“Far-fetched,” they’d say. “Exaggerated. Simplistic.”
On one side, we have the spectacle of Tommy Robinson bellowing through a megaphone while Elon Musk drops in like some demented prophet from Silicon Valley to assure us that “violence is coming”.
On the other side, we have Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, once heralded as the last best hope of the parliamentary left, now squabbling over a mailing list like characters in a low-budget sitcom.
The far right promises apocalypse with theatrical gusto. The centre mumbles reassuring nothings about fiscal prudence. And the left manages to trip over its shoelaces before the race has even begun.
Alas, this isn’t implausible fiction, but political reality.
Consider first the Robinson-Musk duet, a grotesque karaoke performance of grievance and prophecy. Musk, whose main achievement in the United Kingdom is to be even less relevant than he is in California, declares that doom is imminent. Robinson, ever the carnival barker, nods along, as if the two of them were Moses and Aaron preparing to part the Red Sea of immigration.
The crowd, primed by decades of economic decline and political betrayal, laps up their dark vision.
They do not ask whether the wealthiest man on Earth really spends his spare time predicting street brawls in Doncaster for their benefit. They ask only for the next hit of catharsis, the next assurance that their sense of loss and dislocation is a villain’s handiwork. The story need not be true, only satisfying.
And yet the true comedy lies elsewhere. While Robinson and Musk are busy conjuring a dystopia out of thin air, their political nemeses have decided to engage in an exquisite form of auto-cannibalism. Enter Your Party stage left, the great new hope the progressive voters Labour repudiated in its unseemly lurch to the right.
Your Party—the name is just a placeholder—was supposed to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of Keir Starmer’s managerial caution. In practice, it has proven to be less phoenix than pigeon, cooing plaintively and flapping in circles. At the moment, it isn’t even a proper political party, but rather a private company with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana listed as directors; its grand treasure is a mailing list.
Within weeks of being announced, the project collapsed into acrimony: Sultana launched an early membership drive, Corbyn’s allies pulled the plug, accusations of betrayal flew, and the dream of a mass movement dissolved into the kind of bureaucratic spat usually reserved for parish councils. While Tommy Robinson spins dystopian science fiction, his counterparts on the left appear content to write farce.
It would be easy—indeed, it is tempting—to dismiss the whole affair as a clash of personalities. But as The Battleground’s Josh White explains in his recent Undermining the British Left, this spat isn’t simply about who gets to sit at the head of the table, but another painful reminder of the British left’s failure to tame its destructive impulses.
Sultana conveys a yearning for a horizontal, grassroots, participatory politics, while Corbyn’s criticism testifies to an enduring belief in vertical leadership and centralised command. Paralysis is the result, with each side accusing the other of betrayal, each convinced that the other is repeating the sins of the past.
The grand opportunity presented by Britain’s economic and social decay—the collapse of Labour’s credibility, the hunger for something genuinely different—has been squandered in a quarrel over structure and pace.
While the right bellows “fight or die,” the left debates the wording of its bylaws. Meanwhile, the UK continues drifting towards a parody of J.G. Ballard.
Musk’s apocalyptic phrase—“violence is coming to you”— sounds plausible in a land where the state can no longer repair the roof, staff the hospital, or build the railway.
The shortages are both comic and tragic: 140,000 construction vacancies as half-finished housing estates crumble; 47,000 unfilled nursing posts while ministers laud the NHS as a global marvel; civil engineering vacancies doubling even as politicians boast of new defence projects.
The UK wants submarines without sailors, hospitals without nurses, infrastructure without engineers. This perverse form of minimalism is breathtaking.
The demographic arithmetic is equally unforgiving. A collapsing birthrate means fewer workers in the future, yet the only thing keeping the country afloat right now is immigration—the very phenomenon Robinson accuses of destroying the nation.
Without migrant nurses, the NHS would collapse in a week; without migrant builders, roofs would leak indefinitely; without migrant engineers, the UK’s dreams of prioritising nuclear energy and modern transport would be stillborn. Yet the political class treats immigration as a problem to be contained rather than a salvation to be embraced.
The snake devours its own tail and complains of hunger.
To Robinson’s credit, he understands performance. His dystopia is more pulp than policy, closer to George Orwell at his most simplistic than to Margaret Atwood or Philip K. Dick. It works because it matches the national mood.
When ordinary life begins to feel like a form of survivalism—with stagnating wages, soaring rents, and medical care that takes months to access—then talk of invasion and collapse finds a ready audience. The fact that Robinson’s prescriptions would only make matters worse only enhances their appeal.
The point is not to fix the country but to scream that it is broken.
And what about the government? Starmer’s Labour has perfected the art of managerial melancholy. It treats politics as triage, with deficits to be reduced, immigration to be managed, and expectations to be lowered. Number 10 denounces Robinson’s extremist rhetoric while quietly adopting enough of his premises to neuter Labour’s left-wing opposition.
Immigration must be controlled, public services must tighten their belts, the state must never risk frightening the markets.
You could call this “left Toryism,” except that would be too flattering to Toryism, which at least had the courage of its nostalgic convictions. Starmer’s revival of New Labour has spreadsheets. Microsoft Excel inspires no one.
To be sure, the trouble is not unique to Britain. Across Europe, the same pattern continues to repeat itself.
Technocratic centrists govern as though their sole mandate were to avoid risk, only to have populist insurgents feast on the discontent this timidity engenders. Macron in France, the SPD in Germany, various coalitions across the continent—all operate under the same illusion that managerial competence will suffice to neutralise the far right.
It won’t.
Although Tommy Robinson and his ilk may look like clowns, clowns draw crowds. And crowds can tip elections. The centre’s attempt to fight fire with tepid water leaves the embers smouldering, ready for the next spark.
Here is where the left could have stepped in. History provides inspiring examples: the Popular Fronts of the 1930s; the social democratic programs that made demagoguery less appealing by building housing, schools, and a safety net. But the British left seems uninterested in learning from history. Instead, it stages its own petty psychodramas.
The Corbyn-Sultana saga perfectly illustrates how the left can squander a moment of opportunity—the collapse of centrist credibility, the manifest failures of neoliberal policy—by blowing a quarrel way out of proportion.
The populist right says “fight,” the technocratic centre says “manage,” and the left says “Let us adjourn this meeting until we have resolved the question of whether the minutes were properly circulated.”
This is why the UK is paralysed. The government continues to underfund, the right continues to agitate, and the left continues to argue with itself. The shortages deepen, the birthrate declines, the economy drifts, and the rallies grow louder.
The country currently functions like an avant-garde play in which every actor insists on reading from a different script.
“Unite the Kingdom,” Tommy Robinson proclaims, as if the phrase were not itself a bitter joke. “Violence is coming,” Musk insists, as though he were not one of the most insulated men alive. “Memberships will be available soon,” Your Party assures its would-be supporters, even as its directors threaten to sue each other.
The right rants, the centre shrugs, the left sulks. The country declines. The only consolation is that, in the grand sweep of history, farces rarely last forever. Unfortunately, they do sometimes pave the way for tragedies.
The tragicomic part is that none of this is inevitable. A political movement that addressed the real issues—housing, wages, childcare—and treated immigration as a lifeline rather than a threat could rob Robinson of his audience and force Labour to rediscover its backbone.
But such a politics requires risk, imagination, and a willingness to abandon the safety of triangulation. It requires the left to stop acting out the same tired psychodramas and start working towards a reality better than the dystopia of its enemies.
For now, unfortunately, Britain remains trapped in a terrible loop, with populist rage on the right, technocratic caution in the centre, and self-sabotage on the left.
Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.
