You are sitting on your sofa. The kettle has just boiled. The news is on. A government spokesperson is being interviewed. The voices are calm, measured, and familiar. There has been an explosion in Gaza, or southern Lebanon, or somewhere in Syria. There has been a raid somewhere else. Or perhaps an airstrike in Yemen. The names change. The pattern does not. And then come the words: terrorism, security operation, shock and awe, hearts and minds.

What do these words do for you? Do they describe the world, or do they organise it?

When you hear “terrorism”, you picture something bloody, barbaric, sectarian, outside the bounds of anything recognisable as legitimate. When you hear “shock and awe”, you picture precision and overwhelming force, arrows on a map, a strategy designed to end conflict quickly and decisively. When you hear “hearts and minds”, you picture soldiers handing out sweets, aid, stability, schools, and the slow work of building legitimacy.

But notice what has already happened. The labels do not simply describe violence; they sort it. They place it into moral categories before you have seen it clearly. A car bomb is a terror attack. A raid is an operation. A fighter is a militant or a soldier depending on who names him. Some acts are framed as retaliation or response, others appear without context at all. The judgement is built into the language, and it shapes what you are able to see.

So when you hear that people “support terrorism”, what do you think that means? Fanaticism? Cruelty? A disregard for human life? Or is the word doing more work than you realise, applied selectively, stretching in some places and narrowing in others?

Now change your perspective.

You are in Derry during The Troubles, or in Baghdad during the Iraq War, or in Batang Kali during the Malayan Emergency, or southern Lebanon, or parts of Gaza where the sky itself can feel like a threat. The conflict does not arrive as headlines or news bulletins. It does not interrupt your day. It is your day.

Soldiers on the street, or drones overhead. Stops and searches, or checkpoints that divide neighbourhoods and families. Raids and detentions, or the sudden violence of an airstrike. The uncertainty of whether a routine moment will escalate. The quiet calculations, where to stand, when to speak, whether to move at all. The sense that your safety depends not on rules, but on the judgement of someone you cannot question, and who might well hate you. You are told that this is the price of stability. It does not feel like stability. It feels like oppression.

From your sofa, violence appears episodic. A bombing, a strike, a response. From the street, power is continuous. It is not something that happens. It is something you move through.

And even the story of cause and effect shifts depending on where you sit. Some forms of violence are consistently introduced as responses, retaliation for something that came before. Others arrive as if from nowhere, stripped of history, presented as eruptions of hatred or fanaticism. Entire populations are flattened into caricature, irrational, violent, incapable of politics. Armed groups are reduced to “proxies”, extensions of some distant power, their local origins, grievances, and aims quietly removed. You may recognise their names, but not know how they emerged, what they claim to represent, or why they endure.

So when Western audiences ask, often with genuine confusion, why anyone would support those they call terrorists, what is missing?

Take the Provisional IRA. For many in Britain, the conflict was defined by bombs, by attacks on soldiers, by sudden, shocking violence. That is what reached the sofa. But for many in places like Derry or West Belfast, the defining experience was different: the daily presence of soldiers, raids, detentions, and the constant pressure of a system imposed on their lives. The same conflict looked different depending on where you stood.

Support, in that context, was not always ideological, and rarely a simple endorsement of violence. It was shaped by what you saw and what you lived with.

That difference matters. The person on the sofa may treat the worst actions of their country’s soldiers as excesses, regrettable but not representative. The person on the street may make a similar distinction about insurgents, seeing reckless or indiscriminate attacks as wrong without abandoning the broader cause. In both cases, support is not a blank cheque. It is filtered through experience, loyalty, and constraint.

And in that sense, support for insurgents often mirrors something more familiar. “Supporting the troops” does not mean endorsing every action taken by someone in uniform. It means aligning with the force that claims to protect you. For someone living under occupation or sustained external control, support for those labelled terrorists can function in much the same way. Not as a pure endorsement of violence, but as a reflection of where the pressure is felt, and where resistance appears possible.

This is what the language of officialdom tends to conceal. “Shock and awe” is the use of overwhelming force to dominate and disorient, to make resistance feel futile from the outset. “Hearts and minds” is not its softer counterpart but its continuation by other means, a system that makes it costly to resist and risky even to be seen as sympathetic to resistance. It is a carrot and stick approach, where cooperation is rewarded and non-compliance brings pressure, suspicion, or force. Fear sits at its centre.

Neither “shock and awe” nor “hearts and minds” removes violence. They organise it. The terms soften what they’re describing. They disguise its true nature and redirect attention away from it. They suggest that force is precise, controlled, and directed only at those who deserve it, that harm falls on the guilty while everyone else is being protected. But for those inside the system, that distinction does not hold. Force is not experienced as selective. It is ambient, uneven, and often terrifying.

So the question changes. Not “why would anyone support terrorism?”, asked from a distance that already assumes the answer. But what does that support actually mean when the violence that defines your world is not the attack, but the system that precedes it and surrounds it?

From inside the system, an IRA bomb that kills civilians when it detonated early is not experienced as morally distinct, in any meaningful way, from a soldier firing into a crowd during events like Bloody Sunday or Ballymurphy. Both were forms of violence imposed on civilians within a wider system of conflict. Both would be excused, denied, explained, justified, or minimised by those who identify with the actors responsible. From a distance, the distinction between insurgency and counter-insurgency holds. Up close, they look pretty similar.

Precisely because the term “terrorism” is used unevenly, it matters when it clearly applies. When violence targets civilians as the message itself, when fear is not a by-product but the point, something different is happening. The staged executions carried out by ISIS are not simply acts of violence. They are performances built around civilian vulnerability. They are designed to communicate through fear. That should be named plainly. But the existence of terrorism does not simplify the wider landscape. When the term is applied selectively, when some forms of violence are made vivid and others are absorbed into the background, it begins to shape perception rather than clarify it. From the sofa, insurgent violence is the story. From the street, the system is the story.

And that is why this is so difficult to understand when sitting on your sofa. Western audiences are not uniquely blind. But they are looking at a picture that has already been arranged for them. They see spikes of violence and are told that is the whole. They do not see the structure in which those spikes occur, or they are taught to interpret it differently.

So they ask, why would anyone support terrorism?

Turn the image around, and the question changes. What does this world look like from within it? What does “terrorism” mean when it is not the only violence you see, but one part of a system you live inside?

And what would you become, if you lived there?

Britain keeps experiencing Middle Eastern wars as sudden emergencies. Each appears as an unpredictable crisis: missiles, retaliation, allies under threat, difficult decisions taken under pressure.

But they are not sudden and they are not accidental.

The same decision keeps arriving because the same policy keeps producing it. Britain is not repeatedly dragged into Middle Eastern wars. It has built a system that repeatedly places it in them.

Stephen Bush’s recent column is useful because it expresses the respectable Westminster view with unusual clarity. Writing about the government allowing the United States to use British bases after the Iran strikes, he argues that once missiles were flying and British nationals were sheltering in the Gulf, maintaining a “no involvement” position would have been “a fantasy”.

It is a serious argument. It is also revealing.

Bush is describing a constraint. What he does not ask is why Britain repeatedly finds itself in situations where the constraint operates so predictably.

After the US-Israeli strikes, the UK authorised American use of British facilities for attacks on Iranian missile launchers, justifying the move as collective self-defence and protection of British lives. Once retaliation began, involvement was presented as unavoidable.

Yet other allies faced the same crisis and acted differently. Spain hosts major US military bases at Rota and Morón. It prohibited their use in the Iran operations, insisting they comply with the UN Charter and existing agreements. American aircraft relocated elsewhere. The alliance did not collapse.

France condemned escalation and called for diplomacy while stressing it had taken no part in the strikes. Germany and other European governments followed the same pattern: political alignment with Western partners, but little actual operational participation.

The difference becomes striking in the joint statement issued by France, Germany and the United Kingdom. All three governments called for restraint and a diplomatic solution. Their reading of the crisis was almost identical.

Yet the practical consequences differed. France and Germany limited themselves to diplomacy. Britain, while signing the same appeal for de-escalation, authorised the use of its territory for strikes.

The important fact is not that Britain chose involvement. It is that Britain appears to be the ally least able to refuse it. Britain is not merely allied with the United States. It is embedded within an American-led security architecture. Intelligence systems, targeting, basing, logistics and regional deployments operate as an integrated network. When the United States conducts military operations in a theatre where that network exists, Britain does not face a purely political decision. It faces a systems decision.

This arrangement did not arise recently. It is the successor to an older strategic role. For more than a century British strategy in the Gulf has followed a recognisable logic: protect trade routes, secure energy flows and support friendly regimes in exchange for basing and influence. The empire ended, but the operational assumptions endured. The Gulf bases are not a temporary response to recent threats. They are the permanent descendants of earlier British commitments to manage the region’s political order, now incorporated into a wider American security system.

That architecture produces a circular logic.

The bases are justified by instability.
Instability requires supporting local illiberal regimes.
Supporting the regimes deepens instability.
Regional conflict makes the bases indispensable.

When conflict erupts, Britain does not so much decide to participate as discover it is already present.

The argument about British citizens under threat sounds decisive until one pauses. British citizens live in many dangerous parts of the world without triggering military participation. Likewise, Norway is unlikely to enter the war if Norwegian citizens living in Dubai are killed. What matters here is not simply citizens, but infrastructure. Britain is not merely observing events in the region. It is part of the operational machinery through which recurrent military action occurs.

Bush might be right about the immediate moment. Once deeply integrated into another power’s military operations, disentanglement during a live conflict becomes extremely difficult. But that observation should begin a debate rather than end one.

It is fair to ask what would have happened had the government refused. The consequences would not have been trivial. Washington would have reacted angrily. There would have been diplomatic strain and accusations of unreliability. Intelligence cooperation might have become more difficult for a time. But that is not catastrophe. Other allies have disagreed with American military decisions without ending their alliances or their security. Arguments would have followed but the relationship would have endured.

The significance of this episode is therefore not that Britain faced pressure. It is that British politics increasingly treats pressure as proof a decision cannot be taken. If every crisis produces the same conclusion, the conclusion is not caused by the crisis. It is caused by the policy. This is not an argument for isolation. Alliances are normal and often valuable. The question is whether an alliance enhances security while preserving agency, or whether it gradually removes the ability to decide when participation in war is justified.

British debate has become adept at observing entanglement while avoiding discussion of how to reduce it. The country is not only reacting to events in the Middle East. It is operating inside a strategic role it has inherited but rarely examines. Britain treats each Middle Eastern crisis as a new emergency. But a posture designed to keep Britain permanently present in the region will continue to produce them.

The question is no longer why Britain keeps being pulled into these wars.

The question is why it keeps arranging to be there when they start.

A party lost a by-election in Gorton and Denton.

That is not news. Parties lose by-elections constantly. They blame turnout, organisation, messaging, the weather, the leaflet that arrived late. Losing is part of democracy.

What followed was different.

After the result, Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin warned of “dangerous Muslim sectarianism” and questioned whether the election had been free and fair. Nigel Farage went further, alleging cheating and suggesting non-British voters had shaped the outcome.

Pause there, because the word matters.

Sectarianism has a meaning. It describes a society where people vote only for their own religious or communal representatives. Catholics vote Catholic. Protestants vote Protestant. One community refuses to accept political authority from another. So what actually happened in Gorton and Denton?

Many Muslim voters backed the Greens, a party led nationally by a gay Jewish man and represented locally by a white working-class woman. Younger white students and graduates did the same. So did parts of the traditional older Labour vote. The coalition crossed religion, ethnicity and background.

If Muslims had voted for Muslim clerics while white voters rallied behind an explicitly anti-Muslim candidate, you could plausibly talk about sectarian politics. Instead the opposite occurred. Different communities voted together for the same secular candidate in a mainstream party.

Nothing unusual had happened. Citizens had voted. Yet the complaint was not really about campaigning. It was about the electorate. The argument was no longer: we failed to persuade people. It became: these people should not have been decisive.

Once you move from criticising votes to questioning voters, you are no longer arguing about policy. You are arguing about belonging. That is what sectarianism actually is. It appears when democratic outcomes are accepted only if they are delivered by the “right” population. The dispute stops being about what was decided and becomes about who was entitled to decide it. The reaction to Gorton and Denton matters for one reason above all others. It shows that this way of thinking has entered mainstream British politics.

When Losing Felt Normal

For most of modern British history elections settled arguments. Governments were loathed, mocked, protested against and sometimes swept away in landslides. Yet their authority was still recognised. Thatcher could win three elections and remain legitimate to her opponents. Blair could win in 1997 and still be accepted by his critics. Losing did not feel like exclusion. It felt like defeat.

That stability rested on something rarely stated aloud. The institutions of the state, the national story and the symbols of public life reflected English historical experience. For much of the twentieth century Britishness and Englishness were closely intertwined, so English identity did not appear as one identity among many. It appeared as neutrality or normality. Many English people therefore did not experience themselves as a group at all. They experienced themselves simply as ordinary society.

Other citizens understood belonging differently. Scots and Welsh voters maintained more developed national identities alongside Britishness. Irish, Jewish, Caribbean and South Asian communities in England belonged to Britain while recognising it did not fully mirror them. Their citizenship was layered. Because the majority rarely had to think about identity, politics felt like disagreement within a shared public rather than negotiation between different ones.

When the country later became visibly multinational and multicultural, many citizens simply saw identities they already possessed publicly recognised. A large part of the English majority experienced something different. They were not losing citizenship or rights. They were discovering that what had long felt neutral was in fact particular.

This realisation unfolded alongside a wider cultural reckoning. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, being English carried an often unexamined sense of authority. The Empire was a source of pride. The rest of the United Kingdom and the wider world were frequently viewed, sometimes sympathetically and sometimes patronisingly, as places that would benefit from becoming more like England.

Late twentieth-century debates about empire, racism and historical injustice did not simply add new information. They changed the moral framing. The national story was no longer only one of progress and leadership but also of domination and harm. For some citizens this was an overdue correction. For others it felt like a sudden inversion. Characteristics that had never needed explanation were now being explained, criticised and historicised, and what had once carried quiet prestige was experienced as public reproach.

The discovery did not remain reflective for long. When people begin to see themselves as a defined public, politics attaches quickly to boundaries. Questions that once seemed administrative begin to feel constitutional. Not everyone responded this way, but a consistent pattern appeared. Voters who identified more strongly as English than British were more likely to support Brexit, more sceptical of immigration, more hostile to supranational courts and more resentful of perceived asymmetry within the United Kingdom. The common thread was not policy detail. It was legitimacy: a belief that political authority should visibly reflect the majority culture of the country. Disagreement therefore began to feel less like normal democratic conflict and more like a question of rightful ownership.

A democracy becomes unstable when losing an election stops feeling like being persuaded by fellow citizens and starts feeling like being governed by outsiders. The political question quietly changes from what should government do? to who is entitled to decide?

Brexit expressed that shift.

“Take back control” resonated not because voters studied trade law but because it addressed legitimacy. It promised a direct link between a recognisable public and traditional political authority. Supporters wanted democratic restoration. Opponents feared constitutional rupture. Both were responding to the same uncertainty: who sovereignty belonged to.

The 2019 election temporarily calmed the question. “Get Brexit Done” reassured many voters that the system had heard them. But reassurance is not resolution. Leaving the European Union could change law. It could not settle belonging or improve material conditions. Daily life did not suddenly feel better or closer to Westminster. Authority still flowed through courts, institutions and mediated politics.

The Parties and the Public

The political system then tried to manage a problem it did not fully name - Englishness.

Both major parties eventually oriented themselves toward the same English electorate. The Conservatives leaned into recognition, promising borders, sovereignty and national confidence. Labour pursued reassurance, organising its strategy around the imagined decisive voter in post-industrial England: socially conservative, supportive of Brexit, anti-immigration, and culturally uneasy with activism and progressive language.

Neither approach resolved the underlying question, because Britain no longer contains a single uncontested public. Voters began sorting themselves differently. Some moved toward parties expressing a plural civic idea of the country, notably the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Others moved toward Reform, which offers a clearer majoritarian definition of the nation. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, separatist parties saw their vote share increase.

So the divide is no longer simply left versus right. It is between two ideas of democracy. One sees democracy as majority rule by a ‘familiar’ national community. When outcomes do not match that expectation, legitimacy is doubted. The other sees democracy as legitimate precisely because citizens differ and institutions exist to manage those differences.

Seen from within the first view, the Gorton and Denton result did not look like defeat. It looked like malfunction. The voters themselves became evidence the system had gone wrong. Which returns us to the accusation of sectarianism.

A democratic outcome was rejected because of who participated decisively. That is not merely a complaint about politics. It is a sectarian response to democracy. Northern Ireland shows the mechanism clearly. The conflict there was never theological. It was about whether one community would accept authority from another and which electorate counted as legitimate. Elections alone could not settle the dispute because the dispute concerned the boundaries of the legitimate political community itself.

Mainland Britain long believed it was immune to this problem because it believed it had one people. In reality it had a shared assumption. As that assumption fractured, the same legitimacy tension began to appear. This is why British politics now feels unstable.

The rise of Reform and the rise of the Greens are not unrelated. They are competing solutions to the same question. One narrows the definition of the public so outcomes feel legitimate again. The other expands it so legitimacy rests on equal citizenship.

Britain is not simply polarised. It is arguing about what the country is. Elections should decide who governs, not who belongs. When a legitimate defeat is experienced as exclusion, democratic stability cannot last.

The British government has published a proposed major reform of special educational needs and disability (SEND) support in England. Ministers say the changes will end adversarial disputes, ensure children receive help earlier, and reduce the need for legal battles between families and councils.

Many parents and SEND professionals have reacted very differently. Their concern is not simply about change. It is about enforceability. The current system relies on a legal mechanism that compels provision when disagreement occurs. The proposed system relies more heavily on administrative decision-making inside education services.

To understand why this matters, you first need to understand what an Education, Health and Care Plan actually is.

What an EHCP actually does

An EHCP is often described as a plan, but in practice it is a legal duty. If provision is written clearly in the education section of the plan, the local authority must secure it. Without an EHCP, a school is expected to support a child using its own resources. With an EHCP, the state becomes legally responsible for delivering specified support.

Families therefore pursue EHCPs not because they want paperwork but because they want certainty. The difference is enforceability.

EHCPs are intended for children whose needs cannot reasonably be met within ordinary school provision. In practice, families often apply after ordinary support has failed. That may involve persistent distress, attendance collapse, risk of exclusion, autism requiring structured support, learning disability, or the need for constant adult supervision. Access to therapy such as speech and language provision is also a common trigger.

England now has roughly half a million children with EHCPs. The number has risen sharply. That rise is often discussed as a rise in need, but it also reflects how the system functions. When provision is uncertain or subpar, families seek the only route that guarantees it.

EHCPs matter because they specify support, determine placement, and allow legal challenge. The wording of provision determines whether support is enforceable. A vague statement such as “access to support” allows minimal delivery. A quantified commitment such as defined hours of one-to-one assistance from a person with specific qualifications creates a duty the authority must meet. The plan can also name a school, and once named the authority normally has to fund it.

The most important feature, however, is appeal.

The tribunal system

If a council refuses to assess, refuses to issue a plan, or disputes provision or placement, parents can appeal to the SEND Tribunal. Tribunal decisions are binding.

When cases reach a decision, families succeed in the overwhelming majority of them. Nationally, around 99 percent of decided cases result in parents winning on the issues appealed.

This statistic is central to understanding the debate. It indicates that under-provision is not occasional. It is systemic. Each lost tribunal represents a case where the authority’s original decision did not meet the legal standard required to secure the child’s educational provision.

Local authorities are not necessarily acting maliciously. They are operating under constrained budgets while facing open-ended legal duties. But the outcome is clear. The system currently reaches lawful provision reliably only after formal legal challenge.

In other words, the tribunal is not a peripheral safeguard. It is the mechanism that makes the legal right effective.

What the White Paper is trying to change

The government argues the current model is slow, adversarial and inconsistent. Families, it says, should not need legal proceedings simply to obtain help. The reform therefore aims to shift support earlier and into schools.

The proposed structure has three levels. Schools provide universal support through improved identification and teaching adjustments. Children then access targeted specialist input such as speech and language therapy or educational psychology without needing an EHCP. Only the most complex cases receive specialist provision linked to an EHCP based on nationally defined criteria. Schools would record support in Individual Support Plans for children receiving additional help.

The intention is that support should happen because a child needs it, not because a family has secured a legal document.

If the new training programmes, specialist hubs and advisory services work as intended, one clear outcome would follow. Fewer disputes would arise and tribunal cases would fall naturally because provision would already be in place.

The capacity problem

The concern raised by many families and practitioners is that the reform depends on capacity that does not yet exist.

Once the announced funding is distributed across schools and the roughly 1.7 to 1.8 million pupils identified with SEND, the increase amounts to hundreds of pounds per pupil per year and tens of thousands of pounds per school. That can improve support but does not fundamentally change staffing levels. In real terms, it might fund part of a full-time teaching assistant post.

The model also depends on earlier access to educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists. England already has shortages in each of these professions. Training pipelines take years to develop and many areas already struggle to provide regular input even for children with EHCPs. Additional teacher training cannot substitute for clinical assessment and intervention planning carried out by qualified specialists.

The reform therefore shifts responsibility to schools while the professional workforce required to support that shift remains limited.

Specialist placements

The proposals also give local authorities stronger control over the cost of independent specialist placements and seek to reduce reliance on them.

Many non-maintained and independent specialist schools support pupils with the highest levels of need, including children requiring one-to-one, two-to-one, or even three-to-one supervision who cannot safely function in large mainstream environments. These placements frequently follow tribunal decisions that mainstream education cannot safely meet the child’s needs.

Their costs are overwhelmingly staffing. If funding does not cover staff wages, the placement cannot be delivered. If pupil numbers fall because placements are restricted, the schools lose financial viability. Some of the settings that currently support the most difficult-to-place pupils could therefore close. The alternatives would often be residential placements, unsuitable placements, or unsafe placements rather than cheaper local provision.

Why the reaction is so strong

The key disagreement is not about whether reform is needed. Most participants in the system agree the current process is slow and conflict-driven. The disagreement is about sequence, rights, and power.

The present system uses a legal route to correct under-provision. The proposed system reduces reliance on that legal route while giving local authorities greater discretion over provision and placement decisions.

Parents therefore see a specific risk. If improved services genuinely solved under-provision, tribunal cases would decline on their own. Instead, the reform reduces enforceability before there is evidence that the underlying capacity problem has been resolved.

This is why many families interpret the changes not simply as an administrative reform but as a change to the balance between rights and discretion. The question at the centre of the debate is whether support will be guaranteed by services or by law, and whether the new system can provide the same protection in practice that the current legal mechanism, despite its flaws, currently provides.

For years, Westminster talked about “Starmerism” as if it were a philosophy.
It was not. It was a management system. And the system has just lost its architect.

Morgan McSweeney’s resignation matters not because he held high office, but because he held something more important. He held the operational logic of the project. He was described as the Prime Minister’s brain. The odd part is that the brain never really belonged to the leader. The leader belonged to the project, and the project belonged to the brain.

To understand why his departure matters, you have to understand the world that built him: Labour Together, the secret projects in Room 216, and the version of Britain that was constructed around a single imaginary voter while real voters quietly walked away.

Labour Together and the Restoration of Control

Labour Together was never just a loose faction gathered around a charismatic figure or political philosophy. It was an answer to a structural shock.

In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership and power inside the party slipped. Away from MPs, advisers and donors. Towards members. Hundreds of thousands of people joined. Conference votes began to matter again. Constituency parties started to influence policy and select candidates who looked like the membership rather than the leader’s office.

For the first time in decades Labour began to resemble a mass democratic organisation instead of a parliamentary election machine.

For the people whose political lives had been built in committee rooms, TV studios and think tank offices this was not a gentle disagreement about the correct shade of social democracy. It felt like losing control of the machine.

Labour Together was the answer to that loss. It brought together a very recognisable coalition. MPs and their staff. Policy thinkers like Jonathan Rutherford and Jon Cruddas. Local government leaders. Campaign professionals. A small ring of wealthy Labour-aligned donors such as Trevor Chinn and Martin Taylor who had been close to the party in the past.

What united them was not a detailed manifesto. It was a shared understanding of what a “serious” party is supposed to look like. In that worldview, authority rests with elected representatives, permanent party staff, and established institutions, not with a mass membership who can be swayed by enthusiasm, activist groups and independent media that you cannot control using traditional tactics.

In public, Labour Together styled itself as a place for reflection. Conferences about patriotism, belonging, Labour’s loss of connection with England. Some people inside it initially took that at face value. They thought they were doing cultural analysis and renewal.

Alongside that, something more targeted developed. Labour Together became a coordination network. If you could not be sure of winning internal ballots, you moved the fight outside formal party democracy. Journalists and opinion-formers were cultivated. Donors were kept aligned. Potential parliamentary candidates were quietly identified and encouraged. The goal was not to win votes on the conference floor. It was to decide what would ever be allowed onto the floor.

The 2017 general election raised the stakes. Labour did not win, but it came close enough to prove that a membership-directed programme could plausibly form a government. That frightened people who had assumed that the left could never get near real power again.

Labour Together’s internal SWOT analysis of Corbynism, later described by journalists, made two linked points. A government led by the Labour left, if it collapsed in office, could poison the well for a generation. At the same time Corbyn’s personal position and the party’s rules made it difficult to attack him frontally. The opportunity they saw was precise. Find a leader who could present as “competent Corbynism” to the members, while offering something quite different to the institutions that mattered.

That is how Keir Starmer became “their man”.

He did not arrive as a roaring anti-Corbyn figure. He had sat in the shadow cabinet. He had backed much of the manifesto. He was a senior lawyer, measured in public, plausible to the establishment and, crucially, amenable. Ideal if your sales pitch to the members was continuity, while your real intention was to end it.

At the same time, Labour Together figures were looking hard at the information environment. Members did not only form their views at CLP meetings. They formed them while reading independent pro-Corbyn and left-leaning mainstream outlets on their phones.

In internal discussions Labour Together MPs talked about the need to “destroy The Canary”, the most prominent left-wing site read by ordinary members. That phrase matters. It shows that the battle was not only over who led Labour, but over whose account of reality would be treated as legitimate.

Here the party’s disciplinary machinery became a political tool. Allegations around antisemitism and Israel could lead to suspension or expulsion. That determined who could stand for selection, who could organise, who could speak with the party logo next to their name. The antisemitism issue was real and serious, and it harmed real people. It was also politically decisive. Once you frame disputes as misconduct rather than disagreement, you can transform the internal balance of power without a single formal vote.

By the time the 2020 leadership contest opened, the infrastructure and positioning were in place.

The campaign spoke two languages. To members it offered ten pledges that read like continuity with the 2017 and 2019 manifestos: public ownership, workers’ rights, tax justice, radical climate investment. To the wider establishment it offered stability, respectability, and a clear end to the experiment of party democracy.

Those two lines were not held honestly in parallel. They were held sequentially. First you promise continuity to secure the ballot of the members whose votes you need. Then, once the votes are counted and the keys are in your hand, you quietly lock the door on the promises.

That is what happened. The pledges were dropped one by one. Candidate selections tightened. Dissent narrowed. The new parliamentary party began to resemble the leadership rather than the membership.

None of this was improvised. It was the plan.

And the individual most closely associated with turning that plan into something that existed in the real world was Morgan McSweeney.

McSweeney, The Fraud and the Secret Projects

If Labour Together explains the structure, McSweeney explains the method.

He did not enter politics to write theory. He entered to run operations. During the 2001 general election he worked in Peter Mandelson’s rebuttal unit, using the Excalibur system to track hostile stories and help coordinate rapid responses. If you want a picture of the education that produced the later project, it starts there: in a room where politics is treated as message management, not public argument.

Later he worked in Lambeth with Steve Reed, and on campaigns across east London and Essex. The experience that appears to have hardened his outlook came in Barking and Dagenham, where Labour was losing working-class support to the BNP. The successful fightback was built, not on standing outside housing estates shouting “no to racism”, but on talking about allocation rules, neighbourhood change and local services. The aim was to make Labour look attentive and reassuring rather than morally superior.

The conclusion he seems to have drawn travelled back with him into national politics. A party that looks like it is driven from below by activists and social movements will struggle to be trusted with the state. It will always look volatile. From there, his reading of Corbynism followed.

The failed Liz Kendall leadership campaign in 2015 clarified the constraint. A direct anti-Corbyn candidacy was crushed by the membership. You could not simply tell members they were wrong and expect them to thank you. They would vote you down.

So the strategy changed. You did not confront the membership head on. You reshaped the environment in which they made choices.

After 2017, as McSweeney became central to Labour Together, the project took two linked forms. Succession planning and delegitimation.

Succession planning meant identifying a leader who could win a members’ ballot while reassuring MPs, donors, the media and the state. Delegitimation meant stripping authority away from the culture that had allowed Corbynism to arise in the first place.

That required money, information work and secrecy.

Holden’s book pulls back the curtain. Using internal party documents, Companies House records and correspondence, he describes what he calls the “secret projects” run from Room 216 at the China Works building in south London, Labour Together’s base.

Only a handful of people were allowed to work there. Alongside McSweeney, Holden names staffers Hannah O’Rourke and Will Prescott, plus Imran Ahmed, a Labour operative with a long record of combative, anti-Corbyn spin. Steve Reed, rising through the party from local government to the parliamentary front bench, is ever-present in the background.

Holden describes three strands.

First, an intervention in the internal debate on antisemitism. McSweeney and Ahmed trawled through about twenty pro-Corbyn Facebook groups, with a combined membership of roughly four hundred thousand and an estimated four million posts, harvesting examples of antisemitism, racism and violent language. They produced a dossier of around two thousand “incidents”. According to later accounts by friendly journalists, McSweeney ensured that the most disturbing examples were placed with the Sunday Times.

The resulting splash, headlined “Jeremy Corbyn’s hate factory”, treated these large, often open Facebook groups as if they were official arms of the leadership. The existence of the worst posts was presented as proof of a uniquely hateful culture stamped with Corbyn’s name.

The scale and context were barely mentioned. One administrator later pointed out that the “hate” posts were a tiny fraction of total communications, that volunteer moderators had spent years developing “Corbyn standards” of zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism, sexism and homophobia, that there were meta-groups where administrators from different Facebook spaces shared best practice. That did not make the cut. It would have complicated the story.

Second, Holden shows that Labour Together was centrally involved in setting up the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its anonymous campaign Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Internal briefing notes prepared for Reed boasted that Labour Together had “set up” what they mis-named the “Campaign for Countering Digital Hate”, raising start-up funds and providing office space.

Corporate records show that CCDH began life as Brixton Endeavours, a company registered at Labour Together’s address, with McSweeney as sole director. Another company, Labour Campaigns, directed by Ahmed, used the same address. The domain for SFFN was registered to Ahmed personally.

Outwardly, SFFN presented itself as a plucky band of anonymous activists inspired by the US Sleeping Giants campaign, asking advertisers not to fund “fake news”. In reality it was a classic astroturf operation: created by insiders, funded from undeclared Labour Together donations, aimed directly at the pro-Corbyn media ecosystem.

The target list tells its own story. At launch in March 2019 SFFN highlighted four sites. Two were right-wing platforms, Westmonster and Politicalite. Two were pro-Corbyn sites, The Canary and Evolve Politics, both regulated by Impress, with independent assessments that rated their factual content as high even while calling their politics left-wing.

The method was simple but brutal. Take a screenshot of a mainstream advert appearing next to a controversial article. Tag the brand on Twitter. Accuse them of funding hate and lies. Repeat until the brand pulls its ads.

Macmillan Cancer Support was one of the early trophies. The charity was lobbied over an ad that appeared on a Canary piece about Joan Ryan. The key tweet came from a small account calling itself “Dave Gordstein”. Holden shows that “Dave Gordstein” was a fake Jewish-sounding persona run by a non-Jewish activist from Labour Against Antisemitism. Within hours Macmillan announced that it was “taking action” to remove the ad placement. SFFN thanked “Dave” and celebrated publicly. Behind that victory were real journalists facing lost income and job cuts.

The campaign continued. Later, they boasted that The Canary’s monthly traffic had fallen from roughly six million views in 2017 to around 1.4 million by the time of the 2019 election, and that Evolve Politics had tumbled from about two million views to 170,000. It branded that collapse a triumph over fake news. In practice it meant that two of the only significant pro-Labour, pro-Corbyn platforms were badly weakened by the time members went back to the polls.

Third, Holden details work with the Jewish Labour Movement and allied groups to “engineer” the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into Labour. Complaints were curated, packaged and pressed. The concept of “denialism” was deployed so that questioning the way antisemitism was being politicised could itself be classed as antisemitism. Reports that drew on weak or tendentious allegations were folded back into the media narrative as further proof of the severity of the crisis.

This does not erase the existence of genuine antisemitism. It does something more uncomfortable. It reveals that, alongside real pain and real prejudice, there was at least one organised hidden hand inflaming and steering events for factional ends, using undisclosed money and front organisations that posed as independent.

When Holden dug into all this, the reaction from those involved was revealing. Instead of addressing the evidence, they tried to wreck the messenger. According to his account, around £30,000 was spent on private investigators. Sources were hunted. Friendly journalists were briefed that he was working for Russia.

After years running an astroturf “fake news” operation that labelled others as disinformation, they treated scrutiny of their own methods as more “fake news” to be neutralised.

Seen in that light, the 2020 leadership contest looks very different.

By then, the succession plan existed on paper and in practice. Starmer was put forward as the vehicle. The ten pledges were the sales pitch to the members. The real manifesto lived in strategy documents and private assurances to donors, journalists and state actors that the programme would change once control had been recentralised. Crucially, the scale of the operation behind him was hidden in plain sight. Under McSweeney’s watch, Labour Together failed to declare hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations to the Electoral Commission until months after the legal deadline and after the leadership contest had finished.

Whatever the internal justification, the effect was simple. Members voted for their new leader without knowing how much money, and which interests, had already been assembled behind “their man”. Members voted for what they thought was competent continuity. The people running the project knew that continuity would not survive contact with power.

That was not an accident. It was the point.

Hero Voters, Gaza and Reactionary Centrism in Office

On paper, McSweeney’s strategy worked. Labour won a huge parliamentary majority in 2024. Four hundred and eleven seats, a majority of 174, off just 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest vote share ever to deliver such dominance. A landslide in seats, a shrug in the country.

The nature of that victory mattered. Voters had removed the Conservatives after fourteen years of scandal, stagnation and administrative decay. Nigel Farage’s return had split the right-wing vote and helped Labour over the line. What Labour had assembled was not a mass movement. It was a thin, cautious coalition based on reluctant permission.

The leadership did not treat this as a fragile mandate for serious change. It treated it as a warning against it.

Here the logic sometimes called the “Hero Voter” comes into view. The central character in the story is not the activist, the member, the traditional Labour supporter, or even the left-leaning centrist. It is a hypothetical moderate “middle” voter, usually imagined as slightly socially conservative, Brexit supporting, economically anxious, anti-immigration and easily spooked by anything recognisably left-wing.

Everything is done in the shadow of this imaginary figure. Policy is weighed less on its social impact than on whether it might frighten the Hero Voter. If something looks too redistributive, too pro-union, too sympathetic to refugees, too tolerant of protest movements, it is treated as radioactive, even after you have already won the election.

The result is what you could call reactionary centrism. Instead of balancing between left and right, you define yourself against your own side. It is not enough to oppose the Conservatives. You have to demonstrate to the Hero Voter that you are also willing to stand up to the people who put you in office.

That logic explains a pattern that otherwise looks incoherent.

Harsh rhetoric on migration and asylum, including talk of an “island of strangers”, followed by partial retreats once backbenchers, members and the wider public react with disgust.

An initial response to the Hamas atrocities and Israel’s assault on Gaza that echoed the language of collective punishment, defending measures that cut off water, power and fuel to an entire civilian population, followed by months of resistance to calls for a ceasefire, followed again by staggered and limited shifts in position once the domestic political costs grew too high. Local councillors, many of them Muslim, resigned in waves. Labour’s support haemorrhaged in Muslim-majority wards. The party’s standing among British Muslim voters collapsed, and it was not hard to see why.

The decision to ban Palestine Action under terror legislation sent a similar signal. Protest movements rooted in the left would be treated first as public order problems, not as legitimate political actors.

Inside Parliament, MPs who rebelled on issues from welfare to foreign policy faced discipline. Some saw the whip removed for voting with their conscience, only for the government to move towards their position later. The message was not about policy detail. It was about authority. The party had to look “changed”.

The problem was the Labour voters didn’t like the change. The polling picture followed.

Within eighteen months of the “landslide”, Labour’s vote had not consolidated, it had fractured. An Ipsos poll at the start of February put Reform on 30 per cent, Labour on 22 per cent, the Conservatives on 19 and the Greens on 12. A More in Common MRP projected a Reform majority if an election were held now, with Labour and the Conservatives fighting for second place.

The party that had designed itself to neutralise far-right populist challengers had helped to normalise them. By validating the language and framing of its opponents in order to reassure the Hero Voter, it strengthened those opponents’ legitimacy and weakened its own.

What began as an electoral operating model became the method of government. A strategy built to reassure sceptical observers of your discipline is very effective at sterilising real enthusiasm. It is much less effective once you have to govern through crises rather than commentary.

Mandelson, Epstein and the Moment the Machine Broke

Every political system eventually meets the moment that shows you what it really is.

For the Labour Together system, that moment arrived with Peter Mandelson.

For decades Mandelson carried a nickname that was hardly affectionate. The Prince of Darkness. Twice forced out of office, forever associated with spin, dirty tricks, back-channels and elite networking, he embodied the older New Labour world in which Morgan McSweeney learned his trade. He was also close enough to be described as a mentor to key Labour Together figures, including McSweeney himself and Wes Streeting.

Within that mindset, none of this made him a liability. It made him an asset. He had international connections. He was taken seriously by business and media. He was implacably hostile to the Labour left. He had been involved, formally and informally, in shaping candidate selections and internal alignments. To a leadership whose method relied on reassuring powerful institutions that Labour was once again a known quantity, he looked like a human guarantee.

His association with Jeffrey Epstein was not some late surprise. They knew that it continued after Epstein’s conviction for child sexual offences. In any political culture organised around clear moral red lines, that alone would have been disqualifying for a state role. For the Labour Together mentality, the calculation was different. The risk was reputational, not moral, and reputations could be managed. If you had the right people in the room and the right comms strategy, you could tame any beast.

This is the key to understanding why they thought they could get away with it.

The world they imagined themselves operating in was brutal and transactional. Across the Atlantic they expected a hostile White House dominated by right-wing populism. Diplomacy, in that frame, would rely on private networks and informal leverage rather than open politics. Mandelson, they told themselves, could work that terrain. He spoke the language of donors, lobbyists and professional operators they instinctively treated as the serious people in the room.

So when the decision was taken to lobby for him to become Britain’s ambassador to the United States, it was not a careless aberration. It was a textbook application of their method. You select the figure who best signals continuity and “seriousness” to the people you most want to impress and you trust your ability to message your way through anything that follows. Voters and members are not partners in that story. They are the ball being kicked up and down the pitch while the grown-ups play the game.

This time, the game got away from them.

When documents emerged showing Mandelson sharing confidential government information with Epstein, the problem stopped being one of optics. It became a direct test of judgement and of what the government actually valued. The same traits that had once made Mandelson attractive to the leadership suddenly looked like open vulnerabilities: private channels, dodgy personal networks, and a lifetime spent edging along the line between influence and impropriety.

The scandal landed harder than it might have under a different kind of administration because the government had already stripped away its own political defences.

For two years the governing strategy had been to discipline activists, marginalise internal critics and treat dissent as risk. It had alienated large parts of its base over Gaza. It had frozen out figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott who symbolised earlier eras of Labour support, sending a very clear message to the people who admired them. It had helped legitimise narratives about “fake news” and “extremism” that were easy to turn back on itself. It had bent and twisted policy to please the imagined Hero Voter and still failed to win that voter’s long-term loyalty, while driving away people who had once believed Labour stood for something recognisable.

When the Mandelson story broke, there was no protective layer.

There was no mass of activists instinctively inclined to defend the government in the pub, at work or online. They had been treated as a problem to be managed. There was no deep reservoir of trust among supporters who could say, “I may not like this, but I know what they stand for.” They no longer knew. There were no grateful factions on the left willing to say, “This is bad, but we must hold the line for a Labour government.” Those people had been kicked once too often. The Hero Voters, meanwhile, did what they always do. They looked at the mess, shrugged, and drifted away.

A government built to reassure the “right” people discovered that it had very few people left who wanted to defend it.

And that brings us back to McSweeney. Starmer’s premiership has never been anchored in clear values. It has been anchored in technique. The theory was that you could build a value-free electoral machine, staffed by clever operators, guided by polling and message discipline, and that this machine could master a chaotic world. Donors, lobbyists and senior officials were treated as the serious adults whose anxieties needed to be soothed. Members and voters were treated as a problem to be managed with the right line to take.

Without the operator who designed that machine, what is left?

That is why McSweeney’s resignation matters. Not because a clever backroom strategist has left the building, but because it exposes the emptiness at the centre of a project that confused managing politics with doing it. If your premiership is built on comms rather than conviction, removing the person who ran the comms does not reveal the values underneath. It reveals that there were none.

The strange death of Keir Starmer’s brain is not just a personnel story. It is the story of a government that built its house on the shifting sands of perception, discovered that the tide was coming in, and realised, too late, that it had dismantled the scaffolding it would have needed to survive. Even if it tried to find a moral spine now, after years of punishing those who still had one, it would face the electorate with a question it cannot answer.

Why would anyone trust you when you claim to have changed?

This is the final post in The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) series. The earlier pieces examined illiberalism as a system rather than a personality, traced how it aligns across borders, explored its institutional design, and showed how it has embedded itself within Britain without overt rupture. This final article draws those threads together.

The series

• Part I: What illiberalism is, and why it is not simply authoritarianism
  https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part

• Part II: The Axis of Illiberalism as a transnational system
  https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-4b9

• Part III: Designing an illiberal state: Trumpism and Project 2025
  https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-a2c

• Part IV: Illiberal foreign policy and the erosion of international restraint
  https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-833

• Part V: Why capital aligns with illiberal democracy
  https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-668

• Part VI: Britain: alignment, accommodation, and respectability
  https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-e17
  
  

Liberal democracy is not simply a system for choosing leaders. It is a system for limiting power.

Elections matter, but they are not the core of the model. The core is constraint: law that binds the state, courts that cannot be overridden by popularity, rights that do not depend on loyalty, and international rules that restrict what governments may do even when they believe themselves justified. Liberal democracy assumes that power, left unchecked, will eventually be abused, and it builds friction into the system accordingly.

Illiberalism begins by rejecting that assumption.

Illiberal systems do not abolish elections. They hollow them out. The vote remains, but the constraints are treated as optional. Courts are reframed as political actors. Journalism becomes a threat rather than a safeguard. Human rights are recoded as privileges, citizenship as conditional, and international law as something that applies only when convenient. Power is no longer bound by principle, only by alignment.

This series has argued that this is not a mood, a backlash, or a cultural turn. It is a governing method. Once constraint is redefined as weakness, the logic travels quickly. Rules become discretionary. Enforcement becomes selective. Risk is redistributed downward, away from those who govern and onto those who dissent. Institutions adapt. Some comply. Some fall silent. Some are forced out. What remains looks like democracy, but functions very differently.

Illiberalism does not advance through coups or sudden constitutional rupture. As the earlier entries showed, it advances by changing how power understands risk. In a liberal democracy, risk is supposed to run upward. Governments hesitate because overreach is costly. Courts can strike down policy. Journalists can expose abuse. International law can impose diplomatic, legal, or reputational consequences. Power is made to pause.

Illiberal systems reverse that flow. The first step is rhetorical. Constraint is framed as weakness. Courts are said to obstruct “the will of the people.” Journalists are accused of bias rather than error. Human rights are presented as abstractions that protect the undeserving. International law is depicted as something imposed by foreigners with no democratic mandate. None of these arguments are new. What changes is how routinely they are accepted.

Once constraint is delegitimised, rules become conditional. The law still exists, but it is no longer universal. It is applied rigorously to opponents and leniently to allies. Breaches are justified as exceptional, temporary, or necessary. Over time, exception becomes precedent. Precedent becomes practice. Practice becomes normal.

At that point, something crucial happens. Risk is redistributed.

Journalists who challenge power face personal and professional consequences. Activists learn that protest carries escalating legal danger. Minorities discover that rights once assumed to be universal are now contingent on behaviour, alignment, or silence. Institutions designed to protect against abuse begin to prioritise survival instead. This is where illiberalism becomes self-reinforcing.

Institutions do not need to be captured all at once. As shown across Russia, Hungary, Israel, the United States, and Britain, they learn. Editors become cautious. Trustees weigh reputational cost before truth. Civil servants avoid certain interpretations of the law. Political parties adjust language to avoid provoking backlash. None of this requires explicit instruction. The environment does the work.

What emerges is not authoritarian rule in the classical sense, but a system of anticipatory compliance. Power does not need to threaten everyone. It only needs to punish a few, visibly and asymmetrically, so the lesson is internalised by the rest.

This is the mechanism that links the cases examined throughout this series.

The “Axis of Illiberalism” is not a formal alliance, nor a conspiracy. It is a shared logic, learned and reproduced across borders. Different histories, different cultures, different targets, but the same lesson: liberal constraint can be shed without immediate collapse.

Russia demonstrates that elections can be retained while opposition is rendered meaningless. Hungary shows how courts, universities, and media can be hollowed under the cover of reform. Israel illustrates how permanent emergency can justify permanent inequality, and how international law can be treated as selectively binding. The United States proves that even long-established democratic institutions can be bent toward personal rule if enough constraints are delegitimised.

Each case reassures the others. If they can do this and survive, so can we.

Britain’s place in this picture has been the central concern of this series. Britain’s problem is not that illiberalism suddenly appeared in 2016. It is that it was already present, and then intensified.

Long before Brexit, Britain had tolerated the steady erosion of constraint: a tabloid culture comfortable with falsehood, a political class willing to frame courts as obstacles, an expanding security state, and a media environment in which some lies carried far less cost than others. The fire was already burning. Brexit was not the spark. It was the accelerant.

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The referendum represented both the culmination of illiberal pressure up to that point and the moment at which those tactics were normalised and escalated. “Alternative facts”, contempt for expertise, procedural brinkmanship, and hostility to legal constraint were no longer fringe tools. They were validated by mass participation and electoral success. What followed was not rupture, but learning.

Britain specialises in continuity. Change is absorbed through convention, precedent, and institutional drift rather than formal break. In the post-Brexit environment, this became a liability. Illiberal pressure does not arrive in Britain as a demand to abolish rights or cancel elections. It arrives as a series of management problems. How to handle hostile press campaigns. How to avoid regulatory backlash. How to minimise reputational risk. How to keep institutions functioning under sustained political attack.

Each response appears reasonable in isolation. Taken together, they rewire the system. As the previous articles showed in detail, public bodies learned which pressures mattered most. Right-wing media outrage became urgent. Organised complaints from well-connected lobbying networks became existential risk. Methodical criticism from civil society groups, academics, or minority communities was acknowledged, then quietly deprioritised. A hierarchy of concern emerged.

This process has been reinforced, not resisted, by the political centre.

Reactionary centrism did not halt the illiberal drift. It stabilised it. By absorbing illiberal premises while rejecting illiberal aesthetics, it made the transition smoother. Rights were affirmed in principle but narrowed in law. Protest was defended abstractly but criminalised in practice. International law was praised rhetorically but overridden when inconvenient. The result of that accommodation is now visible.

Nigel Farage leads the most popular party in Britain. This is not a sudden eruption of extremism. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has spent years rewarding illiberal behaviour while insulating itself from consequence.

Farage’s record is extensive and unambiguous. Decades of racist rhetoric. Open admiration for Vladimir Putin. Sycophancy toward Donald Trump. Alignment with the European far-right. Repeated use of antisemitic tropes, racist language, and conspiratorial language. None of this has disqualified him. On the contrary, it has proven key to his success. The illiberal ecosystem rewards its own.

If the centre continues to manage illiberalism rather than confront it, the eventual victory of an openly illiberal party does not require a dramatic break. It requires patience. The architecture is already in place. The precedents have been set. The institutions have learned. The transition would be administratively easy.

This is why the purpose of this series has not been to shock, but to clarify.

Illiberalism does not arrive with jackboots and manifestos. It arrives through adaptation, accommodation, and respectability. By the time it is obvious, it is already embedded. The alternative is not nostalgia or procedural tinkering. It is a return to the principles that define liberal democracy as a system of restraint.

Constraint must be treated as a virtue, not a weakness. Courts must be genuinely independent of political pressure. Public broadcasters must be insulated from government appointment and donor ecosystems. Civil society must be protected from intimidation. Rights must apply universally. International law must bind even when inconvenient.

Structural reform matters too. Britain’s extreme concentration of power makes illiberal capture easier. First Past the Post magnifies swings and rewards polarisation. Multi-seat proportional representation would not cure illiberalism, but it would reintroduce friction: coalition, negotiation, compromise.

Above all, Britain must abandon the belief that illiberalism can be neutralised through accommodation. Every concession teaches the same lesson: that pressure works.

This series has traced how that lesson has been learned across borders, embedded in institutions, and normalised at home. The direction is visible. The choice is no longer abstract.

What remains undecided is whether Britain will defend liberal democracy as a system of restraint, or settle for its hollowed-out form while calling it stability.

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Britain likes to tell itself a comforting story.

Illiberalism, in this telling, is something that happens elsewhere. It happens in Russia, where Vladimir Putin dismantled democracy through prisons, patronage, and poison. It happens in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán hollowed institutions while preserving the outward rituals of electoral legitimacy. It happens in Israel, where permanent emergency is used to justify permanent inequality. It happened in the United States under Donald Trump, a noisy and chaotic aberration that could be dismissed as excess rather than system.

Britain, by contrast, imagines itself as fundamentally stable. A country of conventions rather than ideologies. A polity in which excess is absorbed, norms reassert themselves, and extremes are neutralised by moderation, competence, and tradition. The phrase “it couldn’t happen here” is rarely stated outright. It is simply assumed.

That assumption is not credible.

Illiberalism has not arrived in Britain through tanks, coups, or cancelled elections. It has arrived through pressure, accommodation, and asymmetric risk. The UK has not been seized by illiberal actors. It has been reshaped by them, slowly and selectively, with decisive assistance from a political centre convinced it could absorb the shift without being transformed by it.

The water warmed gradually. That is why the frog did not jump.

This matters because illiberalism does not require a moment of rupture. It requires habituation. It requires institutions to learn, over time, which pressures must be taken seriously and which can be safely ignored. That learning process did not happen by accident. It was taught.

Illiberalism in Britain does not operate through a single party, leader, or ideology. It is sustained through an ecosystem: a dense, mutually reinforcing network of media outlets, donors, think tanks, political factions, and transnational allies that shape what is sayable, punish deviation, and normalise rule-bending in one political direction. This ecosystem does not require central coordination. It works through alignment. Incentives point the same way. Pressure flows unevenly. Institutions adapt.

At the domestic level, this ecosystem is anchored by a powerful right-wing media bloc. The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Express, and The Spectator do more than report politics from a conservative point of view. They define the parameters within which politics is conducted. Their front pages determine what counts as scandal, what can be ignored, and what is treated as common sense. Digital platforms intensify this effect. Twitter/X, Breitbart-adjacent networks, ConservativeHome, BrexitCentral, and allied online spaces function as rapid-response amplifiers, converting minor issues into evidence of extreme bias, and procedural neutrality into ideological hostility

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The effect is disciplinary. Journalists, editors, civil servants, regulators, and trustees learn quickly which lines generate pile-ons and which pass unnoticed.

Between media outrage and parliamentary action sits a set of well-funded think tanks and policy institutes. Organisations such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange, and Legatum do not merely generate ideas. They translate donor priorities into policy seriousness, launder culture-war rhetoric into governance language, and recode exclusionary or deregulatory outcomes as technical necessity. They provide ministers and institutions with a vocabulary that allows illiberal goals to enter the bloodstream of the state without appearing ideological.

Within formal politics, this ecosystem finds its vectors. Nigel Farage functions as a boundary-pusher, testing ideas before they are safe. The European Research Group and its successors act as internal enforcement mechanisms, ensuring that the Conservative Party never drifts too far back toward multilateralism or institutional restraint. The Common Sense Group and related parliamentary formations test how far culture-war language can be normalised inside Westminster itself, often laundering antisemitic tropes into the socially permitted vocabulary of national grievance.

Crucially, this alignment is not national.

British illiberalism is embedded in a transnational network that links domestic actors to ideological allies in the United States, Israel, Hungary, and beyond. American donors who fund Trumpism also fund British think tanks and lobby groups. Media ownership overlaps directly, most obviously in the Murdoch empire, where editorial lines travel seamlessly across borders. Pro-Israel advocacy networks intersect with the same funding and media infrastructure, aggressively policing criticism of Israeli policy while normalising ethnocratic governance and the violation of international law.

One unusually explicit site of this convergence is the National Conservatism Conference, founded in 2019 by Yoram Hazony, a pro-Israel nationalist intellectual and president of the Edmund Burke Foundation. National Conservatism was conceived from the outset as a transnational project, not a domestic faction. It is a forum designed to bring together American Trumpism, Israeli ethnonationalism, and European illiberalism around a shared rejection of liberal universalism, multilateral constraint, and rights-based constitutionalism.

Across its conferences in the United States and Europe, including one held in London, speakers and attendees have included Viktor Orbán and his senior allies, leading Trump backers such as Peter Thiel and Ted Cruz, prominent Israeli nationalists closely associated with the Netanyahu right, and British Conservative figures including Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Michael Gove. Israel is consistently held up within this milieu as a model of permanent security exception, Hungary as proof that liberal institutions can be hollowed while retaining electoral form, and Trumpism as an unfairly maligned assertion of national sovereignty.

What matters is not any single speech or venue, but the normalisation of ideological alignment: British political actors participating openly in an international illiberal network that treats liberal constraint itself as the problem to be solved.

Brexit as democratised exemption

Brexit was the moment illiberal logic became democratised. For decades before the referendum, large sections of the British press framed the European Union not as a multilateral political project but as an alien imposition. Sovereignty was presented as something stolen rather than pooled. Regulation was caricatured as foreign meddling. Integration was treated as colonisation. Boris Johnson’s early career was built on fabrications about EU bureaucracy, bendy bananas, prawn cocktail crisps, condom sizes. These stories were not merely false. They were pedagogical. They trained readers to associate Europe with absurdity, intrusion, and illegitimacy.

Over time, the tone hardened. What began as mockery escalated into alarmism. British sovereignty was said to be under existential threat. Fifty million Turks were supposedly on the verge of arriving in London. British boys would soon be drafted into a looming European super-state’s army. These claims were not marginal. They circulated daily through the Conservative press ecosystem and were consumed disproportionately by Conservative members and voters. That radicalisation had consequences.

As UKIP surged under Nigel Farage, denouncing the EU in more explicit and ethnonationalist terms, Conservative politicians faced a choice. Some believed they could neutralise Farage by absorbing his platform. Just as Farage later claimed he had “defeated” the BNP by laundering its ideas into a more respectable register, Conservative strategists convinced themselves they could defeat UKIP by adopting its core premises. Hostility to immigration, disdain for multilateral constraint, and the framing of Europe as enemy rather than partner were no longer fringe positions. They became instruments of party management.

By the time David Cameron called the Brexit referendum, illiberal actors had been campaigning for decades. The Overton window had already shifted. Multilateralism and international law were no longer understood as constitutive of British sovereignty. They were increasingly framed as violations of it. Immigration was no longer treated as a matter of planning, labour markets, or resources, but as an existential threat. A Britain “freed” from EU regulation was widely assumed to be a Britain unshackled.

Brexit made sense. But only if you had been reading the right newspapers.

During the referendum campaign, the dominant right-wing donor and press ecosystem backed Leave. After Cameron resigned, those same networks shifted their weight behind Leave-supporting Conservative leadership candidates, seeking a prime minister who would deliver Brexit in its hardest form. Over time, they got what they wanted. First Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss. Both were ideologically congenial to a donor, think-tank, and media system that treated the EU primarily as an obstacle to deregulation, the dismantling of labour protections, and the weakening of environmental standards.

Later, as the Conservative Party fractured under the weight of its own contradictions, that ecosystem began to pivot more decisively toward Farage himself. This was gradual at first, then accelerated once Rishi Sunak lost to Keir Starmer and the incentives changed. The press, donors, and aligned networks did not abandon the Conservatives overnight. They simply stopped investing in them as a viable delivery mechanism.

Brexit did more than alter Britain’s trading arrangements. It rewired political common sense.

It normalised the idea that rules are optional, constraints negotiable, and law legitimate only when it aligns with sovereignty as defined by those in power. The infamous claim that breaking international law would be “limited and specific” was not a gaffe. It was illiberal doctrine articulated plainly.

The sequence ran like a script.

We did not really break the law.
If we did, it was necessary.
If that is unacceptable, then the law itself must yield.

Once a country accepts that logic, it becomes available everywhere. Not only in treaty obligations, but in domestic rights, institutional checks, and the meaning of citizenship itself.

Brexit matters here not simply as policy failure, but as rehearsal. It was the moment when exemption from rules was made popular, moralised, and defensible. It was also the moment when the pressure that would later be applied to Britain’s institutions was first democratised.

The BBC: conditioning, capture, and asymmetric risk

The BBC occupies a peculiar position in British political life.

It is not a private broadcaster that can be purchased by a billionaire and converted overnight into a partisan weapon. But nor is it independent in the way Britain often tells itself. The BBC is a public institution created by Royal Charter, funded through the licence fee, and structurally entangled with government through appointments, charter renewals, regulation, and political pressure.

That combination makes it uniquely valuable, and uniquely vulnerable.

Illiberal actors did not need to nationalise the BBC. They did not need to abolish editorial independence or issue overt instructions. As with Brexit, they needed only to change the internal calculus of risk. To make certain kinds of journalism professionally dangerous, and certain kinds of complaint institutionally urgent.

That lesson was learned early, and applied patiently.

One of the most consequential figures in this process is Sir Robbie Gibb. Gibb is not an outsider imposed on the BBC from without. His career has moved repeatedly and seamlessly between the corporation and Conservative politics. He began at the BBC as a political researcher before leaving to work as chief of staff to Conservative MP Francis Maude, later supporting Michael Portillo’s leadership campaign. He returned to the BBC in senior editorial roles, including Newsnight and other flagship political programming, before re-entering politics as Theresa May’s Director of Communications in Downing Street.

After May’s resignation, Gibb was knighted for political and public service. He then became a senior adviser at a global strategic communications consultancy, worked as an editorial adviser to GB News ahead of its launch, and advised the government on the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report.

In 2020, Gibb led a consortium that bought The Jewish Chronicle. He refused to disclose who funded the purchase. What followed was a marked shift in editorial direction, widely described by former staff as moving well to the right of the Conservative Party. Journalists resigned over deteriorating standards. Fabricated stories were later withdrawn. The paper apologised and paid damages for false accusations, including allegations linking individuals to terrorism. Multiple journalists described an environment in which political alignment increasingly mattered more than accuracy.

This matters because it establishes pattern and allegiance, not motive.

In May 2021, Gibb was appointed to the BBC Board by Boris Johnson as Member for England. His appointment had been pressed for months by Conservative political advisers. It placed a Thatcherite Conservative, with deep ties to the Tory press ecosystem and a recent record of editorial intervention elsewhere, inside the BBC’s governance structure.

Once there, his influence was not subtle.

According to multiple reports, Gibb attempted to block the appointment of Jess Brammar to a senior editorial role, warning that it would damage the government’s “fragile trust” in the BBC. Labour’s deputy leader described this as Tory cronyism at the heart of the corporation. Gibb denied sending the message. The wider signal, however, landed.

Appointments like this do not operate in isolation. They set tone. They redistribute risk. They shape who is promoted, who is protected, and who learns to self-censor. They create the conditions under which further aligned figures can be installed, and in which staff internalise which kinds of journalism attract backlash and which do not.

The Hostile Environment

Emily Maitlis’s experience is illustrative. Over several years, she was repeatedly censured for partiality in ways that reveal the asymmetry at the heart of the BBC’s impartiality regime. She was criticised for challenging Brexit advocates aggressively, for stating that Dominic Cummings had broken the rules during lockdown, and for sharing content critical of the government. In each case, the issue was not factual accuracy so much as tone, framing, and perceived alignment.

The pattern was consistent. Where scrutiny ran against Conservative power, it was treated as risk. Where scrutiny ran elsewhere, it was tolerated.

In her 2022 MacTaggart Lecture, Maitlis named the problem directly. She stated that an “active agent of the Conservative Party” was shaping BBC news output, and identified Robbie Gibb as acting as an arbiter of impartiality and exerting political influence over editorial decisions.

That allegation was never retracted. It was never substantially rebutted. It was simply absorbed. Maitlis left the BBC shortly afterwards, citing years of accumulated pressure rather than any single incident.

Lewis Goodall left around the same period. His departure was linked to what he described as the broader impartiality drive. He spoke of a newsroom culture in which journalists were warned to “be careful” because “Robbie” was watching, and where political backlash rather than editorial judgement increasingly governed decisions.

These exits were not reactions to scandal. They were responses to a hostile environment.

Michael Prescott’s Memo

Michael Prescott entered this environment as an adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee. In November 2025, Prescott wrote a memo to BBC board members alleging systemic editorial bias. His memo was leaked to The Daily Telegraph, then published more widely after being submitted to Parliament as part of the BBC Chair’s response to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

It is important to note that Prescott was not a whistleblower from outside the institution. He was a participant within its governance machinery. He was also personally connected to Gibb, a relationship he later acknowledged.

The memo alleged bias in three areas: coverage of Donald Trump, coverage of the Gaza war, and reporting on transgender issues. Its centrepiece was a Panorama episode broadcast in October 2024 that edited footage of Trump’s January 6th speech without using the standard visual cue indicating splicing.

That omission mattered technically. BBC standards require a visual indicator when footage is spliced. Had the cue been included, the programme would have met editorial requirements. The BBC acknowledged this as an error and apologised. The episode was withdrawn from rebroadcast. That should have been the end of the matter. It was not.

Prescott’s memo framed the error as evidence of systemic bias. Conservative politicians, right-wing media outlets, and Donald Trump himself escalated the claim into an allegation of electoral interference and institutional bias. Trump threatened legal action. Senior Tories publicly demanded resignations. Illiberal columnists demanded blood.

Within days, Director-General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness resigned. Parliamentary hearings followed. The issue metastasised into a crisis not because the evidence was overwhelming, but because the pressure was.

Other members of the standards committee disputed Prescott’s interpretation. BBC journalists pushed back. The corporation defended its broader editorial record.None of that altered the outcome. The lesson transmitted internally was not about accuracy. It was about hierarchy of risk.

Learning the hierarchy of risk

The same logic was visible in the BBC’s handling of Gaza coverage.

In 2025, the BBC pulled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone after complaints emerged that a child narrator’s father worked for Gaza’s Health Ministry, an institution operating under Hamas governance. No allegation was made that the programme promoted Hamas. No evidence was presented that the narration itself was politicised.

Had the BBC included a disclaimer identifying the father’s role, the programme would have met editorial standards. Instead, it was withdrawn entirely.

To the public, this appeared relatively minor. Internally, it was treated as existential risk precisely because it upset the illiberal ecosytem. Palestinian proximity itself had become a reputational hazard.

This reaction stood in stark contrast to years of meticulous, evidence-based analysis by organisations such as the Centre for Media Monitoring, which documented systematic patterns in the BBC’s treatment of Muslims and its framing of Palestinian suffering. Those findings were methodologically transparent and empirically grounded. They were reinforced by reporting from Owen Jones, who interviewed BBC journalists and editors describing internal pressure, self-censorship, and fear of backlash when covering Gaza and Israel.

Those reports were ignored.

Prescott’s memo, by contrast, triggered resignations, apologies, and structural upheaval.

That asymmetry is the point.

Asymmetric risk, internalised discipline, and who is allowed to stay

What ultimately matters is not any single controversy, but the pattern they form when taken together.

The BBC’s problem is not that it enforces impartiality rules. It is that those rules are enforced asymmetrically, and that asymmetry is now widely understood inside the organisation. Over time, this produces a predictable outcome. Some people internalise the rules and self-censor or leave, while others are effectively exempt.

In 2017, James O’Brien resigned from presenting Newsnight. Asked on social media why he stepped down, he explained that his publicly expressed views, that Brexit would be bad for Britain and that Donald Trump was a racist sex offender, had begun to attract so much attention that he felt compelled to choose between winding his neck in on those issues or no longer presenting BBC political programmes.

He chose to leave. No complaint had been upheld against him. No breach of standards was alleged. O’Brien complied with what he understood the rules to require.

What irked many was not the existence of impartiality rules, or O’Brien’s resignation, but their selective application.

O’Brien’s case contrasted sharply with that of Andrew Neil. Neil worked as the BBC’s flagship political interviewer while openly expressing strong ideological positions on Brexit, economics, climate change, and the left. He edited The Spectator, delivered speeches praising Friedrich Hayek and radical free-market reform, wore Adam Smith Institute branding while presenting BBC programmes, and used his BBC-amplified platform to promote right-wing causes.

None of this triggered equivalent sanction. The issue, then, was not that O’Brien broke the rules. It was that he obeyed them, while others did not need to.

That pattern reproduced itself throughout the organisation.

In 2023, Oscar Bentley, a 25-year-old member of the BBC’s Political Research Unit, explained on air that Rishi Sunak’s claim of a 50 per cent fall in crime relied on selective use of statistics. This was routine fact-checking, based on the unit’s published methodology.

The following day, The Daily Mail accused the BBC of bias. Not by disputing the analysis, but by revealing that Bentley had campaigned for Labour while at university and once posted a photo captioned “dogs for Corbyn” on social media. The Daily Express, TalkTV, and The Daily Telegraph followed.

The message was unmistakable. Accuracy offered no protection. Youth offered no protection. Institutional role offered no protection. Fact-checking Conservative claims carried personal risk.

Meanwhile, no comparable scrutiny attached to right-wing editorial figures whose public political commitments were extensive, continuous, and institutionally protected.

The same logic governed how the BBC responded to complaints about those working in Sports and Entertainment.

Gary Lineker was first suspended and later forced out after expressing political views critical of government asylum policy, despite working primarily in sports rather than news. The BBC treated his comments as incompatible with impartiality.

Alan Sugar, by contrast, repeatedly expressed partisan views aligned with Conservative positions, including direct attacks on Labour politicians and support for Brexit. He faced no comparable sanction.

BBC journalists have been taught a simple lesson. If you upset the illiberal ecosystem, Conservative politicians, right-wing newspapers, donor-backed pressure groups, and aligned lobby organisations, the consequences will be swift, definitive and possibly career ending. If you upset critics on the left, complaints will be logged, filed and ultimately ignored. You can stay at the BBC if you do not provoke the illiberals. If you do provoke them, you should either learn to be silent or prepare to leave.

That is how conditioning works. Not through overt censorship, but through the redistribution of risk.

Why the National Trust was different, and why it was targeted anyway

The National Trust posed a different problem for illiberal actors. Unlike the BBC, it could not be conditioned through appointments in the same way. It is not governed by ministers. Its leadership is not appointed by government. Its funding does not depend on annual political renewal. It is a membership organisation, structured as a charity, with trustees elected by its members and a constitutional obligation to preserve historic sites and material in line with best professional practice.

In institutional terms, it was insulated.

When the Trust published its 2020 report examining historic links between its properties and slavery and empire, it did not call for reparations, removals, or reinterpretation in activist terms. It did not propose policy change. It presented archival evidence and historical context. It did what historians are trained to do.

The backlash was immediate, and revealing.

Restore Trust emerged shortly afterwards, presenting itself as a grassroots movement defending heritage from politicisation. Its language closely mirrored the culture-war playbook already visible in attacks on universities, museums, and broadcasters. Professional historians were recast as Cultural Marxists. Academic method was reframed as activism. Proving context became revisionism. The past itself was turned into a battlefield.

This was not spontaneous. Restore Trust figures were closely linked to the same donor, think-tank, and media ecosystem that had driven Brexit and later conditioned the BBC. Policy Exchange affiliates, Tufton Street networks, and sympathetic columnists amplified the campaign. Nigel Farage accused the Trust of rewriting history. Boris Johnson denounced woke revisionism. Conservative MPs framed the episode as evidence of cultural subversion.

What mattered was not whether Restore Trust’s claims were accurate. They were not. What mattered was that they created pressure. Unlike the BBC, the National Trust could not be disciplined from within. So the strategy shifted.

Instead of capture, the aim was intimidation and acquisition Restore Trust repeatedly attempted to seize control through trustee elections. Each attempt failed. The Trust continued its research programme. The report was not withdrawn. No institutional reversal occurred.

But the campaign worked anyway. Each election attempt forced the Trust to defend its legitimacy. Each media cycle raised the political cost of doing ordinary historical work. Each intervention sent a signal not just to the Trust, but to every other cultural institution watching.

The lesson was not “you must stop”.

The lesson was “you will pay a price if you continue”.

This is how civil society is disciplined without law.

Illiberalism does not always require permanent capture. It requires sustained intimidation. It relies on repetition, exhaustion, reputational risk, and the knowledge that powerful actors are willing to mobilise outrage even when they lose.

The difference between the BBC and the National Trust is instructive. The BBC could be conditioned from within because its governance allowed it. The National Trust could not, so it was attacked from without. Different tactics. Same objective.

And the signal was the same in both cases.

Palestine Solidarity: From conditioning to criminalisation

Long before Palestine Action was proscribed in 2025, Britain’s political institutions had already internalised the boundaries of acceptable dissent when it came to Israel and Palestine. The disciplining of Palestine solidarity did not begin with chants, sit-ins, or direct action. It began with definitions, complaints, and the quiet recalibration of institutional risk.

A revealing early episode came in 2021, when Pearson, the education publisher, withdrew and rewrote sections of its GCSE history textbook The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change 1917–2012. The decision followed complaints from the Board of Deputies and UK Lawyers for Israel, who alleged that the text was biased against Israel. Pearson suspended the title and revised it in response to the complaint. A later review found the original content accurate and well within mainstream historical scholarship.

But the lesson was simple. Historical accuracy was no longer sufficient protection. When it came to Israel, alignment mattered more.

This pattern spread across institutions. Universities came under pressure over pro-Palestine speakers. Arts organisations were attacked for programming deemed insufficiently sympathetic to Israel. Trustees, editors, and civil society leaders learned which issues triggered relentless escalation and which quietly dissipated. What emerged was not overt censorship, but anticipatory compliance, a learned reflex to retreat before controversy could begin.

That reflex was formalised through the widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real, persistent, and dangerous, and it demands robust response. But the IHRA definition blurred vital distinctions by embedding examples that framed certain criticisms of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Legal scholars, Jewish academics, and civil liberties groups warned that it would chill legitimate political speech. They were ignored or painted as antisemites.

The definition was widely adopted and the effect was substantial. Events were cancelled. Complaints escalated. Disciplinary processes were triggered not for incitement or hatred, but for crossing an ideological boundary. ‘Too much’ criticism of Israel was evidence of bigotry. Accuracy was no longer the benchmark. Allegiance was.

These were not the only tools used to narrow the parameters of political discussion. Peaceful tactics used by Palestinian solidarity campaigns were reframed as extremist. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, long grounded in non-violence and international law, was recast as uniquely subversive. In 2023, the government introduced the Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill to prohibit public institutions from participating in boycotts of Israel. United Nations experts warned that the legislation posed a direct threat to political freedom. And yet, the Labour Party refused to oppose it in principle.

The chilling effect rippled outward. Opposition to Israeli policy was no longer merely contentious. It was untouchable.

This shift did not operate evenly. Figures perceived as hostile to Israel were pursued relentlessly. Jeremy Corbyn was targeted relentlessly for alleged episodes of antisemitism such as describing Israel as an apartheid state. That description had been independently reached by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem.

Meanwhile, politicians who echoed antisemitic tropes while aligning with Israeli state interests faced no comparable scrutiny. Suella Braverman invoked the far-right and antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theorists. Nigel Farage spoke regularly about globalists, Soros and the Jewish lobby. Neither was challenged to the same extent as Corbyn by the organisations that had made policing left-wing critics of Israel their core mission.

The rule was not prejudice. It was positionality.

This produced a selective moral economy. Antisemitism was punished most aggressively when the accused was anti-occupation. Islamophobia was normalised. Muslim protest was securitised. Palestinian grief was treated as threat. Jewish dissent, organised through groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour, was marginalised or erased. In its place, the Board of Deputies, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Jewish Leadership Council, all unambiguously pro-Israel, were elevated as the singular, legitimate voice of British Jews.

By 2024, this political logic had hardened. Criticism of Israel was treated as reputational hazard. Advocacy for Palestinian rights was recoded as extremism. International law, so often invoked in British foreign policy rhetoric, was treated as discretionary when it conflicted with Israeli or arms industry interests.

It was in this conditioned terrain that Palestine Action emerged. Founded in 2020, the group pursued direct action campaigns against Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons manufacturer operating multiple sites in the UK. Their actions were disruptive but non-violent. Property, not people, was the target.

Courts recognised this distinction. In several cases, juries acquitted Palestine Action activists on the basis that their actions were proportionate responses to greater harm. In 2022, sustained protest forced Elbit to close its Oldham site. Contracts collapsed. Public awareness surged. That effectiveness made the group intolerable.

As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified in late 2023 and early 2024, mass pro-ceasefire protests filled British streets. The right-wing press responded with orchestrated panic. GB News, The Times, and The Daily Mail cast peaceful demonstrators as dangerous mobs. Suella Braverman invoked the language of national disloyalty. Palestine Action, once treated as fringe, was reclassified as a security threat.

This was not evidence-led escalation. MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre repeatedly concluded that the group did not meet the terrorism threshold. The Home Office acknowledged that proscription would be legally vulnerable. The Foreign Office warned it would damage Britain’s international credibility. United Nations human rights officials cautioned that it would violate international norms.

None of this altered the outcome.

Defence contractors lobbied. Pro-Israel media coordinated consent. Lord Walney, formerly John Woodcock and a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, was positioned as an independent adviser. He recommended the use of terrorism powers against protest. He had received donations and travel support from pro-Israel lobbyists. Bizarrely, his advice was treated as neutral expertise.

On 11 July 2025, the Home Secretary designated Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. Headlines that morning amplified claims of Iranian ties, claims not supported by intelligence assessments. Within days, support for the group became a criminal offence carrying a maximum sentence of fourteen years. This included placards, slogans, donations, and statements of solidarity.

The consequences were immediate. More than two thousand people were arrested under terrorism legislation. Among them were lawyers, medics, clergy, Jewish activists, and ordinary protestors. Dozens remain imprisoned. Several are on hunger strike. Civil liberties groups described it as the largest wave of political arrests in Britain since the anti-nuclear protests of the 1960s.

This was not a state suddenly turning authoritarian. It was the end point of a slow process of pressure, alignment, and capture. What began with textbook edits and semantic battles ended with terrorism powers deployed against peaceful protests.

And once that architecture exists, it will not remain confined to Palestine. Every movement that threatens elite consensus will be told the same thing.

You’re next.

From isolation to integration: how the political centre accommodated illiberalism

The preceding case studies show how institutions behave once illiberal pressure becomes predictable. They also reveal something more disturbing. Illiberalism in Britain has not advanced solely through insurgency. It has advanced through accommodation by the political centre.

This is the domain of reactionary centrism.

Across the past decade, Conservative governments were radicalised by their media ecosystem and constrained by Nigel Farage’s electoral insurgencies. Farage functioned as both threat and alibi. He pushed boundaries. Others followed, claiming responsibility. What was once framed as concession became posture. What began as rhetoric hardened into policy.

But it is the response of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer that shows how illiberalism travels from pressure to consensus. Starmer’s method has been consistent. Promise not rupture, but competence. Not confrontation, but reassurance. In opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, he pledged to retain the Corbynite stance but restore electability by removing “divisive” politics. In opposition to Sunak, he offered continuity with government policy but with less chaos. The objective was not to challenge the illiberal drift, but to neutralise it as a political risk.

The consequences were structural.

In a 2023 speech describing Britain as an “island of strangers,” Starmer did not merely mimic Nigel Farage. He legitimated xenophobic and racist talking points. Demographic change was framed not as a feature of a plural society to be governed and supported, but as a source of unease to be managed and reversed. No clear rebuttal was offered to far-right framings of immigration or multiculturalism. The speech did not confront xenophobia. It absorbed its premises.

The same logic governed Labour’s response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. In the early stages of the 2023 war, Starmer, an international human rights lawyer, defended Israel’s decision to cut off water, electricity, and aid. Many international legal scholars defined these acts as collective punishment. British Muslim communities reacted with anger and despair. Party headquarters later issued clarifications. But the underlying signal was received.

Labour’s instinct was not to anchor itself in humanitarian law. It was to avoid antagonising pro-Israel donors, lobby organisations, and illiberal ecosystem. Time and time again, Labour’s policy has followed this posture.

On asylum, Labour figures endorsed a “Denmark-style” deterrence model that outsourced responsibility while preserving some liberal language. The Conservative Rwanda scheme was criticised largely for cost, competence, and legal fragility, not for its moral logic. Labour’s objection was managerial, not ethical.

The same approach was visible in the party’s stance toward the European Convention on Human Rights. Publicly, Labour committed to preserving the ECHR. Privately, it explored reforms designed to pre-empt Conservative attacks. The aim was to save the convention by changing it. In practice, this meant conceding the premise that human rights law is an obstacle to border control rather than a safeguard against abuse.

Personnel decisions reinforced the message. Labour selected Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel, as its parliamentary candidate in North Durham. Akehurst had previously promoted conspiracy theories about Palestinian “crisis actors,” claimed the UN Human Rights Council was antisemitic, and depicted Jewish anti-Zionists as a dangerous fringe. While Muslim councillors were expelled for retweeting BDS slogans, Akehurst was rewarded with a safe seat.

This was not oversight. It was alignment.

Labour did not seek to defeat the illiberal ecosystem. It sought to reassure it. Not by echoing its rhetoric wholesale, but by accepting its boundaries. Certain issues became radioactive. Certain communities became expendable. Certain principles became conditional. The effect was that they reinforced the illiberal framing Labour had once contested.

Illiberalism no longer needed to fight the centre. It had been integrated into it. Under the banner of competence, dissent was reframed as risk. Human rights were treated as negotiable. Protest was reclassified as extremism. Civil liberties and human rights became luxuries for calmer times.

This is not the path of a populist seizure of power. It is the posture of a governing class that believes survival requires accommodating illiberalism. But the danger is not merely imitation. It is legitimation. By adopting illiberal premises while rejecting illiberal aesthetics, the centre made those premises durable. The Overton window did not merely move. It hardened.

Illiberalism no longer needed to knock.

It had been invited inside.

It already happened here

To understand the direction Britain is heading, it helps to remember where it has already been. The idea that “it couldn’t happen here” does not survive contact with British history.

From partition until well into the late twentieth century, Northern Ireland functioned as an illiberal statelet within the United Kingdom. For decades, the Protestant–Unionist–Loyalist regime at Stormont ruled with the tacit approval of Westminster, systematically subordinating the Catholic–Nationalist–Republican population. Voting rights were restricted. Electoral boundaries were gerrymandered. Housing allocation, public employment, and policing were deployed as instruments of sectarian control. Repression was not incidental. It was structural.

Successive British governments, of both major parties, possessed the legal authority to intervene decisively. They did not. Nor did the BBC in Northern Ireland, which operated for decades as a broadcaster embedded within the PUL order. British security forces acted under Westminster command, yet deferred consistently to unionist priorities. Courts in Northern Ireland were formally part of the UK legal system, but failed repeatedly to protect defendants from political policing, internment without trial, or show-trial procedures. Across Britain, much of the national press repeated official narratives uncritically, minimised state violence, and cast the CNR population as the source of instability rather than its victims.

Even when that violence crossed the Irish Sea, British institutions did not protect the innocent. The Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Maguire Seven, and the persecution of Colin Wallace exposed how easily justice could be overridden once the state had designated enemies. Fabricated evidence, coerced confessions, unlawful detention, and media complicity were not aberrations. They were systemic features of a security state operating with public consent. It took decades of campaigning to secure exonerations. Apologies arrived late, if at all.

The lesson is unambiguous. Britain’s institutions have previously tolerated sustained illiberalism when it was geographically contained, politically convenient, and directed at a marginalised population. There is no serious basis for believing they are inherently immune today.

That legacy has not vanished. It has been retooled.

Since the turn of the millennium, Britain has undergone a slow but consistent expansion of state power at the expense of civil liberty. Surveillance has widened. Protest has been criminalised. Citizenship has become conditional. Judicial constraints on executive action have narrowed. Asylum has been reframed as criminal trespass. Workers’ ability to strike has been hollowed. Boycotts are being outlawed. Dissent itself is increasingly interpreted through a security lens.

The justifications have varied. Terrorism. Extremism. Migration. Disruption. Foreign interference. The function has not.

Parliament passed the Investigatory Powers Act with cross-party backing. Control orders and later TPIMs were normalised. Courts deferred. Media coverage framed protest noise as menace and disruption as threat. After Brexit, emergency language became routine. In the name of pragmatism, legal safeguards were recoded as luxuries.

Britain is still a liberal democracy. Elections are held. Courts still sit. Journalism still exists. But the balance of power has shifted decisively toward a state that lives in fear of the illiberal ecosystem, and away from those who resist it through protest, strike, or boycott.

The United States offers a warning from slightly further along the same path. Surveillance powers introduced under the banner of counterterrorism are now deployed against migrants and liberals. “Domestic terrorism” has become a catch-all for protest. Civil society has not been abolished. It has been demoralised and exhausted.

Britain is not there. But it is further along than it admits. What has been built will not remain dormant. Legal architectures, once normalised, are reused. Powers created for one purpose are redeployed for another. Targets expand. Precedents harden.

Farage, who has repeatedly trafficked in conspiratorial rhetoric while claiming to defend Jews from Muslims, now leads Britain’s most popular party. Elon Musk has addressed Tommy Robinson’s far-right rallies in Britain, promoting great replacement narratives and warning of inevitable violence. The tide is moving against liberal constraint, not toward it.

Britain has spent years softening the ground.

What has been seeded will grow. The question is no longer whether it could happen here. It is happening now. The only remaining question is whether it can be stopped.

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Neoliberalism is usually described as an ideology. A belief in free markets, limited government, competition, and individual responsibility. In that telling, it presents itself as sceptical of state power and wary of democratic interference in economic life.

That description is accurate, but incomplete.

Neoliberalism was not only a belief system. It was also a method. A practical strategy for concentrating wealth while insulating it from democratic constraint. Its real-world success did not depend on whether its philosophical claims were true, but on whether it reliably delivered outcomes favourable to capital.

This distinction matters, because it explains both neoliberalism’s long dominance and its eventual abandonment by many on the right.

As an ideology, neoliberalism was articulated most clearly by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and translated into state practice by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Hayek supplied the moral argument against democratic control over economic life, portraying collective planning and popular intervention as a slippery slope to tyranny, even while conceding a limited role for legal and institutional rules. Friedman supplied the economic programme: deregulation, privatisation, monetarism, and the subordination of social policy to market discipline.

As a method, however, neoliberalism was shaped less by philosophers than by organisers.

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In the United States, figures such as Paul Weyrich understood early that elections were unreliable vehicles for permanent power. Weyrich was not a free-market theorist. He was an institutional engineer. He co-founded the Heritage Foundation, helped create the American Legislative Exchange Council, and pioneered the idea of permanent policy infrastructure supplying ready-made legislation, personnel, and strategy regardless of electoral outcome.

Alongside this institutional project ran a cultural one. Older far-right conspiracism was repackaged into the language of civilisational critique. Economic policy written for capital was fused with grievance capable of mobilising mass support. Redistribution became decadence. Regulation became tyranny. Labour power became moral collapse.

Serious money followed. The Koch network funded a sprawling ecosystem of libertarian and free-market institutions. Later, the Mercer family expanded the model into data-driven media and behavioural influence. They were not alone. Others associated with oil, alcohol, sugar and gambling also provided support. Neoliberalism became hegemonic not because it was uncontested, but because it was structurally advantaged.

In Britain, parallel structures emerged through the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, and the Centre for Policy Studies, which laundered American neoliberal ideas into a British idiom and supplied intellectual cover for deregulation, austerity, anti-union legislation, and privatisation across party lines. These institutions did not need to win every argument. They needed to define what counted as serious.

For several decades, this dual structure held. The belief supplied justification. The method delivered results. Eventually, liberal democracy began to function as intended.

Research documented social and economic harm. Courts enforced environmental, labour, and equality law. Regulators constrained monopolies. Public opinion shifted against austerity and deregulation. Legislatures, unevenly but perceptibly, responded.

Neoliberalism remained profitable, but it became politically fragile. Its claims were scrutinised. Its outcomes contested. Its legitimacy eroded. The problem for concentrated wealth was no longer how to win arguments inside liberal democracy, but how to remove the veto points that liberal democracy still retained.

Neoliberalism had exhausted its usefulness. What followed was not an ideological conversion, but a strategic pivot. Illiberal democracy did not replace markets. It replaced constraint.

Russia and Hungary showed what a post-liberal order could deliver. They were not admired for their values. They were studied for their reliability. What mattered was not legitimacy, but predictability.

In Russia, the bargain was explicit. Wealth and access were permitted on the condition of political acquiescence. Law existed, but it was discretionary. Courts, prosecutors, and regulators functioned as instruments rather than constraints. Rights depended not on neutral rules, but on alignment. Once loyalty was established, risk collapsed. For insiders, the system was brutal at the margins but stable and profitable at the centre.

Hungary demonstrated a softer version of the same logic. Elections continued. Courts existed. Media formally survived. But outcomes became predictable. Electoral law was rewritten. Media ownership was reshaped. Universities and civil society were hollowed out. A loyal oligarchic class was constructed through state contracts, advertising markets, and EU fund channelling. Independent capital was not banned. It was marginalised. Aligned capital flourished.

The difference was not moral, but procedural. Russia enforced loyalty through overt coercion. Hungary achieved it through administrative attrition. Both delivered the same outcome: discretionary protection in exchange for alignment.

Together, these systems revealed the same lesson. Liberal democracy is fairer, but risky. Illiberal democracy is unjust, but reliable.

Under liberal democracy, protection is probabilistic. Courts are independent. Regulators intervene unpredictably. Journalism exposes wrongdoing. Elections can change policy. Wealth confers substantial advantage, but it is always exposed to correction.

Under illiberal democracy, protection is conditional but stable. Pay dues to the ruling party and its ecosystem. Fund its media. Donate. Align publicly. In return, enforcement becomes selective, access becomes predictable, and exposure collapses.

Illiberal systems do not eliminate risk. They reallocate it. Risk concentrates at the margins, among dissidents, independent institutions, and the politically unaffiliated. For insiders, uncertainty collapses.

This alignment of wealth with illiberal democracy was not ideological extremism. It was risk management. Illiberal democracy removes the residual uncertainty that neoliberalism within a liberal democracy could not eliminate.

The pivot did not require new institutions. The same donor vehicles, media platforms, litigation networks, and policy shops were already in place. What changed was their orientation toward democracy itself. The goal shifted from winning arguments within liberal democracy to minimising the risks a functioning democracy posed to accumulated power.

Neoliberalism wanted a smaller state. Illiberalism wants a captured one. It runs on a simple requirement: acquiescence. Leaders do not demand belief. They demand compliance. Independence is tolerated only when it does not obstruct power. Inconvenience is punished. Loyalty is rewarded. Anticipatory obedience becomes rational.

From the perspective of concentrated wealth, this is not radicalism. It is a change in risk structure. Under liberal democracy, wealth is exposed to courts, regulators, journalism, elections, and public learning. Under illiberal democracy, wealth is protected by alignment. Law does not disappear. It becomes discretionary.

This is why oligarchs sign up.

In the United States, this logic is visible in the alignment of major media owners, technology financiers, and platform operators with Trumpism. These actors do not oppose the state. Their businesses depend on government contracts, permissive regulation, selective enforcement, and hostility to supranational bodies when those bodies threaten to impose constraint.

Trump’s volatility obscures a consistent message. Alignment brings protection. Resistance brings cost. For capital, this is clarifying rather than frightening.

Across systems, oligarchs do not need to share ideology. They need only recognise the bargain.

Support the centre of power.
Do not fund opposition.

In return, enforcement becomes selective, access becomes predictable, and wealth becomes insulated from democratic correction. Neoliberalism allowed capital to win most of the time. Illiberal democracy allows it to lose almost never.

Illiberal democracy is not a revolt against neoliberalism’s project. It is what that project becomes when persuasion, legality, and neutral enforcement are no longer judged sufficient to guarantee extreme profits.

It is not a revolt against elites.

It is an elite solution to liberal democracy.

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NATO protection publicly questioned. Sweeping tariffs imposed on treaty allies. Trade agreements overridden by executive fiat. An invaded country blamed for its own invasion. Its president publicly rebuked during a White House meeting broadcast worldwide. Territorial integrity treated as negotiable. Military support linked to preferential access to natural resources. A civilian population described as a problem to be removed. International courts dismissed as illegitimate when they scrutinise allied violence. Agreements broken as routine practice. Authoritarian leaders praised. Democratic allies disciplined.

Taken individually, each of these actions can be (sort of) rationalised. Taken together, they cannot. What emerges is not erratic leadership or diplomatic incompetence. It is a coherent shift in how American power now understands itself. This is not isolationism, nor a return to classical realism. It is an illiberal doctrine of foreign policy that mirrors the hollowing out of liberal democracy at home and projects it outward as strategy.

Illiberalism does not stop at borders. Once restraint is dismantled domestically, it becomes optional internationally. The same suspicion of law, hostility to oversight, and contempt for universality that erodes democratic constraint inside states reappears abroad as doctrine. Power no longer seeks justification in universal terms. It asserts, conditions, and disciplines.

The complete doctrine is not written down as a single manifesto. It is visible in repeated decisions and priorities. It rejects multilateral restraint. It treats international law as conditional. It embraces hierarchy over reciprocity. It collapses the boundary between public authority and private gain. It shows no principled objection to alliances with repressive regimes, provided they do not constrain executive power.

The consequences fall unevenly. Smaller states absorb the pressure. Institutions fracture. Civilians bear the cost. Predictability disappears. Protection becomes conditional. Survival becomes negotiable.

The pattern becomes clearer when viewed alongside the governing logic of other illiberal actors. Vladimir Putin represents the blunt version, enforcing spheres of influence through force, wars described as “special military operations” and treating sovereignty as contingent. Viktor Orbán demonstrates the institutional version, retaining elections while hollowing out constraint and paralysing multilateral bodies from within. Benjamin Netanyahu exemplifies the permanent emergency model, framing politics as existential security management and portraying legal restraint as hostile interference.

These actors do not share a military alliance. What they share is method. Rules are for others. Power is for us. Constraint is illegitimate when it binds the strong.

American foreign policy has increasingly converged with this logic. Ukraine provides the clearest illustration. Under Trump, US peace proposals increasingly treated Ukrainian territorial integrity as a bargaining chip in great-power negotiations rather than as a principle of international law. This posture was made visible during a widely broadcast White House meeting where President Volodymyr Zelensky was publicly pressured to accept imposed terms and admonished in front of cameras. The message was unmistakable. Ukrainian sovereignty was conditional. Ukrainian dignity was optional.

At the same time, continued military and economic support was explicitly linked to preferential access for American firms to Ukraine’s critical minerals and reconstruction contracts. Aid was reframed as investment. Survival was exchanged for extraction rights. Illiberal doctrine does not merely ignore injustice. It monetises vulnerability.

America’s Europe strategy illustrates how illiberal logic is laundered into official doctrine. The 2025 United States National Security Strategy reframed Europe not as a partner in democracy and shared restraint but as a civilisation in decline, undermined by migration, demographic change, and supranational governance. The European Union was recast as an obstacle to sovereignty rather than a guarantor of rights, while ethno-nationalist movements (favoured by Russia) were portrayed as corrective forces. This was not rhetorical excess. It was a signal that alignment with Washington would increasingly bypass multilateral institutions in favour of bilateral loyalty.

The text did not invoke conspiracies like “Cultural Marxism” or the “Great Replacement”. It did not need to. Those narratives share a common structure: civilisation under existential threat, institutions as agents of decay, extraordinary measures as necessity. Illiberal doctrine translates that structure into statecraft, replacing conspiratorial language with strategic euphemism while preserving the diagnosis and the targets. This is how illiberal ideas enter international policy.

Economic policy follows the same logic. In 2025, the United States imposed sweeping tariffs on close allies including Canada and the European Union, despite existing trade agreements and without meaningful multilateral consultation. These measures were not narrow remedies for specific trade violations. They functioned as discipline. Compliance was rewarded. Resistance punished. Unpredictability embraced. Allies openly debated strategic autonomy and decoupling as a result. This was not classical protectionism. It was economic gunboat diplomacy, where markets became leverage and trade law became optional.

NATO reveals the security consequences most starkly. Throughout 2025, senior US officials repeatedly suggested that Article 5 collective defence commitments might not apply automatically to allies deemed insufficiently compliant with US demands. Protection was reframed as transactional favour rather than unconditional guarantee. European leaders warned publicly that such rhetoric weakened deterrence and fractured the alliance. Deterrence eroded not through withdrawal, but through doubt. NATO can never recovered from the damage inflicted by Trump’s illberalism, and Putin could not be happier.

Gaza extends the same logic to population itself. In early 2025, US and Israeli officials discussed post-war plans for Gaza that involved relocating Palestinians outside the territory as part of reconstruction and redevelopment. Human rights organisations warned that these proposals amounted to ethnic cleansing under international law, since they sought to make the continued presence of the indigenous population untenable. This was framed not as punishment, but as solution. Blatant ethnic cleansing was repackaged as humanitarian relief.

When international courts and human rights bodies raised objections, the response was not legal engagement but dismissal. Institutions were described as biased, politicised, or illegitimate. International law prohibiting forcible transfer was not rebutted. It was bypassed. Legality ended where alignment began.

Venezuela demonstrates how illiberal doctrine treats economic sovereignty and political independence as threats that justify coercion. In late 2025, US forces carried out air strikes on vessels in the Caribbean alleged, with minimal public evidence, to be involved in contraband trafficking. These strikes killed crew members. In at least one documented incident, survivors of an initial strike were targeted and executed while attempting to flee, raising serious questions under international humanitarian and maritime law. Reports indicated that aircraft involved in these operations were disguised to resemble civilian planes, a tactic that legal scholars warn may violate longstanding norms separating military from civilian actors.

On 3 January 2026, the United States escalated dramatically. Following air strikes on infrastructure in and around Caracas, US special forces seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores during a pre-dawn operation and transported them to the United States to face federal charges. Maduro was subsequently presented in custody across American media outlets, while US officials announced plans to assert control over Venezuelan oil exports and invite American companies to manage the sector.

A sitting head of state was forcibly removed and displayed. The operation was justified as law enforcement. It bypassed international legal process entirely.

Across these cases, the pattern is unmistakable. The United States is dismantling the rules-based international order.

At this point, a familiar objection arises. The United States has violated international law before. It has supported coups and dictators. It has invaded countries illegally. Israel’s domination of Palestinians did not begin yesterday. None of this is new.

The observation is correct. The conclusion drawn from it is not.

The liberal order was always compromised in practice. What is new is that it is now being rejected in principle. Earlier violations were framed as exceptions, emergencies, or regrettable necessities. They paid legitimacy costs. They required justification. Hypocrisy still acknowledged the rule.

Illiberal doctrine does not bother. Constraint is not bent. It is denied. Law is not violated reluctantly. It’s considered a bonus. Moral language is not rebutted. It is inverted.

Ethnic cleansing becomes humanitarian relief. Extraction becomes investment. Impunity becomes sovereignty. Collapse becomes proof that resistance was foolish.

This is not a change in tone. It is a change in operating logic. When power stops pretending to justify itself, restraint collapses faster. There is no reputational cost to absorb. No contradiction to manage. No institutional cover to maintain.

This is not realism. It is imperial logic updated for the 21st century. Gunboats have been replaced by sanctions, tariffs, and interdictions. Unequal treaties are renamed deals. Sovereignty is tolerated only when compliant.

The most dangerous feature of this doctrine is its export. American power is now used not only to shape state behaviour, but to legitimise illiberal movements inside other democracies. Courts are attacked. Press freedoms undermined. Citizenship narrowed. Executive power exalted. Illiberal democracy becomes a political export.

This is not chaos. It is Illiberalism. Hierarchical, transactional, extractive, and unconstrained by universal rules. It does not promise peace. It promises leverage.
It does not defend democracy. It redefines it. It does not dismantle the international system in its entirety. It repurposes it around power.

The question is no longer whether this doctrine exists. It is whether liberal democracies recognise it in time to respond collectively, rather than as isolated states reacting to pressure one by one. Because in an illiberal world, fragmentation is not an accident. It is the strategy.

The first two articles in this series traced how liberal democracy is hollowed out through the removal of restraint and how illiberal actors align across borders without formal alliance. What remains is the most unsettling turn: the moment when erosion stops being improvised and becomes intentional.

Illiberalism does not need a blueprint to function. It can advance through opportunism, norm-breaking, and selective enforcement. But once those tactics prove effective, they invite something more durable. Planning replaces impulse. Design replaces drift.

In the United States, Project 2025 marks that transition. It is not a manifesto in the traditional sense. It does not articulate a vision of society or offer a coherent moral philosophy. It is a design document: a practical manual for converting electoral victory into permanent control by dismantling the internal restraints of the state. What makes it dangerous is not extremism, but competence.

At first glance, the second Trump term can look chaotic. A journalist loses access after asking the wrong question. A major law firm is banned from federal buildings for representing political opponents. Federal agents appear on city streets without legal authority. Deportations occur while courts are still reviewing cases. Universities quietly close diversity offices to protect funding. Fact-checkers are punished. International courts are sanctioned. Authoritarian leaders are praised.

Each episode, taken in isolation, feels familiar. This is just Trump being Trump: vindictive, impulsive, erratic. A personality problem, not a political system. That assumption is comforting. It is also wrong. Because when these acts are placed side by side, they stop looking random. They begin to form a method. Not a conspiracy, not a super-villain’s master plan, but a way of exercising power that keeps elections intact while hollowing out the institutions meant to restrain it. Political scientists have a name for this system: illiberal democracy.

To understand how this is built, one distinction matters more than any other. Donald Trump is not the architect of this system. He is its beneficiary.

Trump is greedy, vain, narcissistic, and vindictive. He wants power for personal reasons: to punish enemies, silence accusers, enrich himself, and demand loyalty. He is habitually impulsive rather than strategic. He is not a careful planner of institutions. Those around him are.

Trump’s first term exposed the system’s remaining guardrails. Courts blocked some actions. Civil servants slowed others. Inspectors general exposed abuse. Journalists imposed political costs. Even a conservative Supreme Court occasionally constrained executive overreach.

Trump experienced this as sabotage. Trumpists experienced it as a design flaw. Trump reacted emotionally. Trumpism reacted structurally. Project 2025 is best understood as the post-mortem of that first term. It asks a simple question: where did power encounter resistance, and how can that resistance be neutralised next time? Its answer is not to abolish democracy, but to empty it.

Career civil servants are a problem because they answer to law rather than loyalty. Independent prosecutors are dangerous because they investigate. Regulatory agencies are illegitimate because they constrain power and capital. Civil rights enforcement protects ‘the wrong’ people. Oversight exists to obstruct.

The goal of Project 2025 is not chaos. It is insulation.

At the centre of this design is the civil service. Thousands of roles currently protected by norms of independence are targeted for reclassification, rendering them politically contingent. Expertise becomes secondary. Institutional memory becomes a liability. Loyalty replaces competence as the organising principle.

This is not an attack on the administrative state as such. Illiberalism does not abolish bureaucracy. It recognises its importance and captures it.

Independent agencies follow the same logic. Bodies designed to regulate markets, protect the environment, enforce labour standards, or uphold civil rights are reframed as ideological actors rather than neutral institutions. Their insulation from political pressure is treated not as a safeguard, but as illegitimate autonomy. Authority is concentrated in the executive. Procedural friction is redefined as inefficiency. This is where the language of “efficiency” becomes decisive.

Illiberalism rarely announces itself in the vocabulary of repression. It speaks instead in the language of reform. Speed. Streamlining. Accountability. Results. Savings. Friction is cast as failure. Delay as sabotage. Expertise as elitism.

The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency illustrates this logic in practice. DOGE did not bypass the state. It operated inside it. But it reorganised administrative capacity around executive priorities, weakened procedural safeguards, and compressed decision-making timelines. Agencies were merged, defunded, frozen, or repurposed. Normal processes were discarded in favour of speed and disruption.

This is not state weakness. It is state redesign.

Once the machinery of government can be reorganised rapidly through executive action alone, resistance becomes an organisational problem rather than a legal one. Institutions may still object, but they are restructured faster than they can respond.

The judiciary is treated more cautiously, but with the same intent. Courts are not abolished. They are outpaced. Years of strategic Supreme Court appointments have produced a Court increasingly inclined to treat executive power as presumptively legitimate. Doctrines narrowing standing, limiting agency authority, expanding presidential immunity, and deferring to executive claims in areas such as national security have reshaped the legal terrain.

Lower courts may still issue injunctions. Judges may still object. But the knowledge that the apex court is structurally sympathetic to executive authority changes behaviour throughout the system. Risk-taking becomes rational. Delay becomes strategy. Illegality becomes provisional.

Sometimes this philosophy is stated plainly. In a recent interview, Trump described his own morality as the ultimate restraint on his power, particularly in matters of international force. Constraint, in this telling, is not legal or institutional, but personal. Vice President J.D. Vance has expressed the same view in constitutional language, arguing that judges are not permitted to “control the executive’s legitimate power,” reframing judicial review itself as interference rather than safeguard. Instead, he argued the White House believes Trump "has extraordinary plenary power."

In illiberal democracies, courts are not destroyed. They are captured at the top and exhausted below. Project 2025 reflects this reality. It distinguishes carefully between what can be done immediately through executive action and what requires time, attrition, and judicial alignment. Partial implementation is not failure. It is sufficient.

Illiberal democracy does not require completion to function. You do not need to fire every civil servant. You only need to make independence risky. You do not need to silence the press. You only need to make scrutiny costly. You do not need to overrule courts. You only need to act faster than they can respond. Anticipation does the rest.

Immigration policy provides the clearest illustration of how this system works in practice. Under Trumpism, enforcement shifts from adjudication to classification. Punitive outcomes follow labels rather than trials: “illegal,” “security threat,” “gang-affiliated.” Decisions are administrative, opaque, and difficult to challenge. Speed replaces review.

In Minneapolis in early January 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman during an enforcement operation. Within hours, senior administration figures framed the killing as justified, portraying the victim as the aggressor and insinuating political motivation. The official narrative raced ahead of investigation. It did not matter that the video evidence demonstrated that this was not the case. Accountability was already framed as partisan hostility rather than civic obligation.

The point is not the specific facts of the case. It is the tempo and the function. Coercive power first. Moral story immediately. Evidentiary scrutiny later, if at all. This is governance by exception in miniature.

Deportations follow the same logic. People are removed while courts are still reviewing jurisdiction. Even when rulings later find violations, the harm has already occurred and cannot be undone. In some cases, deportees have been sent beyond the reach of U.S. law entirely, detained in foreign prison systems under conditions American courts cannot meaningfully review. The United States does not abolish due process. It outruns it.

The press survives under the same conditions. Journalists are not censored outright. They are disciplined. Access is revoked. Lawsuits are filed. Individuals are singled out. Fact-checkers are delegitimised. Platforms amplify falsehoods at scale. The state does not need to ban journalism. It can make adversarial reporting expensive for the capitalist press and defund state-funded organs.

Regulatory discretion over media mergers and ownership creates a quiet but powerful lever. When executives know that approvals can be slowed or complicated, editorial risk becomes financial risk. Meanwhile, ownership decisions narrow the range of permissible elite opinion without any formal instruction. The Washington Post’s retrenchment of its opinion section after ownership intervention was widely read by journalists as a concession to political reality rather than an exercise of editorial independence. Reporting continues. Exposure occurs. But exposure no longer reliably produces accountability. Truth is not suppressed. It is drowned.

Similarly, universities are not closed. They are conditioned. Funding, accreditation, and regulatory scrutiny induce compliance without legislation. Institutions close offices, rewrite policies, and discipline protest pre-emptively to avoid becoming targets. Student demonstrations, particularly around Gaza, are reframed as security threats or extremism rather than political expression. Protest is not banned. It is reclassified as something universities are already obliged to supress.

Centres of critique are not destroyed. They are induced to police themselves.

This is the illiberal bargain. You keep elections. You keep national pride. You keep the language of freedom and order. In exchange, you accept that rights will apply unevenly, that some people will be excluded or punished, and that law will protect people like you first. This bargain is rarely stated aloud. It does not need to be.

Trump’s role in this system is not incidental. His chaos distracts. His grievances mobilise. His excess normalises. Behind him, a disciplined movement builds the architecture that converts impulse into permanence. Trump is the battering ram.
Trumpism constructs the building.

America under Trumpism does not cease to be a democracy. That is precisely the danger. It becomes an illiberal democracy: elections without effective restraint, law without reliable protection, rights without universality, truth without impact.

Project 2025 explains how this is done. Supreme Court capture makes it durable. Administrative restructuring makes it fast. Loyalist placement makes it reliable. Partial implementation makes it sufficient.

This is not chaos. It is not incompetence. It is not accidental. It is design.

And the question it leaves is whether Americans will accept it, or resist it.

In the first article in this series, liberal democracy was described as a demanding system of restraint. Power is authorised through elections, but constrained through law, rights, institutions, and norms that deliberately frustrate domination. Illiberalism begins where those constraints are treated not as safeguards, but as obstacles.

What follows is not the story of democracy collapsing all at once, but of restraint being removed piece by piece. Nor is it the story of a single regime or coherent ideology. Instead, a recognisable pattern has emerged across different states, political systems, and centres of power. Elections remain. Legal forms persist. Democratic language survives. What changes is function.

This is the Axis of Illiberalism.

The term makes people uneasy, and understandably so. It carries historical weight and invites accusations of exaggeration or paranoia. But an axis does not require a treaty, a shared manifesto, or central command. It describes alignment in outcome. It names a convergence among actors who differ in interest and identity but arrive at the same practical conclusion: that liberal constraints on power can be violated with diminishing cost.

This alignment is neither accidental nor centrally orchestrated. It emerges through selection. Tactics that succeed are copied. Violations that go unpunished become precedents. Systems adapt to reward those willing to abandon restraint and disadvantage those who insist on it. Over time, convergence appears not because actors agree, but because incentives align.

Russia illustrates this sequence clearly. Its domestic transformation preceded its international aggression. When Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia still retained the outward forms of a post-Soviet democracy. Elections were competitive. Media pluralism existed. Parliament was unruly. None of these survived intact.

Independent television networks were taken over by state-aligned corporations after critical reporting on the Chechen wars. Journalists who continued to investigate state violence or corruption were harassed, exiled, or killed.

Elections continued, but competition was neutralised through legal thresholds, media exclusion, and administrative pressure. Courts remained, but were repurposed as instruments of executive will. After mass protests against electoral fraud in 2011 and 2012, dissent was criminalised in stages. Protest laws were tightened. NGOs were labelled “foreign agents,” a term chosen less to regulate funding than to signal treachery. The definition of extremism expanded to include ordinary political opposition.

The treatment of Alexei Navalny demonstrated how democratic form could be preserved while substance disappeared. Prosecuted on charges widely regarded as politically motivated, barred from office, poisoned with a nerve agent, imprisoned on return, and ultimately dead in custody. Navalny was eliminated without formally banning opposition itself. His organisations were designated extremist, criminalising association rather than argument.

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, democratic hollowing was complete. There was no free press capable of challenging the war narrative, no court able to restrain executive action, no opposition movement able to mobilise legally. New laws criminalised describing the invasion as a war. Thousands were detained for anti-war protest.

The invasion was not a deviation from Russia’s political trajectory. It was its extension. Borders became as negotiable as courts had been. International law was violated openly. Civilian infrastructure was targeted. Children were deported. International institutions responded with condemnations, sanctions, and arrest warrants. Russia ignored them and absorbed the costs.

The lesson was not lost on others. A state that eliminated internal accountability could violate the most fundamental rules of the international order and survive.

Hungary demonstrates how the same logic operates from inside a liberal system. When Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority, he moved rapidly to entrench structural advantage. The constitution was rewritten. The Constitutional Court’s powers were curtailed. Loyalists were installed in regulatory and judicial posts with mandates extending far beyond electoral cycles. Electoral rules were redesigned to favour the governing party.

Media pluralism was neutralised without extensive formal censorship. Public broadcasting was captured. Private outlets were acquired by Orbán-aligned business figures and consolidated into a pro-government media foundations. Independent journalism survived in a diminished form, but it is economically fragile and politically exposed.

Civil society and academia followed. NGOs receiving foreign funding were stigmatised as threats to sovereignty. The Central European University was forced to relocate most of its operations after legal changes made normal functioning impossible.

Only once the domestic system was secured did Hungary begin openly defying EU rule-of-law standards. Court rulings were delayed or ignored. Financial penalties were treated as political bargaining chips. Unanimity rules were weaponised to block collective action.

Hungary showed that a state could hollow out liberal democracy legally, remain inside the European Union, and use membership itself as leverage. It became a spoiler not through accident, but by design.

Israel represents a different configuration of illiberalism, one organised around nationality and ethnicity rather than electoral erosion. Israel does not recognise a civic nationality shared equally by all citizens. Citizenship exists, but nationality is registered separately. Jewish nationality is legally privileged but “Israeli nationality” is not. Palestinian citizens of Israel are citizens, but they are not appropriately recognised as a national collective within the state.

This distinction is not symbolic. Nationality carries collective rights. Land allocation, settlement policy, and national self-determination are organised around Jewish nationality and ethnicity rather than equal citizenship. The 2018 Nation-State Law constitutionalised this hierarchy, declaring that the right to national self-determination is exclusive to the Jewish people. Equality is notably absent from the law’s text.

Inside Israel proper, this structure produces systematic disparities. Housing and land policy prioritise Jewish communities. Palestinian citizens face chronic barriers to building permits and municipal expansion. Education funding and infrastructure investment are unequal. Security policy treats Palestinian political activity as a permanent risk to be managed rather than democratic participation to be represented.

In the occupied territories, the logic is explicit. Two populations live under the same sovereign authority and are governed by different legal systems. Israeli settlers are subject to civil law. Palestinians are governed by military law, tried in military courts, and regulated through permits that control movement, land use, family life, and political activity.

Judicial independence therefore represents one of the few remaining internal constraints. Netanyahu’s attempts to subordinate the courts were not merely populist gestures. They were structurally necessary to remove obstacles to settlement expansion and permanent rule without equality. When mass protest delayed these reforms, the project was recalibrated rather than abandoned.

International response has been selective. Criticism exists, but enforcement remains pathetic. Democracy is shown once again to coexist with entrenched inequality, and accountability proves negotiable when framed as security.

The United States tests the core of the system. Donald Trump did not abolish elections. He attempted to make them conditional. Courts, election officials, and even the peaceful transfer of power were treated as legitimate only when they produced the desired outcome. The pressure campaign following the 2020 election and the events of January 6th marked an unprecedented assault on democratic norms in a mature liberal democracy.

Institutional resistance held, but the lesson endured. A sitting president could challenge electoral legitimacy openly, attack judicial authority, and mobilise mass distrust without being removed by the system itself. Trumpism evolved from improvisation into design. Project 2025 represents the codification of norm-breaking into blueprint: purging the civil service, consolidating executive power, and neutralising internal checks in advance. This was Trump using the Orban playbook.

For observers elsewhere, this mattered profoundly. If the central guarantor of liberal order treats democracy as conditional, restraint everywhere looks optional.

This convergence is reinforced through transnational networks that are increasingly explicit. The National Conservatism conference circuit brings together Trump-aligned Republicans, Brexit advocates, Orbán’s allies, Israeli nationalists, European far-right parties, and sympathetic donors and intellectuals. These gatherings do not issue joint instructions. They normalise shared frames: sovereignty as exemption, courts as enemies, liberalism as decadence.

Alongside these networks circulate a set of conspiratorial narratives that perform an important political function. Claims about “Soros,” “globalists,” or “Cultural Marxism” are not coherent theories. They are simplifications and conspiracies that personalise structural conflict and redirect anger away from concentrations of power and toward those who defend liberal constraint. Their vagueness is their strength. “Soros” becomes a stand-in for independent institutions, human rights law, multilateral oversight, and pluralist politics. “Cultural Marxism” collapses feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, and academic critique into a single imagined enemy.

These narratives travel easily across borders because they allow actors with otherwise incompatible nationalisms to recognise a common adversary. This is why figures who deploy antisemitic tropes can form close alliances with explicitly Jewish nationalist leaders. Viktor Orbán’s campaigns have repeatedly drawn on antisemitic imagery, even as he maintains warm relations with Benjamin Netanyahu. The relationship is not contradictory. It is instructive.

What binds these actors is not ethnic or religious consistency, but hostility to liberal, socialist, and multilateral forms of restraint. Nationalism is instrumental rather than principled. It mobilises domestic support, but does not define permanent enmity. Rival nationalisms are tolerated because they are secondary. The real enemy is the architecture of constraint itself.

Money follows the same logic. American donors fund illiberal movements across Europe, including in the UK. Russian funds have flowed to sympathetic politicians and parties to fracture trust and weaken enforcement. Tactics migrate. Red lines are tested. Coordination occurs without central command.

Each part of this axis illustrates a different aspect of illberalism. Russia demonstrates that borders can be changed by force. Hungary demonstrates that institutions can be hollowed out legally from within. Israel demonstrates that democracy can coexist with permanent apartheid. The United States demonstrates that even mature democracies can be pushed to the brink without formal collapse.

Each lowers the cost of norm-breaking for the others. This is how mutual permission operates. Not by conspiracy but through example.

Neoliberalism prepared the ground by concentrating power while insulating it from democratic interference. As inequality widened and legitimacy eroded, persuasion stopped being sufficient. Illiberalism emerged not as a revolt against elite power, but as its adaptation. Where neoliberalism stacked the game, illiberalism rigs it.

Democracy rarely ends in a single moment. Restraint is redefined as optional, then unreasonable, then dangerous. What emerges is not chaos, but a different order, one in which democracy survives as a symbol while its defences are systematically removed.

The next articles in this series turn from alignment to design, from emergence to intention, and from abstraction to practice. The question is no longer whether these actors agree. It is whether they are making the same future more likely.

They are.

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Liberal democracy is often described as a political preference, a cultural style, or a Western habit of governance. In reality, it is something far more demanding: a system of power that agrees to bind itself.

At its core, liberal democracy rests on a paradox. Authority is derived from the people, yet it is constrained against their worst impulses and against its own interests. Governments are elected, but they are not sovereign over everything. Majorities rule, but they do not own the rights of minorities. The state enforces the law, but the law applies to the state with equal force.

This is not an abstract ideal. It is a practical architecture built to prevent a familiar failure mode: the conversion of temporary power into permanent dominance.

Democracy alone cannot prevent that outcome. Elections can authorise governments, but they cannot, by themselves, guarantee restraint. History is crowded with regimes that came to power through the ballot and then used that legitimacy to dismantle the conditions that made meaningful choice possible in the first place.

Liberal democracy exists precisely to prevent that collapse. It does so by embedding constraint into the exercise of power.

Three elements give that constraint substance.

The first is the rule of law, not as a tool of punishment but as a discipline imposed on those who govern. Law in a liberal democracy is meant to be slow, procedural, and frustrating. Courts are independent precisely because they must be able to say no. Legal processes exist not to accelerate power, but to expose it and force it to justify itself.

The second is universal human rights. These are not permissions granted by the state, but limits placed upon it. They do not depend on nationality, ethnicity, religion, loyalty, or usefulness. Their purpose is not to reward virtue, but to protect vulnerability. They exist most meaningfully for those who lack political leverage, when democratic processes fail to deliver justice on their own.

The third is multilateralism and international law. Liberal democracy was never purely a domestic project. It depended on the extension of restraint beyond borders. The post-war settlement rested on a shared understanding that some acts were forbidden everywhere, that sovereignty did not erase responsibility, and that power could be collectively constrained when it refused to restrain itself voluntarily.

Together, these elements form a system that limits what governments can do, not only to others, but to their own populations. It is a system designed to raise the cost of cruelty, to slow violence, and to force domination to explain itself rather than simply assert itself.

This system is often criticised for being weak. It is slow. It is legally dense. It frustrates decisiveness. But these features are not flaws. They are safeguards. A political order that moves too easily toward force is one that has stopped governing and started ruling.

From its earliest struggles, liberal democracy has relied on pressure from below to correct itself. Strikes, protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience are not deviations from democratic life. They are among the means by which those excluded from formal power force their interests into view. Nearly every expansion of democratic rights arrived through disruption that was, at the time, denounced as unlawful, irresponsible, or destabilising. What later generations remember as moral progress often appeared first as public disorder.

For this reason, liberal democracy protects the right to protest even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. Not because disruption is inherently virtuous, but because a system that cannot tolerate non-violent pressure cannot reliably correct itself. When dissent is reduced to permission and protest to performance, democracy loses one of its essential feedback mechanisms.

A similar logic applies to the press and to free expression. A free press is not an ornament of democracy. It is an infrastructure of accountability. Its function is not to reassure the public, but to expose power to scrutiny. By investigating, contextualising, and connecting events to decision-makers, journalism makes political responsibility legible. Without it, elections become rituals rather than judgments.

Liberal democracy therefore protects not just the formal right to speak, but the conditions under which speech can matter: independent media, plural ownership, protection for journalists and whistleblowers, and legal environments that do not punish investigation through intimidation or selective enforcement.

Illiberalism begins where this architecture of restraint is treated as an obstacle rather than a safeguard. It does not abolish elections. It retains them. What it rejects are the constraints that give elections meaning. Courts are recast as enemies of the people when inconvenient. Journalists are framed as traitors or agitators. Protest is redefined as extremism. Human rights become conditional. International law is treated as binding on others and optional for the powerful.

The vote survives, but the veto disappears.

This transformation rarely announces itself honestly. Illiberalism does not always arrive through coups or constitutional abolition. It advances through pragmatism, through the language of security, realism, and national interest. Rules are described as luxuries. Rights as obstacles. Restraint as weakness.

Crucially, this logic is applied selectively.

Law does not disappear. It is repurposed. Enforcement becomes asymmetric. Allies are protected. Opponents are punished. Procedures remain intact, but outcomes become predictable. Power stops asking what is lawful and starts asking who is loyal.

The same pattern appears internationally. Multilateral institutions are not always abandoned, but they are hollowed out. Treaties are cited when useful and ignored when inconvenient. War crimes are condemned in enemies and denied or excused in allies. Universal principles are quietly replaced with bloc alignment and transactional loyalty.

Illiberalism feeds on the achievements of the system it is dismantling. It inherits stability, wealth, and legitimacy produced by decades of constrained power, then spends that capital eroding the constraints themselves. By the time the damage is visible, the institutions that could have resisted it have already been weakened.

This process is not confined to any one country. Norm-breaking travels. Each individual violation lowers the cost of the next. Each unpunished abuse becomes precedent. What emerges is not chaos, but a different order: one in which democracy survives as a symbol while its defences are systematically removed.

This series examines that order. It traces how illiberalism embeds itself within democracies rather than overthrowing them, how it aligns across borders without formal coordination, and how it is sustained not only by strong leaders, but by institutions, capital, media, and those who mistake accommodation for containment.

Liberal democracy is not dead, and it is not naive to defend it. What is naive is to believe it can survive if its core commitments are treated as optional.

Illiberalism is not an alternative model of democracy. It is democracy stripped of restraint, emptied of correction, and repurposed as a tool of power. Understanding that is the beginning, not the end, of organising resistance.

What Comes Next

The next piece will step back and look outward, tracing the Axis of Illiberalism as a system rather than a set of personalities. It will examine how illiberal power aligns across borders, how norm-breaking becomes contagious, and how democratic restraint is eroded through precedent, permission, and selective enforcement.

From there, the series turns to design. It will examine Trump, Trumpism, and Project 2025 not as spectacle or scandal, but as a blueprint for the deliberate construction of an illiberal state, built to survive elections while emptying them of constraint.

The third article moves from design to practice, examining how illiberal democracy operates in everyday governance and foreign policy. Law becomes a weapon rather than a restraint. Protest becomes disorder. International rules become optional. Power learns to act without needing to explain itself.

The final piece brings the analysis home, with a national case study of Britain. It will show how illiberalism arrives not through rupture, but through alignment, accommodation, and respectability, and how reactionary centrism helps normalise what once would have been unthinkable.

Taken together, these articles argue that illiberalism is not an accident, a mood, or a backlash. It is a system. And systems can be understood.

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It began at school. Dulwich College. Late 1970s.

A teacher wrote to the headmaster warning that a teenage Nigel Farage had been seen marching through a Sussex town singing Hitler Youth songs. The teacher begged the school not to make him a prefect, calling him a “fascist.” Farage never denied the letter existed. He just brushed it off.

By 2025, more than twenty of his former schoolmates had gone public. They recalled how he would shout “Hitler was right” in the corridors, make jokes about gassing people, and hiss like a gas chamber during break. Not once. Not as a bad joke. Regularly.

“It was habitual, you know, it happened all the time,” one said. “He would often be doing Nazi salutes and saying ‘Sieg heil’ and, you know, strutting around the classroom.” Even back then, classmates were shocked. When asked about it decades later, Farage said he couldn’t remember. His political ally Richard Tice dismissed the reports as “made-up twaddle.” Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors asked him to apologise. He refused.

Opening the Door: UKIP’s Lurch to the Far Right

By the late 1990s, Farage was climbing the ranks of UKIP. In June 1997, he had lunch with Mark Deavin, head of research for the British National Party. Deavin had written a screed titled Mindbenders, which blamed Jews for controlling the media, and another pamphlet arguing that mass immigration was a Jewish plot to destroy white Europe.

Farage was seen grinning alongside Deavin and Tony “The Bomber” Lecomber, so nicknamed because he once tried to blow up the office of a political rival with a nail bomb. Farage claimed the photo might have been doctored. He said he had no recollection of meeting Lecomber.

At the same time, UKIP underwent a quiet but telling change. When founder Alan Sked quit in 1997, the party removed a rule that had explicitly barred racists from joining. There was no announcement. No discussion. The clause was just gone. Sked later said it was Farage who dragged the party toward the far right.

In that same Guardian report, it was alleged that Farage had used slurs like “nigger” and “nig-nog” in pubs after UKIP meetings. Not in his youth. As a man already in public life.

Making Friends in Europe

In the 2000s, Farage began forging alliances in the European Parliament. He gravitated toward Italy’s Lega Nord and Austria’s Freedom Party. These were parties with long histories of Holocaust denial, racism and fascist nostalgia.

Farage didn’t echo their worst rhetoric, but he gave them cover. He sat alongside them. He helped them access European funds and gain legitimacy. He also became a fixture on Russia Today, where he warned of shadowy elites trying to erase national identities.

2014: Holocaust Deniers in Brussels

That year, Farage brought in Polish MEP Robert Iwaszkiewicz from the Congress of the New Right to help UKIP access Brussels funding. The party’s leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, had claimed that Hitler “probably didn’t know about the Holocaust” and suggested women were intellectually inferior.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it was “gravely concerned by reports that UKIP may sit in the same parliamentary grouping as a far-right Polish MEP in a bid to save its funding. Robert Iwaszkiewicz belongs to an extremist party whose leader has a history of Holocaust denial, racist remarks and misogynistic comments.” Farage defended it as a practical arrangement.

2017: Reviving an Old Trope

On his LBC radio show, Farage declared that “the Jewish lobby” had too much influence in American politics.

This was no slip. The phrase is an old trope rooted in the idea that Jews manipulate governments behind the scenes. The Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust responded immediately. Farage didn’t retract a word.

2018: Turning Point, Turning Away

In 2018, Farage publicly backed Turning Point USA, a hard-right youth movement in the United States. Its leaders had links to white nationalist forums and regularly promoted the antisemitic cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. When a UK offshoot launched, it was met with fierce protests by anti-racist and Jewish groups.

Farage’s support remained unwavering.

2019: Globalists, Soros and the New World Order

Farage told LBC that George Soros was “the biggest danger to the Western world.”

He blamed financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan for the European Union’s power. He praised Hungary’s Viktor Orbán for resisting Soros, even as Orbán’s government plastered Budapest with antisemitic posters.

Farage also appeared several times on Infowars, the conspiracy network run by Alex Jones. He railed against “globalists” and the “new world order,” terms steeped in the language of antisemitic conspiracies.

Later that year, he appeared on TruNews, hosted by Rick Wiles. Wiles had previously referred to Trump’s impeachment as a “Jew coup.” Farage did not object.

2020: Cultural Marxism and BLM

As protests erupted over George Floyd’s murder, Farage didn’t talk about police brutality. He talked about “cultural Marxism” and “Soros-funded” chaos. On GB News and LBC, he warned of anarchists and elites undermining British values.

Jewish groups again raised the alarm. Farage ignored the warnings.

2022: The “Globalist Coup” and Grant Shapps

After Liz Truss resigned, Farage posted on social media about a globalist coup. Among the supposed conspirators was Grant Shapps, a Jewish cabinet minister.

Jewish organisations denounced the statement. Farage’s behaviour did not change.

2023–2025: The Pattern Persists

In 2023, he claimed Britain was being run by a “globalist government.” In 2024, he said Truss had been brought down by a “globalist attack” involving the IMF, Germany and Joe Biden. In 2025, speaking to Bloomberg, he warned that Britain was trapped in a “globalist mindset.”

The language evolves. The ideas do not.

Conclusion: The Warnings Came. He Ignored Them.

The pattern is clear. For nearly five decades, Farage echoed the rhetoric of fascists, promoted conspiracy theories and employed tropes long recognised as antisemitic.

Each time he was challenged by Jewish groups, by journalists, by people who know what this language means, he did not back down. He doubled down.

These were not isolated remarks. They were choices. To remove anti-racism clauses from his party. To meet with Holocaust deniers. To invoke Soros, globalists, cultural Marists and the new world order.

Farage was warned again and again. He knew.

And he kept doing it.

Does that make him an antisemitic? Decide for yourself.

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There is a familiar belief in British public life that rules can save the country from itself. Institutions speak in soft tones, clutch rulebooks as if they were protective charms and reassure the public that fairness can be engineered through careful procedural discipline. This mindset runs through the Labour leadership, the BBC board and the centrist commentators who admire caution as if it were a moral virtue. It is the belief that process equals integrity, that neutrality equals bravery and that strict policing of small infractions among the powerless somehow compensates for studied silence around the powerful.

The BBC’s response to a missing visual cue in a Donald Trump documentary shows how this belief operates. A minor editing oversight triggered formal investigations, reputational panic and the removal of senior staff. The corporation treated a fleeting absent flash as a grave threat to democratic trust. Yet this is the same organisation that reacts with remarkable calm when confronted with far more meaningful conflicts of interest.

The political world offers a parallel in the contrast between Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves. Rayner sought legal advice, corrected an administrative matter transparently and was treated as if she had committed a constitutional offence. Reeves failed to obtain a legally required landlord licence and was forgiven within hours. Both matters were minor. Only one required a resignation. This was not about standards. It was about power and proximity to it.

This instinctive tilt sets the stage for a deeper pattern. Reactionary centrism is the term that captures it. At first glance it appears contradictory, as if caution had been fused with hostility, but in practice it is simple. It is a reflex that tells politicians and media figures to absorb the assumptions of the right and blame leftists for the excesses of the right. Keir Starmer embodies this reflex. He likes to think of himself as pragmatic and serious, a leader who avoids gestures and focuses on what works. Yet on the most ethically consequential issues he absorbs right wing premises long before any debate has taken place.

Immigration reveals this more starkly than any other policy area. Labour under Starmer has embraced a harsh and deterrence based approach to asylum that mirrors the strategies of Reform and the Conservatives. Temporary protection that barely gives refugees time to breathe. Restrictive pathways to settlement. Barriers to family reunification. Property confiscated. Deportations. Enforcement that treats human beings as examples to deter others. All of it wrapped in the language of responsibility and professionalism.

Shabana Mahmood speaks of deterrence as necessary kindness, of resentment simmering in the country and of unnamed forces waiting to weaponise the issue. This is not moral clarity. It is political fear translated into policy. Listen to the language that Labour now uses. Stop the boats. Smash the gangs. Restore control. Protect Britain from becoming an island of strangers. These phrases originate from the rhetoric of the far right yet now pass as the vocabulary of the centre left.

Power Rewards Compliance and Punishes Dissent

The same gravitational pull shapes the BBC. The corporation’s public commitment to impartiality rests on the idea that neutrality can be maintained by strict adherence to procedures. Yet these procedures are applied unevenly. They fall hardest on those who challenge power and barely at all on those who affirm it. Gary Lineker criticised the asylum rhetoric of a Conservative government and was suspended. Alan Sugar praised the Conservatives during election periods and encountered no resistance. This is not neutrality. It is institutional fear.

The cultural sphere provides its own evidence. At Glastonbury, Bob Vylan delivered a chant that said Death to the IDF. It was provocative. Many people found it offensive. Yet it targeted a military force, not a protected group. That distinction matters. But the BBC declared it antisemitism immediately, without nuance or legal assessment, even though if it were a genuine hate crime the courts rather than a broadcaster would be the ones to determine that.

Now place that reaction beside its treatment of Gaza. A vast body of expert evidence, including from Jewish and Israeli scholars, humanitarian organisations, genocide researchers and medical charities, describes the destruction in Gaza as genocide or as an event that clearly meets the threshold for it. International courts have ruled that the situation presents a plausible case of genocide and requires preventative action. Yet the BBC and other media organs refuse to use the word. They claim that only a final judicial ruling can authorise the term. This is proceduralism invoked only where the powerful might take offence and abandoned entirely when a musician with limited influence is the target.

The same instinct drove the withdrawal of a Gaza documentary narrated by a child whose father worked in a ministry administered by Hamas, as many civil servants in Gaza do. The narrated script had been written entirely by the documentary writers. The corporation acted as if it had been caught laundering propaganda. Meanwhile the BBC’s Middle East Editor reportedly displays a personal letter from Benjamin Netanyahu in his office, a photograph of a former Israeli ambassador and maintains cordial relationships with Israeli intelligence figures. None of this has ever raised concerns about impartiality. Not even when its coverage was found to substantially favour Israel.

The one case that should have prompted institutional alarm receives none at all. Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative communications strategist, sits on the BBC board. His presence has never prompted anything close to the hysteria triggered by a missing flash cue in the Trump documentary.

This same selective severity shapes Labour’s internal culture. Punishments fall consistently upon one faction while protections are reliably extended to another. The pattern becomes clearest when arranged thematically. The punishments come first. Angela Rayner, despite full transparency, is pursued relentlessly. Diane Abbott apologised immediately for a poorly phrased letter and remained suspended long after the investigation concluded. These are not neutral responses. They are political signals.

The protections form the second pattern. Rachel Reeves breaches a landlord regulation and the matter is considered closed. Luke Akehurst amplifies inflammatory claims about crisis actors in Palestine and about the United Nations being antisemitic. He faces no discipline. Instead he receives a parliamentary candidacy. These are not isolated oversights. They reveal how proceduralism functions within the party. It is not applied evenly. It is invoked to marginalise the left and relaxed to protect insiders.

The mechanisms behind this theatre are straightforward. Accusations of antisemitism are weaponised as factional tools. Selection processes are redesigned to remove left wing candidates. Criticism of the Israeli government is treated as a reputational emergency. Racism directed at minority MPs becomes a quiet internal conversation. Proceduralism becomes a stage performance of fairness disguising a predictable and partisan outcome.

These dynamics are driven by a common fear. Both Labour and the BBC operate in dread of hostile right wing headlines. Legitimacy is imagined as something granted by newspaper editors rather than something earned through principle or public trust. In this climate, every decision is filtered through the same anxious question. What will the front pages say.

How the Commentariat Became a Conduit for the Right

The final piece in this puzzle lies with the commentariat. Analysts and columnists increasingly act as referees of political behaviour, yet their ability to do so is impaired. They treat power as symmetrical. They insist that standards are standards, never acknowledging that enforcement is selective. They describe factional purges as professionalism. They mistake media pressure and Twitter trends for public mood. When right wing newspapers demand punitive action, commentators treat it as the authentic voice of Britain. When civil rights groups call for restraint, the same commentators dismiss them as fringe activists.

They cannot see how the far right shapes the centre through threat rather than persuasion. They mistake Labour’s retreat as strategic maturity and BBC timidity as institutional rigour. In this way centrism becomes the unwitting midwife of far right politics.

The Human Cost of a Politics That Fears Its Own Shadow

The consequences for the public sphere are severe. Dissenting voices are marginalised. Journalists self censor. Activists are recast as terrorists. The boundaries of legitimate speech narrow until the only remaining choices are authoritarianism in two flavours. Policy drifts right without debate. Opposition becomes hollow. Meaningful alternatives disappear. Marginalised groups face the harshest outcomes. Immigrants are subjected to punitive rules designed to meet an appetite for ever harsher treatment that no policy can satisfy. Racism and discriminatory policing become normalised. Advocacy for Palestinians and broader civil rights movements is treated as a reputational hazard. Accusing someone of bigoty is punished more harshly than bigotted behaviour.

A political culture that punishes its dissidents and indulges its powerful has lost sight of democratic principle. Britain cannot proceduralise its way out of a crisis of power. The rulebook that claims to protect fairness has become a tool for disciplining the vulnerable and shielding those with influence. It cannot restrain the far right. It cannot appease a press ecosystem that openly despises the institutions it dominates. It cannot claim neutrality when it polices only those without protection.

Unless Britain confronts the fact that selective proceduralism is not neutrality but complicity, the political centre will continue to bend rightward, one rulebook at a time.

As the dust settles on Trump’s improbable 2024 election victory, many of us are left not simply with questions about how this happened but, more urgently, why it did. We’re grappling with a series of disturbing realities—most unsettling is the fact that an adjudicated rapist who inspired an attack on the Capitol just four years ago has once again found his way into the White House. Yet, with clearer eyes and a wider lens, Trump’s path to victory wasn’t a magic trick but a meticulously orchestrated dance of conspiracy, ideology, billionaire-backed networks, and the missteps of his opponents. Together, these forces created a political landscape where the improbable became inevitable. This was a victory of cold calculation, not just charisma.

Trump’s win in 2024 marks a chilling milestone, a victory cobbled together from the same toxic ingredients that have been corroding public discourse and democracy itself. At its heart is a perversion of truth—a grotesque mutation of reality that began as a conspiracy culture, was nurtured by the billionaire barons of industry, and found its voice in Elon Musk’s X. It’s a dark irony that this alliance of populist zealotry and concentrated wealth, wielded in the name of “freedom,” has undone democracy.

Conspiracy Culture: The Poisonous Allure of Simple Stories

The birth of conspiracy culture in mainstream politics wasn’t Trump’s doing alone. Conspiracy culture in America has always held a certain allure—think of the JFK assassination or the moon landing skeptics. But it has now blossomed into a sinister spectacle where “alternative facts” and reality-bending narratives are no longer relegated to the margins; they’re algorithmically catapulted into the mainstream. And Musk’s X, re-branded with a mission of unfiltered “free speech,” is the digital amphitheater where these stories echo.

Conspiracy culture, in its modern incarnation, is bound together by a sprawling and sinister mythology: the spectre of “Cultural Marxism.” This grand umbrella conspiracy theory has become a rallying cry on the far-right, uniting everything from fears of socialism’s return to xenophobic anxieties around immigration, and even the belief that “wokeness” and political correctness are tools to dismantle Western civilisation. Unlike traditional conspiracy theories, which typically revolve around isolated figures or events, “Cultural Marxism” presents a comprehensive narrative, positioning progressivism itself as an existential threat to the Western tradition.

This theory has evolved over time, but its modern shape owes much to Paul Weyrich of the Heritage Foundation and William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, two architects who transformed paranoia into political doctrine. Through their influence, Cultural Marxism has grown into a narrative where a cabal of academics, human rights organisations, the media, the judiciary, and even school systems allegedly work in lockstep to corrode Western values and disempower “ordinary” people. Under this worldview, seemingly innocuous movements—civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, multiculturalism—are cast as Trojan horses, harbouring intentions to destabilise society and undermine so-called “traditional” values. Soros-like figures become the villains, “puppet masters” orchestrating immigration, funding “woke” agendas, and deploying political correctness as tools to dismantle the cherished Western way of life.

“Cultural Marxism” purports that Western societies are under siege, that everything from academia to Hollywood is secretly engaged in a plot to emasculate men, erase national identities, and condition future generations to embrace a secular, socialist world order. The theory relies on fear: fear that the freedoms and identities of the West are being erased by elites with their own cryptic agendas. Civil rights movements are, in this view, recast as cynical strategies, waged not to extend equality but to create divisions that tear apart social fabric, all in the name of advancing socialism and destroying “Western tradition.” This belief, often cloaked in intellectual terms, has been injected into public discourse to reframe every movement towards equity as a calculated assault on Western society.

The concept of Cultural Marxism weaves together many threads of old conspiracy thinking, from anti-Semitic tropes about “media control” to Cold War fantasies of “reds under the bed.” But by modernising it, Weyrich, Lind, and their allies ensured it would have broad appeal in a digital age. Its genius lies in its flexibility: it can adapt to new anxieties, co-opting contemporary fears and evolving to include phrases like “wokeness” and “political correctness” as if they were simply the latest weapons in a long-fought cultural war.

For Trump’s campaign, this narrative was a gift. It provided an instantly recognisable villain, a way to frame his opponents as part of an elite conspiracy undermining “real” Americans. Through conspiracy culture and the idea of Cultural Marxism, Trump’s re-election campaign didn’t just run on policies; it offered a mythology. A grand narrative in which sinister forces, cloaked as human rights advocates and educators, use pro-social causes to manipulate the public, erode traditional values, and ultimately weaken the nation. In this worldview, Trump is no longer just a political candidate—he is a crusader, the last bastion of defence against a hidden enemy that seeks to destroy Western civilisation from within.

By placing this theory at the heart of his campaign, Trump tapped into a deep well of paranoia, a desire for simplicity in a complex world, and a resentment towards elites that was shaped, fed, and magnified by think tanks, influencers, and platforms like Musk’s X. The conspiracy culture around Cultural Marxism provided Trump with an ideology that galvanised millions, transforming public discourse into a binary of good versus evil, and leaving little room for critical thought. In a political landscape where the complexities of policy were traded for the simplicity of myth, Trump’s victory became not just possible, but inevitable.

Musk’s dismantling of moderation on X—casting fact-checking aside in the name of “liberty”—created a playground for those eager to distort reality. Through a tangled web of election denial, “deep state” fantasies, transphobia and feverish theories about stolen freedom, X became the perfect storm. It provided a platform where voices of paranoia resonated louder than voices of reason, transforming politics into a game of fear and rage. For Trump, this was a gift wrapped in black velvet: conspiracy culture gave his re-election bid not only a shield from criticism but a fervent base willing to believe, unconditionally, that he was the last line of defense.

The Deconstruction of the Democrats: The Straw Man of “Wokeism” and the Right’s Cultural Strategy

Jon Stewart recently noted the irony in how Democrats, including figures like Kamala Harris, were often cast as the champions of “woke” ideology when, in reality, their policies frequently sought to appeal to traditional Republicans. They reassured voters of their conservative positions on immigration, gun rights, and even fracking, attempting to bridge the partisan divide rather than stoke it. Yet, despite these efforts, the Democratic Party was relentlessly deconstructed and rebranded by the right-wing propaganda machine as a monolithic bloc of “wokeness”—an alliance of enablers of gender ideology, critical race theory, open borders, and creeping socialism. The Democrats’ supposed “wokeness” became a caricature, a straw man that had little to do with their actual positions but everything to do with the right-wing’s effective cultural strategy.

Right-wing activists like Christopher F. Rufo played a crucial role in this deconstruction. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has been one of the architects of a broad campaign to toxify concepts associated with social justice and civil rights under the guise of “critical race theory” and “wokeness.” In a thread on X, Rufo openly described the strategy behind this branding exercise:

“We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Rufo’s words reveal a calculated strategy, a masterstroke of political branding that successfully recast the Democratic Party as the embodiment of everything they argued “cultural Marxism” represented. By co-opting terms like “critical race theory” and “wokeness” and filling them with every unpopular cultural shift or social justice movement, they could create an all-encompassing boogeyman in the minds of many Americans.

From this foundation, the right-wing messaging machine went to work, taking complex social issues—#MeToo, Black Lives Matter, gender identity, immigration reform—and slotting them neatly under this toxic “woke” label. In doing so, they crafted a political shorthand: “the Left” became synonymous with all of the cultural changes the right had already convinced Americans to fear or resent. Critical race theory became a catch-all phrase for any discussion of race; “gender ideology” now encompassed everything from gender-affirming healthcare to children’s literature. In Rufo’s own words, the goal was to make every controversial news story stick to the Democrats, branding them as the “woke” party that pushed these cultural “insanities” on an unwilling public.

This process, however, didn’t just impact the Democrats’ branding—it targeted the very values that had once underpinned liberal democracy. By associating liberal values with toxic labels, the right made it politically dangerous to stand up for ideas like civil rights, social justice, and diversity. These concepts, which are foundational to democracy, were now recast as symptoms of a party that supposedly hated “ordinary Americans.” Liberal democracy itself was thus redefined as elitist, insidious, and incompatible with the interests of the common voter.

Ultimately, this strategy of deconstruction and recodification left the Democrats struggling to shake a brand identity they never constructed. For many voters, the reality of the Democrats’ policies became irrelevant. The narrative pushed by Rufo and the right-wing propaganda machine—relentlessly amplified by Fox News, Newsmax, Joe Rogan, and Musk’s X—had replaced reality. The Democrats had become a monolithic “woke” caricature, toxic by association and indefensible in the eyes of an electorate primed to believe that “liberal democracy” itself was an attack on their way of life.

The Democrats, then, lost not on the basis of what they stood for but on the basis of a meticulously constructed illusion—a straw man of “wokeness” that, by 2024, had swallowed the public perception of the party whole.

The Rise of National Conservatism and Orbanism: America’s Illiberal Turn

Meanwhile, Trump’s ideological underpinnings were no longer simply “Republican.” They had morphed into something far more potent, something that felt foreign and yet oddly familiar—a version of nationalism underpinned by cultural resentment, rigid traditionalism, and an unapologetic rejection of liberal democracy. National Conservatism, a movement that embraces an illiberal future, found an enthusiastic champion in Trump’s America.

National Conservatism, inspired by the “Orbanism” of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, posits that democratic norms and human rights can be discarded in favour of a purist nationalism—one that claims to defend “the people” from the supposed decay of secular, progressive values. In Hungary, Orban’s illiberal democracy has stripped civil society of its freedoms while cloaking itself in the rhetoric of “traditional values.” At first glance, it might look like democracy is retained, but a closer look makes it clear that the political, media and judicial landscapes have been altered so that only the ‘right’ outcomes are achieved. Trump and his allies took notes. Here was a blueprint: an entire ideology that sells reactionary politics as a remedy to social change, one that repackages white nationalism, religious conservatism, and economic nativism as a defence of “Western civilisation.”

Trump’s campaign amplified these themes, framing his re-election as a moral imperative, a last stand to protect America from a tide of cultural erosion. By distilling this into a slick, ideologically consistent message, Trump galvanised voters eager to believe that liberal democracy had betrayed them.

Billionaire-Backed Think Tanks: The Money Engine Behind the Ideology

Then, in the wings, stood the think tanks and billionaire neoliberal networks, whispering policy blueprints and funding grassroots operations with quiet but boundless enthusiasm. While Trump’s rhetoric captured hearts, these think tanks—funded by the Kochs, Mercers, and their ilk—ensured that his policies would benefit their pockets and preserve their power.

The fingerprints of these think tanks—places like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the American Principles Project—are all over Trump’s policies. These billionaire-funded institutions have worked tirelessly to ensure that the politics of resentment are reinforced by the mechanics of power. They’ve poured money into state legislatures, judicial appointments, and public school boards, transforming America’s political landscape from the ground up.

What was most insidious, though, was how they positioned themselves as champions of the “forgotten American.” By aligning their priorities with those of Trump’s base—aggressive deregulation, disdain for international alliances, the rollback of civil rights—they blurred the line between populism and plutocracy. Theirs was an anti-democratic coup, orchestrated with spreadsheets, speeches, and dark money. They turned democracy into a business plan, selling it back to the public as patriotism.

The tragedy is that those who believe the neoliberal network’s lies about “Cultural Marxists” pulling the strings aren’t entirely wrong in sensing that something is amiss. Their lives are getting worse: wealth inequality is deepening, political candidates bow to the agendas of wealthy donors, profiteering is rampant, and public services are in decline. But the real culprits—the billionaires profiting from this suffering—have sold them a story that immigrants and a “liberal elite” pushing progressive agendas are to blame. This scapegoating distracts from the true source of their hardship, protecting those who actually benefit from their decline.

Musk’s X: The Digital Battlefield of “Free Speech”

At the centre of this dark coalition, we find Elon Musk’s X—a Twitter reborn without the decency of restraint, where free speech became the ultimate weapon. Musk, in his quest to establish X as the wild west of the digital world, dismantled safeguards against disinformation, handing Trump and his allies an invaluable tool: a platform where lies spread unchecked.

In Musk’s vision, X was an open arena where speech could flow freely—but free speech became a farce, a battleground where misinformation metastasised and the voices of reason were drowned out by a cacophony of rage, bile, and division. What Musk recognised is that a society without truth cannot function. Liberal Democracy depends on a shared reality, a baseline understanding of facts. Without it, we don’t have political discourse; we have tribal warfare.

For Trump, X was the perfect propaganda machine. A quick scroll through his feed revealed doctored videos, viral lies, doctored images, all churned out to feed the beast of conspiracy culture. What began as Musk’s supposed dream of digital freedom ended as a tool of psychological manipulation, where reality became whatever Trump’s camp needed it to be.

What Comes Next: A Question of Resistance or Submission

We’re left with two choices. Either we accept this as the new normal, where democracy becomes a simulacrum, a hollowed-out shell animated by dark money and digital deceit. Or we wake up, recognising that democracy requires a vigilant public, a press that holds the line against propaganda, and a collective resistance to the forces that would rewrite reality for profit.

For those who care about the soul of democracy, the road ahead is unforgiving. This election shows us that the fight is no longer simply between left and right, but between democracy and oligarchy, between truth and the seductive simplicity of lies. Trump may have won, but the battle for democracy is only just beginning.

Introduction

Taken As Red by journalist Anushka Asthana provides an in-depth exploration of the 2024 general election, a landmark event where Keir Starmer’s Labour party swept to power while the Conservative government, led by Rishi Sunak, experienced a devastating defeat. Drawing from over 100 exclusive interviews with political insiders—including Labour figures like Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting, Tories such as Kwasi Kwarteng, and key individuals from other political parties—Asthana delivers an insider’s account of the election and its build-up.

The book promises a detailed, authoritative look at the strategies and machinations behind the scenes, though it also brings with it certain drawbacks, which we will explore. At this stage, I’ve only completed Part 1: Eyes on the Prize, which offers a semi-reverse-chronological narrative, beginning with Labour’s 2024 election night exit polls and working its way back through the critical moments that shaped the victory. Chapter 1 opens at the 2022 Labour Party Conference, framing the narrative by describing Keir Starmer and strategist Morgan McSweeney’s attempts to rebrand the party as patriotic with a tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II and singing the national anthem at a Labour Party Conference. Subsequent chapters dive into the backgrounds of Starmer and McSweeney, while Chapter 4 examines the role of the Labour Together group, which orchestrated a shift away from Corbynism and toward the centre-right.

While the structure at times feels disjointed, mirroring the tumultuous political landscape being navigated, it becomes clear that this section is more than just an exploration of events. It is, in many ways, the origin story of Morgan McSweeney, whose journey from an intern at Labour HQ to the key architect of Labour’s eventual triumph provides the backbone to this part of the book. McSweeney emerges as a figure not only focused on winning elections but also on reclaiming the party from the left, which he viewed as a greater threat than Conservative governance. I’ve chosen to structure my summary of Section 1 around McSweeney, as it provides a clearer and more coherent way to capture the key events, even though the book itself takes a different narrative approach.

Summary of Taken As Red Part 1

McSweeney’s Early Focus on Electoral Efficiency

McSweeney’s career began with a laser focus on voter efficiency, and this became the hallmark of his political strategy within Labour. His early campaigns, such as his work in Lambeth, demonstrated a key principle: elections are won by targeting a small number of voters in key areas, not by attempting to appeal to a broad base. For McSweeney, victory was a numbers game, and his approach was ruthless—direct resources where they would yield electoral gains and sacrifice vote share in other, less critical areas.

This methodology would eventually shape Labour’s broader electoral strategy under McSweeney’s guidance. Winning elections, in his view, wasn’t about changing minds; it was about aligning yourself with the preferences of key swing voters and promising to implement their policies. His focus was always on securing seats, not merely gaining popular support.

Labour Together’s Plot Against the Left

McSweeney’s vision fully crystallised within Labour Together, a pressure group that formed in the aftermath of the 2017 election. While Corbyn’s near-victory was celebrated by many on the left, McSweeney saw it as a disaster in the making. He was somewhat alarmed by Corbyn’s success. His opposition to Corbynism wasn’t based on the idea that Corbyn couldn’t win—he feared precisely the opposite. A Labour victory under Corbyn would, to McSweeney, be a long-term catastrophe, trapping the party in a leftist cul-de-sac.

Thus, Labour Together embarked on a calculated mission to undermine Corbynism, not through direct confrontation, but by quietly shoring up centrist MPs and protecting them from deselection campaigns while researching optimal strategies to be employed once Corbyn was in trouble. The goal was to build a coalition that could offer a viable alternative to the far left, one that would bring the party back to the centre while still retaining enough appeal to the left-leaning party idealists.

One of McSweeney’s greatest strengths was his use of data-driven strategies. Under his direction, Labour Together embraced a model that focused on adapting to volatile and uncertain political conditions—what he termed “VUCA politics.” By running focus groups and conducting detailed polling among Labour members, McSweeney and his team developed a nuanced understanding of the different factions within the party, allowing them to craft an adaptable electoral strategy.

The Selection of Starmer and the Defeat of Corbynism

After Labour's defeat in the 2019 general election, McSweeney and Labour Together began searching for a leader who could unite the party’s right-leaning instrumentalists while still appealing to the more idealistic left-wing members. Although several names were considered, Keir Starmer quickly emerged as the frontrunner.

The group’s discussions eventually centered around finding a candidate capable of both challenging Corbynism and restoring Labour’s electability. Three main contenders surfaced: John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, and Starmer. Starmer’s loyalty to Corbyn throughout his tenure, combined with his experience as Director of Public Prosecutions, gave him a statesman-like image. His role as Shadow Brexit Secretary also made him appealing to both Remainers and more moderate voters.

McSweeney and Starmer’s team carefully crafted Starmer’s image, positioning him as the most "prime ministerial" candidate. They understood that the party membership’s support for Corbyn wasn’t necessarily rooted in his radical policies, but in his perceived authenticity, honesty, and integrity—qualities they believed Starmer could emulate.

However, Starmer faced competition from candidates like Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey, the latter representing the Corbynite left and seen as a significant threat to his chances. Starmer’s political career had been strategically built—he had stayed loyal to Corbyn, never publicly opposing him, and only publicly withdrew support when circumstances seemingly demanded it. Additionally, his anti-Brexit stance helped him attract support from the soft-left faction of the party.

In selecting Starmer, McSweeney and Labour Together weren’t merely choosing a leader; they were orchestrating a broader ideological shift within Labour. Starmer’s leadership campaign, like McSweeney’s earlier efforts, was defined by data-driven strategy and targeted messaging aimed at specific segments of the party. While Starmer maintained a public persona as a unifier, McSweeney’s team worked behind the scenes to diminish the influence of the left. The strategy was straightforward but effective: build a broad coalition within the party to secure Starmer’s leadership, all while gradually sidelining the far-left elements.

Winning the Election: McSweeney’s Ruthless Voter Targeting

With Starmer at the helm, McSweeney turned his focus to the general election. His strategy remained consistent: win key seats by focusing on marginal constituencies, even if it meant sacrificing vote share in traditionally Labour-strong areas. The 2024 election campaign was characterised by this tactical ruthlessness, though it remains unclear if it worked, or simply worked out. The platform that was required to win over the Labour party idealists was quickly abandoned. Resources were directed at the swing voters that McSweeney believed Labour needed to win, while less attention was given to metropolitan or left-leaning constituencies where Labour’s victory was already assured.

The broader context of the Conservative collapse under Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng made McSweeney’s task easier. The economic chaos following the mini-budget allowed Labour to present itself as a safe, patriotic alternative to Tory mismanagement. Ultimately, Labour’s focus on appealing to a relatively small but seemingly crucial group of voters was followed by a landslide victory, despite winning only just over a third of the popular vote.

Observations

One of the key advantages of Taken As Red is its access to insider accounts, offering a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Labour Party’s rise to power. However, the frequent use of anonymous sources often makes it difficult to determine who is recounting specific events, which raises questions about the objectivity of certain perspectives. The narrative appears to include voices from both the Corbynite and Labour Together factions, but it is clear that those from the McSweeney and Starmer faction are the central contributors.

Asthana does make efforts to counter accusations against the Labour left, particularly regarding the issue of anti-Semitism, which is introduced within the context of Labour Together’s use of it as a tool against Corbyn’s faction. She notes that figures on the left disagree with how they are portrayed by the Labour right. However, the book doesn’t fully engage with the deeper complexities of these claims. For instance, The Canary, a left-wing news outlet aligned with Corbyn, was accused of fostering anti-Semitism, and Labour Together used this to isolate it from advertisers resulting in job losses and ruined reputations. However, Asthana does not address the findings of the press regulator IMPRESS, which dismissed antisemitism complaints about The Canary. This omission raises concerns about how thoroughly the book represents those targeted by campaigns linked to McSweeney.

More broadly, the book tends to gloss over the ethical implications of McSweeney and Starmer’s approach to securing leadership. Their strategy—targeting idealistic, anti-Brexit voters to win the leadership, only to pivot toward more pro-Brexit positions in the general election—raises significant questions about political integrity. Yet, Asthana largely sidesteps these issues, focusing instead on the technical success of their strategy.

This silence is especially jarring when contrasted with occasional editorial asides. For instance, Asthana questions Labour Together’s failure to find "a single female candidate" to challenge Rebecca Long-Bailey during the leadership race. These moments of critique seem inconsistent with the broader neutral tone. The author seems comfortable taking the Labour leadership to task for some failings, but not others.

Conclusion

Taken As Red is an insightful and well-researched account of how Starmer came to power. Based on Part 1, it offers a thorough exploration of Morgan McSweeney’s central role in Labour’s transformation and the strategic mind and ideology behind Keir Starmer’s rise to leadership.

Some anecdotes seem unnecessary and add little to our understanding of the political dynamics, though they may appeal to those who enjoy the soap opera side of politics. It's understandable, however, that Asthana would want to include as much material as possible from her extensive interviews. Others will appreciate the insights into the party officials and internal pressure groups that quietly shape the outcomes of British politics while remaining out of the public eye. Although the book sidesteps deeper ethical and political issues, it still offers a valuable insider perspective on the election and the internal struggles that defined it.

As I continue reading, I’m curious to see whether some of the critiques I’ve raised here—such as the lack of engagement with key ethical issues—are addressed in later sections of the book. McSweeney’s approach is myopic, treating politics as a marketing exercise rather than shaping public discourse. His strategy prioritised telling voters what they wanted to hear, often shifting promises to different groups without a cohesive long-term vision. Even if effective in the short-term, this strategy risks failure if voters lose trust, as no amount of tailored promises will work without belief in the party’s integrity. McSweeneyism has already, arguably, cost Starmer his reputation for authenticity, honesty, and integrity.

Nonetheless, based on what I’ve read so far, Taken As Red is a must-read for those interested in understanding the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring that led to one of the most significant political shifts in recent British history. I look forward to seeing how the rest of the book unfolds.

Back in 2016, Daniel Hannan spun a fantasy of Britain’s post-Brexit future that, in hindsight, reads more like an ode to nostalgia than a credible political forecast. His vision was one of fireworks illuminating the sky on some imagined "Independence Day," a nation revitalised, striding confidently into a future of economic growth, global influence, and renewed self-belief. It was, to put it bluntly, a fever dream of empire reborn, written for an audience desperate to believe that Britain, unshackled from the EU, would not only survive but thrive. But as we now stand in 2024, what has transpired is a far cry from Hannan's romanticised vision. His article, written with the evangelical fervour of a Brexiteer completely unmoored from reality, has proven to be little more than a glossy cover for a story of decline.

Hannan painted a picture of Britain becoming the world’s "foremost knowledge-based economy," leading the charge in biotech, software, and financial services. In his world, the moment the EU’s regulatory grip loosened, innovation would bloom, and the economy would roar to life. Britain would no longer be held back by the allegedly parasitic eurocrats of Brussels. And yet, reality is a stubborn thing. Far from the boom in financial services Hannan predicted, London has seen its influence wane. The City, which was supposed to soar post-Brexit, has instead had its wings clipped, as firms shift operations to Paris, Frankfurt, and Dublin. The fantasy of Britain retaining seamless access to European markets, while simultaneously rewriting the rules, has crumbled under the weight of customs checks, red tape, and lost opportunities.

Let’s talk about those "new industries" Hannan raved about—driverless cars and 3D printing, a shining example of Britain’s ingenuity unleashed. He neglected to mention that innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. R&D requires partnerships, investment, and, yes, a market. Post-Brexit Britain, alienated from the EU’s innovation ecosystem, hasn’t led the world in anything. Instead, it’s a country grappling with worker shortages in key sectors—shortages brought on, not by a surge in talent from abroad, as Hannan fantasised, but by the exodus of EU nationals and Britain becoming less attractive to immigrant-workers. The "points-based" immigration system, once hailed as a magic bullet to bring in only the "best and brightest," has in practice led to shortages in agriculture, healthcare, hospitality, and construction. Far from attracting the world’s top talent, post-Brexit Britain has become a place where many are simply reluctant to come.

Perhaps the most astonishingly naive of Hannan's predictions was his assertion that trade deals with the rest of the world would swiftly replace any losses from leaving the EU. He spoke of new liberal agreements with India, China, and Australia, positioning Britain as a global trade powerhouse. But anyone with an ounce of common sense could have seen the flaw here. Hannan assumed that Britain, once outside the EU, would command the same negotiating power on its own as it did when part of a bloc of 500 million people. In reality, the UK has found itself reduced to a second-tier negotiator, securing deals that, while flashy on the surface, offer minimal tangible benefits. The much-touted trade deal with Australia, for instance, has been a boon for Australian farmers, while British agriculture finds itself on the losing end. The promise of free trade with the world has, instead, resulted in Britain grasping at whatever scraps it can secure.

On immigration, Hannan’s prediction of a points-based system sounds like the dog-whistle dream of a populist riding the wave of xenophobia. He imagined a Britain able to pick and choose its migrants like items from a supermarket shelf, with the result being an influx of highly skilled, patriotic newcomers, thrilled to contribute to this brave new world. What we’ve seen instead is an unholy mess—immigration has not slowed down in the way Brexiters promised, but the composition has shifted, leaving key industries like farming and healthcare in crisis, as EU workers have largely disappeared, and replacements are hard to find. The Brexit dream of restoring "control" over immigration has resulted in labour shortages that threaten to undermine the very economy it sought to protect.

Hannan’s prediction of harmonious relations with Europe and a soft exit was always far-fetched. He envisioned Britain slipping effortlessly into a free trade agreement with the EU, with all the benefits and none of the political obligations. "Terms were agreed easily enough," he wrote, as if extracting oneself from the most complex trading bloc in history were akin to cancelling a gym membership (while somehow retaining the benefits of membership). But the truth is, Brexit has been anything but smooth. The protracted negotiations, the endless disputes over fishing, Northern Ireland, and regulatory alignment have all highlighted the naïveté of Hannan’s post-Brexit utopia. Instead of leading Europe in a new wave of free trade, Britain is wrestling with the consequences of its own isolation. Northern Ireland, far from being settled neatly as part of the Brexit process, remains a flashpoint of tension, its status within the UK and the EU a constant headache for British and European leaders alike.

Hannan’s vision of a revitalised Britain, shaking off the cobwebs of EU membership and finding itself reborn, is perhaps the most tragic of all his miscalculations. He seemed to believe that Brexit would somehow reignite a sense of national pride and purpose, as if leaving the EU would free the nation from the malaise he imagined had set in. Instead, the UK has seen growing division. Scotland edges closer to another independence referendum, buoyed by the reality that Brexit has dragged it out of the EU against its will. The ongoing tensions in Northern Ireland threaten the very fabric of the Union. Far from "recovering its self-belief," Britain is a country wrestling with a deepening identity crisis, unsure of its place in the world.

In Hannan’s post-Brexit fairy tale, Britain was supposed to "straighten its back" and reassert itself as a global power. Instead, the world looks on as a once-proud nation flounders, diminished and disoriented. The hard truth is that Brexit has not unleashed Britain's potential—it has shackled it to a shrinking reality. Hannan's vision, built on ideology rather than pragmatism, reads now not as a prophecy, but as a cautionary tale of hubris, nostalgia, and the seductive power of fantasy over fact.

In the end, it was all fireworks without the follow-through. Britain’s song, it turns out, wasn’t one of triumph—but of mourning for what might have been.

On Thursday, 16th September, British news channels broadcast unsettling images of Prime Minister Keir Starmer laughing jovially beside Italy’s far-right leader, Giorgia Meloni. This disquieting camaraderie served as a grim reminder—Starmer, it appears, is seeking lessons in migration policy from a figure who walks in Mussolini’s shadow.

Starmer’s stance on migration, marked by a stern promise to "stop the boats" more effectively than the Tories, aligns disturbingly with a far-right ethos. This approach sidesteps simple and compassionate alternatives, like expanding legal migration routes, instead favouring draconian measures reminiscent of his conservative counterparts. Moreover, his decision to slash the Winter Fuel Allowance, stripping £1.5 billion from pensioners to partially plug a £22 billion deficit, heralds a stark return to the austerity politics of David Cameron. This choice starkly overlooks the potential to levy taxes on wealthier households, a policy deeply opposed by the right-wing press.

In the arena of international relations, the modest reduction of arms export licences to Israel—just 30 out of 350—reflects a strategic choice. Framing this decision as ‘strictly legal,’ Starmer underscores continuity with previous administrations, aiming to temper criticism from the pro-Israel right-wing press. Yet, with only 13% of Britons supporting Israel’s military actions, this continued arms trade raises grave accusations of complicity in acts many view as ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Starmer’s reliance on legal justifications reframes the issue of arms sales as one that can be addressed through competent governance, but it pleases no one.

"Frontpageophobia," as James O’Brien aptly terms it, seems to steer Starmer’s hand—an ingrained fear of negative press from the right-wing media that has led Labour to forsake much of the transformative vision it once promised its base. This anxiety has manifested in Starmer’s strategic avoidance of policies that could cast his leadership or Labour as too ‘left-wing’, reflecting a belief that tempering their stance will shield them from the wrath of conservative outlets. Yet, this failing did not begin with Labour’s rise to power; it was, regrettably, at the heart of Labour’s long electoral campaign.

Pledges Abandoned in Fear of the Right-Wing Press

Starmer’s shift towards the centre in the run-up to the 2024 general election represented a clear break from the pledges that initially won him support within Labour’s left-wing base. During his leadership campaign in 2020, Starmer had positioned himself as a unifier who embraced many of the progressive policies that defined Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. These included commitments to nationalising key industries—rail, mail, energy, and water—policies popular among voters who saw privatisation as inflating costs and eroding public accountability.

However, as the election approached, Starmer quietly dropped these commitments. Labour’s manifesto no longer featured plans for public ownership, opting instead for a strategy that emphasised regulating industries rather than taking them into public hands. This pivot away from the 2019 platform disillusioned many who had supported Starmer on the basis of his leadership promises. His shift was seen as an attempt to make Labour more appealing to centrist voters and those disillusioned with the Conservatives, particularly in the red wall constituencies Labour lost in 2019.

The same pattern emerged in taxation policy. Initially, Starmer hinted at taxes on the wealthy to address inequality, a cornerstone of the economic vision laid out under Corbyn. Yet, as Labour moved towards the centre, these ambitious proposals were scaled back. Instead of pushing for a wealth tax, Labour’s 2024 platform prioritised fiscal responsibility and more modest tax reforms, aimed at appealing to middle-class voters and businesses. This left many progressives frustrated, having expected a bolder agenda that addressed the root causes of inequality in the UK.

Perhaps one of the most significant betrayals, according to the party’s left, was the scaling back of the Green New Deal. Starmer had originally championed the plan as a transformative investment in green jobs and infrastructure to tackle climate change. But by the time of the 2024 election, the scope of Labour’s environmental proposals had been drastically reduced. The Green New Deal, once envisioned as a radical reimagining of the UK’s post-carbon economy, was pared down to a more moderate set of proposals, focusing on incremental rather than transformational steps toward environmental targets.

The ‘Purge’ of Left-Wing Figures

Alongside these policy reversals, Starmer’s leadership has been marked by the systematic sidelining of Labour’s most prominent left-wing voices. The most symbolic of these actions was the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, following his comments on a report into antisemitism in the Labour Party. Corbyn’s suspension signalled Starmer’s determination to distance himself from the party’s recent past and assert control over its internal direction. By decisively acting against Corbyn, Starmer made it clear that Labour under his leadership would not be seen as a continuation of the Corbyn years.

Other left-wing MPs have also been marginalised. Pro-Palestinian figures like Zarah Sultana and Richard Burgon found themselves pushed to the periphery of the party, with Starmer seemingly wary of allowing their voices to dominate key issues. Sultana and Burgon, known for their strong support for Palestinian rights, were increasingly side-lined as Starmer sought to avoid international controversies that could alienate more moderate voters.

This purge extended to Starmer’s approach to trade unionism. During the wave of strikes in 2022, Starmer instructed his shadow cabinet to avoid joining picket lines—a move that sharply contrasted with Labour’s historic support for workers and unions. Many on the left saw this as further proof that the party was abandoning its traditional base in favour of a centrist, voter-friendly image.

The case of Diane Abbott, one of Labour’s most prominent left-wing MPs, exemplifies Starmer’s strategy. In 2023, Abbott was suspended from the party after writing a letter to The Observer suggesting that while Jewish, Irish, and Traveller communities experience prejudice, they do not face racism in the same way Black people do. Her comments were widely condemned as downplaying antisemitism, and despite issuing an apology, her suspension inexplicably remained in place for months.

As the 2024 general election neared, uncertainty loomed over whether Abbott would be allowed to stand as the Labour candidate for her long-held seat in Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Although the party restored the whip after a lengthy investigation, reports surfaced that senior Labour figures had briefed she would not be selected. Abbott herself publicly stated she had been effectively “banned” from running, despite fulfilling all the requirements set out by Labour’s National Executive Committee. Many on the party’s left saw this as part of a broader effort to marginalise prominent progressive voices within Labour.

These internal ‘purges’, combined with the abandonment of core left-wing policies like nationalisation, tax reform, and the Green New Deal, reflect Starmer’s deliberate strategy to shift Labour to the centre and avoid the ire of the right-wing press. The calculation was simple: Labour needed to win back voters in the red wall constituencies lost in 2019, while attracting disillusioned Conservative voters in the South. The assumption was that left-wing voters had no alternative but to support Labour, despite their disappointment with Starmer’s centrist shift.

Did Frontpageophobia Work or Just Work Out?

At first glance, this strategy paid off. Labour secured a 172-seat majority—the kind of victory many thought impossible just a few years earlier. But as with all majorities, the surface triumph masked deeper vulnerabilities. Labour’s vote share barely shifted—rising from 32.1% in 2019 to just 33.7% in 2024, far below the 40% achieved under Corbyn in 2017. Political analyst John Curtice was quick to point out that this modest increase was almost entirely due to the collapse of the SNP in Scotland. In England, Labour’s advances were more superficial than substantial.

By the time of the 2024 general election, the political environment was primed for a massive Labour victory. The Tories had been in power for 14 years, during which time they oversaw austerity, the fallout from Brexit, and economic instability. Their mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the slow response and a series of contradictory policies, left the public frustrated. This, combined with well-documented corruption scandals and cronyism, especially under Boris Johnson’s leadership, severely eroded the public’s trust in the Conservative Party​. Voters were irritated even more by Liz Truss and her chaotic economic policies, which led to her abrupt departure as Prime Minister, the image of a party in perpetual crisis was sealed. For many voters, the Conservative government had become synonymous with incompetence.

In Scotland, the SNP—once an insurmountable force—was unraveling. A series of high-profile scandals, including investigations into party finances, damaged their credibility. Internal divisions also weakened the party, particularly following Nicola Sturgeon’s departure and the controversial leadership of her successor, Humza Yousaf​.

But these dynamics—Conservative collapse and SNP implosion—were external to Labour’s actual platform. What was clear by 2024 was that many voters were simply exhausted by the status quo. After 14 years of Conservative rule, the public's appetite for change had reached its peak. Given this context, any reasonably organised opposition could have taken advantage of such a ripe political landscape.

The truth is, Labour’s majority didn’t stem from a groundswell of support for Starmer’s centrist vision. It was the fractures within the right-wing vote, driven by Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK, that allowed Labour to pick up key seats without substantially increasing its own share of the electorate. Farage’s return to politics siphoned off votes from the Conservatives in crucial constituencies, particularly in the Brexit-supporting red wall, allowing Labour to win by default.

Yet the cost of Starmer’s centrist shift became clear in other constituencies, where Labour’s abandonment of progressive policies alienated core voters. The Green Party capitalised on this disillusionment, gaining traction in areas like Islington South and Bristol West, once Labour strongholds, where voters felt Starmer’s environmental platform lacked ambition. In these areas, Labour wasn’t the beneficiary of Farage’s disruption—it was bleeding support to more progressive alternatives.

Independents, too, reaped the rewards of Labour’s internal divisions. In Leicester South, independent candidate Shockat Adam defeated Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, a high-profile shadow cabinet minister. Health Secretary Wes Streeting only narrowly held on to his Ilford North seat by just 528 votes.

Even more telling was Jeremy Corbyn’s retention of his seat in Islington North, despite Labour’s significant efforts to unseat him. Corbyn’s victory wasn’t just a win for the former Labour leader—it was a rejection of the party’s centrist drift by the very constituency that had once been a Labour bastion.

Elsewhere, Frontpageophobia benefited the Tory party. Faiza Shaheen, for example, nearly unseated Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green, but her last-minute deselection from Labour, standing instead as an independent, split the vote, allowing Duncan Smith to hold on.

Labour’s electoral victory, then, was as fragile as it was resounding. It rested not on a wave of popular enthusiasm for Starmer’s platform but on frustration with an incompetent government, the vagaries of tactical voting and the fortuitous fragmentation of the right. Liberal Democrats and Green voters, in many constituencies, held their noses and voted Labour to prevent a Conservative win. But this kind of tactical alliance is tenuous, at best. One cannot rely on a campaign to ‘Get the Tories out’ when they have already been ousted. Without the vote-splitting caused by Reform UK or the collapse of the SNP, Labour’s path to a majority would have been far steeper.

Conclusion

Starmer, laughing jovially with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, is effectively cosying up to Italy’s equivalent of Farage. In doing so, he is contributing to the normalisation of the far-right in the UK. His Frontpageophobia—this ingrained fear of negative press—has shaped not only his policies but also cost his party dearly in unity, seats, and votes. He’s not the only person to blame for Labour’s disunity, but he is the only person with the ability to reunite the party. The pressing question now is whether Starmer recognises the toll this centrist strategy has taken on Labour, and whether he can shift away from placating the right, towards the bold, progressive leadership that many of his voters are still longing for.

By seemingly endorsing right-wing and far-right policies, driven by the constant need to placate a hostile media, Starmer is inadvertently nurturing a fertile environment for the radical right to thrive in the UK. Labour is supposed to be the party of change, yet sensible managerialism that mimics conservative politics is incompatible with this vision. If he fails to offer the UK a fresh and inspiring direction, he risks ceding that very ground to the forces he appears so eager to appease.

Episode Overview

In today's episode, we dissect the insidious idea that foreigners and minorities pose an inherent threat to society. This concept has permeated political discourse, influencing policies and public opinion in deeply troubling ways. We examine how this xenophobic rhetoric has been weaponized to create division, marginalize communities, and stoke fear within the population.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Prejudice as a Business Model: We delve into how politicians, lobbyists, and journalists exploit fear and prejudice to advance their careers and agendas, turning xenophobia into a profitable enterprise.

• The 'Othering Playbook': Exploring the historical use of the 'othering playbook' against various groups throughout different times, showing a recurring pattern of scapegoating and marginalization.

• Psychological Mechanisms and Cognitive Biases: Understanding the psychological underpinnings and cognitive biases that make the 'othering playbook' so effective in manipulating public opinion and fostering division.

• Mainstreaming of Far-Right Ideas: Analyzing the rise of far-right ideologies in mainstream politics, as evidenced by the successes of the BNP, UKIP, Reform Party, and Nigel Farage, and how their policies have been incorporated into the Conservative Party's platforms.

• Growth of the Great Replacement Theory in the UK: Investigating the spread of this conspiracy theory within British society and its impact on political discourse and societal attitudes.

Why It Matters

Understanding these dangerous ideas is crucial in addressing and combating the rise of far-right ideologies. By shedding light on the sources and motivations behind these beliefs, we can work towards a more inclusive and equitable society.

Listen Now

Tune in to the Ideas that Broke Britain Podcast to explore these pressing issues in depth. Don’t forget to read the full chapter that inspired this episode at Chapter 5: Aliens are the Enemy.

Join us as we challenge the narratives that divide us and strive to understand the ideas that have shaped contemporary Britain.

As we conclude our exploration of the ideas that have broken Britain, it becomes evident that these concepts have not merely existed in isolation but have coalesced into a new and dangerous pseudo-ideology. National Conservatism is a contemporary political movement that amalgamates traditional conservative thought with neoliberal economic policies, fervent nationalism, conspiratorial thinking, a propensity towards illiberal democracy, and a reactionary stance against progressive social movements. Figures such as Suella Braverman, Miriam Cates, Katherine Birbalsingh, Tucker Carlson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Douglas Murray, Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, and David Starkey are emblematic of this movement. Unlike traditional conservatism, which aims to preserve the status quo and existing institutions, National Conservatives assert they seek to bolster national sovereignty, uphold cultural and religious traditions, and foster social cohesion through the control of social institutions.

Our discussion began and ended with two uniquely British ideas: the notion that the Union is “precious” and that Britain is exceptional. These twin concepts have engendered an extraordinary sense of complacency in the UK, fostering a belief that things cannot possibly worsen, that the situation is never as dire as it seems, and that everything will be fine if only the 'right people' are in charge. This mindset conveniently ignores the growth of English nationalism and the increasing support for Irish reunification and Scottish independence.

English nationalism, once a fringe sentiment, has gained prominence by exploiting fears of immigration, EU influence, and economic decline. This nationalism is not just about identity but also about power and control within the UK, leading to a resentment of the devolution settlements in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Brexit vote epitomised this sentiment, as many English voters saw it as a way to reclaim sovereignty and reassert English dominance within the UK. And yet, the term ‘nationalist’ is rarely applied to the many English politicians who espouse such views.

Just as Britain's history is often filtered  to fit either liberal or conservative narratives of supremacy and exceptionalism, the present is perceived in a way that downplays the structural issues plaguing the UK. This is epitomised by the reluctance of many opponents of the National Conservative movement to label British far-right politicians as such.

Take, for example, Nigel Farage and his Reform Party, which has faced criticism for fielding candidates who have shared racist memes, conspiracy theories, and climate change denial content. Their offences are numerous, including praising Adolf Hitler and arguing that the UK should have accepted his offer of neutrality, spreading Covid vaccine conspiracy theories, claiming Jews use Muslim immigration to destroy the UK, supporting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and endorsing Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine as legitimate. An investigation even found that one in ten of Farage's candidates were "friends" with British fascist leader Gary Raikes, a former organiser for the British National Party.

Despite the extensive list of far-right policies and actions by the Reform Party, there remains a general unwillingness within UK politics and media to label the party as far-right. This stands in stark contrast to the relative readiness with which Farage's European allies are identified as far-right. This reluctance to call out far-right politics within the UK is a manifestation of British exceptionalism, reflecting a belief that Britain is immune to fascism and that Farage's growing popularity cannot possibly align with far-right causes because almost one in five Brits would never support such ideologies.

National Conservatism's rise is no accident; it has thrived in Britain due to the nation's deep-seated sense of preciousness, superiority, inherent goodness, and exceptionalism. These qualities have created a fertile ground for the movement, allowing it to take root and flourish amidst an environment that venerates tradition and resists critical self-examination. The growth of National Conservatism is the product of a meticulously orchestrated conservative ecosystem, comprised of neoliberal and Cultural Marxist think tanks, billionaire-owned media outlets, and political figures who draw upon cognitive biases and age-old beliefs to shape public opinion. Neoliberal think tanks, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, propagate free-market ideologies under the guise of common sense. Simultaneously, think tanks like Policy Exchange and the Turning Point UK push the Cultural Marxism narrative, framing progressive movements as threats to British values. These organisations are heavily funded by billionaires whose interests align with maintaining and exacerbating socio-economic inequalities.

The billionaire-owned media, notably The Times, The Telegraph, The Express, and The Daily Mail, play a pivotal role in propagating National Conservatism. They skilfully exploit cognitive biases—confirmation bias, in-group favouritism, out-group derogation, victim-blaming, status quo bias, and system justification—to reinforce existing prejudices and cultivate new fears. This manipulation primes the British public to embrace more extreme conservative ideologies. For example, the belief in a just world, where individuals get what they deserve, rationalises inequality and stifles empathy for the disadvantaged. Similarly, the entrenched notion that ‘some people are better than others’ sustains a societal tolerance for inequality. Institutions like the aristocracy, elite private schools and the House of Lords, vestiges of feudal privilege, are often perceived as quaint traditions rather than as affronts to equality and democratic principles. Additionally, the First Past the Post electoral system, which perpetuates two-party dominance and marginalizes smaller voices, is seen as a quirky feature of British democracy rather than a serious democratic flaw.

Through strategic framing, selective reporting, platforming think tanks, and sensationalism, these media outlets effectively condition the public to accept increasingly extreme conservative ideologies, embedding them deeply within the societal fabric.

Britain's class-based structure makes it particularly susceptible to New Conservatism. The dominance of privately schooled individuals in media and politics creates a feedback loop where conservative ideas are both generated and amplified within a narrow elite circle. This group, steeped in traditions of hierarchy and privilege, becomes the primary vector through which these ideologies are injected into the mainstream. While these people may not be as wealthy as the billionaire media barons, party patrons and think-tank funders, they often idolise the mega-wealthy. The conversion of a critical mass of the privately schooled elite was a pivotal step in the spread of New Conservatism. This elite class, often shielded from the realities of socioeconomic inequality, finds neoliberal and hierarchical ideas natural and justifiable. As these individuals occupy influential positions in media, politics, and business, their acceptance and promotion of conservative ideas ripple through society, shaping public discourse and policy.

The persistence of New Conservatism is a testament to the power of entrenched ideas and the structures that support them. To counter this movement, it is essential to challenge the myths that sustain it. This means promoting a more inclusive and accurate understanding of British history and identity, advocating for democratic reforms, and fostering a culture that values transparency, equality and empathy over hierarchy, authority and privilege.

The safety and prosperity of the UK and its members depend on recognising and addressing the fractures caused by the 7 dangerous Ideas of New Conservatism. By confronting these issues head-on, Britain can move towards a more equitable and cohesive future, where the values of justice, solidarity and democracy are not just rhetorical ideals but lived realities.