admissible as evidence, and which are to be treated as tactical noise.

This is the defining feature of how establishment discourse manages minority identity. The rule is not that lived experience always counts; the rule is that lived experience counts when it aligns with the institutional narrative. A Black person’s experience of racism counts when it is used to justify existing anti-discrimination frameworks. It becomes considerably less legible when it is used to challenge the conduct of the police, or to question the foreign policy of an allied state. A woman’s experience of harassment counts when it supports the case for specific legislation. It becomes more contested when it is used to challenge institutional structures that powerful men benefit from.

The same logic applies here. Polanski’s Jewish identity was, in Phillips’s framing, only valid as a credential if it produced the correct conclusions. When it produced the wrong ones — when it led Polanski to march alongside pro-Palestinian protesters, to question the characterisation of those marches as hate events, to resist the institutional consensus — it became something to be dismissed. “Don’t try that one on me” is not a refutation of Polanski’s Jewishness, but a revocation of its usefulness.

Consider the comparative scenarios: if a Black guest on a political programme recounted their personal experience of systemic racism, described say, what it feels like to be followed around a shop, or to be stopped and searched repeatedly in the same street and the presenter responded, “Don’t try that one on me,” the consequences would be swift and severe. The clip would be everywhere within the hour with no ambiguity about what had happened: a white authority figure had told a Black person that their experience of racism was a rhetorical trick. Careers would end. If a woman described her fear of walking home alone at night, and an interviewer dismissed it with the same phrase, the response would be identical. The lived experience of women navigating public space after dark is treated, in our current discourse, as a foundational political fact, one that cannot be simply waved away without serious consequences for the person doing the waving.

The question we are forced to ask is why the same protection does not apply to Zack Polanski. Why is his testimony, as a Jewish man, available for dismissal in a way that other minority testimonies are not? The answer, we would argue, lies not in anything particular about Jewish identity, but in the specific political function that this dismissal serves.

The Establishment Interest in Silencing This Particular Voice

Trevor Phillips is not a neutral interviewer. He is a figure of the British political establishment in the most precise sense: a man who has spent decades at the intersection of state power, media, and the management of race. He was appointed chair of the Commission for Racial Equality by Tony Blair. He was the founding chair of the EHRC. He has been friends with Peter Mandelson for fifty years; Mandelson served as the best man at Phillips’s first wedding (Sky News, 2026). These are the map of a man’s political loyalties and institutional commitments.

The establishment, in this context, has a specific and identifiable interest in the framing of the pro-Palestine movement. As we have documented elsewhere, the British state has spent years constructing an institutional apparatus designed to make criticism of Israeli policy professionally and socially costly (Notes From Plague Island, 2026). A central pillar of that apparatus is the claim that the pro-Palestine marches are antisemitic hate events, a claim that crucially depends on the erasure of the many Jewish voices that march in them, organise and defend them.

Zack Polanski is a direct threat to that claim. He is a Jewish man, a prominent political figure, who has marched on those demonstrations and who insists that his Jewish identity is not in conflict with his pro-Palestinian politics. His testimony, if admitted as legitimate, punctures the central argument that the marches are inherently antisemitic. It introduces complexity into a narrative that the establishment requires to be simple. It gives permission to other Jewish people, and to non-Jewish observers, to reach the same conclusion.

Phillips’s dismissal, then, is more than a personal rudeness or a moment of broadcast incontinence. It is a structural intervention. By refusing to admit Polanski’s Jewish identity as a legitimate epistemic credential in this context, Phillips is performing a specific political function: he is protecting the coherence of the establishment narrative against the disruption that Polanski’s testimony would introduce. The phrase “don’t try that one on me” is the sound of the gates closing.

This is what makes the moment so much more significant than a simple interruption. Through trying to silence Polanski, Phillips is demonstrating, live on television, that the rules of identity politics — the rules that say minority experience must be respected, that perception is reality, that lived testimony carries authority — apply only when they produce the right results. When they produce the wrong results, they can be dismissed by the right person with the right credentials and connections, and the dismissal will pass without consequence.

The Irony of the Islamophobia Suspension

There is a further irony that cannot be left unexamined. In March 2020, Trevor Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party following allegations of Islamophobia, based on statements he had made about British Muslims (BBC News, 2020). The suspension was eventually lifted in July 2021 (The Guardian, 2021). Phillips himself suggested that his outspokenness on Labour’s antisemitism problem had contributed to the decision to suspend him (The Jewish Chronicle, 2020).

Whatever one makes of the specifics of that case, the structural irony is acute. Here is a man who has himself been accused of dismissing the experiences and concerns of a minority community, now sitting in a television studio and dismissing the lived experience of a member of another minority community. Here is a man who argued, when it suited him, that his own perception of events should be taken seriously — who complained, with some justice, that his critics were refusing to engage with the substance of his arguments and were instead attacking his credibility — now doing precisely that to someone else.

What This Moment Tells Us About British Media

The broader significance of this exchange lies in what it reveals about the condition of British broadcast media as a space for genuine political discourse. Phillips’s “Don’t try that one on me” did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred in a media environment that has, for years, been systematically hostile to pro-Palestinian voices, that has treated the equation of Palestinian solidarity with antisemitism as a settled matter rather than a contested political claim, and that has consistently failed to apply the same standards of scrutiny to pro-Israel arguments that it applies to their critics.

In that environment, Phillips’s dismissal is representative. It is what the media ecosystem produces when a minority voice says something that disrupts the consensus: not engagement or refutation, but the revocation of the credential that gives the voice its authority. The message is clear and it is intended to be clear. You may speak as a Jewish person, but only if you say the things that Jewish people are supposed to say. The moment you deviate, your identity becomes a trick, and we will say so, on air, without apology.

This is intended as an insistence that the rules of epistemic respect must be applied consistently, or they mean nothing at all. If the lived experience of minority communities is to carry genuine weight in our public discourse, if we are serious about the principle that perception is reality, that testimony matters, that identity grants a form of authority that cannot simply be overridden by those with institutional power, then that principle must apply to Zack Polanski in the same way it applies to anyone else.

“Don’t try that one on me” is a short sentence. But it carries a very long history, and a very specific political purpose. We should not let it pass unremarked.

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References

Baldwin, T. (2004) ‘I want an integrated society with a difference’, The Times, 3 April. Available at: https://www.thetimes.com/sport/cricket/article/i-want-an-integrated-society-with-a-difference-zj32xdvfbpf [Accessed 4 May 2026].

BBC News (2020) ‘Trevor Phillips suspended from Labour over Islamophobia allegations’, 9 March. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51797316 [Accessed 4 May 2026].

Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Guardian (2021) ‘Labour lifts Trevor Phillips’ suspension for alleged Islamophobia’, 6 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/06/labour-lifts-trevor-phillips-suspension-for-alleged-islamophobia[Accessed 4 May 2026].

Home Office (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny. London: The Stationery Office. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c2af540f0b645ba3c7202/4262.pdf[Accessed 4 May 2026].

The Jewish Chronicle (2020) ‘Ex-equality chief Trevor Phillips suggests speaking out over Labour antisemitism prompted suspension by party’, 9 March. Available at: https://www.thejc.com/news/ex-equality-chief-trevor-phillips-suggests-speaking-out-over-labour-antisemitism-prompted-suspension-by-party-v0quk4ar [Accessed 4 May 2026].

Notes From Plague Island (2026) ‘The Architecture of Silence: How Britain Weaponised Antisemitism to Protect a Genocide’, 3 May. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/the-architecture-of-silence-how-britain [Accessed 4 May 2026].

Sky News (2026) ‘Trevor Phillips: “This is the end for my friend Peter Mandelson”’, 1 February. Available at: https://news.sky.com/video/trevor-phillips-this-is-the-end-for-my-friend-peter-mandelson-13501798 [Accessed 4 May 2026].

On the morning of October 7, 2023, the world shifted. Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people and took around 250 hostage (NPR, 2023). The horror and grief of that day was real. And the Israeli military response that followed — a campaign of destruction that has, by any credible measure, constituted a genocide against the civilian population of Gaza — was also real (ICJ, 2024). Within days, hundreds of thousands of people across Britain took to the streets. They marched not in support of Hamas, not out of hatred for Jewish people, but out of an urgent, moral demand that the killing stop. Among them were Holocaust survivors carrying photographs of their own families alongside photographs of Palestinian children, and rabbis in prayer shawls (The Guardian, 2024). They came week after week, in rain and cold, forming one of the largest and most sustained protest movements in British history.

The British state’s response to this mass movement was not to listen and reconsider its position as one of Israel’s most reliable arms suppliers (Campaign Against Arms Trade, 2024). It was to reach for a weapon it had been sharpening for years: the accusation of antisemitism. Since October 7, the British establishment has engaged in a systematic, multi-sited campaign to repress Palestinian solidarity, using the language of anti-racism as a cudgel against those who dare to oppose a genocide. This is a strategy with history, architecture, and purpose.

The practice of labelling Palestinian solidarity as antisemitism has a long history in Britain, built through decades of pro-Israel lobbying and the slow, patient construction of an institutional framework designed to make criticism of Israel professionally and socially costly. Its most important product was the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism; a document whose contested illustrative examples equate criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Jewish racism, and which was not an organic response to a rise in genuine antisemitism but the result of a sustained lobbying campaign. The UK government formally adopted it in 2016. By 2020, the then-Education Secretary Gavin Williamson was threatening to cut funding to universities that refused to follow suit (The Guardian, 2020).

That this infrastructure existed and could be weaponised against political opponents was a documented fact. The Forde Report — commissioned by Keir Starmer himself — found that antisemitism accusations had been used as a “factional weapon” against Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-Palestinian leadership of the Labour Party, deployed to destroy a political movement rather than to combat racism (Forde, 2022). Al Jazeera’s “The Labour Files” investigation, based on the largest leak of internal party documents in British political history, revealed the mechanics: senior officials trawling social media histories, conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish racism, and working hand-in-glove with hostile media to destroy pro-Palestinian activists (Al Jazeera, 2022). The lesson the establishment drew was that the tactic had worked. When October 7 arrived and the streets filled with protesters, the infrastructure was already in place, the media already primed. All that was required was the trigger.

“Hate Marches” and the Language of Criminalisation

By late October 2023, the weekly marches had become a fixture of British political life. Hundreds of thousands of people were filling the streets of London and cities across the country, demanding a ceasefire and an end to British complicity in the assault on Gaza. The political class watched and decided to act. On October 30, 2023, the then-Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, wrote a piece for The Times in which she described the demonstrations as “hate marches” and accused the Metropolitan Police of applying a “double standard” by permitting them to proceed (Braverman, 2023). She claimed that protesters chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were calling for the “erasure of Israel” and that the presence of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs constituted a form of intimidation. She wrote to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner demanding that the marches be banned.

The language was deliberate and the intent was clear. By labelling the marches “hate marches,” Braverman was making a political argument. She was attempting to redefine the act of demanding a ceasefire as an act of racial hatred, and to pressure the police into treating peaceful protesters as criminals. The Metropolitan Police declined to ban the marches, finding no legal basis to do so. Braverman was sacked days later for a separate act of political insubordination that embarrassed Downing Street. The marches she had tried to criminalise continued. However, the label she had attached to them did not leave with her.

The damage was done, largely because the British press eagerly adopted her framing. The right-wing tabloids and broadsheets alike treated Braverman’s “hate march” as an objective description of reality. Front pages routinely juxtaposed images of peaceful marchers with headlines about “mobs” and “extremists.” The media acted as the transmission mechanism for the state’s hostility, laundering a political attack into a national consensus. The marches were now, in the minds of a significant portion of the political class, synonymous with antisemitism.

This framing had practical consequences. Employers, universities, and public bodies, taking their cues from the hostile media environment, began to treat the expression of solidarity with Palestine as a disciplinary matter. The chilling effect that Braverman and her allies sought to create began to take hold, not through any single act of state censorship, but through the accumulated weight of a thousand smaller acts of institutional intimidation.

The IHRA Definition: A Pre-Loaded Weapon

The mechanism through which this chilling effect was institutionalised had been put in place years earlier, in the form of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. The definition itself is relatively uncontroversial: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” The problem lies in the illustrative examples appended to it, several of which conflate criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Jewish racism. The examples include “applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” (IHRA, 2016).

The adoption of this definition across British institutions was the result of a sustained, aggressive lobbying campaign by the UK government and pro-Israel advocacy groups. In 2020, the then-Education Secretary Gavin Williamson explicitly threatened to cut funding to universities that refused to adopt the IHRA definition, effectively blackmailing academic institutions into accepting a highly contested political framework. The vast majority of universities capitulated. A comprehensive report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC) documented the inevitable consequences: staff and students at British universities were subjected to unreasonable investigations, events were cancelled, and speakers were uninvited, all on the basis that their advocacy for Palestinian rights had been deemed antisemitic under the IHRA framework (BRISMES and ELSC, 2023). The report found that the definition was being used exactly as its critics had warned: not to protect Jewish students from genuine antisemitism, but to suppress political speech about Israel and Palestine.

The cases accumulated with grim regularity. At the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), two student leaders, Alexander Cachinero-Gorman and Abel Harvie-Clark, were dismissed from their elected sabbatical roles in 2024 before they had even taken up their positions. Their dismissal followed a series of pro-Palestine protests on campus. They brought legal claims for wrongful dismissal, arguing that they had been targeted for their anti-Zionist beliefs, and in April 2026 the university’s students’ union settled the case for an undisclosed sum (Middle East Eye, 2026). The settlement was a vindication, but it also exposed the fundamental asymmetry of the IHRA regime: institutions can destroy a student’s career on the basis of a contested definition in an afternoon, while it takes years of gruelling legal battles to secure even a partial retraction.

The Purge of the Workplace

The crackdown was not confined to universities. Across British workplaces, employees discovered that expressing solidarity with Palestine was a sackable offence. The most prominent case was that of Mark Bonnick, a 62-year-old kit manager who had worked for Arsenal Football Club for twenty-two years. Bonnick was sacked on Christmas Eve 2024 after a coordinated online campaign by pro-Israel accounts accused him of antisemitism for social media posts opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza (Mondoweiss, 2025). He had used terms such as “ethnic cleansing” and “Jewish supremacy,” language that mirrors the conclusions of major international human rights organisations, including B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch. Arsenal’s own internal investigation concluded that his posts were not antisemitic, yet the club sacked him anyway, citing “reputational damage” (Mondoweiss, 2025). Bonnick, with the support of the European Legal Support Centre, filed a claim for unfair dismissal. His case is a precise illustration of how the weaponisation of antisemitism works in practice: the accusation is made, the investigation finds no evidence, and the punishment is administered regardless.

Bonnick was not alone. Healthcare workers were suspended for sharing information about the casualty figures in Gaza. Teachers were investigated for displaying Palestinian flags in their classrooms. Social workers were reported to their professional bodies for attending marches. A prominent disability charity, Sense, sacked a worker who had protested against the proscription of Palestine Action, only to reverse the decision after Novara Media reported the case publicly. The message being sent was unmistakable: your job, your career, your professional standing: all of these are contingent on your silence about a genocide.

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What makes these cases particularly instructive is the mechanism through which they operated. In almost none of them was the worker accused of actual antisemitism — of hatred of Jewish people as Jewish people. The accusation was invariably more nebulous: that their posts were “inflammatory,” that they had brought their employer “into disrepute,” that their views were “divisive.” The accusation functioned as a social and professional contaminant. Once made, it was sufficient to end a career regardless of its truth. This is the weaponised accusation in its purest form: a charge that requires no proof and admits of no defence, because the damage is done the moment it is levelled.

The Terrorism Label and the Criminalisation of Protest

As the marches continued and the death toll in Gaza mounted, the state escalated its response. The target was Palestine Action, a direct-action group founded in 2020 with the stated aim of disrupting the operations of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer with facilities across Britain. Palestine Action’s tactics were not subtle: activists broke into factories, spray-painted buildings, and damaged equipment. They were prosecuted under ordinary criminal law for criminal damage and trespass. They were not, by any reasonable definition, terrorists.

In July 2025, the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000, placing the group on the same list as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (Home Office, 2025). The decision was immediately condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, who called it a “disturbing misuse of UK counter-terrorism legislation” that expanded the concept of terrorism “beyond clear boundaries” (OHCHR, 2025). The UN High Commissioner warned that the ban “conflates protected expression and other conduct with acts of terrorism” and constituted “an impermissible restriction” on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association (OHCHR, 2025).

The government’s own intelligence assessment, obtained by The New York Times, told a story that directly contradicted the Home Secretary’s public justifications. The declassified report, compiled by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre within MI5, stated explicitly that “a majority of the group’s activity would not be classified as terrorism” under British law (New York Times, 2025). It expressed doubt that the group would explicitly encourage attacks on people, a characteristic of every other organisation on the proscription list. The three specific incidents cited in the assessment as meeting the legal test for terrorism all related to property damage at arms manufacturing sites (New York Times, 2025). One of them — a break-in in Glasgow where activists flew flags and set off fireworks on a factory roof — had been prosecuted by Scottish police as a “breach of the peace,” not a terrorism offence. The Scottish police had concluded that “the group had been focused on protest activity which has not been close to meeting the statutory definition of terrorism” (New York Times, 2025).

The government knew this. It proscribed Palestine Action anyway. The consequences were immediate and sweeping. Membership of the group became a criminal offence. Expressing support for Palestine Action became a criminal offence. Wearing a badge or carrying a sign that could arouse “reasonable suspicion” of support for the group became a criminal offence, punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. More than 1,400 people were arrested under the terrorism law in the weeks following the ban, the majority of them at peaceful protests where demonstrators held signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action” (New York Times, 2025). The High Court ruled in February 2026 that the ban had been unlawfully applied, finding that the Home Secretary had acted outside the scope of her powers and that most of Palestine Action’s illegal activities could be dealt with under ordinary criminal law (BBC, 2026). The Home Office immediately appealed, and the ban remains in force pending the outcome of that appeal (Reuters, 2026).

Starmer and the Golders Green Pretext

The final act in this escalating campaign of repression arrived in late April 2026. On April 29, a man named Essa Suleiman stabbed two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London. The attack was horrific. The victims — Shloime Rand, 34, and Moshe Shine, 76 — were hospitalised with serious injuries. The suspect was arrested at the scene. He had a documented history of serious mental health issues. He had been referred to the government’s own Prevent counter-extremism programme in 2020 and cleared as a terrorist threat within six weeks (The Guardian, 2026).

None of this prevented Keir Starmer from seizing the moment. Within hours of visiting the scene in Golders Green, the Prime Minister had delivered his most explicit attack yet on the right to protest. “If you are marching with people wearing pictures of paragliders without calling it out,” he declared, “you are venerating the murder of Jews” (The Guardian, 2026). He called for the prosecution of anyone chanting “Globalise the intifada,” describing it as “calling for terrorism against Jews.” By May 2, Starmer had gone further still. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he would support stopping some protests altogether, citing the “cumulative effect” of the weekly marches on the Jewish community (The Guardian, 2026). He said he had been “having discussions with the police for some time” about the possibility of banning certain demonstrations.

The speed and confidence with which Starmer moved from a single violent incident to a call for banning mass protests is itself revealing. It suggests not a reactive response to a crisis, but the deployment of a pre-prepared argument waiting for the right moment. The right to protest in Britain is protected not only by convention but by the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporates Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To ban a protest, the state must demonstrate a specific, concrete threat that cannot be addressed by less restrictive means. A generalised claim about the “cumulative effect” of demonstrations on a community’s sense of safety does not meet that threshold. Starmer, a former lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions, knows this; his call was a political signal.

It is necessary to be precise about what Starmer was doing here, because the imprecision is significant. He was not arguing that the man who stabbed two people in Golders Green had been radicalised at a pro-Palestine march. There is no evidence of any such connection. He was doing something more insidious: he was using the fear and grief generated by a real act of violence to justify the suppression of a political movement that has nothing to do with that violence. He was conflating the actions of a mentally ill man, cleared by his own government’s counter-terrorism programme, with the hundreds of thousands of people who have marched peacefully through London demanding a ceasefire.

This is the logic of the weaponised antisemitism accusation in its most advanced form. It does not require evidence of a direct connection between protest and violence. It requires only proximity; the suggestion that the marches create an “atmosphere,” a “cumulative effect,” a climate in which antisemitism can flourish. The marches become responsible for what they are alleged to represent, which in this framing, is not a demand for Palestinian rights but a threat to Jewish safety.

The most striking dissents, meanwhile, came from within the Jewish community whose pain the response purports to be addressing. Rabbi Herschel Gluck, a senior north London rabbi, told Middle East Eye plainly: “It is certainly not the marches that caused the tragic stabbing attacks on Wednesday in Golders Green.” He went further. Banning the marches in the name of the Jewish community would be an own goal: “There are many Jews who participate in the marches. Pro rata, there are more Jews than any other community. And the idea of banning speech is something that is a very un-Jewish thing to do” (Middle East Eye, 2026). Daniel Levy, the British-Israeli analyst and former adviser to the Israeli government, told Channel 4 News that the proposed moratorium on marches was “appalling” and that “you can’t have a false dichotomy between Jewish safety and Palestinian rights.” He went further still: “First we’ll be told you can’t protest on this and then you won’t be able to protest on anything and then we’re living in a fundamentally different society” (Channel 4 News, 2026).

Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Green Party, appeared on Sky News on May 3 to defend the marches and was met with the full force of the machinery. When he pointed out that many Jewish people, including himself, march in solidarity with Palestinians, the presenter Trevor Phillips dismissed the invocation of his Jewish identity outright: “Don’t try that one on me.” Polanski had already written publicly that he was “the only Jewish leader of a major political party” and suffered “antisemitic abuse every single day,” and condemned the conflation of “the Israeli government’s genocide and actual antisemitism” as “disgusting” (Polanski, 2026). After the interview, he wrote that Phillips had smirked while he described being Nazi-saluted at, adding: “it feels deeply antisemitic.” The architecture does not distinguish between its targets. When a Jewish man argues that antisemitism is being weaponised, the response is to question his motives, erase his identity, and treat his testimony as a rhetorical manoeuvre. It processes everyone who challenges it the same way.

The Democratic Crisis

Something has been stolen. The language of anti-racism — one of the most hard-won moral achievements of the twentieth century, built on the bones of people who were murdered for their identity — has been taken and turned into an instrument of political suppression. It has been done not in spite of a stated commitment to fighting antisemitism, but in the name of it. That is a theft. It has a cost that extends far beyond the individuals sacked, suspended, prosecuted, or silenced.

Genuine antisemitism — the real, persistent hatred of Jewish people as Jewish people — is a serious and growing problem in Britain and across the world. It demands serious, sustained, and principled opposition. But every time the accusation of antisemitism is levelled at a nurse who shared a casualty figure, a student who attended a march, or a kit manager who used the words “ethnic cleansing” (words used daily by the United Nations) the accusation loses force. It becomes noise, the cry of a state that has used the charge so promiscuously, against so many people with so little evidence, that when genuine antisemitism appears, the alarm has already been silenced by overuse. The British state is not protecting Jewish people. It is instead burning through the moral capital that protects them.

The same government that placed Palestine Action on a terrorism list alongside Al-Qaeda has not proscribed a single organisation for its role in facilitating the killing of over fifty thousand Palestinian civilians. Starmer himself is the sharpest illustration of the rot. He built his political identity on legal rigour and human rights. As Director of Public Prosecutions, he prosecuted hate crimes. He talks about antisemitism with the fluency of a man who has rehearsed the speech many times, yet he leads a government that sells weapons to a state the International Court of Justice has found to be plausibly committing genocide. He has not called for an arms embargo or used Britain’s diplomatic weight to demand a ceasefire. He has not done the one thing that would most concretely protect the safety of Palestinian civilians, which is to stop arming the people killing them. Instead, he stands outside a stabbing scene in Golders Green and uses the grief of a community to justify banning the people who are demanding he act. The conclusion is not complicated: his concern is not for Jewish safety, but for the management of a policy he cannot defend.

Resistance and Resilience

Despite the severity of the repression since October 7, the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain has refused to be silenced. The weekly marches have continued, drawing diverse crowds united by a shared demand for justice. The legal victories have accumulated: the High Court’s ruling against the Palestine Action proscription, the SOAS settlement, the ongoing employment tribunal brought by Mark Bonnick. Most remarkably, juries have repeatedly acquitted activists charged with criminal damage at arms factories, finding that the defendants had a lawful excuse in preventing the commission of a greater crime. When ordinary citizens are presented with the facts of Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, they consistently refuse to convict those trying to stop it. The movement has repeatedly demonstrated that the architecture of repression can be contested.

So, we keep writing and bearing witness. The machinery of repression depends on our exhaustion and self-censorship, but we must refuse. We owe this to the Palestinians, who have been buried, starved, displaced and dismembered while the question of whether we may mourn them at all is debated by ministers and lawyers. We owe it to the Jewish friends and neighbours and rabbis and Holocaust survivors who have refused, at considerable cost, to let their identities be conscripted into the architecture being built around them.

We have a right to call it a genocide and we should not be afraid to do so. When children are killed in their tens of thousands, when hospitals are bombed, when a population is starved as a matter of policy, when the Genocide Convention is invoked at the International Court of Justice and provisional measures are ordered — the word is not a slur. It is a description. The architecture of repression depends on our being too frightened of the word “antisemitism” to use the word “genocide.” The two charges have been deliberately wired together so that one cannot be uttered without the other being thrown back at us. That wiring must be cut. We have a responsibility to name what is happening. We do not need permission from a Prime Minister who is complicit in the genocide to use the words that international law has already given us.

It is the least we can do.

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References

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NPR (2023) ‘Israel revises down its death toll from Hamas attacks on Oct. 7’, 11 November. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2023/11/11/1212458974/israel-revises-death-toll-hamas-attacks-oct-7 [Accessed 3 May 2026].

The Guardian (2024) ‘London Gaza protest: Holocaust survivors join pro-Palestine demonstration’, 27 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/27/london-gaza-protest-openly-jewish-march-holocaust-survivors-palestine-demonstration [Accessed 3 May 2026].

Al Jazeera Investigative Unit (2022) ‘What really happened during Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis’, Al Jazeera, 25 September. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/25/what-really-happened-during-labours-anti-semitism-crisis [Accessed 3 May 2026].

The Guardian (2020) ‘Williamson accuses English universities of ignoring antisemitism’, 9 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/09/williamson-accuses-english-universities-of-ignoring-antisemitism[Accessed 3 May 2026].

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New York Times (2025) ‘Secret Report Undercuts U.K. Condemnations of Pro-Palestinian Group’, 12 September. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/world/europe/palestine-action-uk-government-assessment.html[Accessed 3 May 2026].

Reuters (2026) ‘Britain challenges court decision that Palestine Action ban was unlawful’, 28 April. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-challenges-court-decision-that-palestine-action-ban-was-unlawful-2026-04-28/ [Accessed 3 May 2026].

OHCHR (2025) ‘UK: Palestine Action ban “disturbing” misuse of UK counter-terrorism legislation, Türk warns’, 25 July. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/uk-palestine-action-ban-disturbing-misuse-uk-counter-terrorism-legislation [Accessed 3 May 2026].

There is a woman sitting in an earth-tone living room, bathed in natural light, offering advice to a friend whose husband refuses to wash his hands. The friend is frustrated, tired of reminding a grown man about basic hygiene. The woman on the couch, however, has a different perspective. She tells her friend that it would be better for her entire family to contract the bubonic plague and die than for her to continue treating her husband like a toddler by reminding him to wash his hands (Demopoulos, 2026).

This is not a sketch from a dystopian comedy. It is a genuine piece of instruction from “Wife School,” a video masterclass led by Tilly Dillehay, a Baptist writer and pastor’s wife. For $17, Dillehay teaches women how to become the kind of wives who inspire “godly leaders.” This means smiling, remaining attentive, and above all, submitting. It means learning the “skill of zip it” when disagreements arise, asking permission to spend $300 on a chair or to join a committee. It means, quite literally, choosing the risk of pestilence over the risk of nagging (Demopoulos, 2026).

Wife School is part of a growing cottage industry of online courses sold by affable Christian women to other women, promising domestic bliss through total submission. It sits alongside the broader “tradwife” movement, where influencers churn butter in milkmaid dresses and declare that feminism is the root of all female discontent. But to dismiss this as mere nostalgia or internet cosplay is to miss the machinery whirring beneath the pastel surface.

This is a counter-revolution. When women gain autonomy, patriarchy rarely returns in the form of a blunt instrument. Instead, it returns wearing softer clothes: wellness, femininity, faith, and order. It repackages hierarchy as virtue. To understand how this mechanism works, we must look beyond the aesthetics of the kitchen into the architecture of the prison.

The Aesthetics of Submission

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that we no longer live in reality, but in a “hyperreality” composed of simulacra: copies of things that either had no original or no longer have one. We consume the simulation of a thing rather than the thing itself (Baudrillard, 1981).

The tradwife movement and courses like Wife School are perfect examples of this phenomenon. These women are not actually living in the mid-twentieth century. They are modern influencers, building lucrative businesses on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, monetising the image of a past that never truly existed in the frictionless, perfectly curated way they present it. They are selling a simulacrum of tradition.

As Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who studies influencers, notes, these women are exploiting the feelings of inadequacy and instability felt by their followers. “They’re selling wife skills, sure, but what they’re really selling is stability” (Demopoulos, 2026). In an era defined by economic precarity, the burnout of the “girlboss” era, and the overwhelming complexity of modern life, the promise of a simple, ordered existence is deeply seductive.

But the simulation serves a darker purpose. By wrapping subjugation in the aesthetics of Pottery Barn catalogues and fresh blowouts, the Christian Right has managed to market misogyny as a lifestyle brand. They have realised that you cannot force women back into the kitchen with laws alone (at least, not yet) but you can sell them the kitchen as a wellness product. Submission is no longer framed as a legal or economic necessity; it is framed as the cure for the anxieties of modernity. Patriarchy has entered its influencer era.

This commodification of submission is a highly effective strategy for neutralising resistance. When oppression is packaged as a consumer choice, it becomes much harder to critique. The tradwife influencer is not a victim of patriarchy; she is its most successful salesperson. She has taken the very structures that limit women’s freedom and turned them into a lucrative personal brand. In doing so, she provides a template for other women to follow, suggesting that the path to happiness lies not in challenging the system, but in perfectly adapting to it.

This hyperreal version of the 1950s erases the actual history of that era. It ignores the widespread dissatisfaction, the reliance on tranquillisers, and the systemic exclusion of women from public life that characterised the period. Instead, it presents a sanitised, Instagram-filtered version of the past, where the only challenge is perfecting a sourdough recipe. This historical amnesia is crucial to the movement’s success. By erasing the reality of women’s past struggles, it makes the return to those conditions seem desirable.

The danger of this simulacrum is that it replaces political action with aesthetic consumption. Instead of fighting for structural changes, such as affordable childcare, equal pay, or reproductive rights, women are encouraged to retreat into a highly curated domestic sphere. The political is reduced to the personal, and the systemic failures of society are reframed as individual failings that can be cured by a $17 online course.

The Internal Guard

If Baudrillard explains the packaging, Michel Foucault explains the mechanism. In his seminal work Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the evolution of power from the spectacular, public violence of the sovereign to the subtle, pervasive control of modern institutions. At the centre of this shift is the concept of the Panopticon: a prison design where inmates can be observed at any moment by a central guard tower, but cannot see into the tower themselves (Foucault, 1975).

Because the prisoner never knows exactly when they are being watched, they must assume they are always being watched. The genius of the Panopticon is that it renders the external guard obsolete. The prisoner internalises the surveillance and begins to police their own behaviour. As Foucault writes, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault, 1975).

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Wife School is the domestic Panopticon. The teachings demand the meticulous policing of the internal self. Dillehay instructs women to track their hormonal cycles — not for family planning, but so they can monitor the “insanity” of their emotions and ensure they remain kind to their husbands. She tells them to “rewrite the headlines” in their own minds, reframing their husbands’ failures as virtues. If a husband neglects a duty, the wife must tell herself that it simply means he has time for something else (Demopoulos, 2026).

This is the creation of what Foucault called “docile bodies:” bodies that can be subjected, used, transformed, and improved through disciplinary practices. The woman is taught to monitor her tone, her facial expressions, her hormones, and her private thoughts. The husband does not need to be a tyrant, because the wife has been trained to be both the prisoner and the guard.

The ultimate victory of this system is that the subjugation is framed as a choice. Dillehay calls it “proactive submission.” By convincing women that they are choosing to shrink themselves, the system masks its own coercive nature. The soul, as Foucault observed, becomes the prison of the body.

This internalised surveillance extends beyond the immediate relationship with the husband. It encompasses the woman’s entire relationship with herself. She is taught to view her own desires, ambitions, and even her basic emotional responses with suspicion. Any feeling of frustration or resentment is not a valid response to an unequal situation, but a sign of her own spiritual failing. She must constantly monitor herself for signs of rebellion, actively suppressing any impulse that might disrupt the patriarchal order.

In this way, Wife School achieves a level of control that external force could never manage. A woman who is forced to submit may still harbour rebellious thoughts; a woman who has been trained to police her own mind will actively suppress those thoughts before they can even form. She becomes the architect of her own subjugation, constantly working to ensure that she remains a docile and compliant subject.

The brilliance of this mechanism lies in its invisibility. Because the control is internalised, it does not feel like oppression. It feels like self-improvement. The woman is not being forced to submit; she is choosing to become a “better” wife. This framing makes the system incredibly resilient, as any critique of the power structure can be easily dismissed as an attack on the woman’s personal choices and religious beliefs.

The Weaponisation of Consent

The most chilling application of this internalised surveillance occurs in the realm of bodily autonomy. The Guardian report highlights the teachings of Wife School regarding sexual obligation. Dillehay instructs her students that “a husband expects a yes” when he asks for sex, quoting Corinthians to argue that spouses should not deprive one another.

She compares sex to pizza: when it is good, it is great, and when it is bad, it is still pretty good. Therefore, wives must sometimes settle for “frozen pizza,” which is an extended metaphor that attempts to make the consumption of unwanted sex sound mundane and acceptable (Demopoulos, 2026).

When “a husband expects a yes” becomes theology, consent is no longer about mutuality. It becomes a weapon. This is where the Panopticon reaches a dark, terrifying conclusion. The woman must not only submit her body to her husband, but she must police her own mind to ensure she does so willingly, or at least without complaint. She must manufacture her own consent to avoid the sin of deprivation.

This ideology operates in a culture where, as the CDC reports, one in four women will experience physical violence by an intimate partner (Demopoulos, 2026). Yet Wife School does not address abuse. Instead, as writer Elena Trueba discovered when she took the course, women are directed to resources that argue against always believing victims and suggest that abuse sometimes stems from a victim’s “sinfulness” (Trueba, 2026; Demopoulos, 2026). The internal guard is thus reinforced: if you are suffering, it is because you have not policed yourself rigorously enough. As Dillehay herself puts it: “If you’re going to suffer, suffer as a righteous woman” (Demopoulos, 2026).

The weaponisation of consent is perhaps the most insidious aspect of this entire ideology. By framing submission as a religious duty, it removes the possibility of refusal. A woman who says no is defying God. This places an immense psychological burden on the woman, forcing her to constantly override her own instincts and desires in order to maintain her spiritual standing.

Furthermore, the trivialisation of unwanted sex — comparing it to “frozen pizza” — serves to normalise coercion. It suggests that a woman’s physical boundaries are of little consequence, and that her primary role is to serve the needs of her husband. This is a profound violation of the core principles of bodily autonomy, repackaged as a quirky, relatable metaphor. It is a bleak reminder that beneath the pastel aesthetics of the tradwife movement lies a deeply disturbing reality of control and subjugation.

This dynamic is not limited to sex. It permeates every aspect of the marital relationship. The woman is expected to constantly anticipate her husband’s needs and desires, adjusting her own behaviour to ensure his comfort and satisfaction. She must become an expert in reading his moods, managing his emotions, and smoothing over any potential conflicts. This emotional labour is entirely unacknowledged and uncompensated, yet it is essential to the functioning of the patriarchal household.

The psychological toll of this constant self-monitoring and emotional management is immense. It requires a level of hyper-vigilance that is exhausting and ultimately destructive to the woman’s sense of self. She is no longer an independent agent, but a mere extension of her husband’s will. This is the true cost of the tradwife fantasy: the systematic dismantling of the female self.

The Laboratory of Tyranny

Why does this matter beyond the walls of individual homes? Because the domestic sphere is the foundation of the political sphere. Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of totalitarianism, warned of the dangers of atomising individuals and destroying the public sphere. When the public realm is eroded, citizens retreat into the private realm, where unquestioning obedience can be normalised (Arendt, 1951). The home becomes the laboratory where authoritarian subjects are manufactured.

The creators of these courses are not operating in a political vacuum. Dillehay’s books are published by Canon Press, an imprint owned by Douglas Wilson, an extremist pastor based in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is a self-described Christian nationalist who has openly opposed a woman’s right to vote and envisions a patriarchal theocracy (Demopoulos, 2026; Simmons, 2026). In Wilson’s ideal America, voting rights would belong solely to the male head of the household. Women in households led by a husband would have no individual political voice (Simmons, 2026).

This is the political endgame of Wife School. If you can train half the population to treat obedience as holiness — to ask permission to buy a chair, to view their own desires as sinful, to police their own thoughts for signs of rebellion — you are manufacturing the ideal authoritarian citizen. A woman who has been trained to say “yes” to every demand of her husband is a citizen who has been trained to say “yes” to the demands of the state.

The recent UNLV study on the tradwife movement confirms the hostility beneath the aesthetic. Researchers found that men who view the movement favourably do not hold “benevolent” sexist views rooted in chivalry; rather, they exhibit “overt, explicit and hostile” sexism. They resent women while simultaneously expecting them to bend to every whim (Robnett, 2026; Demopoulos, 2026).

The connection between domestic subjugation and political authoritarianism is a stated goal of the Christian nationalist movement. By establishing strict hierarchies within the home, they are laying the groundwork for a society based on similar principles. The husband is the sovereign of the household, and his authority is absolute. This model of governance is then projected outwards, creating a vision of a state where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and unquestioning obedience is demanded of the many.

In this context, Wife School is a training ground for a new political order. It is teaching women to accept their own disenfranchisement, to view their lack of political power as a natural and necessary consequence of their gender. By normalising submission in the private sphere, it prepares the ground for the acceptance of authoritarianism in the public sphere.

This is why the tradwife movement must be understood as a deeply political phenomenon. It is not a retreat from politics; it is a different kind of politics — one exclusion, of hierarchy, and control. It seeks to dismantle the democratic institutions that have allowed women to participate in public life, and to replace them with a system based on patriarchal authority.

The danger of this movement is amplified by its alignment with broader authoritarian trends. As democratic norms erode and right-wing populism gains ground, the tradwife ideology provides a ready-made model for social organisation. It offers a vision of a society where order is maintained through strict gender roles and unquestioning obedience to authority. This is a vision that is deeply appealing to those who feel threatened by social change and long for a return to a mythical past.

The Machinery of Choice

The Christian Right understands that democracy depends on equality, and therefore, to dismantle democracy, one must first dismantle equality. They have built a sophisticated machinery to achieve this. The simulation of tradition (Baudrillard) masks the internalised surveillance (Foucault), which in turn manufactures the compliant citizens required by authoritarianism (Arendt). It is a system that commercialises female insecurity, turning misogyny into a $17 online course.

Authoritarianism does not always arrive in jackboots. Sometimes it arrives in pastel kitchens, accompanied by Bible verses and smiling women who have been taught to call their own erasure “freedom.” The question is not whether individual women “choose” submission. The question is what social, political, and theological machinery is shaping that choice, and who profits when women are taught to shrink.

This machinery is constantly evolving, adapting to new platforms and new anxieties. It uses the language of empowerment to sell subjugation, and the aesthetics of wellness to mask control. It is a highly effective system, precisely because it is so difficult to identify. It does not look like oppression; it looks like a lifestyle choice.

But we must not be fooled by the packaging. The core message of Wife School and the broader tradwife movement is one of profound inequality. It is a rejection of the fundamental principles of feminism, and a deliberate attempt to roll back the gains that women have made over the past century. It is a reminder that the fight for equality is never truly won, and that we must remain vigilant against the ever-changing forms of patriarchal control.

The ultimate goal of this movement is to change the very nature of Western society. By establishing the home as a laboratory of tyranny, they are preparing the ground for a broader political transformation. They are building a world where hierarchy is naturalised, where submission is virtue, and where the Panopticon is not a prison, but a kitchen.

The success of this movement depends on our willingness to accept its premises. It relies on our collective amnesia, and our willingness to trade freedom for the illusion of stability. But we must resist this temptation and recognise the tradwife movement for what it is: a sophisticated attempt to repackage patriarchy for a new generation. We must reject the simulacrum of tradition, dismantle the internal guard, and refuse to participate in the laboratory of tyranny. Only then can we hope to build a society based on true equality and genuine freedom.

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References

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Demopoulos, A. (2026). ‘‘A husband expects a yes’: how wife schools are shaping submissive Christian women.’ The Guardian, 28 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/28/wife-school-christian-women-submissive [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.

Robnett, R. D. and Hammond, M. (2026). ‘Ambivalent Sexism Theory as a Framework for Understanding Men’s Attitudes About the #Tradwife Movement.’ Psychology of Women Quarterly. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03616843261433199 [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

Simmons, T. (2026). ‘Hegseth mentor Doug Wilson’s vision for a Christian nation means married women can’t vote.’ Religion News Service, 10 April. Available at: https://religionnews.com/2026/04/10/hegseth-mentor-doug-wilsons-vision-for-a-christian-nation-means-married-women-cant-vote/ [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

The Wife School (no date). The Wife School: Biblical Wife Coaching for Women Who Want to Fix What's Out of Order in Their Marriage. Available at: https://thewifeschool.com [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

Trueba, E. (2026). I went to Wife School so you don’t have to.’ Substack, 13 February. Available at:

Unholy Alliances by Elena Trueba

I went to Wife School so you don't have to.

What did I do with my one wild and precious life this week? I spent $17 on Tilly Dillehay’s Wife School…

Read more

4 months ago · 81 likes · 19 comments · Elena Trueba

[Accessed: 28 April 2026].

On April 22, 2026, Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social responding to a state-level redistricting referendum in Virginia. The vote had narrowly passed by 51.4 percent to 48.5 percent. The President declared the entire process illegitimate. “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” he wrote. “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’” (Al Jazeera, 2026). He called it “another Crooked Victory” and demanded the courts reverse the result.

The sitting President of the United States declared a democratic vote rigged because his side lost, and because people voted by mail. Not a presidential election; not even a congressional race. A state redistricting referendum. A procedural vote about where to draw lines on a map, and he called it a stolen election.

By pre-emptively declaring a state-level referendum fraudulent because of mail-in ballots, Trump is testing the exact language, logic, and narrative architecture he intends to deploy against the 2026 midterms. The Virginia post is the warning shot. The administration is actively constructing the machinery to steal them.

Our previous analysis published here — Wake Up Call: The Echoes of Weimar — established the historical framework: the Weimar Republic was not destroyed by a putsch but by a pseudo-legal process of coordination, Gleichschaltung, in which democratic mechanisms were turned against democracy itself. That argument was made as a warning. The evidence now suggests it was not a warning about a distant possibility, but a description of what was already beginning. This article is about what is happening.

There is one detail from history that is worth holding in mind as you read what follows. In April 1932, Hitler lost the German presidential election to Paul von Hindenburg by millions of votes. He immediately declared the result fraudulent. A German court examined the claim and ruled against him. He vowed to “attack, attack, and attack again.” The filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, watching him that night, observed that he “spoke as if he had won the election” (Ryback, 2024). Bear that in mind, and then read Trump’s Virginia post again.

Since the Weimar analysis was published, the administration has moved with deliberate speed to remove every institutional safeguard that protected the integrity of the 2020 election. The officials who held the line have been fired. The agencies that debunked fraud claims have been gutted. The legal mechanisms that blocked politically motivated prosecutions have been dismantled. And a draft executive order — seventeen pages long, circulated among Trump allies since spring 2025 — sits ready to be signed, granting the President emergency powers over the conduct of federal elections. The question this article addresses is not whether Trump will attempt to interfere with the 2026 midterms, because the evidence that he is already doing so is overwhelming and documented. The question is what that interference will look like, why he cannot afford a clean election, and what the consequences will be; not just for November 2026, but for November 2028, and for the republic itself.

As the 2026 midterms approach, the landscape has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. The current administration has spent the last year quietly and systematically executing its own Gleichschaltung. What Trump is building is not a system without elections; it is rather a system of “managed democracy,” the model perfected by Vladimir Putin and his chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov. In a managed democracy, the regime gouges the ballot box. Elections are retained as political theatre to provide a veneer of democratic legitimacy while the outcome is predetermined long before the first vote is cast (Atlantic Council, 2024). The visual markers of democracy remain — campaign commercials, polling stations, volunteers — but the competitive nature of the system is entirely eradicated.

The Existential Risks

For Trump, the 2026 midterms are about personal, existential survival. His approval ratings have collapsed into the mid-30s, driven down by the economy, mass deportations, and the war in Iran (The Guardian, 2026). The Senate map, once thought to be a Republican lock, is now a genuine toss-up, with prediction markets placing control at a 50-51 coin flip (270toWin, 2026).

If the Democrats win the House, they gain subpoena power. That means the immediate launch of sweeping investigations into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the conduct of the Iran war, and, most dangerously for Trump, the Epstein files.

The Epstein exposure is a uniquely personal threat. In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release all files related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell within 30 days. The DOJ blew past the deadline. When they finally released approximately 3 million files in January 2026, the rollout was chaotic: nearly 100 victims’ names and nude photos were mistakenly left visible, while crucial information was redacted (Yahoo News, 2026). More importantly, 2.5 million files are still being withheld from the public.

What is being hidden? An NPR investigation found that the DOJ appears to have withheld notes from an FBI interview with a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her when she was 13 years old (CNBC, 2026; Daily Beast, 2026). The released files are missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations involving Trump (Houston Public Media, 2026). Despite evidence detailing the abuse of more than 1,000 women and children, the DOJ has made zero arrests beyond Epstein and Maxwell themselves (NPR, 2026).

Trump’s handling of the fallout reveals his panic. On April 2, 2026, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, ostensibly because he was unhappy with her handling of the Epstein files and her failure to prosecute his political enemies (CNBC, 2026). He replaced her with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who promptly declared that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward” (Krishnamoorthi, 2026). Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are floating a presidential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell.

House Oversight Republicans have spent the last year acting as Trump’s firewall, blocking Democrats from issuing subpoenas related to Epstein by holding “roundtables” instead of hearings to prevent votes on the matter (Politico, 2026). A Democratic House strips away that shield. The Department of Justice’s internal watchdog has already opened an audit into the agency’s compliance with the Transparency Act (New York Times, 2026). The pressure is mounting.

If the Democrats win the Senate as well, the threat escalates from exposure to removal. More than 85 Democrats have already called for Trump’s impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment over his actions in Iran (NBC News, 2026). Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has explicitly refused to rule out a third impeachment if Democrats regain control (The Grio, 2026).

Trump knows this. He has publicly warned his supporters that a strong Democratic showing will lead to his impeachment (Newsweek, 2026). He cannot afford a clean election, because a clean election, given his current standing, likely means losing the House. Losing the House means losing the shield. It is these reasons alone that make a clean election unviable for him.

Gutting the Electoral Immune System

To ensure the election is not clean, the administration had to first remove the people who kept it clean in 2020. To comprehend the scale of what has been done, one must look back to a windowless room in Washington in December 2020. Attorney General William Barr had summoned federal officials responsible for protecting American elections — experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and top FBI officials — to a fortified room at the Justice Department’s headquarters. Trump was obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Biden. The CISA specialists explained patiently that a clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem. There was no fraud. Just human error, subsequently confirmed through a hand count of the ballots (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

Those CISA specialists, and the dozens of career officials like them who stood between Trump and the theft of the 2020 election, are now gone. Every single one of them. A ProPublica investigation published in April 2026 found that at least 75 career officials who played important roles in election security at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and other departments have left, been fired, or been reassigned since Trump returned to power (Clark and Fifield, 2026). They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees. Ten of those appointees actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote. The rest are associates of such people. The election denial movement has merged with the federal government.

The destruction of CISA is the most visible part of this purge. CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. After the 2020 election, it played a crucial part in puncturing the fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, after Krebs and his colleagues released a statement calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history” (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

Upon returning to the Oval Office, Trump finished the job. Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The agency’s election security work was frozen entirely. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specialising in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The destruction did not stop at CISA. The National Security Council’s election security group, which coordinated departmental responses to electoral threats, was disbanded. The Foreign Malign Influence Center — a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China, and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election — was dismantled in August 2025. Former national security officials told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The FBI has been similarly gutted. Kash Patel, the bureau’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in American politics, was also disbanded.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for ensuring the department’s inquiries were not improperly influenced by politics, was effectively destroyed. After Trump returned to power, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned or were transferred thereafter. The 36-person section was reduced to two (Clark and Fifield, 2026). It no longer reviews politically sensitive cases.

The Civil Rights Division’s voting section, which had enforced federal laws protecting voting rights and combating racial discrimination, has been similarly undermined. Nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, issued a memo declaring that the division’s mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections. The administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the very lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

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This is the deliberate, coordinated removal of every person and institution that said “no” in 2020. The mechanism is the goal. The institutional immune system has been systematically dismantled to ensure that when the order comes to intervene in the 2026 midterms, there will be no one left to refuse.

The Fulton County Raid: The Weimar Parallel Made Flesh

What happened in Georgia is the single most important event of the last year, because it demonstrates exactly how the machinery of theft operates when the guardrails are gone.

In late January 2026, the FBI carried out an unprecedented seizure of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, Georgia — a Democratic stronghold. The operation was orchestrated by Kurt Olsen, whom Trump had hired as his director of election security and integrity. Olsen had worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in court and was later sanctioned by judges for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

When the FBI’s Atlanta field office chief, Paul Brown, examined the report Olsen presented to justify the raid, his team found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether. Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors that did not make a strong enough case to move forward. Brown was then offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office. He retired. With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

This is the Weimar parallel made flesh. The career official who says no is removed. He is replaced by someone who says yes. The raid proceeds. “They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” said Ryan Crosswell, a former Justice Department lawyer who handled election cases for nearly five years (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The Fulton County demonstrates the FBI can now be weaponised against local election officials who refuse to comply with the administration’s demands. It is a message to every county clerk, secretary of state, and election official in America: comply, or face the consequences. Imagine being a local election worker in Detroit or Philadelphia, knowing that the federal government is now willing to deploy the FBI to seize your equipment if the President dislikes the vote count. The machinery of theft is abstract until it touches a person. The Fulton County raid proves it will touch anyone who stands in the way.

Manufacturing the Illusion of Fraud

With the guardrails removed and the loyalists installed, the administration has spent the last year manufacturing the pretexts necessary to justify intervention. The most aggressive tool in this arsenal has been the DOJ’s unprecedented campaign to seize state voter rolls. The Justice Department has filed federal lawsuits against 29 states and the District of Columbia seeking access to sensitive voter registration data (Holtzman Vogel, 2026). The administration’s stated rationale is the detection of non-citizen voters. But the tool being used to identify them — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system — has been found to be riddled with inaccuracies. DHS claimed the system had identified more than 21,000 potential non-citizens on voter rolls in the past year. But officials who checked those results in detail found vast inaccuracies. Most states eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential non-citizens as registered to vote, and far fewer had ever actually voted (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The tool is not fit for purpose, but that is not the point. The point is to generate numbers, doubt, and a pretext. It creates the illusion of a tainted voter pool, which can later be cited as justification for throwing out results.

Running in parallel is the SAVE America Act, which passed the House at Trump’s urging and would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate — when registering to vote (Votebeat, 2026). Trump himself stated that if the SAVE Act were enacted, Republicans would “never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race” (Center for American Progress, 2026). It is an explicit admission that the policy is about partisan advantage, not election integrity.

To understand what this means in practice, consider Courtney Patterson. He is 80 years old. He was born on his family’s farm in Lenoir County, North Carolina, and was fortunate that a country doctor recorded his birth. “But many other people who grew up with me didn’t even have that,” Patterson told Capital B. Babies were delivered at home by midwives who were illiterate. On the rare occasions a doctor visited, he might leave with a ham or produce — payment from families with little cash. Documentation of births, if it existed at all, was written down in a family Bible (Tensley, 2026).

Patterson has served on the Lenoir County Board of Elections for close to 15 years. In all that time, he said, “we have never had to investigate” a single case of someone falsely claiming citizenship to vote. What he sees in the SAVE Act is something older and uglier: “It’s the same pattern,” he said, comparing it to the literacy tests and poll taxes of the Jim Crow era (Tensley, 2026).

The numbers confirm his instinct. The Brennan Center for Justice found that 21.3 million voting-age Americans do not have proof of citizenship readily available. One-fifth of Black Americans born in 1939 and 1940 were never issued birth certificates. Only one-third of Black Americans hold passports, compared to half of all American adults. The racial disparity is not incidental (Morris and Henry, 2024). As Demetria McCain of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund put it: “This isn’t an ID law. Your driver’s license isn’t going to help you. You’ve got to have something like a passport or a birth certificate.” And then she drew the direct historical line: “And guess what the poll tax was about? It was about money” (Tensley, 2026).

The SAVE Act would also destroy the infrastructure of Black civic participation. For decades, voter registration has orbited around community life: churches, fraternities, sororities, grocery stores. But proving citizenship requires formal documentation verified at a government office. “You can’t do that at a church registration drive,” McCain said. “You can’t do that in front of a grocery store” (Tensley, 2026). The legislation dismantles the communal architecture through which Black Americans have exercised their democratic rights for generations.

The Uniform at the Door

Beyond the legal machinery of disenfranchisement, the administration is also preparing a more visceral form of voter suppression: the physical deployment of federal immigration agents to American polling locations.

In March 2026, Trump abruptly ordered ICE agents to major US airports to assist the Transportation Security Administration during a DHS funding lapse. The decision surprised even senior officials within his own administration. But Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a figure who remains deeply embedded in the administration’s ideological orbit, was not surprised at all. On his War Room podcast, Bannon explained the real purpose: “We can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms.” He was unambiguous about the intended outcome: “ICE is going to be there in the fall of ‘26, just like they’re in airports today. So, from the War Room, suck on that!” (Knutson, 2026).

Mike Davis, a far-right lawyer assisting the administration with its effort to pack the judiciary with loyalists, endorsed the idea on the same broadcast. His justification was the same baseless claim that animates the entire voter suppression apparatus: that non-citizen voting is a widespread problem. It is not. Numerous studies and voter roll audits have found that non-citizens fraudulently voting is vanishingly rare. The claim is a pretext (Brennan Center, 2026b).

The Brennan Center for Justice has been explicit: sending ICE or any other armed federal agents to polling places is illegal. Federal law expressly bans federal officers from interfering in elections, and a separate statute — on the books since 1865 — prohibits troops and armed federal agents from being deployed anywhere an election is held. Any form of voter intimidation by federal agents is illegal under both federal and state law (Brennan Center, 2026b). The Department of Homeland Security has no role in enforcing election laws. ICE has no business being anywhere near a polling place.

But legality is not the point; the uniform at the door is, as is the patrol car parked outside a polling station in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood in Phoenix or Miami, or the ICE van idling at the end of the street where a Black church in Detroit has been running its voter registration drive for forty years. Nobody needs to be arrested. Nobody needs to be turned away. The mere presence of immigration enforcement agents at or near a polling place is enough. The chilling effect — the decision made at home, before leaving the house, that today is not worth the risk — is the intended outcome. The architecture of theft does not always require a lock. Sometimes a shadow is enough.

Markwayne Mullin, confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, refused during his confirmation hearing to definitively rule out deploying ICE to polling places, saying only that it could happen in the event of a “specific threat” (Brennan Center, 2026b). The White House has similarly declined to issue a categorical assurance that it will not happen. In the absence of a clear prohibition, Bannon’s promise stands.

The Iran War as Pretext

The most dangerous pretext being manufactured, however, is an international one. Just hours after launching the war in Iran, Trump reposted a headline on Truth Social claiming: “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States” (Waldman, 2026).

This was a deliberate signal. By explicitly linking the Iran war to election interference on the very day the bombs began falling, Trump was constructing a narrative bridge between the foreign conflict and the domestic vote. If Iran is an enemy of America, and Iran tried to interfere in elections, then any election result that weakens Trump — the man Iran supposedly fears — can be reframed as an Iranian victory. The logic is circular, but it does not need to be sound, it just needs to be loud.

Timothy Snyder, writing in Project Syndicate just days ago, laid out the threat of using crisis to manipulate elections with characteristic bluntness: “The United States is seven months away from the most consequential midterm elections in its history. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump, together with Israel, has started a war against Iran. These are the ideal conditions for a head of state to seize power in a coup” (Snyder, 2026). Snyder identifies five scenarios through which Trump could exploit the war but singles out one as the most dangerous: the exploitation of terror. A foreign enemy carrying out an attack against American civilians during wartime would provide an aspiring dictator with a pretext to declare a state of emergency and suspend elections. Snyder does not stop there. He raises the spectre of a false-flag operation, noting that “in 1999, the Russian secret services bombed apartment buildings in Moscow, triggering a chain of events that set in motion Putin’s march toward dictatorship. Chances are high that Trump, Putin’s client in the White House, has considered this approach” (Snyder, 2026).

Whether or not one considers a false-flag operation plausible, the broader point is undeniable: the Iran war is a domestic political tool (as well as a foreign policy disaster). It provides the ultimate national security rationale for executive overreach. And it creates the conditions under which an attack — real or manufactured — could be used to justify the suspension of democratic norms. As Snyder concludes: “if a terrorist attack does occur in the next seven months, Americans should be skeptical of Trump, who will undoubtedly attempt to blame his domestic opponents and discredit the midterms” (Snyder, 2026).

The Shadow of Emergency Powers

The final, most severe escalation in this architecture of theft is the preparation to use emergency powers to seize control of the electoral process itself. A 17-page draft executive order titled “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference” has been circulating among anti-voting groups and administration allies since spring 2025 (Democracy Docket, 2026a). The draft order would declare a national emergency to allow the President to take unprecedented control over voting. Its sweeping scope would prohibit most Americans from casting a mail ballot and would require all 211 million registered Americans to re-register in person at an election office by proving their citizenship (Center for American Progress, 2026).

The draft cites the National Emergencies Act, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, and the Defense Production Act as its legal basis. Legal scholars note that none of these authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone enact a wholesale takeover of federal and local elections (Center for American Progress, 2026). The US Constitution expressly gives states the power to administer federal elections.

Yet the administration’s allies are openly preparing the ground. Late last week, election deniers who tried to overturn the 2020 election met with top administration election security officials in a “summit” aimed at pushing Trump to declare a national emergency and take over the midterms (Waldman, 2026). Among the attendees were Kurt Olsen, the architect of the Fulton County raid, and Heather Honey, an election denier now in charge of election security at DHS.

Jerome Corsi, an election denier who is reportedly coordinating with the White House on the draft order, stated on a right-wing podcast in March 2026: “I think Plan A has always been an executive order from President Trump... He’s not going to allow the 2026 midterm elections to be stolen without taking some strong executive action and executive order” (Democracy Docket, 2026b).

The legal reality — that the President does not possess the constitutional authority to suspend or rewrite election laws — is almost beside the point. If the administration issues an emergency declaration aimed at seizing control of the electoral apparatus, it will force the courts, state governors, and the military to choose sides in real-time. In a system where the institutional guardrails have already been systematically dismantled, relying on the courts to swiftly and decisively halt an executive power grab is a terrifying gamble. When leaders are allowed to deny reality on this scale, atrocity often follows.

Election Night: The Machinery in Motion

So, what does this actually look like in practice? Imagine November 3, 2026.

The polls close. The early returns, heavily skewed by in-person voting, show Republicans performing well. But as the night wears on, the mail-in ballots — the very ballots Trump has spent years demonising — begin to be counted in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona. The margins tighten. The Senate hangs in the balance. The House majority begins to slip away.

Before the count is even close to finished, Trump takes to Truth Social, echoing his Virginia post: “A RIGGED ELECTION IS TAKING PLACE! MASSIVE MAIL-IN BALLOT DROPS!”

But this time, the machinery activates. The DOJ, now purged of its independent career lawyers, immediately files emergency injunctions in federal courts to halt the counting of mail-in ballots, citing the “tainted” voter rolls they spent the last year manufacturing doubt about. The FBI, weaponised as seen in Fulton County, dispatches agents to election offices in Democratic strongholds, demanding to seize voting machines and ballots under the guise of investigating “foreign interference” from Iran.

And then, the executive order drops. Citing the ongoing war and the “national emergency” of foreign meddling, Trump signs the 17-page document, attempting to federalise the election process and invalidate millions of votes.

The chaos is intentional; the goal is to stop the count, create an impenetrable fog of doubt, and force the issue into a Supreme Court that he has packed, or into state legislatures where his loyalists hold power.

The Final Test

Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, put it plainly: “Our election system withstood Trump’s attacks following the 2020 election, but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers in positions of power and fewer guardrails in place” (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

In 2020, there were 75 career officials across DHS, DOJ, and other departments who formed the backbone of the institutional immune system. There was a CISA that could debunk fraud claims in real time. There was a Public Integrity Section that could block politically motivated prosecutions. There was an FBI field office chief in Atlanta who could look at a politically motivated request and say no.

Every single one of those defenses has been removed. With the federal oversight mechanisms gone, the defense of the election now relies entirely on the resilience of state officials, the integrity of the remaining independent courts, and the public’s unwavering refusal to accept a pre-rigged outcome.

That is a very thin line to hold. But it is not nothing, and there is something else that the architecture of theft cannot suppress, something that the draft executive orders and the purged officials and the ICE deployments cannot reach: the fact that more and more Americans are seeing through Donald Trump.

Consider what the machinery itself reveals. Trump’s approval ratings are in freefall. The Virginia redistricting vote went against him. The Senate is a genuine toss-up. If he were truly popular — if the MAGA movement were the unstoppable force it presents itself as — none of this would be necessary. The SAVE Act would not be needed. The DOJ voter roll lawsuits would not be needed. The draft emergency executive order would not be needed. The promise of ICE agents at polling places would not be needed. The architecture of theft is the confession of a man who knows he cannot win a clean fight.

The resistance is already underway. It is being led not by institutions in Washington but by state-level officials who were elected by the same people Trump is trying to disenfranchise. It is being built in courtrooms where attorneys general are fighting the DOJ’s voter roll lawsuits. It is being sustained by the ordinary donations filling the legal defence funds preparing injunctions against the emergency orders. The institutional immune system may have been hollowed out at the federal level, but it is being rebuilt from below: in state houses, county election offices, and in the decisions of local election workers who look at a federal agent at their door and refuse to be intimidated. The people united is a formidable thing. History has shown that repeatedly.

This is not a moment for passive observation. The time to act is now. Support the state-level officials fighting the voter roll lawsuits. Fund the legal groups preparing the injunctions. Demand that local representatives publicly commit to certifying the vote, regardless of federal pressure. The architecture of theft is being built in plain sight — so is the resistance to it.

There is one final, devastating reality to confront. The 2026 midterms are not a rehearsal for something else. They are the foundation upon which everything that follows will be built. If the Republicans hold the House through suppression and manufactured doubt, they retain the committee chairs, the subpoena power, and the firewall around the Epstein files. If they hold the Senate, they retain the ability to confirm loyalists to every remaining institution — including any Supreme Court vacancy that opens before 2028. And if the emergency executive order is successfully deployed in 2026 and survives legal challenge, it does not remain a draft document circulating among election deniers. It becomes established practice. By November 2028, the courts will have ruled on it. The precedent will have been set.

And in January 2029, the man sitting in the Vice President’s chair, presiding over the certification of the Electoral College, will not be Mike Pence. Pence was a constitutionalist who believed, however reluctantly, that his role was ceremonial and legally constrained. He did the right thing in 2020, and he paid for it politically — hounded out of the movement he had served, booed at his own party’s rallies. JD Vance has given every indication that he holds no such conviction. He has been explicit that he believes Pence made the wrong call. Every piece of the architecture being built now — the purged officials, the gutted agencies, the weaponised DOJ, the ICE deployments, the emergency powers — serves two purposes simultaneously: to win in 2026, and to make 2028 irreversible. With Vance in the chair, the final act only requires a signature.

The Weimar Republic fell because its citizens believed the institutions would save them, even as those institutions were being gutted from within. Americans do not have the luxury of that illusion. The federal institutions have been inverted, their authority turned against the democratic processes they were built to protect. The defence of the republic now rests not in Washington, but in the hands of the people who are already fighting back, and in the hands of every American who understands what is at stake before the polls open in November 2026.

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References

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It takes a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty to build a political brand on the absolute moral authority of the Catholic Church, only to tell the Vicar of Christ to stay in his lane the moment he disagrees with your boss. Yet this is the position in which Vice President J.D. Vance now finds himself. When asked about Pope Leo XIV’s condemnation of the Trump administration’s war in Iran, Vance offered a polite but unmistakable dismissal. “It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality,” he said, “and let the President of the United States stick to dictating American public policy” (Vance, quoted in Luscombe 2026).

It is a statement that reveals everything about the nature of Vance’s faith. For years, Vance has positioned himself as the intellectual vanguard of the “post-liberal Catholic” movement: a political project that explicitly rejects the separation of church and state, arguing instead that Catholic social teaching should be the organising principle of American public life. But when the head of that Church actually attempts to apply its moral teaching to American public life, Vance suddenly discovers the virtues of secularism. His Catholicism, as it turns out, is not a submission to divine authority. It is instead a costume, worn to dignify the hangover of a decaying order and discarded the moment it becomes inconvenient.

The Post-Liberal Pretence

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, a decision he has frequently described as the culmination of a long intellectual journey away from the secular liberalism of his Yale Law School education. He aligned himself with a group of conservative Catholic thinkers — men like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule — who argue that the liberal democratic order has failed because it lacks a shared moral foundation. Their proposed solution, often termed “integralism” or “post-liberalism,” is a society ordered toward the highest good, as defined by the Catholic Church (Deneen 2018; Vermeule 2020).

In this worldview, the Church is the ultimate arbiter of moral truth, and its teachings should inform the laws and policies of the state. Vance has eagerly adopted this framework, using it to provide a veneer of intellectual seriousness to the Trump administration’s most brutal policies. He has presented himself as a man who has found the philosophical grounding that the modern Republican Party so desperately needs. Not just a politician, but a thinker; a man whose policy preferences are rooted in two millennia of Catholic tradition.

But this intellectual branding has always been a fragile construct, dependent on a highly selective reading of Catholic teaching. The Church’s social doctrine is vast and complex, encompassing a commitment to the poor, the marginalised, and the immigrant, as well as scepticism of unfettered capitalism and militarism. Vance, however, has consistently ignored the parts of Catholic teaching that conflict with the priorities of the Trump administration, focusing instead on those elements that can be twisted to support a nationalist, America First agenda.

Consider his defence of the administration’s mass deportation program. When challenged on the cruelty of tearing families apart and expelling millions of people, Vance did not rely on standard Republican talking points about border security. Instead, he invoked the concept of ordo amoris, the right ordering of love. Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, Vance argued that a Christian’s primary moral obligation is to those closest to them: their family, their community, and their fellow citizens. Only after these obligations are met, he suggested, can one extend compassion to strangers (NPR 2025).

It was an attempt to weaponise Catholic theology against the very migrants the Church commands its followers to welcome. But it was also a profound distortion of Aquinas, who never suggested that love for one’s neighbour should be conditional on their citizenship status, nor that the state is exempt from the demands of charity (Orr 2026). When Pope Francis — Leo’s predecessor — rebuked this view of theology, Vance simply ignored him, continuing to use the language of the Church to justify the policies of the empire.

This selective obedience is the hallmark of the cosplay Catholic. It allows Vance to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously supporting policies that are fundamentally incompatible with the teachings of the Church he claims to revere. It is a theology of convenience, designed not to challenge the powerful, but to comfort them.

The Church as Chaplain

This pattern of selective obedience has now reached its logical conclusion in the dispute over the Iran war. Pope Leo XIV has been unequivocal in his condemnation of the conflict, telling Chaldean Catholic bishops that “God does not bless any conflict” and warning against the “delusion of omnipotence” driving the American war machine (Winfield 2026). For a true post-liberal Catholic, one who believes that the Church’s moral authority supersedes the secular state, this should be a moment of profound crisis. The Vicar of Christ has declared the war immoral.

But Vance experiences no such crisis. Instead, he tells the Pope to “stick to matters of morality,” as if the decision to drop bombs on foreign cities and risk global conflagration is somehow a morally neutral administrative task. “Let the President of the United States stick to dictating American public policy,” he says, neatly severing the connection between faith and politics that his entire intellectual brand is built upon.

In doing so, Vance reveals himself to be the polite, articulate face of the same thuggish impulse that led a Pentagon official to threaten the Vatican ambassador with a return to the “Avignon Papacy” (Religion Dispatches 2026). The Pentagon’s threat was crude and historical; Vance’s dismissal is smooth and televised. But the underlying message is identical: the Church is permitted to exist only so long as it serves the interests of the American empire. When it refuses to bless the empire’s wars, it must be silenced, sidelined, or threatened into submission.

Vance’s demand that the Pope stay in his lane is a demand that the Church subordinate itself to the state. It is the exact opposite of the integralist vision he claims to champion. He does not want a state guided by the Church; he wants a Church that acts as a chaplain to the state, offering theological cover for whatever atrocities the administration decides to commit.

This is the fundamental contradiction of the post-liberal Catholic project as articulated by Vance and his allies. They claim to want a society ordered toward the highest good, but they are entirely unwilling to accept the authority of the institution that defines that good. They want the moral authority of the Church without the moral obligations. They want the aesthetic of faith without the substance. They want the power to dictate morality to others, without the burden of submitting to it themselves.

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The Choice of Submission

The ultimate absurdity of Vance’s position is illuminated by the man he has chosen to serve instead of the Pope. While Vance was telling the head of the Catholic Church to stay out of politics, his boss was busy posting AI-generated images of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social (CBS News 2026). Blasphemy by anyone’s standards.

Donald Trump rejects the moral authority of the Church while attempting to usurp it. He demands the kind of absolute loyalty and devotion that is traditionally reserved for the divine. When the Pope criticises him, Trump attacks the Pope’s legitimacy, claiming credit for his election and whining that the Pontiff is “weak on crime” (Trump 2026).

That is the man to whom J.D. Vance has pledged his allegiance. A man who threatens genocide before breakfast, demands that the military swear loyalty to him personally, and deletes blasphemous images of himself only when the political backlash becomes too severe.

For a genuine Catholic, the choice between the moral authority of the Pope and the demands of a man who posts himself as the Messiah should not be difficult. But Vance has made his choice. He has looked at the system that is currently dying — a system that requires constant war and the demonisation of the vulnerable to sustain itself — and decided that its hangover is worth defending, even if it means telling The Holy Father to sit down and be quiet.

At its heart, this is a question of power. Vance understands that his political future depends on his absolute loyalty to Donald Trump. If that loyalty requires him to publicly contradict the Pope, to distort Catholic theology, and to defend the indefensible, he will do so without hesitation. His faith is entirely subordinate to his ambition.

The Collapse of the Performance

Vance’s Catholicism is pure political strategy. It was adopted to provide intellectual cover for a movement that is fundamentally anti-intellectual and deeply immoral. It allowed him to present himself as a serious thinker, a man wrestling with the deep questions of political philosophy, rather than just another ambitious schmuck willing to say whatever is necessary to secure power.

But the war in Iran has forced the issue. You cannot be a post-liberal Catholic while simultaneously demanding that the Pope stay out of public policy. You cannot claim that the state must be guided by moral truth while defending a war that the Church has explicitly condemned. You cannot serve two masters.

When Vance told the Pope to “stick to matters of morality,” the performance collapsed, revealing not a devout Catholic struggling to reconcile his faith with his political duties, but a cynical operator who views the Church as just another area to be managed and manipulated.

The Trump administration’s demand for submission is absolute. It requires its servants to abandon their principles, dignity, and, ultimately, their faith. Pete Hegseth has chosen to resolve this tension by inventing a militant, crusading Christianity that blesses his desire for overwhelming violence. J.D. Vance has chosen a different path: he simply turns his faith off when the President requires it.

The tragedy of J.D. Vance is not that he is a hypocrite; politics is full of hypocrites. The tragedy is that he is a man who clearly understands the moral bankruptcy of the system he serves yet chooses to serve it anyway. He has read Aquinas. He understands the concept of the common good. He knows that the war in Iran is a moral catastrophe. But he has decided that the rewards of power are worth the price of his soul.

In the end, Vance’s cosplay Catholicism is a testament to the enduring power of the American empire to co-opt and corrupt even the most profound moral traditions. It is a reminder that when faith is reduced to a political brand, it loses its power to challenge the status quo. It becomes just another tool of the powerful, used to justify the unjustifiable and to silence those who dare to speak the truth.

Pope Leo XIV has spoken the truth. He has declared that God does not bless any conflict, and he has refused to be intimidated by the threats of the Pentagon or the insults of the President. In doing so, he has exposed the moral emptiness of the Trump administration and the intellectual bankruptcy of its defenders. J.D. Vance may tell the Pope to stay in his lane, but the Servant of the Servants of God has already spoken, and the world is listening.

The contrast between the two men could not be starker. On one side is a Pope who understands that true moral authority requires a willingness to speak truth to power, even when it is dangerous or unpopular. On the other side is a Vice President who has built his career on a carefully curated image of intellectual seriousness and religious devotion, only to abandon both the moment they become politically inconvenient.

Vance’s intellectual journey, from the secular liberalism of Yale Law School to the post-liberal Catholicism of his current political brand, has always been marked by a certain performative quality. He has adopted the language and the aesthetic of faith, but he has never truly submitted to its demands. He has used the Church as a prop, a way to signal his seriousness and his commitment to a higher moral order, while simultaneously serving an administration that is defined by its cruelty, its corruption, and its absolute disregard for the truth.

This is the essence of the cosplay Catholic. It is a faith that is entirely instrumental, a bludgeon to be used and discarded as needed. And it is a faith that is ultimately empty, devoid of the moral courage and the spiritual depth that true religion requires.

As the war in Iran continues to escalate, and the Trump administration’s rhetoric becomes increasingly unhinged, the moral ruin of Vance’s position will only become more apparent. He has tied his political fortunes to a man who demands absolute loyalty and who views any challenge to his authority as a personal insult. He has done so while claiming to represent a religious tradition that explicitly rejects the idolatry of power and the glorification of violence.

It is a contradiction that cannot be sustained. Eventually, the act will implode entirely, and Vance will be forced to confront the reality of what he has become. In the meantime, the world will continue to watch as the Vice President of the United States attempts to reconcile his carefully curated image of religious devotion with his unwavering support for an administration that is waging war in the name of God. It is a spectacle that is both tragic and absurd.

And through it all, Pope Leo XIV will continue to speak the truth. He will continue to remind the world that God does not bless any conflict, and that the true measure of a society is not its military might or its economic power, but its commitment to justice, peace, and the common good. It is a message that J.D. Vance would do well to heed, if only he were willing to listen.

But Vance has made his choice. He has chosen the empire over the Church, power over principle, and ambition over faith. He has become the very thing he once claimed to despise: a cynical operator who uses religion as a political tool; a man who invokes the name of God to justify the unjustifiable. And in doing so, he has revealed the true nature of his post-liberal Catholic project. It is not a defence of the faith; it is a betrayal of it.

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References

CBS News (2026) ‘Trump posts AI image depicting himself as Jesus Christ, drawing backlash’, CBS News, 13 April. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-posts-ai-image-jesus-christ/ [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Deneen, P. J. (2018) Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Luscombe, R (2026) ‘JD Vance defends Trump amid spat with Pope Leo: ‘Stick to matters of morality.’’ The Guardian, 14 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/14/jd-vance-defends-trump-pope-leo-spat [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

NPR (2025) ‘Pope rebukes Trump over migrant deportations and refutes VP Vance’s theology’, NPR, 11 February. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-48194/pope-rebukes-trump-over-migrant-deportations-and-refutes-vp-vances-theology [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Orr, J. (2026) ‘Neighbour-Love and Nation-State: Can Ordo Amoris Offer a Framework for Just Immigration Policy?’, William Temple Foundation, 13 January. Available at: https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/neighbour-love-and-nation-state-can-ordo-amoris-offer-a-framework-for-just-immigration-policy/ [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Religion Dispatches (2026) ‘Why Would the Pentagon Allegedly Threaten the Pope’s Ambassador with an “Avignon Papacy”?’, Religion Dispatches, 10 April. Available at: https://religiondispatches.org/2026/04/10/why-would-pentagon-allegedly-threaten-popes-ambassador-avignon-papacy [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Vermeule, A. (2020) ‘Beyond Originalism’, The Atlantic, 31 March. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/ (Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Winfield, N. (2026) ‘Pope Leo XIV amplifies criticism of US-Israeli war in Iran, says God does not bless any conflict’, AP News, 11 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-leo-chaldean-trump-mideast-iran-720eea814712d1d859875f39661d599f [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

When an empire is told “no,” it usually responds with violence. When Donald Trump is told “no,” he responds with a tantrum.

In the wake of Pope Leo XIV’s refusal to bless the administration’s war in Iran, the President of the United States took to Truth Social to air his grievances. The resulting 330-word rant is a masterpiece of narcissistic injury, a document that reveals exactly how small the man running the United States really is. But beneath the whining and the capital letters, the post reveals the central tension of this administration’s relationship with religion: the question of who, exactly, gets to speak for God.

Trump complained that Leo is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He grumbled about COVID-era restrictions that the Pope had nothing to do with. He whined that Leo meets with “Obama Sympathizers.” And then, in the most revealing line of the entire outburst, he attempted to claim credit for the papacy itself: “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump” (Benen, 2026).

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The words were spoken in Rome, but they were aimed directly at Washington. On Palm Sunday, 29 March 2026, Pope Leo XIV presided over a prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica. He did not name the American president, he did not need to, because the target of his moral outrage was unmistakable.

“Enough of the idolatry of self and money!” the Pope declared. “Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” (Winfield, 2026a). He then turned his attention to the specific rhetorical strategy that the Trump administration has used to sanitise its violence in the Middle East. He denounced the “delusion of omnipotence” that fuels the conflict, warning that “even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death” (Winfield, 2026a).

Rather than a theological dispute, this is a struggle over who gets to define morality. The Trump administration, armed with the deadliest weapons in human history, is attempting to monopolise the language of righteousness to justify a war of choice. The head of the Catholic Church, an American himself, is refusing to let them have it.

The conflict between the Vatican and the White House exposes the central hypocrisy of the Trump project: its cynical, transactional use of religion as a tool of state power. When the administration demands that the Church bless its wars, and the Church refuses, the scripture runs dry. What remains is not faith, but a demand for submission so absolute that it has reportedly led the Pentagon to threaten the Vatican itself.

The Trump Project: War Framed as Destiny

To appreciate the depth of this clash, we must first understand how the Trump administration talks about violence. Instead of the language of reluctant necessity or strategic deterrence, it is the language of holy war.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rhetoric of Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is the ugly, militant id of the administration’s Christian nationalism. He bears a “Deus Vult” (God wills it) tattoo, a crusader slogan that he has described as a call for followers of Christ to “take up the sword in defense of their faith, their families, and their freedom” (Jones, 2026). He carries a Bible with the Jerusalem Cross and “Deus Vult” stamped on the cover (Kaylor, 2026). The tattoo and the Bible have become a uniform.

Hegseth views the military which he oversees as a spiritual force. He presides over monthly Christian worship services at the Pentagon, the first such events in the building’s history (Jones, 2026). In his book American Crusade, he explicitly links American identity to Christian violence, writing that “American Crusaders must lead the cultural fight” against Muslims, communists, and trans people (Jones, 2026).

When the war with Iran escalated, Hegseth’s rhetoric reached a fever pitch. On 25 March 2026, during a Pentagon worship service, he prayed directly for God to pour out “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” (Kaylor, 2026). The prayer was read from a script and had previously been delivered to bless the military operation in Venezuela in January. He then applied it to Iran. The full text is worth sitting with for a moment, because it clearly reveals the distorted theology at the heart of this administration:

“Break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish. Let their bulls go down to slaughter for their day has come, the time of their punishment. Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.” (Kaylor, 2026)

This is the language of a crusade. The writer Brian Kaylor, who watched the service, noted that the prayer was the second most violent he had ever encountered, surpassed only by Mark Twain’s satirical The War Prayer, written as a critique of exactly this kind of religious bloodlust (Kaylor, 2026). The difference is that Twain was being ironic. Hegseth was not.

The prayer was accompanied by an equally explicit verbal declaration. Hegseth told the American public to pray for victory over the Iranian regime “in the name of Jesus Christ,” urging them to do so “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches” (Barrow, 2026). He has described the war as a conflict between a Christian nation and its enemies, and he has invoked his faith to cast American military power as an instrument of divine will.

Trump himself, when asked by a reporter whether he believed God approved of the war, replied: “I do, because God is good — because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of” (Barrow, 2026). The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the iconic Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, declared that God had “raised him up for such a time as this,” and prayed for victory so that Iranians could “be set free from these Islamic lunatics” (Barrow, 2026).

Then, on 7 April 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social what may be the most nakedly genocidal statement ever made by a sitting American president. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” he wrote, “never to be brought back again” (Trump, 2026). The post was framed as a warning to Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but the language was akin to a man who had convinced himself that destruction was righteous, and that God was watching approvingly.

This is the “delusion of omnipotence” that Pope Leo XIV condemned. It is the belief that American military power is an extension of divine will, and that the annihilation of a sovereign state is a righteous act of purification. Hegseth uses God as a weapon; Leo uses God as a limit.

The Hollow Faith of J.D. Vance

If Hegseth provides the militant crusader imagery, Vice President J.D. Vance provides the intellectual hypocrisy. Vance’s highly publicised conversion to Catholicism in 2019 was celebrated by the New Right as a sign of intellectual seriousness, evidence that the MAGA movement had a philosophical depth beyond its most brutish instincts. But his faith, when tested against the demands of the Trump project, is revealed as a hollow performance, an aesthetic choice rather than a moral compass.

Vance did not simply join a parish and start going to Mass. He entered an intellectual world immersed in post-liberal Catholic thought — a movement associated with thinkers like Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule, who argue that liberal democracy has failed and that the state should be guided by Catholic social teaching. This is Catholic integralism: the belief that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies (Lecaque, 2026). It is a seductive framework for an ambitious politician, because it provides a sophisticated theological vocabulary for authoritarian politics.

The problem, which Vance has never satisfactorily resolved, is that the actual Catholic Church — including two successive popes — has consistently rejected the specific applications of this framework that the Trump administration favours. The Church’s opposition to the war in Iran, its defence of migrants, its insistence on the dignity of the poor: these are not liberal positions imported from outside the tradition. They are the tradition.

Vance has repeatedly attempted to extract moral authority from the Church to serve the state. In early 2025, he tried to use the Catholic theological concept of ordo amoris, the order of love, derived from St. Augustine and developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, to justify the administration’s draconian immigration policies and mass deportations. In a Fox News interview, he argued that Christian love requires prioritising one’s own citizens over foreigners: that the duty of love moves outward in concentric circles, from family to community to nation, and that this hierarchy justifies excluding the stranger (McKeown, 2025).

Before he was even elected Pope, Cardinal Robert Prevost — the man who would become Leo XIV — had already weighed in on this argument. On 3 February 2025, he posted on X, linking to a National Catholic Reporter editorial with the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” (Pereira, 2025). He broke a period of silence on social media specifically to make this point. A man who had not posted on X since July 2023 returned to the platform to tell the Vice President of the United States that he had misread the Gospel.

The Vatican’s formal response was swift and devastating. In a February 2025 letter to US bishops, Pope Francis explicitly rebuked Vance’s interpretation. Francis wrote that the true ordo amoris is discovered by meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception” (McKeown, 2025). The Pope added, pointedly: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups” (McKeown, 2025).

Vance’s reaction to this papal reprimand was exposing. He told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, “I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game” (Politico, 2025). This is precisely what a man says when he has lost the theological argument and knows it. He does not derive his moral authority from the Church; he attempts to use the Church to launder his political ambitions. When the Vicar of Christ contradicts his political imperatives, the faith is discarded.

The pattern has continued into the Iran war. When the Pentagon meeting with the Vatican’s ambassador became public knowledge in April 2026, Vance said only that he would “look into it,” a response so deliberately vague as to be meaningless (Newsweek, 2026). He did not condemn the reported threats or defend the Pope’s right to speak freely. He offered the same studied non-answer that he always offers when his Catholicism is put to a genuine test: a shrug dressed up as prudence.

This is the question that Vance cannot answer, and that the media has been too polite to press: where does he get his moral authority from? If it comes from the Catholic Church, then he must answer to the Pope. If it does not come from the Church, then his conversion is a costume, nothing other than a way of signalling intellectual seriousness to a certain kind of conservative voter, while practising a politics that the Church explicitly condemns. The Pope chided him on immigration, the treatment of migrants, and on the war in Iran. At what point does a Catholic politician who has been repeatedly corrected by the Pope acknowledge that he is not, in any meaningful sense, following his faith? The answer, of course, is that he will not because the faith was never the point.

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Leo XIV: A Moral Counterweight

It is crucial to understand that Pope Leo XIV is not a progressive hero or a liberal ally. He is a traditionalist whose opposition to the war reflects established church teachings, not the reflexive politics of the moment. As Catholic University professor William Barbieri noted, the Church has spent five centuries helping to develop strong international norms, a tradition “rooted in Scripture and theology and philosophy” (Barrow, 2026). The Pope’s opposition to the war is not a political statement. Rather, it is the application of a moral framework that pre-dates the United States by fifteen centuries.

Leo XIV was born Robert Francis Prevost on 14 September 1955 in Chicago, Illinois. He joined the Order of Saint Augustine in 1977 and was ordained a priest in 1982. He spent more than a decade as a missionary in Peru, working in poor, rural communities far from the corridors of power. He later led the Augustinian order globally and served as Pope Francis’s Prefect for recommending bishop appointments around the world. This role that gave him a view of the global Church and its relationship with political power in every corner of the planet (Vatican News, 2025).

When the College of Cardinals elected him in May 2025, Trump welcomed the news as “a great honor for our country” (Barrow, 2026). The administration assumed, as it assumes about everything, that an American pope could be a useful American asset. But Leo’s global experience — his years in Peru, his oversight of bishops across the developing world, his first-hand knowledge of how Washington’s economic and military policies affect less powerful nations — had given him a perspective that no amount of transactional thinking could accommodate.

Leo’s power in this narrative stems precisely from his structural position. He is the head of an institution that claims universal moral authority, and he is using that authority to contradict the American empire’s claim to divine endorsement. When Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, Leo called the threat “truly unacceptable” and said any attacks on civilian infrastructure violate international law (Barrow, 2026). When Hegseth prayed for overwhelming violence, Leo told Chaldean Catholic bishops gathered in Rome — senior clerics of an Aramaic-speaking Iraqi Christian church whose communities have been devastated by decades of American-backed conflict — to “proclaim clearly that God does not bless any conflict; to cry out to the world that whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs” (Winfield, 2026b).

In his Palm Sunday message, Leo went further still, quoting the Book of Isaiah directly: “even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood” (Barrow, 2026). This is a direct theological reproach of the administration’s claim that God endorses the war. The line from Isaiah was chosen deliberately. It is a passage about rulers who perform religious rituals while committing atrocities, who believe that prayer can sanctify violence. Leo was saying, in the plainest possible terms, that Hegseth’s war prayers are an abomination.

Theology professor Natalia Imperatori-Lee of Fordham University described the moment: “Popes have critiqued unfettered capitalism before, very robustly. The popes have critiqued the Industrial Revolution, right? Things that the U.S. has been at the forefront of. But it’s never been this specific and localized” (Barrow, 2026). The fact that Leo is a native English speaker removes any ambiguity from his words. There is no translation to hide behind, no cultural distance to exploit. When Leo says, enough of war, every American Catholic — and every American — understands exactly what he means and exactly who he is addressing. This is a line-by-line refutation of the Trump project. It is a refusal to allow the language of faith to be co-opted by the machinery of war.

The Avignon Threat: The Empire Demands Submission

The administration’s response to this moral resistance reveals the true nature of its authoritarianism. It wholly disagrees with the Pope and views independent moral authority as a threat to be neutralised. In January 2026, a closed-door meeting took place at the Pentagon between US defense officials and Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s outgoing ambassador to Washington. The meeting occurred after Leo had delivered a major foreign policy address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, that included what the AP described as a “strong but veiled criticism” of US military intervention (Winfield, 2026b). According to reports, an American official warned the ambassador that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, and the Catholic Church had better take its side (Lecaque, 2026). The most intimidating detail of the meeting was the reported invocation of the “Avignon Papacy” (Lecaque, 2026).

For those unfamiliar with 14th-century history, the Avignon Papacy refers to a period when a series of French popes resided in Avignon rather than Rome, effectively serving as extensions of the French monarchy. This arrangement did not arise peacefully. It began after the King of France sent his minister, Guillaume de Nogaret, to beat Pope Boniface VIII and hold him captive in retaliation for excommunicating the king. Boniface died shortly afterwards. His successor, Benedict XI, lasted only eight months before also dying suddenly. The next pope, Clement V, was the Archbishop of Bordeaux and a personal friend of the French king. He moved the papacy to Avignon, where it remained for nearly seventy years, a period which historians sometimes call the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Church (Lecaque, 2026).

To invoke Avignon in a meeting at the Pentagon is a mafia-style threat, a reminder that empires can break popes. The implication was unmistakable: comply or face the consequences. As Thomas Lecaque, an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University, wrote in Religion Dispatches: “it’s easy to see how an invocation of Avignon is a (very) thinly-veiled threat of violence” (Lecaque, 2026). The threat was taken seriously enough that Vatican officials reportedly shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later in the year for the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary (Lecaque, 2026). The first American pope was effectively told he was not welcome in his own country.

The Vatican, for its part, issued a careful statement saying that the meeting “does not correspond to the truth in any way” in the characterisation given by media reports, and that Pierre’s attendance was part of his “regular duties” (Winfield, 2026b). The US Embassy to the Holy See echoed this, calling the reports a “deliberate misrepresentation.” Both statements were notably careful: they disputed the characterisation of the meeting, not the fact of it. The meeting happened; what was said in the room remains contested.

What is not contested is the broader pattern of behaviour. This is an administration that has threatened to deport legal residents, used the apparatus of the state to intimidate judges, journalists, and political opponents, and has sent its Defense/War Secretary to pray for the eternal damnation of its enemies. The idea that it would also send a message to the Vatican that the Pope had better fall into line is not, in the context of everything else this administration has done, remotely surprising.

An American Pope vs. an American Empire

There is a profound irony in the fact that the most prominent voice challenging American militarism today belongs to the first American pope. Leo XIV, a 70-year-old from Chicago, and Donald Trump, a 79-year-old from Queens, two white boomers from the same generation who represent jarringly distinct approaches to vast power (Barrow, 2026). They grew up in the same post-war America, lived through the same upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam, and arrived at positions that could not be more opposed.

Trump came of age in the world of New York real estate, where power is measured in money and leverage, and where the only moral question is whether you won or lost. Leo came of age in the Augustinian order, and then in the barrios of Peru, where power is measured in its effect on the poor, and where the only moral question is whether you served or abandoned the vulnerable.

“They’re two white guy boomers but they could not be any more different in their life experiences, in their values, in the way they have chosen to live those values,” said theology professor Natalia Imperatori-Lee. “This is a very stark contrast, and I think an inflection point for American Christianity” (Barrow, 2026).

The clash between them exposes a fracture within the American identity itself. The United States exports power, violence, and form of capitalism that has enriched a tiny elite while immiserating billions. The Vatican, under an American pope, is attempting to export restraint. Leo understands, from his years in Peru, what it means to live in a country that is on the receiving end of Washington’s decisions. He knows what American power looks like from the outside. Trump and his advisers, as Steven Millies, a professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, observed, “think only in terms of transactional politics — who’s for us and who’s against us” (Barrow, 2026). They cannot comprehend a moral framework that exists outside of their own power demands.

The administration’s confusion about Leo is, in this sense, revealing. They assumed that an American pope would be a useful American asset, that shared nationality would translate into shared political interest. They did not understand that Leo’s Americanness is precisely what makes him such a devastating critic. He is not a foreign dignitary offering polite diplomatic concern, but a man from Chicago who reads the New York Times, plays Wordle, and follows American sports (Barrow, 2026). He understands the country’s domestic political crisis from the inside. He has chosen, with full knowledge of what he is doing, to say: this is wrong.

The Refusal That Matters

There are limits on moral authority. The Vatican does not have an army. Pope Leo XIV cannot stop the bombs from falling on Iran, force J.D. Vance to abandon his cynical politics, or make Pete Hegseth understand the blasphemy of his crusader tattoos. The (delicate) ceasefire that took hold in April 2026 was the product of negotiations, not papal intervention.

But in a political landscape dominated by cowardice and complicity, refusal matters. When the Republican Party cheers a man who posts genocidal threats on social media, and the Cabinet applauds a Defense/War Secretary who prays for the eternal damnation of America’s enemies, the Pope’s refusal to bless the war creates friction in the narrative. It makes the administration’s claim to religious authority harder to sustain and gives cover to the American Catholics — and there are millions of them — who are appalled by what is being done in their name and in the name of their faith.

The Trump project relies on the illusion of total consensus, the idea that its actions are not only necessary but righteous. By saying ‘no,’ Leo XIV shatters that illusion. He exposes the administration’s religious rhetoric as a cheap con, and its threats against the Vatican as the desperate flailing of a project that knows it has lost the moral argument.

There is also the question of what the Avignon threat reveals about the administration’s deeper ambitions. Lecaque’s analysis in Religion Dispatches is worth returning to here because the invocation of Avignon is, at its most ambitious, a fantasy of a captive church — an American papacy that would rubber-stamp the administration’s wars, bless its deportations, and provide theological cover for its authoritarianism (Lecaque, 2026). This is Catholic integralism in its most deranged form: not the Church guiding the state, but the state capturing the Church.

The fantasy is farcical, as Lecaque notes. It underestimates the depth of anti-Catholicism in American Protestantism, the independence of the College of Cardinals, and the basic structural reality that the Vatican is a sovereign state that has survived empires far more powerful than the current occupant of the White House. But the fact that someone in the Pentagon apparently thought it was worth invoking tells you something important about the administration’s relationship to power. It does not recognise limits or accept the existence of institutions that it cannot control. When it encounters one, its first instinct is to threaten it.

This is the administration that J.D. Vance serves, and the project that his Catholicism is supposed to dignify. And this is the Pope who has looked at all of it — the war prayers, the genocide threats, the Avignon fantasy — and chose not to kneel.

When a dying empire demands God’s approval for its atrocities, refusal becomes a form of resistance. The most dangerous thing in a war built on the delusion of omnipotence is a voice that resists. Not because the voice has the power to stop the bombs, but because it has the power to name what the bombs are. They are not God’s will. They are not a crusade. They are not righteous. They are what they have always been: the violence of the powerful against the powerless, dressed up in the language of the divine.

Leo XIV knows this. He has spent his life in the places where that violence lands. And the institution he leads has watched empires like this one rise and fall for two millennia — has buried their flags, forgotten their names, and kept going. It has outlasted every tyrant who tried to bend it, silence it, or capture it. In that long reckoning, Donald Trump will not merit a chapter. He will barely be a footnote: filed, forgotten, and unmourned.

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References

Barrow, B. (2026) ‘Trump and Pope Leo are at odds over Iran’, AP News, 10 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/trump-pope-leo-iran-war-relationship-criticism-8473f1d8b8127a77ef94ba2f4ad378fb[Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Jones, S. (2026 ‘Iran Has Become Pete Hegseth’s Holy War’, New York Magazine, 1 April. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/iran-pete-hegseth-holy-war.html [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

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