Where will the British New Right come from?

mapping out the good, the bad and the ugly

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. […] Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. […] A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves.” -Timothy Snyder, Notes on Tyranny

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”- George Orwell, 1984

“there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.'“ -Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

"He that wishes to see his country robbed of its rights can not be a patriot." -Samuel Johnson

Elon Musk's Twitter takeover in October 2022 dramatically accelerated Westminster’s Yankee influence. The old Westminster adage, "don’t confuse Twitter with the country," still holds- in 2024, only about 10% of the UK population was on Twitter (compared to more than half on Facebook and Instagram), but that 10% includes our political catalysts.

Musk sodomised X’s algorithm and subsidised the most prolific Genetically Mortified engagement farmers and exposed us to an avalanche of race war porn, or just porn. Rupert Lowe is making around £950 per hour on Twitter, with some estimates at £13K monthly. The normies have abandoned ship, leaving Westminster hacks responsible for the headlines that keep our ministers up at night to stew in a massively skewed Musk-pilled information environment. Musk’s re-heating of the grooming gangs scandal led to a bunch of very online boys getting a glowing Sunday Times write-up. That is power.

I have identified nine categories of potential insurgent foot soldiers, stranding army troopers, quiet backers and complicit bystanders of the British variety of Trumpism or the new European ethnonationalism.

Nigel Farage is currently at the helm, but that may change. Presuming Kemi Badenoch is removed before the next elections, Robert Jenrick is still in the game. Another leader for either party may yet emerge.

The obvious suspects:

1. Net-zero migration crusaders

   Those convinced immigration is behind most UK issues- housing crises, inflation, and collapsing public services - form the Reform Party’s core voting base. New campaigning groups like Migration Watch, which is not affiliated with any party, have formed to highlight this argument. This category includes remigration supporters who believe there should be mass deportations of not just illegal immigrants but also legal immigrants and the children and grandchildren of legal immigrants. This is a pain point for Farage, who knows that if more moderate potential voters realise Reform is made up of people who support mass deportations of British citizens to countries they haven’t been in for decades and their children who perhaps have never lived there at all, then he will not be able to keep up the perception of respectability that has allowed him to maintain his personal polling so far.

2. Race-war hooligans

   Those behind violence during the summer riots, mosque protests, and threats against asylum seekers, led by far-right ethnonationalists such as Steve Laws, the ‘migrant hunter’ from the Homeland party and Musk’s favourite fugitive far-right refugee Tommy Robinson. Race supremacists who want civil war.

3. Race scientists

   A fringe intellectual group fixated on dubious racial IQ theories. There have been efforts to rehabilitate them over the years, which mostly end with people getting fired and organisations losing funding (cancel culture still protecting us from its grave). People say they are hateful, but I don’t think they possess or express feelings; the ones I know are non-sinister neurodivergent, akshually nerd types, but in their mission to ‘say the quiet part loud’ are giving the race war hooligans an academic footing. As Freddie Deboer has said, they are right that human cognitive abilities are not equally distributed across people. Yet, they cannot extend that theory to themselves and see the cognitive and emotional deficits that lead them to want to extend this theory on race and ethnicity - when most of us are a mix of many - on the planet that gave us slavery, the caste system and the Holocaust. What started as anti-DEI frustration has backfired into an obsession fuelling the race war. This is why we can’t have nice things like free speech. Thanks for nothing, nerds.

4. Zoomer edge-lords

   Young men with no political backbone who, in another era, would be anarcho-communists but in the current climate, have turned to the nihilist anti-establishment movement that garners the most energy. The young nazi I have been talking to is a good example; despite him being American, there are identical British cases. At the Sovereign House Arc after-party, D’Arc, I met a couple of grinning Oxford uni boys from the Homeland party. They are the types who read J’Accuse and Pimlico journal and share acerbic Yookay aesthetics memes behind anon accounts. Some are so American-brained they have Milady avatars for their profile pictures. Where the American schizo-posting zoomer lusts after Dasha from Red Scare and idolises Bronze Aged Pervert, his English cousin simps over peatarded Veronica and looks up to Raw Egg Nationalist (the two arrived together at the aforementioned D’Arc party).

   You have unknown words in this paragraph? Don’t google, don’t ask Deepseek. The grass is greener right beneath your feet.

   

5. Sensitive Young Men- ‘Yookay’ Edition

   Online edge-lords who read. Not just on screens, like books and stuff. They have hard copies of the Spectator in their dilapidated rented Fulham flats. They may write for the Critic under a pseudonym and text like P.G. Woodhouse. Striving middle-classers who went to an MPS or a grammar school. They did not go to Eton or Harrow; they resent boomers and chicken shops on the high street. Their parents can’t buy them a flat. Whereas the American Sensitive Young Man crawling to Trumpism unironically wears tailored three-piece suits and pocket squares despite growing up wearing flip flops to his Political Theory 101 lectures, our Anglo boys slip into tweed and corduroy like it’s their birthright to wear socks that don’t match. Where the online edge-lords find a kindred spirit for their hatred for everyone through reading the back pages of the last psychiatrist, the Sensitive Young Man identifies with the spiritual despair of Larkin. Where the online grifters look for fame, they recoil from it. They look down with contempt at people who think Farage is the Messiah who will save us.

   The dark horses:

6. Fair-weather Tory establishment

   The Chamberlains of their generation. Tory insiders, like Tim Montgomery, who founded ConservativeHome and recently defected to Reform. Arguably, he is rethinking his choice now that Reform has shown its support for Trump and tolerance of Putin. I know of several Tory heavyweights, former Cabinet ministers and looming figures who have quietly voted for Reform. Former SpAds, whose career capital was in freefall after a solid decade of being hot commodities in the public affairs industry, who would be ready to staff Farage's Number 10. I find this category to be in the top three most disappointing because my small ‘c’ sensibilities lead me to believe that conservatives should stand for conserving or they stand for nothing.

7. Free Market Fundamentalists

   Adam Smith, the founder of free market liberalism, would arguably support free labour movement. Yet the London Tufton street Institute, which continues his legacy, has been suspiciously focused on anti-immigration work recently. One of its young director recruits has achieved name recognition by posting pseudo-intellectual race war slop threads with the telltale signs of a finely tuned ChatGTP pro touch. In comparison, the IEA (Institute for Economic Affairs) has remained faithful to its free market ideals, with its talking heads defending people employing who they want. Kristian Niemietz, its Editorial Director, joined Aaron Bastani on Novara media and explained he couldn’t support Trumpism because he is protectionist and pro-tariffs, but Farage is a Thatcherite, so if he sticks to that, he wouldn’t mind him. The same goes for other libertarian commentators.

8. Techno-optimists and pro-growthers

   Disruption hopefuls linked indirectly to Dominic Cummings, looking for Blob-icide. Poor man’s Peter Thiels. I see myself as part of this broader ecosystem, but I don’t empathise with the lack of political instinct. I am contemptuous of policy nerds who think our political system and government machine are computers that can be fixed by better back-end coding. Like the race science nerds, they are naively stirring base human instincts, which they are not equipped to tame once unleashed (see race warrior hooligans above), hence why I am keeping these under close observation. It’s right that Labour BNPs ( Big Name in the Party - I just came up with this acronym) and SpAds court and flatter them. They are impatient and highly motivated, and idle hands are the devil's workshop. Also, the Labour establishment showing them appreciation when they produce good ideas will challenge the party’s tendency to be insular and impose purity tests. They are found in TxP and Future House events; maybe they did a Civic Futures fellowship, or maybe, like yours truly, they got an Emergent Ventures grant. They read Work in Progress, Palladium Magazine and the free posts on Bismarck analysis and subscribed to Astral Codex ten before Sam Bankman-Freed made EAs a household brand.

9. Communitarians and Blue Labour traitors (ahem, Maurice Glasman):

   It’s those closest to you who hurt you most- because with them, you never thought to raise your shield.

   Farage is a Thatcherite, and Jenrick is a Tory, so it would be a big betrayal if people affiliated with the Labour party fall behind a coalition led by either, but the rhetoric from some self-proclaimed blue Labour commentators in the safety of GBnews studios (nowhere is safe when I am in the green room, comrades) is indulgent of the net zero immigration zealots above. In this category, I include communitarians radicalised into nativism by Mary Harrington’s and Louise Perry’s content. I was once at a GBnews party, and I chatted with a Labour commentator who did not know of me. I asked them how they were finding GBnews, and they went into sycophantic praise of the channel and how brilliant they were on some issues, like immigration. GBnews coverage of immigration is many things: obsessive, scaremongering, hysterical, and counterproductive. For the love of all that is good and holy, brilliant is not a word I would use when its star presenter asked me last week why Keir Starmer cares so much about Putin when immigrants are invading our island. They make up over 50% of negative coverage of Muslims in the UK. It was wrong of the left to see racism everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anywhere.

Our biggest weakness is that Brits are poor, which makes us corruptible. Especially those in politics and media, unless they come from generational wealth, they have to twerk for Musk like a bear at a gypsy wedding. They won’t speak against extremism if it harms their bottom line.

Our economic impoverishment has intensified our spiritual poverty. Our political discourse has withered, and our media landscape is decimated. Senior producers are becoming baristas; seasoned investigative journalists pivot to corporate comms, and former ministers cash in on corporate speaking circuits. Like dogs returning to their vomit, idealistic political advisers become dead-eyed consultants at the same firms they once swore were the root of all evil.

This has left swathes of political space to be occupied by chancers. I should be happy as it is now the right that is self-destructing, but I am not. How wise was it for the CIA to orchestrate authoritarian regimes or Netanyahu to prop up Hamas? I’d rather fight establishment tories than have to pretend racist thugs deserve political space.

While the groups above have different interests and values, like the broad MAGA tent on display at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship last month, they are waltzing together towards a singular polity.

The opportunistic young pull the wool over the impotent old, and those LARPing civility dog whistle to their feral tribesmen.

Before you know it, more people will find themselves in race war struggle sessions, like the ones I subject myself to on the GBnews couch, where I am regularly being lectured about how the most oppressed group are straight white men.

Dominic Cummings has been urging Tory voters toward Reform, echoing the Curtis Yarvin/Peter Thiel accelerationist theory: Britain's establishment is so rotten that only radical destruction can trigger a meaningful reset.

Personally, the only Orwellian world I am interested in is the one committed to the gentleness of the English civilisation.