Tag Archives: politics

The Arsonist, The Pint And The Keys to Number 10

Nigel Farage has thrived as a political insurgent and would be useless as an incumbent of political office, like the turd that won’t flush. He has become a constant fixture in the feckless punditry of the media class, proffered to the disenfranchised and angry as a universal panacea for their grinding poverty and relentless exploitation. His is the politics of hate and eugenics dressed up in red, white, and blue.

But there really is hope.

For alongside the stench of stale ale, fags, and old roubles, there is the toxic whiff of yesterday’s news about him. Like your hate-filled racist uncle, he has overstayed his welcome, another Trump tribute act and just one repeat appearance too many from Aunty Beeb.

Nigel Farage embodies feelings of visceral disgust and a sense of national embarrassment. Drunk on attention, he refuses to leave the political stage, even as we grapple with a terrifying political reality. The weariness is palpable; the sense that those in charge are not just failing but speaking a different language has curdled into a desperation for anyone to dismantle the rotten structure. Recent polling even suggests this desperation could make him Prime Minister. The bloke from the pub, the uncle you avoid at family gatherings, could soon be the resident of Number 10. The fundamental problem with professional arsonists, of course, is that you should never, ever ask them to look after the matches or give them the keys to your house.

You have to hand it to him, the man knows his craft. For three decades, Farage has perfected the art of the political insurgent. He is a master diagnostician of national discontent, tapping into the veins of frustration over immigration, sovereignty, and a sneering elite with unerring accuracy. His victory with the Brexit campaign wasn’t a fluke; it was the culmination of a career spent turning apathy into anger, and anger into votes. He is a brilliant campaigner, a savvy media operator who can turn a cancelled bank account into a national crusade and command a stage with the practiced ease of a seasoned broadcaster. He provides a simple, satisfying release valve for a complex and paralysing pressure. He gives you someone to blame. And in a world that feels chaotic and nonsensical, that is a powerful, seductive gift.

But here’s the rub: the skills required to tear a house down are the polar opposite of those needed to build one. The insurgent’s armoury – the pint, the fag, the sharp soundbite – becomes a liability in the quiet corridors of power where detail, diplomacy, and diligence are the currency. This is a man who has serially quit every major leadership role he’s ever had, often vanishing in a puff of drama only to return when the spotlight beckoned once more. He has never run a government department, never managed a large-scale bureaucracy, and surrounded himself with a party whose own candidates have a history of scandal and incompetence. His entire career has been a protest against the establishment; he has no experience, and seemingly no interest, in the grinding, unglamorous work of actually being it.

Worse, his playbook for power is a recipe for national disaster. He championed Liz Truss’s catastrophic mini-budget, a policy that sent the markets into a tailspin, and seems keen to repeat the experiment. Analysts warn a Farage premiership could trigger a 20% collapse in the pound, with inflation and mortgage rates soaring into double digits. His signature policy, Brexit, is a project he now openly admits has failed, yet his solution is inevitably more of the same poison. That stench of stale ale and old roubles you mentioned isn’t just an aesthetic; it’s the smell of economic instability and diplomatic isolation. It’s the toxic whiff of a man still shouting the same old slogans as the world moves on, leaving us to live with the consequences.

So, what do we do? It’s easy to feel helpless, to simply ride the wave of outrage and despair. But that is exactly what this brand of politics wants. It thrives on our exhaustion. The real act of rebellion, the truly patriotic act, isn’t to find a louder strongman to shout back. It is to deny the outrage-merchants their fuel. It starts with a quiet, personal insurgency: curating your media diet with ruthless discipline, practising what you might call informational hygiene, and refusing to let your emotional state be dictated by the latest manufactured controversy.

And then you take that resilience outside. The antidote to the grand, empty spectacle of national politics is the tangible reality of local action. Find the most boring-sounding local committee you can – planning, parks, the parish council – and join it. Re-engage with the civic fabric of your community by talking to people. Build something. Fix something. This is the painstaking, vital work of democracy. It’s the levy that shores up the flood defences against the tide of populism. It is how we prove that real power doesn’t come from a bloke shouting in a television studio, but from the collective, determined effort of people who have decided, quietly and firmly, to take back control for themselves.

Autocracy in the digital space.

We were all raised on stories of obvious tyranny. We were taught to look for the book burnings and the public shamings. We were told to listen for the sound of the cage door slamming shut. But what happens when the cage has no bars? What happens when the prison isn’t a place, but a state of mind, meticulously constructed to feel like freedom?

This is the world of informational autocracy. It’s a far slicker, more sophisticated beast than the clumsy dictatorships of the last century. It doesn’t need to rule by fear when it can rule by manufactured consent. This new model of power doesn’t abolish elections; it mimics them, ensuring the outcome is a foregone conclusion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy. It doesn’t ban the free press; it buys it, starves it of advertising, or floods the zone with so much state-sponsored noise that the truth is simply drowned out. Look at Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, or Erdoğan’s Turkey. The playbook is the same: project an image of competence and stability, paint all opposition as chaotic or treacherous, and ensure the majority of the public never gets a clear enough signal to know the difference. The primary goal is not to terrorise the population, but to convince them. And the engine room of this entire operation is the device in your pocket.

Enter the social media platform: the greatest accelerator of informational autocracy ever invented. These systems are not neutral tools; they are battlegrounds designed for a very specific kind of warfare. Their algorithms, built not for truth but for traffic, are perfectly tuned to reward the divisive, the sensational, and the outrageous. It’s no accident that, on platforms like X, false political stories are proven to spread 70% faster than the truth. Outrage is profitable. Division drives engagement. In this environment, an autocrat’s propaganda isn’t just another post—it’s premium fuel for a machine designed to run on it. We are not just the audience; we are the unwitting foot soldiers, sharing and amplifying narratives that fracture our own societies. But this battle isn’t just for the hearts and minds of the masses. There’s a more specific, more strategic target in its sights.

Every society has an “informed elite”—that small but crucial group of journalists, academics, professionals, and artists who have the access and the training to see through the noise. In the old world, an autocrat had to arrest or exile them. In the new world, the strategy is far more subtle. Social media allows the regime to monitor them, identifying dissenters for a quiet campaign of shadow-banning, legal threats, or professional exclusion. Even more effectively, it allows them to be co-opted. A slice of the elite is turned into well-paid influencers, their credibility used to launder regime propaganda. The very tool that could expand the ranks of the informed by democratizing information also shatters their authority, turning public discourse into a chaotic free-for-all where a verified expert has the same algorithmic weight as a state-funded troll farm.

It leaves us in the crossfire of a silent, borderless war. The tactics perfected in Moscow and Beijing are now exported globally, seeping into the bedrock of democracies. This is the slow poison: the erosion of public trust, the exhaustion of civic life, and the creeping sense that objective truth no longer exists. This is the ultimate goal. The aim isn’t just to win an argument; it’s to create an environment where the very idea of a shared reality seems naive. It is to foster a deep, weary cynicism that leads to democratic fatigue, where we disengage not because we are forced to, but because we are too tired to continue.

So, what is the way out? It is not to find a mythical, uncompromised platform or to wait for a single heroic leader. The resistance begins with a conscious and deliberate act of what can only be called informational hygiene. It starts with us. We must become fierce curators of our own information, deliberately seeking out and paying for quality, independent journalism. We must take our conversations offline and into the real world, rebuilding the connective tissue of society in our own communities. And above all, we must build our own resilience as if it were armour. They are counting on our burnout. An exhausted, cynical public is their ideal political landscape.

This is the work. It is not glamorous. It is not easy. But it is real. The most radical act in an age of quiet persuasion is a loud and curious mind. Keep yours sharp. Keep it open. And never, ever let them convince you to close it.

The Playbook: What the Left Can Learn from the Right’s Online War Part 2

The far-right’s online dominance is not an accident. It stems from savvy, adaptive tactics that exploit platform algorithms, human psychology, and cultural voids, turning fringe ideas into mainstream forces. While the left should never mimic their toxic elements like hate and disinformation, there is immense value in borrowing their structural and strategic tools to counter far-right gains.

Drawing from recent analyses, the key is ethical adaptation: using their methods to focus on hope, facts, and inclusivity, creating “alt-left pipelines” that radicalise people toward justice, not division.

Here are five transferable lessons for a progressive counter-strategy.

1. Build a Multi-Voice “Roster” for Narrative Dominance (The WWF Model)

The Right’s Method: They succeed with a diverse “ecosystem of creators“—intellectuals, meme-makers, and podcasters—who cross-promote and create social immersion. This “multiplicity of voices” normalises extremism, turning a single opinion into a perceived chorus.

The Left’s Deployment: Create a “Red-Green roster” of 20-50 voices (eco-activists, union organisers, TikTok storytellers) focused on core issues like inequality and climate. Use X Spaces for collaborative “story arcs” and fund collaborations through platforms like Patreon to foster community. The goal is viral, relatable formats that explain complex issues simply, like “why your rent doubled.”

2. Craft Gradual “Pipelines” for Positive Radicalisation

The Right’s Method: Their infamous “alt-right pipeline” hooks users with benign frustrations (e.g., “woke overreach”) then uses algorithms to pull them into echo chambers. This process of self-radicalisation happens without overt pushes.

The Left’s Deployment: Design an “alt-left pipeline” that starts with empowering content, like TikToks on “union wins” or stories of community success. This can funnel users to deeper dives on podcasts or documentaries about systemic issues. Ethically used AI tools could even offer personalised recommendations that target disillusioned centrists with messages of hope, addressing alienation head-on.

3. Weaponise Memes, Humour, and Emotional Storytelling

The Right’s Method: Irony, memes, and “outrage farming” create addictive engagement that polarises audiences and evades content moderation. They tap into real anger but channel it with simplistic, divisive narratives.

The Left’s Deployment: Flood platforms with joyful, subversive memes (“Billionaires vs. Your Rent” cartoons) and powerful, emotional stories, like videos of successful worker strikes. Use social media for provocative but substantive threads that expose hypocrisy. Focus on a “politics of substance” by creating new cultural symbols of solidarity, like remixing old union anthems for a modern audience.

4. Invest in Local Organising and Power-Building Networks

The Right’s Method: Online tactics are merely the recruitment arm for their offline infrastructure. They channel digital anger into real-world rallies and loyalty, building power from the ground up.

The Left’s Deployment: Mirror this by linking online campaigns directly to local action. Use platforms like Discord for one-on-one recruitment based on what matters to people in their communities. Channel energy into sustained wins, like establishing tenants’ unions or mutual aid groups, rather than chasing fleeting viral moments.

5. Play the Long Game of Institutional Capture and Patience

The Right’s Method: They understand that short-term wins like elections are secondary to long-term cultural entrenchment. They play the “long game,” infiltrating institutions like local school boards and media outlets over decades.

The Left’s Deployment: Shift from reactive online debates to proactive, institution-building. This means creating progressive media co-ops, getting involved in local governance, and controlling the narrative with preemptive framing (e.g., “Before you ask about taxes, here’s how billionaires dodge them”). As mainstream platforms become more toxic, this also means scaling safely on decentralised alternatives like Bluesky or Mastodon.

Ethical Guardrails and Risks

Any adaptation of these methods must prioritise anti-hate safeguards and robust fact-checking to avoid the pitfalls of disinformation. The goal is to turn the right’s tactics of scarcity and division into a new strategy of abundance and solidarity. The left’s greatest advantage is substance; these tools can help make that substance go viral.

This Isn’t a Drill. This is Your Guide to Resisting the Brit Card.

Feeling powerless is part of the plan. They want you to believe this is all too big, too technical, and too inevitable to fight. They are counting on your resignation as they assemble the cage around you, piece by piece, hoping you’ll be too tired or distracted to notice. But their entire, multi-billion-pound system has a fatal flaw, a single point of failure. That single point of failure is you.

We have options. They require effort, courage, and a refusal to be intimidated. Here’s a breakdown of the response options we have as citizens, from the simple to the deeply committed.

1. The Information War: Know Your Enemy and Spread the Word

First, don’t be a passive consumer of this. The primary battleground right now is awareness.

Educate Yourself and Others: Read everything you can. Understand the technology (Foundry, Gotham), the key players (Palantir, Peter Thiel), and the political machinations. When you talk about it, be informed. Use the facts.
Share Intelligently: Don’t just scream into the social media void. Share the articles and the evidence with people in your life who might listen. Send it to your family WhatsApp group. Talk about it with friends. The aim is to break this story out of the ‘conspiracy’ box and into the mainstream conversation.
Frame the Debate Correctly: When you talk about it, don’t let them frame it as “convenience vs. privacy.” Frame it correctly: Freedom vs. Control. It’s not about faster logins; it’s about the state’s ability to switch you off.

2. Political Pressure: Rattle the Cage

The system might feel rigged, but it’s not soundproof. They still need a veneer of public consent.

Your MP is Your Employee: Write to your MP. Don’t send a generic email; send a pointed one with specific questions. “Have you read Palantir’s contracts with the NHS?” “What are your specific concerns about linking a Digital ID to their software?” “Will you publicly pledge to vote against any mandatory Digital ID scheme?” Go to their local surgery and ask them face-to-face. Record their answer.
Support Advocacy Groups: Organisations like Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group, and others are fighting this at a policy level. Support them. Amplify their work. They have the resources to launch legal challenges and lobby Parliament effectively.
Sign and Share Petitions: While they can sometimes feel like shouting into the wind, official parliamentary petitions that reach a certain threshold must be debated. It forces the issue onto the official record.

3. Economic Resistance: Starve the Beast

This is a big one, and it’s where we have more power than we think.

Use Cash: This is the single most powerful act of passive resistance. Every note you spend is a small vote for privacy, for anonymity, and against a fully traceable digital currency. When shops ask you to pay by card, politely refuse where you can. Make cash a visible, normal part of daily life.
Scrutinise Your Services: Look at the companies you do business with. Is your bank a partner in the new identity frameworks? Does your tech provider have a record of collaboration with state surveillance? Where possible, move your money and your data away from those who are building the cage.
Support Privacy-First Technology: Use encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Use privacy-respecting search engines. Ditch services that harvest your data as their business model. The more of us who do this, the more we normalise privacy.

4. The Final Line of Defence: Non-Compliance

This is the sharp end of it, and it requires real resolve.

Refuse to Volunteer: When the Digital ID is first rolled out, it will be “optional.” Do not opt-in. Do not download the app. Do not be a guinea pig for your own cage. The lower the initial uptake, the harder it is for them to claim it has public support and the more difficult it becomes to make it mandatory.
Public Protest: If and when the time comes, be prepared to take to the streets. Peaceful, mass protest is a fundamental British right and a powerful part of our history. It shows the government that public anger is real and cannot be ignored.
Build Local Resilience: The more we rely on centralised state and corporate systems, the more power they have over us. Support local businesses. Start community skill-sharing networks. Build relationships with your neighbours. The more resilient and self-sufficient our communities are, the less we need their systems.

None of these is a magic bullet. But they are not mutually exclusive. We can do all of them. It’s about creating a multi-fronted resistance: informational, political, economic, and social.

They are counting on us to be too tired, too distracted, and too divided to fight back. Let’s disappoint them.

The easiest thing to do is sign the petition
Do not introduce Digital ID cards
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

If you are an investor you could move holdings from the following funds to more ethical ones:

Top 10 Largest Institutional Holders of shares in Palentir. The following table lists the top holders by shares outstanding, including shares held, percentage of total shares, and approximate value (based on recent market prices around $177–$180 per share).

Rank	Institution / Fund Name	Shares Held	% of Shares Outstanding	Value (USD)
1	Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund	69.13M	3.17%	$12.28B
2	Vanguard 500 Index Fund	60.38M	2.77%	$10.72B
3	Invesco QQQ Trust, Series 1	46.48M	2.13%	$8.25B
4	Fidelity 500 Index Fund	26.96M	1.24%	$4.79B
5	SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust	26.02M	1.19%	$4.62B
6	iShares Core S&P 500 ETF	25.41M	1.17%	$4.51B
7	Vanguard Growth Index Fund	22.38M	1.03%	$3.97B
8	The Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund	17.13M	0.79%	$3.04B
9	Vanguard Information Technology Index Fund	13.37M	0.61%	$2.37B
10	Vanguard Institutional Index Fund	13.04M	0.60%	$2.32B

Palantir & Brit Card: The Final Piece of the Surveillance State.

To understand what’s coming with the mandatory “Brit Card,” you first have to understand who is already here. The scheme isn’t appearing out of thin air; it’s the logical capstone on an infrastructure that has been quietly and deliberately assembled over years by a single, dominant player: Palantir. Their involvement isn’t just possible—it’s the probable, planned outcome of a strategy that serves both their corporate interests and the UK government’s long-held ambitions.

Let’s be clear about the facts. Palantir isn’t some new bidder for a government contract; they are already embedded, their surveillance tentacles wrapped around the core functions of the British state. They have over two dozen contracts, including with the NHS to analyse patient data, the Ministry of Defence for military intelligence, and police forces for “predictive policing.” They are in the Cabinet Office, they are in local government. They are, in essence, the state’s private intelligence agency.

This is a company forged in the crucible of the CIA and the NSA, whose entire business model is to turn citizen data into surveillance gold. Their track record is one of mass surveillance, racial profiling algorithms, and profiting from border control and deportations. To believe that this company would be hired to build a simple, privacy-respecting ID system is to willfully ignore everything they are and everything they do. The “Brit Card” is not a separate project for them. It is the keystone—the final piece that will allow them to link all their disparate data streams into one terrifyingly complete surveillance engine, with every UK adult forced onto its database.

But to grasp the scale of the threat, you have to ask why this is happening here, in the UK, and not anywhere else in Europe. This isn’t a happy accident; it’s a deliberate strategy. Palantir has chosen the UK for its European Defence HQ for a very simple reason: post-Brexit Britain is actively marketing itself as a deregulated safe harbour.

The UK government is offering what the EU, with its precautionary principles and landmark AI Act, cannot: regulatory flexibility. For a company like Palantir, whose business thrives in the grey areas of ethics and law, the EU is a minefield of compliance. The UK, by contrast, is signalling that it’s willing to write the rules in collaboration with them. The government’s refusal to sign the Paris AI declaration over “national security” concerns was not a minor diplomatic snub; it was the smoking gun. It was a clear signal to Silicon Valley that Britain is open for a different kind of business, one where restrictive governance will not get in the way of profit or state power.

This brings us to the core of the arrangement: a deeply symbiotic relationship. The UK government offers a favourable legal environment and waves a giant chequebook, with an industrial policy explicitly geared towards making the country a hub for AI and defence tech. The MoD contracts and R&D funding are a direct financial lure for predatory American corporations like Palantir, Blackrock, and Blackstone, inviting them to make deep, strategic incursions into our critical public infrastructure.

This isn’t charity, of course. In return, Palantir offers the government the tools for mass surveillance under the plausible deniability of a private contract. By establishing its HQ here, Palantir satisfies all the sovereign risk and security concerns, making them the perfect “trusted” partner. It’s a perfect feedback loop: the government signals its deregulatory intent, the money flows into defence and AI, and a company like Palantir responds by embedding itself ever deeper into the fabric of the state.

This isn’t about controlling immigration. It’s about building the infrastructure to control citizens. We are sacrificing our regulatory sovereignty for a perceived edge in security and technology, and in doing so, we are rolling out the red carpet for the very companies that specialise in monitoring us. When the firm that helps the CIA track its targets is hired to build your national ID card, you’re not getting documentation. You’re getting monitored.

Flipping the Switch: The Digital Pound in the Wrong Hands

The Digital Pound: A Tyrant’s Dream Come True.

You’ve heard all the promises about the Digital Pound. That it’s safe. That your privacy is guaranteed. But you have to ask yourself one brutal question: what happens when the people making those promises are gone? Because in the hands of an authoritarian regime, the system they are building today becomes the perfect weapon for controlling you tomorrow. This isn’t an academic exercise; it’s a warning. The infrastructure of a digital cage is being assembled right now, and what matters isn’t the current design, but what it will become in the wrong hands.

This isn’t just an academic exercise. History is littered with democracies that faltered. To build this infrastructure without considering the worst-case scenario is not just naive; it is reckless. In the event of an authoritarian takeover, the digital pound, linked to a Digital ID, would not be a tool of convenience. It would be the most perfect instrument of state control ever conceived.

The first and most immediate change would be the weaponisation of surveillance. All the current safeguards—GDPR, promises of data privacy, the separation between the Bank and private wallet providers—would be swept away overnight. An authoritarian state would rewrite the laws, bypass regulations, or simply coerce private companies to hand over the data. The system is already designed for traceability; a new regime would just have to point it in the right direction. Every transaction, every donation, every purchase would become an open book to the state, revealing your networks, your beliefs, and your loyalties. Financial privacy would cease to exist.

This leads directly to the next implication: conditional access to your own life. Today, they promise it’s a choice. Under an authoritarian regime, that choice would vanish. The digital pound would become mandatory, and cash, the last bastion of anonymity, would be aggressively phased out. We’ve seen how quickly existing financial systems can be turned against citizens. During the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the government froze the bank accounts of thousands of suspected dissidents. A digital pound would make this process frictionless and absolute.

Your access to money, and therefore your ability to buy food, pay rent, or travel, would be tied directly to your compliance. A centralised Digital ID would become the linchpin of a social credit system, where your right to participate in the economy is granted or denied based on your loyalty to the regime. Step out of line, and you could be switched off. Not arrested, not charged, just silently and efficiently excluded.

With this power, our fundamental civil liberties would be dismantled. The right to protest, to assemble, and to speak freely would be neutered. An authoritarian state could reprogramme the digital pound in an instant. It could block donations to opposition groups, restrict travel to protest locations, or even limit what you are allowed to purchase. The “silent denial of a transaction” would become the state’s most effective tool for suppressing dissent, creating a chilling effect that would silence opposition far more effectively than any police force.

And in a final, devastating step, such a regime could use the digital pound to manipulate the economy for its own ends. It could issue “helicopter money” directly into citizens’ wallets to shore up loyalty, but with strings attached—programmable funds that can only be spent on state-approved goods. It could even revalue the currency overnight, forcing everyone into the new system and wiping out the savings of those who resist.

The democratic checks and balances we rely on today are fragile. They can be eroded or dismantled. The infrastructure we build, however, is permanent. To create a centralised system that fuses identity and money is to build a cage. We may be promised that the door will remain unlocked, but in the hands of an authoritarian ruler, that door would be slammed shut and bolted. The Digital Pound would become the ultimate enforcer, turning every citizen into a subject, their freedom contingent on the flick of a switch.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

Your New Digital ID Isn’t For Convenience. It’s For Control.

The Digital Back Door: Why a National ID is the End of a Free Society

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

Lyric George Sumner – The Police

There’s a pitch being sold to the British public, dressed up in the language of convenience and national security. It’s the idea of a Digital ID for every adult, a neat, modern solution to complex problems like illegal migration.

I can tell you this isn’t progress. It’s the architecture of a control system, a Trojan horse that smuggles a surveillance state in under the guise of efficiency. It is the end of a free society, and we are sleepwalking towards it.

Let’s start by dismantling the primary justification: fixing the border. The claim that a Digital ID will stop the boats is, to put it plainly, bollocks. It will not stop trafficking gangs, nor will it fix a fundamentally broken system. Criminals and their networks are, by their very nature, experts at working around systems; they adapt faster than bureaucracies can legislate. The ones who will pay the price for this vast, expensive, and dangerous infrastructure will not be the criminals, but the honest, law-abiding citizens of this country.

The fundamental flaw lies in a concept I deal with daily: centralised risk. We spend hundreds of billions a year on cybersecurity, yet the volume and severity of data breaches are breaking records. The threat grows faster than the spend. From Jaguar Land Rover to major airports, no centralised system has proven impenetrable. Now, imagine that vulnerability scaled up to a national level, with a single database linking your identity to every checkpoint of daily life: where you go, what you buy, what you read, and who you speak to.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit. A sophisticated ransomware attack, seeded quietly through a compromised supplier or a disgruntled insider, lies dormant for months. It slowly rolls through the backups, undetected. Then, on trigger day, the live registry and every recovery set are encrypted simultaneously. The country grinds to a halt. Payments fail. Health and benefits systems stall. Borders slow to a crawl. Citizens are frozen out of their own lives until a ransom is paid or the state is forced to rebuild the nation’s identity from scratch. To centralise identity is to centralise failure.

This, however, is only the technical risk. The greater political and social danger lies in the certainty of function creep. It will begin as an optional, convenient way to log in or prove your age. But it will not end there. It will inevitably become a mandatory prerequisite for accessing money, travel, employment, and essential public services. Our fundamental rights will be turned into permissions, granted or revoked by the state and its chosen corporate contractors.

This isn’t a theoretical dystopian future; it’s a documented reality. India’s Aadhaar system, initially for welfare, now underpins everything from banking to mobile phones and has been plagued by data leaks exposing millions to fraud. We are seeing the groundwork laid in the UK with the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF), a federated model reliant on a network of private suppliers like Yoti, Hippo Digital, and IDEMIA. This multi-vendor approach doesn’t eliminate risk; it multiplies the potential points of failure through a web of interconnected APIs, each a potential back door for attackers.

Furthermore, this system is built on a foundation of exclusion. The assumption of universal digital literacy is a dangerous fiction. With a significant percentage of UK adults lacking basic digital skills, a mandatory Digital ID will create a two-tier society. The elderly, the poor, and the vulnerable—those who cannot or will not comply—risk being locked out of the services they need most, deepening inequality and fuelling social unrest.

The gravest danger, however, emerges when this infrastructure is placed in the context of a crisis. Economic collapse, social unrest, or an environmental emergency often serves as the justification for an expansion of state power. A Digital ID system provides the ready-made tool for authoritarianism. In a crisis, it could be repurposed to monitor dissent, freeze the bank accounts of protesters, or restrict the movement of individuals deemed a threat. It builds, by stealth, the machinery for a social credit system.

And this brings us to the corporate engine waiting to power this machine: Palantir. The US data-mining firm is already deeply embedded within the UK state, with contracts spanning the NHS and the Ministry of Defence. Palantir doesn’t need a specific contract for the “Brit Card”; its platforms, Foundry and Gotham, are designed to do precisely what a Digital ID enables on a mass scale: fuse disparate datasets into a single, all-encompassing profile for every citizen.

The Digital ID would be the “golden record” that connects your health data, your financial transactions, your movements, and your communications. In a crisis, Palantir’s AI could be used for predictive surveillance—flagging individuals who enter a “protest zone” or transactions to “undesirable” organisations. This isn’t just a British system; with Palantir’s deep ties to US intelligence, it becomes a system subject to foreign demands under legislation like the CLOUD Act. We would be outsourcing our national sovereignty.

The entire premise is flawed. If the government were serious about the border, it would enforce current laws, properly resource patrols and processing, and close existing loopholes. You do not need to build a panopticon to do that. We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason, recognising their threat to our fundamental liberties. Reintroducing them through the digital back door, outsourced to a network of private contractors and data-mining firms, is a monumental error.

There are better ways. Decentralised alternatives using cryptographic methods like zero-knowledge proofs can verify status or identity without creating a central honeypot of data. But these privacy-first solutions lack government traction because the true, unstated goal is not security or convenience. It is control. We must not fall for the pitch. This is a system that will centralise risk and outsource blame. It will punish the vulnerable while failing to stop the criminals it targets. It is the foundation for a future where our rights are contingent on our compliance. The choice is simple: yes to privacy-first proofs, no to a database state.

Beware the all-seeing eye!

New Look Fascism: Hiding In Plain Sight

We all know the old footage. The stark, monochrome marches, the rigid salutes, the frenzied crowds. It’s the ghost that haunts our modern world, and we’ve convinced ourselves we’d spot its return a mile off. We tell ourselves, “Never again,” with a quiet confidence that comes from knowing the enemy’s uniform. But what if the uniform has changed? What if the new fascism isn’t wearing jackboots, but a tailored suit, a tech bro’s hoodie, or the ironic grin of a meme?

That’s the unsettling truth we have to face. The aesthetics of authoritarianism have undergone a quiet but total redesign for the 21st century. It’s a friendlier, more insidious form that creeps in not with the bang of a dictator’s fist on a podium, but with the soft, persuasive glow of a smartphone screen. It’s less about stormtroopers and more about Silicon Valley’s vision of a tech-utopia, less about blood-and-soil rallies and more about the curated nostalgia of a “lost” masculinity. To my own mind, the most dangerous trick it’s pulled is making the whole thing feel like one big, bad taste joke.

Take a look around. The Italian Futurist Artists glorified war and speed; today’s tech oligarchs preach a gospel of progress, selling us a shiny, minimalist future where their corporations, not nations, are in charge. It’s a vision of power wrapped in the cool, unobjectionable aesthetics of a corporate keynote. And when that feels too cold, it offers Solar Punk—a beautiful, green-washed dream of harmony that can so easily be twisted to justify eco-fascist ideas of population control and exclusion. It’s utopia as a sales pitch, and it’s dangerously persuasive.

But the real shift, the one that leaves many of us feeling like we’re shouting into a void, is the weaponisation of irony. The symbols of hate have been replaced by cartoon frogs and anime girls. The dehumanising rhetoric is hidden behind layers of “just banter, mate.” It’s a shield of plausible deniability that allows cruel ideologies to spread through gaming chats and podcast bro culture, targeting young men who feel adrift. When you try to point out the nastiness lurking beneath the surface, you’re instantly labelled a humourless “snowflake.” It’s a brilliant, frustrating tactic: they make the world meaningless, so that caring about anything at all becomes a sign of weakness.

And now, we have AI. This, to me, feels like the final stage of this aesthetic hollowing-out. We’re being flooded with AI-generated slop—politicised art created without a shred of human conviction or creativity. It’s the ultimate tool for aestheticising politics, turning historical atrocities and genocidal fantasies into just another piece of content, stripped of all weight and horror. When everything can be faked and every image is just empty aesthetics, how do we hold on to truth?

So, how do we push back against something that’s designed to be slippery, ironic, and everywhere? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I believe it starts with a kind of stubborn, clear-eyed authenticity.

First, we have to get better at reading the aesthetics. We need a new kind of literacy that looks past the what and questions the how. Why does that political ad look like a video game trailer? Why is that leader communicating entirely in memes? We have to name the tactics when we see them, pulling back the curtain on the irony and the aesthetic whitewashing.

More importantly, we have to offer a better, truer story. You can’t fight a sense of belonging built on hatred with a list of policy points. We need to build real, tangible communities—through unions, local projects, mutual aid—that give people a genuine stake and a connection that no online cult can match. And we need to champion art and narratives that are unafraid of complexity and rich with empathy, that offer a vision of a future worth fighting for, one that includes everyone.

Ultimately, it comes down to a simple, profound choice: we have to insist on meaning. In a world that’s being deliberately drained of it, we must value truth over fiction, complexity over simplistic lies, and the inherent dignity of every person over the fascist’s cruel hierarchy of worth.

It’s not about winning an online argument or a single election. It’s a long, persistent effort to build a world where people feel secure and respected enough to see the new fascism for what it is: a seductive, well-designed package with nothing but emptiness inside. And that requires us to be, above all else, true to ourselves.

The Keep Sane in Troubled Times Playbook
1. Develop Critical Aesthetic Literacy
The first step is to recognise the weaponisation of aesthetics. This means moving beyond analysing what is said to how it is presented.

Teach Media Literacy 2.0: Go beyond identifying fake news. Teach people to deconstruct visual rhetoric: Why does a political ad use a specific type of animation? Why does a leader’s social media feed look like a meme page? What emotions is a corporate “utopian” video trying to evoke, and what material realities does it hide?
Name the Tactics: Publicly label the strategies when you see them. Point out the irony-poisoning, the co-option of subcultures, the use of AI slop to flood the zone. By making the mechanics visible, you rob them of their power.

2. Rebuild Trust through Material Politics and Local Organising
Fascism feeds on alienation, despair, and the collapse of trust in institutions. The most powerful antidote is to demonstrate that collective, democratic action can improve people’s lives.

Focus on Material Conditions: Shift the conversation from the abstract culture war to concrete, material issues: affordable housing, healthcare, wages, unionisation, climate resilience. Fascism offers scapegoats; a real alternative must offer solutions that address the root causes of anxiety.
Strengthen Local Community: Support and participate in local unions, tenants’ associations, mutual aid networks, and community gardens. These organisations build real-world solidarity, trust, and collective power that is immune to online manipulation. They provide a sense of belonging that is not based on hatred of an “other”.

3. Create Competing, Hopeful Narratives and Aesthetics
You cannot defeat a powerful aesthetic with a dry policy paper. The left and centre must relearn the art of storytelling and vision-building.

Articulate a Positive, Inclusive Future: Solar Punk, as mentioned, has positive potential. We need compelling, artistically rendered visions of a future that is both technologically advanced and socially just, ecologically sustainable, and inclusive. This vision must be attractive enough to compete with the nostalgic fantasies of the far right.
Support Art and Culture that Builds Empathy: Fund, celebrate, and amplify art, films, music, and games that celebrate complexity, diversity, and human dignity. Counter the dehumanising caricatures with rich, humanising stories.

4. Strategic, Unified Opposition and Deplatforming
While open debate is ideal, the video correctly shows that these movements often argue in bad faith, using debate as a platform to spread conspiracies.

Do Not Normalise: Avoid treating fascist ideology as a legitimate point of view in political discourse. The goal is not to “debate” whether some people are inferior, but to isolate and discredit those ideas. Media outlets have a responsibility not to platform figures who traffic in replacement theory or Holocaust denial for “balance”.
Strengthen Institutional Guardrails: Defend and strengthen independent journalism, an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, and the rule of law. Support projects that document hate speech and extremist networks. This is the unsexy, bureaucratic work that is essential for democracy’s survival.

5. Personal Responsibility and Courage

Interrupt Casual Bigotry: Do not let racist, homophobic, or antisemitic “jokes” slide in personal conversations. A calm, firm response like, “I don’t find that funny,” or “Why do you say that?” can disrupt the normalisation process.
Support Victims: Stand in solidarity with those targeted by hate. If you see someone being harassed, be a proactive bystander. This demonstrates that the community will not tolerate intimidation.
Protect Your Mental Space: The constant barrage of corrosive content is designed to exhaust and demoralise. It is essential to log off, engage in real-world communities, and protect your capacity for empathy and hope. You cannot fight a long-term battle while burned out.

The Core Challenge: Rejecting Meaninglessness
The video concludes that the ultimate goal of this aestheticisation is to make everything meaningless. Therefore, the most profound act of resistance is to insist on meaning.

This means:

Valuing Truth: Upholding the distinction between fact and fiction.
Valuing Complexity: Rejecting simplistic, us-vs-them narratives in favour of nuanced understanding.
Valuing Human Dignity: Constantly affirming the inherent and equal worth of every person, against the hierarchy of worth that fascism promotes.

Countering this new fascism is not about winning a single election or a viral online battle. It is a long-term, cultural, and political project to rebuild a society where people feel secure, respected, and hopeful enough to reject the seductive but deadly lies of fascism in any aesthetic guise.

How To Beat Reform

Core Strategic Principle: Diagnosis Before Prescription

Think of the 1970s and you think of flared trousers and Abba. You probably don’t think of Nazi salutes on British streets.

But for a time, the far-right National Front (NF) was a terrifying force in UK politics. Its skinhead gangs terrorised immigrant communities. Its leaders were open Hitler admirers. And in the 1977 elections, over 200,000 people voted for them.

Then, they were crushed. Not in a war, but by a brilliant, gritty campaign that united punk rockers, grandparents, trade unions and communities. Today, as a new wave of populism gains traction, the lessons from that victory are not just history – they’re a handbook.

Here’s how it was done, and how it applies now.

Lesson 1: Stop Debating, Start Disrupting

The anti-fascists of the ’70s knew a crucial truth: you can’t reason someone out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. So they didn’t try. Instead, their strategy was simple: make it impossible for the NF to function.

They physically blocked their marches. They packed their meetings and shouted them down. The goal wasn’t to win an argument; it was to create such a logistical nightmare that the authorities were forced to ban events and the Nazis were too ashamed to show their faces.

The Modern Application: Today, the town hall meeting has been replaced by the social media algorithm. The tactic of disruption isn’t just about physical blocking—which can backfire against a legal party—but about a more sophisticated, multi-pronged assault. This means flooding the digital space with compelling counter-content, using ‘pre-bunking’ techniques to inoculate the public against predictable manipulation, and actively ‘de-branding’ their language by refusing to parrot loaded terms. Instead of “stop the boats,” the debate becomes about “fixing the asylum system.” The goal remains the same: to deny their narrative the clean air it needs to breathe.

Lesson 2: Expose the Core, Not Just the Policies

The NF tried to hide its Nazi core behind a veneer of ‘respectable’ racism. Anti-fascists ripped this mask off. They circulated photos of leader John Tyndall in his not-at-all-a-Nazi-uniform and highlighted his speeches praising Hitler. The result? The more moderate followers fled, and the party splintered. The label ‘Nazi’ stuck because the evidence was overwhelming.

The Modern Application: This isn’t about slapping the ‘fascist’ label on every opponent. It’s about rigorous exposure. Who endorses this party? What do their policies logically lead to? When a candidate is found to have made extremist statements, the question to the leadership is simple: “Do you condone this? If not, what are you doing about it?” Force them to either repudiate their fringe or be defined by it. The battle is to expose the underlying narrative of national humiliation and purging, no matter how sanitised the language.

Lesson 3: Apply Institutional and Economic Friction

Beyond the battle of ideas lies the less visible but equally critical war of institutional accountability. The 1970s activists understood that pressure had to be applied at every level. When the Hackney Gazette ran an NF advert, its staff went on strike.

The Modern Application: The contemporary equivalent is wielding strategic economic and legal pressure. This means holding corporate donors publicly accountable, supporting rigorous challenges to potential campaign spending breaches, and demanding that media platforms couple any coverage with immediate, contextual fact-checking. The objective is to create friction—to make supporting or enabling populism a professionally and reputationally costly endeavour. This isn’t about silencing opposition, but about enforcing the rules and standards that populists seek to erode, ensuring demagoguery carries a tangible price.

Lesson 4: Out-Create Them. Make Hope Go Viral.

This was the masterstroke. While some groups fought in the streets, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism (RAR) fought for the culture. They realised that to win over a generation, you couldn’t just be against something; you had to be for something better.

RAR staged legendary gigs that paired white punk bands like The Clash with Black reggae acts. Their 1978 carnival in London attracted 100,000 people—a joyful, defiant celebration that made the NF look like the miserable, hate-fuelled sect they were.

“This ain’t no fucking Woodstock. This is the Carnival against the Nazis!” – Red Saunders, RAR co-founder

The Modern Application: This is the most critical lesson. Populism feeds on pessimism and cultural despair. The antidote is to build a more compelling, positive, and inclusive vision. Where is the modern equivalent of RAR? It’s about supporting creators, artists, and community initiatives that showcase a confident, modern Britain. It’s about telling stories of successful integration and shared future, making ‘hope’ more viral than ‘fear’.

Lesson 5: Protect Your Own. Community is Armour.

When the state failed to protect them, targeted communities organised their own defence. The Southall Youth Movement and others made their neighbourhoods ‘no-go zones’ for racists, patrolling streets and confronting threats directly. This wasn’t just about physical safety; it was about building unbreakable social and political resilience.

“What did we share with the white left? We learned from them as well. We shared the vision of a new world, our world, a world in which we were all equal, a fairer world.” – Tariq Mahmood, activist

The Modern Application: The threats today are often more digital and psychological than physical, but the principle is the same. This means strengthening local community bonds, supporting organisations that monitor and combat hate crime, and building robust support networks. Critically, this work must be underpinned by a ‘marathon, not a sprint’ mentality. The defeat of the National Front was not the work of a single election cycle but a sustained, multi-year effort. The modern challenge is to build resilient, long-term infrastructure—’the bakery’—that can withstand populist waves by addressing the underlying grievances of isolation and economic despair they exploit.

The Uncomfortable Truth for Today

The crucial difference is that Reform UK is not the National Front. It is a populist party, not a fascist paramilitary one. Applying the 1970s playbook isn’t about mindlessly copying tactics; it’s about intelligently adapting the principles.

The battle against the NF was won by a coalition that understood this was a war fought on multiple fronts simultaneously. It required the raw energy of street-level disruption, the sharp wit of cultural creation, the shrewdness of political exposure, and the patient, grinding work of institutional and legal challenge.

To effectively challenge modern populism demands the same holistic courage. It is not enough to out-create them online if their economic enablers face no consequences. It is not enough to win a legal battle if the cultural narrative of grievance remains unchallenged. The lesson of the 1970s is that victory comes not from a single masterstroke, but from the relentless, coordinated application of pressure everywhere it counts. The question is whether we can build a movement with the strategic depth to fight on all those fronts at once.

The UK Didn’t Just Sign a Tech Deal – It Handed Over the Keys.

Whilst all eyes are on Trump at Windsor the UK Government announced the “Tech Prosperity Deal,” a picture is emerging not of a partnership, but of a wholesale outsourcing of Britain’s digital future to a handful of American tech behemoths. The government’s announcement, dripping with talk of a “golden age” and “generational step change,” paints a utopian vision of jobs and innovation. But peel back the layers of PR, and the £31 billion deal begins to look less like an investment in Britain and more like a leveraged buyout of its critical infrastructure.

At the heart of this cosy relationship lies a bespoke new framework: the “AI Growth Zone.” The first of its kind, established in the North East, is the blueprint for this new model of governance. It isn’t just a tax break; it’s a red-carpet-lined, red-tape-free corridor designed explicitly for the benefit of companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI. The government’s role has shifted from regulation to facilitation, promising to “clear the path” by offering streamlined planning and, crucially, priority access to the national power grid—a resource already under strain.

While ministers celebrate the headline figure of £31 billion in private capital, the true cost to the public is being quietly written off in the footnotes. This isn’t free money. The British public is footing the bill indirectly through a cascade of financial incentives baked into the UK’s Freeport and Investment Zone strategy. These “special tax sites” offer corporations up to 100% relief on business rates for five years, exemptions from Stamp Duty, and massive allowances on capital investment. For every pound of tax relief handed to Microsoft for its £22 billion supercomputer or Blackstone for its £10 billion data centre campus, that is a pound less for schools, hospitals, and public services.

Conspicuously absent from this grand bargain is any meaningful protection for the very people whose data will fuel this new digital economy. The deafening silence from Downing Street on the need for a Citizens’ Bill of Digital Rights is telling. Such a bill would enshrine fundamental protections: the right to own and control one’s personal data, the right to transparency in algorithmic decision-making, and the right to privacy from pervasive state and corporate surveillance. Instead, the British public is left to navigate this new era with a patchwork of outdated data protection laws, utterly ill-equipped for the age of sovereign AI and quantum computing. Without these enshrined rights, citizens are not participants in this revolution; they are the raw material, their health records and digital footprints the currency in a deal struck far above their heads.

What is perhaps most revealing is the blurring of lines between the state and the boardroom. The government’s own press release celebrating the deal reads like a corporate shareholder report, quoting the CEOs of NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Microsoft at length. Their voices are not presented as external partners but as integral players in a shared national project. When Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, declares that “Stargate UK builds on this foundation,” it raises the fundamental question: who is building what, and for whom?

This unprecedented integration of Big Tech into the fabric of national infrastructure raises profound questions about sovereignty and control. These data centres and supercomputers are not just buildings; they are the “factories of the future,” processing everything from sensitive healthcare data from the UK Biobank to research that will define our national security. By handing the keys to this infrastructure to foreign entities, the UK risks becoming a digital vassal state, reliant on the goodwill and strategic interests of corporations whose primary allegiance is to their shareholders, not to the British public.

The “Tech Prosperity Deal” has been sold as a triumph of post-Brexit, “Global Britain.” But the reality is far more sobering. It is a deal that sees the government leveraging its power to reduce tax income, strain the national grid, and cede control of critical infrastructure, all to entice a handful of the world’s most powerful companies. The handshake may have been for £31 billion, but the price of Britain’s digital independence could prove to be far higher.

Quentin Budworth

Lens-based artist, writer and musician.