Letter from Plague Island, 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:
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
