In England's Dreaming
Intense pessimism about the present has shaped the political mindset of young people. But can they discover optimism for the future?
Towering columns
At The Spectator, Maxwell Marlow considers what is driving the authoritarian turn among young people.
Polling this week shows that one third of 18-30 year olds are increasingly in favour of authoritarianism. They would prefer an authoritarian system led by a decisive figure, even if it meant sacrificing some democratic freedoms. Dissatisfaction can be found across the political spectrum, with 33 per cent of young Labour voters leaning towards authoritarianism, whilst it is half of the Reform voting youth…
…However, the radicalisation of young people is not just about the slow immiseration of Britain, with declining living standards and crumbling infrastructure. Myriad videos now appear on people’s screens of shop-lifters, bike thieves and illegal immigrants entering the country with ease. And when this immiseration culminates in a young professional having their phone swiped from their hands on their walk to the office, they are told not to worry about it as crime is going down.
The lurch towards authoritarianism is not a deep-seated yearning for jack boots, five year plans, or Volkswagen Beetles. It comes from a frustration that the British state, no matter its majorities or might, cannot fix the very basics. When a young person looks down at their Instagram in their ninth hour of their wait in a dingy NHS reception room, at the spotless pavements of Dubai, or the autonomous vehicles of China, is it any wonder they yearn for a government that can actually do something?
At The Critic, Nicholas Stephenson argues that precarity among young graduates is fuelling political extremism.
While Westminster flounders, real wages have stagnated since 2008, even as rents and house prices continue to soar. Those lucky enough to have found a job must choose between spending half of their income renting a tiny flat with five other people or burning it on long commutes from their parents’ homes in the sticks. But for the unemployed graduate, the situation is even bleaker: there is no mirage of home ownership flickering on the horizon — just darkness, and the suffocating pull of economic and cultural quicksand.
A desert of opportunity stretches out before Britain’s graduates, AI is cannibalising entry-level jobs, close to 100,000 jobs have disappeared in the hospitality sector alone since the NIC hike, and an influx of overseas workers is squeezing them out of both graduate and part-time roles. According to The Telegraph, more than 630,000 of them are now claiming universal credit, twice as many as those who “failed” their GCSEs by getting grades D-G, equivalent to grades 1-3 in the new grading system…
…The truth is that the UK is producing too many graduates, without enough graduate jobs to go round. Peter Turchin, a historian — who specialises in patterns of civilisational collapse, calls this phenomenon elite overproduction and identifies it as a catalyst behind societal disintegration across history. The Taiping Rebellion, history’s deadliest civil war, ultimately erupted when the number of elite aspirants taking China’s civil service exam massively exceeded the number of official posts. The rebellion’s leader was Hong Xiuquan, a repeatedly unsuccessful exam candidate, and he rallied those like him: young, educated, resentful young scholars who felt the social contract had been broken and only radical action could fix it.
At The Atlantic, Lenore Skenazy, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt reflect on how screentime has made childhood more lonely and parenthood more stressful.
Since the 1980s, parents have grown more and more afraid that unsupervised time will expose their kids to physical or emotional harm. In another recent Harris Poll, we asked parents what they thought would happen if two 10-year-olds played in a local park without adults around. Sixty percent thought the children would likely get injured. Half thought they would likely get abducted…
…Still, parents spend more time supervising their kids than parents did in the 1960s, even though they now work more and have fewer children. Across all income levels, families have come to believe that organized activities are the key to kids’ safety and success. So sandlot games gave way to travel baseball. Cartwheels at the park gave way to competitive cheer teams. Kids have been strapped into the back seat of their lives—dropped off, picked up, and overhelped. As their independence has dwindled, their anxiety and depression have spiked. And they aren’t the only ones suffering. In 2023, the surgeon general cited intensive caregiving as one reason today’s parents are more stressed than ever.
Kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise—a gap that devices now fill. “Go outside” has been quietly replaced with “Go online.” The internet is one of the only escape hatches from childhoods grown anxious, small, and sad. We certainly don’t blame parents for this. The social norms, communities, infrastructure, and institutions that once facilitated free play have eroded. Telling children to go outside doesn’t work so well when no one else’s kids are there.
At The Critic, Rob Bates argues the push for better data around immigration and crime will pave the way for preventing the entry of dangerous foreign nationals.
Ministry of Justice data for England and Wales shows that a quarter of rape convictions last year were of foreign nationals. They account for just a tenth of the population but up to a third of sexual assault convictions. Many more convictions — of migrants now classed as British citizens — will be hidden within native conviction numbers.
Some politicians have picked up this mantle — raising alarm about the fact that Afghans are 22 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than Brits, or that 40 per cent of sexual offence charges in London are tabled against foreign nationals. But rather than report these facts, the established media has adopted a rearguard position — desperately pleading with the public to ignore the mounting evidence. As this issue continues to grow in salience, we should be concerned that traditional media outlets are about to embark on a campaign of mass obscurantism…
…Luckily, as with many facets of modern Britain, the political and media establishment — still gently drunk on the bottle of multicultural liquor they have been gulping from for twenty years — have been caught off guard on this issue. So certain were they that open borders were virtuous, that they failed to notice the tens of thousands of foreign nationals being convicted each year. Others have not. Barnes Wallis’ political descendents have unleashed a barrage of bouncing truth-bombs in recent weeks, unalterably shifting the axis of debate on this issue for the remainder of the parliament. Westminster has been flooded with the truth, and things are changing.
On her website, J.K. Rowling reviews Nicola Sturgeon’s memoirs and unpicks the former First Minister’s legacy.
Both Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, made great play back in 2014 about how very different their nationalism was to the nasty kind – you know, the racist, get-the-immigrants-out, thuggish sort you find in other, lesser countries. Scotland, they asserted, breeds a kinder, better type of nationalist. You get all the good stuff – an upsurge in national pride, a flowering of native culture, a people once more embracing self determination – without the slightest echo of jackboots.
Oddly, this message didn’t resonate too well with No voters who were being threatened with violence, told to fuck off out of Scotland, quizzed on the amount of Scottish blood that ran in their veins, accused of treachery and treason and informed that they were on the wrong side of, as one ‘cybernat’ memorably put it, ‘a straightforward battle between good and evil.’
Even while conceding she possibly ‘didn’t make enough effort at the time to appreciate what it was like for those on the other side’, Sturgeon’s final analysis of the referendum is that ‘the contest was, in the main, positive and good-natured.’ This is an excellent example of a recurrent feature of Frankly: Sturgeon acknowledging that she could – maybe, perhaps, just possibly – have done something a teeny bit better, then awarding herself an A-.
On Commonplace, Oren Cass and Anna Wong discuss the future economic outlook of the United States.
You can suppose that there’s an economic slowdown, and I think that’s indeed likely, because just the tariffs alone is essentially a one-percent contraction in fiscal impulse. Think about the $300 billion in tariff revenues that we’re getting this year. That’s about 1% of GDP. But then you have the One Big Beautiful Bill, which is an expansionary impulse, kicking in around next April. We estimate that it will be an expansionary impulse of 0.4%. And then, on top of that, you have the natural cyclical rebound from whatever happened this year.
Heading into the midterm elections thing will start picking up on top of that. Plus, you’ll have continuing AI investment and the combination of tax incentives in the OBBB as well as the resolution of the trade war with deals and incentives in trying to get firms to invest in the U.S. This could create a tailwind not only from fiscal and trade policy but also monetary policy. It’s very likely that the Fed will be cutting more steeply next year. In fact, Wall Street already prices in that next year you’ll have all three of these tailwinds pushing the economy forward, which means that by 2027-2028, since monetary policy works with large lags, you’ll see much stronger investment.
Aside from that, investors and some really smart traders are thinking about a world where inflation is low by 2028 since AI is a very disinflationary force, and it will be very disruptive to the labor market, especially with recent college graduates. And you can already see this in China where they’re ahead in AI adoption and it’s already impacting the labor market for young people. So we may be in that spot a couple years from now, and that will be very deflationary.
Wonky thinking
At Engelsberg Ideas, Michael Lucchese makes the case for articulating a conservative canon rooted in truths about what it means to be human. Lucchese draws on the example of Russell Kirk’s famous attempt in The Conservative Mind.
In this sad moment of loss and retreat, then, perhaps the conservative movement can rediscover strength by looking back to its forebears and the principles they so nobly advanced – especially Russell Kirk and his vision of an imaginative conservatism. He sought to orient conservatism not toward temporary success in day-to-day political controversy, important as that may be, but rather around what he called the ‘Permanent Things’ that constitute the ‘unbought grace of life’. He aimed to found a conservative movement that is poetic rather than political, patriotic rather than critical, philosophic rather than ideological. If the conservative movement is to endure beyond a series of 24-hour news cycles or even four years of a presidential administration, then it must return to this older, dispositional conservatism.
Kirk’s most profound articulation of this disposition came in his 1953 book The Conservative Mind. More than any other text, it can best be considered the founding document of the conservative movement. Originally produced as a dissertation at the University of Saint Andrews, it quickly became a bestseller because the American people were desperate for something with greater moral substance than the New Deal liberalism then dominating public affairs. Readers were deeply frustrated with both the rationalist central planners governing the nation from Washington and the relativists who were beginning to take the commanding heights of culture and academia. The Conservative Mind offered them an unapologetic defence of their actual way of life – a great intellectual blow against the revolution of the 20th century.
In some ways, though, it may be surprising that a book like The Conservative Mind could have such an influence. Kirk indeed concerned himself with the deeds and speeches of great statesmen, such as Edmund Burke, John Adams, and Benjamin Disraeli, and with the political thought of great minds, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, and Irving Babbitt. But much of the book is more concerned with literary figures such as Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Henry Adams. Kirk believed that even more than written constitutions or abstract political theories, literature can express the true essence of a people and the fundamental roots of social order that we must strive to conserve. If conservatism hopes to conserve anything of true worth, then it must be more than a political movement – it must be understood as a literary tradition.
Kirk began The Conservative Mind by setting two tasks before himself: first, to define conservatism, and then to examine its ‘validity for this perplexed age’. Far from setting up conservatism as a rival ideology to those throwing the time out of joint, he argued instead that it seeks to defend existing establishments against upheaval because it understood them as particular expressions of certain universal truths about the human person. He identified a soft ‘canon’ of conservative principles – ranging from belief in a transcendent moral order to a faith in the wisdom of our ancestors.
Kirk proceeded through the rest of the book by means of a series of biographical sketches depicting the aforementioned figures, and many others who shared these convictions, as a way to concretely demonstrate their meaning. His accounts of their victories and defeats over two centuries reveal that conservatism is a way of life, that is to say a set of spiritual practices – like those offered by the philosophical schools of antiquity – to cultivate in our hearts a decent respect for the Permanent Things.
The Institute for Progress has published The Launch Sequence. It is a collection of essays proposing ambitious AI projects to support scientific advancement, ensuring artificial intelligence benefits society.
The way we think about the emerging technologies of our time often depends on the way we perceive the moment we’re in. At the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis laid out a fundamentally optimistic vision for organized scientific research directed towards human benefit, leading to the establishment of the Royal Society in London, which in turn inspired a wave of new scientific academies across Europe. In 1955, John von Neumann wrote an essay titled “Can We Survive Technology?” containing a more pessimistic vision of technological development in a world newly characterized by world-ending nuclear arsenals, suggesting that the only real strategy was to simply muddle through.10 In 2019, as synthetic biology tools like CRISPR were becoming increasingly available, and AI compute scaling trends were becoming more clear, Nick Bostrom’s 2019 article, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis,” suggested that the only way to deal with widely available destructive technologies might be “ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order.” Vitalik Buterin’s 2023 essay, “My techno-optimism,” can be thought of as a synthesis of many of these ideas — the new technologies of our era could lead to disaster, but so could our response to these threats, if it leads loss of democratic values or the concentration of power. Buterin’s solution is a wide-ranging R&D program focused on defensive technologies to mitigate and defend against emerging risks while avoiding centralized control.
We borrow the optimism of Bacon, but subscribe to the basic logic of those like Buterin: rather than treating the trajectory of a technology as inevitable, we should think expansively about how we might go about shaping it. This isn’t wishful thinking. Over recent decades, the United States has successfully taken varied approaches to shaping the development of new technologies:
Nonproliferation: With nuclear weapons, we decided that the only way to safely manage the technology was to lock it down. Evidence about the unprecedented destructive power of the technology led President Roosevelt to classify all fission research in 1942, which in turn led to the centralization of R&D through the Manhattan Project, and to America’s subsequent nonproliferation strategy. Although this strategy hasn’t been perfect, nuclear proliferation has consistently been slower than anticipated by most experts.11
Selective Acceleration: In the 1980s, recognizing the downsides of private companies patenting genetic sequences, we decided to proactively accelerate the development of universal tooling and infrastructure for gene sequencing through the Human Genome Project. This created a vast public domain resource that helped prevent broad patents on raw genomic sequences.12
Defensive Acceleration: In the face of COVID, the Trump Administration realized that overcoming the pandemic required massively accelerating a new defensive technology: the mRNA vaccine platform. Operation Warp Speed combined market-shaping mechanisms, a whole-of-government strategy, and the streamlining of regulation to radically accelerate the development of the first fully-approved mRNA vaccine. The vaccine was developed in just 9 months, more than 10 times the normal speed, and far faster than any vaccine ever developed.
Podcasts of the week
Tom Ough and Aris Roussinos discuss the meaning of Anglofuturism and its critique of the modern British state.
Dominic Cummings lifts the lid on how the civil service operates and why the Johnson Government lost control over immigration.
Book of the week
We recommend The National Interest: Politics After Globalization by Philip Cunliffe. The author examines the origins of nationalism and realism and their potential revival in the wake of Trump. The author also provides an account of how these ideas were abandoned by Western elites over the past thirty years despite their past success and basis in representative governance.
Despite Thatcher having seemingly won the nation back from socialism across her political victories of the 1980s, she and her followers would also lose it in due course – not least as she was ousted by her own government, in part to facilitate Britain’s closer alignment with the EU. More importantly, Thatcher herself had dismantled the national economy that had been built up over the post-war years – an economy organized around national policies and priorities.
Hence Thatcherite Britain saw a swathe of large state-owned firms and utilities that had hitherto been seen as integral to national economic growth and technological prowess privatized: British Gas (1986), British Airways (1987), British Steel (1988), British Rail (1993). In addition to privatization, there would also come efforts to shadow the functioning of competitive marketplaces in the internal functioning of the public sector. Critics of the policy likened it to familial financial distress and household insolvency. In the words of the former British Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan speaking from the House of Lords at the time, ‘First the Georgian silver goes, and then all the nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canaletto’s go.’ Paraphrased as ‘selling off the family silver’, perhaps the very effort needed to render Macmillan’s concern about Canaletto amenable to popular discourse gives some indication as to why the criticism failed to halt the policy.
Yet Macmillan’s larger point was right; the financial respite won by neoliberalism was done by running down an inherited national patrimony. What is more, this patrimony was not just economic. Just as the success of privatization depended on selling off large and valuable state-owned enterprises, so too the political project could only succeed on running down a national stock of accumulated loyalties, institutions and structures of rule and accountability. As we saw in the previous chapter, the nation involved concessions – not only economic concessions in the sense of redistribution and welfare spending, but also political strategies of integration – corporatist bargaining, promises of full employment, defence of national interests, and so on. These concessions became more burdensome as the post-war era wore on. When the costs of those concessions no longer balanced against the advantages – notably trailing off at the end of the post-war boom – the ruling classes’ effort to disentangle themselves from the nation accelerated.
Just as national states developed large national firms, so they had to first accumulate the kind of expansive political authority that did not exist prior to the Great Depression and the Second World War. The neoliberals – and perhaps in contrast to their classical liberal forebears – understood that a powerful state was needed in order to expand, consolidate and strengthen the market order. What was less understood was that the effort to expand the market required deploying and running down not only the national patrimony of state-owned enterprises but running down the less tangible but no less real asset of political authority.
This was apparent in the national revanchism that was so crucial to the electoral appeal of neoliberalism, especially for Reagan and Thatcher. Both of them mounted strategies of fusionism in which they tried to marry social conservatism to pro-business reforms. It was a strategy that was viable during the Cold War, when religious and social conservatives could be drafted into a stand-off against godless Soviet communists.
Yet the political capital spent by Reagan and Thatcher was capital accumulated by the very same state the neoliberals excoriated – large, powerful, bureaucratic and authoritative, with an infrastructural capacity to oversee large-scale logistical and productive processes. The supply of this political authority was not limitless. If the market was to be re-legitimated at the expense of the state by using the state, the state would lose authority in that process. In practical terms, the process of shedding popular expectations of political power also entailed shredding political and civic representation. This process, which took a variety of forms – whether decimating organized labour, outflanking troublesome centres of urban dissent or establishing independent agencies with powers devolved from the state – nonetheless retained the same overall thrust: snapping the links between civil society and the state. The result of this was the ‘the void’ between rulers and ruled.
Quick links
It took just 401 days for Keir Starmer to reach 50,000 small boat arrivals compared with 603 days for Rishi Sunak and 1,066 days for Boris Johnson.
The Chagos Islands 99-year lease will cost £35 billion in cash terms, which is ten times more than the Government claimed.
Latest affordable housing statistics for London show only 347 homes started in the first quarter of 2025-26.
The number of Universal Credit claimants increased by 1.1 million since July last year, reaching a record-high of 8 million people.
A government-commissioned review has concluded that UK nuclear regulation is not fit for purpose.
Data shows a collapse in conscientiousness among 16 to 39-year-olds.
The Government’s AI Energy Council called for higher gas use to power the rollout of new data centres.
By Purchasing Power Parity, Russia’s economy came in fourth in the world at $6.91 trillion in 2024 , behind only China, the US, and India.
Chinese AI company DeepSeek delayed its new model after failing to train it using Huawei’s chips.
Syria’s transitional government is open to the return of Russian military police patrols in the southern provinces.