I wrote last week that Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe are dragging Britain down a sort of “death spiral.” As they spar for the keys to the far-right kingdom – a largely online realm of ethno-nationalists – they’re dragging the rest of us down with them.

Farage provided us with an excellent case study of the cycle in action this week. His ‘emergency address’ on Tuesday saw him plumb new depths of depravity – almost certainly an appeal to the far-right fervour brewing amongst Lowe’s tribe.

The Reform leader is caught in a storm of questions about his crypto benefactors and the past conduct of his Makerfield candidate. But of course he didn’t address any of that. The “emergency,” Farage tells us, is that white people are under attack.

Despite passionate pleas for civility from the victim’s family, Farage weaponised the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak by a Sikh man. He presented the police’s poor response to the murder as iron clad evidence of “two-tier policing” and “anti-white prejudice.” He called out for a response of “pure, cold rage”, telling the public that “White Lives Matter.”

It’s an escalation on an existing theme. Reform has been on a crusade against so-called “two-tier policing” for some time. The concept is, of course, completely ridiculous. This country is notoriously quick to round up Palestine protestors and surprisingly lenient with events like Tommy Robinson’s recent hate parade. Not that facts hold any power here.

The other false insinuation, other than police being biased against white people, is that this kind of violence is inexorably linked to migration. Sikhs, interestingly, have traditionally been a sort of model minority for many on the right – Tommy Robinson has repeatedly praised the Sikh community – but it would appear that desperate times call for someone new to be thrown under the bus.

Farage’s address teleported me back to late 2010s and early 2020s. When I was living in Texas, ‘White Lives Matter’ was a rallying cry for neo-Confederates and other unsavoury types. It was then a direct response to the growing Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and it paired up neatly with silly arguments about “white genocide” and calls to make America a white ethnostate.

Farage's comparison of Henry Nowak to George Floyd was particularly revealing. When Floyd's murder ignited the Black Lives Matter movement, Farage treated it as a dangerous cultural contagion and compared its activists to the Taliban. Now he reaches for the same imagery himself.

So in summary: Farage’s rhetoric is often couched in dog-whistles, a subtle game of winks and nods. But this one was more like a racist fog horn. The radical Restore Britain gang have been castigating the Reform leader for his perceived weakness on identity politics - and this seems like an attempt to tell them that he’s heard them.

So Lowe, of course, had to go further. Restore Britain pledged that it would summarily execute Nowak’s killer Vickrum Digwa and deport his “foreign family.”

“Laws will change, the country will change, everything will change,” Lowe wrote on X. Elon Musk quoted his tweet, adding that “it is this or death.”

In the wake of the frenzy, the far-right descended on the streets of Southampton where eleven police officers were injured. The publicity around Nowak’s murder has been like jet fuel, Neo-Nazis and Tommy Robinson’s clique leveraging the scandal as a recruitment tool.

We’ve seen the violence that can erupt from this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric – it can very easily spill out into the streets. Once politicians start telling people that they are victims of a vast conspiracy against them, that the authorities are covering up the truth, and that the country is being stolen from them, it becomes increasingly difficult to control what happens next.

For Farage and Lowe, those drastic potential consequences are completely secondary to their battle for control over the rising populist tide. They don’t really care.

The danger of the "two-tier policing" narrative is that it can easily become self-reinforcing. If far-right activists are arrested, that supposedly proves the authorities are targeting them. If they are left alone, it proves the authorities are weak. Either way, the grievance carries on.

Farage and Lowe both benefit from a political environment in which every confrontation, every arrest and every public controversy can be folded back into the same story of victimhood and betrayal.

Without a fundamental rethink to our political system, this kind of race-based politics will just get more and more normalised. Reform and Restore’s race to the bottom this week has seen the national media talking about “two-tier policing.” The public discourse is shifting towards their framing of the world.

I wrote last week that putting an end to this death spiral once and for all will involve bringing back mutual trust. To build a democratic counter force that can win hearts and minds, relegating extremists back to the fringes of politics.

But to do that will require a confrontation with a broken system. A system that fails to solve people’s actual problems, ignores entire blocs of voters, and bends to the whims of uber-wealthy bankrollers like Elon Musk and Christopher Harborne.

Until that day, the far-right cascade will continue.

Having lived in the States and written about American politics for years, the amount of money involved in British donation scandals can sometimes feel surprisingly small. The hard reality for us at the moment is that the bankrollers of US politics are breathtakingly well-resourced. They view Britain’s politicians as an absolute bargain. And they’re looking for a new venture.

Sixteen years ago, a key US Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) solidified the idea that money was a form of political speech. Those who said it at the time were largely ignored, but it truly set the stage for a Presidency like Donald Trump’s.

Fast forward fourteen years, and the total election expenditure during the US’ 2024 cycle was a whopping $14.8 billion (roughly £11 billion). It’s the second highest of all time, beaten only by an inflation-adjusted $18.3 billion (£14.6 billion) spent in 2020. These are astronomical sums of money for political campaigns – more than any other country on Earth.

The United States is about seven times richer than the UK by GDP and about five times larger by population. But its federal elections in 2024 consumed more than 115 times as much money as Britain's 2024 general election campaign (£94.5 million).

At first glance, that disparity might sound reassuring. You might say that Britain has seemingly avoided the runaway arms race of American campaign finance so far. But our figures are increasing with each election at pace. The opposite conclusion may ultimately be closer to the truth.

Because British politics is so much cheaper, it is also far easier to influence. Indeed, many of Britain’s most potent donation scandals would barely register in American politics.

Reform’s former Welsh leader Nathan Gill was bribed by pro-Kremlin interests for a paltry £40,000. Going further back, Neil Hamilton's career was effectively destroyed over allegations involving payments of roughly £2,000 per parliamentary question.

Even Christopher Harborne’s £5 million gift to Farage – unprecedented and absolutely staggering in British politics – pales in comparison to the $277 million Trump received from Elon Musk or the $100 million he received from Israeli billionaire Miriam Adelson.

Britain offers a better return on investment.

As Oliver Bullough, author of the very good book Butler to the World puts it: US billionaires could buy Britain for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas. “And, let’s face it, that money wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems.”

If Farage (or Rupert Lowe) are as good an investment as Trump, they could open new, unregulated markets for fraud-laden cryptocurrencies. They could slash regulations, dismantle public assets, weaken labour protections, and appoint sympathetic figures to key regulatory bodies. And best of all, they can be bought on the cheap.

The great danger is that our political system is utterly ill-equipped to stop any of this from happening. We’re barrelling towards outright oligarchy, and that risk is no longer abstract. You can look at Trump’s America and see it clearly. Once an oligarch class becomes entrenched, they have a tendency to disassemble democratic safeguards and accountability mechanisms. They can be nigh on impossible to dislodge.

So we’re sat here at this critical juncture, our governing party squabbling within its ranks, utterly distracted from the impending tidal wave poised to hit our shores.

How do we stem the tide?

MPs are working to strengthen the tepid campaign finance reforms in the Government’s Representation of the People Bill (RPB). The measures currently proposed, including a £100,000 donation cap for Brits living abroad and a moratorium on cryptocurrency donations, are certainly welcome. But they’re just not going to be enough.

MPs are putting forward a range of amendments, most notably a proposal to limit annual donations to £1 million a year for all British donors. Others argue for restrictions on cash donations from specific types of donor – fossil fuel companies, property developers, cryptocurrency companies, and companies attached to public contracts. All of these are welcome in my view.

And we’ve long argued that a stronger Electoral Commission – which never really recovered after Boris Johnson stripped its powers in 2022 – is a necessity. What good are campaign finance laws if they’re not being comprehensively enforced and not properly deterring bad actors?

Bullough, who knows a thing or two about how dark money works in Britain, argues we should go even further. Only people on the electoral register can vote, he writes, so they should be the only ones eligible to donate. No more shell companies, no more unincorporated associations. He suggests donations be made in sterling with proper background checks (to prevent ineligible individuals donating by proxy), capped at £100,000 per elector.

He also points to a key avenue of influence-buying that is seldom discussed in these debates: the media contract. GB News and Elon Musk’s X are bankrolling politicians on the far-right. They’re another channel through which billionaire cash can enter our political system.

In essence, we need a system so simple, so air-tight, that it can stand guard against a class of people who seek to own the world. Our outdated 1990s-style system of regulation isn’t going to last long in the new digital dark money frontier we find ourselves in. It’s time for a comprehensive update. Starting with this RPB. And not stopping after that.

Yes, Nigel Farage and his former disciple Rupert Lowe have come to blows again, battling for custody of an angry little populist fiefdom.

Each accuses the other of being a fraud and a sell-out – accusations that may contain more truth than either would care to admit. So the temptation to say “Let Them Fight” and leave it at that is almost overwhelming.

Polls show that Lowe’s Restore Britain, while far smaller than Reform, could act as a spoiler for Farage in the forthcoming (and absolutely pivotal) Makerfield by-election. This schism threatens to loosen Farage’s iron-clad grip on the British right.

But zoom out, and it’s also a symptom of something deeper. A chaotic cascade of grievance politics. Britain will keep churning out ever more noxious far-right mutations until we have a political system capable of actually fixing people’s problems.

Let me explain.

Farage outflanked the deeply unpopular Conservatives by grasping something the traditional right never could: in an age of economic instability and collapsing public trust, passionate insurgents eat pencil-pushers for breakfast.

So instead of talking about marginal tax rates or fiscal frameworks, he castigated woke metropolitan elites in their ivory towers. He built a hit-list of permanent political enemies – migrants, activists, judges, journalists, academics, “globalists,” the BBC. He convinced a growing audience these are malign forces never to be reasoned or compromised with. He offered up incredibly simplistic solutions targeted at people who can’t fight back. He spoke in fiery tones of betrayal, of civil war, of a burning reckoning just over the horizon.

And crucially, he changed not just the message but the medium. Farage abandoned the stiff choreography of traditional politics for something more intimate and addictive. He roused his audience with frenzied monologues filmed on his smartphone. He broke the establishment’s decorum and called people rude names in public. He fed content-hungry platforms like TikTok and ‘X’ with viral retorts and fear-mongering videos.

Say what you want about the right-wing populist playbook, but it works. The trouble comes later – when they actually have to govern. Farage isn’t quite there yet.

But with the help of wealthy donors like Christopher Harborne, a compliant media ecosystem, and a political establishment too cowardly to challenge his framing, Farage transformed himself from fringe demagogue into the gravitational centre of the British right.

The irony is that Rupert Lowe is now deploying the exact same tactics against Farage. And Farage has no idea how to fend them off.

Lowe casts Reform as weak, compromised and contaminated by Farage’s ego. He positions himself as the “real” insurgent speaking uncomfortable truths that Farage no longer dares articulate. He escalates the rhetoric. He pushes further right. He promises a purer confrontation with Britain’s enemies, a more authentic rebellion against the so-called system – which he and Farage are of course both very much part of.

Backed by Elon Musk’s vast algorithmic power, Lowe believes he alone will bring the right’s populist crusade to glorious fruition. He seems to think he alone can wage the imaginary battle for the future of Western civilisation – against Islam, Wokeness, and whatever else keeps his followers angry – that so many on the right now treat as holy scripture.

Farage doesn’t know how to deal with Lowe because Lowe doesn’t fit into his operating model. Farage designed his machine to attack mainstream politics from the outside. He never built a firewall for an attack from his right flank. And now his party potentially stands to lose a pivotal election in Makerfield because of it.

But don't mistake this for the far-right eating itself. Lowe will fail, or he won't. Farage will adapt, or he won't. Either way, the machine keeps churning, and the finished product is only likely to be more extreme, more outrageous, more committed to the agendas of powerful donors.

Because the underlying rot here isn’t about Farage and Lowe as individuals. It’s the political system that propels people like them to positions of power. A system that fails to solve people’s actual problems, ignores entire blocs of voters, and bends to the whims of uber-wealthy bankrollers like Elon Musk and Christopher Harborne.

As I’ve said, it’s clear that we need a break from the old regime. We need nothing short of a comprehensive democratic revival. A historic restoration of our public institutions. It’s long, hard work to build a political system people can trust. But it must be done.

Because if we don’t find a way towards mutual trust, towards functioning public services, towards affordable bills and rents – we’ll be left with an ever more extreme procession of self-interested egomaniacs.

When 21st-Century Influence Meets 20th-Century Rules

Elon Musk’s intervention in British politics yesterday - he reposted a six-minute video by Rupert Lowe, Leader of the far-right party, Restore Britain (viewed 26m times at the time of writing) - offers a stark illustration of how modern influence operates beyond the reach of traditional democratic safeguards. While the world’s richest man can reshape political narratives through algorithmic amplification and strategic content suppression, Britain’s electoral regulators remain equipped for an era of paper leaflets and public meetings. This mismatch between technological capability and regulatory capacity represents one of the gravest threats to democratic integrity in our time.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The stakes could not be higher. Everyone now knows that social media platforms set the political narrative, fundamentally altering how democratic discourse operates. And our democratic institutions struggle to keep up with the pace of change. The speed of technological development has coincided with institutional confidence crisis, enabling foreign states and ultra-wealthy individuals to destabilise our democratic institutions.

When platform owners can amplify or suppress content in real-time during critical political moments, they wield influence on a scale that dwarfs anything our antiquated regulatory systems were designed to address. A single algorithmic tweak can direct political messaging to millions of voters instantly, instantly shaping their understanding of political events without any meaningful oversight. This is happening right now and it is shaping how our next election will play out.

The New Reality of Digital Influence

The mechanics of modern electoral influence bear little resemblance to the campaign finance laws designed to regulate them. Current electoral law focuses on traditional donation and spending limits but cannot regulate platform owners’ ability to amplify or suppress content during elections. Posting a political leaflet to a million voters would cost millions of pounds - directing a tweet to many more costs virtually nothing. And while politicians are bound to declare donations above modest thresholds, platform owners operate in a regulatory vacuum where their influence-shaping decisions face no electoral oversight.

AI-generated content and algorithmic amplification present new opportunities for electoral interference that current regulations do not address. These technologies operate at machine speed, capable of generating and distributing persuasive content faster than human fact-checkers can respond. During election periods, when public attention is at its peak and decisions are made rapidly, this speed advantage becomes decisive.

The asymmetry is profound. Traditional media face relatively strict rules about political advertising, disclosure requirements, and editorial balance during election periods. Digital platforms, despite their far greater reach and influence, operate under minimal constraints. They can serve different political content to different users, making detection of bias nearly impossible, while maintaining plausible deniability about editorial intent.

How Outdated Systems Enable Modern Manipulation

Britain’s regulatory response to these challenges has been woefully inadequate. The Electoral Commission has publicly criticised the government’s claimed ‘zero-tolerance approach to foreign interference’, warning of significant loopholes in new legislation. When even the government’s own electoral watchdog disputes official claims about regulatory robustness, we know we have a significant problem.

Recent legislative efforts have missed the mark entirely. The Representation of the People Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, has been criticised for containing ‘nothing much that would improve the state of online campaigning’ despite explosive growth in digital political advertising. While digital political advertising has exploded in both volume and sophistication, the regulatory framework remains focused on traditional campaign methods.

Current regulators lack real-time monitoring capabilities for platform-based influence operations, creating dangerous regulatory blind spots. And this is not just a problem with resourcing - though resourcing is a factor - it is a problem of fundamental design. Our electoral oversight was built for visible, traceable activities: printed materials, broadcast advertisements, public meetings. Digital influence operates through opaque algorithms, micro-targeted messaging, and platform-mediated interactions that leave minimal public trace.

The inadequacy of enforcement mechanisms became clear in recent cases. The Nathan Gill scandal revealed how our politics can be influenced by hostile foreign states. And just how inadequate our existing enforcement mechanisms are. When electoral violations are detected, often months or years after the fact, the penalties are often woefully out of proportion to the potential benefits of manipulation. And the damage has been done. The burglars have long gone with your telly by the time the police arrive.

The Evidence of Regulatory Failure

The transparency gap between traditional and digital campaigning exposes the system’s fundamental flaws. Social media platforms are now so powerful that they can bulldoze any agenda being set by more traditional - and regulated - political activities. Yet transparency requirements for digital political messaging remain minimal. While newspaper political content must include clear attribution and funding sources, social media political content can be promoted with minimal disclosure requirements.

This creates perverse incentives. Sophisticated actors quickly learn that influence exercised through platform control faces minimal scrutiny compared to traditional campaign activities. Why bother with processes that require mountains of paperwork to record, track and declare donations when you can simply shape political narratives through algorithmic manipulation? Spending limits are an irrelevance when you can amplify preferred messages through opaque and virtually costless recommendation systems.

The Musk intervention illustrates these dynamics perfectly. His ability to influence British political discourse operates almost entirely outside traditional electoral regulation. He can promote certain political content to millions of users, suppress opposing viewpoints, and shape trending topics - all without triggering any meaningful oversight mechanisms.

What Democratic Defence Requires

Effective regulation for the digital age demands several fundamental shifts. First, we need real-time monitoring systems capable of detecting algorithmic manipulation, at least during election periods, if not constantly. This means more than just providing our regulatory bodies with legal authority. They must have the technological capability and the resources required to use that authority effectively.

Second, platform transparency requirements must match the scale of influence these companies wield over democratic discourse. If platforms shape political narratives, they must face commensurate disclosure obligations. This includes algorithmic auditing, content amplification reporting, and clear attribution for all political content.

Third, regulatory frameworks must address AI-generated content and algorithmic amplification as electoral interventions in their own right. The current focus on paid political advertising misses the vast majority of political influence that platforms exercise through their core functions.

Finally, enforcement powers must match the speed and scale of modern influence campaigns. Post-election investigations of pre-election manipulation serve little democratic purpose. Real-time detection and response capabilities are essential.

The Choice We Face

We have some important decisions to make. We can continue pretending that 20th-century regulations can govern 21st-century influence, watching our democratic discourse become increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated manipulation, often by foreign actors, many of them openly hostile to our national interests. Or we can acknowledge that technological change demands institutional change and act now to put it in place.

The latest Musk intervention should serve as a genuine wake-up call. We should not simply tut and roll our eyes, as is our tendency in Britain. As AI capabilities expand and platform influence deepens, the gap between technological possibility and regulatory capacity will only widen. The question is whether we choose to close that gap while we still can, or whether we allow democratic discourse to be shaped by whoever commands the most sophisticated influence technology.

Our democratic institutions have adapted before - to radio, to television, to 24-hour mass media. The digital age presents challenges of greater complexity and speed, but the fundamental principle remains unchanged: democratic discourse requires effective democratic oversight. The alternative is rule by algorithms, accountable to no one but the billionaires who own them.

You’ve probably seen this week’s news splashes, read the sweaty palmed op-eds or seen the former cabinet ministers doing the talk show rounds. They’re all saying the same thing: “Britain is becoming ungovernable”.

Now on the surface, it can seem like they have a good reason to say something like that.

Since 2016, Britain has had six Prime Ministers, eight chancellors and nine foreign secretaries – with a new premiership already looking increasingly likely. In just ten years, the country has churned through almost as many leaders as it did in the nearly four decades between Thatcher entering Downing Street and the Brexit referendum.

Turbulent indeed. But where the commentariat and many of the politicians diagnose the electorate with a terminal case of rowdiness, there’s a far, far simpler truth here – one those same people are incredibly reluctant to admit.

The people and the institutions that make up Britain’s political apparatus have completely lost the public’s trust. And you really don’t need a doctorate in political science to understand why.

We’ve got a first-past-the-post voting system that throws people’s votes out the window and puts only a select few constituencies in the spotlight. The rest be damned.

A lobbying industrial complex whose business model involves crowding out the aspirations of ordinary people to make way for the whims of billionaires.

A routine political habit of making promises to the public that aren’t kept – or worse, of neglecting to address people’s needs at all.

And perhaps worst of all: we have a calcified and out-of-touch political class that benefits from all of this and can’t ever possibly understand what the public is so upset about.

It sure has its problems, but Britain is a country with a robust civic and democratic tradition. It’s immensely governable. People still join associations, volunteer, petition, leaflet, fundraise, sit through planning meetings, serve as councillors, form campaign groups, write angry letters, and queue patiently outside polling stations in the drizzling rain. So many of us still believe in the power of democracy.

The message that Britain has sent premiership after crumbling premiership is not that we want out of democracy – it’s that we want in. People want a part to play in the crucial decisions about the future of their communities and their country. They’re tired of being dishonestly performed at during the campaign and then managed from above after polling day.

And instead of confronting that genuine democratic failure honestly, much of the Westminster establishment has chosen an easier explanation: blame the public. Blame voters for being too angry, too volatile, too irrational to govern.

What has collapsed is not the public’s appetite for participation, but their confidence that the existing political system is capable of translating that participation into meaningful power.

Westminster increasingly resembles a sealed machine which absorbs public pressure without ever fundamentally responding to it. Governments rotate in and out while the underlying settlement remains oddly untouched: over-centralised, opaque, short-termist and insulated from meaningful accountability. It’s no wonder people tire of them so quickly.

People notice when their devolved nations and regions – who have long been promised a fair shake – are still treated like administrative inconveniences.

They notice when Parliament can find limitless energy for internal psychodrama but suddenly becomes paralysed when confronted with housing shortages, crumbling public services or collapsing local economies.

They notice when politicians speak endlessly about “hard-working families” while constructing and defending a political economy in which asset wealth matters far more than work itself.

So when Westminster insiders lament that Britain has become impossible to govern, they’re really complaining about how hard it is to win over public consent without fixing Britain’s democracy or addressing the issues people care about. They’re blaming the patient for the disease.

The lesson, then, for our self-satisfied political-media class is simple: listen to people and change those systems. Cure this affliction. You cannot indefinitely run a twenty-first century society through institutions that increasingly resemble closed off old boys’ clubs. At some point, the country naturally starts pushing back.

And no, the cure for distrust is not better or more efficient management of the same insulated institutions that produced the distrust in the first place. People want a break from the old regime.

Pretending this crisis can be managed without meaningful democratic reform will simply continue producing more Nigel Farages and Rupert Lowes – entrepreneurs of political distrust feeding off institutions too arrogant to notice their own decay.

The cure is the same as it always was: distribute power more widely, scrap FPTP and make representation fairer, strengthen local democracy, reduce the stranglehold of money and patronage on political life, and rebuild institutions that people can genuinely see themselves reflected in.

It’s certainly not an easy task. But it is achievable.

And if we don’t want to discover what a truly ungovernable country looks like, it’s our only path forward.

I strongly commend the Prime Minister for blocking eleven far-right instigators from attending the Divide the Kingdom march organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) yesterday.

But it comes tragically late in the game. Robinson’s politics - panic about migration, national decline and demographic “replacement” - has steadily seeped into the mainstream. And Starmer himself has embraced and abetted the broken Westminster political system that has permitted the far-right to fester.

Starmer was right to bar Robinson allies like Filip DeWinter (a Flemish nationalist with an affinity for Nazi slogans and iconography), Valentina Gomez (a far-right Colombian-American influencer who opened her speech last year with “England for the English”), or Joey Mannarino (a US influencer who calls for “remigration” - the forced removal of all non-whites).

And he was correct to describe the march as hateful and divisive. Flyers yesterday called to “secure a future for white people” (eerily close to the Nazi’s infamous 14 words) and placards read “stop white replacement.” Speakers described Muslims and migrants as civilisational and demographic out-groups that could never be British, and they roused the crowd with thinly-veiled threats of civil war.

I’ll accept that there were probably people at that march who were simply misled or manipulated. Frustrated about politics and fed a pack of lies. But I will extend no such courtesy to any of the speakers or organisers.

Robinson has essentially led a trojan horse into the heart of British politics. His movement claims it’s protecting “our women” and “our streets,” that it’s promoting “national unity.” Talking heads will say they have “legitimate concerns about migration” or "genuine critiques of Islamic culture.”

But their defining belief is that different ethnicities cannot co-exist. Like the BNP crossed with 11th century crusaders, they see the world as a civilisational clash between “The West” (white people) and hostile, anti-modern outsiders. They are consumed by a paranoid obsession with racial demographics, and champion a performative cruelty toward migrants, minorities and the multicultural life of modern Britain itself.

And while it masquerades as a grassroots uprising, it’s all astro-turfed to hell by big bankrollers like the right-wing American financier Robert Shillman and everyone’s favourite white nationalist billionaire Elon Musk.

For all of those reasons, the Prime Minister’s belated intervention this weekend was welcome. But if he really sees this as a “fight for the soul of the country” as he claims, he needs to acknowledge that his premiership has enriched the toxic political atmosphere Robinson and Farage thrive in - it helped that trojan horse make it through the gates.

It was just last November when Robinson himself celebrated and publicly endorsed Starmer’s hardline immigration policy. “The Overton window has been obliterated,” Robinson cheered. “Well done patriots!”

Much to the delight of Robinson, Farage, Rupert Lowe, and others of that ilk, nuance and compassion was all but eradicated from the national immigration debate under Starmer and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Labour adopted the policy and rhetoric of the populist right: “smash the gangs”, tougher deportations, endless rhetoric about borders, control and national decline.

And they didn’t do it for ideological reasons.

They ceded that ground because it was what the hollow game of Westminster politics commanded them to do. It was a cynical, consultant-brained political calculus. And the math was wrong, too - they could never beat the nativists at their own game.

Under First-Past-The-Post, modern British politics has become a frantic competition for a relatively small number of culturally conservative swing voters in post-industrial constituencies. An entire political apparatus - strategists, lobbyists, and consultants - has been erected around that narrow contest. A lot of voters are just left out in the cold - and become ripe for the picking by far-right opportunists.

The bigger problem is that consultant-driven and donor-oriented parties no longer attempt to transform public opinion or articulate coherent moral visions. They mirror anxieties back at the electorate in focus-grouped fragments: tougher borders, bigger flags, crueller slogans, more enemies at the gate.

I remember last summer when Starmer wholeheartedly embraced the online “Raise the Colours” phenomenon - people plastering St George’s and Union flags absolutely everywhere. Starmer thought he was “reclaiming patriotism” (a worthy endeavour), but in practice he just lent legitimacy to a campaign organised by far-right nationalists.

Because it goes against the conventional wisdom of Westminster strategy, Starmer did not truly seek to reclaim the flag - to articulate a deeper, better democratic vision of what loving one’s country actually means. That would be too risky under the perverse incentives of FPTP.

So in the twilight days of his premiership, Starmer has taken a welcome stand. But he still seems to think the far-right is a simple problem of bad people saying ugly things. He doesn’t acknowledge that Robinson is a morbid symptom of the political system he himself inhabits: FPTP-oriented, consultant-driven, donor-pleasing, devoid of moral nerve.

And until that system is fixed - until our leaders can look beyond this hollow politics, build more functional institutions, and make the moral case for decency - the battle for the soul of the nation will rage on.

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The pundits and the politicians are straining to explain last week’s political earthquake. Almost all of them are neglecting an essential point.

Several competing narratives have emerged to explain Labour’s catastrophic losses and Reform’s gains in the local elections. The FPTP-brained among us still see British politics as a football match between Labour and Reform UK. They see red councils flipping turquoise and conclude that Labour still is not doing enough to win over anti-migrant voters. (Will they ever?)

Others recognise that Britain is now in a multi-party battle royale, exacerbated by an electoral system designed for two dominant blocs. In this telling, Labour was pincered on all sides. It’s coalition drifted to Greens and independents, while Farage consolidated the right. Under FPTP, Labour lost votes to its left and seats to its right.

There’s truth to that. But the prevailing narratives both seem to focus their attention on voters already inside of the electorate. What if there’s a more profound story to tell about the rise of Reform UK and the disintegration of traditional parties?

‘DNV’ Turns Out

The 2026 local elections saw a far higher turnout than those of May 2024 – nearly 11% higher.

The chart below, a data-driven estimate of how voters switched parties between ‘24 and ‘26, does show Labour shedding votes to the Greens and the Conservatives to Reform UK. Part of the picture is missing because the smaller parties and independents are not included.

But it’s enough to reveal the elephant in the room: a big proportion of Reform’s 2026 voter base did not vote in 2024.

Why is that important, you ask? It would appear that Reform UK – already known to perform well amongst the politically disengaged – is bringing people in from the sidelines. Rather than simply trading voters around, Nigel Farage is winning over those who feel left out and excluded from politics. He’s reshaping the electorate.

None of this means cultural issues or economic grievances are irrelevant, nor that Reform’s support comes primarily from non-voters. But focusing exclusively on voter switching risks missing a deeper transformation: the re-entry of politically alienated people into UK politics.

Meanwhile, Labour is losing people who should be engaged. Neglecting their own supporters and chasing their opponents, surprisingly, hasn’t panned out well as a strategy. It doesn’t exactly radiate self-respect or authority.

And many of the voters they push away seem liable to become raw material for the next wave of anti-system politics.

A Forgotten Bloc

I’d be remiss not to remind you that this is precisely what Donald Trump did in the United States.

If ‘Did Not Vote’ was a candidate, it would have won nearly every US Presidential election since 1960. Trump activated a cohort of people who have long been invisible to those inside America’s political-media bubble. People that America’s broken, billionaire-funded FPTP politics long ignored. Our political system has a similar affliction.

For those that see through Trump and Farage’s brand of populism, it’s easy to blame those voters. To cast them as misled or reactionary. Indeed, the populist right do not have a strong track record of actually fixing those people’s problems. But there are a few things to remember about how we got here.

Our political system – especially FPTP – has rendered the aspirations and desires of people outside a select few swing seats as basically irrelevant. Parties increasingly take their voter bases for granted, speaking to them only in the language of managerial tweaks or “we’re the lesser of two evils” arithmetic.

In safe seats, people saw that their votes changed nothing. ‘Sensible’ political strategists essentially ignore them. Donors’ whims have been routinely privileged over constituent’s desires. In Westminster, the same narrow political class rotated in and out of office while living standards stagnated and public trust collapsed.

For years, millions of people have believed that politics was not really for them. Not because they were apathetic, but because they saw no meaningful route to influence. The table was tilted, the game rigged.

In a world in which every political party is telling them their votes aren’t wanted, they’ve found a force telling them that they are. That’s something that anyone who doesn’t want to see a Reform government will eventually have to confront. So far, the powers that be are refusing change and casting more dsillusioned voters into the populist right’s net.

So it’s not just about the internal dynamics of partisan politics. It’s not about blaming the politically disengaged for coming back to democracy. It’s about the cascade of constitutional, representative, and ethical failures of our political system – and the toxic, Trump-shaped consequences that ensue.

I watched the big speech yesterday. Most of what Starmer said was true. His government has made mistakes. They have misjudged what the country actually wanted from them. And the whole job has been made harder because the authoritarians are at the gates. He is right about all of that. But he missed the most obvious thing. All three problems have the same root cause: our outdated, unfair voting system. Let me explain.

Starmer came to power with decent intentions. He wanted to deliver the change people were so plainly desperate for. But the moment he asked himself what that change actually was, he hit the same wall every Prime Minister hits. There is no reliable way to read what the people of this country actually want. Our voting system supresses some signals and amplifies others, both unfairly. At the 2024 general election, Labour took 63% of the seats on just 34% of the vote. Reform UK got 14% of the vote but less than 1% of seats. The Greens, with 7% of votes, also less than 1% of seats. And, across the board, 85% of MPs were elected on less than half their constituency vote. Anyone looking for the will of the people would not find it in those figures.

Layer on top of that the tactical vote. Hundreds of thousands of voters with Green or Liberal Democrat instincts lent Labour their ballots last year because it was the only effective way to remove the Conservatives. Their vote was never intended to be an enthusiastic endorsement of Labour, never mind of how they have governed the country since. That fundamental distortion lurks, invisible, inside Labour’s seat count and inside every policy mistake he has made since.

Every signal he received told him he knew where the country needed to go and that nobody was in any position to argue.

But the signals were wrong. Driving a country forward using those signals is like driving a car with a faulty dashboard. Imagine a speedometer that reads 50 when you are doing 80, then 60 when you are doing 30. Imagine a sat-nav that tells you to turn right when you need to head left. You will not get where you want to go. You will not be in control.

Effective management of any system depends on accurate data, and our voting system - within a wider democratic system corroded by disinformation, big money and weak regulation - is no longer capable of providing that.

This is why, every time Starmer calibrates a policy programme, people emerge from the woodwork to tell him he has got it wrong. It is why he sees Reform doing 30mph and thinks they are doing 80, and then rewrites his domestic agenda to chase them. It is why when he thinks he is going fast enough on the green agenda, voices on his own benches tell him he needs to speed up. The chaos is not random. It is what happens when a Prime Minister tries to drive a country forward with a dashboard that is disconnected from reality.

The answer to this problem is to ensure that when voters express what they want, the system shows it, clearly and accurately. People should be able to vote for what they actually want, not for whatever turns out to be the least bad way of stopping something worse from taking all the power. And when those votes are counted, they should translate into a House of Commons that fairly reflects them. So the views of all the people can feed into debates on where our country should be heading and how we should get there. The system that produces all of these distortions has had its day. We need to be rid of it.

Now, I can hear some of you cheering, “Yes! Let’s switch to proportional representation right away!” But that would be a mistake. There is an important job to do before we can make such a monumental decision. If we skip that step, we risk jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Because PR is not a single system. It is a family of systems, each with their own strengths and trade-offs. Some prioritise local representation. Some prioritise proportionality. Some are built on a single national vote, others on regions or constituencies. Choosing between them is one of the most consequential decisions any democracy can make, and it should not be settled by rushed legislation from a tired Prime Minister chasing a headline, or a fresh one impatient to make a name for themselves. That is precisely why we need a National Commission on Electoral Reform (NCER).

Open Britain made the case for the NCER in 2024. It was adopted and championed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections. In 2025, we worked with partners across the democracy sector and in academia to build draft Terms of Reference, as a ready-to-go blueprint. Much careful thought went into that design and it would be a mistake to overlook it now.

The design is straightforward and fair. The Commission would be independent of government and political parties. It would be time-limited, with twelve months to report to Parliament with its recommendations. It would have public participation at its heart, not as token decoration but as the source of legitimacy any reformed system will need. And it would work through four critical questions in a deliberate order: what criteria should a fair electoral system meet; how well does First-Past-the-Post deliver against those criteria; what alternative systems exist (in our devolved administrations and in comparable countries) and how do they perform in practice; and, on the basis of all that, what system would best meet the needs of modern Britain. The order of this consideration matters. No honest answer to the fourth question is possible without first answering the other three.

That is what makes the NCER strategically distinct. It does not assume its conclusion. It does not pre-pick a system. It does not skip past important questions about voter rolls, boundary processes, money in politics, how systems can be tilted by disinformation, how easy they are to administer and regulate. All of these things need to be considered honestly and independently. The NCER would shine a light on the whole democratic dashboard and ask the only question that matters: does this system still tell the truth about who we are and what we want from politics, and if not, what would? A year’s careful work in exchange for a settlement capable of lasting generations is a trade any serious government should welcome.

Whoever is leading the Labour Party - and the country - in the months ahead will face the same challenges Starmer is wrestling with today. The democratic dashboard will still be broken when they inherit it. If they are to succeed where he has struggled in making Britain a stronger and fairer country, they will need to make robust decisions that are rooted in reality, not just grasp for answers in the fog of first-past-the-post.

If you agree the NCER represents the best and fairest way to fix this problem, please add your name to our petition. An amendment to the Representation of the People Bill currently making its way through Parliament will soon be tabled. It will call on the Government to assess the case for a National Commission and report back to Parliament. Signing the petition sends a clear signal that the people of this country have had enough of the distorted political picture produced by First Past the Post and the bad policy decisions that flow from it.

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There are a lot of valid policy questions that Green party leader Zack Polanski should answer, but none of his opponents or media interlocutors ever seem to ask them. It’s just one symptom of a malignant civic disease – one on full display ahead of local elections today. Britain can no longer engage in meaningful policy debates.

I’m personally sympathetic to the Greens’ broad message of hope. But as a newly resurgent party that’s still getting its act together nationally, policy and expertise is a weak spot. Given their rise in the polls and their bold promises – many of which would necessarily involve local planning and funding – no one is really taking them to task.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a valuable opportunity for the embattled Labour Party. But instead of asking Polanski how his party would build housing en masse, reform the planning system, manage trade-offs between environmental protections and infrastructure expansion, or fund ambitious local investment programmes, Labour has mostly defaulted to the same shallow moral and identity arguments that now dominate almost every political conversation.

Starmer instead paints the Green Party as “extremist,” “divisive” and “sectarian.” Polanski – the Jewish leader of a multicultural and progressive party – has mainly been discussed in the media lately in terms of debates about Islamic extremism and antisemitism. While there are of course real and valid concerns there, the political goal has seemingly become to morally contaminate Polanski – to taint him with fears about extremism and social fragmentation – rather than challenge him substantively on policy. (And he should absolutely be challenged!)

As London Mayor Sadiq Khan warned the Prime Minister last month: “Don’t call Green voters extremists… They’re people who are progressives. They may not agree with us on all these issues, but we should try and court them and win them over.”

Reform UK also benefits enormously from the disappearance of substantive political scrutiny. Farage is rarely pressed in sustained detail on how Reform’s promises would actually function in government – whether on deportations, the NHS, public services or economic growth. The party thrives in an environment where emotional resonance matters more than expertise or well-considered policy.

In fighting election campaigns, what we get from Reform UK is a sort of anti-politics. On paper, they should be the party most eager to debate the Greens – on net-zero costs, on infrastructure delays, on the practical limits of localism. We hear little of that.

Instead of sparring with Polanski over energy economics or planning law, Reform’s campaign machine defaults to a different register: culture war, race-based fear-mongering, and the vague notion that the Greens represent an all-encompassing ‘wokeness’ that will destroy Western civilisation.

When their activists do mention the Greens, it’s rarely about specific green belt trade-offs or housing targets. It’s jumping and shouting about “family voting,” calling people islamists and communists, or implying their opponents are alien and un-British. The goal was never to win the argument, but to render any real discussion impossible.

In a sense, Reform UK’s approach to the Greens has increasingly become the norm across British politics. The end result of all this is that no one really learns much. We won’t ever find a new consensus. The huge questions we need to address about this country’s future – from our relationship with Trump’s America to green energy investment to housebuilding to industrial policy to immigration – don’t really have a forum for genuine debate anymore. It’s all just noise and psychodrama.

Unfortunately, there is no singular cure for this 21st century democratic affliction. We have allowed the institutions that once mediated political disagreement – local journalism, mass-membership parties, civic associations, churches, trade unions and a trusted public sphere – to steadily decay. In their place we have built a hyper-nationalised, algorithmically driven politics that primarily rewards performative outrage.

First-Past-The-Post is making things much worse. A fragmented five-party system operating through an electoral model designed for two broad coalitions creates permanent incentives for fear-based campaigning. Low-turnout local elections fought on narrow margins reward polarisation, smears and threats (exemplified by Reform UK pledging to build migrant detention centres in Green Party constituencies).

Money and lobbying are also relevant here. Political movements increasingly function as marketing operations sustained by donors, consultancies and online engagement metrics. Under those conditions, it is far easier to mobilise voters through cultural panic or emotional identity than through detailed arguments about planning reform, grid infrastructure or local government finance.

What is clear on polling day today is that Britain can’t go on like this. An open, pluralist and confident country depends on citizens being able to disagree constructively about difficult questions without treating opponents as existential enemies or moral contaminants.

In a proper democracy, both the Greens and Reform UK would be answering hard questions all of the time. But the system we have now is a boon to the populist right’s grievance politics, and a barrier to policies that could drive our futures and make our lives better.

Westminster is ripe with scandals these days, but The Guardian just uncovered a whopper.

Cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne reportedly gave Farage an undisclosed £5 million personal gift just before he announced he’d run for his seat in Clacton in 2024. That tax-free gift is the largest known sum ever accepted by an individual politician in British history. Farage has been referred to the standards committee in light of the revelations.

Harborne’s cumulative donations to Farage and his various parties over the years (including the Brexit party) now total more than £27 million. That’s a staggering sum.

I’ve been writing for years about how big money corrodes politics. We’ve all seen the damage it can do in the United States’ backwards ‘money-is-speech’ political system. Large-sum donations continue to climb here in Britain too, while politicians are captured by vested interests and trust falls to record lows.

But I have to say this latest fiasco is genuinely absurd. One can infer from the revelations that billionaires like Harborne can now effectively buy their own MPs. That one deep-pocketed individual with a pet project can single handedly shift the political landscape of a nation. And in this most recent case, were it not for the work of wily journalists, we probably wouldn’t even know about it.

Money Behind the Mask:

Harborne clearly has a type. The Thailand-based billionaire (also known as Chakrit Sakunkrit) previously gave generously to the Brexit party. He also endowed the personal office of Boris Johnson with £1 million in 2022, just months before a company in which he was majority shareholder (QinetiQ) received an £80 million defence contract. A pretty good return on investment.

So with Reform UK on the rise, it’s not a huge shock that he’s betting big. He seems to have helped Farage finally make his way into Parliament (on his eighth attempt) in 2024, and his money will now surely boost Reform in upcoming local elections.

Farage has claimed that the £5 million was for his security services, that “Christopher is an ardent supporter who is deeply concerned for my safety.” This morning – hours before the Guardian report came out – he conveniently dropped a story to The Telegraph about an arson attack on his home more than a year ago. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether it’s normal to spend £5 million on a simple security detail.

But Farage and his party have seemingly had a lot of expendable income. Reform UK petrol stations sell fuel at slashed prices, and prize draws offer to pay energy bills for entire streets. They’re massively outspending their opponents ahead of local elections. Farage himself scrounged up £215k to invest in Kwasi Kwarteng’s bitcoin company.

“Hand on heart, I haven’t promised [Harborne] a thing,” Farage says.

Forgive me if I can’t bring myself to believe it. Even if there’s no explicit promise – I’d expect that at the least there’s an understanding of mutual interest. And it’s pretty clear where that interest lies.

Crypto-Politics:

In the Epstein files, email exchanges between former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and the disgraced sex trafficker reveal that they viewed cryptocurrencies as a tool to destabilise the global order and break free from the pesky rules and regulations of the traditional financial system. More than that, they sought to use it to discreetly fund a “populist/nationalist coalition.”

Bannon saw Farage as a key player in his so-called “European revolution,” his effort to bolster far-right movements in the late 2010s including Viktor Orbán, Germany’s AfD, and the Brexiteers. He told Epstein he could pressure these parties to “shut down” any legislation regulating cryptocurrencies.

While there is no evidence Harborne has any connection to this network, it seems possible he is thinking in the same terms. He is in a perfect position to benefit from a crypto revolution. He’s heavily leveraged in the industry, an early buyer of digital tokens that have skyrocketed in value.

As with Trump and his crypto industry pals across the Atlantic, Farage seems keen to help him. Not only is Reform UK the first party to accept crypto donations, but he also advocates for a state-owned bitcoin reserve, deregulating the industry, and slashing taxes on the sector. “I am your champion,” he told a crypto conference in London last year.

It presents a contradiction for Reform UK voters, one that will only get harder to ignore. A movement that claims to be a grassroots rebellion challenging establishment power is intertwined with a financial system designed to evade oversight altogether – one that disproportionately benefits the extremely wealthy insiders funding it.

Elite Populism:

Russell Jackson at Byline Times recently deployed a term for Reform UK that resonated with me. He calls them “Elite Populists.”

The ranks of Reform UK are largely former attendees of elite all-boys schools. Many made a lot of money in the high-powered corporate world. They manufacture anger and grievance on racial and cultural lines, all while remaining deeply embedded in the very establishment they claim to be fighting.

“What masquerades as rebellion from below is oligarchy from above – a repackaging of class power as cultural revolt. The theatre of ‘authentic’ anger conceals the reality that these movements are fuelled, financed, and amplified by the ultra-rich, who are the primary beneficiaries,” Jackson writes.

It’s why Harborne is a vulnerability for Farage’s entire project. If people in Clacton and beyond are allowed to figure out what this party really is – a ruthless business operation by and for the wealthy in the vestige of a grassroots political party – it is likely to lose its lustre for many.

It’s easy to fixate on figures like Harborne (and they deserve scrutiny) but they are symptoms, not causes. Our political system has left the door open to the powerful few. It’s a structural failure that many could have predicted – and many did.

That door can be closed again with meaningful regulation. Parliamentarians, in their neglect, got us into this mess. We’ll need bold legislation - starting with the Representation of the People Bill - to close that door.

St George’s day – this past Thursday – generally marks the start of a peculiar season in British politics. Debates over English identity and patriotism are re-ignited and rehashed anew. Politicians play tug-of-war with a Union flag. It’s also a moment the far-right is quick to seize: rising tensions, scathing rhetoric, and the first portents of summer street unrest.

But for all the theatrics, we rarely get to have a sincere dialogue about what it means to be British (or English, for that matter). What we see is more of a branding exercise. A contest – surely designed to appeal to a familiar cohort of swing-seat voters ahead of May elections – to claim the colours for one’s political team. To paper over the harder conversations with polyester flags and anti-migrant grandstanding.

I’ll confess that I’m not the most ‘patriotic’ person, at least in the traditional sense – but I’m not alone. As Suella Braverman relishes in reminding us, just 41% of young people say they’re proud to be British, down from over 80% a decade ago. Only one in ten say they’d fight for this country (desire to fight in a war is a key indicator of patriotism, apparently).

Crucially, the polling shows that young people – generally a more cosmopolitan sort – feel alienated by a country they increasingly view as small-minded, exclusionary and, at times, racist. Perhaps more importantly, though, the pay to cost-of-living ratio is dire, the job market is atrocious, and home ownership and retirement feel like increasingly distant fantasies. Many, understandably, feel there isn’t a place for them here.

Reform’s solution is of course to double down. They’ve unveiled new plans to mandate flags in every school paired with an official portrait of the King. More substantively, they’ve taken yet another page out of Trump’s playbook and laid out a plan for “patriotic education” – a propagandistic curriculum that will pleasantly skip over the sordid bits of this nation’s storied past.

It’s said that authoritarians always want you to forget history.

And just a day after St George’s day, Farage declared war on what he calls “benefits Britain.” We simply can’t afford a welfare state, he said, echoing those familiar tones of austerity politics. “Yes, there’ll be riots, and there’ll be strikes and there’ll be protests, and we know all of that, but that’s what we’re going to have to do – it has to be done.” Spoken like one who truly loves his fellow Britons.

Suella Braverman would have us believe that we can simply mandate patriotism. That those in power can continue to ignore this generation’s social concerns and economic conditions, and simply shower them in flags and force their teachers to yell about how great Britain is. Good luck with that.

For Reform, patriotism is almost entirely about aesthetics, symbols, and slogans. There is little lurking beneath the surface. They have no true concept of what it is to be British in the turbulent 21st century, no vision of how to carry British values forward in practice. It’s just a pantomime, regurgitated iconography from a bygone age. A costume you can just put on – or, apparently, force the next generation to put on.

But having a costume to put on – being told who you are, who you hate, and what you stand for – is a lot easier than having to figure all of that out for yourself. There’s an allure to it that’s gripping people today.

For Labour’s part, they have tried for several years now to “reclaim” patriotism from the far-right. I admire the effort. Starmer, who also loves standing in front of large Union flags, accused Reform UK of trying to “hijack our flag and spread hate.” He called it “plastic patriotism that corrodes the very bonds that tie us together.”

He’s right, of course, but I’m not sure that it’s convincing to very many people. Talking about decency, unity, and service – as he so often does – can start to ring a bit hollow. Not least because it’s always in direct strategic reaction to Reform UK. It feels like a play to swing-seat voters, a defensive attempt to fend off allegations about Starmer’s “lack of patriotism” (one of Farage’s favourite accusations).

As former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas puts it so well: “All politics is a battle of stories – the tragedy is that, at the moment, the Government is not even trying to tell one.” They need a fresh narrative about patriotism, one completely separate from Farage and his movement.

Pair that with the Mandelson affair and Starmer’s broader lack of popularity, and it doesn’t feel like patriotism is really being reclaimed for good. It’s not clear that Labour really understands the allure of Farage’s patriotism. They don’t seem to grasp that people want answers from systems that have slipped out of their control.

It’s not something Farage would want taught in schools, but this country is steeped in a far richer patriotic tradition than flag-waving alone: the Levellers and Chartists who fought to expand early democracy; the suffragettes who won women the right to vote; the trade union movement that secured basic rights at work; the post-war generation that built the NHS and welfare state; and countless others who challenged injustice in the name of a fairer society.

I may not be much of a patriot in Farage’s sense, but that’s largely because I see national identity as a collaborative effort. The product of millions of us, deciding what we care about and what we value.

To truly reclaim patriotism, we need to reclaim democracy itself. Not just in the narrow, procedural sense, but as a living, participatory force – one that gives people real agency over their lives, restores a sense of shared direction, and makes the country feel like something we are building together rather than something being done to us.

No amount of flags, slogans or staged displays will fill the void.

Peter Thiel’s Palantir drew a lot of attention last weekend for a tweet that reads like the monologue of a cartoon villain. In a long post, they endorse the arguments made in The Technological Republic, a 2025 book written by the company’s CEO Alex Karp and his lawyer Nicholas Zamiska.

If, understandably, you haven’t read it, it’s not a business self-help book or a meditation on leadership and disruption. It’s a radical political manifesto. In essence, it sketches out a world in which democratic deliberation gives way to technological necessity, and where those who build and control software systems claim a central role in the exercise of power. As opposed to, you know, the people.

Coming from the official channels of a data analytics company that’s thoroughly embedded as a contractor in public services around the Western world – from America’s ICE to Britain’s NHS – it gives significant cause for concern.

So how do we best understand this tech bro stab at philosophy? The arc of the book’s (and the tweet’s) argument is actually quite simple, and it echoes the rhetoric of authoritarians past.

There is a crisis, they say, stemming from weak and “decadent” leadership, as well as multiculturalism and pluralism. A violent new world of AI warfare and technological conflict is coming soon. Soft power and compromise are dead, we’re told, and instead surveillance software (conveniently, their industry) will be the new foundation of “hard power.”

Silicon Valley must therefore be given ever more control over our lives, put in charge of not just our news and interactions but our nations’ very sovereignty and self-determination.

This is a vision of government as a hard-nosed endeavour for the military-minded. Elon Musk’s idea that empathy will lead to “civilisational suicide” seems to have caught on, the notion that it’s inherently weak to care for, work with, and learn from one another.

“If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle,” they write, “we should build it; and the same goes for software.” The state should fund their terrifying AI weapons, they say. But of course when the public asks – for better healthcare, better pay at work, or a stronger democracy – the answer is far less certain.

Their dark vision for the world does contain kernels of truth. We are, undeniably, in a period of geopolitical instability (in part thanks to the President that Palantir backed). Surveillance is expanding, while civil liberties are under pressure (in part due to the software they create). And politics can often feel curiously hollow – our leaders cautious, managerial, and lacking in conviction.

The conclusion Palantir draws from this, however, is not to deepen or strengthen democracy, but to move beyond it.

They warn against “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.” But the problem today is not an excess of competing visions, but a shortage of them. Political life feels thin not because too many voices are heard, but because so few are able to shape outcomes in any meaningful way.

The same logic runs through their critique of the “psychologisation of modern politics.” Stripped of its academic language, this is an argument against emotional investment in public life – against people caring, identifying, and finding meaning in collective political projects. But this capacity to “find expression in people they may never meet” is not a flaw of democracy. It’s what makes it possible. Without it, politics becomes something much colder: less about shared purpose, more about management and control from above.

Palantir apparently no longer see themselves as an ordinary tech company, but as the unelected elites destined to rule our future by surveillance and force. Pair this manifesto with what we’ve seen from their ally Donald Trump across the Atlantic – masked agents using their tech to round up migrants and crush dissent. I have little doubt that a Reform-led government here in Britain would trend in the same direction.

While conversations about Palantir’s role in the NHS and beyond are vital in light of their anti-democratic views and anti-privacy reputation, there is a more systemic problem at play here. It goes well beyond any one company.

I recently interviewed historian Quinn Slobodian, who has quite a useful framework for understanding what’s happening here. His latest book cites The Technological Republic as a defining example of what he calls “Muskism” – the political and economic doctrine characterised by Elon Musk.

Muskism, he says, is a system where states and people alike become dependent on privately controlled technological infrastructure to carry out even basic functions. Where power is routed away from democratic institutions, and towards networks controlled by engineer-overlords who can supposedly “optimise” Government without all the messy consensus-making and bureaucracy.

“Elon Musk ends up seeing people themselves in quasi-digital terms – as contaminants within a system,” Slobodian told me.

“The ‘illegal immigrant’ becomes, in effect, an embodied computer virus – something that disrupts the optimisation of the system in the same way malicious code disrupts a network. And just as you would clean a codebase, the implication is that you cleanse the territory of these elements to restore proper functioning.”

Palantir’s ‘X’ manifesto applies the same logic to freedom and liberty. Not as rights to be exercised collectively, but as systems to be managed from above.

But democracy is not a technical problem to be solved. It never has been. It is the insistence that ordinary people retain control over the forces that shape their lives – even when that control may be messy, contested, and sometimes inefficient.

Liberty, in the end, means having a say over the systems that govern us. And refusing to give it up.

In a leaked memo last month, Keir Starmer told Ministers not to be “overly deferential” to devolved governments. He warned it “almost inevitably creates political challenges or missed positive opportunities.”

Polls show that he’ll have both in spades come devolved elections in Scotland and Wales on May 7th.

The SNP is projected to win an outright majority at Holyrood. Plaid Cymru roundly defeated both Labour and Reform UK in the Caerphilly by-election last October, and is now set to end Labour’s enduring rule over the Senedd. And Sinn Féin already leads Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive.

For the first time in the history of devolution, the three devolved nations are on course to be led by parties whose stated long-term aim is to leave the United Kingdom. And this doesn’t seem to be a repeat of 2014 black-and-white referendum politics. The nationalist parties are bound by a deep shared frustration with the Starmer Government and with Westminster more broadly. It goes beyond gung-ho independence activism and into the realm of plain old discontent.

The three parties are coordinating on policy - from public spending and taxation to welfare and EU relations. At the least, they’re certainly set to give the embattled Starmer Government a historic headache.

But perhaps that Starmer memo shines a light - at least in part - on what’s happening here. The PM wrote that he wanted his Government to be “confident in our ability to deliver directly in those nations, including through direct spending, even when devolved governments may oppose this.”

Last winter, Starmer used legislation designed by Boris Johnson specifically to thwart devolution (the Internal Markets Act) in order to fund the Pride in Place scheme in Wales, bypassing the devolved government entirely. Understandably, it severely irked backbench Labour members of the Senedd who were set to hold their ground against a rising Plaid Cymru.

In a letter to Starmer in December, eleven backbench Labour MSs called it a “constitutional outrage.” Welsh Labour, they added, had “raised expectations” about further devolution, and accused the Government of “not only not progressing these but rolling back the existing devolution settlement.”

Scotland has seen the same pattern, just less neatly packaged into a single row. Since Brexit, Westminster has increasingly funded projects directly through levelling up and Shared Prosperity schemes, bypassing Holyrood and dealing instead with councils and local bodies. Ministers defend it as “delivering for Scotland”. But the SNP - like lots of voters in Scotland - see it as proof that devolved power exists only at London’s discretion.

The essence of this issue is that successive governments have failed to take devolution seriously. To often in Westminster it is viewed more as a pesky administrative exercise than a serious democratic project. Voters, who do genuinely care about regional autonomy from Westminster, can clearly sniff that out - and it’s not like Starmer’s made a particularly compelling or even coherent case for his philosophy on these matters.

But to focus all of this on devolution squabbles alone is to ignore the even bigger elephant in the room. Britain’s two-party political system has all but imploded. The pendulum swing between Conservative and Labour - that reliable alternation which defined the past century - does seem to be at its end. This is what comes next.

Things have already been getting weird, right? Reform UK rose from the fringes to the top of the polls, and more recently we’ve seen Zack Polanski’s newly revitalised Green Party come crashing out of the gate to win the Gorton and Denton by-election in a stunning upset. We’re in utterly uncharted waters now, but the immediate results are predictable.

People across the political spectrum are searching for alternatives. They still don’t trust the Conservatives, and they don’t trust Starmer’s Labour either. Plaid, the SNP, and Sinn Féin are offering up their pitches. You’ll notice that much of their rhetoric today has far more to do with the cost of living and specific local issues than loud calls for “independence now!”

Under the Senedd’s new - highly proportional - electoral system, the Greens and of course Reform are also expected to be competitive, with Polanski’s party set to be the “kingmakers” - potentially power-sharing with the Welsh nationalists at Plaid.

I’d put it this way: there’s long been an inverse relationship between the level of shambles in Westminster and the popularity of nationalist parties. In the eyes of many voters, they stand apart from Britain’s political establishment - the ultimate protest vote, with independence as the ultimate leverage over a distant centre.

And for that reason, I’m not convinced we are truly headed for a Disunited Kingdom should Plaid and the SNP win in May. What we are headed for is a verdict - on Westminster, on Starmer’s Labour, on Reform UK, and on a creaking political settlement that’s on its way out the door.

The politically adept answer to this moment isn’t to centralise harder or to shout louder about the Union or fear-monger about a break-up. It’s to make this union something worth being part of, something democratic and truly devolved. Something that treats its constituent nations as worthy of sharing power with, not as subjects to be controlled from on high.

The importance of Welsh and Scottish elections this May, Starmer wrote to Ministers, “cannot be underestimated.” He’s right. But probably not for the reasons that he thinks.

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The big brains at Reform UK seem to believe they’ve found their lethal attack line ahead of local elections next month. They’re running against the “Boriswave”, what Zia Yusuf calls “a legacy of Tory incompetence and Labour’s open border ideology.”

And they’ve produced a remarkably dodgy report to back it all up, which astoundingly claims that settled migrants who arrived between Jan 2021 and June 2024 will cost the UK a whopping £622bn by 2085, or roughly £20k per household.

The ‘Boriswave,’ for those fortunate enough to be unaware, describes a period of relatively liberal migration policy under Boris Johnson. The term was originally concocted by terminally online trolls in the sordid depths of Elon Musk’s ‘X.’ Naturally, it’s now a part of mainstream public discourse.

Net migration was 254,000 in 2021, 634,000 in 2022, and rose to a peak of 906,000 in 2023. By 2025 that had reduced by nearly 80% to about 204,000. It essentially describes a short-lived, though certainly significant, post-Brexit wave of migrants which were of course less likely to be white Europeans.

Nigel Farage took out an op-ed in the Telegraph on Tuesday to lament our collective doom (unless you vote for him) and the usual suspects like GB News and The Daily Mail ran the shocking figures unchallenged in scary bold letterhead.

So I’ve taken a look at their so-called report, and I’ll tell you this:

• The analysis here is completely unserious - it should have been cordoned off on ‘X’

• This entire thing is premised on a complete rewriting of the actual history of the Boris Johnson era, not to mention the fact that its accusations implicate recent converts to Reform UK.

• I think we all strongly suspect what this is actually about.

Bad Maths

If I promise to give you £1,000 in 50 years’ time, is that worth £1,000 to you today? Anything could happen by then. At the very least, inflation will have taken its toll. That’s why governments and economists say no. They use what’s called a ‘discount rate’ - a formula that reduces future values down to what they think they’re worth today.

Reform UK, however, isn’t going to let a pesky thing like basic financial forecasting get in the way of a useful disinformation campaign. They admit their £622bn figure is not ‘discounted’ - and that applying standard Treasury discounting brings it down to £154bn. Looking more manageable already.

£154bn still seems high, though, right? But that’s because the methodology problems run much deeper. Reform rely completely on their own fantastical assumptions about migrant earnings, rather than real-world data - which leads them to underestimate how much migrants actually contribute in taxes. It renders this whole exercise basically akin to guesswork.

The Government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) recently did similar research with real data from HMRC (which was also surely available to Reform). They produced a much more balanced report showing that skilled workers on visas who entered in 2022 and 23 are estimated to contribute a net £47bn over their lifetimes, and that while others may cost the UK treasury in the long term, there are “positive spillover effects.”

You’ll not get acknowledgement from Reform that a low-income migrant may be performing an essential social care role or working for low pay in our NHS. The point here is to produce a big scary number that makes you feel poorer and then angrier.

History Rewritten

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Why did this “Boriswave” actually happen? Where were the True Patriots™ when this supposed open door policy was randomly enacted?

Britain was reeling from the twin shocks of a no-deal Brexit and a global pandemic in 2021. Headlines were apocalyptic, warning of food shortages and shortfalls in staff in various industries. Who was going to save our Christmas turkey and sprouts? Johnson lowered the threshold for non-EU visa applicants to get supply chains moving again.

Then of course there were the geopolitical shocks - most notably Putin invading Ukraine in 2022. In a broadly popular move, Johnson’s Britain agreed to resettle Ukrainians displaced by the invading Russian army.

Farage and his top brass (several of whom were members of Conservative administrations in power when this all happened) seem to be caught in a feverous amnesia. Have they just plucked the term ‘Boriswave’ from an online troll pit and run with it, any semblance of self-awareness be damned?

Maybe there’s a deeper reason.

The Laundromat

Let's call this what it is. "Boriswave" is a term minted by Elon’s online Nazis to spread demographic panic. These are people who hold a fundamental belief that different cultures and ethnicities cannot (and should not) co-exist. Enoch Powell would find many of them excessive and uncouth.

And that is where parties like Reform UK come in. Their role is to channel that online vitriol into a relatively polished and politically presentable package. To concoct scary specious scenarios and then jump and shout to make ordinary people afraid.

It’s revealing that Reform politicians are currently being berated on ‘X’ for putting up “Boriswaver”(see: non-white) candidates in the upcoming local elections. And that the term is particularly popular among supporters of Rupert Lowe’s offshoot Restore Britain party, now running a zombie campaign to the right of Reform UK.

So no, this isn't a serious report. It's more of a laundering operation. It takes filthy ideas that even hard-nosed xenophobes are squeamish about expressing and coats them with just enough sugar to make them palatable. We see it for what it is. And we are calling it out. It is a shame that more of our friends in the mainstream media will not do the same.

Viktor Orbán conceded defeat this evening (Sunday), after sixteen years, after four consecutive supermajorities, after rewriting the constitution and redrawing the maps and packing the courts and calling all of it democracy. Péter Magyar - who broke with Fidesz in 2024 and built an opposition in under two years from inside Orbán’s own political network - is on course for 137 seats to Orbán’s 55, with around two-thirds of ballots counted. In one of Orbán’s final messages to his supporters, he said: “We will not surrender. Never, never, never.” Then he did.

Remember, JD Vance was in Budapest last week. He stood in front of a crowd of Fidesz supporters and called Orbán wise and smart and a model for Europe. Trump phoned into the rally and told the crowd Orbán was a fantastic man. But that message seems not to have had the desired effect on Hungary’s voters. 77% of them voted - a record since the end of communism, 876,000 more voters than in 2022. Analysts suggest the Trump/Vance intervention may have actively accelerated Magyar’s win rather than helping Orbán. But the endorsement was unambiguous, and it’s on the record. We should assume this is the new normal. Trump’s administration will go out of their way to help political allies - blatantly, forcefully and without any regard to diplomatic convention.

Winning politicians often include the line “The real work starts now” in their first major address to the people. For Magyar, this will be particularly true. He is on course to win a two-thirds supermajority - or close to it, pending final results. He needs it. Not to govern, but to begin the work of rebuilding Hungary’s hollowed-out democratic institutions.

A simple majority would not be enough to reverse what Orbán built. Fidesz won four consecutive elections, several of them on minority vote shares, because the rules were set by Fidesz. Districts were drawn to maximise Fidesz seats. State broadcasters were converted into campaign infrastructure. Advertising revenue was redirected toward loyalist media and weaponised as a tax instrument against the rest. Courts were packed. A new constitution was written. Ostensibly, every formal feature of democracy remained throughout - elections, courts, a nominally free press - but each was methodically drained of any real function.

Magyar spent the campaign telling Hungarians the country faced choices. East or West. Propaganda or honest public debate. Corruption or clean public life. He was right about the choices. He knows exactly which levers were pulled, because he spent years inside the machine that pulled them. That knowledge will matter when the legal and institutional unwinding begins, and he will need to hold on to it, for this work will take a long time. Sixteen years of deliberate capture cannot be reversed in an afternoon, even with a supermajority and the best intentions.

Some things will move quicker than others. The EU will move now on frozen funds and the €90 billion Ukraine loan that Orbán kept blocking. The Kremlin loses its most useful veto player inside the bloc. These are significant consequences. But it is in those slower-tempo tasks that our most instructive lesson lies.

The democratic situation in Britain is not as bad as the one in Hungary. Our institutions have not been captured. Our courts have not been packed. Our electoral maps have not been redrawn by a governing party to entrench its own power.

But the structural vulnerabilities are not hypothetical. FPTP gave Labour 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote last year. That same arithmetic could deliver unassailable power to any party achieving similar vote concentration in 2029, including Reform UK. Campaign finance enforcement is weak enough that money moves through our politics without serious scrutiny. The institutions that would need to resist a consolidation attempt are already under sustained rhetorical attack from the political movement that would benefit most from undermining them. And Farage has said more than once that Hungary provides a useful model for the future he sees for Britain.

Magyar is inheriting a captured judiciary, politicised regulators, gerrymandered districts and entrenched patronage networks. Rebuilding what Orbán dismantled will take years, possibly a decade, even with a supermajority. We should not lose sight of that in the midst of the euphoria that will accompany Orbán’s defeat.

The old adage about prevention being better than cure applies here. It would have been easier for Hungary to defend, strengthen and renew its democracy in 2010 than it is today. The big question is whether the British people will take the lesson from Hungary or wait and have to learn it the hard way.

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The United States today looks increasingly like the opening pages of a ham-fisted dystopian novel. The President has rarely seemed more volatile (which is really saying something), and there’s no end in sight to the blatant corruption and the ideological crackdowns of MAGA’s fanatical kleptocracy.

But in the pocket universe of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York City, a subplot is unfolding to complement America’s tale of disruption and disorder. In the Big Apple, a different kind of political campaign won out against the odds last November. Mamdani just marked his first 100 days in office, his ambitious grassroots campaign now faced with the harsh machinery of New York City’s local government.

It certainly hasn’t all gone to plan. On the campaign trail, Mamdani emphasised the importance of a strong start, but budgetary constraints (a black hole left by the previous administration, familiar to us in Britain) have set him back significantly on his bold policy platform. New York City is still not affordable three months in, and Mamdani faces many roadblocks to implementing his core policies - free buses, freezing the rent, and universal childcare.

But it is revealing that Zohran Mamdani is currently the eighth most popular politician in the entire country, whereas the Democrats are suffering from their lowest approval rating on record - somehow trailing four points behind Trump’s Republicans.

So what can Mamdani’s first 100 days tell us about what voters actually want from politics now - and how hard it is to deliver it?

1. Politics Still Happens in the Real World

“New Yorkers deserve a mayor that they can see,” Mamdani told the camera in a viral video last June. “One that they can hear, that they can even yell at.” In that clip, the Mayor-to-be walked the entire 13 mile length of Manhattan island, a non-stop meet-and-greet with fans, critics, and oblivious bystanders alike. Last week, he did another long walk-and-talk to mark his first 100 days, embracing and chatting with his constituents.

While his campaign was lauded widely for its social media prowess, the content of those videos mattered. Where Trump will amass loads of views posting AI generated images of himself as a Jedi knight, Mamdani’s videos centre real people talking to their candidate about real (often quite local and niche) issues.

While you’ll see politicians like Trump and Farage have some success using the internet to amplify abstract national political narratives about immigration or cultural grievances, there’s something to be said for meeting people where they are. For reminding them that politics can start down their street instead of with a scroll of their phone. For being there for them to yell at you when you fail to deliver, instead of insulated and far removed.

2. Moral Clarity Cuts Through the Noise

Not unlike Sadiq Khan in London, Mamdani has faced a relentless barrage of vitriol from the right-wing press. His Muslim faith, his upbringing in Uganda, and his pro-Palestinian human rights position make him an obvious target. But despite the rogue’s gallery of influencers calling him a “terrorist” and an “Islamo-Marxist,” he continues to make a robust case for the benefits of multiculturalism and unity.

People see that and - even if they may disagree - have to respect it. Politics today is starved of conviction and moral clarity, so contorted by the whims of donors, consultants and lobbyists that it’s very hard to believe what anyone is saying. Refusing to yield to the powers that be is a sort of superpower.

When asked about Trump’s Iran War recently, Mamdani did not mince words: “We are spending tens of billions of dollars to kill people. Money that could be making life easier for working people.” You’d struggle to imagine most other American politicians saying that.

3. Hope Isn’t Cheap

Mamdani’s movement, at its core, is about hope. That multicultural democracy can win out over the xenophobes and the racists. That a new social and economic contract can help squeezed families pay their bills. That people can trust politics again.

But the harsh realities of the first hundred days have made clear that hope alone isn’t really enough. To survive contact with budgets, roadblocks, and the slow grind of government requires a great deal of graft and pragmatism.

The author Ta-Nehisi Coates observed recently that different kinds of communication come at different costs. Farage and Trump can “talk on the cheap,” as he puts it, throwing words out into the world and getting just enough back to build hollow and insincere movements.

But where shooting out a tweet is cheap, “it’s significantly more expensive - mostly in time - to cook dinner for somebody, to travel to a city to see somebody, to organise a group of people to see each other,” Coates writes. To build a movement in the real world.

Mamdani’s 13-mile walks, his unscripted encounters, his willingness to be yelled at - that is expensive work. It doesn’t go viral as easily as mass-produced AI slop. It doesn’t produce a quick return on investment. And after 100 days, it hasn’t yet delivered an affordable New York.

But Coates’ takeaway is that you get what you pay for. Cheap messages produce a cheap product - movements that evaporate upon contact with reality. The hard work of getting people together produces something slower, harder, and more durable: a reservoir of goodwill that might just survive the first 100 days, and the next 100 after that.

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You might have noticed that the official social media channels of the United States government are posting like deranged basement-dwelling teenagers.

It doesn’t exactly breed confidence – in the midst of a highly consequential war – to see Nintendo Wii animations spliced with footage of lethal drone strikes. To watch bizarre montages of Iron Man, Braveheart’s William Wallace, and Top Gun’s Maverick calling you to arms. Or to witness AI-generated images of Trump riding into battle on a gigantic lion.

And yet this is what passes for political communication in 2026. The toxic and unthinking meme culture that was once restricted to dark corners of the anonymous internet has come to take on a central role in American public life. The term ‘slopaganda’ is apt: this is high-volume, high-engagement garbage – and it serves a clear strategic purpose.

There’s an obvious temptation to dismiss it all as a product of red-pilled Gen Z staffers. Or to say that it’s just the latest in the torrent of right-wing disinformation across the past decade. And those are fair points. But these videos and images serve a greater purpose – they trivialise and separate us from the realities of politics and of war. They stand in for real analysis and democratic debate, rendering people into bystanders rather than participants.

Trump’s political comms style was always more about emotional charge than informational substance. He’s the “sh*tposter-in-chief,” after all. The President’s infamous Twitter tirades gave way to early slopaganda during his first term. In 2017, Trump famously posted an old video of him tackling and punching out Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania, with “CNN” superimposed on McMahon’s head. However ridiculously, it set the tone: politics was presented as little more than a spectacle of conflict and humiliation.

But with the heightened militancy and authoritarianism of Trump 2.0 – and the advent of AI image generation tech – we’ve plumbed fantastical new depths. The admin got in quickly on the Ghiblification craze last year (a viral trend where internet users fanatically converted images to the nostalgic hand-drawn style of Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away). The White House posted a genuinely shocking image, mocking the deportation of a migrant in that same viral style.

And since Operation Epic Fury (the US and Israel’s controversial attack on Iran in late February this year) we’ve witnessed an explosion of AI-generated nonsense. People have lots of legitimate questions about this war – why it’s happening, how long it will last, what human and economic price will be paid. None of those questions are properly addressed by the administration, and the slop serves to shut them down entirely.

There’s a stark difference between this war and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. At that time, the government had to craft a comprehensive narrative to justify what they were doing. They had to offer people a justification and a plan (never mind whether any of it held true) and at least take questions from critical journalists about it. The Trump administration can instead deflect entirely, jamming our feeds and our brains with trash content designed to light up his supporter’s brain chemistry and distract the rest of us.

AI models have given the Trump regime endless fodder for the media to mull over, as well as a way to capture citizens’ attention and detach them from the material reality of the conflict. This kind of content, as ludicrous as it is, is a honed weapon. It’s a form of information warfare designed to dumb down our political debates to utter oblivion.

We see much more mundane, diluted versions of this from the UK government as well. The Prime Minister has been accused of mimicking the White House after posting several videos of himself surveying military hardware – riding in helicopters and watching jets take off – set to the Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing. It was posted at the beginning of the US-Israel-Iran war. He’s previously posted a number of videos depicting his government’s detainment of undocumented migrants.

Where Starmer’s attempts are largely met with ridicule, the hard-right nationalists are Britain’s reigning Slopaganda champions. Reform UK, Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, and the right-wing ecosystem around them have embraced AI imagery and videos for just about everything. In one dramatic case, Farage’s party posted an AI-generated image of the Hamble Valley Reform team entitled “Real People – Not Career Politicians.”

As in the States, the overarching goal is to simplify narratives. To build a fantasy world for supporters to abscond to. AI is deployed by the right to generate nostalgic and idyllic British towns before the supposed ravages of immigration, white faces as far as the eye can see. It shows fake images of Farage meeting a (non-existentent) terminally ill child as their dying wish. It portrays English knights making patriotic proclamations about blood and soil.

Joe Slater calls it “Zombie Politics” – the notion that parties like Farage’s and now Rupert Lowe’s can build themselves up from scratch (without much personnel or infrastructure) by leveraging these tools to go viral and cultivate attention. As he puts it: “An AI model can read a government data release, draft a response and circulate a press release before a legacy party has scheduled the meeting to discuss.”

But fundamentally what makes all of this so effective is not just the volume or the absurdity, but the tone. Online, everything exists in a kind of suspended ambiguity – a limbo of sincerity. It’s “irony poisoning”: a state in which constant exposure to this sardonic content erodes our ability to distinguish between what is meant and what is not. Politics begins to feel unreal, a pantomime to watch rather than a process to participate in.

This kind of content is invigorating to the small clique of right-wingers in Britain and the US looking for an AI fantasy world to inhabit. But more important is what it does to the rest of us: traps us further in a doom loop of political detachment, further and further away from true engagement and inclusion in our own political systems.

A democracy that is always reacting is not one that can truly act.

FAIR WARNING: This is an unusually long Ugly Politix piece. If you’re not the type who enjoys reading 2000 words - I’m looking at YOU, Mr Somerton! 😉 - you might want to skip this one. No offence will be taken.

I was in a chemist in Grantham the other day, and got talking to the pharmacist dispensing my prescription. It is one of the blessings of my Irish stock that I am predisposed to strike up conversations with strangers - something I have always done and something I always will. Why? Because I have lost count of the number of magical moments this habit has given rise to over the years - moments of laughter, of insight, or just of genuine and unexpected human connection. And, on this occasion, it was all three.

You see, as well as being both funny and clever, the woman behind the counter was from Kerala. She had been in the UK eleven years, was able to address her regular customers by name, and - perhaps most importantly - knew precisely what pills and potions they needed to keep them ticking. It was clear from the few moments I spent in her presence that she was part of the fabric of the place - part of Grantham - and an important part of the lives of those regulars.

I mention her because, increasingly in this country, she and people like her are seen not as essential components of our communities but - to adopt the tone of the government’s recent Immigration white paper - a fiscal liability.

Don’t worry, loyal readers, I am not about to conduct a forensic exploration of that immigration white paper. I just think that this little exchange between two strangers tells us something important - and I want to make sure you don’t miss it.

The revelation is not so much about immigration but about how political decisions are made in our country. And that, as you will know, is the subject behind virtually everything I do in my day job running Open Britain.

Let me start by asking you to ponder three statistics: 62% of the British public want it to be easier for NHS staff to come to this country. 54% say the same for care workers. And only 8% oppose immigration for skilled workers. Those are not statistics from some overly-woke pressure group with an agenda - they are the settled, repeated findings of mainstream polling. The British people, it turns out, have much more sophisticated views on immigration than they are generally given credit for.

Now let me tell you what the government is planning to do. It is planning to shut the care worker visa route entirely to new overseas recruits - a route through which more than 220,000 of these key workers have entered the country since 2020. It has already hiked the salary threshold to £41,700, and now plans to raise it further - and it intends to scrap the ‘shortage occupation list’ discount on that threshold. It plans to raise the minimum skill level to degree-equivalent, which removes roughly 180 occupations from eligibility at a stroke. And it intends to double the qualifying period for permanent settlement from five years to ten.

You might read that list and think: well, the public must have been clamouring for all of that. They were not. In fact, despite the impression given by our media, immigration is not even in the top ten topics when people are asked about their own personal priorities - the things that actually keep them up at night. It only surges into the list of top issues when pollsters ask a different question: what are the country’s priorities? That gap - between what people experience in their own lives and what they believe the nation is suffering from - is largely the product of a cynical process known as agenda-setting. It starts with certain politicians and media outlets deciding what crisis suits their needs. It involves them flooding the airwaves with exaggerated and skewed ‘news’ that drives concern in their audience. And it ensures people dutifully report it back to the pollsters as a key concern when asked a carefully framed question. Public sentiment is reduced to a pawn in the games of billionaire media owners and political power-brokers.

It’s important to point out that people do have genuine anxieties about certain aspects of immigration. They worry about irregular small-boat crossings and the lack of control that signals. They worry that dangerous individuals convicted of crimes and deported can find their way back into the UK. But they don’t worry about the Filipino nurse keeping a ward running at three in the morning, or the healthcare assistant doing observations at four. Those people are, by any honest reckoning, holding the country’s healthcare system together. And we have a dangerous lack of those people. There are 131,000 unfilled social care vacancies in England right now. 34,000 nursing gaps. UNISON has said bluntly that these sectors would have collapsed long ago without overseas workers.

And, knowing all this, the government’s considered response is to slam the door shut on this essential resource. Why?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood exposed the government’s reasoning, and it’s worth pausing on, because the framing tells you everything about the thinking behind it. She warned of “350,000 low-skilled workers and dependents” with an “estimated lifetime cost to the taxpayer of £10 billion.” Now, leave aside whether those numbers survive scrutiny and just notice what that framing does. It takes a quarter of a million individual human contributions - the carer who gets your elderly mum out of bed in the morning, the HCA who ensures the nursing home is safe and hygienic - and it compresses them into a line on a spreadsheet. A cost. A burden. Something to be managed down.

Labour MP Tony Vaughan, to his credit, put his finger on the sharpest absurdity. Under the new rules, he pointed out, a Goldman Sachs banker on a senior intra-company visa can reach indefinite leave to remain years before the care worker in that nursing home. “We cannot have a system,” he said, “where the child of a banker gets settlement after three years and the child of a care worker gets it after 15.”

And the damage is not limited to the individual. Industry analysis suggests the reforms could cost their employers upwards of £14,250 per worker in red-tape costs before permanent residence - a reported 158% increase. For the social care sector, which operates on margins that would embarrass a church fête, those numbers are not a challenge, they are an extinction event.

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So - and this is the question I kept coming back to - if the British people don’t want this, and the evidence doesn’t support it, and the sectors affected are already in crisis, then who exactly is it for?

And here is where we leave immigration behind and arrive at the thing I actually wanted to talk to you about.

It is for the swing voter in the marginal seat. Or rather - and this is an important distinction - it is for the government’s idea of what that swing voter wants. An idea shaped not by data, not by evidence, not by the 62% who’d like the NHS to be able to recruit the staff it needs, but by the distortion machine that is the first-past-the-post voting system.

You are probably all sick of me telling you that Labour won 63% of the seats in the House of Commons on 34% of the vote at the last election…but it’s an important factor in all this. That is not a mandate. It is a quirk of the distortion that FPTP brings. And it creates a very particular kind of terror for the government - the terror of the accidental majority. When your grip on power is built on sand, you do not govern for the country. You govern for the few thousand voters in a few hundred constituencies who might tip the result in your opponents favour next time. You govern for the margin.

And who is in the margin right now? Reform UK - the party projected to win 381 seats on 31 per cent of the vote at the next election. But only 6% of Reform voters believe Starmer is genuinely anti-immigration (and so are unlikely ever to put their votes behind him on that basis). The government is chasing voters it will never catch, using policies that punish people it claims to represent, justifying their actions with a popular mandate it does not hold.

This is the chaos and distortion that FPTP brings. 74% of votes cast - 21 million of them - are wasted (ignored) in the process FPTP uses to translate the will of the people into the power structure within the Commons. This is why the views of the 62% who want skilled immigration made easier end up being ignored. Because their votes aren’t in the right postcode, their views don’t matter.

Some MPs have decided not to accept the chaos and distortion, at least in this one area of policy. A hundred Labour MPs signed a letter opposing these particular reforms. Angela Rayner went so far as to call them “un-British.” The government reportedly asked the Home Office to consider the options - but the official response was that “the position has not changed.”

Here is what should strike you most powerfully in all this. It is that first-past-the-post doesn’t merely distort who gets to sit in parliament, it distorts what they do when they get there. It takes a nuanced public position that is broadly pragmatic about immigration - yes to nurses, yes to scientists, worried about disorder at the border, not remotely interested in punishing care workers - and compresses it into a single, panicked imperative: ACT TOUGH. And so governments - of whatever colour - ARE tough. On the wrong people. In the wrong way. Every time.

Under proportional representation - I know those words make some people’s eyes glaze over, but stay with me - a government would find it much harder to push a programme that didn’t reflect what the country actually thinks. It would be as unlikely that it could push an agenda of open borders as it would an agenda of forced deportation of settled immigrants. Its line of least resistance would be in pursuing an agenda for which there was broad public support and for which there was fair representation in the Commons. In this case, it would increase the likelihood that they would implement policies helpful to a care sector needing to recruit the staff it needs. It would mean an immigration system designed around evidence rather than headline management. It would mean the 62% who want NHS recruitment to work would have a parliament that looked like them, and policy that sounded like them. It would be proper democracy.

The British public already knows what it wants on immigration. It has been remarkably clear about it to anyone willing to listen. The problem is not the public. The problem is a voting system that takes a nuanced public opinion and turns it into a blunt instrument, then hands that instrument to whichever party can secure the support of the biggest minority of voters.

I didn’t ask the woman in the chemists what she thought of the government’s immigration plans, but I suspect she’d see the gap between what the people she serves actually want and what they end up being offered more clearly than most.

A change in our electoral system wouldn’t solve all these issues overnight. But it would force every government to engage with what people actually think, rather than what it is convenient to pretend they think. And that, for me, is the minimum a democracy owes its voters.

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If you’ve been on the look-out for a cast-iron example of why our political system needs a good, hefty kick up the backside, I’m here to tell you that your quest is over.

And - as is so often the case - we have Mr Farage to thank for that. Who says he never does anything good?

Think back to last year’s local elections. I know it’s hard, what with the world busy packing a decade of events into every 12 month period, but give it a go. Specifically, think back to what Farage was saying at the time about taxes.

If you’re struggling, let me help: He was promising that Reform would cut your taxes. He was pointing at the enormous salaries of the ‘fat cats’ who run our councils and the state of our pothole-ridden roads and promising that, if you only voted Reform into power, you could have silky-smooth roads and money back in your pocket to boot. It almost sounded too good to be true.

And it wasn’t a slip of the tongue after a particularly refreshing lunch either. It was a promise plastered over many of his party’s election leaflets.

In Lancashire, the Reform leaflet said: “We fight for lower council tax.”

In Kent, it said: “Reduce waste and cut your taxes.”

Across the country, in leaflet after leaflet - many bearing Nigel Farage’s smiling face - Reform UK went into last year’s local elections with a message so simple even they couldn’t misunderstand it. Vote for us. We’ll cut your taxes.

And, sure enough, they won big. Reform swept to outright majority control of ten councils. In Kent, it was a landslide. In Durham, a political earthquake. Even Darren Grimes (‘Crafty’ to his mates) got a seat. Voters who had never voted anything but Labour put their cross next to Reform, trusting a promise printed in black and white.

Then the bills arrived.

Every single Reform-controlled council in England raised council tax. Not one has cut it. Not one has even frozen it. Every single one has put it up.

Kent? Up 3.99%. Derbyshire? Up 4.90%. Staffordshire? Up 3.99%. North Northamptonshire? Up 4.99% - the maximum possible without the need for a referendum.

And then there’s Worcestershire, where Reform runs a minority administration. Up 8.98%. (That is not a typo - nearly NINE percent.) Reform’s council leaders actively sought and received special government permission to raise it that high.

Reform’s own figures claim an average rise of 3.94% across their councils. Independent analysis puts the figure at 4.32%. But I’m not here to split hairs - either way, there’s no minus sign in front of those numbers.

That is quite a journey from “cut your taxes.”

And Now, The Gaslighting

What sets this apart from ordinary political promise-breaking is not the broken promise itself. Local government finance is brutal. Councils inherit debt. Social care costs are relentless. Any honest party taking control of cash-strapped councils would have to make painful choices on tax.

The real difference is how Farage has responded.

When ITV News Meridian confronted him with the Kent leaflet - one of the ones that literally says “cut your taxes” - Farage replied: “Well, cutting taxes could mean not putting them up as much, I suppose…but I never promised cuts in council tax.”

Later, he was actually shown a leaflet with the words “cut your taxes” on it, and still he maintained he never promised to cut taxes. In the same breath, he redefined “cutting” as “raising less than the other lot would have.”

Imagine if McDonalds aired an advert claiming to have cut the price of a Big Mac when they’d actually raised the price by 10p, justifying it on grounds that Burger King had put the price of a Whopper up by 15p? The Advertising Standards Agency would come down on them like a tonne of bricks, and someone in McDonalds would likely - and rightly - lose their job.

When Channel 4’s Paul McNamara challenged him on this issue, Farage tried a different line. Those were “national policies,” he said, clearly implying that voters would be mugs to believe that the stuff on the back of the local election leaflet would have anything to do with the local elections. I’m not joking.

Why This Matters Beyond Council Tax

The council tax story is important in its own right. Real people in Kent, Durham and elsewhere made real decisions at the ballot box based on a real written promise. That promise was broken. And the man who made it is now redefining the English language to pretend it wasn’t.

But the deeper problem is the playbook it reveals.

Make bold, simple promises. Win power. Fail to deliver. Then deny you ever made those promises. (And take on an indignant air as you do it, just for the lols.)

This isn’t a one-off. It’s how Farage has operated for a decade. During the Brexit campaign, he stood in front of a poster promising to “take back control” of immigration. When net migration hit record highs after Brexit, he just said it was someone else’s fault. The Remainers screwed-up the implementation. The Tories betrayed Brexit.

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The council tax story is the same trick, played on the local stage - but this time we have better evidence with which to shine a light on it. Because this time, the leaflets are still out there. The TV footage exists. The council tax bills are still sitting behind the clock above the fireplace. The only thing that’s changed is amount of brass in Farage’s neck as he tells us that we’re the ones misremembering.

If Nigel Farage cannot be held accountable for a promise printed in ink on a campaign leaflet, what happens when he’s making promises about the NHS, about defence, about your rights at work or the rights we all depend on to hold our politicians accountable when they lie? The polls currently project Reform winning a landslide majority at the next general election - potentially on the votes of barely three in ten of those who turn up to vote. The office of Prime Minister provides a lot of power, perhaps way too much for a man who treats his own promises as first drafts.

So remember: He promised to cut your taxes. He raised them. And now he’s telling you that raising taxes is actually cutting them. And you’re the idiot for not understanding that.

And when he and his mates knock on your door in the coming weeks, ask them to explain - in REAL English - where we’re all going wrong.

Earlier this week, 3,000 people gathered peacefully in Trafalgar Square to break their Ramadan fast - a lawful public event, open to people of all faiths. Nick Timothy, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and the man who would be in charge of law and order in a Conservative government, described it as 'an act of domination' aligned with 'the Islamist agenda.' Nigel Farage called it 'a group of people attempting dominance over our capital city.'

Domination. Dominance. Two men, supposedly from different parties with different political agendas, reaching for practically the same word to describe the same thing: 3,000 peaceful people breaking their Ramadan fast together in a public square. That’s more than a coincidence. It’s conscious convergence. And we need to be clear about what’s driving it, where it will take us, and how our decrepit democratic system provides little protection for those who want a different future for our country.

When it comes to the anti-muslim agenda, Timothy has ‘form’…lots of it.

He didn’t just stumble into this latest scandal. He has spent a career building a political brand on precisely this ground. As a special adviser at the Home Office, he helped design the “hostile environment” immigration policy - the one that produced the Windrush scandal. He played a role in the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham, which a New York Times investigation later characterised as an “Islamophobic hoax”. He campaigned against Labour’s Islamophobia definition, calling it “rigged” and urging supporters to “stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws.” He introduced the Freedom of Expression (Religion or Belief System) Bill, seeking to clarify that the Public Order Act does not cover criticism of religion.

Each episode escalates on the last. Each positions Timothy as the person willing to “say what others won’t.” And each plays directly to the right-wing media ecosystem - GB News, Talk TV, The Spectator, The Telegraph - that any future Conservative leadership contender needs to win over. And it’s working (for him). Bookmakers rate him one of the favourites to succeed Kemi Badenoch when the day comes.

Which brings us to Badenoch herself - the would-be Prime Minister who chose to pour petrol on the fire.

If Timothy was just another new-intake MP naively entering a political minefield, you might expect his leader to display some appropriate contrition, give him a very public rap on the knuckles, and move to close the matter down by directing the media to an important new initiative to have the swimming baths in Huddersfield upgraded. But that is not who Timothy is, and that is not what happened.

Badenoch did not reprimand Timothy. She did not distance herself. She called Timothy “fantastic” and said the event “should never have been permitted to take place.” She then introduced a claim that women had been “pushed to the back” - a claim the event organisers called ‘totally untrue’ and for which no evidence was ever produced.

The leader of the official opposition went further than the original post. She did not merely tolerate the culture war. She accepted it, amplified it, and fabricated details to sharpen it - in the same week she launched her local election campaign.

That is a clear departure from Conservative Party history. Edward Heath sacked Enoch Powell for the “Rivers of Blood” speech. William Hague forced John Townend to apologise for claiming immigration was making Britain a “mongrel race”. And Iain Duncan Smith sacked Ann Winterton for telling a ‘joke’ that involved a Pakistani man being thrown out of a train window. Previous Conservative leaders understood there was a line. Badenoch has decided the line is the strategy.

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So, why exactly are they doing this?

Most media commentary on this issue focusses on the surface facts, and misses the underlying structural drivers.

That coverage rightly acknowledges that the Conservative Party is locked in an existential fight with Reform UK for right-wing voters. But it usually fails to mention that under First Past the Post, that fight is all or nothing. There is no mechanism for two right-of-centre parties to push their own agendas _alongside_ their political neighbours. Under FPTP, one will win the seat. The other will get nothing. So, recognising that Reform has the momentum with voters right now, the Tories face a difficult choice: either absorb Reform’s voters or be destroyed by them.

That is why Timothy’s language is indistinguishable from Farage’s. It is not ideological drift. It is a structural incentive. FPTP forces mainstream parties into a race to the bottom with their closest opponents - and the only way to win is to become indistinguishable from whichever of them appears to have the upper hand. The electoral system is dragging the official opposition toward the politics of the far right.

And once they get there, what stops them?

Not Parliament. Timothy’s post was on X, not inside the Commons. It drove a week of national debate, forced exchanges at PMQs, and positioned the entire Conservative Party - all without a single word being uttered in a place where rules, standards or accountability apply.

Not the standards system. There is no mechanism to hold a shadow cabinet member accountable for describing a lawful religious gathering as an act of domination. No committee hearing. No investigation. The only remedy on offer was Starmer demanding Badenoch sack Timothy - which she refused.

Former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve put it plainly. If the demand that such events “shouldn’t happen again” applies only to Muslims, he said, “it is an act of discrimination against them without any lawful basis. To achieve it you would have to enact discriminatory legislation targeted at Muslims. Is this what Nick Timothy is advocating?”

A former Tory law officer, spelling out that his own party’s position logically requires religious discrimination. And still: no democratic mechanism to do anything about it.

The triple system failure

This is a story about three systems failing at once. An electoral system that incentivises the race to the bottom. A democratic infrastructure that has no way of holding politicians accountable for choosing the bottom of the barrel. And a ballot box that cannot function as the last line of defence - because the same electoral system is designed in a way that presents most voters with Hobson’s choice every election.

Think about what happens when you go to vote at a general election. Millions of us are cajoled into voting tactically - backing the least-bad option rather than the candidate we actually want. In seat after seat, voting against a party’s bad behaviour is a luxury the system does not permit. And for the millions whose votes are simply discarded - wasted in safe seats where the result is a foregone conclusion - the ballot box is not a mechanism of accountability at all. It is an empty ritual.

The problem is not just Nick Timothy. Politicians will always chase votes. Ambitious ones will always court media attention. The problem is a system where chasing those votes and courting the media means mimicking the far right, where doing so carries no democratic consequence, and where even the voters who object have no reliable way to make it count.

But there’s hope…if we’re prepared to take a stand.

That is why Open Britain is fighting for fundamental reform of our democratic system. It’s a dry, technical subject, far too tedious for most ordinary people to think much about while they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their families. But, as this episode demonstrates, it is a matter of fundamental importance to everyone who wishes to have a say in their own future, or at least not to have that future dictated by small group of well-funded and well-connected extremists.

If you believe we should all have access to fair information on which to make our democratic decisions; should have fair influence over the issues in the national debate and the people who make the rules we live by; that all our votes should count so they deliver fair representation in Parliament; and that those in power should be held to the traditional rules of British fair play, then you’re on our side. Join us…we’ll be glad to have you on board.