I'm in the US and I really like reading your posts for many reasons, among which is that they're so well-written and thoughtful. I wonder how much of the discontent with both the center left Labour Party and center right Tories (from a US perspective) has the at its origin the state of the UK economy. How much damage has Brexit done to the UK and has this also prompted a rise in the far right, among people whose economic outcomes and prospects are not what they expected (and not what the previous generational cohort attained)? I think that (along with the usual reactionary positions on social issues) fuels a lot of the anger and (even violence) in US politics. Is it a big factor in the UK?
Thank you, that's kind, and you've put your finger on the right thing. The economics is where this starts, and the order in which it happened is what did the damage.
The fact underneath everything is wage stagnation. British real wages have been close to flat for the best part of two decades. Had pay carried on growing at its pre-2008 rate, the typical worker would be around £11,000 a year better off, a gap the Resolution Foundation calls all but unprecedented in the modern record. The TUC reckons it the longest pay squeeze since the Napoleonic wars, and real wages were not forecast to recover their 2008 level until 2027. You said it exactly: a generation has grown up earning less, in real terms, than the one before it. That had not happened in Britain in living memory.
2008 was a global shock the whole world shared. What came next was a domestic choice. From 2010 the Conservatives chose austerity, and the cuts were not spread evenly. Local council funding fell by 30 to 40 per cent in real terms, and the welfare reforms landed hardest on the places already poorest. This is where your question about the far right gets its sharpest answer. The economist Thiemo Fetzer traced how exposure to those welfare cuts drove the rise of UKIP, and through it the Leave vote; his finding is that the referendum would probably have gone to Remain without austerity. For every pound stripped out of local transfer income, he estimates the local economy contracted by two to two and a half. The grievance was real, and then it was handed a target.
Brexit deepened the wound it claimed to heal. The government's own forecaster, the OBR, puts the long-run hit at 4 per cent of productivity relative to staying in the EU. On an economy of nearly three trillion pounds that works out at roughly £125 billion of lost output and tax revenues lower by something close to £50 billion a year. The cruel part is who was sold it. The regions promised that leaving would answer their decline are not better off; the new trade barriers fell on exactly the places least able to absorb them. A real grievance was given a false cure, and the cure made the patient worse.
Which brings you to now. The discontent you notice with both Labour and the Tories is the duopoly being punished for presiding over the lost decade between them. Reform UK currently leads the national polls, with Labour and the Conservatives tied behind it; in last month's local elections Reform gained so many council seats while Labour lost so many.
The anger turned violent in the summer of 2024, when riots spread across English towns, aimed at asylum hotels and mosques. That is the dangerous turn. The material grievance is genuine and has a documented cause. The diagnosis, though, has been captured by a politics that points the anger downward, at migrants and refugees, rather than at the people who made the decisions that hollowed the places out.
So the American parallel you draw is the right one. Same mechanism, different scenery. A long collapse in what people could reasonably expect, measured against what their parents managed, becomes a reservoir of anger, and the right has been quicker and more ruthless than the left at deciding where to aim it. To answer you plainly: yes, it is the biggest factor we have. The economic damage is the precondition. The far right is what moves into the vacancy when the mainstream parties spend fifteen years insisting the damage either isn't real or can't be helped.
Thank you so much for such a detailed response. Of course, the history of Germany after World War I presents a horrifying example of what can happen in far more extreme economic circumstances. I sincerely hope the center holds, both here and there (apologies to W B Yeats).
You give the people a free pass in how wedded they are to white supremacy- its the only way to explain the reticence to take legal action against elected officials to enforce accountability.
I take the point, but I'd resist the framing slightly. If I write 'the people are wedded to white supremacy' as a single verdict on a single bloc, I've done a version of the thing the article is warning about: replaced individuals with a category and read the category as a sentence. The public isn't one thing. Belfast this week had men going door to door demanding foreigners out, and it also had neighbours sheltering the families those men were hunting. Both are 'the people'.
What I do think is true, and what the piece argues, is that this politics can't function without a receptive audience, and that receptiveness has a history. Empire built a habit of looking down, and that habit didn't die in 1948 or 1997. The sentence about cultures works because enough people were already primed to hear it as obvious. No disagreement there.
On legal action against elected officials, though, I'd point the finger somewhere more specific. The bar for incitement is set high by statute, the CPS treats politicians as radioactive, and Parliament has no interest in fixing either. That's not the public's reticence, it's the state's. Blaming a diffuse national psyche for what is actually a set of identifiable institutional choices makes the problem feel unfixable, and it lets the named individuals who could act off the hook. I'd rather keep the pressure on them.
In paragraph five under the section entitled The Useful Mask, you nail a tactic deployed for many years now by extreme political British unionists in Northern Ireland. A deeply and unapologetic movement of entitled exclusion and vicious racism and misogyny, they have, when backed into a socially excluded corner, by dint of their own social acts of race baiting, victim blaming and terrorising violence, placed amenable middle class,’nice’ unionist women in positions of political or media leadership, to speak for them.
So far, this duplicity has worked every time to convince their middle class conservative voting base that they remain the voice of middle way, common sense and loyally local Northern Ireland.
Nothing could be further from the truth on the DUP poverty enforced loyalist paramilitary run estates. Hence the ease with which Elon Musk can play it both ways in Northern Ireland. Inciting Northern Irish loyalist racist violence whilst claiming to be the voice of Western civilisation.
Of course if the ruling class in either UK’s Westminster or Ireland’s Dáil had not been so ideologically married to hard globalisation and a financial neoliberalisation of all of their societal structures, as well as consistently politically lazy in regard to all things Northern Irish, Musk and his violence inciting political populist colleagues would not have been given such an easy opening to destabilise both countries by harnessing the consequences of these actions. Northern Ireland has increasingly become a socio economic and political tinderbox under its widely corrupt and conflict junky duopoly at Stormont since 2008.
Thank you, this adds a dimension the piece didn't reach and probably should have. The dynamic you describe is the same mechanism wearing different clothes. Where Reform uses a minority messenger to pre-empt the charge of racism, the unionist version uses respectability, the reasonable middle class voice positioned in front of a movement whose character is well understood on the estates it actually runs. In both cases the messenger's function is to make the question impolite before it can be asked.
Your point about the structural opening is the one I'd underline. Musk and his imitators didn't create the conditions in Northern Ireland, they harvested them. Two governments treated the place as a managed problem rather than a society, a duopoly at Stormont learned that antagonism pays better than delivery, and the deprivation left behind became raw material for anyone with reach and an appetite for fire. This week was the harvest arriving. The article argued that ranking precedes removal. Northern Ireland is a reminder that the ranking has been institutional there for generations, which is why the transfer from post to street happens faster than anywhere else in these islands.
Yes. Clearly explained. I have become too embedded here physically and emotionally these past three decades to be able to write about the political and socio structural imbalances and the increasing dangers of their consequences on the ground with such erudition. That takes a rare combination of distance and compassion.
I'm in the US and I really like reading your posts for many reasons, among which is that they're so well-written and thoughtful. I wonder how much of the discontent with both the center left Labour Party and center right Tories (from a US perspective) has the at its origin the state of the UK economy. How much damage has Brexit done to the UK and has this also prompted a rise in the far right, among people whose economic outcomes and prospects are not what they expected (and not what the previous generational cohort attained)? I think that (along with the usual reactionary positions on social issues) fuels a lot of the anger and (even violence) in US politics. Is it a big factor in the UK?
Thank you, that's kind, and you've put your finger on the right thing. The economics is where this starts, and the order in which it happened is what did the damage.
The fact underneath everything is wage stagnation. British real wages have been close to flat for the best part of two decades. Had pay carried on growing at its pre-2008 rate, the typical worker would be around £11,000 a year better off, a gap the Resolution Foundation calls all but unprecedented in the modern record. The TUC reckons it the longest pay squeeze since the Napoleonic wars, and real wages were not forecast to recover their 2008 level until 2027. You said it exactly: a generation has grown up earning less, in real terms, than the one before it. That had not happened in Britain in living memory.
2008 was a global shock the whole world shared. What came next was a domestic choice. From 2010 the Conservatives chose austerity, and the cuts were not spread evenly. Local council funding fell by 30 to 40 per cent in real terms, and the welfare reforms landed hardest on the places already poorest. This is where your question about the far right gets its sharpest answer. The economist Thiemo Fetzer traced how exposure to those welfare cuts drove the rise of UKIP, and through it the Leave vote; his finding is that the referendum would probably have gone to Remain without austerity. For every pound stripped out of local transfer income, he estimates the local economy contracted by two to two and a half. The grievance was real, and then it was handed a target.
Brexit deepened the wound it claimed to heal. The government's own forecaster, the OBR, puts the long-run hit at 4 per cent of productivity relative to staying in the EU. On an economy of nearly three trillion pounds that works out at roughly £125 billion of lost output and tax revenues lower by something close to £50 billion a year. The cruel part is who was sold it. The regions promised that leaving would answer their decline are not better off; the new trade barriers fell on exactly the places least able to absorb them. A real grievance was given a false cure, and the cure made the patient worse.
Which brings you to now. The discontent you notice with both Labour and the Tories is the duopoly being punished for presiding over the lost decade between them. Reform UK currently leads the national polls, with Labour and the Conservatives tied behind it; in last month's local elections Reform gained so many council seats while Labour lost so many.
The anger turned violent in the summer of 2024, when riots spread across English towns, aimed at asylum hotels and mosques. That is the dangerous turn. The material grievance is genuine and has a documented cause. The diagnosis, though, has been captured by a politics that points the anger downward, at migrants and refugees, rather than at the people who made the decisions that hollowed the places out.
So the American parallel you draw is the right one. Same mechanism, different scenery. A long collapse in what people could reasonably expect, measured against what their parents managed, becomes a reservoir of anger, and the right has been quicker and more ruthless than the left at deciding where to aim it. To answer you plainly: yes, it is the biggest factor we have. The economic damage is the precondition. The far right is what moves into the vacancy when the mainstream parties spend fifteen years insisting the damage either isn't real or can't be helped.
Thank you so much for such a detailed response. Of course, the history of Germany after World War I presents a horrifying example of what can happen in far more extreme economic circumstances. I sincerely hope the center holds, both here and there (apologies to W B Yeats).
You give the people a free pass in how wedded they are to white supremacy- its the only way to explain the reticence to take legal action against elected officials to enforce accountability.
I take the point, but I'd resist the framing slightly. If I write 'the people are wedded to white supremacy' as a single verdict on a single bloc, I've done a version of the thing the article is warning about: replaced individuals with a category and read the category as a sentence. The public isn't one thing. Belfast this week had men going door to door demanding foreigners out, and it also had neighbours sheltering the families those men were hunting. Both are 'the people'.
What I do think is true, and what the piece argues, is that this politics can't function without a receptive audience, and that receptiveness has a history. Empire built a habit of looking down, and that habit didn't die in 1948 or 1997. The sentence about cultures works because enough people were already primed to hear it as obvious. No disagreement there.
On legal action against elected officials, though, I'd point the finger somewhere more specific. The bar for incitement is set high by statute, the CPS treats politicians as radioactive, and Parliament has no interest in fixing either. That's not the public's reticence, it's the state's. Blaming a diffuse national psyche for what is actually a set of identifiable institutional choices makes the problem feel unfixable, and it lets the named individuals who could act off the hook. I'd rather keep the pressure on them.
Thank you for this astute and clarifying article.
In paragraph five under the section entitled The Useful Mask, you nail a tactic deployed for many years now by extreme political British unionists in Northern Ireland. A deeply and unapologetic movement of entitled exclusion and vicious racism and misogyny, they have, when backed into a socially excluded corner, by dint of their own social acts of race baiting, victim blaming and terrorising violence, placed amenable middle class,’nice’ unionist women in positions of political or media leadership, to speak for them.
So far, this duplicity has worked every time to convince their middle class conservative voting base that they remain the voice of middle way, common sense and loyally local Northern Ireland.
Nothing could be further from the truth on the DUP poverty enforced loyalist paramilitary run estates. Hence the ease with which Elon Musk can play it both ways in Northern Ireland. Inciting Northern Irish loyalist racist violence whilst claiming to be the voice of Western civilisation.
Of course if the ruling class in either UK’s Westminster or Ireland’s Dáil had not been so ideologically married to hard globalisation and a financial neoliberalisation of all of their societal structures, as well as consistently politically lazy in regard to all things Northern Irish, Musk and his violence inciting political populist colleagues would not have been given such an easy opening to destabilise both countries by harnessing the consequences of these actions. Northern Ireland has increasingly become a socio economic and political tinderbox under its widely corrupt and conflict junky duopoly at Stormont since 2008.
Thank you, this adds a dimension the piece didn't reach and probably should have. The dynamic you describe is the same mechanism wearing different clothes. Where Reform uses a minority messenger to pre-empt the charge of racism, the unionist version uses respectability, the reasonable middle class voice positioned in front of a movement whose character is well understood on the estates it actually runs. In both cases the messenger's function is to make the question impolite before it can be asked.
Your point about the structural opening is the one I'd underline. Musk and his imitators didn't create the conditions in Northern Ireland, they harvested them. Two governments treated the place as a managed problem rather than a society, a duopoly at Stormont learned that antagonism pays better than delivery, and the deprivation left behind became raw material for anyone with reach and an appetite for fire. This week was the harvest arriving. The article argued that ranking precedes removal. Northern Ireland is a reminder that the ranking has been institutional there for generations, which is why the transfer from post to street happens faster than anywhere else in these islands.
Yes. Clearly explained. I have become too embedded here physically and emotionally these past three decades to be able to write about the political and socio structural imbalances and the increasing dangers of their consequences on the ground with such erudition. That takes a rare combination of distance and compassion.
Thank you.