Letter From Plague Island, June 2026
June 2026
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.
