When one thinks of the manosphere – an array of male supremacist subcultures that have gained prominence in recent years – one typically imagines certain things: meat-headed internet influencers selling overpriced self-improvement courses and get-rich-quick schemes; foam-flecked rants about ‘hypergamy’ (marrying up) and the oppression of men under the jackboot of feminism; glistening, preening men with hypertrophied physiques puffed up for the camera, who think that women, in some cosmic sense, are the problem.

And you wouldn’t be far wrong. The various subcultures that make up the manosphere – pickup artists, incels (involuntary celibates), male separatists – spend much of their time thinking about women. They plot, scheme and fantasise about bringing women down a notch and reasserting the authority of their forefathers.

It is hardly a new phenomenon, even if the delivery system by which the message is pushed – the algorithm – still feels relatively novel. A sizeable minority of men have always hated women. Seen in this context, the manosphere is merely the latest manifestation of the will to assert male dominance. It is thanks to the internet that the message appears to have so many contemporaneous exponents.

If the internet has taught us anything, it is that conspiracy theories are profitable. Seed fear in your audience and you may reap the rewards. Fear drives clicks and clicks drive profit. Fear also creates a degree of paranoia – a refrigerator hum of loathing and anxiety directed at women. The message is repeated ad nauseam: women won’t love you, men won’t respect you – now buy my course and I will be your saviour and guide. We call them influencers when really they are salesmen: entrepreneurs whose ostentatious digital avatars are designed to make those on the other side of the screen feel small by comparison.

Much of this industry is best understood not as politics but as commerce. The customer is not buying ideology so much as salvation: from humiliation, rejection, drift, the sense of not measuring up in some way. Masculinity entrepreneurs monetise private pain by translating it into public blame. The genius of the business model lies in telling unhappy men that their misery is not only contingent or personal, but civilisational. Low self-esteem becomes evidence of social collapse; romantic disappointment proof of gynocracy (the rule of women).

Conspiracy theories also beget conspiracy theories. You start with one and they proliferate like flies on carrion. There are certain contradictions that can be resolved only with additional intrigues. It is tempting to point out the contradictions in all this but this is beside the point. Conspiracy theories are emotional systems designed to convert confusion into certainty. Women can be weak and omnipotent in the same breath because what matters is not coherence but resentment. The same mind that believes feminism has infantilised society can also believe feminists secretly rule it.

According to the manosphere, women run the world. Yet this half of the species is also described as hysterical, hypocritical, hypergamous, emotionally incontinent, intellectually deficient and collectively duplicitous. The people supposedly least suited to anything beyond cooking and cleaning are apparently running the show. How, the men of the manosphere invariably ask, did we end up here?

The answer, more often than not, is that women are not imagined as acting alone. In the conspiratorial imagination, female autonomy cannot simply emerge from social change, economic independence or shifting norms. It must have been engineered. And once a movement begins searching for hidden engineers – those who corrupt tradition, weaken men, control media, finance institutions and dissolve natural hierarchies – it is only a short walk into older and darker territory. The manosphere frequently rediscovers, in updated slang and meme form, the classic architecture of antisemitism. Women become marionettes, controlled by dark forces pulling the strings behind the scenes. Jews provide an answer to the question: who designed this system? The manosphere sells wounded men a fantasy of restored power while antisemitism supplies the villain who stole it.

The internet has accelerated this process by rewarding escalation. Moderation rarely goes viral. Nobody builds a parasocial empire by advising viewers to improve their sleep hygiene and develop realistic expectations. Attention goes instead to those willing to name enemies, promise forbidden truths and speak in the cadences of revelation. Every platform nudges creators toward the dark side. Yesterday’s dating guru becomes today’s race scientist; today’s anti-feminist becomes tomorrow’s Holocaust ‘sceptic.’

This drift is discernible across influencer culture. In August 2024, Andrew Tate – the influencer who faces trafficking charges in Romania – told his livestream audience that ‘they [Israel] control the Matrix. They control narratives.’ Following his arrest later that month, Tate also retweeted a post by the American white supremacist Nick Fuentes. ‘Just 2 days after Andrew Tate said that “the Matrix” is really just the Jewish mafia – his house was raided and he was arrested again,’ Fuentes wrote in the tweet promoted by Tate. Tate has also encouraged followers to question whether ‘they’ lied about the Second World War and whether the Nazis were really the ‘bad guys.’

The longer a person spends in the manosphere, the more likely they are to veer into adjacent conspiracies. Dan Bilzerian, the Instagram playboy whose ostentatious lifestyle made him a hero to adolescent males during the 2010s, has recently taken to denying the Holocaust. ‘6 million Jews did not die during WW2, they lied to you,’ he wrote on X in January 2025. ‘Stop calling “them” Globalists, Elitists, Frankists, Sabbateanists, Communists, Deep State, Zionists, Oligarchists, Rothschild Bankers JUST SAY JEWS…’, tweeted Myron Gaines, co-host of the popular Fresh&Fit podcast, in August 2024.

The podcast circuit is another reliable conduit. It is an autodidactic terrain where credulous hosts give guests carte blanche to monologue their half knowledge and wrong knowledge. Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the world with an audience exceeding 11 million listeners per episode, recently hosted Ian Carroll, a known conspiracy theorist and Holocaust revisionist, who claimed in 2024 that ‘Israel did 9/11.’ Rogan’s podcast is particularly influential among young men. In March last year, the comedian Theo Von – another major player in the male-dominated podcast world – invited on the conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, who has promoted the blood libel and described the Bolsheviks as part of a ‘Jewish cabal.’ Others in the masculinity scene talk of being ‘Jewpilled.’

I saw the same logic in person in 2022, when I attended a manosphere conference in Orlando, Florida while researching a book on the subject. All the usual grievances were on display that weekend. There was a ‘war on masculinity’; feminism had turned America into a ‘shithole’; the Biden administration wanted to trans your kids. Everything was framed in an apocalyptic us-versus-them mentality.

What struck me most was how theatrical much of it felt. The swagger, the jargon, the bone-crunching handshakes and the borrowed certainty: masculinity not as a settled condition but as a costume that required constant adjustment under the stage lights. Men secure in themselves rarely need to announce it at volume. Yet insecurity is fertile ground for movements that promise initiation, brotherhood and enemies to blame.

The conference was more or less what I expected. Yet there was an additional language being spoken too – a code, or dog whistle, intended only for the already initiated. There was much talk of ‘globalists’, ‘cultural Marxists’, ‘bankers,’ and ‘cosmopolitans.’ One speaker warned of a ‘globalist genocide.’ Another spoke of a ‘game’ being played in the shadows. ‘You can call them globalist interests, you can call them bankers, you can call them whatever,’ he said ominously. ‘These people control things behind the scenes.’ When I later looked him up online, I found him posting memes that cast doubt on the Holocaust. One of these described ‘all this woke stuff’ as ‘coming from the Jews.’

Those present were passing through a gateway into older obsessions. One masculinity guru was on stage doing the usual macho-man routine when he suddenly started talking about ‘the Js’ acting ‘behind the scenes.’ He had sprinkled it into the speech like herbs on a pizza. During a drinks break, I heard two other speakers discussing the challenges facing men. ‘What about the Jews?’ asked one. ‘I don’t know about that,’ replied the other, noncommittally.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised. There has long been an overlap between masculinist grievance and the far right. Even where explicit antisemitism is absent the architecture often looks familiar: the world is rigged; weak men obey; hidden powers manipulate society; women are rewards or status objects; force and domination are required to restore order.

None of this is historically new. Keynes once observed that practical men were usually slaves of some defunct economist. Today’s conspiracy theorists are no less indebted to the codswallop of the past. Do not let the medium distract from the message: the new men of the manosphere are not new at all. They are repackaging older hatreds for the digital age.

It is easy to mistake online aesthetics for intellectual novelty. A meme can make an old prejudice feel fresh. But little of substance here was invented on YouTube, Telegram or X. The platforms have changed the speed of transmission rather than the underlying content.

In his 1996 cultural history of masculinity and nationalism, The Image of Man, George L. Mosse argued that fascism used manliness both as an ideal and as a practical tool to strengthen its political order. To do so, it required outsiders – whether Jews or homosexuals – against whom virility could be defined. In fascist discourse, the Jew was, as Mosse wrote, ‘at best half a man.’ Across the European far right, Jews were frequently accused of violating masculine norms. Walter Rathenau, Germany’s wartime economic planner, and Léon Blum, prime minister of France’s Popular Front, were both caricatured by nationalists as effeminate homosexuals bent on subjugating their nations. A 1936 cartoon in Le Charivari depicted Blum in female form.

The Italian fascist Julius Evola – whose influence is still apparent today in circles that fetishise ‘warrior masculinity’ – believed healthy societies were masculine whereas ‘decadent’ societies were feminine. His obsession with virility also fed his hostility to Jewish culture, which he regarded as overrefined and effeminate.

Moreover, the structure of manosphere misogyny is analogous to antisemitism. Women, like Jews in the conspiratorial imagination, are portrayed through contradiction: simultaneously inferior and superior; weak yet all-powerful; irrational yet cunning; contemptible yet somehow dominant.

Movements organised around perceived weakness are forever searching for symbols of strength. They admire hardness: the so-called military virtues, physical force, punitive borders, enemies dealt with summarily. This helps explain why some figures in the masculinist world are drawn to states or leaders they otherwise know little about, such as Vladimir Putin. Such admiration is often less geopolitical than psychological.

The state of Israel occupies a similarly contradictory place in the modern masculinist ecosystem. Some admire it as a militarised nation-state: border-conscious, unapologetic, willing to use force. Israel becomes, in this reading, a fantasy of masculine sovereignty in a weak and decadent age. Others depict it as the command centre of global manipulation, controlling American politics, media and finance. Many manage to hold both positions at once: praising Israeli hardness while recycling classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence. Coherence is beside the point.

The manosphere presents itself as a new movement born of dating apps, declining birth rates and algorithmic discontent. In truth, its emotional grammar is much older. Men who feel dispossessed are told they have been robbed; women are cast as collaborators; Jews as the hidden engineers. The technology may be modern but the paranoia is of an older, more noxious, vintage.

You can also buy my book Lost Boys, which is now out in paperback, here.

King Charles’s state visit to the United States this week has revived familiar talk of the “special relationship” and the soft-power benefits Britain supposedly derives from royal pageantry. These discussions are usually accompanied by boasts that Britain “punches above its weight” thanks to traditions tied, not too subtly, to hereditary monarchy.

It is one of those things readily assumed—largely because soft power and influence are extraordinarily difficult to measure. And so what we get instead is an endless parade of royal correspondents talking up the supposedly magical effects of pomp and ceremony on the King’s American hosts. “Donald Trump loves monarchy,” I have heard more than one excited BBC journalist tell viewers.

Naturally he does—and he is not alone. A section of the American public retains a fascination with all things royal and aristocratic. The “special relationship” is based, at least in part, on an idea of Britain that ceased to exist perhaps a century ago. A country of bowler hats, delicate manners, royal garden parties and Winston Churchill (considering the current US administration’s reluctance to help Ukraine, even Churchill has seemingly been reduced to a serviceable caricature).

Nostalgia weighs particularly heavy on British politics at the present time. If the old are acting as a fetter on the young, it is not only for material reasons. They also seem to want to preserve in aeternum an idea of Britain—i.e. the Britain they grew up in. Hence the endless jeremiads one sees on social media (Facebook in particular) about the “good old days”.

Typically these memes of national decline are suffused with nostalgia for an imaginary country of the past. The “good old days” of milk floats, privet hedges, clipped lawns, bad food, cold showers, copper boilers, chip butties, the cane. “WHO REMEMBERS THE SUNDAY NIGHT TIN BATH BY THE FIRE?” The themes are nearly always the same. Humiliation was character building, violence was an acceptable form of moral instruction and emotional repression was a part of growing up. Underlying it all is contempt for contemporary “softness” and a thinly disguised regret over the disappearance of traditional hierarchies. Much of it is now, ironically, churned out by A.I.

Nostalgia is, among other things, a demand that other people live inside your memories. It requires that the young exist in a state of suspended animation. In contemporary Britain, the young are expected to inhabit the world of the old—even if, ironically, the latter are increasingly part of a generation (the sixties cohort) who once sought to overturn every last vestige of their parents’ authority. Crucially, it is a generation that assumed it would never grow old and therefore never relinquish cultural primacy. Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I suspect it is not altogether far from the truth.

The preponderance of cloying, often sub-literate nostalgia here at home arguably makes it easier to identify another closely related variant emanating from the United States. According to the American president and his supporters, Britain is “unrecognisable” and experiencing “civilisational erasure”. Any praise they do have for Europe is couched in the language of loss and wistfulness. In April American Vice President JD Vance said he “loves Europe”—albeit not the Europe that Europeans actually inhabit so much as a “European civilisation” he wants us to “preserve” in aspic.

Today, once again, we hear another chorus of uplift about the King’s “charm offensive” on his state visit to the US. Presumably the thinking goes that, by playing up to the stereotypes that Trump has about Britain, he will ensure the survival of the “special relationship”. It is the politics of good feeling: practical outcomes dissolved into vibes.

Yet what does all of this pandering add up to in practice? Very little, except to our home grown reactionaries who also long to resurrect a vanished world. Trump’s previous state visit to the UK last year was accompanied by an enormous amount of pageantry—rides in horse-drawn carriages, lavish banquets beneath sparkling chandeliers and the carefully choreographed rituals of royal deference. Yet it produced no discernible benefit to the British people. Shortly after returning to the US, Trump berated the prime minister, threatened to invade Greenland and ridiculed British soldiers who had died in American wars. So much for soft power!

The thing about idealisation is that those on the receiving end are often denied the right to change. Donald Trump, JD Vance and Co have an idea of Europe largely uncoloured by any interest in the people who live there, who are expected to play their allotted role in the neo-pessimist worldview. Indeed, Europe as it actually exists provokes little short of revulsion on the radical right.

That British monarchists should wish to exaggerate the influence of the Crown is hardly surprising. Yet no country can live indefinitely on borrowed grandeur. The King will buttress Trump’s ego and he will go on being Trump—someone for whom “history” is little more than a succession of present moments.

If it is wrong for the old to act as fetters on the young, surely it is no less wrong for a former imperial power to be pushed around indefinitely by its successor. You might say we have become victims of our own heritage industry.

I will be talking about my latest book Lost Boys at Backstory bookshop on 5 May with the novelist Nicolas Padamsee (author of the brilliant book London is Mine). If you are interested in coming along, tickets can be purchased here.

I spent last week in Havana. I’ve written a couple of pieces on what I saw—snippets of conversations, and (hopefully) some details that rarely make it into conventional articles. You can read my previous two entries here and here.

In this piece I’ll try to bring some of it all together. This piece is free to read, but some of my dispatches are only available to paid subscribers. If you’d like to support my work, you can upgrade here.

The city of Havana stinks. Melting polyethylene. Smouldering cardboard. Blackened beer cans bobbing on a sea of tiered ruffles of ash and cinders. Cubans are well-versed in the art of Resolver—getting by, making do, solving problems creatively in conditions of scarcity. One of the most important tenets of this philosophy today is the ability to hold one’s breath—to retain a clean pocket of air in the lungs as one passes a heap of burning trash.

Last month President Miguel Díaz-Canel told a visiting group of foreign supporters that Cubans were a people “who prefer to die standing than living on their knees.” This is less heroic than it sounds. In recent weeks, rubbish has piled up in parts of Havana that the authorities can no longer reliably service. If Habaneros are on their knees, one reason is to escape the rancid smell of the garbage the state has decided to burn instead of collect.

Of course, the visiting delegation saw little of this reality. The smell does not reach the upper floors of the luxury hotels where Jeremy Corbyn, Hasan Piker and Pablo Iglesias were holed up during their short trip to the island. Nor, judging by the Potemkin photos they posted to social media, did their government guides show them around those parts of town. That would have broken the spell. It’s an a priori requirement to ignore such things. “A revolution is not a bed of roses,” as Fidel Castro once proclaimed. But it can look remarkably comfortable from a kip of Egyptian cotton with air conditioning, en suite and a panoramic view of Havana.

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Nobody in their right mind wants to be around extreme poverty. And least of all as an interloper from the other side. The pleading faces stripped of dignity. The sunken eyes that bore into you. The men and women lingering in the dark behind beaten doors. The broken bodies—bodies which, like the country’s electrical grid, are slowly shutting down. The distance between you is too great. You may as well be a visitor from outer space. You are seen as an instrument, a means to an end—or worse, an almsgiver. That was what Castro created: a leviathan that decides who eats and who doesn’t, who is sent to labour in the fields, who gets a car and who has to make do with a push bike, who sinks and who swims. Castro is dead and the state which sprang up in his monomaniacal image is on its last legs. Outsiders are all that’s left—interlopers who arrive in button-down shirts and pistachio shorts. Can I spare 500 Cuban Pesos? Sure I can—take it. But then the next person wants another handout. And the next, and so on.

The ruling class promised an omelette. They broke a lot of eggs, spilled much of the yolk, yet still their half-starved subjects wait for dinner to be served. Meanwhile the cooks have locked themselves in the kitchen—octogenarians, nonagenarians, ghosts of the past. In the end, bolting the door shut is the only way to save themselves: to avoid being held accountable for someone else’s blood, someone else’s sacrifice.

New luxury hotels are constantly going up in Havana. Most of them lie empty, their corridors silent. Government spending on the vaunted healthcare system is just 2 per cent while spending on tourism (controlled by the military conglomerate GAESA) is more than 30 per cent. Most visitors have now deserted the island. The shops in Havana Vieja (Old Havana), which once did a brisk business selling olive green caps and Che Guevara trinkets to the nostalgists—Cuba’s very own heritage industry—cut a mournful figure. The foreign visitors who once made their unspoken pact with Marxism-Leninism are gone for the most part (a few grizzled sex tourists still lurk around San Rafael Boulevard looking to score a young Cubanita).

Why build more of them then?

It’s worth considering the enormous transfer of assets that took place when the Soviet Union collapsed. Those who controlled the factories, the raw materials, the weapons controlled the future. Political commissars became business executives. The nomenklatura reinvented themselves as businessmen, entrepreneurs and, in some cases, gangsters. Once the signal had been given from above, the pretence that such property belonged to the people could finally be dropped. As the architect of Russian “shock therapy” Yegor Gaidar would later admit, the nomenklatura acted to “change the facade of the decrepit system, to legalise property relations that had formed spontaneously within the system and to build (or to bring to the surface) out of the shadows the edifice of nomenklatura state capitalism.” “It followed the scent of property as a predator pursues its prey.”

Despite the bombastic and fiery rhetoric, the Cuban elite is preparing for every eventuality. They have long allowed themselves to enter into capitalist relations with European hotel chains, even while the population was being encouraged to die for their ideals. Newer and emptier hotels may thus be seen as a land grab: a way for the military to hedge their bets by locking down the country’s prime real estate ahead of all eventualities.

Gorbachev has been a cautionary tale for Leninists ever since he inadvertently collapsed the system they revered. Castro despised him. Moscow had once paid more than 11 times the world price for Cuban sugar; by 1989 that had fallen to “just” three times the world price. In the summer of that year, shortly after Gorbachev’s visit to the island, Cuba executed one of its leading generals, Arnaldo Ochoa, following a summary trial. The popular former head of the Cuban army in Angola, Ochoa was accused of being involved in drug trafficking. According to well-informed accounts, he probably was (with the approval of the Cuban leadership). But many suspected he was liquidated due to his popularity and desire to bring Gorbachev-style reforms to Cuba. If Fidel said you were guilty then you were guilty, whether or not you had committed the specific acts. The proceedings, which were televised, had the character of a show trial from Stalin-era Russia. Shortly prior to his execution by firing squad, Ochoa declared to the court that “If I receive this sentence, which might be execution… my last thought will be of Fidel, for the great revolution he has given our people.”

The spectacle was intended as a warning to others in the military—many of whom had studied and trained in the Soviet Union—that the Russian spring would not be coming to Cuba: a pretext for blowing a man’s brains out.

While Gorbachev liberalised, Castro centralised. Many Soviet publications were subsequently banned in Cuba. The parting of ways found expression in the “Rectification of Errors” campaign adopted in 1986, whereby Cuba eliminated the private farmers’ markets that since 1968 had allowed producers to sell their surplus at market prices. Everything would henceforth have to go through the state. The Cuban elite was unwilling to relinquish control of the island’s economy and—by extension—its political levers. Notably, the announcement of the rectification campaign came shortly after a state visit by Castro to North Korea, courtesy of the country’s “Eternal Leader” Kim Il Sung, during which he was supposedly impressed by the totalitarian regime’s state-run work facilities. Work in Cuba would henceforth become a “patriotic duty”—or as the slogans above the entrances to the labour camps for homosexuals set up in the 1960s had once told inmates, “work will make you men.”

Should a conflagration with the United States occur, the Cuban government will invariably attempt to rally the population behind hot words and theatrical gestures. Sovereignty. Self-determination. Revolution. Resistance. Patria o Muerte! (homeland or death)—all of it subordinated to a familiar message: don’t think for yourself, simply accept the authority of others. The audience must be kept away from the stage.

But what sovereignty do the Cuban people presently enjoy? We can agree that the United States has no right to meddle in Cuba’s internal affairs. But do the Cuban people have that right, or is it the preserve of an ageing politburo that no longer even pretends to know how to solve Cuba’s myriad problems? Regardless of one’s views on the historical neighbour to the north, this seems to me the elementary point. So many years of sacrifice—and for what? To step over garbage and swerve buildings that might collapse on you? It was the Romanian writer Panait Istrati who came up with the best riposte to Castroism and its predecessors: “All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?” The Cuban people have had enough of omelette makers.

For Cubans, the god that failed has become a nightmare from which they fear they will never wake. It is somebody else’s dream: a gerontocracy of military officers and western leftists trapped in a time capsule of their own manufacture. The dream of those who sleep in air-conditioned rooms under white cotton sheets. Dreams come to an end, but so must nightmares.

During my last day in Havana I spoke to a sixty-something road sweeper resting on a wooden stool under a palm tree, its branches brushing his face like slim green swords. He offered me a cigarette and ran through a familiar list of complaints as we smoked thin, filterless cigarettes. He had no soap at home. A pound of rice cost 300 pesos on the black market. We did the usual tentative dance, trying to bridge our separate realities: the Cuba he inhabited and the one I had briefly entered.

What about the blockade, I asked.
“We Cubans live under a double blockade,” he said. “The one in the north and the one imposed by the government here.”

Cuba really did stand for something, the street sweeper added with a wry smile. It stood for not paying people. When I asked what he wanted for his country, he lowered his voice. “Patria y vida,” he said, echoing the forbidden slogan of the 2021 protesters—homeland and life.

You can also buy my book Lost Boys here.

This week and next I’ll be sending short dispatches from Havana—notes on what I’m seeing, snippets of conversations and (hopefully) some interesting details and asides that rarely make it into conventional articles.

If you’d like to receive those dispatches while I’m in Cuba, you can upgrade here.

This week the Cuban government released two new monetary denominations—2,000 and 5,000 peso bank notes. It’s a measure presumably introduced to prevent Cubans from turning up to stores with wheelbarrows full of cash, which is where things are currently heading. When I was here in the 2010s, one dollar would get you around 24 Cuban pesos. This week the rate reached a record high of 524 pesos to the dollar.

A few days ago a Cuban friend, as we walked around the city, would stop me whenever we reached the window of one of the big department stores. He would point incredulously at some of the things on the other side of the glass. He works as a bartender and earns about 200 Cuban pesos (CUP) a night (less than 50 cents). If he wants to buy, say, a pound of rice from the numerous well-stocked markets, that will cost him nearly a day-and-a-half’s salary (between 250 and 350 CUP per pound).

In the past, apologists for the Cuban government would point to the monthly ration book (the Libreta) whereby Cubans received a basic food basket. But since Raul Castro succeeded Fidel in 2008 the ration book has been gradually reduced. Today it supplies, on average, only enough for the average Cuban to subsist on for at most about two weeks, if scrimping. Certain everyday items, such as toothpaste and shampoo, have been removed from the ration book altogether. Today, because of rampant inflation, a tube of toothpaste can cost as much as 600 Cuban pesos—15 per cent of the average monthly salary. To put that in a UK context, that’s the equivalent of someone on an average salary having to spend £315 on a single tube of toothpaste.

Annual inflation at the end of last year was 14 per cent. It peaked at 77 per cent in 2021. Meanwhile, gross domestic product has declined by 15 per cent since 2020. The social contract, which generated a degree of mass support for the revolutionary government in the 1960 and 1970s, has disintegrated. “Hunger, filth, and need,” is the reality for many people on the island today, as one Cuban woman summarised it in a recent video shared on Cubanet. One 60-year-old Cuban I spoke to has to work two jobs—one as a tour guide and another as a teacher—in order to take home 9,000 Cuban pesos a month—enough, he told me, to eat a single meal a day.

There’s no guarantee you will have access to your money. Many ATMs in Havana don’t work, and those that do often run out of cash extremely quickly. Have you ever waited for four or five hours in line at a cashpoint? Me neither. But plenty of Cubans have.

Against this backdrop, much of the real economy in Cuba operates in the shadows. There is no relationship between supply and demand. And where the government fails to deliver, the black market steps in. As a recent article for CiberCuba phrased it, “Regulated prices don’t work because there are shortages and insufficient production, which makes real market prices much higher than officially permitted. This leads to inflation, which the government tries unsuccessfully to control with restrictive measures.”

I don’t want to minimise the impact of the long-standing American trade embargo, nor Trump’s full on blockade of the island. Central Havana is currently experiencing blackouts of five to six hours everyday, as I witnessed when I went for a walkabout there this evening.

The decision by the US government to block oil shipments to Cuba has resulted in daily life grinding to a halt. It is also having a direct impact on the distribution of humanitarian aid. The UN Resident Coordinator in Cuba, Francisco Pichón, has warned that 170 containers of essential humanitarian products that have already arrived in Cuba are not reaching people due to the fuel shortage.

The thinking among Trump and secretary of state Marco Rubio is not dissimilar in at least one respect to the Stalinist regime they wish to topple: you can’t make on omelette without breaking eggs. The omelette in this case is the Cuban real estate coveted by many Americans (including Republican members of Congress). Amid all the canting talk from Washington about human rights on the island, it is worth remembering that it was the Agrarian Reform Law of May 1959 (whereby tracts of US land were given to Cuban peasants) that first prompted the Americans to seek to overthrow Fidel Castro. To this day the United States enjoys cordial relations with numerous regimes with abominable human rights records. But with those countries is can conduct profitable business. Not so with Cuba, which is really the crux of the matter when it comes to right-wing animosity toward the island.

But blame for the dire economic situation must also be laid squarely at the door of the Cuban government. Much as it did in the Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc countries, the bureaucratic command economy translates in practice as centralised management of systematically induced shortages.

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This piece is free to read, but the rest will go to paid subscribers while I’m on the island. If you’d like to receive those dispatches while I’m in Cuba, you can upgrade here.

Coming into land at Jose Marti airport in Havana, few of the usual signs of life are visible from the small window of the aeroplane. The roads resemble arteries in which blood has abruptly stopped flowing. When we land, ours is the only plane on the tarmac.

The last time I visited Cuba was in the summer of 2019. Before Covid-19. Before the mass protests of 2021. Before Trump cut off the oil. Havana has always had “bustle”—a certain vibration, a joie de vivre, even amid the ever-present shortages. Today the streets are abandoned. The highways are empty, the shops closed. Even the police, in their pressed grey uniforms—a permanent fixture on every street corner in the past—are absent. The government can’t afford to pay them.

I first came to Cuba 20 years ago, in 2006. I was a communist at the time, albeit only by temperament: a raw, unorthodox socialist who wasn’t sufficiently schooled in the art of always landing on your feet (dialectics). I had, however, imbibed some of the mystique of La Revolucion and wanted to see it up close—to see what, if anything, it had to offer. To discover, as one of those platitudinous left-wing slogans has it, if another world was possible.

Perhaps it was—perhaps it is—though I didn’t find it on that trip. I did see Fidel Castro speak in the town of Bayamo in eastern Cuba on the 26th of July, the anniversary of his failed putsch against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1953. Also my grandmother’s birthday—I think I even phoned her from inside the rally, from deep within the sweaty throng in my red Brigate Rosse (red brigades) t-shirt that had a picture of a Kalashnikov on the front. I’d never even fired a real gun.

We got up at 5am that morning. The owner of the house we were staying in politely declined our invitation to attend; being retired, he wasn’t obliged to turn up like so many others, bused in by the state to applaud on cue. The two-hour speech itself was soporific enough; may as well stay in bed rather than turn up and pretend to be awake.

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It was the penultimate speech Castro ever gave as president—standing on the podium towering over everybody like a giant oak tree. He gave another later on that day before almost dying of diverticulosis on the trip back to Havana. He must have given the same speech hundreds of times before. Yankee imperialism; capitalist reactionaries; the blockade; David versus Goliath; socialism or death; venceremos! The other gringos present seemed to enjoy it at least.

Cuba today is the same but worse. The idea of Cuba is itself an misapprehension—a mirage. There are Cubas (plural). There is the Cuba of the elite. The high security compounds. The official cars. The special schools and hospitals. The international diet. The diplomatic sojourns overseas. The Cuba you don’t see, but know exists, behind the curtain.

Then there are the Cubans who have relatives in Miami or elsewhere overseas. The nouveau riche falling out of the bars and nightclubs of Vedado, clad from head to toe in Armani, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Versace. Giant plates of steak, pork belly, chicken cordon bleu, french fries. Mojitos, negronis, Cuba Libres. Bling bling. Cha-ching.

Tourists are few and far between in Havana right now, frightened away by the blackouts and Trump’s repeated threats to “take” the island (not to mention the lack of jet fuel). The new hotels the government keeps building for them lie empty.

The tourists, when they do come, inhabit another reality. A tropical paradise of stupendous beaches with white sand and crystalline waters. The Hemingway bar. La Fábrica de Tabacos. Air conditioning. Sightseeing in pink and yellow Cadillacs. The willowy mulattas who make them feel young again as they knock back strawberry daiquiris and chew on Cohibas.

The Cubans go along with it. You would too were you in their shoes. Hunger clarifies. What’s a bit of mottled flesh in exchange for a full stomach and—if they’re really gone on you—a ticket out of here? Better than sitting in an inner tube hoping to bob your way to Florida. “Revolutionaries, forever young,” proclaims a government billboard in Havana (one of many). Forever young but not for the young. For the sexagenarian tourists and the nonagenarian politburo. Young Cubans grow old waiting for their turn to come.

It’s dispiriting to be constantly hit up for money. Everyone you go, you sense a pair of eyes sizing you up. It’s the only time a tourist really gets an insight into what it’s like to be a Cuban: to feel as if you’re always being observed. The routine gets tiresome quite quickly, but what can you do. “Where you from? England? You want taxi, cigars? I can get you beautiful Cuban girl”. No necesito nada, gracias.

You could say that communism really has “never been tried” in Cuba, because it’s pure dog eat dog. In the bureaucracy, everything depends on mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism. Down below, where the stakes are higher, you need some kind of benefactor overseas. For those without that, shaking down a dwindling number of tourists is all that’s left—selling whatever you have; selling yourself; playing the game. It’s a young person’s game. You wouldn’t want to grow old here.

“Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.”

This Fidel Castro slogan has been the governing principle in Cuba for nearly 67 years. Independent media is crushed, dissent criminalized, and surveillance embedded into daily life through neighborhood committees designed to ensure that, as Castro himself once put it, everyone knows what each person does.

Before 1959, the island was governed by a strongman who maintained order while American business (and mafioso) thrived. Castro’s revolution was, in part, a rejection of that arrangement. It held out the promise of sovereignty and dignity. What it delivered instead was another form of domination: a centralized, authoritarian state that co-opted the language of social justice to shore up the power of a new ruling class.

Castro himself was less of an ideologue than a caudillo in the classic Latin American mold—opportunistic, charismatic, and intolerant of rivals. As his Argentine sidekick Che Guevara later admitted, Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet bloc was “half the fruit of constraint, half the result of choice.” Communism provided not just an economic model but a bureaucratic structure through which Castro was able to consolidate power.

That model has failed in ways that are by now familiar from the old Soviet bloc. Systems that could build rockets and project power proved unable to provide basic goods.

I’ve seen this with my own eyes. In my early twenties I spent around a year in Cuba. On some days it was impossible to find toiletries or basic medicines in the state-run shops. The monthly ration booklet—which every Cuban is issued by the government—barely stretched to a week. Cuban friends would spend hours queuing for basic goods or quietly working out an exit strategy—often marriage to a foreign national.

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This is the reality of Cuba today. The country’s economic problems are exacerbated by the long-running American embargo but not solely caused by it. In recent years, millions of Cubans have emigrated. Those most dissatisfied are also those most able to leave. Exit has become the system’s most reliable safety valve.

Since the loss of Soviet subsidies in the early nineties, Havana has adapted through a familiar pattern: limited economic openings followed by political retrenchment. Power remains concentrated in the military and security apparatus, which dominates key sectors of the economy. The result is stagnation—enough flexibility to survive, but not enough to loosen the grip of the ruling elite.

There are many good reasons to despise such a system. The real question is what follows from that judgment—and whether U.S. policy under Donald Trump represents a serious attempt to help the Cuban people achieve something better.

For decades, Washington has (to varying degrees) relied on a simple formula: apply enough external pressure and the regime will either reform or collapse. Trump has intensified this approach by tightening the embargo, restricting remittances, curbing travel, and cutting off sources of hard currency.

Washington’s goal is to induce sufficient hardship on the island to provoke internal pressure for change. But what sort of change? Democracy or human rights? Unlikely. Trump’s underlying vision is probably far less noble: a Cuba reshaped into a compliant, economically open client state—one that admits American business on favourable terms and aligns itself with U.S. interests.

Trump’s policy in Venezuela is illustrative here. In January, Nicolás Maduro was replaced with someone more willing to bend the knee. Delcy Rodríguez cut a deal with the Americans that let them profit from the country’s oil. As for the Venezuelan people, they are still waiting.

The Cuban people are also waiting. But even if Trump were interested in improving their lot, current policy probably won’t do that. Sanctions tend to weaken civil society more effectively than they weaken the state itself. In Cuba, the government retains control over resources, institutions, and—most importantly—the security apparatus. When remittances are restricted, it is Cubans who lose their lifeline. When tourism declines, it is small private businesses—one of the few areas of relative autonomy—that suffer. When shortages deepen, daily life is stripped back to a grinding, undignified struggle for the necessities.

It is a mistake to assume that such hardship will automatically translate into mass rebellion. It is just as likely to produce exhaustion or exodus. Under current conditions, sustained political mobilization is difficult. Add to this the steady outflow of intellectuals as well as younger, more disaffected citizens, and the result is a society whose remaining citizens are preoccupied with more quotidian concerns.

Meanwhile, the regime can prop itself up with the narratives it has long relied upon. Economic hardship can be blamed on the American aggressor. Corruption and brutality can be waved away. Hardliners are strengthened, able to argue that reform is too dangerous in the face of foreign pressure.

This dynamic is well understood on the island itself. Many Cubans are perfectly capable of holding two ideas at once: that their government is repressive and incompetent, and that American policy makes their lives harder rather than easier.

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This is frequently misunderstood abroad. For decades, sections of the Western left have responded to Cuba’s failures by defaulting to boilerplate anti-Americanism, treating the regime as a kind of proxy for their own dreams of a better world. That this vision of a city on the hill has not been borne out by half a century of “revolution” is almost beside the point.

Just this weekend, more than 500 left-wingers from around the world arrived in Havana to deliver five metric tons of food supplies and medical equipment to the Cuban government. The delegation included the former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the streamer Hasan Piker, and the Irish rap group Kneecap. The trip was organised by the Progressive International—which describes the Cuban model as “sustaining hope in moments of global retreat”—in collaboration with the Cuban government. Some have posted triumphant selfies of themselves with Miguel Díaz-Canel, the country’s dictator.

When Cubans took to the streets to protest against their government in 2021, chanting “liberty” and “motherland and life,” the Cuban president sent his government’s “black beret” special forces to beat them up—they were subsequently prosecuted in summary trials. According to human rights groups, as of February there were 1,213 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in Cuba.

They are conspicuously absent from left-wing calls for “peace and justice.”

If the aim were genuinely to support Cuban society in loosening the grip of the state, American policy would look different to the one that Trump is pursuing. There was an imperfect logic—but a logic nonetheless—behind the thaw in relations that took place during the Obama era. The dictatorship did not fall. But increased travel, expanded remittances, and diplomatic engagement were not concessions to the regime so much as attempts to bypass it. The policy created modest but real changes: a growth in economic autonomy, greater exposure to the outside world, and a subtle shift in expectations.

Trump has attempted—and more or less succeeded—in reversing Obama’s policies. Cuba and the United States are once again locked in a standoff. In Havana, the state-planned marches continue; the left-wing solidarity missions touch down at José Martí airport; and Cuba’s president promises to fight to the last drop of blood—someone else’s, of course. Cubans have seen this film before. Fight imperialism? A decent meal would be nice.

Trump has one strategy—in war and in life—based on a belief that his instincts, which typically mean his desire for American domination and enrichment, are superior to any reasoned analysis by experts. It’s a shame Fidel is not still around: he would have understood.

When institutions hollow out, they present an opportunity for the money men. Football clubs are bought up by chancers, newspapers are taken over by oligarchs, and vicars fall over themselves at the sight of an open chequebook.

That the Church of England is facing the same fate is due to a number of causes, some of which have been discussed ad infinitum elsewhere. But one reason for the Church’s decline is its treatment of women. Though historically led by a small caste of gentleman leaders, it was the work of women that kept the church going. Behind the imagery of Father, Son, Judge, King and Lord was an army of largely middle-class laywomen. And then, gradually, they drifted away. As Professor Linda Woodhead and the journalist Andrew Brown write in That Was the Church That Was, which documents the decline of churchgoing in England and the takeover of parts of the church by elite evangelicals, “as women’s equality gained ground, the Church’s unthinking sexism and traditional exhortation to ‘honour and obey’ was becoming distinctly unpalatable to most of the population. Older generations of women remained in the pews, but their daughters abandoned them for alternative secular and spiritual options.”

The religious aspect of Paul Marshall’s public life is, in some ways, the most interesting. Marshall, the hedge fund billionaire and media investor, has centred many of his interventions on Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), a charismatic Evangelical church that combines a modern presentation with a highly traditional theology. I have an essay on him in the latest edition of Byline Times — Sir Paul Marshall and the rise of elite evangelical nationalism. Byline subscribers can read it here (£):

At the heart of Marshall’s political vision is a spiritual diagnosis: he believes that liberalism has “lost its moorings,” that the Enlightenment has corrupted society, and that only a revival of Christian values - as interpreted by a narrow and authoritarian strain of elite evangelicalism - can save Britain from moral collapse.

Nowhere is Marshall’s mission clearer than in his involvement with HTB and the wider evangelical networks orbiting the Church of England. HTB, located in one of London’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, has become the beating heart of elite evangelical Anglicanism.

HTB presents itself as sleek and modern, its services built around charismatic preaching and contemporary worship. Yet the vision it promotes is deeply hierarchical: traditional family structures, male leadership and a rigid moral code. Through its Church Revitalisation Trust (CRT), which Marshall funds, HTB has expanded its reach across Britain, planting churches and promoting an agenda that merges evangelical theology with authoritarian values.

If America’s evangelical right believes the United States is God’s chosen nation, Britain’s evangelical elite often appear to believe that they themselves were chosen to run the country - and that liberalism has allowed that authority to slip away.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and — perhaps most importantly of all — money.

During the research for the article I spoke with Professor Linda Woodhead, a leading sociologist of religion at King’s College, London. Woodhead makes a simple point, but an important one: the Church of England didn’t collapse overnight. It thinned out, losing its social base while retaining its institutional shell.

She also makes the point that when an institution loses confidence while retaining its symbolic power, it becomes open to capture, particularly by groups with the money and organisation to take advantage of that weakness.

The language used to describe this project is often revealing. Marshall and his allies like to talk about “Judeo-Christian values” — a political construction that helps form alliances and avoid accusations of antisemitism1.

“There’s no such thing as ‘Judeo-Christian’ really,” Woodhead told me. In practice, the term serves to build alliances — a convenient umbrella under which different strands of conservative thought can gather, while smoothing over the less convenient parts of their history.

The same pattern can be seen elsewhere. One of the more striking things Woodhead told me is that the relationship between religion and the culture war is often misunderstood.

“Christians on the right started the culture wars,” she said. “They ran it first, and then it got picked up more widely.”

What we are seeing now is not simply politics infecting religion. In many cases, it is religion — or a particular, highly organised version of it — that has set the terms.

As Woodhead also points out, English evangelicalism has long been shaped by elite networks. “In the post-war period,” she told me, “they had a very explicit programme — a long march through the institutions — putting their people into public schools, Westminster and the Church of England.”

And yet, for all this activity, the numbers remain small. HTB and its satellites are loud, but they are not large. “It’s not even a blip,” Woodhead said. “Church decline is the big story — and they haven’t changed that.”

Which is where the paradox lies. This is not a mass revival. It doesn’t need to be. What matters is not the number of believers, but where they are and what they control.

The Church of England, for its part, has helped create the conditions for this shift. “It has ceded the territory,” Woodhead told me. “It doesn’t speak about Englishness anymore… and that leaves space for others to move in and claim it.”

Into that space step figures like Marshall, armed not just with conviction but with capital to deploy in the culture war. The church is simply one more ideological battleground.

If liberal supporters of the 2003 Iraq war were searching for their Spanish Civil War moment, today’s neoconservatives seem to view events in Iran through the prism of the European revolutions of 1989. As Donald Trump himself put it in a recent address, “to the people of Iran, rise up and seize your country.” A few missile strikes are launched and the expectation in Washington seems to be that Iranians will flood into the streets and overthrow their oppressors.

When people think about revolutions they usually begin with certain mental models, and those models often misrepresent how dictatorial regimes actually collapse. Part of the problem is that we are still living in the afterglow of 1989. The end of the Cold War was a formative moment for many of today’s leaders.

As the historian Timothy Garton Ash argued in 2009, the events of 1989 appeared to inaugurate a “new model of revolution”: peaceful uprisings in which citizens reclaimed their states from authoritarian rule. The problem is that this model has since become the default way of imagining how dictatorships collapse — even in places where the underlying political dynamics are entirely different.

This was arguably part of what drove support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration after 9/11 were shaped not by Vietnam but by the fall of communism. They were men of the 1980s, not the 1960s. The invasion of Iraq was supposed to trigger democratic change across the Middle East. Once the tyrant was gone, the region was expected to democratise spontaneously.

But the popular revolutions of 1989 are arguably the exception rather than the rule. In reality, most regime collapses come about through elite fragmentation rather than popular protest.

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Last week Reform UK announced that it would consider reopening selective grammar schools if it were to win power. The proposal taps into a long-standing belief in British politics: that academically selective schools offer bright working-class children a ladder of social mobility.

It is an appealing story, and one that has endured for decades. But it is also a story that sits uneasily with the evidence.

When writing my first book, The Myth of Meritocracy, I spent a good deal of time looking at the history and consequences of grammar schools. What I found was that the reality of selective education is rather different from the popular narrative. Far from serving as engines of mobility, grammar schools have tended to reinforce the advantages of families who already possess educational and cultural capital.

Given the renewed discussion around selection, I thought it might be useful to revisit part of that argument here.

What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from The Myth of Meritocracy in which I examine the evidence on grammar schools and ask a simple question: who actually benefits from academic selection? Some of the statistics date from when the book was written, but the broader pattern they illustrate has changed remarkably little.

(Excerpt begins below.)

Grammar schools are one of the most enduring educational myths. For some, they represent the obvious answer to Britain’s social mobility conundrum.

A great deal of this nostalgia rests on the assumption that social mobility was markedly better in Britain during the post-war period, and is now in precipitous decline. Proponents of a return to grammars genuinely want to improve the education chances for working class kids — or at least most of them do.

Part of the attraction of the old system undoubtedly rests on the fact that stark inequalities exist in comprehensive schooling. Despite the formal abolition of selection, in practice it persists, and, as with elsewhere in the economy, the power of money has only increased in recent decades.

The reality of educational inequality

Homes in desirable school catchment areas cost significantly more than those in areas with unpopular schools. According to one survey of 1,100 parents of school-age children, parents are willing to pay 18 per cent more for a property near their preferred school — the equivalent of £32,000 on the average property price of nearly £180,000 in England, Wales and Scotland. In London, the premium is £77,000 on a house costing £474,000.

For parents who wish to spend even greater sums educating their children, there are exclusive fee-paying (independent) schools. Approximately 7 per cent of children in education attend these schools, and fees start at around £3,000 per annum. However, this initial investment offers a handsome return. Pupils who attend fee-paying schools are five times more likely to go on to study at Oxford than their peers from the state sector.

Half a century after a Labour government first moved to abolish grammar schools, there is no equality in education. The most deprived areas in Britain have 30 per cent fewer good schools than the least deprived. There are also fewer good teachers who want to work there. According to the OECD, British schools are some of the most socially segregated in the developed world.

Such is the demand for school places that ambitious parents have reportedly started registering their unborn children for prestigious private schools. Other affluent parents ‘hot house’ their children from the age of three by paying for costly private tutoring. William Perry, the co-director of Bonas MacFarlane, which provides private tutoring, recently told the Times Educational Supplement that Britain has “the most in-demand private [schools] sector in the world”.

The private school network endows in the children who attend a level of social and cultural capital that has the power to open invisible doors as they grow older. It should come as no surprise to learn that so many parents should want to send their children private when they are likely to earn £193,700 more on average between the ages of twenty-six and forty-two than those who attend state schools.

Accounting for family background and early educational achievement, the wage premium is a massive £57,653. Children from independent schools who didn’t go to university are just as likely to enter the elite as working class Oxford graduates who attended comprehensives.

The history of the tripartite system

Michael Young’s 1958 polemic against meritocracy was originally aimed at the grammar school system, which was seen to epitomise the ruthless separation of “gifted” pupils from the rest at an early age.

His book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, caricatured the 11-plus examination — essentially an IQ test — as operating on the assumption that “civilisation does not depend on the stolid mass…but upon a creative minority…The restless elite.”

Those who passed the 11-plus were thus set on a path to future prosperity.

Calls to bring back grammar schools are often based on similarly inegalitarian assumptions: the sheep must be ruthlessly sorted from the goats in the name of “social mobility”. The most commonly held defence of the grammar school system is that once upon a time it allowed bright working class kids to transcend their home life. This is the very definition of the meritocratic ideal.

When grammar schools were first introduced, there in fact were good meritocratic reasons to support educational reform. A large divide between the type of secondary education available to the rich and poor led in 1944 to the Education Act, which introduced the so-called “tripartite” system of education.

This included grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools. The different schools were intended to provide separate but equal schooling geared to children of different abilities. In practice, few technical schools were actually built; thus, for most children it was a case of passing the 11-plus or attending a substandard secondary modern.

The inequalities perpetuated by the tripartite system — most working-class children ended up at secondary moderns — led to the formation of the comprehensive movement, which campaigned on the principle of one type of secondary education for all.

This policy was ultimately adopted by the Labour Party, resulting in Harold Wilson’s government asking local education authorities in 1965 to reorganise secondary education along comprehensive lines. At the time, it was felt that selective education was on the way out.

Doubt was increasingly being cast on theories of inherited intelligence; gender inequality was rife — many local education authorities had more grammar school places for boys than girls; and middle-class dissatisfaction with the system was growing.

Thus, when Labour Education Minister Tony Crosland reportedly promised in the 1960s to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland”, there was no eruption of popular outrage.

By 1979, over 80 per cent of secondary school pupils were attending comprehensive schools.

In a neat historical irony, it was Margaret Thatcher as Education Secretary who, between 1970 and 1974, is understood to have closed more grammar schools than any Education Secretary before or since.

The former Tory leader Sir John Major went on to make a doomed attempt to rally voters in the 1997 election around the slogan of “A grammar school in every town!” However, on the whole, few mainstream politicians have seriously considered reintroducing grammars (perhaps voters realised that Major’s policy would also have meant a secondary modern in every town).

Between 1980 and 2015, the Conservatives did not open any new grammar schools and nor did Labour close any existing ones. The matter was understood to have been finally closed in 2007 when the young Tory leader David Cameron rejected calls to bring back grammars, defining it as a “key test” of whether the Conservative Party was fit for office.

(Though in 2015 Cameron appeared to row back on this early pledge, allowing his Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to approve a so-called “satellite” grammar school in Sevenoaks in Kent — the first grammar school to be approved for fifty years.)

Yet the egalitarian penumbra surrounding grammar schools still lingers.

What the evidence says

Selection at eleven still exists in thirty-six local authorities; and the evidence gleaned from the 164 remaining state-funded selective schools is a damning indictment of the grammar school system.

A study of Buckinghamshire, a county with a wholly selective school system, found that private school pupils were two and a half times more likely to pass the 11-plus exam than state school pupils.

Conversely, the pass rate for children on free school meals was one-eighth of the average.

This discrepancy between wealthy pupils and the rest occurred in spite of the introduction of supposedly “tutor-proof” testing in 2013. The rich still managed to pay private tutors to beat the 11-plus.

Areas that have retained selective education also have a bigger average wage gap between high and low earners. The highest earners from grammar school areas were found to be better off than top earners born in comparable comprehensive authorities1.

Grammar schools may benefit the 20 to 25 per cent of pupils who attend, but education for the rest tends to suffer. And these losers come disproportionately from poor homes.

Meanwhile, despite the meritocratic mythology, the winners of the grammar system come overwhelmingly from the affluent middle classes.

A study2 by the Sutton Trust found that just 3 per cent of those attending existing grammar schools were entitled to free school meals. Almost 13 per cent of entrants came from the independent sector, largely made up of fee-paying preparatory schools.

At 161 out of the UK’s 164 grammar schools, only 10 per cent of pupils were eligible for free school meals. Meanwhile, ninety-eight of these schools had fewer than 3 per cent and twenty-one had fewer than 1 per cent.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies3, deprived children are significantly less likely to get into a grammar school than the most privileged, even when they achieve the same grades aged eleven.

Thus the old myth about grammar schools lifting up bright members of the working class does not stand up to scrutiny.

Selection benefits the affluent but results in poorer academic performance for the rest. Educational performance for the poorest pupils in areas where selection persists is significantly worse than their equivalents in comprehensive areas.

Nor do global comparisons reflect favourably on grammar schools: nine of the ten best education systems in the world are comprehensive.

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The deeper problem with selection

Grammar schools ultimately fail on their own terms. They may benefit the affluent middle classes, but there is no evidence — either from the past or in the present — to suggest that they help the poor.

Far from boosting social mobility as their champions claim, grammar schools are a 1950s throwback mired in empty romanticism.

In a different sense, grammar schools resemble the doctrine of meritocracy in microcosm. Even if grammars were able to achieve what their supporters claim — a high degree of social mobility for the poor — the ethical question engendered by their success would remain: does a just society anoint a handful of people based on the extremely narrow criteria of ‘IQ’?

When looked at this way, it is perhaps less surprising that so many proponents of a return to grammar schools are on the political right: the desire to return to educational selection is part of a conservative desire to justify economic inequalities on the basis of natural ability.

Unjust rewards are considered just if they occur as a result of merit.

The fly in the ointment, so to speak, is a familiar one: a scientific IQ test may seem egalitarian, but to paraphrase Marx, children sit the critical 11-plus examination “under circumstances given and transmitted from the past”.

The weight of vastly divergent home and educational experiences is invariably brought to bear on rich and poor children, producing contrasting human material at the age of eleven.

When grammar schools reached their zenith in the late 1950s, fewer than 0.3 per cent of pupils leaving grammar school with two A-levels had come from the unskilled working class4.

Richard Tawney pointed out this fundamental paradox, which is at the heart of the “equality of opportunity” rhetoric, way back in the 1930s.

“It is only the presence of a high degree of practical equality which can diffuse and generalise opportunities to rise,” Tawney wrote. “The existence of such opportunities … depends not only on an open road, but upon an equal start.”

The same paradox that has upset broader attempts to engender social mobility also applies to grammar schools and the 11-plus.

In 1961, Raymond Williams effectively summed up the problem of a selective school system thus:

Differences in learning ability obviously exist, but there is great danger in making these into separate and absolute categories. It is right that a child should be taught in a way appropriate to his learning ability, but because this itself depends on his whole development, including not only questions of personal character growth but also questions of his real social environment and the stimulation received from it, too early a division into intellectual grades in part creates the situation which it is offering to meet.

Unequal outcomes generate unequal opportunities. Educational selection at age eleven is thus liable to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And yet, renewed calls for selective education show that the grammar school myth still exerts a powerful hold on the British political imagination.

I have been thinking a lot about Cuba lately. I spent time on the island in the late 2000s - probably around a year of my life in total. I wrote my journalism dissertation about the country. I was present in person at one of the last speeches Fidel Castro gave as the country’s supreme leader (a predictably long-winded affair that began at around six o’clock in the morning to avoid the July heat). I made many friends and acquaintances along the way.

Most of the people I knew back then have since left the country, or at least the younger ones have. The last time I visited Cuba was in 2019. Since then things have deteriorated sharply. First the pandemic cut off the country’s main source of hard currency. Then Donald Trump returned to office and tightened economic sanctions. His administration recently arrested Cuba’s main benefactor in Venezuela and threatened to levy tariffs on any country that sold oil to Cuba.

I’ve tried to make sense of where the country is heading in a recent article for Foreign Policy, which argues that Cuba is not on the brink of collapse so much as entering a long, managed decline. You can read it here.

Extreme hardship is now widespread across the island. Shortages are rife and blackouts prolonged. Last week, the Cuban government warned that jet fuel would not be available at the country’s international airports from Feb 10 to Mar 11, 2026. Foreign embassies and companies are reportedly drawing up emergency evacuation and contingency plans. Several countries, including the UK, Canada and Ireland, have told their citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Cuba.

Having spent time in Cuba (and not in one of the plush resorts designed for tourists), you may understand why I have little patience for a certain type of western revolutionary who extols the virtues of the country while overlooking the abuses. The healthcare. The education. The war against apartheid South Africa in Angola. Trust me, I’ve heard the entire inventory. I also understand (or at least I think I do) why people enjoy hearing the story. The novelist and former communist Arthur Koestler once described such observers as “peeping Toms,” peering through a hole in the wall at history while not having to experience it themselves.

According to Castro’s own estimates, at one point there were as many as 15,000 political prisoners in Cuba. One of the darkest periods of the repression occurred in 1963 when Castro approved “Operation P,” named because of a black “P” (for pimps, prostitutes, pederasts) emblazoned on the uniforms of those arrested. The operation saw Castro’s Stasi-trained secret police sweep through Havana targeting homosexuals, religious believers, and “deviants” - often simply men with long hair and blue jeans. Those rounded up were placed in UMAPs (Military Units to Help Production), where they were subjected to forced labor. According to the poet Armando Valladares, imprisoned by Castro in 1960, “there have been few examples of repression of homosexuals in history as virulent as in Cuba.”

But you can get away with a great deal in some circles if you can just make an enemy of the United States. Castro embodied a set of revolutionary aesthetics that Western admirers found intoxicating. For some, he became a vessel into which they could pour their own fantasies: the macho man in the tropics; the humanitarian who meted out violence and retribution; the fatigue-wearing outlaw beloved by the proponents of international peace.

When he was alive, western celebrities and intellectuals flocked to Cuba to pay homage. Jack Nicholson (“Castro is a humanist”), Oliver Stone (“Castro is very selfless and moral, one of the world’s wisest men”), and the supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss (Castro is “an inspiration to everyone”) were some of those who lavished praise on the dictator. “I just spent an hour and a half talking with your president, Fidel Castro,” a star-struck Campbell told a press conference in the Hotel National in 1994. “But he told me there was nothing to be afraid of because he already knew a lot about us from reading the press.” As the high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez later disclosed, the information did not come from the media. “My job was to bug their hotel rooms with cameras and listening devices,” he said.

This tendency to project onto Cuba one’s own wishes is evident in a recent article from the Progressive International. Nestled amid the usual fusillade of clichés about Yankee imperialism and the ‘global south’, we learn that Cuba is “an island of 11 million people”. Except it isn’t, not any more. Cuba has lost over two million of its inhabitants since 2021. According to the economist and demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, there may be as few as 8.62 million Cubans still living in the country.

This is a revealing oversight on the part of the self-declared ‘friends of Cuba’. Accurate information is readily available to anyone - or at least, to those who can be bothered to look. But in the end we are dealing with a question of faith. “Cuba must not fall”, as the author of the piece writes, “because if it does, the loss will not be Cuba’s alone. It will belong to all those who dare to believe that another world is possible”.

To acknowledge that millions of Cubans do not share your faith will not do. The death of one person is a tragedy and the death of a million is a statistic, as the apocryphal line attributed to Stalin has it. Or in the case of Cuba, the emigration of two and a half million is treated as little more than an ethical parenthesis.

A majority have material reasons for leaving Cuba: poverty, shortages, power cuts, et cetera. But what’s also become even clearer in recent years is the total unwillingness of the government to enact any meaningful reforms. To do so would risk loosening their grip on power. The protesters who took to the streets in the summer of 2021 were jailed and tortured, including minors. Many later fled into exile. The brief hopes for reform that flowered in the mid-2010s during the presidency of Raúl Castro - and which saw the Obamas visit Havana - were quickly extinguished by the regime’s security forces.

America’s sanctions will merely impoverish the people of Cuba even further. The regime’s apparatchiks already live a separate life to that of a majority of the country’s inhabitants. As I write in my piece for FP, sanctions can deepen hardship without loosening the government’s grip, instead strengthening the siege narrative and driving those who have the means to leave the country. Pressure intended to bring change may instead lock in a poorer, emptier, more repressive Cuba.

For most people reading this, Cuba is probably a small country far away. As such I don’t expect most people to care. But as long as there are people on the left still willing to project their metaphysical fantasies onto the island, I will feel obliged to write pieces such as this. After all, these aren’t just statistics for me. At one time, many of them were my friends.

Alternatively, you can buy my book Lost Boys here.

Now that a deal on the Chagos Islands has been concluded, the British government speaks as if a long and awkward problem has finally been tidied away. Sovereignty will pass to Mauritius. The military base on Diego Garcia will continue under lease. Ministers talk of international law, partnership, and closing a chapter of history. It is remote from the disorderly lives of the people whose history is supposedly being settled.

Yet before the ink is dry on the agreement the wider realities intrude. The Trump administration has warned that the deal is a strategic mistake. Some critics argue it weakens Western security; others insist it is the only way to safeguard the base in the long term. What was presented as a tidy act of decolonisation begins to look, once again, like a decision about military convenience.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Britain expelled the entire population of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean to make way for a United States air and naval base. Families who had lived there for generations were loaded onto ships and deposited in Mauritius and the Seychelles, often with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Officials described them as “contract workers” and “transients”, phrases chosen not because they were accurate but because they were useful. If the islanders were not a real people, then no real injustice had occurred.

For decades afterwards, the British state behaved in a familiar way when confronted with inconvenient victims: it delayed, denied, and spoke in a bureaucratic language designed to obscure reality. Resettlement was deemed “impractical”. Compensation was “final”. Legal defeats were treated as administrative nuisances. Meanwhile, the wretched Chagossians remained scattered and dependent on the goodwill of other countries that had not expelled them.

Now the vocabulary has shifted again. The rhetoric of empire has been replaced by the vocabulary of decolonisation. Among its supporters, the British government is said to be “respecting international rulings” and “returning the islands”. On paper it sounds like an overdue settling of accounts. But there is something curiously bloodless about a settlement that resolves a dispute between governments while leaving the original victims in much the same limbo as before.

The deal treats Chagos primarily as territory. Yet the central fact about Chagos is not who owns the land, but what was done to the people who lived on it. Changing the flag does not, by itself, absolve the crimes of the past.

Indeed, there is a risk that the transfer makes justice even less likely. Once sovereignty passes to Mauritius, Britain can now disclaim responsibility. Future problems can be treated as matters for the new sovereign. Apologies, already delivered in cautious instalments over the years, acquire the comforting air of closure. The crimes of the past are written off.

To argue that Britain should have kept Chagos while restoring the islanders’ rights is not to defend empire. It is to insist that the state which expelled them should bear the cost of putting that wrong right. In practical terms justice would have meant funded resettlement for those who wished to return, serious compensation for decades of exile, and political autonomy for a revived Chagossian community.

Instead, Britain has opted for a convenient posture: relinquish sovereignty, retain strategic access, and issue vague expressions of regret. The military base stays, the geopolitical benefits remain, and the burden of direct rule disappears. The settlement may satisfy lawyers and diplomats, but it leaves the moral arithmetic largely unchanged.

There are, of course, those — mainly conservative writers — who insist that Britain must keep Chagos under any circumstances. They have shown little interest in the welfare of the islanders, preferring instead to cling to a familiar imperial nostalgia. For them, the islands are less a homeland than a symbol that Britain “punches above its weight”. But celebrating the handover as a triumph of international law sidesteps the fact that almost nothing has been done to rebuild a society the British deliberately dismantled.

One of the quiet ironies of the affair is that Britain’s legal vulnerability arose from its own decision to remove the population. Had the Chagossians been allowed to remain, their wishes would be central to any settlement, as they are in the Falklands or Gibraltar. Instead, the absence Britain created is treated as evidence that the islands belong elsewhere. The people were removed to secure sovereignty; now sovereignty is surrendered because the people are gone.

A government that wished to act honourably would not treat this as the end of the matter. Britain expelled the Chagossians, prevented their return, and resisted them in the courts for decades. These facts do not change because a treaty has been signed.

What would begin to right the wrong is money, infrastructure and sustained effort to rebuild a community Britain destroyed for reasons of state. Anything less leaves the central injustice intact, merely administered under a different authority.

British public life has a persistent habit of treating legal form and diplomatic approval as moral closure. The Chagos deal risks becoming one more example.

If Britain wishes to show that this settlement is more than an exit strategy, it should begin with restitution that is tangible and costly. Empires have always preferred to rewrite the account rather than repay it. But changing course does not erase what was done to get there.

Last year I wrote a profile of Reform UK’s latest parliamentary candidate Matthew Goodwin for Prospect magazine. It’s free to read on the Prospect website until Monday.

What prompted a promising academic to throw it all away to become a propagandist for the radical right?

Some see Goodwin’s political realignment as entirely self-serving, a way to make a killing by churning out reactionary agitprop, along with other renegade scholars. Others see a series of minor setbacks as having wounded his pride, warping and curdling his politics. One former colleague described Goodwin to me as “brittle” and unable to distinguish between academic disagreement (a normal part of campus life) and personal attacks. Others have accused Goodwin of “going native” among those he had originally set out to research.

Goodwin’s type—so-called heterodox intellectual turned populist demagogue—is a morbid symptom of the digital age. To paraphrase Albert Camus, he is an empty prophet for mediocre times. A selection of glossy headshots on Goodwin’s website suggests a foray into party politics could at some point beckon. That was certainly the view of at least one former academic colleague I spoke to. And why not? Goodwin is precisely the sort who could make a name for himself in these strange days. What Goodwin lacks in charisma he makes up for in self-promotion.

For those of us who once enjoyed his work, Goodwin now cuts a rather pathetic figure, his ideological trajectory recalling the American journalist Dorothy Thompson’s description of the “saturnine man” in her 1941 Harper’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?”: “He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him.”

You can read the full piece here. You can also read my profiles of Douglas Murray and the ‘reactionary feminists’ for free too.

“I painfully and reluctantly ended up reaching the conclusion that actually the sexual culture of the 1950s was pretty good,” the British journalist Louise Perry told Bari Weiss’s Free Press podcast in February last year.

The complaint that feminism has gone too far is something one grows used to hearing from certain men. It is more unusual to hear the same language from a woman. Yet that is precisely what an increasingly prominent group of female writers, including Perry, is claiming. It is the contention of these “reactionary” or “postliberal” feminists that the progressive movement for women’s rights has failed women. In its place, they push for a new kind of feminism which, to many readers, won’t sound like feminism at all—a bit like a member of the Conservative party declaring themselves a socialist.

Perry and fellow British commentator Mary Harrington have built significant followings by arguing that the liberation promised by the sexual revolution and liberal feminism more generally has failed the majority of women. To varying degrees, they claim that contraception, gender fluidity and the erosion of traditional family life have left women in a more precarious position, further exposed to male power.

Judging by the effusive cover blurbs on Feminism Against Progress, an influential 2023 text by the 46-year-old Harrington, a contributing editor at UnHerd, reactionary feminism has its fair share of admirers. Self-described “gender critical” journalists such as Helen Joyce and Suzanne Moore, and the academic philosopher Kathleen Stock, all provided generous praise for the book, as did the former cabinet minister—and now editor of the Spectator—Michael Gove, who refers (rather fittingly for a tome railing against hook-up culture) to its “penetrating insights”.

Harrington’s thesis draws on some familiar conservative tropes: progress is an illusion; human nature is ineradicable; and all reform leads to revolution. Though her arguments are frequently anecdotal, she likes to cloak her work in the vernacular of the left. She discusses “class” and “materialism”—at one point in her book, she even invokes Marx and Engels. But the class struggle is always sublimated beneath admonitions to accept the world as it is. The only thing that can be done is to steel oneself against it, get married and have children.

Right-wing media has long been keen to utilise liberals with “second thoughts”. Their role in the reactionary ecosystem is to persuade those on the fence that it is the political left they should be worried about. Even better if they can find women and minorities who themselves believe the most reactionary arguments. It can be a lucrative business for all involved. Becoming the “thoughtful” left-winger who is unafraid to confront unvarnished truths about one’s own side can open up a new stratum of influence. Invitations flood in for comment pieces, podcasts and speaking gigs, many of them well-remunerated. I peered over the edge of the precipice myself during the Jeremy Corbyn era of the late-2010s, when I was regularly asked to share my doubts about the then-Labour leader.

As a movement (if one can call it that), reactionary feminism similarly comprises “independent thinkers” who have been “mugged by reality”. The 34-year-old Perry has a degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies and was a member of the Labour party until 2023. Perry has insisted she is not a conservative; yet in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, she writes that sexual liberalism has seen society “smoothly transition from one form of feminine subservience to another,” repackaged as emancipation.

Nowadays Perry describes herself as a Christian and, in 2023, spoke at the National Conservatism conference in London, alongside JD Vance, Douglas Murray and other leading lights of the new right. She has written glowingly of Elon Musk as a “visionary” whose “goal is to save humanity… from our own lethargy and cowardice”. Like Musk, she has become intensely interested in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal—10 years after it was first reported. She frames the sexual abuse that took place in the language of racial conflict. “There is no disputing the fact that the motivation for these crimes was—and is—explicitly anti-white,” she has written.

Perry and Harrington had solid middle-class upbringings: the former in London, the latter in the home counties. Perry’s parents—an academic and a lawyer—read the Guardian, which she would also read on the way to school. These days Perry is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where her lacerations of the progressive left dovetail neatly with the instincts of the newspaper’s conservative audience.

Harrington, meanwhile, studied English literature at Oxford before “mutinying against every form of normal”, as she writes in her book. She devoured Judith Butler, founded an “ethical” startup and possessed a “fierce determination to make the world a better place”. In her twenties, Harrington experimented with gender fluidity, even changing her name to Sebastian at one point. Shortly after giving birth to her first child (and nearly dying in the process), she realised she no longer believed in progress.

Much of her advocacy today boils down to the claim that contraception, gender fluidity and the erosion of traditional family life have not freed women but left them at greater risk, vulnerable not only to male power but also to the vicissitudes of the market. As with Perry, this journey rightwards is presented as a reluctant form of political apostasy. “Like many kinds of revolution, losing my faith happened slowly, then all at once… I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are only acceptable inasmuch as they’re optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally,” she writes in her book.

Despite some occasional nods to Marxism, beyond her own protestations there is little in Harrington’s backstory to suggest a noble mind overthrown. Instead, it seems as if, while dabbling in some progressive affectations, she was drawn to a reactionary politics. She has cited Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple as the first book to “transformatively challenge [my] assumptions about how the world works”, having formerly believed “all the official progressive ideas.” This book is standard conservative fare in which the welfare state and a “culture of poverty”—rather than material deprivation—are blamed for the plight of the poor.

Perry cites Harrington as an inspiration for her own politics and both have trodden a similar ideological path in recent years: liberal feminism is the God that failed. Both have also found a niche repeating social-conservative arguments while presenting themselves as fearless heterodox truthtellers. Perry has argued, for instance, that “feminists should cut themselves loose from both left and right, since both political traditions were until very recently entirely dominated by men and male interests.”

Another rising star of the reactionary feminist tendency is the writer Freya India, a 25-year-old blogger who seems ubiquitous on Substack and the right-leaning podcast circuit. India also writes for After Babel, the newsletter launched by the bestselling author Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist campaigning against phone-based life. Where Harrington and Perry operate at the level of theory and polemic, India represents a younger, more personal register through which these ideas are now circulating. The Modern Wisdom podcaster Chris Williamson as “the blonder, younger Louise Perry”.

An admirer of Jordan Peterson—who rails against “the modern whores of Babylon” (i.e. pornstars and egirls) —India has built a profile with her critique of liberal “choice” feminism. “For years now I’ve seen mainstream feminism march onwards, steadily over-correcting, shedding all meaning, insisting that everything I do is empowering whatever the effect on my long-term wellbeing or those around me,” she wrote in a 2023 Substack piece entitled “Empowerment feminism failed us”. She goes on to argue that consumerism has moved us further from our “authentic” selves and that young people are wallowing in a cult of victimhood.

There are elements here that the political left could plausibly endorse: critiques of atomisation, capitalism and objectification. Yet the reactionary feminists frame the appropriate response in an unmistakably traditionalist key. India too describes herself as a “social conservative”.

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Western society has a tendency to recycle the same moral panics about “feminisation”. In his 1903 essay “Le Romantisme féminin”, Charles Maurras argued that decadence and romanticism had “feminised the souls and minds of French people”, reflecting a wider fin-de-siècle anxiety among nationalist thinkers that cultural feminisation signalled a loss of masculine vigour. Around the same time, the novelist and fellow countryman Maurice Barrès went so far as to suggest that an increase in women’s power would leave men dispossessed of their manhood. Plus ça change.

The 1990s saw an explosion of pop science literature lamenting a feminism that had “gone too far”. Many of these, such as the bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), depicted men and women as inhabiting entirely separate mental worlds.

More recently, the conservative political commentator Helen Andrews claimed in Compact, an antiliberal new right magazine, that the growing number of women in universities and company boardrooms in the United States presented a “threat to civilisation”, a case she had first made at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC last year, alongside evangelical Christians, Trump administration officials and blood-and-soil nationalists (the speech was called “Overcoming the Feminisation of Culture”).

Such interventions feed into a growing backlash against societal gains made by women. In common with the reactionary feminists, Andrews draws on evolutionary psychology to give a patina of science to her nostrums about men and women. Both Perry and Harrington are keen to emphasise a supposedly hardwired human nature. Perry writes of “evolved psychological differences between the sexes”, often passing off contested assumptions about male and female nature as empirical common sense. “Cancel culture is girl culture,” reads the title of a representative Substack article (subtitle: “Part 1: How feminine aggression works”) . These biological “facts” are then grafted onto a romanticised account of the past.

Biological explanations (including evolutionary language) have historically been used to justify social hierarchies. At least one study suggests that privileged groups are more likely to treat social outcomes as the inevitable product of evolved traits. Perry may present herself as someone who has broken with the assumptions of her class and upbringing, but biological explanations have an obvious appeal to the bourgeoisie. If it’s all in the genes, equality is always a chimera and reform is bound to fail. Jordan Peterson speaks in a similar register, telling his followers to set their own “house in order” before criticising the world, and insisting that capitalism is not the fundamental cause of inequality.

In common with the work of other conservative thinkers, Harrington and Perry’s ideas are suffused with pessimism. Harrington cites Horace’s warning: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.” Perry, meanwhile, suggests that hierarchy and violence are “baked in” to the human condition.

What Harrington retains from Marxism is determinism. The contraceptive pill leads inexorably towards what she calls “meat Lego Gnosticism”, a dystopia in which human beings have ceased to be human at all.

And yet a paradox runs through reactionary feminist thought: human nature is said to be fixed and unalterable, while also being perpetually threatened by progressive reformers bent on “de-sexing and disembodying us all”. If nature is truly immovable, one wonders why it requires such vigilant policing.

Accepting things as they are presumes a clean separation between one’s own prejudices and material reality. Yet it is always wise to guard against projection. Not all of us share the same “preference for our own genetic kin” that Harrington posits as natural. Gender essentialism has an unfortunate tendency to shade into race essentialism.

On X/Twitter, Harrington is a prominent voice in the increasingly racialised discourse around Britishness and Englishness. She uses the term “Yookay”, a right-wing neologism, to deride multiculturalism. During the 2024 Notting Hill Carnival, she speculated about an “unusually high number of men without characteristics stabbing people at random”. On a panel in Cambridge in February 2025, she declared: “The English are an ethnicity, if you have eyes you can see that… I fear [the creedal-nation experiment] won’t end well.”

During the English riots of 2024, Perry warned that Britain was “entering a period of sectarian violence that could develop into outright civil war”. On Substack, she has described Englishness as a “biological phenomenon” and human beings as “fundamentally quite xenophobic”. On the Rotherham grooming scandal, Perry has claimed that “the racists were right”. She has also written that “immigration restrictionism is the antipogrom position”. In the Wall Street Journal she has described Lucy Connolly, who during the disorder of 2024 wrote on X/Twitter that rioters should “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards [asylum seekers]”, as a “mother and babysitter with no criminal record” who fell afoul of “Two Tier Keir” (Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for inciting racial hatred).

Despite her article for the Critic in 2020 arguing that feminists must “reject left and right”, Perry’s recent podcast guests read like a Who’s Who of reaction. These include Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book which argued that race and intelligence are linked. In early 2025, Perry sat down with Connor Tomlinson, a hard-right activist who believes people “without native British ancestry” should be banned from sitting in parliament.

Reactionary feminists have a tendency to depict the 1950s as a biscuit-tin idyll of rugged paterfamilias and happy homemakers tending to a winsome brood of children. Such claims may ring hollow to the numerous women whose domestic lives were ever punctuated by violence. Marital rape was not recognised as a crime in the UK until 1991; illegal abortions accounted for 17 per cent of maternal deaths in the US in 1965. No-fault divorce laws, for which feminists advocated, have allowed many women to escape abusive marriages. In this context, progress seems less illusory than reactionary feminists suggest. In the US, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled between 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy magazine in December 1953, an indication that heterosexual marriage in the 1950s was not as picture perfect as such postliberal feminists like to suggest.

Political converts tend to lapse into moral absolutism as a way of repudiating their former selves. As Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher once observed of reactionary ex-communists, the hatred of a former ideal can curdle into hostility towards any ideal at all. For some, every act of formerly acknowledged pleasure must carry deferred “consequences”. Harrington, in particular, is hostile to many of the practices she once embraced. The hardening of private renunciation into public moral severity is a familiar phenomenon. Former pickup artists demand chastity; ribald comedians discover God; and here, the onetime founder of a social enterprise startup urges society to undergo a “freedom haircut”.

Quite what this shearing might entail is rarely spelled out, though there are hints. In a 2022 interview with the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Harrington said she was “on the side of Caesar”, musing that the prospect of technomonarchs with “untrammeled power” was “far from the worst option currently on the table”. She later declined to condemn the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. Perry, for her part, has written that sexual asymmetry must be accepted “even if that means curtailing our freedoms”. She opposes no-fault divorce and urges young women to marry and remain married.

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A science-fiction trope is to treat scientific instruments as gateways to “secrets man was not meant to know”. Reactionary feminism is animated by a similar fear: that modernity has revealed too much, permitted too much and unsettled too many hierarchies.

This worldview is antimodern rather than anticapitalist. Though it borrows the language of Marxism and feminism, this vocabulary is quickly abandoned once it has served its rhetorical purpose. Despite the lip service paid to materialism and class in Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, for instance, structural explanations are given short shrift. Indeed, she ultimately blames Marxism for displacing the nuclear family.

Moreover, while they may profit from ideological crossdressing, reactionary feminists are less keen on the real thing. The transgender movement is a particular target of opprobrium: for Harrington, as she writes in her book, its aim is to “replace every single-sex group with a unisex jumble of meat-parts, segregated by unfalsifiable ‘identity’”.

To paraphrase Thomas Carlyle, industrial society dissolved all social bonds except those of the cash nexus. The 20th century produced two broad responses: some clung to race, hierarchy and myth; others sought emancipation through collective struggle. Two decades into the 21st century, reactionary feminism belongs firmly to the former tradition. Its answer to social disintegration is not reform, but enclosure—withdrawal into the home, the family, certain gendered roles and an imagined moral order, policed from above.

And yet Harrington is herself perhaps the ultimate expression of the very encroachment of technology she bemoans. Her online intellectual persona is resplendent with internet neologisms—the result of “thousands upon thousands of hours of committed posting and scrolling”, as the academic David Klemperer and the writer Morgan Jones astutely observed in a 2023 review of Feminism Against Progress for Renewal.

That this worldview is now articulated in the name of feminism is the movement’s most striking innovation. In reclaiming the label “reactionary”, Harrington and Perry reject the idea that feminist history is a story of progress. What feminism does claim as progress, they dismiss as a trap. What they offer instead is a politics of limits, hierarchy and resignation—a boilerplate conservatism, repackaged for a gloomy age whose prevailing emotion is fear.

The following passage is from an article I wrote for the Independent back in 2012.

According to the International Trade Union Confederation’s 2012 annual survey, “anti-union discrimination, violations of collective bargaining rights and the non-respect of collective agreements were frequent and persistent in both the public and private sector”.

After leading a 15-day strike at the state iron mining company in 2009, [one trade unionist] was jailed for seven years for “crimes” that included unlawful assembly, incitement, and violating the government security zone. According to The Human Rights Foundation…his imprisonment had more to do with the fact that he took workers out on strike than with any of the trumped up official charges.

The country in question was Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez had recently won a presidential election. Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution was a great cause célèbre on the left. I remember attending meetings in London as a student activist and seeing members of Socialist Action (a tiny Trotskyist sect linked to then mayor of London Ken Livingstone) wearing tracksuits bearing the yellow, red and blue of the Venezuelan flag. As the Coalition government was implementing austerity in Britain, Venezuela was supposed to demonstrate that ‘another world’ was possible.

There are plenty of things I got wrong during the past 15 years. I didn’t think Britain would vote to leave the European Union in 2016 nor that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022. But for the most part I was right about Venezuela. The abuses I have mentioned above were not excused as part of a ‘dialectic of history’ as the punishment camps in the Soviet Union had been; on the left they were simply ignored - and anybody who mentioned their existence was ostracised in bien pensant circles.

That notwithstanding, it was obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Latin American politics that Hugo Chávez - and later his successor Nicolás Maduro - had more in common with Fidel Castro than with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Not that this prevented the then Independent columnist Owen Jones from describing Chávez as someone who led a “progressive, populist government that says no to neo-liberalism”. Jones even went on a pilgrimage to Venezuela during this period to act as an ‘election monitor’. When he returned he informed readers that Venezuela was “an inspiration to the world, it really does show that there is an alternative”.

Two years later, when students in Venezuela were demonstrating against Maduro, Jones penned another column for the same newspaper claiming that the post-Chávez government was being unfairly maligned. Though prepared to concede that Venezuela was not ‘some sort of paradise’, he nevertheless proceeded to paint those protesting against the government as dupes of the CIA who were agitating for a ‘Pinochet-style coup’. Indeed, once the throat clearing was out the way it was more or less business as usual.

As for the government’s much-maligned democratic credentials, when Chávez was elected in 1998, he received 3.7 million votes against the opposition’s 2.6 million. In 2013, his successor Nicolás Maduro received 7.6 million votes, against the opposition’s 7.4 million.

Democracy is as much about what happens between elections as what occurs on the day of the vote; you don’t need to be shoved into a voting booth at gunpoint to live under a tyranny. Hungary is a similar example closer to home, the main difference being that it is conservatives rather than socialists who are prepared to tell lies about the country.

Or when things get too bad simply never mention the subject again. Jones was hardly alone in this: in the mid-to late 2010s it became deeply unfashionable in left-wing circles to talk about the so-called Bolivarian revolution, which was treated as an embarrassment best forgotten. The country, and the people who lived there, might as well have ceased to exist. When inflation reached the hundreds of thousands of per cent, when journalists were imprisoned, when Maduro rigged the National Assembly so only his supporters could win, when armed militias (the colectivos) rampaged through the country murdering and disappearing people with impunity - all that could be heard was the sound of crickets.

Now that the United States is involved, many of the same people have reemerged from their self-imposed voeux de silence, only to claim a monopoly of insight into the region. Having condemned Trump’s abduction of Maduro, Jones has been forced to account for the fact that the deposed Venezuelan dictator was ‘not a good guy’, as BBC journalists like to say. But he wasn’t one of us either.

There are times when one can witness history being re-written in real time. Faith consists in believing what reason will not believe, as Voltaire put it.

Obliged to acknowledge the existence of Venezuela again, left-wing intellectuals have reached for the familiar backstop of a ‘revolution betrayed’, either by Stalinist purges or Thermidorian reaction. Maduro is a tyrant and a crook but he wasn’t a true socialist. Thus Chávez and Maduro’s irresponsible European and North American admirers get off scot-free. The highest priority is once again to ‘save’ socialism from its actually existing practice.

The individuals involved may wish to preserve their reputations but I suspect such historical revisionism does more damage in the long run. Why do so many revolutions end in squalor, corruption and brutality? Did Venezuela’s oil industry collapse because it was too neoliberal, or because political loyalty replaced technical expertise as a precondition for employment? Is a cult of personality such as that which surrounded both Venezuelan leaders inevitable when advancement in any field is contingent on being a ‘yes’ man? Does it help or hinder the left if all inconvenient facts are stashed away in a drawer marked ‘forgetting'?

For Venezuelans themselves these things really did demonstrate that another world was possible, in many cases one of hunger, grief, fear and uncertainty. I suspect some of them were disappointed to find that their erstwhile comrades had moved on to pastures new.

Left-wing commentators are fond of throwing around a quote by Antonio Gramsci about the old dying and the new struggling to be born. But socialists would do well to consider how this might be applicable to their own project. If socialism and social democracy are in the doldrums, it is partly because genuine historical accounting has rarely taken place. Instead we hear over and over how the city on the hill was thwarted by the machinations of the United States. Perhaps so, but it never tells the full story.

In practice, anybody who attempts to grapple with the downsides of state socialism (and whether or not some flaws may be inherent) is treated with suspicion on the basis that there should be no enemies on the left. And yet ordinary people - who aren’t animated by the same faith as the likes of Jones et al - can hardly fail to notice these outbreaks of epistemological double vision.

What does any of this matter when Trump and Putin are carving up the world? Probably not much. But as a socialist I happen to think the health of the left is quite important. Internationalism should also mean something beyond a mouthful of empty slogans.

Alternatively, you might consider buying my book.

I don’t use social media much these days (especially not Twitter/X), but I dropped in briefly the other day and was struck by how openly pro-appeasement much of the political right has become when it comes to Russia. ‘We won’t fight for you,’ declared Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) in response to a call for Britons to help deter Russian aggression. Such indignant responses were commonplace in the online communities inhabited by the likes of Mr Yaxley-Lennon.

I suspect this is partly down to a shift in the so-called Overton Window because of Donald Trump. There is a growing synergy between US and Russian policy towards Europe which seeks to weaken and divide it from within. Both imperialist powers see our civilisation as decadent and in decline. Both have a fundamentally racist view of non-white peoples. Both worship power, conquest and violence. And both display very little interest in the fates of people living outside of the ‘big powers’.

The recently published United States National Security Strategy talked of ‘help[ing] Europe correct its current course’ and avoiding ‘civilisational erasure’. An earlier version of the document said that US foreign policy should seek to persuade Hungary, Poland, Italy and Austria - four countries already governed by the far right - to leave the European Union. Speaking of which, an AfD deputy (from Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party) has been described in a strategy memo to the Kremlin as ‘under our absolute control’. And so we find ourselves in a situation where the two largest imperial powers are working to bring fascist parties to power in Europe - one by force, another by blackmail.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that we are already at war with Russia. Indeed, the refrain from some quarters - that Russia would never dare to attack us - is disproved by events. As this informative article from August of last year by Daniela Richterova for War on the Rocks puts it:

Mysterious fires have been ravaging civilian and military facilities across Europe. They follow other seemingly random incidents damaging fiber-optic cables, railway systems, GPS signals, department stores, and ammunition manufacturing plants across Europe that have escalated in frequency following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most recently, three high-speed rail lines in France were sabotaged before dawn on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Targets in the United States have also recently taken hits, with a major explosion damaging an ammunition plant in Pennsylvania in April and another deadly explosion hitting a weapons plant in Arkansas in July. While in some cases the target countries are still determining the cause or searching for culprits, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Denmark have arrested individuals connected to these attacks. What is more, with various levels of confidence, these governments have openly declared Russia responsible.

Not that this has stopped right-wingers from squealing about a warning by the head of the armed forces that Britain’s ‘sons and daughters’ must be ready to fight back if Russia attacks us. ‘Patriots should not fight for the British state,’ declared one Telegraph columnist earlier this week. The long and short of it is that they don’t wish to fight alongside people they deem to be foreigners, including many British citizens. The fact this sort of thing is published in what was once a respectable newspaper shows the extent to which what was previously the far right is today simply the right.

The far-right believes Britain is already at war to be sure - albeit not with Russia. Hence the use of military language when talking about foreign migrants. Asylum seekers are routinely described as ‘fighting age males’ who constitute an ‘invasion’ force. This is a way of dehumanising some of the most wretched people on earth. It also has the added benefit of allowing a pseudo-patriotic rabble to cast themselves as warriors valiantly defending Britain from foreign conquest. And yet when it comes to real war the same people say they will refuse to fight (presumably because their taxonomy of human beings places white Russians above those from Syria or Afghanistan).

The chief problem with the internet is the way it clears the way for this sort of flight from reality. Whatever Mickey Mouse theory of the world one holds, there are sure to be 100 million people who will reflect your own brand of stupidity back at you. Of course, there are also 100 million people who will loudly disagree with you. But you can simply block those voices out - or if you are as rich as Elon Musk you may simply buy the platform in question and game the system so that alternative voices remain inaudible.

Right-wing admirers of Russia frequently defend the country on the basis that it propagates ‘traditional values’. Conservative intellectuals like Jordan Peterson interpret Putinism as some kind of revolt against a decadent west. Russian campaigns against LGBT organisations would seem to support this narrative. However, traditional values in Russia mean little more than the survival of the political regime. Russia has higher rates of divorce, abortion, addiction, and violence than most Western democracies. It is also a more violent and materialistic society. Like some of the ‘useful idiots’ from a previous era, the Kremlin’s contemporary admirers are devoted to a mirage.

Outright Russophilia remains rare on the political left. More common is a kind of equivocation or moral equivalence rooted in parochial isolationism. Readers of both the Telegraph and Tribune would prefer to move on and talk about something else. This finds expression in a torrent of cliches and anaemic language you hear whenever the subject of British support for Ukraine is broached. Last week I watched some Hoxton mullet on PoliticsJoe try to dress up a reactionary argument about the ‘national interest’ and ‘foreign wars’ as something radical and clever. The prospect of war with Russia is an inconvenience and anyone who takes the threat seriously will be accused of warmongering or suffering from amnesia regarding the ‘disastrous military adventures’ of the past. Everything is merely a recapitulation of Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya under different constellations. Anyone who objects is branded an ‘armchair general’ (as if civilian control of the military is a bad thing). It is a substitute for thinking that the left carries around with it like a congenital hump.

It is common to hear the fallacy that deterrence equals escalation when in fact the reverse is true. One of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 (or, indeed, in 2014) is that it does not have an adequate deterrent - i.e. it does not sit under the NATO security umbrella. Bullies only understand force, as any fool can tell you. Dictatorships resemble crime families. As Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two of Russia’s most respected investigative journalists, now at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), put it:

the only way to avoid a much larger war may be for European deterrence to impose badly needed discipline on the Kremlin.

And so we arrive at the paradoxical position where war becomes more likely because large numbers of people have convinced themselves that the worst possible outcome is ‘escalation’.

Comparisons to Nazi Germany are frequently hyperbolic and are usually best avoided. However just as Hitler styled himself as a sworn enemy of the 1918 revolution in Germany, so Putin considers the breakup of the Soviet Union to be a monstrous crime. Hitler’s resolution that ‘there must never again be a November 1918’ finds its reverberation in the Putinist desire to reverse the humiliations Russia experienced in the 1990s. Therefore anything is justified if it prevents the current ruling class in Russia from losing its power (that ruling class being, in the eyes of Putin and his inner circle, the only people capable of holding things together).

There is a certain irony in the fact that those on right and left who draw, respectively, on Churchillian ‘finest hour’ rhetoric or anti-fascist cliché for propaganda purposes, are much less interested in facing down a despotic ruler in the here and now. This can sometimes come as a shock to those of us who grew up imbibing heroic stories about the Second World War. To be a quisling or a collaborator was seen as something disgraceful. Chamberlain’s name was a term of abuse. But then moral identity only emerges when tested by history; or as Malraux put it, ‘a man knows nothing of himself until he has acted’.

The same is true for you or me of course. But one surely does well not to surrender before a single shot has been fired by one’s own side.

Alternatively, you can buy my book Lost Boys here.

With so much else labelled ‘woke’ in recent years, it was probably inevitable that fascists would be given the label too. And so we have the ‘woke right’, a term coined by conservatives and centrists who appear to be having second thoughts about some of their MAGA allies.

The term has been knocking around on the internet for several years but the recent murder of Charlie Kirk has seen it picked up by mainstream outlets including the New York Times and the Economist. Following the assassination of the right-wing YouTuber earlier this month, various Trump supporters called for Kirk’s posthumous critics to be fired from jobs, removed from public life or worse. According to the Economist, whether they like it or not this slots them firmly into the intellectual tradition of ‘woke’:

Just as members of the woke left are fixated on systemic racism, the woke right thinks international liberalism is the structural explanation for their misfortune. This must be counteracted in strong terms, including through the use of cancellation.

The reactionary political satirist Andrew Doyle has described the woke right as ‘a kind of ideological doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts’. Similarly, the pro-Trump podcaster Konstantin Kisin detects the influence of wokeness in a resurgent white nationalism. ‘The deranged worldview of the woke left, along with its disregard for truth, hatred of the West and falsification of history, is now being replicated on the right.’

If this sounds like the old wife beater defence that’s because it is. Parts of the right may be veering into authoritarianism but apparently that too can be blamed on the left, either for giving them ideas or for provoking them. Everything must be refracted through the prism of the culture wars, including a resurgent fascism. Authoritarian tendencies on the right are thus framed as a product of the campus politics of the 2010s. According to Bari Weiss at the Free Press:

‘Over the past two decades the woke left said: “Everything is taboo” - our Founding Fathers, the idea that men and women are different, the idea that wearing hoop earrings is verboten because it’s cultural appropriation, and on and on. Naturally, people got fed up. Including people like me. Then some on the right exploited that anger, and said: “Nothing is taboo” - not words like gay or retarded, but also not Holocaust revisionism or white nationalism.’

One stifling orthodoxy - of the po-faced social justice variety - has provoked an equal and opposite reaction. Such a formulation allows anti-woke culture warriors like Weiss to make the appropriate noises about developments on their right flank while still landing on their feet. The obsessive focus on leftist excess was correct all along, not least because the far-right is now the far-left. Or something like that.

Tempting as it must be for soi-disant classical liberals to blame their most repugnant pro-Trump allies on the left, it makes for shockingly bad history. In fact it’s an inversion of the truth: racial chauvinism is not a doppelgänger of leftist excess but a reaction against the unravelling of hierarchies of race and sex.

To be sure, the authoritarian temperament is not exclusive to left or right. Moreover, conservatives can at times be the left’s best students, even if this is more tactical than ideological. As Corey Robin put it in The Reactionary Mind, his 2011 compendium of conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, ‘Some of the stuffiest partisans of order on the right have been more than happy, when it has suited their purposes, to indulge in a little bit of mayhem and madness.’

But content matters as well as form. Many of those today issuing pompous denunciations of the woke right have made lucrative careers out of depicting progressivism as a forerunner to Bolshevism. Of nobody is this truer than James Lindsay, an anti-woke provocateur for whom all reform leads to revolution. ‘Like their counterparts on the Woke Left,’ he writes, ‘the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there’s a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the [white] identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading’.

In other words, because of left-wing goading, white nationalists have reluctantly decided to embrace a culture of racial victimhood. Only a fool or demagogue could believe this rubbish. As to how the woke right has come to see itself as the benighted victim of anti-white racism, the works of James Lindsay may provide a clue. In his 2022 book Race Marxism, Lindsay claims that white people in America are being treated in a way that ‘parallels the Nazi scapegoating of Jews’. Anti-racist activists, he says, wish to enact a ‘total Racial Bolshevik Revolution’ and a ‘Dictatorship of the Antiracists’ comparable to Mao’s China. Indeed throughout the book Lindsay depicts opposition to racism as little more than a smokescreen for the overthrow of western civilisation. In the end, a cigarette paper separates the paranoid ramblings of the author from the paranoid ramblings of the woke right (I prefer to call them ‘fascists’).

I have my own criticisms of wokeism to be sure. It can sometimes encourage people to define themselves in terms of mutually irreconcilable ethnic groups that can never truly understand one other. It holds that words are actions; law is political; racism is permanent; and that only white people can be racist. Bashful left-wing fellow travellers would do well to acknowledge these ideological deformities along with the real world excesses that have at times accompanied them. Publishers really did pulp novels because a handful of online reviewers deemed them ‘insensitive’; businesses were shut down for serving ‘inauthentic’ food; and venues cancelled comedians because employees claimed they might express ‘dangerous’ opinions.

But some perspective is in order. Woke is self-evidently not ‘a vehicle to bring Marxist theory into the United States’, as Lindsay and others have claimed. It is a portmanteau of postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory; as such it is hostile to universalist theories like Marxism.

Not that this has prevented the dauphins of Joseph McCarthy from depicting it as a front for communist subversion. But then, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once observed, ‘The right-winger needs his communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up.’

And yet whatever reservations one may have about the doctrine-dazzled left, it should be possible to make a moral distinction between those who seek to rid the world of racism (as most woke-adjacent people do) and those who try to propagate it. Or in a formulation that phoney centrists might understand, perhaps woke is an equal and opposite reaction to the decades of bigotry that preceded it. Just a thought.

Anti-woke culture warriors share more or less the same interpretation of recent history with those they call the woke right. Briefly summarised it is this: in the 2010s the United States (and Britain) was captured by an ideological fever. The apogee of this political eruption came in 2020, when protests against the murder of George Floyd swept through western cities. As the forces of law and order prostrated themselves before the new religion of wokeness, rioting and disorder broke out. Statues were toppled and the mob ran riot.

The liberal centre subsequently split as it does on such occasions: some made common cause with the reactionary camp and began to pump out agitprop for those unnerved by the potential social implications of what they had witnessed. Others sought to remain equidistant from both sides; others concluded that the main danger lay in the backlash itself (the storming of the Capitol on January 6 provided a glimpse of what genuine authoritarianism looked like).

I’m prepared to believe that Donald Trump profited from certain outbreaks of woke zealotry. Yet even this risks conceding too much. To state the obvious, white racial chauvinism anticipated woke by quite some distance1. What’s more, its historical virulence has as often as not coincided with periods of right-wing political dominance. Ku Klux Klan membership peaked at four million during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. White power activists officially declared war on the federal government during Ronald Reagan’s first term. The former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke won over half the white vote in the Louisiana gubernatorial race during the George H.W. Bush presidency. Put another way, fascists have been with us for much longer than Robin DiAngelo have been shaking down guilt ridden liberals. The forerunner to the Black Lives Matter movement was the some lives matter more than others movement2.

American writers including John Ganz, Matt McManus and Quinn Slobodian have done a good job tracing how this stuff has made its way into the bloodstream of the mainstream GOP. There are good reasons to see it as a maniacal reaction to the steady unravelling of hierarchies of race and sex. Ignazio Silone’s description of fascism as ‘a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place’ captures it better than any variant of both sidesism. Then again Silone was a democratic socialist so his work will be ignored by the purveyors of the ‘horseshoe’ theory of political life (the idea of an absolute equivalence between far-left and far-right).

While it’s true that Stalinist authoritarianism has more in common with fascism than with pluralist democracy (beware those for whom the main enemy is always liberalism), horseshoe theory is too neat and tidy for my liking. Not least because it inflicts a historical injustice on those writers of the far-left who had the measure of both Hitler and Stalin long before their more respectable counterparts. Proponents of the equivalence doctrine have never satisfactorily answered the following question: who are the fascist equivalents of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell and Rosa Luxemburg? I’ll wait.

Back in our own time, beware of those who seek to hover above it all, casting a weary eye over the insanity below and ‘bristling at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives’. Theirs is less a fleshed out analysis of a resurgent right-wing authoritarianism than a chicken-brained attempt to pivot back to their own obsessions.

2

In Britain we have our own version of this bullshit. The further right you go the less agency people are said to have. Racist rioters who smashed up mosques and tried to burn refugees alive in the summer of 2024 are depicted by right-wing media as responding mechanically to left-wingers ‘ramming multiculturalism down their throats’ et cetera.

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Alternatively, you can buy my new book Lost Boys here.

Following his assassination last week, the far-right political influencer Charlie Kirk has been posthumously lauded by various commentators for everything from his supposed ability to connect with the ‘youth’ to his ‘civility’. In a characteristically simpering piece for UnHerd, Sohrab Ahmari claimed that Kirk ‘championed open, earnest debate’. ‘Kirk provided one of the very few spaces in which the American Left and Right could meet and hash things out on earnest, civil terms,’ he wrote. Even American liberals have conceded that Kirk had that much going for him. According to Ezra Klein in the New York Times, Kirk ‘practiced politics the right way’.

I despise political violence. Aside from the immorality of murdering people for their political opinions, it’s stupid and counterproductive. As the great Palestinian scholar Edward Said once put it, the weak should use means that render their oppressors uncomfortable - something random acts of murder can never do.

And yet during his short life Kirk seemed to have fewer scruples, though you wouldn’t know it from his retrospective sanctification by credulous commentators. When Paul Pelosi (the husband of House Speaker Nancy) was attacked in 2022 with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco, Kirk put out a call for an ‘amazing patriot’ to bail the attacker out (though he made sure to include some obligatory throat clearing about the ‘awfulness’ of the attack).

Despite such attempts to have it both ways, Kirk saw politics in a starkly Manichaean key: Donald Trump was, he said, the last chance to save ‘Western civilisation’ from ‘secular godless totalitarianism’. As well as being both pitiful and portentous, rhetoric like this was implicated in the violent assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the lead up to that disgraceful episode, Kirk not only acted as a megaphone for bogus allegations of voter fraud, but boasted of sending 80 buses of ‘patriots’ to help foment the riot at which seven people subsequently died. The mob that descended on the American capital that day evinced little desire to hash anything out in earnest, civil terms. Perhaps because they had been whipped into a frenzy that the election had been stolen by those seeking to impose ‘godless totalitarianism’.

Indeed, the radioactive response in some quarters to Kirk’s assassination is more befitting of his ‘legacy’ than any insipid tribute. Various MAGA influencers have spent recent days declaring ‘war’ on the American left and calling for its violent suppression. A certain amount of online hyperbole is perhaps to be expected. But these are not merely the deranged fragments of an online inceltariat. America’s Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has implied that the State Department will review the legal status of immigrants who mock Kirk’s death.

As I think I’ve made obvious by now, I have little time for the scourge of weepy revisionism. Charlie Kirk was a bigot and a misogynist and a promoter of too many conspiracy theories to list, including that of a plot to replace white people in America. To posthumously (and euphemistically) describe him as a ‘divisive figure’ simply won’t do. The organisation he founded, Turning Point USA, was a knock off John Birch Society, dedicated to the same paranoid vision of rooting out ‘communists’ and ‘subversives’. In 2016 it published a ‘Professor Watchlist’, meant to encourage McCarthyite witch-hunts against ‘leftists’. The organisation has a UK branch too; I was recently just a few yards away when its armband-wearing chief operating officer gave a Nazi salute following a foam-flecked speech at an anti-refugee protest in Portsmouth. Forgive me if I don’t think much of a ‘legacy’ as paltry as this.

I suppose I’m more interested in what the stratospheric rise of a person like Charlie Kirk says about the state of political discourse. He was in many ways representative of a type that has come to dominate the internet’s ‘infotainment’ ecosystem in recent years. His purported renown among a section of the youth probably explains the urge among certain mainstream newscasters to conjure away the nasty bits. They too desperately want to be down with the kids.

It is certainly true that Kirk was a successful operator in the digital format in which politics is increasingly consumed. He was an effective political entrepreneur and a skilful gladiator in the cybernated coliseum; a pioneer of the easily-digestible 10-second ‘slap-down’; a hero to a subdivision of a subliterate generation in a subliterate nation.

But did he really promote ‘debate’? Only in the sense that a muzzle promotes conversation. As Kyle Spencer, who spent time with Kirk while writing his 2022 book Raising them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, told New York magazine a few days ago:

‘If your definition of a debater is somebody who is 10-plus years older than the people he is debating, spends hours and hours a day coming up with arguments for his belief system, who goes to communities of much younger people, finds topics in which he is a great expert and a great debater on, brings them into the fold to discuss these topics, then uses what they say on videos that his organisation edits, and puts them online to mock his opponents and the views of his opponents, then [Kirk’s] a good debater.’

Even the radioactive politics he espoused, designed to prey on the most base and primal of human instincts, appear to have been partly churned out to order. As Spencer pointed out in the same interview, ‘He [Kirk] always seemed to have the views of the people who were giving him money or power’.

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In a characteristic piece of hyperbole, the President said Kirk’s ‘legacy’ would ‘live on for countless generations to come’. As to the extent of this legacy, a modest stack of ear-splitting airport fodder (a representative sample: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West) hardly counts as an oeuvre. In truth, like the majority of internet loudmouths, Charlie Kirk ceased to exist as a person of any real significance the moment he stopped posting.

Just as his murder was a by-product of the Second Amendment he vociferously championed (a form of political extremism in its own right), Kirk’s persona could only reach the audience it did because of a digital landscape that rewards those who adopt the hysterical tone and register of talk radio. He specialised in a style of discourse that was emotive, adversarial, and most of all designed to generate maximum online engagement (clicks, likes, shares) regardless of the consequences.

Most people seem to recognise that such algorithmic sludge is not synonymous with a healthy political culture. Yet the prevailing telos seems to inoculate most from any sustained critique: technology is inevitable and technology is progress.

The classic text on this fallacy is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, published some 40 years ago. Postman’s strikingly simple insight - drawing on the work of media theorist Marshal McLuhan - was that the technologies we use to communicate invariably shape the content. Postman saw how lofty political subjects had been rendered ‘shrivelled and absurd’ as the ‘magic of electronics’ supplanted the ‘magic of writing’. Though we continue to use the same well-worn labels - debate, democracy, free speech, et cetera - their meaning has been utterly transformed by the constraints of the medium. As Postman might have put it, we don’t see a debate on the internet. We see a series of short clips in which people who call themselves debaters appear.

The objects of Postman’s ire seem relatively benign when compared to the forces unleashed by the algorithm. At the risk of sounding tautological, the social media age is less about entertainment and more about capturing attention. If television reduced politics to a series of soundbites and carefully crafted images designed to produce impressions rather than sustained reasoning, social media has created a simulacrum of the democratic commons. A place where the purveyors of bigotry and superstition furnish the world with an ever-expanding constituency of volatile and resentful losers. It is both tragic and fitting that the killer should emerge from the same poisonous digital swamp navigated so expertly by his victim.

Alternatively, you can buy my new book Lost Boys here.

Orlando, Florida, October 2022

A man with a closely cropped Mohawk hands me a rectangular box and gives me a bone-crushing handshake that bends my fingers until they nearly break. It’s an assertion of dominance. I’ve just arrived and somebody is already trying to win a cock fight. The box emits a pungent aroma. Soap – three bars of it – are inside, each named after an iconic masculine cultural figure, in this case Bond, Durden and Maverick.

The soap comes infused with a potent pheromone kick that promises to ‘enhance alpha status, masculinity, charisma, mischief and attractiveness’. I want to test this claim out but when I look around all I see are burly white dudes with Ned Kelly beards, tight-fitting T-shirts and scrunched up facial expressions. I make a mental note to splash myself with Bond before I head downtown to the bars tonight.

I am at the Avanti Palms Resort and Conference Center on International Drive, a popular vacation spot a short distance down the freeway from the famous Walt Disney World. It’s October but the weather is hot and muggy. Outside the front of the hotel, rods of sunlight slip between the tall and slender palm trees and land on the dew-glazed verges. Meanwhile, in the hotel lobby sunburned tourists melt into faux leather armchairs and crane their necks at iPhones, their white flab turned a shade of tandoori red by the blazing October sun. Conference attendees arrive in a steady stream, heavyset men in T-shirts emblazoned with uncompromising slogans – ‘Barbarian’, ‘Freedom not Fear’, ‘Give Violence a Chance’ – who zigzag through the scattered fortress of suitcases and human flesh.

In the conference suite itself a selection of merchandise is spread out on a trestle table. Vendibles include quasi-MAGA (Make America Great Again) trucker caps. Priced at $37, they come in red, white, blue and black – plus a pink one for the women back at home (preferably in the kitchen). The caps feature slogans that are variations on the same theme. ‘Make Women Great Again’, ‘Make Women Sexy Again’, ‘Make Men Alpha Again’ and ‘The Future is Patriarchy’. There is something for the kids too: a brown and white teddy bear wearing a vest that says ‘FEMINISM IS CANCER’.

This is the 21 Convention, the self-proclaimed Woodstock of the manosphere now in its sixteenth year. For four days every October the alpha males of the internet come together to rail against the feminist conspiracy which they believe runs the world. The long-time organiser of the gathering, Anthony ‘Dream’ Johnson, describes the four-day event as ‘TED Talks for men’ – albeit with a misogynist twist. A diminutive man with a closely cropped beard and a MWGA (Make Women Great Again) trucker cap that sits permanently on his head, Johnson is the self-proclaimed president of the manosphere. He started the 21 Convention in 2006 and claims to have ‘helped over 100 million men’. He calls himself ‘beachmuscles’ on social media and takes beta males and turns them into ‘apex red-pilled alpha males’. Prices for one-to-one consulting begin at $500 an hour.

*

The consensus in Orlando is that society is waging a ‘war’ on all things masculine; that courts and institutions are working in concert for the benefit of women; that false rape accusations and paternity fraud are rife; and that modern women are out of control. The turnout is relatively small compared to some of the other workshops I have attended during my research: I count forty men in total. This probably has something to do with the $2,000 ticket price. Only diehards come to live events; most choose to engage with the recordings at home: Johnson’s 21 Studios YouTube channel has over half a million subscribers.

In between sessions, men float around the conference rooms flaring their latissimus dorsi muscles and tensing their arms. Derogatory terms – ‘faggot’, ‘soy boy’, ‘beta cuck’ – are regularly affixed to those deemed to be lacking in the approved masculine qualities. Anthony Johnson’s go-to insults all draw on the theme of homosexuality. Things he doesn’t like are either ‘gay’, ‘totally gay’ or ‘totally fucking gay’.

In a world where masculinity is bound up with the sexual conquest of women – not to mention an exhausting, round-the-clock assertion of dominance – homosexuality is seen as undermining male hegemony. In contrast to other red pill teachings, it is treated as a cultural choice rather than a biological inevitability. Speakers in Orlando blame the ‘rainbow community’ for women’s sexual liberation as well as everything else defective about the modern world. Indeed, the ubiquity of anti-gay rhetoric at the conference is such that I will feel short-changed if none of the speakers ever shows up in the news under a heap of male prostitutes.

‘Stop being gay, that’s bad for you,’ declares Jeff Younger, a thrice married man who says he likes women ‘chaste and obedient’. Younger, fifty-six, was once discharged from the United States military following an ‘admission of homosexuality’. Yet he’s put all that behind him and these days purports to follow traditional Christian teachings on sexuality. ‘We live in a profoundly decadent age,’ he tells the audience. In 2022 Younger ran as a Republican candidate for the Texas House of Representatives on a ticket campaigning against gender-affirming treatments for children (he lost in the primary runoff). Younger has also been involved in a custody battle with the mother of his biological son over whether the child should be allowed to change gender. It isn’t just gender transition he opposes but gender non-conformity: the men in his family are forbidden even from growing their hair out.

‘The gay community has brought a lot of these things in and women have piggybacked on it,’ says Greg Adams, a YouTube influencer who coaches men in what he calls the ‘free agent lifestyle’. Predictably enough, the free and easy life is off limits for women. ‘You can’t turn a hoe into a housewife,’ says Adams, who evinces an implausible concern that ‘women will end up single and old’. At least four of the speakers at the 21 Summit are former pickup artists. But in recent times the teachings of Genesis have supplanted those found in The Game. Red pill spaces today overflow with former hard-partying womanisers who are all about conservative values. Johnson, a self-confessed former playboy, used his own keynote to bemoan a ‘complete decline in female modesty’.

*

One of the most influential red pill gurus (and a previous 21 Convention speaker until he fell out with Johnson) is Rollo Tomassi (real name George Miller). Tomassi styles himself as the ‘Godfather’ of the red pill: a sceptical observer of the human condition who coolly doles out his unvarnished wisdom to an audience of men bamboozled by the ‘gynocentric social order’ (i.e. a society ruled for the benefit of women).

Reading his 2013 book The Rational Male, it’s easy to grasp why Tomassi’s audience features a preponderance of men who have been chastened by acrimonious divorces and failed relationships. A hostile and antagonistic tone emanates from every page like steam billowing off hot tarmac. Together with a long list of gripes about modern women, the book also provides the ‘newly unplugged’ male reader with advice on how to ‘flip the script’ on women. Men are encouraged to escape the ‘feminine matrix’ by applying a mixture of boilerplate self-improvement advice and alpha male cosplaying. Those who want to learn from Tomassi himself can pay $1,000 an hour for one-to-one mentoring on ‘sussing women out’.

The Godfather of the red pill’s main qualification for claiming a monopoly of insight in this area is the monogamous marriage he has been in since 1996. And the fact he adopts former racing greyhounds at his home in Reno, Nevada. ‘Everything I ever needed to learn about life I learned from my greyhounds,’ he has said. In case this CV fails to reassure, Tomassi endows his work with a scientific patina, routinely falling back on obscure graphs and charts and quoting (selectively) from evolutionary psychology and behaviourism (the idea that behaviours are acquired through conditioning). At other times he tries to sound like an anthropologist by making references to ‘hunter-gatherers’, ‘lizard brains’ and ‘tribalist beginnings’.

Along with other red pill ideologues, Tomassi maintains that ‘men’s and women’s brains are wired differently’. Men, it turns out, are ‘hard-wired’ to do the things they have always wanted to do: play the field, chase women half their age, and lord it over the wife back at home. Women on the other hand are programmed by their ‘evolved mental firmware’ to smile and put up with it.

Tomassi also offers the angsty men who tune in each week to his YouTube channel (224,000 subscribers) a comeuppance fantasy. The women who turned them down, left them on read and slept with other men are destined for a fall. She mistakenly thought she could have it all. Instead, she’s likely to end up depressed and alone as a ‘growing undercurrent of mid-life women…regret their past decisions to remain single into spinsterhood’.

*

In the early days of the manosphere, men might stumble across pickup artist forums while looking for tips on what cologne to wear or how to ask a woman out. Two decades later, masculinity influencers were warning that even men in ostensibly loving relationships were at risk of being betrayed. ‘Women pick a monogamous marriage and they cheat with high-status guys,’ Jordan Peterson told the Joe Rogan Experience in 2018. Justin Waller, a business partner of Andrew Tate and popular masculinity influencer in his own right (and a sometime guest at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort), told his 1.1 million followers that a woman would only love them until she found a better option. ‘You think she won’t leave you for that guy who makes a little bit more money? Promise you she will.’

Men are around twice as likely to cheat on a partner as women. Yet rhetoric like this helped to fuel a preoccupation in the manosphere with paternity fraud – i.e. when a man is told (falsely) that a child is biologically his by the child’s mother. There was a widespread perception that huge numbers of men were unwittingly raising children that were not their own. Multiple speakers at the 21 Convention claimed that married men were seen as potential ‘targets’ of paternity fraud by duplicitous women. Meanwhile on social media, Tomassi was calling for the ‘Federally mandated DNA paternity testing of all births’.

A heightened sense of paranoia about the paternity of one’s children was downstream from the red pill trope that women were biologically programmed to seek out ‘alpha sperm’ behind the back of her ‘beta provider’ husband. In 2018, Jordan Peterson claimed that paternity fraud was ‘more common than anybody suspected’. It was not unusual in the manosphere to hear the claim that between 10 and 30 per cent of children were being raised by men who were unaware they were not the biological father. Yet despite the ubiquity of such eye-catching figures, cases of misattributed paternity are exceedingly rare. A 1999 study found the extent of paternity discrepancy in the UK to be just 1.6 per cent.15 Meanwhile the most reliable study for North America has put the non-paternity rate at between 1 and 3 per cent.

The 30 per cent figure appears to have originated from a transcript of a small symposium on the ethics of artificial insemination that was carried out in a town in south-east England in 1972. The results from the study were never published so the method of testing and population sample were not independently verified, though one participant in the symposium is reported to have described the sample as ‘highly biased’. Moreover, DNA techniques in the early 1970s were unsophisticated compared to DNA profiling as we know it today, which wasn’t developed until the 1980s.

A 2016 review of the scientific literature found a much lower incidence of misattributed paternity than the figures commonly cited in the manosphere. The authors of the review were dismissive of the idea that women cheat to secure the best genes for their offspring. ‘The observed low EPP [extra-pair paternity] rates challenge the idea that women routinely “shop around” for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations... Human EPP rates have stayed near constant at around 1 per cent across several human societies over the past several hundred years.’

*

At the red pill summit in Orlando the sexual double standard is treated as a given. Men are encouraged to ‘spin plates’ – which is to say, to date multiple women at the same time – whereas women who do the same are diminished as ‘sluts’ and ‘whores’ who are ‘run through’ and ‘ruined’. The importance of a woman’s ‘body count’ was emphasised ad nauseam in Orlando. Within a heterosexual context, men can do more or less as they please. However, according to red pill ‘science’, women who want a piece of the action risk losing their ability to ‘pair bond’ – i.e. to form a romantic emotional attachment.

It is ironic that being a red-blooded alpha male should co-exist with a gnawing sense of performance anxiety. But then, the notion that she might have had better is unnerving to those prone to think of themselves as dominant alphas – a rank that demands a certain thrust and potency. From this tension emerges an uptight machismo that feels mortally threatened by party girls, rainbow flags and Andrea Dworkin.

During my week in Orlando, sitting at the back of the air-conditioned conference suite listening to this stuff, I was often tempted to laugh. It’s an emotion that is hard to avoid when confronted with such a taut and inflexible aesthetic. There was something comic about the brutal handshakes, the flexing of muscles and the regular conflations of strength with brute force – not to mention the arrant humourlessness of it all. Whether turning people like this into figures of fun diminishes them or not is another matter. In any case, the jovial mood soon gives way to something darker.

This is an abridged and edited extract from Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere. You can buy my book here. Alternatively, you might consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. It costs £4.95 a month and as a freelance writer, every paid subscription means I can dedicate more time to writing this newsletter.

Portsmouth, 8 August 2025

The Royal Beach hotel on Portsmouth’s seafront is a Victorian-era building with (so I’m told) excellent views of the city’s historic port. Built in 1866 in the Edwardian Baroque style, this faded palace has hosted some illustrious guests over the years, including Winston Churchill, General Eisenhower, and the Queen Mother. However, it is the hotel’s latest occupants who are arguably causing the biggest stir.

As of March, 749 asylum seekers had received support in Portsmouth – 96 of whom were placed in hotels, with the remainder in dispersed accommodation, according to government statistics. On Friday 8 August, there was to be a protest on the Portsmouth seafront against the presence of a portion of that number in the Royal Beach.

I first learned about the demonstration from a local Facebook group. “The lions are gathering,” read one comment below the line. When I arrived in the city, I quickly spotted my first big cat: a bald middle-aged man in a loud Union Jack shirt. Having wagered that we were heading to the same place, I trailed my unwitting guide several hundred yards to the official meeting point on the promenade. I strolled between the placards – ‘stop the boats’, ‘veterans before refugees’, ‘fuck Starmer’ – while he blended effortlessly into the shimmying backdrop of red, white, and blue.

About 100 people had gathered in front of the South Parade Pier to protest against the asylum seekers shut away across the road. “No more refugees, send them home,” yelled a diminutive man into a loudspeaker. The smell of watermelon mist vape filled the air. The oratory, which drowned out the keee-yaaah squawks of local seagulls, was directed at the occupants of the hotel and a smaller group of counter-protestors from Stand Up To Racism who had assembled across the street. “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here,” they chanted. The intermittent toot of car horns for the anti-migrant protestors told another story.

This Friday had been designated by radical-right groups as “abolish asylum day”. Mass protests had been organised at eight locations across the country where asylum seekers were being housed. There was another protest here a week before; there was also one outside Portsmouth Guildhall for which more than 1,000 people turned out; and another down the road in Waterlooville, where the council had planned to house 35 asylum seekers in a former retail premises. The plans were dropped after a local outcry and the intervention of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the area’s MP. The protests mostly passed off peacefully, though some anti-racists reported being verbally abused.

Shortly after I reached the seafront on that Friday evening, a middle-aged man in a blue ‘Portsmouth Patriots’ T-shirt asked if I wanted a sticker for my lapel. Superimposed over yet another Union Jack were the words ‘STOP IMPORTING, START DEPORTING’. More revealing was the website listed at the bottom which belonged to Turning Point UK – a radical-right pressure group that wants to deport refugees while importing America’s ‘culture war’. It is a strategy that seems to be gaining traction. Between 30 July and 7 August 2024, 29 anti-immigration demonstrations and riots took place across 27 towns and cities in the UK. This year has seen a further wave of anti-asylum sentiment, though most of the protests have so far been peaceful.

Turning Point UK’s ‘chief operating officer’ (even the organisation’s nomenclature is parasitic of American corporate terminology) is Nick ‘Tenco’ Tenconi – a bombastic ex-personal trainer who assumed the leadership of the rump of UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party) in February.

Tenconi arrived on the seafront a little after 7pm, escorted by a couple of heavies. He made a short but vitriolic speech denouncing those shuttered up in the hotel as “savages” who didn’t care about our values. Really, they were his values. Liberalism was out and God was in. Tenconi promised that UKIP would “reinstate Christianity” were it to win power. Both prospects seem vanishingly small. Nigel Farage left UKIP in 2018, accusing its then Leader, Gerard Batten, of being obsessed with Islam and English Defence League co-founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’). “UKIP wasn’t founded to be a party fighting a religious crusade,” Farage told reporters at the time. Since his departure, UKIP has haemorrhaged support. Farage’s old party once forced David Cameron into offering a referendum on membership of the European Union. These days it is little more than a ramshackle street movement.

But the pivot to religious zealotry met with the approval of at least one ‘born again’ protestor on Portsmouth’s seafront. While his wife walked around behind us carrying a flag that said ‘JESUS IS KING’, a middle-aged man named Paul, clad like several others in a blue ‘Portsmouth Patriots’ T-shirt, told me that the Church of England was an “abomination” that had gone “completely woke”. Its endorsement of same-sex marriage was a particular sore point.

But what about the biblical injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’? I asked. Paul’s conception of it was an exclusive one. Refugees coming to Britain were “mostly Muslims” and “don’t respect our Christian way of life”. Paul still believed that the Southport killer, Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff to churchgoing Christian parents, was Muslim.

I didn’t come to Portsmouth to argue the point but I was curious to know how Paul felt so confident in pronouncing on the religious beliefs of people he had never met. “Christians wouldn’t lie [to come to Britain],” he said. I felt I already knew what Paul’s rehearsed answer would be if I gave a counter-example: they were not real Christians. Besides, I wasn’t sure he would listen to an irreligious journalist who had come down on a day trip from London, a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah to the right-wing evangelical crowd.

With all the talk of Britain being a ‘Christian nation’, I felt compelled to look up the 2021 Census, which found that a minority (46.2 per cent) of the population still identified as Christian. Moreover, the dwindling flock of British Christians were mostly followers of the mild Anglican variety. The stuff Tenconi was espousing, on the other hand, was Christian nationalism – eschatological, Manichean, and thirsting for (in his words) a “political revolution” that would bring about “salvation”.

The neo-Nazi Homeland Party is active on the ground in Portsmouth. It has been handing out leaflets warning that “indigenous” Britons are being “replaced” by immigrants. A small coterie of the far-right were in attendance that night. The runic tattoos and occasional shouts of “burn them out” gave it away. Under the watchful eyes of the local constabulary, every so often, they hurled a half-empty can of Stella at the small anti-racist contingency across the road. “Paedos, paedos, paedos,” they chanted in motley unison.

Not everyone there could be reduced to leftist caricature. That would be to disdain what are, in some cases, legible complaints. Several people I spoke to were at pains to point out – often before they realised that I was a journalist – that Britain needs some level of immigration. “We just want to know who’s living in our community,” said one 40-year-old woman.

Earlier this year, one resident of the Royal Beach, a 33-year-old asylum seeker, Rabie Knissi, was jailed for 10 years for a sex attack on a local woman of a similar age. The man pushed the victim against a parked car before attempting to rape her. Elsewhere, protests kicked off outside the Bell Hotel in Epping after an Ethiopian refugee, Hadush Kebatu, was charged with sexual assault for allegedly attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl.

Many of the flags and placards on display in Portsmouth played on a wider purported threat to women and girls. ‘PROTECT OUR CHILDREN’, screamed the largest banner that was draped over railings on the promenade. ‘Protect our girls, how many more?’ read another.

Such complaints are hard to disentangle from the inflammatory portmanteau of zombie statistics, tabloid hearsay, and provincial prejudice that often accompanies them. During his speech, Tenconi reeled off some implausible-sounding statistics of his own, which I’d previously heard Farage cite. “Forty percent of sexual assaults in London over the course of the last five years have been committed by those born overseas,” the Reform UK Leader has claimed.

In reality, foreign-born individuals are less likely to be charged with sexual offences than those born in the UK. Ironically enough, Farage had arrived at his inflated percentage by drastically undercounting the number of foreign-born people that actually live in Britain.

After the arrest and trial of Rabie Knissi, George Madgwick, one of Portsmouth’s independent councillors, toured the studios of right-wing television implying a cover-up. This is now part of the radical-right’s modus operandi. Its members style themselves as dissident truth-tellers and foes of the establishment. Last year, after the Southport murders, Nigel Farage used his platform on GB News to sow speculation as to whether “the truth is being withheld from us”. In Nuneaton, a Reform council leader recently accused police of “covering-up” details about two men, reportedly Afghan asylum seekers, who were charged over the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl. Warwickshire police dismissed the claims.

The number of hotels being used for asylum seekers has reduced from more than 400 in the summer of 2023 to fewer than 210 today. The Government has announced plans to end the use of hotels to house migrants altogether by 2029. It has also said that foreign criminals will face immediate deportation after sentencing.

But some people are never happy, and the protests continue. Some of those involved in the demonstrations make no effort to hide the fact that they see the Labour Government as illegitimate. Almost all the Facebook groups set up by organisers of the anti-migrant protests feature petitions demanding an immediate general election. Among all the caps lock fury and bumptious lectures on Englishness from people who show scant respect for the language, a common theme emerges: the Labour Party is an existential threat to the very survival of Britain’s history, culture, and traditions.

But it’s not all apocalyptic rhetoric and mawkish peans to a lost England. The culture war is big business – especially for the online bottom-feeders who see local grievances through the prism of clicks and cash. One YouTube influencer, who films himself entering migrant hotels and taunting staff and residents, is reportedly earning thousands of pounds a month in advertising revenue. Other self-styled ‘citizen journalists’ line their pockets on X by pumping out a torrent of rumour and hearsay. I spotted at least one of these media entrepreneurs in Portsmouth, the camera at the end of his selfie stick gliding across the surface of the crowd like a submarine’s periscope.

The macho men of the far-right have long sought to position themselves as the protectors of damsels in distress. Tenconi styles himself as a defender of masculinity, Christianity, and conservative values. The heavyset UKIP Leader narrowly avoided jail in 2011 after punching a rival alpha male in a duel over a cigarette. His own version of ‘chivalry’ asserts that women need protecting – not just from wily foreigners but from themselves too. An opponent of abortion, he accuses the left of “pushing liberal freedoms on women”.

As to the fate of Britain’s menfolk, the asylum seekers in the hotel across the road were described by Tenconi that night as “fighting-age males”. The man dispensing the Turning Point UK stickers said the same. Other protestors called them “invaders”. It was a constant paranoiac drumbeat: the swarthy men coming to Britain from war-ravaged territories were not seeking sanctuary but conquest – of our lands and our women.

The idea that immigrants and refugees are would-be sexual predators has long been a staple of far-right discourse. The trope was deployed against Jewish refugees in the 1880s, and was used again in the 1950s against immigrants from the Caribbean. In her 2018 book, Bring the War Home, a deeply researched account of America’s white power movement, Kathleen Belew showed how the figure of the black rapist has been deployed in far-right literature (and not only far-right literature) in the United States. “The innocent white mother and child symbolised the race under siege,” she writes.

Today’s British anti-migrant street movement has its own women’s caucus, the reassuringly conventional ‘pink protestors’ whose raison d’être is to “stand together against the danger posed to women and young girls by unidentified men in our community”. One should probably take some of the women’s grievances at face value. However, at least one of the ‘concerned local mothers’ interviewed by GB News at a recent anti-migrant demonstration at the Barbican in London was revealed by anti-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate to be a longtime associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’. Toni Collins (‘Ginger Toni’) was spotted a few days earlier in a Turning Point UK video of another protest in Epping, once again claiming to be a concerned local resident. It could be that she has two London residences (she wouldn’t be the first person caught moonlighting as a plain-speaking tribune of the people). But it seems more likely that she was on an ‘astroturfing’ mission.

If it wants to root out violent misogyny, the radical-right would do well to look in-house. Of those arrested following the anti-immigration riots of last summer, 41 per cent had been previously reported to the police for domestic violence. Offences included actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint, and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour, and criminal damage. In one jurisdiction, police reported that 68 per cent of those they arrested had previously been apprehended for domestic abuse.

Nigel Farage has warned that undocumented men from ‘misogynistic’ countries pose a threat to British women. Yet, earlier this year, the beaming Reform Leader was pictured hanging out with the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor. He has been accused of rape (McGregor denies the allegations but was ordered to pay €248,000 in damages last year after losing a civil case in Ireland). Farage has also been photographed with misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate. He has described Tate – who refers to women as “bitches”, “hoes”, and “selfish cunts” who are “barely sentient” – as an “important voice for men”. Tate is awaiting trial in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking – charges he denies.

‘We don’t feel like we can talk about immigration’.

This sentiment was relayed to me several times that Friday evening. Sections of the media like to play it on repeat. The apogee of this style of discourse can be seen in the hysterical output of Matthew Goodwin, the academic-turned-Reform UK supporter who presents his own show on GB News every weeknight. “Am I a terrorist? How the British state views opposition to mass immigration as an indicator of terrorist ideology,” wrote Goodwin in a typically incendiary article for his Substack newsletter in June.

The notion that nobody in Britain can talk about immigration is a persistent myth. People talk about the subject a great deal; and frequently in a truculent and jingoistic register. Two years ago, I appeared on a news panel on Talk TV alongside the veteran radio DJ and ‘shock jock’ James Whale. Whale died from cancer this month and, in the aftermath, the newspapers tripped over themselves to lay it on thick. All the usual clichés were trotted out about a “loose cannon” who “broke all the rules” and so forth. The Telegraph described Whale as a “leviathan of late night broadcasting who would do and say the unthinkable”. Whale’s reputation was furnished by outbursts such as the one I witnessed up close in 2023. During a discussion about small boats crossing the English Channel, Whale called for the Royal Navy to point its guns at the men and women in the boats. There were a few audible gasps in the studio, but alas, Whale suffered no lasting career damage. Indeed, six months later he was made an MBE. Cancel culture, indeed.

The political salience of asylum seekers in small boats has increased as the media has been steadily cannibalised by the radical-right. This new strain of reaction is a student of the old revolutionary left; as such it understands the importance of monopolising the means of communication. It doesn’t need to storm the newspapers and occupy the radio stations because it can simply buy them up. In 2022, the right-wing tech billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He has since used the platform, now known as X, to help put Donald Trump in the White House and attempt to foment ethnic strife in the UK. Sir Paul Marshall, an oligarch of our own who bankrolls GB News along with the Spectator magazine and UnHerd, was exposed last year by Hope Not Hate for liking and retweeting a series of racist posts on X. One of the offending posts suggested that a civil war between “native Europeans” and “fake refugee invaders” was imminent. Rupert Murdoch, who is always eager to lower the tone, made his own foray into tabloid television in Britain with Talk TV.

In Nigel Farage, anti-asylum protestors have a charismatic leader who is adept at converting generalised public dissatisfaction into focused anger and prejudice. Currently riding high in the polls, Farage will at some point have to set out a practical vision for governing Britain. This will require a delicate balancing act to keep the protest movement onside without scaring away the middle classes. There are already grumbles from Farage’s right flank. Out on the streets of Portsmouth on Friday night, I was told on several occasions that the Reform UK Leader had “sold out” to the establishment. At one point during the protest, Tenconi performed what looked like a Nazi salute.

It seems clear that, if his party is to achieve genuine electoral success, Farage will have to sell out the radical wing of his base many times over. Maybe it will be him the protestors eventually come for.

This piece was originally published in the September edition of Byline Times.

Buy my new book Lost Boys.

Every nation has its clichés: in Britain it’s red post boxes, fish and chips, and (supposedly) bad teeth. The long-running BBC series Homes Under the Hammer could probably be added to the list. The show follows buyers as they pick up properties at auction before renovating them. It’s hugely popular, drawing an average audience of 1.3 million viewers. As for how it’s taken me this long to discover a show that has been running on BBC One for twenty consecutive years, I confess I don’t watch much daytime television.

Speaking of outdated clichés, it’s often said that home ownership in Britain is a ‘national obsession’. While probably true at one time - I can remember reading articles in the liberal media twenty years ago about how we should follow the continentals and embrace renting - it’s taken on a subtly different meaning today. Nowadays the British dream is bound up with owning somebody else’s home.

Homes Under the Hammer first aired in 2003, the same year that home ownership in Britain peaked at 70 per cent. Until the mid-1990s the private rental market made up just 9 per cent of UK households. Since then the number of private rentals has more than doubled. As of 2023, around 19 per cent of UK households - about 5.4 million homes - were privately rented. Today there are 2.8 million landlords in Britain, and the average age of a private renter in England has risen to 41. Meanwhile, home ownership has fallen to 65 per cent, and fewer than one-third of Londoners aged 20–39 own a home.

As the economy has changed, so has Homes Under the Hammer. In its early years the programme would often feature people who were simply looking for a place to live. These days buyers are usually more interested in the sales value or ‘rental yield’ of the property, which they view as an ‘investment’. Every episode follows more or less the same formula. A middle aged married couple rip the character out of a two bedroom house and turn it into a white-and-grey HMO (houses in multiple occupation) with 12 bedrooms. A woman named Michelle turns a derelict public toilet into four holiday lets. A property developer named Lenin (yes really) boasts of making a 15 per cent yield on a terraced house in Stoke-on-Trent.

Shortly before becoming party leader, Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Party Conference in 1975 that ‘We Conservatives believe in creating a property-owning democracy’. After winning the 1979 election, she set about achieving it through the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, which saw 2.2 million council homes sold to private owners while supply of new social housing was deliberately restricted. By 2016, 40 per cent of the council houses Thatcher and her successors had sold off were being rented out by private landlords.

It was the introduction of buy-to-let mortgages under John Major’s government in 1996 that turbocharged the growth of the modern private rental sector. Landlords now only had to pay the interest on a loan each month rather than the capital. Tax relief for landlords meant they could henceforth pay as little as 10 per cent on their capital gains and no National Insurance.

It’s clear that many of the properties put up for auction on Homes Under the Hammer are probate sales. Watching the show, one always hopes the grandkids aren’t watching as the glib presenters visibly shudder at the departed’s failure to slavishly follow the latest fashions. But not to fear, the pebbledashing, floral print wallpaper and ‘dated’ fittings will all be ‘ripped out’. Cue the inevitable white paint (two shades only: white and brilliant white), dark grey carpet, and B&Q laminate flooring. ‘Job’s a good ’un,’ as one of the unctuous presenters might say.

A few buyers have appeared on the show multiple times. One family has a portfolio of over 200 houses. They like to continuously remortgage in order to buy more. Others prefer to let their purchase sit idle and empty before selling it on at a later date for a profit. The least offensive buyers (besides the vanishingly small number who actually want to live the properties they’ve bought) do the place up before selling it. But most are clearly aiming to do the bare minimum in order to make a financial killing. Family homes are transformed into bog standard holiday lets and HMOs in which it goes without saying (literally) that eight people will be expected to share a kitchen. One room is frequently turned into two or even three with a section of plasterboard (who even wants a living room or a dining area?).

Renovation and refurbishment complete, it’s time to get the pocket book out and tot up the gains. An estate agent arrives to wander around the property looking bemused before giving an updated valuation. One episode I recently watched featured a property developer and landlord from Norfolk named Helen who was ‘looking forward to adding to her growing rental portfolio’. She had recently bought a two-bed flat in the seaside town of Cromer for £107,000. Having given the place a lick of paint and a new bathroom, she is given a resale price of £190,000 and a rental yield of £700 a month by the visiting estate agent. But a moody Helen is having none of it. Like many others who appear on the show, she wants more bang for her buck. ‘I think that’s probably a bit low,’ she snorts. ‘I’ve talked to someone who will let it for me for £875.’ This, the presenters gleefully inform viewers, will bring in a ‘healthy yield of over 7 per cent’.

If people on the show appear to be raking it in, that’s partly because buyers (and the makers of the show) rarely disclose the free labour that family and friends have put into the renovations.

More egregious is the fact that the people who will actually live in the properties featured in the show (tenants for the most part) remain invisible throughout. To acknowledge them at all would spoil the illusion that something benign or even admirable is taking place. Instead, the viewer is shown a procession of braying estate agents and petty rentiers whose personalities have seemingly been atrophied by a life lived solely through the prism of getting rich. The typical lingua franca is sales patter and petrol forecourt humour. Clichés and uptalk are ubiquitous.

Occasionally the fourth wall cracks to reveal more than the show’s creators probably intend. New owners will decide against replacing a broken kitchen unit because it would eat into their ‘pocket money’. Mould and damp are quite obviously painted over by a buyer who is in a rush to let it out. In 2022, one of the ‘expert’ estate agents used by the show turned out to be none other than Sheffield’s most notorious landlord. In 2024, Gunes - ‘Gary’ - Ata, a landlord with over 5,000 properties to rent, was fined £97,000 for a ‘serious and deliberate’ failure to manage a block of student flats in Sheffield. The local council have described Ata as a ‘rogue landlord’.

If only Ata were the exception. According to Citizens Advice, 2.7 million households living in privately rented properties – more than half the total – are affected by damp, mould or excessive cold. More than half a million rented homes - both private and social - have black mould issues. Of more than 570,000 complaints about privately rented homes in the past seven years, no action was taken in more than 90 per cent of cases. Fewer than 1 per cent of complaints resulted in a landlord being prosecuted. It isn’t hard to game the system. When interest rates go up, you pass the bill on to your tenants. If they object, you throw them out (by saying you’re selling up) before finding a replacement who will pay because demand is high (in today’s market, there is always somebody desperate enough).

Homes Under the Hammer captures the prevailing zeitgeist of the past 20 years. It assumes with teleological inevitability that property prices will go up along with rents. It tells its audience that work won’t make them rich, but a portfolio of bricks and mortar just might. For whatever reason, our public broadcaster still feels the need to glamourise a form of ‘passive’ income that will see the majority of license payers prostrate and getting screwed.

And yet dark clouds are gathering on the horizon. Certain unpleasant facts are threatening to intrude on the lucrative world of buy to let. Consequently, those who’ve done well out of the recent bonanza are threatening us with an ‘exodus’. The Labour Party is currently pushing its Renters’ Right Bill through parliament. It includes plans to remove section 21 orders, which allow landlords to carry out ‘no fault’ evictions. Just 22 per cent of landlords support the policy; a quarter say they will sell all their properties if it becomes law.

It’s probably best not to take such bleating seriously. The proportion of landlords who reported making a profit actually increased from 84 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 to 87 per cent in the second. Meanwhile, according to the Office for National Statistics, the ratio of rent to income is now ‘unaffordable’ in every London borough.

More than 5 per cent of the adult population in Britain are landlords. As a recent piece in the London Review of Books put it, ‘today most of us, even those of us who rent, are no more than a few degrees of separation away from a rentier, and even closer to an owner-occupier whose financial security is also dependent on landlordism’. Shows like Homes Under the Hammer cater less to the five per cent than to a larger constituency who dream that they too could one day watch the hassle-free rental income roll in. Rent extraction has come to be seen as a human right; the petty rentier as an entrepreneur who is perennially on the cusp of financial freedom.

Despite the obvious drawbacks, it’s a version of democratic capitalism that has proven to be remarkably resilient. Thanks to shows like Homes Under the Hammer, a sizeable chunk of the population see themselves as temporarily embarrassed property tycoons. They may not have much of a stake in the current system, but they can still be relied upon to take the necessary measures in its defence.

Buy my new book Lost Boys.