Looking for a Bigger Vehicle

At the end of PartOne, we left Britain’s fragmented far right with a problem.

It had organisations. Quite a fucking lot of them, as it happens. It had activists, conferences, publications, livestreams, propaganda networks, local campaigns and increasingly large audiences around street politics. What it didn’t have was anything remotely resembling the electoral reach the BNP had briefly achieved fifteen years earlier.

Patriotic Alternative could build a movement, but it wasn’t winning elections. Homeland had gone to the trouble of registering as a political party and then spent much of the following couple of years tearing itself apart. Alek Yerbury had created the National Rebirth Party. The British Democrats were still contesting elections. Steve Laws had stood for UKIP and later Homeland.

None of them had solved the problem.

You can spend years building another nationalist organisation from scratch, persuade a few hundred people to join it, create regional branches, hold conferences, distribute thousands of leaflets and argue endlessly about strategy. At the end of all that work, you still have to persuade millions of people to vote for you.

Or you can look at a political party that already has those voters and ask a rather different question.

Can we use that instead?

That question wasn’t something I went looking for and then tried to infer from a few suspicious connections. People inside the network were asking it themselves.

In May 2025, Mark Collett and David Clews published a joint declaration arguing that nationalists should join Reform UK.

Collett, of course, is the former BNP figure we followed through Part One into Patriotic Alternative. Clews represents a different part of the network. He runs Unity News Network, a media operation rather than one of the political parties we’ve been mapping, but the two were publicly advocating the same strategy.

And they weren’t talking about simply voting Reform. They were talking about joining it.

Their declaration encouraged supporters to become members, get involved locally and work towards positions inside the party. Clews talked about people becoming organisers, candidates, staff and researchers. Collett argued that the most useful people would be those without an obvious public history in nationalist politics, people with what he called a “clean public image”.

This wasn’t Reform announcing some alliance with Patriotic Alternative. It wasn’t Nigel Farage inviting Mark Collett round for a chat about immigration policy. It was people outside Reform looking at the party and deciding it might be useful to them. Collett described Reform as a political “wrecking ball”, something capable of smashing apart the existing political settlement and creating opportunities for the nationalist politics he actually wanted.

And once I started looking at it that way, another name from Part One appeared.

Kenny Smith.

The same Kenny Smith who went from senior positions in the BNP to Patriotic Alternative and then led the split which created Homeland.

Smith claimed that during the 2024 general election he had helped three Reform candidates. He said that a message subsequently came down instructing Reform candidates to stop working with him and other Homeland activists. He also claimed that some people around Reform remained willing to work with him privately afterwards, provided nobody knew about it.

That last bit needs a fucking enormous asterisk. It is Smith’s claim, and without knowing who those people supposedly were or finding independent evidence that those relationships existed, I’m not going to turn it into proof of secret cooperation.

Fortunately, we don’t need it. Collett and Clews publicly wanted nationalists to join Reform, seek positions and influence the party. Smith says Homeland activists had already helped Reform candidates.

For the first time in this investigation, we’re not simply following somebody who happened to move from one political organisation into another. We’re looking at a strategy.

Which leaves the obvious question.

Did it actually work?

Because announcing that you’re going to infiltrate a political party is considerably easier than successfully infiltrating the fucking thing.

Who Actually Got In?

There are people with histories elsewhere on the far right who made it into Reform. There are also people who explicitly wanted to infiltrate Reform. Those are not automatically the same group of people.

Raymond Saint is probably the clearest place to start.

In 2024, Saint was selected as Reform’s parliamentary candidate for Basingstoke. Reporting subsequently identified a Raymond Saint at the same address on the leaked 2009 BNP membership list. Reform withdrew its support and said former BNP members were not welcome.

That gives us a solid route from the old BNP world into Reform, but it happened before Collett and Clews publicly launched their strategy in May 2025.

Grant StClair-Armstrong presents a slightly different version of the same problem. He had been selected as Reform’s candidate in North West Essex before old material emerged in which he had expressed support for the BNP. He resigned as the candidate. Somebody with documented pro-BNP politics had got through Reform’s selection process, but there is nothing establishing that Patriotic Alternative put him there.

Then we get to Kai Cunningham, and this one is considerably more interesting.

Cunningham became involved with Reform in East London and spoke at a party meeting in 2025. Reporting subsequently uncovered statements in which he had advocated a “national socialist government”, alongside antisemitic material, and specialist reporting identified him with White Vanguard, another explicitly racial-nationalist organisation appearing elsewhere in this network. Reform suspended him.

Cunningham later told The Sunday Times that his “initial intention was to get on the inside of Reform.”

Well, there it fucking is.

His own account gives us unusually direct evidence of somebody from this wider political milieu deliberately entering Reform. What it doesn’t establish is that Collett or Clews sent him there. So the line we can actually draw is White Vanguard → Cunningham → Reform, followed by suspension.

Then there is Joe Custodio. He had previously stood for Reform in local elections and was later photographed at a Patriotic Alternative summer gathering. He said a friend had invited him, that he stayed for several hours and denied being a PA member. Reform subsequently said he was no longer a candidate or member.

That tells us a former Reform candidate attended a PA event. It doesn’t magically make him a PA operative.

So the conclusion is less sensational than “Patriotic Alternative infiltrated Reform”, but considerably better supported. People with established histories elsewhere on the far right did get into Reform, and at least one man linked to the racial-nationalist fringe later said getting inside Reform had originally been his intention. What we cannot currently establish is that these cases were the product of the specific Collett and Clews operation.

Reform was targeted. Whether that particular operation successfully planted a coordinated group inside the party remains unproven.

With Restore Britain, however, we can get considerably further.

From Reform to Restore

If Reform was the first bigger vehicle people in this network openly talked about using, Restore Britain gave us something much easier to follow.

This time we don’t just have a strategy. We have people.

Restore begins with Rupert Lowe, which means our route into it actually runs through Reform itself. Lowe had been elected as a Reform MP in 2024, fell spectacularly out with Nigel Farage and the party the following year, and eventually created Restore as his own political project.

Restore wasn’t another Homeland or National Rebirth Party trying to build an electoral organisation from the nationalist fringe upwards. It came with a sitting MP, an existing public profile and considerably more media attention than most of these groups could dream of getting.

Its politics were already further right than Reform. Restore talks about reversing mass immigration, redefining access to British citizenship and deporting legally resident foreign nationals who fail various tests around employment, benefits, language and integration. Its published position is quite explicit: “If that means millions go, then millions go.” I’ve covered Restore Britain’s mass-deportation plan in my previous piece, Restore Britain: Who Are the Ten Million?.

You can see why Steve Laws became interested.

By this point Laws had travelled a particularly useful route through our map. He had stood for UKIP, joined Homeland, left it after deciding it had become too moderate, founded Remigration Now, maintained links and campaigned with Patriotic Alternative, and was now looking towards Restore.

He joined and encouraged other people from his political world to do the same. He told supporters to campaign, leaflet, canvass and get involved in elections, and reporting quoted him urging supporters to become candidates and branch organisers in order to create a “stronghold” inside the party. Laws himself later acknowledged that he had encouraged all his followers to join Restore because he regarded it as the right political “vehicle”.

There’s that fucking word again.

Unlike the Reform story, here we can connect that strategy to actual people.

Callum Barker is one of the clearest examples. We met Barker in Part One through Homeland and the protests around the Bell Hotel in Epping. Barker was one of the administrators of Epping Says NO, alongside fellow Homeland members Adam Clegg and Andrew Piper and local activist Craig Kitts. Barker subsequently moved towards Restore, with specialist reporting identifying him as an ex-Homeland figure supporting and campaigning around the party.

Then there is Lydia Straiton. Reporting identified Straiton as a Restore organiser in London City and East while she was also participating in a Remigration Now members’ Telegram group. She subsequently appeared in Restore organiser training involving Lowe.

And Sam Wilkes, another figure in the remigration milieu, also signed up to Restore and remained there even as Laws’s relationship with the party later began to implode.

Put all that together and I think the most defensible description is limited but demonstrable personnel penetration. Laws publicly encouraged people from his political milieu to join Restore and build influence, and people connected to that milieu subsequently appeared as members, campaigners and, according to reporting, local organisers.

That is not the same thing as saying Laws controlled Restore, or that Rupert Lowe was taking instructions from Remigration Now. In fact, what happened next rather strongly suggests the opposite.

But first we need to stay in Epping for a moment, because the Bell Hotel protests expose another part of this network which is much harder to fit inside neat organisational boxes.

The Network Outside the Organisations

Epping is useful because it shows us something the organisational family tree can’t.

Callum Barker, Adam Clegg and Andrew Piper were connected to Homeland and were administrators of Epping Says NO, alongside local activist Craig Kitts. Barker became one of the most prominent organisers around the protests outside the Bell Hotel.

But the people turning up outside the hotel weren’t simply Homeland supporters. Contemporary reporting from one of the early demonstrations found that most were local people with no affiliation to any political movement.

That changes the shape of the map.

A relatively small number of organised political activists can operate inside a much broader mobilisation made up of people who have never joined Homeland, Patriotic Alternative or any of the other organisations we’ve been following. Those spaces can be Facebook groups, local campaigns, protests outside asylum hotels, livestream audiences or flagging campaigns built around one issue and possibly gone again six months later.

Orla Minihane arrived in that same mobilisation from a completely different direction. She was already involved with Reform UK and would go on to help build the Pink Ladies out of the Bell Hotel protests. We’ll come back to her, because her route becomes one of the clearest examples of how grassroots mobilisation and electoral politics can meet.

For now, the important point is Epping itself. Homeland activists were involved in administering Epping Says NO while a much larger number of unaffiliated local people joined the protests. Craig Kitts later became involved in flagging activity associated with Raise the Colours. Different people were entering and leaving the same political space without ever needing to belong to the same organisation.

That is the bit the organisational map misses.

And once you see it, Tommy Robinson’s role starts making considerably more sense.

When the Crowd Is Bigger Than the Organisation

Tommy Robinson doesn’t sit at the top of some enormous far-right organisational chart. He isn’t running Patriotic Alternative, Homeland or Remigration Now, and some people inside those organisations don’t particularly like him.

What Robinson can do is get people onto the streets.

In September 2025, his Unite the Kingdom rally brought around 150,000 people into central London according to the Metropolitan Police estimate. When he did it again in May 2026, the number was smaller but still around 60,000.

Put that next to the organisations we spent Part One following. Patriotic Alternative can hold conferences and demonstrations. Homeland can organise activists. Remigration Now can run campaigns. None of them can independently put anything remotely resembling 60,000 people on the streets.

Robinson can, which makes him less an organisational hub than a mobilisation hub.

At the May 2026 Unite the Kingdom rally, around forty activists from Patriotic Alternative, Remigration Now and other nationalist groups positioned themselves outside King’s Cross, where people travelling to Robinson’s rally would pass them. They put up two enormous “STOP WHITE REPLACEMENT” banners and claimed to have distributed 15,000 leaflets promoting remigration and demographic replacement.

Patriotic Alternative wrote about it themselves. They were openly hostile towards parts of Robinson’s politics, but boasted that they had taken their message “directly to the people” attending his rally.

They didn’t need to control Unite the Kingdom. They didn’t even need to particularly like Tommy Robinson.

They needed his audience.

PA and Remigration Now were deliberately cooperating with one another, as they had at a joint demonstration in Nuneaton a couple of months earlier. Their relationship with Robinson’s rally was different. They saw a crowd vastly bigger than anything they could assemble themselves and took their politics to it.

Robinson, meanwhile, was telling supporters from the stage to get involved in local politics.

So in the same space you had a huge protest audience being encouraged towards political activity while smaller organised groups tried to put their own ideas in front of it. Nobody needed to merge with anybody.

And Unite the Kingdom wasn’t the only loose mobilisation creating those opportunities.

Something similar was happening with flags.

The Flags

Before going any further with Raise the Colours, we need to separate two things that are very easy to muddle together.

There is a specific organisation called Raise the Colours, associated particularly with Ryan Bridge and Elliott Stanley, which emerged from flagging activity around Birmingham and Worcestershire. Then there is the much broader Operation Raise the Colours, the name and hashtag used across a decentralised national campaign which saw Union flags and St George’s flags appearing on lamp posts, roundabouts and other public spaces across the country from the summer of 2025 onwards.

They’re connected. They are not the same thing.

The wider campaign had no single national membership list or headquarters sending instructions to everybody putting a flag on a lamp post. Different local groups appeared around it, sometimes independently, sometimes using the same branding and hashtags and sometimes cooperating with people from elsewhere.

In Birmingham, for example, the Weoley Warriors became one of the prominent local flagging groups. They used the Operation Raise the Colours identity, but that doesn’t make them simply the Birmingham branch of Ryan Bridge’s organisation.

And putting up an England flag does not make somebody far-right. Plenty of people involved described what they were doing simply as patriotism.

Organised far-right actors did, however, enter the wider campaign. One of the figures identified around Operation Raise the Colours was Andrew Currien, also known as Andy Saxon, who has been reported as having links to both the English Defence League and Britain First. The Times reported that his campaign received hundreds of flags from Britain First, while Britain First published videos of its own activists putting up flags in Salford and Little Hulton and explicitly described them as taking part in Operation Raise the Colours.

The specific Raise the Colours organisation developed in another direction. Bridge and others moved beyond flagging into increasingly confrontational anti-immigration activism, including activity around the Channel and northern France. The organisation today presents itself as a lawful grassroots patriotic movement and explicitly says it does not support vigilantism or unauthorised activity.

By 2026 it was also involved in legal confrontations with councils over flagging. In Oxfordshire, Bridge and other named figures agreed to a High Court injunction preventing unauthorised flagging on council infrastructure. Birmingham City Council subsequently sought its own injunction against the group.

What began as a loose national flagging mobilisation had therefore produced local groups, attracted established political activists and organisations, and created its own more formal campaigning structures.

One of the people moving through those different layers was Danny Tommo.

The Man Who Keeps Moving

Danny Tommo, whose real name is Daniel Thomas, doesn’t fit neatly into the organisation-to-organisation route we followed in Part One. His political importance comes largely from moving between people, campaigns and audiences.

He was already well known as an associate of Tommy Robinson, but during 2025 he developed a profile of his own around anti-asylum and anti-immigration protests and the growing movement around asylum hotels. He then became involved with Ryan Bridge and Raise the Colours.

By late 2025, Tommo and Bridge were working together on Operation Overlord, which took their activism across the Channel into northern France. They travelled to areas around Calais and Dunkirk, livestreaming themselves confronting migrants and aid workers and searching for small boats used for Channel crossings. French authorities later intervened against British activists involved in this activity.

Then, because apparently no investigation into the British far right can go more than about fifteen minutes without somebody having a massive fucking falling-out, Tommo and Bridge split.

By January 2026, the relationship had collapsed amid arguments over money, strategy and the direction of their campaigning. Bridge continued with Raise the Colours while Tommo carried on independently, still using the Operation Overlord name around some of his activity.

In late May he launched Patriot Platform, pitching it as a way of turning the much broader pool of people angry about immigration and asylum into something more organised. He talked about getting “boots on the ground”, building local networks and recruiting people prepared to take direct action. By June he was claiming 30,000 people had signed up. By August that claim had risen above 40,000.

Those numbers need treating as exactly what they are: Tommo’s numbers. When Patriot Platform held what it called its National Recruitment Day on 22 August, specialist reporting put the physical turnout at roughly 200 people.

The more interesting thing is the route. Tommo moves from Robinson’s orbit into protest organising, then into collaboration with Raise the Colours and Operation Overlord. That relationship blows up, but his audience and contacts don’t vanish with it. He carries on independently and builds Patriot Platform.

He is trying to turn audience into organisation.

That is a very different model from the BNP. The organisation can change while the audience follows the individual.

And one of the clearest places where these newer campaigning networks meet electoral politics brings us back to Epping.

The Pink Ladies

The Pink Ladies grew out of the protests around the Bell Hotel in Epping, with Orla Minihane arguing that the campaign should be visibly led by local women rather than masked men and the violence that had begun to surround some of the demonstrations. She helped establish the Pink Ladies, named rather straightforwardly after the colour they wore.

Minihane was not new to politics. By late 2024 she was vice-chair of Reform UK’s Epping Forest branch and had been selected as a Reform candidate for local elections that were subsequently postponed. When the Bell Hotel protests took off, she was already sitting inside one of the electoral parties we’re mapping.

The Pink Ladies spread beyond Epping. Groups appeared elsewhere around protests against asylum accommodation, with different local organisers and identities operating under the same broad banner. By November 2025 there was also a formal company, Pink Ladies Services Ltd, with Minihane and Vikki Smith as directors, although the existence of the company does not tell us that every group using the name around Britain was centrally directed from Epping.

Their public message concentrated heavily on the safety of women and girls, asylum hotels and immigration, allowing them to organise in spaces quite different from those occupied by explicitly ethnonationalist groups. By 2026 they were appearing at demonstrations well beyond Epping. At a July protest in Dover, Pink Ladies activists shared the mobilisation with figures from other parts of the political right, including a Restore candidate and a reported Advance UK adviser. Tommy Robinson promoted the event to his audience, while Danny Tommo had separately encouraged Pink Ladies supporters to join one of his Dover actions earlier in the year.

The group also developed relationships with other campaigning organisations, including the Women’s Safety Initiative.

Then Minihane moved from Reform to Restore Britain, where Rupert Lowe made her spokeswoman for the safety of women and girls.

Her route is worth putting plainly:

Reform → Epping protests → Pink Ladies → Restore.

It doesn’t begin in the old BNP world. It comes through electoral politics, a local protest movement and a campaigning network before arriving at Restore from a completely different direction to Steve Laws and Remigration Now.

By the summer, those two routes were about to collide.

At a Restore event in Gateshead, Minihane said something which exposed an argument that had been sitting underneath the party for months.

She talked about protecting British girls from abuse and explicitly included girls from Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Somali backgrounds.

Which raised a question far bigger than the Pink Ladies.

Who actually counts as British?

Who Gets to Be British?

You can believe immigration should be reduced drastically, demand mass
deportations, oppose asylum accommodation and support all sorts of
policies I personally think are fucking appalling, while still believing
that a British citizen whose grandparents came from Pakistan is British. This is the position of many on the hard right, there are many shades of xenophobia and bigotry, not all are absolutist in their racism.

Ethnonationalism introduces a different stress test, to all this. Belonging, for them, ultimately becomes a question of ancestry.

By August 2026, that argument was happening inside Restore Britain.

Restore’s campaigns director and spokesman Charlie Downes had publicly argued for a conception of Britishness rooted in indigenous ancestry and Christianity. Harrison Pitt, Restore’s head of policy, was promoting remigration and talking about Britain’s changing demographics. Other Restore figures were publicly rejecting the idea that Britishness depended upon being white or having sufficiently deep ancestral roots.

Downes’s place in that wider political milieu became harder to dismiss at the end of August. Searchlight reported that he was due to speak at the Dominion Society’s DomCon26 conference in Ontario alongside Martin Sellner, the Austrian identitarian activist who has spent years promoting “remigration”. Downes was detained at the US-Canada border on the way to the event.

Back inside Restore, Jez Hermer, the party’s candidate in the Dover district council by-election, told The Sunday Times that he did not believe somebody had to be “pure white” to be British and said he had found himself reassuring voters that Restore did not endorse ethnonationalism. He even pointed out that his own great-great-grandfather was Estonian.

Which seems an entirely sensible thing to say.

Steve Laws fucking hated it.

His politics were explicitly ethnonationalist, and when Hermer rejected an ethnic test of Britishness, Laws attacked him for failing to understand what he regarded as the political basics.

Then came Minihane’s Gateshead speech.

Some people around Restore’s online base attacked her for including British girls from minority backgrounds when discussing protection from abuse. Minihane hit back. Restore transport spokesman Howard Cox defended her and went after her critics. Laws then attacked Cox and accused Rupert Lowe of failing to defend the party’s membership.

What looks initially like another tedious factional row was really an argument about who belongs to the nation.

And then, on 2 September, right in the middle of the fallout, Restore published a policy paper specifically trying to answer the question.

It is called Restore Britain’s Philosophy of National Belonging.

The timing is fairly fucking extraordinary.

Restore says citizenship is the legal boundary and explicitly recognises the legal equality of British citizens, but says national belonging does not end with a passport. It describes Britain as a “historic national community” shaped across generations by family, place, culture, institutions, loyalty and shared experience, and places that alongside what it calls demographic security and national continuity. The same statement says a Restore government would end mass immigration, radically reform citizenship and substantially reduce the foreign-national population.

That doesn’t make the argument disappear. It explains why the argument existed.

Restore is trying to hold two ideas together. One is a legal category in which British citizens are equal. The other is a thicker idea of national belonging in which ancestry, historical continuity and demography still matter. That is not quite Laws’s demand for an explicitly ethnic definition of Britishness, but nor is it the simple civic proposition that citizenship settles the question.

Eventually somebody asks about the British Pakistani kid born in Birmingham, and that is where the difference becomes rather difficult to hide.

The ethnonationalist milieu had got far enough inside Restore to have this argument publicly. It had not got far enough to dictate the answer.

On 29 August, Steve Laws quit.

The Vehicle Breaks Down

When Laws finally explained his departure, he did something rather useful for this investigation: he described the strategy in his own words.

He said he had encouraged all of his followers to join Restore and therefore had a responsibility to tell them when it was no longer the right “vehicle”. He also said that for months he had been using contacts inside the party to try to steer it and admitted, rather plainly, “I have failed in that attempt.”

That is about as neat a summary of the experiment as we’re likely to get from the man conducting it.

Laws had looked at Restore as a mainstream vehicle for nationalist politics. He and others from that political milieu got inside it. He tried to influence its direction. Then he concluded that the attempt had failed and walked away, complaining of “horrendous decisions”, “one failure after another” and what he called a “humiliation ritual”.

Three days after Laws left, Orla Minihane resigned as Restore’s spokeswoman for the safety of women and girls, but for very different reasons. She said she wanted to concentrate on the Pink Ladies and publicly thanked Rupert Lowe for his continuing friendship.

And on the same day Minihane stepped down, Lowe announced something else which makes the broken-vehicle line considerably more interesting.

Restore had received £500,000 from Cambridge technology entrepreneur Simon Galbraith, through his company Cade Hill Investments. The money came as two £250,000 donations, one in April and another in August, and was the first major financial backing publicly identified for the party.

So while Laws was telling his followers that Restore was no longer the right vehicle, Restore itself had just acquired half a million quid and, the following day, published its new statement on national belonging.

That is not what a party disappearing looks like.

It is what a failed attempt to steer one looks like.

And Minihane’s departure tells us something different again. She left an official party role and turned her attention back towards the campaigning network she had helped build outside it.

Neither route simply ends at the party door.

Laws still has Remigration Now. Minihane still has the Pink Ladies. Tommy Robinson still has his audience. Danny Tommo can fall out with Raise the Colours and build Patriot Platform. Organisations can split, campaigns can collapse and political vehicles can cease to be useful without the people, contacts and audiences around them vanishing.

Which leaves us with the thing I thought would be much easier when I started drawing all these fucking lines.

What exactly are we looking at?

What the Network Looks Like Now

After following this thing from the BNP through nearly two decades of splits, regroupings and political migrations, the temptation is to produce one enormous diagram with FAR RIGHT written across the top and draw lines between absolutely everybody.

That would be bollocks.

There isn’t one British far-right organisation hiding behind all these names. There isn’t a central committee deciding that Mark Collett does Patriotic Alternative, Steve Laws handles remigration, Tommy Robinson does the crowds and Rupert Lowe provides the electoral vehicle. There isn’t a common company or pot of money underneath them all. Some of these people cooperate. Some compete. Some used to cooperate and now appear to fucking despise each other.

What survives is movement between different kinds of political space.

The organisational strand is the easiest to see. The BNP collapses, but people from it reappear in newer organisations. Patriotic Alternative produces its own splits. Homeland produces more. People carry contacts, experience and politics from one group into another.

But that is only one layer.

Robinson shows how a huge political audience can exist without becoming a conventional membership organisation. Epping shows how organised activists can operate inside a local mobilisation made up largely of people with no formal affiliation. Minihane shows how somebody can move from an electoral party into that mobilisation, build a campaigning network and then return to party politics through a different vehicle. Restore shows that people from the ethnonationalist fringe can enter a larger party and try to influence it without controlling the thing.

That is a much stranger structure than the BNP ever was.

It is a political ecosystem in which formal organisations, individual bridge figures, media audiences, local campaigns, street mobilisations and electoral parties repeatedly overlap.

The lines between them mean different things. Sometimes somebody really is a member. Sometimes they leave one organisation and join another. Sometimes two groups deliberately campaign together. Sometimes somebody appears on another group’s platform or promotes its event. Sometimes people simply occupy the same protest space.

And sometimes two people believe similar things but have no demonstrable organisational connection at all, in which case there is no line to draw.

That is why the network can reach considerably further than the membership numbers of its formal organisations suggest.

It doesn’t need everybody to join.

A small organisation can take its politics to somebody else’s demonstration. An influencer can direct an audience towards a campaign. A Facebook group can become a local mobilisation point. A protest movement can produce political candidates. An electoral party can become a temporary vehicle for people whose politics developed somewhere else entirely.

And when that vehicle breaks down for one faction, the people, contacts and audiences don’t disappear with it.

Which brings us all the way back to the BNP.

The BNP tried to put this kind of politics inside one political organisation and win elections with it. What came afterwards is much harder to draw because so much of it no longer stays inside the boxes. And that, after following all these fucking people through all these fucking organisations, is the thing I keep coming back to.

The organisation isn’t the thing that persists.

The network is.

Further Reading

Mapping Britain’s Far-Right Network: Part One - From the collapse of the BNP to the groups, splinters and recurring figures that followed.

Who the Hell Is James Henry Holmes?: Property developer. Flagshagger. Restore Britain reject. Now chasing priests around churches.

Stop Watching the Flags: Britain’s radical right is loudest on the street. Its real power may be somewhere else.

James Orr: The Man in the Middle - Inside the network of ideas, money and influence reshaping the British right

Don’t mourn. Organise. The hard right already has.

Restore Britain: Who Are the Ten Million?

I Spent an Evening Among Nathan Cofnas’s Supporters. It Was Quite an Education.

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

The Party That Died

There was a point, not actually that long ago, when Britain’s far right had something it has struggled to recreate ever since: one obvious political home.

The British National Party was founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, who had previously been chairman of the National Front. Under Nick Griffin, another former National Front figure, the BNP embarked on an attempt to drag itself away from the violent and openly neo-Nazi image associated with parts of Britain’s post-war far right and make itself electorally palatable. It didn’t stop being the BNP. It changed how the BNP tried to sell itself. A later government review describes that strategy as an attempt under Griffin to move away from its violent and neo-Nazi image in order to win greater public acceptance.

For a while, it worked.

During the 2000s the BNP stopped being merely some collection of racist gobshites shouting at the edges of British politics and became an actual electoral force. It won council seats. In Barking and Dagenham in 2006 it took 12 seats, establishing a sizeable bloc on the local authority.

Then came 2009.

At the European elections, 943,598 people voted BNP. That was 6.2 per cent of the vote across Great Britain, enough to send two BNP representatives to the European Parliament, including Griffin himself.

Nearly a million votes.

That number matters because we’re going to spend a lot of this investigation among organisations whose active memberships can be measured in hundreds, sometimes apparently considerably fewer. For all the subsequent attempts to rebuild, regroup and rebrand Britain’s racial-nationalist right, none of the organisations we’re about to encounter has reproduced what the BNP briefly achieved electorally.

And then it fell apart.

The 2010 elections were devastating. In Barking and Dagenham, the BNP lost all 12 of its councillors, while Griffin failed in his attempt to become the constituency’s MP. Nationally, its momentum began to disappear. By the 2014 European elections, the party that had taken more than six per cent five years earlier had fallen to just over one per cent and lost both its MEPs.

There were internal disputes, defections and financial problems. Griffin lost the leadership in 2014 and was subsequently expelled. In January 2016 the BNP was removed from the Electoral Commission’s register after failing to submit its annual confirmation of registered details on time, forcing it to make a fresh application. It was re-registered the following month.

The party technically survived. Politically, but the thing that had terrified parts of Britain a few years earlier was fucked.

And this is normally where the story becomes much too simple.

The BNP rose. Britain rejected it. The BNP collapsed. The end.

Except political organisations aren’t buildings. When you demolish one, the people inside don’t disappear into the rubble. Some leave politics altogether. Some moderate. Others drift elsewhere, fall out with one another, establish new organisations or decide elections were the wrong strategy in the first place. What interested me was the people who carried broadly the same politics into something else.

What happened to them?

One was Mark Collett.

Collett had been chairman of Young BNP and later the BNP’s director of publicity. Years after the BNP’s electoral collapse, his name would appear again as the founder of Patriotic Alternative, established in 2019. The government’s review identifies PA as having been founded by the former BNP youth leader, while subsequent reporting has described the organisation as attracting activists looking for a new political home after the BNP’s effective collapse.

Another was Andrew Brons, one of the two BNP politicians elected to the European Parliament in 2009. His subsequent political journey would help lead to the creation of the British Democratic Party, another organisation we will encounter later.

Then there is Julian Leppert, another figure with a BNP history who later moved through For Britain and into the British Democrats, before appearing much later in specialist reporting around campaigning for Restore Britain.

Don’t worry about remembering every organisation yet. That’s rather the point.

At first this looks like a bewildering collection of tiny parties, organisations, campaigns and factions. If we simply catalogue them one after another, it stays bewildering. Start writing the names of the people beside them, though, and the same names begin coming back.

Sometimes they’re founders. Sometimes members, candidates, speakers or campaigners. Those distinctions matter and we’ll preserve them throughout this investigation. Appearing at somebody’s event doesn’t make you a member of their organisation, any more than standing beside somebody at a demonstration proves you’re taking instructions from them.

There is no need to invent connections. There are already enough real ones. And one of the clearest begins with that former BNP youth leader.

Because in 2019, almost a decade after the BNP’s electoral high-water mark had begun collapsing beneath it, Mark Collett started building something else.

It was called Patriotic Alternative.

And from there, the family tree gets considerably more fucking complicated.

Building Something New

When Mark Collett reappears in this story, he isn’t trying to resurrect the BNP.

By the time Patriotic Alternative emerged in 2019, both the political landscape and the tools available to movements outside the mainstream had changed.

Collett brought considerable baggage with him. He had chaired Young BNP and later served as the BNP’s director of publicity. The government’s review identifies him as PA’s founder and describes the organisation as promoting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, in which indigenous white European populations are understood to be being replaced through mass non-European immigration.

But PA wasn’t simply another attempt to get BNP-style candidates onto ballot papers.

Its strategy was much more diffuse. There was an online operation built around blogs, videos, livestreams and social media. Offline there were conferences, hiking groups, fitness activities, summer camps, banner drops, leafleting and deliberately mundane-looking community activity: countryside walks, litter picking and local campaigning. PA itself still describes its model as based around “Community, Activism and Advocacy” rather than electioneering.

The BNP had principally attempted to convert racial nationalism into votes.

PA was trying to build a movement.

Alongside Collett was Laura Towler, also known as Laura Tyrie, PA’s deputy leader and one of its most visible public figures. This isn’t merely an informal political association. Companies House records Mark Collett and Laura Tyrie as active directors of Patriotic Alternative Ltd and both as persons with significant control.

Then there is Sam Melia, Towler’s husband and a senior PA figure.

Melia was also behind Hundred-Handers, a propaganda project producing material that supporters could download, print and distribute. During his later prosecution, Leeds Crown Court heard evidence about racist stickers circulated through the network. Melia was convicted of offences relating to intending to stir up racial hatred.

One person, in other words, can operate across different bits of the ecosystem at the same time. Melia’s PA role existed alongside a propaganda operation capable of distributing material well beyond the structure of a conventional political party.

PA itself was also pulling together people from different generations of the British far right. Reporting in early 2023 described older activists joining younger ones under the PA banner, while the government review noted assessments that it had begun drawing together elements of a fractured far-right scene.

The scale still needs keeping in perspective. PA has claimed tens of thousands of supporters, while estimates of actual membership have been far smaller. Its own 2021 conference attracted only a few hundred people.

That is a very different thing from the nearly one million votes the BNP received in 2009. But raw membership numbers don’t quite explain why PA matters here. Its importance lies as much in who passed through it as who stayed.

Alek Yerbury spent time in PA before leaving and creating something of his own.

Steve Laws appeared as a speaker at PA events before his later involvement elsewhere.

And then a sizeable section of PA itself decided the organisation wasn’t going anywhere fast enough.

The arguments were mostly about strategy. Should they concentrate on activism and community-building, contest elections, produce propaganda or try to turn this little movement into something recognisably political?

Eventually another question would arise: why keep building tiny organisations at all if there might be a considerably larger political vehicle available elsewhere?

But that comes later. First came the split in PA.

In April 2023, Patriotic Alternative suffered the most consequential rupture in its short history. Members frustrated by its political direction broke away, with the government’s later review recording the split and the creation of the organisation that followed.

They weren’t abandoning the politics. They were building somewhere else for them.

Homeland.

The Split

In April 2023, Patriotic Alternative didn’t simply lose a few disgruntled members.

It split. And the man at the centre of that breakaway had already been through this world before.

Kenny Smith was Patriotic Alternative’s national administration officer. Before PA, he had held senior positions inside the British National Party, including Scottish regional organiser and head of administration. Contemporary reporting from the BNP era identifies him in both roles.

So another line runs straight out of the old BNP world:

BNP → Kenny Smith → Patriotic Alternative.

Then Smith broke with Mark Collett.

Reporting on the split described frustration within the breakaway faction over PA’s political direction. Collett’s critics thought the organisation had become too preoccupied with livestreaming, online personalities and social activity, while they wanted something more explicitly political and capable of contesting elections.

This wasn’t a handful of people muttering in a Telegram group and buggering off.

Searchlight reported that 32 of PA’s 54 organisers deserted Collett. VICE, drawing on material obtained by Red Flare, likewise described a large proportion of PA’s senior organisational structure defecting.

Among those who remained with Collett were Laura Towler/Tyrie and Sam Melia. Among those reported as moving across were Anthony Burrows, then PA’s East Midlands regional organiser, Connor Marlow from the West Midlands and Jerome O’Reilly from Wales.

The new organisation was called Homeland.

Its own account gives us unusually precise dates. Homeland says the initial decision to make a go of it was taken in the early hours of 19 April 2023. The party formally adopted its constitution and declared itself founded on 8 May 2023, before gaining Electoral Commission registration on 31 January 2024.

Homeland wasn’t simply PA with a different logo. It wanted to become a political party.

Its constitution created a National Council responsible for political direction and day-to-day management, and the organisation began talking openly about community politics, electoral organisation and appearing on ballot papers.

Which gives us a useful little picture of how this fragmentation actually works.

PA didn’t disappear when Homeland was created. Collett kept PA. Smith and a substantial chunk of its organisation created Homeland alongside it.

Where there had been one organisation, now there were two.

Follow Smith rather than the organisation names and the continuity becomes much clearer:

BNP → Patriotic Alternative → Homeland.

And Homeland’s current politics make that continuity difficult to miss. Its programme advocates what it calls remigration, including a plan for more than ten million people to leave Britain over ten years, explicitly framed around restoring the country’s “historic demographics”. Those are Homeland’s words, not mine.

We’ll come back to the word "remigration”, because it begins turning up all over the place.

First, though, the people who had left PA because they thought they could build something better were about to discover that Homeland had problems of its own.

And once we follow those departures, the diagram starts going completely haywire.

The Dispersal

Homeland was supposed to solve the problem.

Patriotic Alternative, in the eyes of those who left it, wasn’t going anywhere. Homeland would be more serious, more disciplined and more politically useful. It would become a registered party, build local organisation and turn racial nationalism into something capable of exercising actual political power.

Then Homeland started having exactly the sort of internal arguments from which Homeland itself had been born.

This is the point where following organisations becomes considerably less useful than following the people.

One of the most important was Steve Laws.

Laws had already moved through several parts of the nationalist right. He had been involved with For Britain and the English Democrats, and in February 2022 stood as the UKIP candidate in the Southend West parliamentary by-election, receiving 400 votes. He later became Homeland’s South East regional organiser and sat on its National Council.

Then, in April 2025, he resigned.

His departure came during a wider internal crisis over Homeland’s leadership, personnel and political direction. Specialist reporting described Laws as arguing that the party was going soft on remigration and moving towards what he regarded as civic nationalism.

Laws subsequently launched Remigration Now, an activist and pressure group devoted specifically to remigration. Its own website describes the organisation in exactly those terms. Searchlight later described Laws as launching the group after leaving Homeland.

And Laws wasn’t the only person leaving.

Kai Stephens, previously known within Patriotic Alternative as Barkley Walsh, had followed the original route from PA into Homeland. After the later turmoil he surfaced again in the British Democrats, which identifies him as its Norfolk organiser.

That takes us back towards an older generation of this story.

Andrew Brons, the former BNP MEP, had already helped establish the British Democrats after leaving the BNP. More than a decade later, Stephens arrived at the same organisation from the opposite direction, through PA and Homeland.

Two generations of this political world had ended up in the same place.

Then there is Alexander Bramham.

Bramham had been involved with Homeland before joining Alek Yerbury’s National Rebirth Party, where he became the Stafford branch organiser. He left the NRP in June 2026 following another internal dispute, this time over the party’s response to disorder in Southampton.

Which means one route into the NRP came through Homeland.

Another came directly through its leader, Alek Yerbury, who had previously been part of Patriotic Alternative before leaving and creating the National Support Detachment.

Those two branches had started separately and then met again inside the same party.

And then there is Callum Barker.

Barker was involved with Homeland and became one of the people behind Epping Says NO, the protest network that developed around the Bell Hotel asylum accommodation controversy in Essex. But the newer research makes that relationship rather more important than I initially realised.

Barker wasn’t simply a Homeland member who happened to attend the protests. He was one of the administrators of the Facebook group around which the local mobilisation developed, alongside fellow Homeland members Adam Clegg and Andrew Piper and local activist Craig Kitts. Barker was subsequently described in reporting as one of the leading figures around the group.

That needs handling carefully because most people protesting around the Bell Hotel were not Homeland members, and there is no basis for pretending they were. Somebody joining a local protest does not inherit the politics or affiliations of whoever happens to administer its Facebook group.

But the reverse matters too.

This was not simply a case of a Homeland activist standing in the same crowd as everybody else. Members of an established racial-nationalist party were holding organisational roles inside a much broader local protest network.

By 2026 Barker had left Homeland and was appearing around Restore Britain, with reporting identifying him as part of the ex-Homeland contingent moving towards Rupert Lowe’s new party.

Restore belongs properly in Part Two of this investigation, so we’ll park Barker at the edge of the page for now.

There was also Sam Wilkes, better known online as Zoomer Historian, who had become involved with Homeland before moving into the same wider remigration milieu as Laws. By 2026 he was publicly arguing the case for Restore Britain.

By that point, Homeland had shed figures towards Patriotic Alternative, Remigration Now, the British Democrats, the National Rebirth Party and Restore Britain. Specialist monitoring found only 166 visible accounts across its surviving regional chats in July 2026, although that cannot sensibly be treated as a membership figure because the same people may appear in multiple chats and others may not appear at all.

What we can say is that activity had fallen dramatically and defections had badly weakened the organisation. What we cannot quite say is that Homeland had ceased to exist. Its website remained online and its corporate structure remained active. So rather than declaring another dramatic collapse, the more accurate description is that Homeland remained active but heavily diminished, with its actual membership uncertain.

And that makes it more interesting, not less.

Look at Homeland purely as a small political party and you see an organisation damaged by factionalism. Look at where its people went and it starts looking like a junction.

Stephens heads towards the British Democrats. Bramham goes to the National Rebirth Party. Laws creates Remigration Now. Barker moves from Homeland into the Epping protest network and later towards Restore. Wilkes moves into the remigration milieu and publicly backs Restore. Others move elsewhere, including back towards PA.

They didn’t all go together and they certainly didn’t all get along. Quite a few of these departures happened precisely because they were fighting with one another.

But the politics didn’t disappear when Homeland weakened.

They dispersed.

And to understand one of the places they dispersed into, we need to go backwards slightly.

Because the National Rebirth Party already had another former Patriotic Alternative activist waiting there.

His name was Alek Yerbury. And I’ve personally come across this one on the streets.

Another Branch

By the time Alexander Bramham arrived in the National Rebirth Party, Alek Yerbury had already taken a completely different route there from Patriotic Alternative.

After leaving the British Army, Yerbury joined Patriotic Alternative and remained there for roughly fifteen months. He later told UnHerd that he had come to believe PA offered no serious solution to what he thought was happening to Britain.

So he left, he doubled-down and started something else.

The National Support Detachment, or NSD, came next. It wasn’t initially another little political party looking for deposits to lose at elections. It was an activist formation intended to support anti-immigration protests and provide a more disciplined nationalist presence on the ground.

Yerbury had spent six years in the Army and has talked openly about the attraction of military discipline and structure. By 2024 he had moved into electoral politics and created the National Rebirth Party.

The NRP was registered with the Electoral Commission on 28 February 2024, with Yerbury listed as both leader and treasurer. And if you’re wondering where Yerbury sits politically, he is unusually willing to tell you.

In interviews he has spoken about making Britain “as homogenous as possible” and described a political system profoundly different from multiparty liberal democracy. UnHerd reported his belief that society might be better organised along lines closer to military hierarchy, with collective will taking precedence over liberal individualism.

You don’t need to reverse-engineer a secret ideology from dog whistles when the bloke is prepared to explain the whole thing himself.

But the bit that matters to our map is where these paths start meeting again.

Yerbury came through Patriotic Alternative.

Bramham came through Homeland.

Homeland itself came out of Patriotic Alternative.

And now Yerbury and Bramham had arrived in the same party by different routes.

There are threads reaching further backwards too. Alex Eversfield has been reported as a former BNP member who later became involved with Yerbury’s National Support Detachment and then the National Rebirth Party.

Different decade. Different organisation. Same person.

By 2026, people from the NRP were also appearing at some of the same demonstrations as figures elsewhere on the far right. At disorder in Southampton that year, the NRP’s Portsmouth branch organiser Luke Jahn was among those present alongside figures including Tommy Robinson, Britain First leader Paul Golding and UKIP’s Nick Tenconi.

That means they were at the same mobilisation.

It does not magically turn them into one organisation, prove an alliance or establish that they were coordinating with one another. Chuck every shared protest into the same category as membership and you quickly end up with one of those mad corkboard diagrams where everybody who has ever stood within twenty feet of Tommy Robinson becomes part of the same conspiracy.

We don’t need that. The real personnel movements are interesting enough without fucking embellishing them.

And by this stage a pattern is becoming hard to miss. The people emerging from this fragmented political world aren’t all trying to do the same thing. Quite a lot of the splitting happens because they disagree about what they should actually be building.

Yerbury wants a political organisation capable of gaining power. Others think the answer lies in activism, propaganda, community-building, street politics or something outside conventional party politics altogether.

And some will eventually decide the best route might be to stop building tiny organisations and find a bigger one that already exists.

Before we get there, though, a few of those other strategies are worth following.

Different Answers to the Same Problem

By now we’ve got quite a collection of organisations: the BNP, Patriotic Alternative, Homeland, the British Democrats, the National Support Detachment and the National Rebirth Party.

It would be tempting to draw a few red lines between them and declare that we’ve uncovered one enormous far-right organisation operating under six different names.

We haven’t.

They’re separate organisations. They disagree with each other, compete with each other, split from each other and, quite frequently, seem to fucking despise each other.

The interesting bit is what happens to the people.

Take the British Democrats.

We’ve already arrived there twice. Andrew Brons, elected to the European Parliament for the BNP in 2009, was involved in establishing the party after leaving the BNP. More than a decade later, Kai Stephens arrived at the same organisation by a completely different route through Patriotic Alternative and Homeland.

Then there’s Julian Leppert.

Leppert was a BNP councillor in Redbridge and later became involved with For Britain, the party founded by former UKIP leadership candidate Anne Marie Waters, before moving to the British Democrats.

Waters gives us another route of her own. She had been in UKIP, contested its leadership in 2017 and then founded For Britain. After For Britain disbanded, Waters returned to UKIP, which formally announced her as its justice spokeswoman in April 2023.

If this is beginning to feel less like a family tree and more like somebody dropped a plate of spaghetti onto British politics, good. That’s roughly where I was by this stage of the research.

But electoral parties were only one answer.

Simon Birkett represents a very different one.

Birkett is the director and controlling figure behind The Woodlander Initiative, a project built around buying land and creating physical community infrastructure. Companies House confirms his control of the company, while PA records show the Woodlander founder speaking at its 2024 annual conference. Independent reporting has also documented close links between Birkett and PA.

This isn’t another political party and shouldn’t be treated as one. The strategic idea is different: rather than winning elections, build institutions and physical spaces outside mainstream political structures.

Then there’s propaganda.

We’ve already met Sam Melia and Hundred-Handers. There is also Heritage and Destiny, a long-running racial-nationalist publication providing another platform within this wider world. Collett has written for it, which is all we need to say here. A publishing connection is a publishing connection. It isn’t evidence of one merged organisation.

And another media operation becomes important later: Unity News Network, run by David Clews.

Clews doesn’t appear here because he followed the same membership trail as Stephens or Laws. His importance comes when his platform and his relationship with Collett become part of a very explicit discussion about what people in this world should do next.

That belongs in Part Two.

Then there are the streets.

This is where Tommy Robinson becomes relevant, and he is exactly the sort of figure around whom lazy network maps become useless. Robinson isn’t secretly running PA, Homeland or the NRP. What he does have is a large audience and an ability to draw people from otherwise separate parts of the right and far right into the same physical space.

The same applies to protests where groups such as the British Movement, White Vanguard, National Resistance Movement and local nationalist organisations appear alongside better-known figures.

A shared pavement isn’t a merger document.

Events still matter because they create meeting points. Activists from different organisations turn up, see one another, speak to the same crowds and occasionally cooperate around something they temporarily agree about. That is worth recording without pretending it means anything more than the evidence shows.

But the more I’ve mapped this, the more I’ve realised there’s another part of the network sitting around the organisations themselves, and it’s one I hadn’t properly accounted for when I started.

The audiences.

Robinson is probably the easiest way to see it. His importance here isn’t that he controls the groups we’ve been following. He doesn’t. It’s that he can mobilise far more people than most of those groups could ever hope to recruit as members. The same thing happens on a smaller scale around asylum-hotel protests, local Facebook groups and other campaigns which can attract people who have never joined a far-right organisation and probably never will.

That does not make everyone in those spaces part of the far right. It would be ridiculous to take someone who turns up at a local protest because they object to an asylum hotel and magically turn them into a member of Homeland because a Homeland activist happened to be involved in organising the Facebook group.

But the other direction matters.

People from organised groups can move into those much broader spaces. They can help organise them, speak at them, distribute material, promote their own campaigns and try to turn a larger audience towards their politics.

Epping is one of the clearest examples we’ve found so far. Epping Says NO contained plenty of local people with no connection to Homeland, but Homeland members Barker, Clegg and Piper were helping administer the network around it. That gives us something more substantial than people merely standing on the same pavement, without pretending the entire protest belonged to Homeland.

And by 2025 and 2026 this wider mobilisation layer starts becoming much harder to ignore. Huge demonstrations, asylum-hotel campaigns, flagging groups and temporary campaign brands begin overlapping with figures from the formal organisations we’ve been following. Some of those links are strong. Some are little more than shared space. We’ll get properly into Unite the Kingdom, Raise the Colours, Pink Ladies and the people moving around those campaigns in Part Two, because doing it here would turn this into a fucking book before we’ve even got there.

For now the important thing is that the network isn’t built entirely from organisations and the people who move between them. There is a much looser political world surrounding them, made up of protests, campaigns and audiences that can appear and grow without anybody having to join a conventional party at all.

Which makes the diagram considerably messier.

But it also makes it considerably more useful.

What we have by this stage, then, isn’t one post-BNP strategy.

The British Democrats and NRP pursue elections. Patriotic Alternative builds an activist movement. Woodlander works on physical community and land. Melia’s Hundred-Handers concentrated on propaganda. Media operations create audiences. Street protests create moments where otherwise separate factions occupy the same space, while the wider mobilisation layer gives organised activists access to people who may belong to none of these organisations at all.

And through all of this the people keep moving between bits of it.

Amid those different strategies, one particular idea starts appearing with increasing frequency.

It’s there in Patriotic Alternative, it becomes central to Homeland. It appears through the politics of people moving around the network. And Steve Laws eventually builds an organisation around the word itself.

Remigration.

Which sounds rather bureaucratic until you ask the obvious question.

Who, exactly, do they want to send away?

The Word That Travels

There is one word that keeps cropping up as you follow all of this.

Remigration.

It sounds almost deliberately boring. Something you might find buried halfway down an immigration statistics spreadsheet. People migrate. Some migrate back. Remigration.

Except that isn’t how the word is being used here.

Patriotic Alternative has been using the language for years. Its material has advocated deporting people in Britain illegally while also arguing for wider forms of repatriation. By 2025 PA writers were openly debating much larger programmes of removal and presenting remigration as the answer to what they described as demographic replacement.

Then Steve Laws leaves Homeland and Remigration Now appears.

The name rather gives the game away.

Remigration Now describes itself as an “activist and pressure group” dedicated to promoting remigration. Its website carries material by Laws arguing that integration is a myth, sells “Total Remigration” stickers and has a live countdown asking when white Britons will become a minority. Its FAQ defines remigration as returning immigrants and their descendants to what it calls their country of origin through voluntary and mandatory measures.

So we’re no longer talking simply about deporting somebody who has no legal right to remain. And Remigration Now doesn’t sit in splendid isolation from the organisations we’ve already followed.

In March 2026, Patriotic Alternative and Remigration Now jointly organised a demonstration in Nuneaton. PA’s own account says precisely that. Two months later activists from PA and Remigration Now were working together again at the Unite the Kingdom rally in London, where 15,000 leaflets were distributed presenting demographic change as “replacement migration”.

That is documented cooperation.

But with the wider mobilisation layer in mind, there is another reason that second example matters.

Unite the Kingdom wasn’t a Patriotic Alternative rally or a Remigration Now rally. PA’s own account describes activists from the two organisations deliberately taking their message into a much larger demonstration organised around Tommy Robinson’s audience. They didn’t need the people there to be members of either organisation. They needed somewhere much bigger than themselves in which to distribute their politics.

That is precisely why separating membership, joint campaigning and access to an audience matters.

Homeland goes considerably further and, helpfully, puts numbers on it. Its current policy is called “Ten Million Over Ten Years.” And yes we have heard that number and rhetoric before. It’s loud and proud in Restore Britain’s immigration policy document.

Homeland says its remigration programme would involve more than ten million people leaving Britain over a decade, minimum. The policy includes deportations, required departures when visas expire, measures intended to produce “self-departures”, encouragement of voluntary emigration and fundamental changes to immigration and nationality law.

And it tells us why. The stated aim is to restore Britain’s “historic demographics”.

This is why allowing the word remigration to float around undefined is such a problem.

In ordinary demographic language, somebody voluntarily returning to the country where they were born can be described as remigration. In this political world the term can cover something much wider: deportation, removal of legal migrants, pressure to produce voluntary departures and, in Remigration Now’s own definition, the departure of immigrants’ descendants.

Homeland’s policy makes the demographic objective explicit. Remigration Now’s FAQ makes the ethnic one difficult to miss.

So when arguments over remigration tore through Homeland, they weren’t merely arguing about whether annual immigration figures ought to be lower. They were arguing about who belongs here, who should leave and ultimately what sort of population Britain ought to have.

And by 2026 the word had travelled well beyond Homeland.

PA and Remigration Now were campaigning together. PA’s own material framed remigration around maintaining a white British majority. Steve Laws appeared at PA’s 2025 conference as the representative of Remigration Now alongside Mark Collett and other nationalist speakers.

None of that means everybody using the word has one agreed policy. Homeland does not take orders from PA. PA does not take orders from Laws. And somebody advocating lower immigration in mainstream politics does not become part of this network simply because a far-right group likes something they said.

What we can show is much more straightforward.

The word is circulating through organisations whose personnel we have already been following. Some of those organisations campaign together. Their activists appear on each other’s platforms. And in their own material, several define remigration in terms extending well beyond the removal of people who are in Britain illegally.

Which leaves one rather fucking enormous question.

Who counts as someone who should go?

For Homeland, the answer runs into the millions and is explicitly tied to altering Britain’s demographics.

For Remigration Now, immigrants’ descendants are included in the definition.

For Patriotic Alternative, remigration sits inside a political project openly concerned with maintaining a white British majority.

So when some of the same people start looking towards UKIP, Reform and Restore Britain, the interesting question isn’t simply whether those parties themselves use the word.

It’s whether people carrying this particular politics are trying to get through the door.

The Network Survives the Party

So where the fuck does all of this leave us?

We started with the BNP.

At its height it could put nearly a million votes on the board in a European election, elect councillors and send two MEPs to Brussels. Then it imploded.

If you stop the story there, Britain’s organised far right suffered a fairly straightforward political defeat.

But we followed the people.

Mark Collett went from the BNP to founding Patriotic Alternative. Kenny Smith went from senior organisational roles in the BNP to PA and then led the breakaway that became Homeland. Andrew Brons went from BNP MEP to the British Democrats. Julian Leppert moved from the BNP through For Britain and into the British Democrats. A newer generation passed through Patriotic Alternative before splitting again into Homeland, Yerbury’s National Support Detachment and other projects. Then Homeland began shedding people of its own.

None of this produced another BNP.

That is probably the most important thing Part One establishes.

There is no replacement organisation sitting at the centre of this story issuing instructions to everybody else. There isn’t one leader or one strategy. There isn’t even much evidence that some of these people can spend very long in the same organisation without eventually having a massive fucking row.

What survived was messier: people carrying contacts, audiences, publications, political ideas and organisational experience from one project into another, while new organisations repeatedly formed out of arguments inside the old ones.

Patriotic Alternative tried building a movement rather than recreating the BNP electoral machine. The people who left PA to create Homeland wanted something more explicitly political. Alek Yerbury went another way, through the National Support Detachment and into the National Rebirth Party. The British Democrats offered another electoral route, bringing figures from the older BNP generation into the same organisation as people arriving from the much newer PA and Homeland world.

Other people concentrated on propaganda, media, protests or physical communities.

And the closer we look at the protests, the more another part of the picture appears. Not everybody in this political ecosystem is moving from one formal organisation into another. Sometimes activists from those organisations are instead moving through broader spaces where most of the people involved have no formal connection to them at all.

Epping showed us one version of that. Unite the Kingdom showed us another.

That doesn’t turn the crowd into the organisation.

It means the organisation has found a crowd.

And then there is remigration.

That word has followed us through several parts of the story, but we now know enough not to leave it sitting there as some vague synonym for reducing immigration. We’ve found Homeland proposing more than ten million departures in ten years to restore what it calls Britain’s historic demographics. We’ve found Remigration Now defining its target as immigrants and their descendants. We’ve found PA and Remigration Now campaigning together around demographic replacement.

That’s the picture at the end of Part One.

Not a conspiracy. Not a secret command structure. Not half a dozen names for one organisation.

A network.

Sometimes the connection is membership. Sometimes it is somebody leaving one organisation and joining another. Sometimes it is a shared campaign or platform. Sometimes it is people from one of these organisations operating inside a much broader protest or mobilisation which most of the people involved have no formal connection to at all. Occasionally it is no more than being at the same event, which is why I’ve been deliberately fucking pedantic about the difference.

We don’t need to exaggerate this.

The documented version is interesting enough.

Because then something changes.

For years, much of this world had been wrestling with the same basic problem: how do you turn politics measured in hundreds of committed activists into something capable of influencing a country of nearly 70 million people?

You can form another party, launch another campaign, hold another conference or print another fifteen thousand leaflets.

But you’re still on the fringe.

By the middle of the 2020s, some figures inside this network had begun talking openly about another route.

What if you stopped building the vehicle?

What if you found one that already had voters?

This is where Mark Collett becomes important again.

Collett and David Clews, who runs Unity News Network, publicly discussed a strategy of supporters joining Reform UK and attempting to influence it from within. It wasn’t something dragged out of a leaked document or whispered in a private group. The strategy was discussed publicly.

And Steve Laws, after moving through UKIP, Homeland and Remigration Now, would begin looking towards another political vehicle.

Restore Britain.

The question changes here. We’re no longer asking what happened to the people who came out of Britain’s fragmented far-right. Now we need to ask what happened when they started looking towards parties with a much bigger door.

That’s Part Two.

Further Reading

Who the Hell Is James Henry Holmes?: Property developer. Flagshagger. Restore Britain reject. Now chasing priests around churches.

Stop Watching the Flags: Britain’s radical right is loudest on the street. Its real power may be somewhere else.

James Orr: The Man in the Middle - Inside the network of ideas, money and influence reshaping the British right

Don’t mourn. Organise. The hard right already has.

I Spent an Evening Among Nathan Cofnas’s Supporters. It Was Quite an Education.

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

Yesterday, I saw a video.

It had been filmed the day before, on Saturday, after an anti-immigration demonstration in Doncaster. The video was shot inside Doncaster Minster. There were police officers, protesters and the vicar, the Revd Dr Richard Frith. And standing there filming him, challenging him and demanding answers was a bloke I recognised as James Henry Holmes.

I had heard of James Henry Holmes, because of the big fucking flag story, but knew no more about him. So I looked him up. Fucking hell. Because it turns out the bloke arguing with a vicar inside a church has had quite the journey to get there.

Holmes is a Sheffield-based businessman. His corporate history stretches back thirty years and his own biography says he started out as a market trader before moving through retail businesses and eventually into property. Companies House records support that broad trajectory, with businesses going back to 1996 and an increasing shift into property and investment from the 2010s onwards.

And he’s done pretty well out of property.

His company, Homes by Holmes, describes his property-development activity as worth more than £40 million. There is a bit of ambiguity about exactly what that £40m measures because the company uses it both in portfolio-type language and to describe cumulative refurbishment and reconstruction projects. So that’s not Holmes’s personal wealth, nor can I independently call it a current £40m property portfolio. What we can say is that he’s built a substantial property-development operation.

One part of that operation is particularly relevant. Holmes controls at least 75% of Holmes Investment Group, which in turn controls at least 75% of Saltergate Ltd, the company whose mortgage charge identifies the former North East Derbyshire District Council offices in Chesterfield.

Which is what makes the next bit interesting.

Because somewhere between building a substantial property business and 2025, James Henry Holmes got really fucking into flags.

Then came the fucking flags

Holmes attracted wider attention after hanging an enormous Union Jack across those former North East Derbyshire District Council headquarters at Saltergate.

After an earlier version was damaged, reports described a replacement around 100 feet across. Holmes told the Sheffield Tribune it cost £3,000, although other reporting put it at £2,500. Either way, that’s quite a lot of fucking flag.

Holmes called his campaign Fly the Flag.

There was an inevitable planning row, subsequently presented in some quarters as another example of Britain apparently being ashamed of its own flag. Except an earlier version carried FLYtheFLAG.uk branding, which meant it could be treated as an advertisement for planning purposes. The subsequent unbranded Union flag itself wasn’t considered a planning breach and no enforcement action was taken against it.

So less they’re banning our flag, more have you filled in the correct fucking form?

At this stage, you could probably file Holmes under wealthy bloke gets spectacularly enthusiastic about Union Jacks and move on with your life.

Except Fly the Flag didn’t stay a giant flag on a building. It became a campaign.

Holmes encouraged people to support businesses displaying flags and avoid those that didn’t. Then the flags started appearing alongside increasingly explicit anti-immigration politics.

By late 2025, Holmes was promoting an anti-immigration demonstration outside the Sandpiper Hotel in Chesterfield, which was housing asylum seekers. He called for a “Massive turnout” involving flags and chants, while material he circulated described the nation as “under attack”. To give him his due, that same material explicitly said “Peaceful protest only”, and Holmes himself rejected the suggestion that his flag activism was racist, describing the Union flag as a symbol of unity and saying he approached this from a position of “stamping out racism”.

Which makes what else he was saying rather interesting.

His Facebook activity was reported to include material calling for all mosques in Britain to be closed. When challenged directly, Holmes initially questioned whether he’d posted it before acknowledging that he may have reposted it. Later reporting continued to note calls for all UK mosques to close appearing on his Facebook page.

So we’re quite a long way from a big flag on a building now.

There’s a pattern emerging. Immigration. Islam. Invasion. Deportation. The idea that Britain is being taken away.

And in 2026, Holmes found somewhere to put all of that political energy.

Enter Rupert Lowe

Holmes announced that he’d joined Restore Britain.

Not just ordinary membership either. He announced that he’d joined Restore’s Cromwell Club, its donor tier costing £2,500 annually. We don’t have Holmes’s bank statement proving the payment, but his announcement of joining the club was reported independently and he was subsequently interviewed and identified as a Restore Britain member.

And then, in May, Holmes turned up at a Unite the Kingdom rally organised by Tommy Robinson.

There’s no evidence Holmes works with Robinson. He attended the rally, he was interviewed there, and he explained what he thought was happening to Britain.

“We are being invaded and our country is being given away by our own government.”

He also described Reform UK as “Muslim-infiltrated” and said Restore was the only party prepared to pursue mass deportations and remove DEI measures.

Remember the bit about “stamping out racism”?

Anyway.

Then came this:

“In order for us not to be violent, there has to be a political solution.”

That’s quite a fucking sentence.

To be precise, Holmes didn’t say he personally intended to attack anybody. It wasn’t a direct threat. But nobody dragged violence into that conversation for him.

Holmes did that himself.

He was explaining why he believed a political solution was necessary, while presenting Restore Britain, with its policy of mass deportations, as the political answer.

Which makes what happened next considerably funnier.

Restore Britain reject

Because after publicly announcing his membership of Restore’s £2,500-a-year Cromwell Club and promoting the party as the political answer Britain needed, Holmes subsequently reported that Restore had cancelled his membership.

And this happened at roughly the same time that Restore’s Sheffield operation was descending into its own little civil war.

Public material from the Sheffield operation contains arguments about organisers being appointed, memberships being revoked, lack of an AGM, internal democracy and accountability, communication failures and allegations of bullying and interference from figures further up the party structure.

Which is quite something for a movement whose entire political vocabulary seems to consist of variations on taking back control. The Sheffield lot apparently wanted to take back control from the people telling everyone else to take back control.

What I can’t establish is that Holmes himself was central to that Sheffield revolt. The surviving material doesn’t name him, and some of its wording actually points towards somebody else having written it. Nor have I found a Restore statement, termination letter or disciplinary finding independently confirming exactly what happened to Holmes’s membership or why.

So what we have is Holmes saying Restore cancelled his membership, while a separate but very real internal row was kicking off inside Restore’s Sheffield operation.

And the chronology still leaves us with something rather wonderful.

The calls to close mosques apparently weren’t the end of Holmes’s association with Restore. The invasion rhetoric wasn’t. Describing Reform as “Muslim-infiltrated” wasn’t. The Tommy Robinson-organised rally wasn’t.

“In order for us not to be violent” wasn’t.

Whatever eventually happened between Holmes and Restore, apparently that lot hadn’t previously been sufficient to prevent him publicly identifying himself as one of them.

There’s your fucking standard.

And then there was a vicar

Which brings us back to Saturday.

An anti-immigration demonstration had taken place in Doncaster alongside a counter-protest. Independent reporting establishes that Frith opposed the demonstrators, that the Minster bells rang, that protesters attempted to confront him and that police formed a line between Frith and protesters.

The footage I saw was filmed inside Doncaster Minster, and I recognised Holmes as the man filming and challenging Frith. What I haven’t found is independent reporting separately identifying Holmes as one of the people inside. So that’s my identification from the footage, rather than something I’m pretending has been independently established elsewhere.

And that’s about as far as I’m prepared to push the factual description.

I’ve seen people describe protesters as having “stormed” the church. I haven’t established that Holmes stormed anything. I mean, Holmes and a couple of gammon mates would struggle to “storm” a Wetherspoons at last orders. I also haven’t established that he followed Frith from outside into the Minster. The footage I saw begins inside the church.

It doesn’t need embellishing.

Because there is already something fucking ridiculous about what we’re looking at.

Here’s a man who launched a campaign about defending British national identity. Who covered a building with a Union Jack around 100 feet across. Who has talked about Britain being invaded. Who acknowledged he may have reposted material calling for Britain’s mosques to be closed. Who described Reform as “Muslim-infiltrated”. Who advocated mass deportations. Who threw himself behind a political movement that talks about restoring Britain’s traditional inheritance.

And there he is, in the footage I watched, standing inside a Church of England church, camera rolling, challenging a Church of England vicar.

This is the thing about all the flag shagging and endless talk about defending British culture that always gets me.

Which Britain?

Because the vicar is British too. The church is British. I mean, there isn’t anything much more traditionally British than a vicar stood in a place where a church has existed on that spot since the 13th century.

But also let’s mention the Britishness of the people protesting against Holmes and his merry band of malignant morons.

Maybe someone should explain to Holmes that British Muslims are British.

The people who think his politics are fucking appalling don’t somehow cease to belong to the country because he bought a bigger flag than them.

And perhaps that’s the most revealing part of James Henry Holmes’s journey.

It starts with the flag as a symbol of belonging.

Then belonging starts acquiring conditions.

Support the right businesses.

Oppose immigration.

Close the mosques.

Back the right political movement.

And eventually you’re standing inside an English church confronting an English priest because apparently even the fucking vicar isn’t doing Britain properly.

I started looking into James Henry Holmes because I wanted to know more about the bloke I recognised arguing with a priest in a church.

I found a property developer who became a flag campaigner, moved into anti-immigration activism, publicly announced himself as a member of Restore’s £2,500-a-year Cromwell Club, called Reform “Muslim-infiltrated”, advocated mass deportations and went to a Tommy Robinson-organised rally where he talked about a political solution being necessary “in order for us not to be violent.”

And then he turned up in my feed, inside Doncaster Minster, having a go at the vicar.

So, turns out my opinion of James Henry Holmes from the video wasn’t exactly improved by looking into him. He’s just another racist cunt who needs a lesson in what it really means to be British, and in Britain’s rather long tradition of telling people with politics like his to fuck off.

Further Reading

Stop Watching the Flags: Britain’s radical right is loudest on the street. Its real power may be somewhere else.

James Orr: The Man in the Middle - Inside the network of ideas, money and influence reshaping the British right

Don’t mourn. Organise. The hard right already has.

I Spent an Evening Among Nathan Cofnas’s Supporters. It Was Quite an Education.

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

Before Cable Street in 1936, there was Hull.

I’m starting there because I’m from Hull, obviously, but also because it slightly pisses me off that whenever anyone talks about Britain’s great tradition of physically standing up to fascists, we immediately jump to Cable Street. Cable Street was magnificent. I’m not taking a thing away from it. But three months before Cable Street, Oswald Mosley brought his Blackshirts to Hull and we’d already given him a pretty good idea of how welcome fascism was going to be.

On 12 July 1936, Mosley arrived at Corporation Fields expecting to hold a rally. Something like 10,000 people turned up to oppose him. Dockers, railway workers, trade unionists, communists, Jewish residents, ordinary Hull people. And this wasn’t one of those nice modern counter-protests where everyone stands fifty yards apart behind two lines of police barriers shouting at each other until it’s time to go home.

They fucking went for them.

Bricks flew. There were running fights. Blackshirts got battered. Mosley could barely make himself heard and eventually the police advised him to give the whole thing up and get out. As he was driven away his windscreen was smashed, and there are accounts claiming somebody actually took a gun to the protest and shot at him, though the truth of that part is lost to the myths and mists of time.

Which is probably for the best, because I’m not advocating shooting fascists here. There’s a place and time for that, and that’s not here in this essay.

But I am enjoying the mental image of Mosley arriving in Hull expecting to demonstrate the growing strength of British fascism and leaving considerably fucking faster than he arrived.

Three months later came Cable Street.

Cable Street became the legend. Hull had already shown them how it was done.

And all of this has been rattling around my head because of something that happened in Minneapolis last week. A bloke dressed as Spider-Man punched far-right January 6 activist Jake Lang and the internet promptly elevated him to folk-hero status. His name is William Nicholas Love II, although everyone now seems to know him as Black Spider-Man, which is frankly much better.

He’s been charged with assault, so there’s a real legal case attached to all this and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I’m interested in the reaction to the image. Because people fucking loved it. And I understood immediately why.

I love old comics. I’ve got loads of the things. And if you know your comic history, you know exactly where my brain went.

Captain America. The first issue. The first fucking cover.

Captain America punching Hitler in the face.

Not after Pearl Harbor either. Captain America Comics #1 appeared before America had even entered the Second World War. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jewish, created a superhero dressed in the American flag and introduced him to the world by having him lamp Adolf Hitler.

There’s not a lot of ambiguity in the artistic statement. Here’s America. Here’s Hitler. Fucking wallop.

And once I started thinking about that image alongside Spider-Man in Minneapolis, I realised there’s a much longer tradition here than the comic book joke suggests. Particularly in Britain, where for the best part of a century we have had successive generations of fascists appearing, announcing that this time they’re going to take the streets, followed fairly reliably by another collection of people turning up to make the experience as fucking unpleasant as possible.

Cable Street came after Hull, in October 1936. Mosley wanted to march his Blackshirts through the heavily Jewish East End. Jewish residents, Irish dockers, communists, socialists, trade unionists and thousands of ordinary Londoners decided he wasn’t going to. We remember “They Shall Not Pass”. We remember the barricades. We have murals and plaques now.

What sometimes gets lost in the heritage version is that they actually fucking fought. There were barricades. There were missiles. There were running battles with police trying to clear a route for the Blackshirts. Mosley eventually abandoned the march.

And that matters, because we have a peculiar habit in this country of waiting until radical political movements become history and then sanding all the rough edges off them. Everybody becomes a courageous campaigner. Everybody peacefully stood together. Someone probably sang something. Eventually justice prevailed.

Except history wasn’t nearly that polite.

After the Second World War, Jewish British servicemen came home from fighting actual Nazis and found Mosley and assorted fascist cunts organising again. Imagine that. You’ve just survived six years of war. You’ve watched Europe discover what fascism actually means when it gets state power. Six million Jews have been murdered. You finally get home and some cunt is standing on a street corner preaching antisemitism again.

So Jewish ex-servicemen formed the 43 Group. And they didn’t form a fucking book club. They gathered intelligence. They infiltrated fascist organisations. They disrupted meetings. And when necessary they physically fought Mosley’s people.

Then came the 62 Group in the early 1960s, confronting Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement and the next generation of British Nazis.

One of my favourite episodes from this whole period involves Denis Healey. In 1965, Colin Jordan disrupted a Labour Party meeting, got onto the stage and started shouting. Healey, who was Defence Secretary at the time, punched him.

The actual Defence Secretary. Imagine the fucking headlines now.

But that’s how strange our relationship with this history has become. We live in a country that spends half its life wanking itself silly over the generation that defeated fascism, while simultaneously treating the concept of anti-fascism as somehow suspicious.

Churchill. Spitfires. Dunkirk. VE Day. Finest Hour. Union Jacks. Lovely.

Mention anti-fascists and suddenly everyone gets nervous. You even get absolute muppets claiming to be anti-antifascist. Not realising that the double-negative means they openly declaring themselves to be fascists. You could make up how stupid these fuckwits are. What exactly do they think all the fucking Spitfires were doing in WWII?

Anyway, back to the story, then came the National Front.

And this is where we have to be careful about comforting ourselves with the idea that British fascism has always been a joke. It hasn’t. The National Front became a serious political force during the 1970s. It contested elections, built substantial membership and tried to establish ownership of the streets.

So people fought them there too.

Wood Green in 1977. Lewisham a few months later. Huge counter-demonstrations, community organising, running battles, arrests, injuries. The National Front wanted the theatre of marching through multicultural communities and demonstrating who controlled the street. Anti-fascists understood perfectly well what that theatre was supposed to communicate and decided to fuck up the performance.

Out of that period came the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, and this is where “punching Nazis” needs to mean something wider than literally punching Nazis.

Because some of the most effective punches weren’t fists. They were gigs.

They were badges and posters and leaflets. Punk bands playing alongside reggae bands. Tens of thousands of young people turning up to Rock Against Racism carnivals. Racism being made culturally embarrassing. Fascism being made deeply fucking uncool.

There were also people punching Nazis. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.

Anti-Fascist Action arrived in 1985 and was considerably less coy about it. Its approach combined political work in working-class communities with direct physical opposition to fascist organisations. The National Front, British Movement and BNP didn’t just find themselves challenged at elections. They could find themselves challenged outside meetings, in pubs, around football ground, at railway stations, on street corners.

There are people who were involved in all this who still argue about whether those tactics worked, whether particular confrontations were justified, whether violence sometimes strengthened the people it was supposed to weaken. Those are legitimate arguments.

What isn’t legitimate is pretending it didn’t happen, and it didn’t have an impact. Because look at the names that have come and gone. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. His post-war Union Movement. The National Socialist Movement. National Front. British Movement. BNP. Later the EDL and all the splintering, mutating organisations that followed.

British fascism keeps changing its fucking clothes. And anti-fascism keeps turning up.

Not always in the same form. Not always from the same politics. Not always using tactics I would personally support. But there is a lineage here that we seem oddly reluctant to acknowledge.

And then, wonderfully, part of that lineage crosses the Atlantic.

Minneapolis had a serious Nazi skinhead problem in the 1980s. A multiracial anti-racist skinhead crew called the Baldies started confronting them. Out of that scene came Anti-Racist Action in 1987, and people involved in its formation were aware of Britain’s Anti-Fascist Action.

So when Black Spider-Man turned up in Minneapolis nearly forty years later, there’s a bizarre little historical circle closing.

British anti-fascists influenced American anti-racist street organisation.

America gave us Spider-Man. Spider-Man punched a far-right activist in Minneapolis.

I’m sorry, but sometimes history has a sense of humour. And underneath all of this is Captain America still punching Hitler. That’s the image I keep coming back to.

We have spent generations teaching children that Nazis are the villains you don’t have to feel morally conflicted about. Captain America punches them. Indiana Jones punches them. Video games let you shoot thousands of them. Nazis have effectively become popular culture’s universal shorthand for yes, these are definitely the fucking bad guys.

Then somebody encounters fascism outside a cinema screen and suddenly half the room wants a seminar on civility.

I’m a pacifist. I’m not suggesting everybody reading this should wander into town looking for somebody to twat. Calling somebody a fascist doesn’t magically give you the right to assault them, and political violence can escalate horribly, create martyrs, hurt innocent people and hand extremists exactly the propaganda they want.

But I also refuse to sanitise the people who actually confronted fascism because their methods make us uncomfortable now.

Hull wasn’t polite. Cable Street wasn’t polite. The 43 Group wasn’t polite. Lewisham wasn’t polite. Anti-Fascist Action definitely wasn’t fucking polite.

And perhaps there is something worth recovering from that tradition that doesn’t require everybody to start swinging punches.

The absolute refusal to be intimidated by these people.

The refusal to surrender our collective public spaces to them.

The willingness to organise against them rather than merely gawp at them online.

The instinct to ridicule their pomposity, expose their lies, challenge their organising, turn up when they try to frighten communities and make fascism socially toxic rather than exciting. And yes, historically, occasionally somebody got punched.

I’m not editing that bit out. This isn’t a piece about condoning violence, it’s about don’t condoning the rise of fascism on our streets again. And fascism is an ideology of violence.

Remember ninety years ago Oswald Mosley brought his Blackshirts to my city and discovered that Hull wasn’t interested. Ten thousand people turned up. They threw bricks at him. They chased him out of the city.

Three months later London did the same at Cable Street. Jewish veterans carried the fight into the post-war years. Another generation confronted the National Front. Another went after the BNP. The organisations changed, the clothes changed, the language changed, but people kept deciding there were some things you simply didn’t stand quietly and watch.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had already distilled the entire argument into one comic-book cover. Captain America. Hitler. Fist.

Sometimes you really don’t need a 2,500 word essay, to explain your point. One image can say it all. And most recently the image of Will Love as Spider-Man punching Jake Lang, was that image.

So the next time somebody wraps themselves in a Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes, and starts lecturing any of us about defending traditions and values, I might actually agree with them. There are some traditions I’d very much like to keep.

And if fascists insist on dragging us back to the 1930s, they really shouldn’t be surprised when some of us remember what happened to them the last fucking time.

Further Reading

Don’t mourn. Organise. The hard right already has.

How Do You Bring Them Back? - The Outrage Machine, the Failure of Politics, and the Working-Class Case for Reason How do you bring them back?

Is Britain Turning Far Right, or Is the Megaphone Just Too Loud?

They Shall Not Pass: A History of Antifascism and the Fight Against Trump’s Fascist Coup

We Were All Born Antifascist

The Black Flag: History, Meaning, and the Symbolism of Refusal

Yesterday, UKIP held a march through London against Sharia law. It was led by Nick Tenconi and, according to reporting from the day, attracted about twenty supporters. Not twenty thousand. Not two thousand. Twenty. The counter-protest reportedly managed around 150.

I laughed. Of course I fucking laughed.

You could organise a larger political movement by getting on the wrong bus. I’ve accidentally organised bigger revolutions from my kitchen table.

And lately there has been plenty to laugh at, with the far-right. Danny Tommo launched his Patriot Platform with claims that more than 45,000 people had expressed an interest, then his grand National Recruitment Day reportedly attracted barely 200 people to a country park outside Coventry. The Pink Ladies billed their Dover demonstration as their biggest yet and managed around 120.

Everywhere you look there seems to be another group. Another logo. Another flag. Another Telegram channel. Another bloke filming himself walking towards some police officers. Patriot this. British that. Raise something. Restore something else. A proliferation of organisations which, when they actually gather in the same physical place, can sometimes look less like an uprising and more like the queue outside a moderately busy Greggs.

But I’m beginning to think we’ve all been watching the wrong thing.

Not because these groups are harmless. They aren’t necessarily. Street politics can intimidate people. It can create disorder. It can recruit. It can normalise ideas. It can make minorities feel unsafe in their own communities. And occasionally somebody like Tommy Robinson demonstrates that this political world really can put enormous numbers of people onto the streets.

So I’m not suggesting we ignore the street protests. These idiots, are useful idiots to those that want to change the face of this nation. But, I am suggesting we stop confusing visibility with power.

Because we have become extremely good at watching the flags. They are designed to be watched. Like some patriotic pissing contest.

A demonstration is visual. A confrontation outside a hotel is visual. A bloke shouting into a megaphone is still visual. Flags cable-tied to lampposts are visual. Somebody saying something spectacularly racist into a livestream gives everyone something to screenshot, repost, condemn, ridicule and argue about.

And I’m as guilty of that as anybody.

Some bellend says something utterly fucking ridiculous and my immediate instinct is to show you what the bellend has said. Then you show somebody else. Somebody reposts it angrily. Somebody reposts it approvingly. Somebody makes a reaction video. Somebody writes a news story about the reaction to the reaction. The original bellend wakes up the following morning with another 10,000 views and the satisfying knowledge that half the country is talking about him.

Twenty people can suddenly occupy an extraordinary amount of political space online.

Which means headcounts don’t tell us what they once did. The street still matters. But increasingly the street is also just the background for content. And once you start thinking about it like that, another question becomes much more interesting.

Where does the thread go?

Take the Pink Ladies.

Their supposedly enormous national demonstration in Dover managed around 120 people. Easy to laugh at. But their founder, Orla Minihane, isn’t simply somebody standing on a pavement holding a placard. She is also Restore Britain’s spokeswoman on women and girls’ safety. Rupert Lowe publicly announced her appointment earlier this year.

Suddenly the interesting bit isn’t the 120 people. It’s the bridge. The street campaign and the political organisation are not separate little boxes anymore. A person can exist in both.

And that is where I think our attention needs to start travelling.

Follow the language too. Small boats. Asylum hotels. Grooming gangs. Women and girls. Sharia. Remigration. Flags. British culture. National decline.

The specific subject changes constantly, but underneath it sits the same emotional proposition. Something is being taken from you. Your country. Your safety. Your culture. Your streets. Your daughters. Your flag. Your future.

Once somebody accepts that proposition, almost anything can become evidence for it.

That matters because politics built around fear doesn’t necessarily disappear when the statistics change. Numbers can fall while the story survives. A hotel can close and the grievance moves somewhere else. One claim can collapse and another takes its place. That’s how the machinery of fear works.

The evidence changes. The story in their heads doesn’t.

Women and girls are a particularly revealing example because violence against women is real. Sexual violence is real. Domestic abuse is real. Exploitation is real. Grooming gangs were real and institutional failures surrounding them were appalling.

Which is precisely why victims deserve better than being turned into political props.

If protecting women is genuinely the principle, then follow the evidence wherever it leads. Protect the woman assaulted by a migrant. Protect the woman assaulted by her British husband. Protect the girl exploited by a grooming gang. Protect the woman being terrorised by an ex-partner. A victim shouldn’t stop being politically interesting because her attacker has the wrong fucking passport for your narrative.

And this is where simply following street organisations stops being enough. We need to start following the ideas upstream. As I have been in recent weeks. Who takes the grievance and gives it intellectual respectability? Who writes the policy paper? Who funds the organisation producing it? Who supplies the candidates? Who owns the infrastructure? Who provides the office? Who introduces whom?

Who gets invited into rooms that the bloke with the megaphone will never enter?

That doesn’t require a conspiracy. In fact, I think conspiracy thinking makes us worse at understanding this stuff. There does not need to be a secret WhatsApp group containing Peter Thiel, James Orr, Rupert Lowe, Nigel Farage, Danny Tommo and somebody from the Pink Ladies agreeing what everyone will do on Tuesday.

Politics doesn’t work like a Bond villain meeting. Networks overlap. People move between organisations. Donors support projects they agree with. Intellectuals provide arguments. Campaigners provide pressure. Influencers provide attention. Political parties turn some of those ideas into programmes. Sometimes the connections are strong. Sometimes they’re tenuous. Sometimes there isn’t a connection at all.

Our job should be to find out which is which. We’re investigating infrastructure, not conspiracy. Because while everybody is looking at the flags, something much more consequential can happen.

Somebody gets elected. And then somebody gets their grubby little hands on the cheque book.

Which brings me to Essex.

On Friday, Essex County Council announced something called Operation Vanguard.

The council says asylum seekers housed at the Wethersfield centre are regularly transported into Braintree, Colchester and Chelmsford. Wethersfield currently houses around 800 men, with the Home Office planning to increase that to 1,245 and potentially 1,700. The council says residents have raised concerns about gatherings in those town centres, particularly around antisocial behaviour and the safety of women and girls.

Its answer is to put privately contracted security operatives into those three places for an initial three-month trial. These fascist foot soldiers have zero powers, they’re just taxpayer funded perception patrol. All talk and no trousers.

But look at what has happened. They are no longer just standing outside an asylum hotel with somebody holding a phone. They are inside local government. A political narrative about asylum seekers, public space, British culture, women and girls and community safety has reached an elected authority. And an elected authority can do something that the bloke with the flag cannot.

It can spend public money. That is the distinction I think we need to get much better at seeing. Street movements can create pressure. Influencers can create attention. Campaign organisations can create narratives. Think tanks and political projects can develop policies.

But government can implement things. Even local government. Government has budgets, staff, contracts. Government has buildings, procurement systems, legal departments and institutional authority.

The person shouting into a megaphone might frighten you. The person signing the purchase order can change your fucking life. And none of this means we should stop documenting what happens on the street.

Watch Tommy Robinson, UKIP, the Pink Ladies, Patriot Platform, and the whole far-right fucked up street level ecosystem. Watch the people putting flags on lampposts and the people turning up outside asylum accommodation.

Document the intimidation, the violence, the rhetoric. Document who is talking to whom. Just don’t stop there. When you see somebody on a pavement, ask where the thread goes. Who is behind them, pulling the strings.

Because twenty people marching through London yesterday is funny. It genuinely is. Twenty people trying to present themselves as some enormous national awakening while being comprehensively outnumbered by the people who came to tell them to fuck off deserves ridicule.

But twenty people on a street tells us how many people turned up to a march. It does not tell us how far an idea has travelled. And that, increasingly, is what I want to know.

So yes. Watch the flags.

Just don’t stare at them for so long that you miss the people writing the policy, building the infrastructure and signing the cheques.

Further Reading

James Orr: The Man in the Middle - Inside the network of ideas, money and influence reshaping the British right

Don’t mourn. Organise. The hard right already has.

I Spent an Evening Among Nathan Cofnas’s Supporters. It Was Quite an Education.

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

I have been thinking about outrage for quite a long time.

Not outrage in the old-fashioned sense of simply being fucking furious about something, because there is plenty happening in the world worthy of that. I mean outrage as an environment. The strange digital atmosphere we now spend a sizeable part of our lives inhabiting, where something is always happening, somebody is always furious, somebody else has said something appalling, a war is happening three posts beneath a joke, a politician is lying two posts above somebody’s breakfast, and all of it arrives through exactly the same little rectangle in your hand.

A few months ago I wrote a Kitchen Table Philosophy piece called The Outrage Machine. I was trying to work out why social media so reliably produces this atmosphere, and I ended up placing quite a lot of the responsibility on us. The algorithm hadn’t invented outrage. Human beings managed that perfectly well thousands of years before anybody had Wi-Fi. What the algorithm had discovered was that we are remarkably attracted to it.

I wrote that the outrage machine wasn’t powered by algorithms. It was powered by us.

I still think I was right. I’m just no longer convinced I was right enough.

That thought has been nagging at me since Meta agreed this week to settle a huge collection of American lawsuits concerning children and social media, potentially paying somewhere around $18 billion. The states had accused Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram in ways that kept children hooked, while misleading people about the risks. Meta denies wrongdoing, which needs saying because a settlement isn’t an admission of guilt, it’s just a fat cheque to make people go away.

However the size of the cheque means we’re still asking questions. And it is a fucking enormous cheque. But the money isn’t what has been bothering me.

It’s the design changes.

Among the things Meta has agreed to introduce for teenagers are limits on daily use, restrictions overnight, notifications being switched off during school hours and measures intended to interrupt the endless scroll. There are changes around age verification, recommendations and how some of the little mechanisms of social approval work.

That interests me far more than the money because it drags us into philosophy almost immediately. And that’s where I like to live. In the philosophy of life, while sat contemplating it at my kitchen table.

If you can change behaviour by changing the design of the environment, what exactly are we talking about when we say somebody freely chose to spend four hours scrolling through it?

This isn’t really a question about Meta anymore. It’s a question about autonomy.

And autonomy is one of those philosophical words that sounds much more complicated than it needs to. Strip away the academic wrapping and we’re basically asking how much of what I do is actually me doing it.

I choose to pick up my phone, to open an app, to click something, to keep scrolling.

Fine. That is on me. But what happens when the environment in which I’m making those choices has been deliberately constructed to make certain choices more likely?

This is where B. F. Skinner becomes rather difficult to avoid.

Skinner spent much of his career making people uncomfortable about exactly this. His behaviourism challenged the comforting idea that somewhere inside us sits a completely independent little captain called Free Will, making decisions untouched by the world around it. Change the environment, Skinner argued, change the reinforcement, change the consequences of behaviour, and you can change the behaviour itself.

People tend to hear Skinner and immediately think of rats pressing levers in boxes, which is slightly unfair but also, admittedly, difficult to resist when you’re holding a smartphone.

I’m not going to call Instagram a Skinner box because that’s too easy and it isn’t really accurate. Skinner was working with carefully controlled systems of reinforcement. Social media is infinitely messier, as are the human beings using it.

But there is something Skinner understood which we seem strangely reluctant to acknowledge when talking about technology.

Our environments affect us. Of course they fucking do. We accept this everywhere else in our lives.

Casinos are designed in particular ways because environment affects behaviour. Supermarkets spend fortunes deciding where products should sit because environment affects behaviour. Advertisers have spent more than a century learning how repetition, association, aspiration, fear and desire influence behaviour. Political propagandists knew it long before any of them.

Yet somehow we ended up with the bizarre idea that a social-media platform capable of measuring our behaviour in extraordinary detail like never before, is merely a neutral container in which we happened to make choices. Which it plainly isn’t.

And Skinner never had access to anything remotely like this.

The Skinner box couldn’t watch millions of rats simultaneously and discover that one rat responded particularly well to videos about immigration while another became unusually animated whenever somebody mentioned vaccines.

The box couldn’t continuously redesign itself around the rat. That is where the philosophical problem becomes considerably more interesting. Because social media doesn’t simply provide an environment. It observes our behaviour inside that environment.

We teach it about us, by simply being in it. Every pause is information. Every click is information. Every like, share, comment, follow, unfollow and moment spent staring at something tells the system a little more about what holds us.

And then it gives us more. Which brings me back to something I wrote in The Outrage Machine.

I said we powered the machine. We do. But I hadn’t really followed the thought far enough.

We power the machine, we are the fuel for the machine, and the machine studies the fuel.

It doesn’t need to create our psychological vulnerabilities. We arrive with those already installed. Human beings want approval. We want belonging. We’re curious. We’re frightened of threats. We notice danger. We like novelty. We enjoy being right. We particularly enjoy discovering that the people we already dislike are even worse than we thought.

The machine doesn’t have to invent any of that. It merely has to notice. And outrage is remarkably noticeable.

Anger holds attention. Fear holds attention. Conflict holds attention. Certainty holds attention. None of this means there is an evil algorithm sitting somewhere deciding to radicalise Auntie Susan because she clicked on the wrong Facebook post after dinner.

The algorithm doesn’t believe anything.

This is where I think Jean Baudrillard (yes him again) would have had an absolute fucking field day.

Baudrillard was fascinated by the point at which our representations of reality begin to detach themselves from whatever they originally represented. Eventually the signs and images don’t simply describe the world. They begin constructing the world through which we understand everything else.

His word for the destination was hyperreality.

It is one of those ideas which sounded deliberately provocative when he was writing about Disneyland, advertising, television and the Gulf War and now feels disturbingly ordinary when you open your phone. And he was writing long before we had these things.

Think about how an event reaches you today. Something happens somewhere in the world. Somebody films perhaps thirty seconds of it. That fragment is uploaded. It begins circulating. Somebody adds a caption. Somebody else removes the context. Someone reacts to the reaction. Somebody screenshots that. A politician comments on the screenshot. A newspaper reports that people are angry about the politician’s reaction to the screenshot of the reaction to the thirty-second clip. Phew!

By lunchtime, the original event is almost beside the point. The representation has become an event of its own.

And then something even stranger happens. The political response produced by the online reaction changes what happens in the real world.

Reality created the content, but the content has now created reality.

That’s the loop Baudrillard was circling decades before Zuckerberg was old enough to have a future Facebook account. This matters enormously when we start talking about the outrage machine because what we encounter online isn’t simply a distorted picture of reality. It increasingly participates in producing reality.

Politicians media teams know what is trending. Journalists know what is trending. Campaigners know what is trending. Governments know what is trending. They respond to it. Their responses become content. We respond to their responses.

At some point it becomes almost impossible to identify where the world ends and the representation of the world begins.

Guy Debord arrived at a neighbouring problem from a different direction.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argued that modern capitalism increasingly mediates human relationships through representations. We stop simply living and increasingly encounter life as spectacle.

Social media has done something to Debord’s spectacle which I suspect even he might have found exhausting. It gave the audience cameras. We aren’t simply consuming the spectacle anymore. We’re producing it.

Every one of us can perform ourselves publicly. We photograph the meal before eating it. We announce the holiday while taking it. We publish our political opinions and then watch numbers appear beneath them telling us how successfully those opinions performed.

And I am absolutely not pretending to stand outside this. I write on social media every fucking day. I watch the numbers. I know when something has landed, or when something hasn’t. I adapt accordingly. I know that peculiar little dopamine flicker when a post suddenly takes off.

I’m not writing this from a monastery. I’m sitting at the same kitchen table where I write half the things that subsequently get thrown into the machine.

That’s why I find this interesting. The spectacle isn’t something being done to us by a distant media industry anymore. We have become participants in its production.

Meta provides the stage, the lighting, the ticket office and the advertising hoardings, but we’re the ones putting on the show. And the better the show performs, the longer everyone stays in the theatre.

This is where Byung-Chul Han becomes particularly useful because he looks at what all this constant connection actually produces. Han describes digital society as a swarm. I like that idea because a swarm can contain an enormous amount of activity without necessarily going anywhere.

That feels painfully familiar. Something terrible happens. We react. Thousands of people react to the reactions. There are arguments, denunciations, hashtags, counter-hashtags, screenshots, quote posts, pile-ons and declarations that somebody is DONE, as they announce a flounce.

For perhaps twelve hours it feels like the most important thing happening in civilisation. Then something else happens. Off we go again.

I wrote about this in Doomscrolling Fatigue, because after enough time inside this environment the problem isn’t simply outrage anymore. It’s exhaustion.

Everything demands an emotional response. War. Genocide. A nation collapsing again. Some celebrity saying something stupid. A dog wearing sunglasses. Another war. An advert. Somebody you’ve never met having an argument with somebody else you’ve never met.

The feed flattens them into the same physical object. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.

Han’s swarm helps me understand something about that experience which I hadn’t quite articulated before. Reaction can feel remarkably like participation.

I see something appalling. I become angry. I post about it. Other people become angry. Thousands of people express their anger together. There is genuine human feeling there. Sometimes that feeling becomes political action. Sometimes it changes things. But sometimes nothing has actually happened except that a very large amount of moral energy has been converted into engagement.

The machine has eaten extremely well. And tomorrow it will be hungry again.

That brings us back to attention. Because underneath everything I’ve been writing about in these pieces, attention is the thing being fought over.

Attention sounds trivial. It isn’t. Attention is how reality gets into your head.

You cannot consciously experience everything happening around you, so your mind selects. This matters. That doesn’t. Look here. Ignore there. What repeatedly receives your attention begins shaping your understanding of what the world is like.

If you spend six months being shown videos of crimes committed by immigrants, immigration begins to feel inseparable from crime even if the selection you’re seeing bears no statistical relationship whatsoever to the society around you.

If every political story reaching you confirms that your opponents are corrupt, stupid, dangerous or evil, eventually the possibility that millions of ordinary people might simply disagree with you becomes harder to imagine.

You don’t need to lie. Selection can do extraordinary things all by itself.

Which is why I increasingly dislike the phrase “attention economy”.

It’s too polite. It makes the whole arrangement sound like a natural market which somebody discovered lying around. Attention wasn’t an economy until somebody worked out how to sell it. And what is actually being sold isn’t really advertising space.

It’s access to us. Our eyes, our time, curiosity, anger, fear, boredom, our desire to belong.

A portion of our conscious lives, commodified and sold off. That is an extraordinary commodity when you actually sit and think about it.

And that is why the Meta settlement interests me philosophically. The lawsuits concern children, and children obviously deserve protections adults don’t require.

But there is a danger in allowing the discussion to stop there.

A sixteen-year-old brain doesn’t become an entirely different object at midnight on its eighteenth birthday. Adults respond to reinforcement, we still crave approval. We become compulsive, we can be manipulated. We absolutely inhabit hyperreality Baudrillard described, even if we can’t name it. Adults participate in spectacle, even if they’ve never heard of Debord. Adults join the swarm, Byung-Chul Han beautifully articulated.

So once we accept the principle that the architecture of a digital environment can affect behaviour, the question becomes unavoidable.

What is that architecture doing to everybody else?

I don’t think the answer is that social media controls us. That lets us off far too easily. It also gives the technology almost mystical powers it doesn’t possess. We still have agency. We still make choices. We still bear responsibility for what we believe, what we share and how we behave.

But Skinner’s uncomfortable ghost remains sitting at the kitchen table with me, asking the same irritating question.

What happens when the environment in which those choices are made has been deliberately designed to influence them?

And Baudrillard is, as always, sitting beside him wondering whether the reality we’re choosing between is reality anymore. Debord is pointing out that we’re simultaneously watching and performing the whole thing. Han is looking at billions of us frantically reacting and asking whether all this communication has actually made us more capable of acting together.

It’s getting quite crowded around this fucking table. But they’re all circling the same problem.

Human autonomy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We make choices inside environments.

And for perhaps the first time in human history, billions of us spend substantial parts of our waking lives inside information environments which watch how we behave and continuously adjust themselves in response.

That deserves more philosophical attention than “phones are bad for kids”.

It also makes me reconsider what I wrote in The Outrage Machine. The algorithm didn’t invent outrage. I stand by that. We brought the outrage, the tribalism. We brought the fear. We brought our extraordinary capacity to divide ourselves into groups and immediately conclude that everyone in the other group is a fucking idiot.

But the machine learned.

And once the machine learned which parts of us kept us looking at the machine, those parts became commercially valuable. That’s the bit I hadn’t followed far enough. Because the question isn’t whether Meta invented human behaviour.

The question is what happens when human behaviour becomes something that can be observed, measured, predicted and monetised at this scale. What happens when your attention is worth money to somebody else? What happens when keeping it becomes a business objective?

And what happens when the reality most effective at holding your attention isn’t the reality most useful for understanding the world?

I don’t have a neat answer. I don’t particularly want one. This is just another thoughtful piece, in my on-going through processes.

That’s rather the point of these Kitchen Table Philosophy pieces. I sit here, turn something over, drag a few dead philosophers into the kitchen and see whether the thing looks different when we put it back down.

This one does. A few months ago I thought of the outrage machine primarily as something we collectively powered. Then I started thinking about what continuously living inside it was doing to us. Now I’m wondering whether I’ve been asking the wrong question.

Perhaps the most important thing isn’t who powers the machine. Perhaps it’s who gets to decide what the machine puts in front of us. Because there are only so many hours in a human life.

There are only so many things you can notice, so many things you can care about. Only so much anger you can sustain before it becomes exhaustion. Only so much world you can fit inside your head. Your attention is finite.

And somewhere along the way we allowed some of the largest corporations ever created to build machines whose profitability depends upon acquiring as much of it as possible.

So perhaps attention is something we should stop thinking of as merely something we pay. Perhaps we should start thinking about who we’re paying it to.

And whether we ever actually meant to give them quite so fucking much.

Kitchen Table Philosophy Archive is an ongoing series exploring politics, culture, philosophy, and the strange psychological landscape of the internet age.

I have spent a lot amount of time recently disappearing down rabbit holes on the British hard right. I just stopped myself here, only one sentence in. I’ve noticed my language shifting as I’ve written these pieces recently. I use “far right” less than I once did, partly because it has become such a loaded, divisive label that it can sometimes obscure more than it explains. I’ve increasingly used “hard right” instead, but I’m conscious I may now be leaning on that too heavily. And the term “New Right” is beginning to enter my lexicon, which means something more specific again: an emerging intellectual and political ecosystem, particularly across Britain and America. They overlap, certainly, but they aren’t interchangeable. If I’m going to spend this much time picking apart other people’s language and claims, I should probably be equally careful with my own.

So… I have spent a lot amount of time recently disappearing down rabbit holes on the British New Right. That’s the fitting term for what I’m about to start talking about.

I started originally looking deeper at Reform UK, around the time of the Clacton by-election, and the people gathering around Nigel Farage. That led me into Cambridge, National Conservatism and the strange intellectual hinterland developing behind the grinning man-of-the-people performance with the pint. I went looking at Nathan Cofnas and the attempt to put a respectable academic jacket back on race science, and found Aporia, Noah Carl, Emil Kirkegaard and a network of people talking about heredity, IQ and race while insisting we shouldn’t be so terribly vulgar as to call it eugenics.

Actually I first looked at Turning Point UK, in a deeper sense before Reform, which took me backwards to Charlie Kirk’s American operation and forwards to Nick Tenconi, who went from running TPUK to leading UKIP.

Then Restore Britain led somewhere else again. Rupert Lowe, Ben Delo, The Sanctuary in Westminster, Aporia turning up again, and a political infrastructure stretching considerably further than one angry former Reform MP.

Different stories. Different people. Different organisations. Done, publish, who’s next? That has been what I’ve been doing. Research, write, publish, research write, publish. And then I stopped. Took a breath. Looked at what I was doing, and noticed something bigger. All these organisations and ecosystems kept touching. And one name kept appearing off in the distance more often enough that I initially thought he might be the story.

Peter Thiel.

Which made a certain amount of sense. Thiel is a billionaire, an early political patron of JD Vance, a co-founder of Palantir, a major figure in Silicon Valley’s increasingly political right and a man who has spent years funding, cultivating and talking to people interested in what might come after the liberal political order.

So I went looking properly. And somewhere during that investigation I realised I was looking at the wrong man. Not completely wrong. Thiel remains extremely important. But while staring at the American billionaire, I had nearly missed the Cambridge philosophy professor who seemed to have an extraordinary knack for being somewhere nearby whenever these different worlds collided.

James Orr.

If you don’t know the name, you probably should. Because James Orr is now Head of Policy at Reform UK. And that rather changes the temperature of everything else.

So who the fuck is James Orr?

If you were designing the biography of an anti-establishment populist insurgent, you probably wouldn’t start with Winchester College, Balliol, Freshfields, Sullivan & Cromwell, Oxford and Cambridge.

Orr was born in 1978 and spent part of his childhood in Brussels, where his father worked as a lawyer. Both his parents were successful lawyers. He went to Winchester College, where Rishi Sunak was a younger contemporary, then Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a double First in Classics.

He converted to law, worked in corporate finance at Freshfields and Sullivan & Cromwell, and then, in 2009, walked away from the City and into academia.

Around the same period came Christianity. Orr has described himself as essentially atheist after Oxford, before meeting the woman who became his wife, attending an Alpha course at Holy Trinity Brompton and returning to faith. He subsequently completed an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, spent several years as a McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and eventually returned to Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity.

His work was philosophy of religion, metaphysics, phenomenology, Kant, Heidegger, Edith Stein, natural law and classical theism. His doctoral thesis was Divine Lawmaking: A Conceptualist Account. His first monograph was The Mind of God and the Works of Nature. This was serious academic philosophy, not a Reform manifesto with some Aquinas stapled to it. The politics came later. Thing is, for me, he’s operating in my zone. Obviously within a different social class.

I studied philosophy with theology at Hull, a skint working class lad with two kids and collapsing relationship at the time, that within ten years found himself the head of the foreign faculty of the English and Literature department of the University of Suwon. I know, fucking mental, but that is just one of my crazy life stories. I am an anarchist, an antifascist, an arsehole. I ended up an actual anti-establishment activist, because I’ve always rejected authority, even when I have been handed some. On the other hand James Orr is the absolute poster boy of what an establishment figure looks like. So much so, that he is in a position to redefine what the “establishment” is from the inside, and that is exactly what he is attempting to do. And this kitchen table anti-establishment iconoclast is here to call him out.

Anyway, after that little segue, back to Orr, and his politics. He points towards Brexit as the rupture. In the overwhelmingly Remain world of Oxford and Cambridge academia, he became the conspicuous Leave voter. He has talked about noticing that the academics around him overwhelmingly favoured Remain while many of the people doing less prestigious jobs around the university did not.

Over the following years, Orr became increasingly involved in arguments about academic freedom, liberalism, national identity, Christianity, family and the purpose of the state. He joined or advised an expanding collection of conservative and Christian organisations: the Free Speech Union, the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, St Paul’s Theological Centre, History Reclaimed, Briefings for Britain and others.

And then National Conservatism. That’s where the map really begins to spread.

National Conservatism: where the rooms start filling up

Orr isn’t simply somebody who once spoke at a NatCon conference.

He chairs the British arm of the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organisation behind National Conservatism. Companies House records give him 75 per cent or more of the voting rights in the UK company. In other words, this is not an honorary line halfway down an academic biography. He has serious organisational authority.

NatCon matters because it provides a meeting place for a political movement that doesn’t fit comfortably inside the old conservative box. It is nationalist, socially conservative, sceptical of liberal individualism and much more comfortable than traditional British Conservatism with the idea that government should actively defend a particular moral, cultural and national order.

Orr calls his own version a “politics of national preference”. The nation is not simply an administrative area containing whoever happens to be standing inside it. Government owes particular obligations to its own people. Family, faith, history, inheritance and national belonging matter. Liberalism, in Orr’s analysis, has spent too long pretending the state can remain neutral about all of those things while the institutions holding society together gradually disappear.

You can see why this travels rather well across the Atlantic. Because over there, one of the most politically powerful people developing a remarkably similar critique of liberalism is an old friend of Orr’s.

JD Vance. The Vice-President of the United States.

The British sherpa

This isn’t one of those political-network connections where two men were photographed eight seats apart at a conference and somebody on Twitter has drawn a red line between them. Orr and Vance are friends. Good friends from what I can gather.

They appear to have met around 2019 through mutual friends. Annoyingly, despite digging, I still haven’t been able to establish confidently who those mutual friends were. That’s one loose end I’d very much like tied. It is likely another node in the network. But that’s a moot point, as what happened afterwards is much more important.

They spent social time together. There are accounts of long soft focused walks in France. It sounds like a idyllic bromance developed. The Vance family reportedly stayed with the Orr family in Cambridge in 2023. Orr has met Vance in Washington. Vance has called him his “British sherpa”. Aw bless them.

That phrase “British sherpa” tells us rather a lot about Orr’s function. He is somebody who can translate the British political and intellectual landscape for an American friend who went on to become Vice-President of the United States.

And Vance, of course, takes us straight back to Peter Thiel. There’s the connection.

Thiel employed Vance at Mithril Capital, invested in his venture-capital career and then poured roughly $15 million into supporting his Senate run. Whatever else one thinks about their later political relationship, Thiel’s role in Vance’s ascent is not speculative. It was enormous.

But there’s an important bit of restraint required here. I have not found evidence that Peter Thiel introduced James Orr to JD Vance. As I say, I couldn’t find the mutual friends. I mean that would make a beautifully tidy chain. I could stop here, job done, cabal revealed.

Thiel → Vance → Orr → Reform.

Unfortunately, beautifully tidy chains are exactly how you end up writing conspiracy bollocks. The evidence says Orr and Vance met through mutual friends. Until we know who they were, that’s where that particular line stops.

The relationships do overlap. They do not necessarily originate with one another. And that’s going to become rather important. As the whole of this larger hard right ecosystem in the USA and UK, is a series of overlapping connections between key players.

Peter Thiel and Cambridge

The Orr-Thiel relationship, however, is real and considerably deeper than a shared conference.

Thiel’s Cambridge orbit appears in the research by around 2016–18, when his chief of staff Charles Vaughan was reportedly making contacts among conservative academics and students. Vaughan attended a Cambridge dinner in 2018 under the auspices of Ralston College at which Orr and Jordan Peterson were among those present.

Then there is money. There’s always the money.

In November 2018, according to university documents, Thiel offered Cambridge a five-figure donation through Orr while Orr was being considered for his Cambridge faculty appointment. The handling of that donation was later reviewed by Deloitte. The review reportedly found weaknesses in Cambridge’s controls but no evidence of bribery. They didn’t need to money speaks, but cronyism speaks louder in these establishment circles.

That’s important, because I’m not interested in turning “Thiel gave money through Orr” into “Peter Thiel bought James Orr a job at Cambridge”. The evidence doesn’t establish that. But you dear reader can fill in the gaps on that one. It doesn’t take a genius with an Oxbridge degree to work it out.

There was also a dispute over anonymity. Reporting suggested Orr sought to keep the donor anonymous; Orr’s lawyers said it was Thiel who requested anonymity. So it all sounds a bit messy. What we can safely say is interesting enough without adding anything to it: Peter Thiel’s money entered Cambridge through an arrangement involving James Orr. We all know money speaks, as I said. Enough said.

And the relationship continued. In December 2023, Thiel gave an Oxford lecture reportedly co-organised by Orr.

We’ll come back to somebody who attended that lecture.

Then, in January this year, Orr organised four invitation-only Peter Thiel lectures at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, on one of Thiel’s more recent intellectual preoccupations.

The Antichrist.

Because apparently this story wasn’t already weird enough. Orr publicly described the lectures in glowing terms. So “they’ve met” doesn’t really cover it. Nor, however, have I found evidence that Orr works for Thiel, that Thiel personally bankrolls him, or that Thiel is financing Reform through Orr.

What the evidence gives us is something more nuanced: a long-running intellectual and institutional relationship, with an element of patronage, stretching back years before Orr formally entered party politics.

And Thiel is only one of the internationally famous people passing through Orr’s Cambridge world.

The Conservative kibbutz

One of the more fascinating parts of Orr’s story is his home life, although not for the reasons the tabloids might enjoy. I’m not interested in where he lives. I’m not planning on doing the tabloid thing of rifling through his bins, for some salacious story. I’m interested in what he himself says happens there.

Orr has publicly described the larger property where he lives as containing a small residential intellectual community, roughly ten people, predominantly PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and research fellows. There are communal Sunday lunches, discussions and a revolving collection of visitors.

He has jokingly called it a “Conservative kibbutz”.

Which is a sentence I suspect has never previously been uttered in Cambridge without somebody immediately opening a bottle of port, and signing up to join a Friends of Israel group.

Jordan Peterson has been part of Orr’s world for years. Orr invited him to Cambridge, later became an instructor at Peterson Academy, and reporting places Peterson within this wider Cambridge social circle. Orr is also a fellow of Ralston College, whose founder Stephen Blackwood crops up elsewhere in this story.

Then there is Trinity Forum Europe. Orr is its Director of UK Programs. Previous reporting has connected events around that network with people including Peterson, Douglas Murray, Philippa Stroud and Charles Murray.

And this is where I think something more important than individual ideology becomes visible. Orr convenes. He builds rooms in which people meet. He has spent years around students and young academics, visiting intellectuals, conservative organisations, Christian networks and transatlantic political figures.

That would be an interesting footnote if Orr had remained a Cambridge academic. Then Reform hired him. And part of his job was recruitment.

From the seminar room to Farage

There was an intermediate stage before Reform that matters enormously.

The Centre for a Better Britain was incorporated in late 2024 and began assembling something much closer to political infrastructure than an ordinary discussion group: policy development, research, polling, draft legislation and people.

Orr became chair of its advisory board and oversaw policy work. The organisation sat formally outside Reform, but it occupied exactly the political territory into which Reform was rapidly expanding. Its circle included people with connections to Farage and Reform donors, and contemporary reporting said it was seeking substantial funding in Britain and America.

This is the missing evolutionary step. James Orr did not go directly from discussing Heidegger at Cambridge to asking Nigel Farage what he fancied doing about corporation tax. He spent years building political-intellectual networks, moved into an organisation developing policy infrastructure for the populist right, and then in October 2025 joined Reform’s senior team as an adviser to Farage.

The remit announced at the time wasn’t merely “give Nigel clever ideas”.

It included finding people. Zia Yusuf said Orr would bring talented people into Reform. Obviously they must be behind the scenes, in the daily clown show we get presented as Reform publicly. Subsequent reporting described a strategy of attracting “elite defectors” from academia, law and business. Orr himself talked about the extraordinary pool of able students he had encountered at Cambridge and recruitment at scale.

Now put that beside everything that came before. The residential intellectual community. The dinners, visiting speakers, conferences, transatlantic friendships, institutional boards. And NatCon.

It does not prove Cambridge is some clandestine Reform recruitment centre. There are more dramatic allegations about Orr’s activities around students, and they remain disputed and incompletely adjudicated. We don’t need them. We have enough here. I’m not here to get into the allegations of safeguarding issues around students and the environment Orr created, I’ll leave that for others.

The documented continuity is interesting enough. Orr spent years bringing people and ideas together. Then Reform hired him partly to bring people and ideas together.

In February 2026, he became Head of Policy.

This is where the story stops being primarily about an interesting academic movement. The ideas now have a route into a party that wants to govern Britain. And this is the point that we should all start to worry about what is going on behind Farage.

And then Aporia walks back into the room

This was the moment during the research when I started swearing at my notes.

Because I’d already been here. While investigating Nathan Cofnas and the network around modern “race realism”, one publication kept appearing: Aporia.

Aporia sits inside an intellectual ecosystem involving Cofnas, Noah Carl and Emil Kirkegaard and has published arguments around race, intelligence, heredity, demographics and human differences.

I’ve already gone properly into that world, its history and the attempt to rehabilitate hereditarian ideas under more respectable language, so I’m not going to reproduce the whole investigation here. There are links at the bottom of this piece of writing, if you want to read other connected writings.

The relevant fact for this story is much simpler. Aporia attended the 2023 National Conservatism conference in London. And afterwards it thanked James Orr for organising the conference and inviting it.

That’s not guilt by association. It isn’t even association. It’s an invitation.

And this is where I need to be precise because there is already enough here without making shit up. I have not established that James Orr shares Nathan Cofnas’s views on race and intelligence. I have not established a close Orr-Cofnas friendship. I have not found evidence that Orr was part of the Human Diversity Foundation, Polygenic Scores or Pioneer Fund milieu.

What we can establish is that Orr used his position inside National Conservatism to give Aporia access to a serious political conference. That’s politically significant in its own right.

And the circle gets stranger because Thiel has separately been reported as seeking introductions to Cofnas and Carl. So the lines don’t run neatly from Orr to every person involved. They do intersect however.

Orr connects to Thiel. Orr connects to Aporia. Thiel has separately been reported as taking an interest in Cofnas and Carl. Cofnas, Carl and Kirkegaard connect through the hereditarian intellectual ecosystem around Aporia. Do you see?

Nobody needs to be secretly controlling anybody for that to be worth looking at. In fact, pretending somebody is controlling it would make the network less interesting.

The page where everybody turns up

Then I found ARC. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was co-founded around Jordan Peterson and Philippa Stroud and presents itself as an international movement seeking a more positive alternative to cultural pessimism and decline.

James Orr sits on its advisory board. Jordan Peterson is there too obviously. Not terribly surprising, as the co-founder. Then you keep reading. Names, names I’ve seen before. Names I’d ignored, if I’m honest. I was focusing on other things, but names I recognised from reading documents, articles, websites, etc… Maurice Glasman. Danny Kruger. Douglas Murray. Paul Marshall. Philippa Stroud. Stephen Blackwood. Ben Delo. Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Several people who had wandered independently into completely different parts of my research were sitting on the same institutional page.

Now, again, an advisory board is not a conspiracy. It doesn’t mean Ben Delo and Maurice Glasman are spending Thursday evenings jointly plotting the destruction of liberal democracy over a cheeky Nando’s. But it does answer one important question.

Are these merely names that an overexcited researcher can connect by drawing enough lines? No. There are actual institutions where some of these worlds overlap.

ARC is one of them. And Ben Delo is where another of my previous investigations suddenly comes crashing into this one.

The crypto billionaire in the next room

Delo co-founded BitMEX and became one of Britain’s youngest self-made billionaires.

He is also now a major Reform donor. In early 2026 he gave Reform £4 million.

But Delo’s importance here isn’t simply the cheque. He and Orr share the ARC advisory board. Orr attended Delo’s summer gathering in 2025. And remember that Peter Thiel lecture in Oxford reportedly co-organised by Orr in December 2023.

Delo was there. That’s enough evidence to say they occupy an overlapping social and institutional world. It is not enough to say Ben Delo personally funds James Orr. I haven’t found evidence for that. What Delo does fund is where things get particularly interesting.

The Sanctuary. Which sounds like the HQ of a clandestine cult.

The Sanctuary is a Westminster political and media space backed by Delo, providing offices, events facilities, podcasting and other infrastructure to a collection of organisations and individuals on the right.

And this is where the Restore Britain investigation walks through the door.

Restore used The Sanctuary to launch its mass-deportation campaign. Aporia has also been linked to the Sanctuary ecosystem. The Cambridge Scrutonian Society, itself reported to have emerged from students around Orr’s wider Cambridge milieu, has connections to the same space.

I’ve already done the deep dive into Restore, Rupert Lowe and the considerably harder political world accumulating around that project. And here is where I could make this essay much more exciting by talking bollocks.

I could draw: Orr → Delo → Sanctuary → Restore Britain

And then announce that James Orr is secretly behind Rupert Lowe. Except I have found no evidence for that. I really wanted to find that link. I’ve also found no evidence that Peter Thiel funds Restore Britain. I haven’t found an Orr-Rupert Lowe political partnership.

And the harder ethnonationalist groups appearing around the edges of the Restore story do not suddenly become part of James Orr’s network just because I can reach them after several clicks of the mouse.

That’s not how this works. What we have found is something subtler. Delo is himself a bridge. He shares an institution and social environment with Orr. He independently gives millions to Reform. And he independently provides physical infrastructure used by organisations elsewhere in the British New Right.

Orr is important here. Delo may be more important.

The network changes shape depending on which bit you’re looking at.

That’s precisely why I no longer think we’re looking for a mastermind.

Another route across the Atlantic

Turning Point provides an even better test.

James Orr really did know Charlie Kirk.

But the research actually weakened the version of that relationship I initially imagined, which is exactly what research is supposed to do.

Orr appears to have become personally close to Kirk relatively late, during the final months of Kirk’s life in 2025. He spent time with him in Phoenix and Aspen. After Kirk was killed in September, Orr wrote warmly about him, later appeared prominently on The Charlie Kirk Show, and in December spoke at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix.

That’s a real connection. Orr had entered the TPUSA world.

What I haven’t found is evidence that Orr had an organisational role in Turning Point UK. Nor have I found a meaningful direct connection between Orr and Nick Tenconi.

And that’s interesting because we’ve already investigated that branch of this ecosystem.

Turning Point UK was launched out of the American Turning Point ecosystem. Tenconi became its COO. Then, in 2025, Tenconi became leader of UKIP.

So another transatlantic route exists: TPUSA → TPUK → Tenconi → UKIP.

I’ve covered that before. It doesn’t need James Orr. That’s the point.

If I wanted to prove James Orr secretly controls everything to the right of Ed Davey, I could probably produce a very impressive diagram. I tried actually, I spent hours last night trying to create organisational maps, that showed the whole network/ecosystem linked together. I gave up.

Unfortunately, I’d also be talking bollocks if I said I could. What I have is just that bit too messy to really map it visually yet. Maybe further down the road, I might find the links I need to create that map.

Anyway, the Turning Point branch demonstrates that we’re looking at something larger than one man’s contacts. There are multiple bridges between the American and British hard right.

Orr is one. He isn’t the customs officer. Or should that be passport control? Meh, it’s early hours as of the morning and my brain is closing down.

The left-wing lord at the right-wing party

And just when you think you’ve got the ideological shape of this thing sorted, along comes Maurice Glasman to fuck it up.

Glasman founded Blue Labour. He’s a Labour peer. And he is important here.

Orr regards Glasman as a friend and intellectual influence. Vance has independently developed a relationship with Glasman. Glasman sits with Orr on ARC’s advisory board. That tells us something essential about the intellectual movement surrounding Orr.

It isn’t simply the “far right” gradually accumulating more far-right people. I’ve already mentioned, the use of prefixes to the right, that we have to be careful with using. They dilute and do a disservice to our argument. The New Right is the intellectual/political ecosystem, an attempt to build a new governing philosophy and elite. The hard right, is a broader description of political positioning. It can include parts of Reform, Restore and UKIP, but it doesn't tell us much about the intellectual network we're actually mapping.

Some of the ideas moving through it all come from communitarian critiques of liberal capitalism that originated elsewhere entirely. Blue Labour attacked the destruction of community, the weakening of family and local institutions, the dominance of markets and the detachment of political elites from working-class life.

Parts of the New Right look at that diagnosis and say: yes.

Then they offer rather different prescriptions. This helps explain why Orr doesn’t fit neatly inside old Thatcherism either. He is socially conservative, nationalist and Christian, but his critique of liberalism includes economic liberalism.

And this creates a fairly spectacular contradiction inside Reform. Nigel Farage comes from a political tradition soaked in Thatcherism, markets, deregulation and individual liberty. Orr thinks excessive individualism is part of the problem.

The market has spent decades doing precisely what cultural conservatives now complain progressive politics has done: uprooting people, dissolving local ties, weakening communities and treating human beings as interchangeable economic units.

You can’t spend forty years allowing capital to turn communities into spreadsheets and then blame the resulting alienation entirely on immigrants and university diversity officers. Sooner or later Reform is going to have to decide what “post-liberal” actually means if it gets to the Treasury.

That argument may prove every bit as important as immigration for them.

Christianity isn’t decoration here

The religious element also deserves more attention than British political journalism generally gives it.

Orr’s Christianity isn’t a Sunday hobby. It sits underneath his politics.

Family, nation, moral obligation, inherited culture and limits on individual autonomy are bound up with his understanding of Christianity and natural law. Contemporary reporting places him on extremely conservative ground on abortion, marriage and family, while his immigration rhetoric has hardened considerably, including publicly referring to people crossing the Channel to seek asylum as “invaders”.

That puts him inside a political culture much more familiar in the United States than Britain. Vance’s Catholic post-liberalism belongs to the same broad conversation. So does National Conservatism. So do parts of the Peterson and ARC worlds. Danny Kruger, another significant figure around Reform’s emerging policy operation, has his own strong Christian-conservative identity and his own relationship with Vance.

Again, Orr isn’t the only bridge. But he is standing on a remarkable number of them.

And that matters because Reform has usually been understood through Farage: pub, pint, cigarette, Brexit, borders, blokeish insurgency.

The intellectual machinery developing around the party is rather different. It is asking what the state should encourage. What kind of families it wants. What obligations citizens owe each other. What constitutes a nation. Who belongs to it. What Christianity should contribute to public life. And whether liberalism itself has reached the end of the road.

That’s a much bigger political project than “stop the boats”. This is an elitist project to change the whole social, political and cultural landscape of the country forever.

Are you fucking scared yet?

The establishment insurgent

There is another thing about Orr that I find fascinating.

He is absolutely fucking terrible casting for the role of anti-establishment revolutionary. This isn’t somebody locked outside Britain’s elite institutions banging on the window. He’s inside the fucking building arguing that the wrong people are running it.

And perhaps that is a better way to understand the New Right than the language of populism allows. This isn’t necessarily a revolt against elites. It is partly a battle between elites over which worldview should govern institutions.

Orr’s complaint isn’t really that clever, highly educated people have too much influence over Britain. He is a clever, highly educated person seeking considerably more influence over Britain. His complaint is that the current clever, highly educated people believe the wrong things.

Which brings us back to recruitment. Because movements that want to replace an elite eventually need another elite ready to replace it. And Orr has spent years cultivating exactly the sort of people who might become one.

So what have we actually found?

After all of this, I don’t think Peter Thiel is sitting at the centre of a British political network pulling strings. I’ll admit, that’s what I originally went looking for when I started.

I don’t think James Orr is either. That’s not what the evidence shows.

What it shows is messier and, frankly, more interesting. Thiel matters because he provides money, intellectual patronage and access to a powerful American technology and political network. Vance matters because he has taken post-liberal ideas into the vice-presidency of the United States.

Peterson brings an enormous international audience and his own educational and institutional world. National Conservatism provides an organised ideological meeting place. ARC provides another international institutional space where people from several of these networks physically sit together.

Delo brings money and infrastructure, from his £4 million Reform donations to The Sanctuary. Aporia provides an entry point into the hereditarian world I found while investigating Cofnas.

Turning Point provides a separate transatlantic political machine, one British branch of which eventually produced the current leader of UKIP. Restore Britain occupies another, harder part of the British landscape, connected more clearly through Delo’s infrastructure than through Orr himself.

And Reform is where some of these ideas and people acquire something they didn’t have in Cambridge seminars, podcasts, conferences or Westminster think tanks.

A plausible route to government.

The interesting thing about James Orr is not that all those lines terminate with him. They don’t. It’s that he can move through an extraordinary number of them. He can organise National Conservatism and invite Aporia. He can host Peter Thiel. He can teach in Jordan Peterson’s educational world. He can holiday and talk politics with JD Vance. He can sit on ARC alongside Maurice Glasman, Danny Kruger and Ben Delo.

He can cultivate students and young academics at Cambridge. And then he can walk into Reform UK with an explicit mandate to recruit people, build networks and ultimately run policy.

That is an unusual political skill set. And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say he could well be the Machiavellianism manipulator pulling the strings behind Farage’s throne. The real Prime Minister in waiting. The a British version of JD Vance, to our own Temu Trump. Farage is a clown, Trump is a clown. There isn’t a day goes by where they don’t give me some fuckwittery for me to fill my Threads followers feeds with. But Vance and Orr? Do not underestimate these men. We would do so at our peril.

The bit we should probably be worried about

There is a comforting way to think about Reform UK.

Nigel Farage. That’s it.

One extraordinarily effective political salesman who has spent three decades turning grievance into airtime. If Reform is Farage, then eventually it all goes away.

Trump produces a similar comforting illusion in America. But the people around this emerging international New Right are already thinking beyond individual leaders.

Orr himself has written about Vance as a possible intellectual future for MAGA beyond Trump. And that’s why I’ve become much more interested in the infrastructure than the personalities standing at the podium.

We have to pull out and look at the infrastructure these men just stood to the right of the clowns running things are doing. And who is backing them. A billionaire paying for something can matter enormously. So can the person who knows who ought to be invited to dinner.

None of this requires a conspiracy. In some ways, a conspiracy would be easier. You expose the bloke at the top, reveal the secret funding, draw the arrows and roll the credits. Political ecosystems are harder. They grow.

People enter them for different reasons. They disagree. Organisations overlap. Money flows down one route while ideas move down another. A Cambridge academic and a crypto billionaire can share an advisory board without sharing a political programme. A Labour peer can influence a Reform policy chief. A race-realist publication can be invited into a National Conservative conference without its entire worldview becoming NatCon policy. An American youth organisation can produce a British branch that ends up feeding UKIP without James Orr having anything to do with it.

That messiness isn’t evidence that the network doesn’t exist.

The messiness is what makes it a network.

And this is why, after starting in completely different places, I keep coming back to James Orr. Not because every road leads to him. I’ve spent quite a lot of this essay explaining the roads that don’t.

But an extraordinary number pass nearby. And around the edges, through people and institutions rather than some imaginary command structure, we can see the other investigations coming into view: Cofnas and the hereditarian world, Restore Britain and The Sanctuary, Turning Point and UKIP.

That’s the picture I couldn’t see when I was looking at each piece separately.

It isn’t Peter Thiel’s network. It isn’t James Orr’s network. It isn’t even one network.

It’s an ecosystem of overlapping political, intellectual and financial networks increasingly capable of moving ideas and people between the American New Right and British politics.

And right now, one of the people standing in the most interesting position inside the British end of it is a Cambridge philosopher of religion who most voters have probably never heard of.

Nigel Farage is the man in front of the cameras. James Orr is the man I would keep an eye on.

Because Farage may be the face of Reform. James Orr is helping to decide what comes out of its mouth. And what the future will look like for all of us.

Further Reading

Don’t mourn. Organise. The hard right already has.

I Spent an Evening Among Nathan Cofnas’s Supporters. It Was Quite an Education.

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

I’ve mostly treated Restore Britain as another source of comedy material for my Threads audience. Rupert Lowe says something ridiculous, one of the little gang around him says something even more ridiculous, I take the piss, everyone has a nice time and we move on with our day.

Then I saw a number. 10,000,000.

Charlie Downes, Restore Britain’s campaigns director and official spokesman, has said a Restore government would deport “upwards of ten million people.”

And that stopped me. Because ten million isn’t “stop the boats”. It isn’t deporting foreign criminals. It isn’t even Restore Britain’s own estimate of the number of people living illegally in the country. Ten million people is around one person in every seven living in Britain. And when you look at like that, that is fucking scary.

So I had what seemed like a fairly straightforward question.

Who the fuck are they?

Restore Britain’s own mass-deportation policy works from an estimate of roughly 1.8 to 2 million people living illegally in Britain. Their position on those people could hardly be clearer: every single one should be deported.

Okay, so far so good, that’s still within the hard right rhetoric of Reform. You can argue about the estimate. Independent assessments of the undocumented population vary considerably and are generally lower. But for the purposes of this exercise I’m happy to use Restore’s number. Two million.

But, Downes said upwards of ten million. So where did the other eight million come from?

That was the point where I stopped laughing and started reading.

Oh. They don’t just mean illegal migrants.

You don’t have to trawl through leaked Telegram groups or decipher dog whistles to discover that Restore wants to remove people who are legally resident in Britain.

It’s on their website. Under its policy to “Reverse Mass Immigration”, Restore Britain says:

“If a legally resident foreign national is unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime or actively hates our way of life and wishes to do us harm, they will be deported.”

Read that beginning bit again. Legally resident.

This isn’t a policy about somebody who has entered the country illegally or overstayed a visa. Restore is explicitly talking about people whom the British state has given a legal right to live here.

And look at the tests that follow… There’s an enormous difference between some of those things. If somebody has committed a serious criminal offence, there is at least a legal process capable of establishing what happened. There are already circumstances in which foreign nationals can be deported following conviction.

But what does “fails to integrate” mean? Who decides? How integrated is integrated enough? Is there a test? Does someone come round with a clipboard and ask if you know the words to Jerusalem?

What does “hates our way of life” mean? Which way of life? Mine? Rupert Lowe’s? Yours?

Britain contains monarchists, republicans, Muslims, Christians, atheists, communists, Tories, anarchists, vegans, fox hunters and people who put the milk in tea first. We’ve been arguing about what “our way of life” means for centuries. That is part of our way of life in this country. We’re a mongrel breed melting-pot, a vibrant ever adapted nation rich in a history of multicultural mixing from way back even before Commonwealth and even before Empire days.

Anyway, back to unpicking that website statement, social housing? That one is particularly revealing because living in social housing isn’t behaviour. It isn’t a crime. It isn’t even a political opinion. It’s where you live. Yet Restore lists it among possible reasons a legally resident foreign national should be expelled from the country.

Then, at the bottom of the same policy section, comes the sentence that suddenly makes Downes’s ten-million claim look rather less like a random bit of online chest-beating:

“If that means millions go, then millions go.”

Right. Now we’re getting somewhere. And that somewhere feels a bit fucking 1930s Nazi Germany at the moment, when you think about it. Now I promised myself I wouldn’t invoke the N-word, in relation to Restore Britain, but fuck me, it’s hard not to make that connection.

So I tried to count them.

This is where it gets messy, and I think the mess matters. Restore says there may be around two million people living illegally in Britain. Fine. There’s the first two million, according to Restore’s own estimate.

But Britain also contains millions of people who are legally resident here without being British citizens. Work visa holders. Family members. Europeans with settled status. People with indefinite leave to remain. Students. People who have built lives here perfectly legally.

Restore does not say all of those people would automatically be deported. Instead it establishes conditions under which legally resident foreign nationals could be.

You cannot take the total number of foreign nationals in Britain and simply add it to two million undocumented migrants and announce that you have solved Charlie Downes’s arithmetic. Some of these populations overlap in datasets, different official measures count different things, and Restore itself has not clearly said every legal foreign national would go.

Then there are dual nationals. Restore has also proposed stripping British citizenship in certain circumstances. Again, it does not say every dual national would lose citizenship, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I mean it’s looking bad enough already, without over egging what they are suggesting.

So I’ve tried to reconstruct the ten million from what Restore has actually said.

And I can’t. Not reliably. What I can establish is much more important. Restore starts with around two million people it says are here illegally. It then explicitly expands deportation to legally resident foreign nationals according to a mixture of objective and extraordinarily subjective tests. It proposes removing citizenship from some dual nationals. And its campaigns director still arrives at:

Upwards of ten million.

Restore has not publicly explained exactly who fills that number. And when somebody proposes deporting roughly one person in seven from the country, I don’t think asking for the names of the categories is being pedantic.

I think it’s the bare minimum requirement.

Then Britishness itself starts getting weird.

This is where the whole thing stops looking like merely an exceptionally aggressive immigration programme.

Charlie Downes has said it is a “statement of fact” that Muslims are less British than Christians. That is a fascinating sentence because it has nothing to do with immigration status. He’s shifted the goal posts to pick on people of faith that he doesn’t like. A Muslim can be born in Bradford, hold a British passport, have British parents and grandparents and never have lived anywhere else. Maybe hardly ever left Yorkshire in their whole lives.

A Christian can rock up at Heathrow from Texas tomorrow morning. So if the Christian is somehow “more British”, we are no longer discussing citizenship. We are discussing identity. Religion. Culture. Possibly ancestry. I mean, if we’re going on ancestry, there are archaeological artifacts that prove Muslims have wandered these isles since the 8th-9th Century. Is that ancestorial line long enough for the Restore Britain policy?

Downes has talked about Britishness in precisely those broader terms, including ancestry and connection to the land. Yet, Muslims don’t seem to factor in his twisted view of Britishness, which lets be straight here, is as racist as fuck.

Then there is Harrison Pitt, Restore’s senior policy figure, who has described Britain’s immigration history as a “perverse, fanatical demographic experiment.”

Again, pay attention to the language. Not a labour-market mistake, or even excessive immigration. A demographic experiment. That language treats immigration not simply as movement across borders but as something happening to the composition of a people. The composition of the British, we famously mongrel breed.

Which brings us to a word that has started appearing with increasing frequency around this part of the European right: Remigration.

It sounds almost bureaucratic in its simplicity. Deliberately so. Ordinary deportation generally means the state removing someone who has no legal entitlement to remain, or somebody whose status makes them liable to removal under existing law.

“Remigration” on the other hand, in contemporary European identity politics can mean something much broader: deliberately reversing previous migration, including pressure on people who are legally settled to leave, and in harder right versions, it’s questioning whether naturalised citizens or their descendants really belong at all. That does not mean everyone who uses the word means precisely the same thing. It’s become a trendy word of the new hard right. From politicians on podiums, to knuckle dragging street activists are using it. So it does mean we should ask what the person using it actually means by it.

Harrison Pitt has participated in discussions about remigration with Martin Sellner, one of the most prominent European advocates of the concept. That isn’t guilt by association. I’m not interested in doing that. Meeting somebody does not magically transfer their entire ideology into your brain. It takes a little more than that, not much more if you’re already susceptible to the idea, but still, not as simple as that.

But if you are Restore Britain’s senior policy figure, and you are publicly engaging with one of Europe’s best-known remigration theorists about remigration while your own organisation is developing policies explicitly aimed at reversing migration, it is reasonable to consider that somewhat relevant. Especially when your campaigns director is simultaneously talking about removing upwards of ten million people.

And this is where Restore develops a genuinely interesting internal contradiction.

Rupert Lowe says he rejects ethnonationalism. Of course he does, otherwise the fascist label would be slapped on him by teatime. He says he does not support neo-Nazism or racial nationalism, and there is no justification for pretending he has said otherwise. This is the thing with the new hard right, they know what to disavow themselves of, what to deny before the label arrives.

But senior people around him are talking about ancestry, Christian identity, demographics and remigration. So Restore now has a pretty fundamental question sitting unresolved inside itself: What makes somebody British?

Is Britishness citizenship? Is it adherence to certain laws? Culture? Language? Christianity? Ancestry? Some mixture of them all? Because if your political programme includes removing millions of people, that philosophical question very quickly stops being philosophical.

Somebody eventually has to draw the line.

Then there’s Restore Britain’s Policy Document

Up to this point, you could still dismiss some of this as the usual hard-right online arms race. One bloke says five million. The next says ten. Somebody posts a Union Jack. Everyone gets very excited. Someone cums in their little Ingrrrland tighty whiteys.

Restore Britain’s actual policy document is called, Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics. It runs to 113 pages. And this is where the story became considerably less funny for me.

Because Restore hasn’t merely talked about deportation. It has thought about what the British state would need to become in order to carry it out. The document proposes repealing the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, withdrawing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights. It proposes abolishing the asylum system in its current form.

And it proposes a new “Great Clarification Act” designed to reassert parliamentary power against judicial interference. And then there is the machinery. Restore discusses dramatically expanding immigration detention.

Military camps, yes internment camps. Or concentration camps, if you will. Large-scale enforcement. Data sharing. Checks involving public services, landlords, employers and financial institutions. Even systems for members of the public to report people suspected of being in the country unlawfully, potentially with financial incentives attached. Yes, they plan to offer to pay people to grass. I mean fucking hell, Dave on Facebook will be reporting half the street, when he is skint at the end of the month.

If all this isn’t already sounding too Orwellian, or Stasi enough for you, lets go on.

Their document proposes a “hostile environment” deliberately designed to make life sufficiently difficult that large numbers leave voluntarily, alongside hundreds of thousands of enforced removals. Whatever your opinion of immigration, stop for a moment and think about what mass removal actually requires.

First you need classification. Who is allowed to remain and who isn’t?

Then you need identification. Where are those people?

Then you need information. Where do they work? Where do they live? Which bank do they use? Which public services do they access?

Then you need detention. What happens between identifying someone and removing them?

Then you need enforcement. What happens when somebody refuses to leave?

And finally you need to deal with the law. What happens when a court says the state cannot deport somebody?

Restore’s document addresses all of those problems. That is the bit that made me sit back, and go fucking hell, these cunts are not even fascism lite. They’re going full dystopia, full on 1984. V for Vendetta. Fahrenheit 451. The Handmaid's Tale. Children of Men. It Can't Happen Here. All rolled into one fucked up hellscape, where no-one will be safe.

Because this isn’t somebody writing “SEND THEM HOME” beneath a Facebook article. Somebody has sat down and tried to design the administrative system. And their own deportation paper contains a particularly important caveat. It says the document deals with the existing illegal migrant population. But it also contemplates what happens if dramatic changes are made to the status of legal migrants.

In other words, Restore understands perfectly well that the definition of who is “illegal” is not immutable. Parliament writes immigration law. Change the law, and somebody who was legally resident yesterday can find that the rules governing their future have changed. So me, you, nobody is safe in this version of Britain Restore wants.

Which brings us straight back to the ten million.

So what do you call this?

I know exactly where political discussion goes at this point. Somebody says fascist, I mean I already have really. Somebody else screams that the word has lost all meaning. Then everyone spends three days arguing about Mussolini instead of discussing the actual policy. I’m not particularly interested. I call a spade a spade on this matter.

Fascism is a specific historical and political phenomenon. Restore Britain is a new political party operating within a democratic system. It is not 1930s Italy or Germany, and shouting “Hitler” every six paragraphs would tell us very little.

But political ideas have characteristics. Defining national belonging through ancestry, religion or ethnicity is a characteristic of ethnonationalist politics.

Designating very large categories of residents for removal is a characteristic of authoritarian population politics.

Making citizenship conditional for selected groups moves citizenship away from being a secure legal status and towards something the state can revoke according to political definitions of belonging.

Weakening judicial restraints makes it easier for governments to act against individuals without courts stopping them.

Building systems capable of identifying, reporting, detaining and removing enormous populations creates a very particular kind of state power.

Those things have histories. Some of those histories absolutely do run through fascistic and authoritarian political traditions. But I don’t need to decide which historical label you personally stick on Restore Britain.

I’m more interested in showing you what they have written down.

You can decide what to call it. I know what I call it. You know what I call it.

And they don’t need to win.

There is another reason I think dismissing Restore because it is currently a fringe party misses the point.

They do not necessarily need Rupert Lowe walking into Downing Street. Harrison Pitt has talked about the value of a “right-wing arms race”, with politicians competing to move further right. That may be Restore’s most realistic route to influence.

If Restore takes voters from Reform, Reform has a choice. Ignore them, or chase them further right. Lowe has already attempted to make cooperation with Nigel Farage conditional on Reform adopting key Restore policies.

So the danger isn’t necessarily a Restore government. A smaller party can change a larger party by changing what that larger party believes it must promise to survive.

We have seen that mechanism before across politics. Ideas do not need a majority when they first enter the bloodstream.

They need leverage.

So I’m back where I started.

Back to the ten million.

Restore Britain says there are around two million illegal migrants and wants them all deported. Restore explicitly says legally resident foreign nationals should also be deported if they fail tests including claiming benefits, living in social housing or failing to integrate.

Restore proposes citizenship deprivation in certain cases. Senior Restore figures talk about remigration, ancestry, Christianity and demographic change.

Its campaigns director says a Restore government would deport “upwards of ten million people.” And after going through their policies, their statements and their deportation blueprint, I still have the same question.

Who are the ten million?

If your political programme involves removing something approaching one person in every seven currently living in Britain, you do not get to hide the answer inside the word “immigration”.

You need to tell us who those people are. Not euphemisms. Not the new trendy catch-all word “remigration”. Not “demographics”. People. What people? Which people?

Which legally resident neighbour? Which colleague? Which family? Which family member? Which British citizen whose citizenship suddenly becomes less secure? Which person who has spent twenty years building a life here but fails somebody’s definition of “integration”? Which ten million?

That isn’t hysteria. It isn’t a Nazi comparison. We don’t even need to use that label to prove what Restore Britain are here. It isn’t left-wing pearl-clutching.

It is the simplest question you can ask somebody who has just proposed one of the largest population removals in modern British political discourse.

Who, exactly, are you planning to remove?

I started looking into Restore Britain because ten million sounded absurd. I’m finishing considerably less amused. Because whatever the final number turns out to mean, Restore has already written down a surprising amount about the kind of state it would build to make people leave.

And that is not a fucking joke.

Further Reading

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

Most of what I do online is difficult to put neatly into a box. I’m sarcastic, certainly. I take the piss. I use satire when it fits. But underneath all of that I’m usually doing something much simpler: finding out what is actually happening and putting it in front of people. I suppose sarcasm has become my delivery system for information. The facts do the heavy lifting. I just occasionally point at them and ask whether everybody else can see how fucking ridiculous this is. I can go from deadly serious, to a throw-away sarcastic punchline in the space of a short punchy paragraph. It’s how I write, it’s my style I’ve developed over many years.

That works quite well when the people you’re writing about are ridiculous. Donald Trump is ridiculous. Nigel Farage is ridiculous. The people who think Britain is being invaded because somebody opened a Turkish barber shop are ridiculous. There is enormous power in taking people who desperately want to appear frightening and important and making them look fucking stupid.

But I’ve reached an uncomfortable point in my work where I’m finding it increasingly difficult to laugh without also looking at what sits behind the joke.

Because some of this is getting very fucking serious.

For a long time I knew I was looking at different parts of the same ideological bullshit. Trump and MAGA in America. Christian nationalism. Turning Point. Farage and Reform. The various hard-right networks here, across Europe, and over the pond in the good old U.S. of A. Then more recently, Nathan Cofnas and the people around him. I could hear the same arguments coming out of different mouths, watch the same enemies being invented and see the same language being recycled, but knowing that people inhabit the same ideological world isn’t the same as knowing how that world works.

Recently I’ve started finding the connective tissue.

And the deeper I’ve gone, the more those apparently separate stories have begun connecting through actual people and organisations, political relationships, money, media platforms, conferences, donors and institutions. Sometimes the connection is direct and documented. Sometimes it’s a shared network or overlapping personnel. Sometimes it’s simply an idea making its way from one country into another and finding a receptive audience when it gets there.

I’m not interested in drawing lines between things that aren’t connected. That’s conspiracy-board bollocks and it helps nobody. What interests me is that there are now enough real lines that I don’t need to invent any.

I went looking at individual stories and kept finding doors into the same building.

I thought I was looking at America

I’ve spent months writing about Trump, MAGA and Christian nationalism for my book. The more I’ve researched that world, the less useful it has become to think of it simply as American electoral politics being merged with faith. That the separation between church and state is a thing of the past, as the flag and the cross fuse into one faith based fascist system.

Christian nationalism isn’t just a bunch of evangelical voters who happen to like Donald Trump. There is an intellectual infrastructure around it. There are organisations, campaign groups, media operations and wealthy people willing to fund ideas they want pushed into political life. Some of those relationships are old, others are newer, and they don’t all agree with one another. They don’t need to.

I’ve described MAGA before as a closed-loop system. A claim moves from an activist to an influencer, from there into partisan media, back out onto social media and eventually into the mouth of a politician. Once the politician says it, the media reports that the politician said it and the whole fucking thing starts again with a fresh coat of legitimacy.

I’ve spent a lot of time dismantling that machinery because it fascinates me as much as it horrifies me. What I hadn’t appreciated until I started following some of the British connections was how porous the Atlantic had become.

Turning Point didn’t remain an American story. The arguments around Christian nationalism didn’t remain neatly inside American churches. MAGA’s obsession with Europe didn’t remain an occasional Trump rant about NATO. JD Vance has spent a considerable amount of political energy telling Europeans what is supposedly wrong with our democracies, our speech laws and our societies. Now the American ambassador to Britain is wading publicly into the Jason Arday controversy and criticising Cambridge.

At some point you have to stop treating these as completely separate curiosities and look at the environment in which they’re happening.

Because Britain isn’t being invaded by American politics. That gives America far too much credit and Britain far too little responsibility. We have our own hard right. We’ve been manufacturing racist cunts domestically for centuries without requiring an import licence.

What we’re seeing is something more interesting. Political movements in different countries are learning from one another, borrowing arguments, sharing platforms and occasionally sharing people. American culture-war language arrives here and finds British organisations already speaking something remarkably similar. British stories travel in the opposite direction and become evidence for American claims about Europe’s supposed collapse.

It is a conversation. Unfortunately, quite a lot of the people having it are fucking terrifying.

Then Jason Arday died

I’d been seeing Jason Arday in my news feed for weeks. That’s the part I keep coming back to, all this week.

I was busy. I was researching Reform, Turning Point, Farage, Trump and MAGA. I was writing about Christian nationalism. Every day there seemed to be another piece of political insanity requiring attention. But Arday kept appearing.

Another story. Then another. Then another. And on it went day after day.

I remember thinking it was strange. Why am I still seeing this bloke? How many developments can there possibly be in an academic plagiarism story? And then I carried on with whatever I was doing.

I regret that now.

It was Arday’s death that made me go back and ask what the actual fuck I’d been watching happen in front of me. Once I started digging into the coverage, the vague discomfort I’d had while watching those stories repeatedly appear stopped being vague.

The figures gathered by media researchers are extraordinary. NewsCord counted 249 pieces in 22 days. Professor Steven Barnett has put the figure at 289 stories across a comparable period, although the methodologies aren’t identical and I wouldn’t pretend those two numbers are interchangeable. The Times and Sunday Times were credited with around 44 pieces, the Telegraph titles around 43, the Mail and MailOnline around 38. The Spectator managed 21 substantial pieces in roughly 21 days.

Twenty-one. About one man. In three weeks. In a weekly fucking magazine.

And this wasn’t a prime minister. He wasn’t running for office. He hadn’t started a war or stolen millions from the Treasury. He was an academic facing serious questions about his work and public biography, questions which absolutely could and should have been investigated. But hundreds of pieces?

That’s where my interest shifted from what Jason Arday may or may not have done, to what the media was doing to Jason Arday. Because once you start following the story backwards, you eventually arrive at Nathan Cofnas.

I hadn’t intended to follow Nathan Cofnas anywhere

I mean, I had no clue who the creepy rat-faced little Temu Himmler looking cunt was until earlier this week.

There were concerns about Arday’s academic work before Cofnas became involved. That needs to be understood properly because otherwise the whole story gets distorted. Academics including Dave Harris and Martyn Hammersley had raised concerns years earlier. There had been journal corrections and institutional discussions. Times Higher Education had worked on an investigation in 2025.

Then, on 21 July 2026, Cofnas published DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.

And the story changed. The academic-integrity allegations were now packaged inside an argument about race. Cofnas wrote that Cambridge had “grabbed a random Black person with an unvetted fairytale backstory” and asked whether “the only way to have Black professors is to abandon all standards”.

Three days later the Telegraph was running “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row.”

Then came the rest.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time tracing what happened next because I’m interested in how information moves. Which allegations were already known? Which were new? Which journalists explicitly cited Cofnas? Where did particular phrases first appear? When did an individual academic-integrity story become a story about diversity, meritocracy and Black academics?

The pattern becomes increasingly difficult to ignore when you lay the dates beside one another.

And Cofnas kept publishing.

I counted somewhere around 35 Arday-related Substack posts over roughly 22 days, however any of his little sycophantic minions want to frame it, to suit their sick fucking racist agenda, that is a sustained and personal attack.

So, I went onto Cofnas’s Substack and made a sarky comment about it.

A little dig, really. Because I had a fairly obvious question. At what point does this stop being one academic calling out another academic over alleged plagiarism and become personal?

That’s where I crossed into his world. And then his world started crossing into mine.

The attacks came remarkably quickly. Then the death threats. “You’ll be next.” “Kill yourself.” Variations on the same charming theme. It is still happening, as I write this inside Substack’s online editing software. I’ve barely looked at Substack itself for more than 24 hours because I can already see what is waiting for me from the notifications ever increasing almost minute by minute.

I’ve been online for a very long time. I know what a pile-on looks like before I open the fucking door.

Nobody needs to have sent a memo saying everybody go after Postmodern Iconoclast. I’m not suggesting they did. Social media doesn’t require that kind of organisation. Somebody reacts, somebody shares it, other people arrive, the platform discovers that everyone is having a lovely furious time and keeps serving the argument to people likely to join in. Before long you’ve got sycophants, minions, ideological fellow travellers and fascists all shouting in the same room.

Nobody had to book the room.

This is where it gets uncomfortable

I’m an old hand at pile-ons.

I’ve had hundreds of people descend on me over AI. I’ve had dozens of death threats. I’ve been told to kill myself more times than I could possibly count. One particularly pleasant individual explained how I should kill myself, film it and livestream it so they could watch. If I go a week without some fascistic fuckwit planning my final curtain call, I haven’t been trying hard enough. Death threats and calls for me to end my life, are an everyday part of my online experience. As absolutely fucked up as that sounds.

I’ve also experienced a national press pile-on.

Years ago I was walking to a 24-hour supermarket in Hull in the middle of the night wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Some lads on bikes apparently decided my tan meant I was Pakistani and racially abused and threatened me. I reported it because I’d previously worked alongside the police and knew that logging racist incidents helps them understand and map what’s happening locally, with race hate incidents.

That was all I intended to do.

The story leaked. The Hull Daily Mail contacted me and covered it reasonably, talking about my previous work with multicultural organisations and refugee projects. Then it was syndicated.

I woke up with my face sitting at the top of Google News.

For two days I became national content.

The abuse was fucking extraordinary. Eventually I found myself on LBC with Nick Ferrari, who appeared to want a nice little story about police time being wasted. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t particularly interested in playing the role he’d apparently imagined for me, and when the interview stopped going where he wanted it to go I was cut off mid-sentence.

So when I talk about the psychological sensation of a pile-on, I’m not observing it from outside.

I’ve deliberately made myself mentally tough enough to operate in this environment because otherwise I couldn’t keep doing what I do. But being able to cope with something doesn’t make it pleasant. It still gets through. It still feels fucking horrible to open your phone and discover that hundreds of strangers have apparently decided you’re the cunt of the day, and deserve to die.

There is a peculiar feeling when enough people are attacking you at once. Intellectually you know it isn’t the whole world.

It just temporarily feels like it is. That’s why the Arday story hit me as hard as it did.

I’m not comparing my experiences with his. The scale isn’t remotely comparable. I’m saying I’ve felt a tiny piece of that sensation and I know how oppressive even that can become.

What scares me now isn’t what happens to me. I’m old enough and ugly enough to take these monsters on. It’s what happens when the same machinery lands on somebody who has never experienced it before.

Imagine making one sarcastic comment and suddenly strangers are telling you to die. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know how far it will go. You don’t know whether the threats are bullshit. You don’t know whether tomorrow there will be twice as many. You don’t know if the know where you live, and could turn up at your door.

Somebody already vulnerable could be absolutely fucking destroyed by that.

And we are going to lose more people, if the hard right have their way.

The story got bigger than Jason Arday

The Arday research led me towards Cofnas, and Cofnas led somewhere else.

This is where the work I’ve been doing recently has begun colliding with the work I’ve been doing for months.

Cofnas isn’t simply an academic with controversial opinions about plagiarism. His writing about race, heredity, intelligence and Black academics sits within a much wider intellectual and political world. Recent reporting has explored connections running through Cambridge and into networks associated with Peter Thiel and race-science politics. At the same time I’ve been digging elsewhere into Turning Point UK, UKIP, Reform and the people and organisations moving around the British hard right.

Then America enters the picture again.

The US ambassador’s intervention over Arday and Cambridge didn’t create these connections, but it landed in the middle of a pattern I’d already been trying to understand: American political figures increasingly treating European political and cultural arguments as their business, while parts of the European hard right increasingly look across the Atlantic for validation, amplification and ideas.

The tentacles aren’t coming from one octopus. There are lots of fucking octopuses.

That’s probably a less elegant political theory, but it is closer to what I’m finding.

Organisation without coordination

This is the area where language can get us into trouble very quickly.

When people see the same arguments appearing across different countries, publications and political movements, the temptation is to imagine somebody sitting in a dark room controlling everything.

Reality doesn’t need to be that theatrical. As much as we want to find a dark cabal.

People with broadly compatible politics naturally find one another. Wealthy people fund projects they agree with. Campaigners share successful tactics. Journalists read other journalists. Politicians discover language that gets a reaction and use it again. Social platforms notice what keeps people furious enough to remain on the platform and keep showing them more of it.

Eventually an ecosystem develops.

Ideas can move through that ecosystem without anybody issuing instructions. A phrase can begin in a Substack post, appear in a newspaper, be repeated by a television commentator, clipped for social media and arrive in somebody’s Facebook feed stripped of the context in which it started. By the time it reaches the person shouting it in a comment section, it feels like common knowledge.

I’ve watched versions of that process for years. What I’m beginning to understand is how much infrastructure now exists around it. And the hard right is very fucking good at using it.

The left has plenty of people doing extraordinary work, but too often we’re doing it alone. Somebody investigates one organisation. Somebody else follows the money. Another person documents extremist networks. Somebody spends their evening correcting misinformation in a comment section while another is getting screamed at by three hundred anonymous accounts.

Meanwhile the bullshit travels. That isn’t because the people producing it are necessarily cleverer.

They’re better at making it move. And the algorithms love it when the outrage machine grinds out more bullshit to fill our feeds. Anger drives up profits for the platforms that package and sell collective outrage as ad-space.

Am I still going to take the piss?

Abso-fucking-lutely I am.

Sarcasm, satire and ridicule are part of what I do and I’m not giving them up. Authoritarians desperately want to look powerful. Fascists particularly enjoy uniforms, symbols, grand language and the performance of strength. Laughing at them punctures something they work extremely hard to maintain.

Ridicule is a fucking weapon. But it isn’t a strategy.

The old IWW phrase keeps coming back to me:

Don’t mourn, organise.

There has to be room for mourning. When somebody dies, of course there does. Jason Arday’s death stopped me in my tracks and sent me back through weeks of coverage I’d noticed without properly seeing. But eventually reflection has to produce a question.

What do we do? And I mean we.

Not thousands of individuals sitting at thousands of kitchen tables firing isolated posts into social media and hoping something sticks.

I’ve organised like this before. Years ago, friends and I would set up private chats when we saw racist or hard-right bullshit spreading online. We’d work out what was actually being claimed, find the information and go into those spaces together.

Not to bully somebody. Not to threaten them. Not to find a random individual and make their life fucking miserable. The target was the bullshit.

If a racist lie was spreading, fill the conversation with the evidence that demolished it. If misinformation was being repeated until repetition made it look true, interrupt the repetition. Put contrary information directly in front of the people being fed the lie.

I’ve seen it work. Swamp the bullshit, not the person.

Maybe we’ve become too atomised since then. We publish our rebuttals to audiences who already follow us while the original lie continues travelling somewhere else.

We can do better than that. And increasingly, I think we’re going to have to.

Something else is happening

My audience has grown enormously over the past few months, but follower numbers aren’t the interesting part anymore.

People are beginning to help.

They tag me when they find something they think I’ve missed. They send information. People quietly DM connections they’ve spotted. Others offer help behind the scenes. Occasionally somebody trusts me with information they don’t want attached to their name. I’ve got whistle-blowers coming forward. Like minded people who can’t offer front-line help, but are happy to beaver away behind the scenes.

Keep doing it.

If you give me something in confidence, it stays in confidence. If you’re sitting on something you think I should see, send it. I cannot promise every lead becomes a story because sometimes the evidence won’t support it, and sometimes what initially looks enormous turns out to be fuck all. But they’re all pieces of the puzzle none-the-less.

That’s how research works.

But something is beginning to form around all this, and I want to see where we can take it. This is where I’m talking directly to my people. My comrades. Those of you who’ve adopted Radical Left Scum because apparently that’s what we are now.

Cool. Wear the badge. But I’m asking some of you to step forward as well.

If you’re good at research, help research. If you understand corporate records or political funding, there is plenty to dig through. If you’re good at archiving things before they mysteriously disappear, that’s useful. If you know an area better than I do, tell me when I’ve missed something. If somebody is being hammered online for challenging this shit, don’t leave them standing there alone.

I’m not asking for an army of trolls.

I’m asking for a network of people who give enough of a shit to help one another establish what is true and then make the truth harder to bury.

I’ve spent thirty years fucking around online in one form or another. I’ve disrupted and destroyed racist groups before. I’ve organised with anarchists, socialists and people who wouldn’t describe themselves as either. I know collective action doesn’t require a leader, matching T-shirts and a fucking steering committee.

Sometimes it starts with a few people talking to each other.

So let’s start talking.

Because I’m not laughing quite as comfortably anymore

I will still get up tomorrow, make my coffee, open Trump’s latest deranged proclamation and take the piss out of him.

I’ll still dismantle Farage’s bullshit. I’ll still ridicule Reform. I’ll still poke MAGA, Turning Point and every puffed-up authoritarian gobshite who wanders within reach.

That’s part of how I communicate. Sarcasm is still my delivery system for information, and I have absolutely no intention of becoming solemn all the fucking time.

But behind the jokes, my understanding of what I’m looking at has changed. The individual stories are beginning to connect, overlap and merge into something we can’t collectively ignore anymore.

Jason Arday led me somewhere I hadn’t expected to go. Cofnas opened another door. Turning Point opened others. The work on Reform, UKIP, MAGA and Christian nationalism keeps bringing me back into overlapping territory. Now American officials are inserting themselves into British arguments while people inside Britain are feeding those same arguments back into the American culture war.

I don’t yet know how large the whole picture is. That’s why I’m going to keep digging.

But I know enough now that I don’t want to sit here in six months wishing I’d taken it more seriously when the connections first started appearing.

And I don’t want you sitting on the side-lines either.

If you’ve been reading, laughing, sharing, sending me things and wondering what else you can do, this is me answering you.

Stand beside the people doing the work. Bring what you’re good at. Protect people when the swarm turns on them. Don’t just scroll on by, and think “thank fuck I’m not them.” Challenge lies where they’re actually spreading. Keep records. Share evidence. Make connections. Ask awkward fucking questions. Stand up and be counted.

Swamp the bullshit, not the person.

And when they try to isolate one of us for doing it, make damn sure they discover we’re not alone.

Don’t mourn.

Organise.

Further Reading

I Spent an Evening Among Nathan Cofnas’s Supporters. It Was Quite an Education.

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

I probably shouldn’t have done it. But of course I fucking did.

Last night I wandered into Nathan Cofnas’s Substack. More specifically, I wandered underneath his own post announcing that he’d been suspended by Ghent University following complaints concerning his conduct towards the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday.

And I left a comment.

Now, before we go any further, I need to make something absolutely clear because I’m not going to sit here polishing my halo and pretending I spent the evening as some detached observer of online behaviour.

I was being a trouble-making troll. I was sarcastic. I wound people up deliberately. At various points I was puerile, provocative and probably quite irritating. No, I was absolutely being irritating. Now, whether I should have is open to debate. Sometimes the little devil on my shoulder takes over.

This isn’t exactly new behaviour for me.

I’ve been trolling people online for about thirty years. Before social media existed, I was doing this shit on message boards. It’s a skill set at this point. Anyone who follows me on Threads knows exactly what I’m like when somebody comes looking for an argument. Comes onto my posts, into my arena. I enjoy it, it’s a game, and I play the game well.

I enjoy puncturing pomposity. I enjoy finding the little weak point in someone’s argument and poking it until they get annoyed. And if somebody escalates with me, my instinct has always been to escalate further. I have very little filter at the best of times and almost none whatsoever when somebody decides we’re having an internet fight. It’s gloves off, and lets go.

There is a rule, though. I punch up. I don’t kick down. Maybe sideways. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but I do let them throw the first punch, helps me get a measure of where things will go.

And if you come at me, as far as I’m concerned we’ve agreed to meet as equals. You take the piss out of me, I’ll take the piss out of you. You call me a name, I’ll probably find a better one. You make a ridiculous argument, I will absolutely make you wear it around your neck for the rest of the conversation.

So let’s establish that before anything else. I’m not some innocent party, who went where I went and got all offended because a bunch of Cofnas sycophants piled on me.

I wasn’t innocent. I wasn’t polite. I wasn’t trying to be. I wanted to provke.

What I actually went there to talk about was Cofnas’s conduct towards Jason Arday. My argument wasn’t particularly complicated. I wasn’t defending plagiarism. I wasn’t saying Arday’s academic record shouldn’t be scrutinised. And I certainly wasn’t claiming Cofnas caused Arday’s death. All of which I was accuse of doing.

I kept having to repeat those things as the evening went on, which should probably have been my first clue as to where this was heading.

My actual point was much narrower. Cofnas had published something like 35 posts concerning Jason Arday over 22 days. Whatever legitimate questions existed about Arday’s academic work, I thought it was reasonable to ask whether this remained academic scrutiny or whether, somewhere along the way, it had become something more sustained and personal.

That was it. Then the supporters arrived. And fucking hell, they’re weird little bunch. I guess it was first it was funny. I was in my zone, batting them off one by one, waiting for them to come back and have another go at me. There were vague little put-downs. Somebody informed me that there was “a term in psychology” for the sort of rhetoric I was using without, rather beautifully, ever telling me what the term actually was.

Others immediately started arguing with things I hadn’t said. Many of them literally were having arguments inside their own heads, about things they thought I’d said.

Apparently I believed Arday couldn’t be criticised. No! Apparently I thought plagiarism didn’t matter. No! Apparently I was accusing Cofnas of killing Arday. Definitely fucking no! This became the strange rhythm of the evening. Someone would invent a position for me, become terribly angry about it, and then demand I defend it. I’d calmly explain that I didn’t believe the thing they were accusing me of believing. They’d carry on arguing with the voice inside their heads anyway.

It was like watching people repeatedly punch a cardboard cut-out of me while I stood three feet away saying, “I’m over here.” And because I’m me, I started taking the piss.

I’d opened with calling Cofnas “Temu Himmler”. I stand by Temu Himmler, it still makes me laugh. I mean have you seen Cofnas? He definitely has a passing resemblance, and there is a thread of through that runs from eugenics, through Himmler and the Nazi death camps, through hereditarianism, and right through to Cofnas and his “race realism”.

There were jokes about people’s mums. At one point I made an OnlyFans joke, later realised I’d attributed it to the wrong person and then, when he smugly corrected me, simply made the joke about his mum instead. It’s childish I know, but it makes me chuckle every single time.

As I said, no halo. Then something changed. One of Cofnas’s defenders told me:

“Follow Arday, little victim.”

Right. That’s not particularly subtle. Then came:

“You should be next.”

And again. I should be next? It was starting to take a dark turn, and it had escalated quickly. Thus the mask slipped from the fascist faces of Cofnas’s followers. A man had died by suicide and somebody defending Nathan Cofnas was now using that death to tell me that I should kill myself too.

The silly internet argument suddenly wasn’t quite as silly. Then Arday became:

“the black”.

Not Jason Arday. Not Professor Arday. Not even the bloke they thought had committed academic misconduct. “The black.”

And shortly afterwards came:

“The white won.”

There was something almost useful about the bluntness of it. No need for me to infer anything. No need to search for coded language or wonder whether I was reading too much into somebody’s politics. Black lost. White won. There you go.

And there I was directly underneath Nathan Cofnas’s own Substack post, surrounded by people who had arrived specifically because I had criticised Nathan Cofnas. An academic whose public reputation is intimately connected with arguments about race, intelligence, heredity and human difference.

I’m not saying Cofnas was complicit in writing those words, under his post. Though he should have been moderating them, in my opinion. But it spoke volumes about the ecosystem he has around him, and the kind of people that inhabit it. I’m not saying everyone who reads Cofnas thinks like that. And I’m certainly not going to do the exact thing I’ve spent years criticising other people for doing, and declare someone guilty by association because some knuckle dragger standing nearby said something disgusting.

People are responsible for their own words. That’s the point. But online communities are interesting things. They’re little echo chambers, where people think they’re safe to say awful things, because the people around them either encourage them, support them share the same views, or remain silent, which is just as bad,

They develop languages. They develop assumptions. They develop boundaries around what can be said and what can’t. They develop heroes and enemies. They ironically, as we have seen, see the world in black and white. And sometimes you learn more about those boundaries by irritating the community than you ever would by quietly observing it.

Trolling, when you strip away all the silliness, can do that. You introduce a little disruption, prick at the performative nonsense they spout, try to make somebody slightly uncomfortable and see what they reach for. Most people reach for nothing particularly interesting. They tell you to fuck off. They call you an idiot. They make a joke back.

Fine. That’s the game. Though I find such simplistic come-backs disappointing. Still the responses are their responses, and they must live or die by them. I mean nobody made these people reach for suggested suicide as a come-back. Nobody made someone reduce Jason Arday to “the black”, or proudly announce that “the white won”. But that was among what came back.

And perhaps the strangest part was the way Arday’s death itself became part of the prosecution against him. He was a coward, he had abandoned his family, he couldn’t face being exposed. People who had never met him confidently explained what had been going through his mind before he died.

One person told me that Cofnas and “the rest of the online right wing” had so thoroughly destroyed Arday’s public identity that Arday “saw no way out”. I remember stopping at that one. I’ve seen some people type out some awful shit in my time, but these Cofnas fanboys, where a whole different breed of cunt.

I’d spent the evening repeatedly refusing to claim that Cofnas caused Arday’s death. Suicide is complicated. Human beings are complicated. We cannot climb inside the final moments of another person’s mind and reconstruct causality because it happens to suit whatever argument we’re having on the internet. Yet here was someone defending Cofnas while constructing precisely that causal story himself.

Cofnas and the online right had destroyed Arday’s public identity so thoroughly that he saw no way out. That was their proud boast. And somehow I was the irresponsible one for asking whether the conduct surrounding Arday deserved examination.

That contradiction kept appearing in different forms. Arday did something wrong, therefore Cofnas did nothing wrong. That seemed to be the basic equation. Time and time again, they nearly all eventually reached for that one. And I couldn’t get them past it. I kept saying the same thing. These are two separate questions.

Jason Arday could have committed plagiarism. Nathan Cofnas’s conduct towards Jason Arday could still have crossed a line. Both things could even be true simultaneously. I can’t tell you how many times I repeated that one.

This shouldn’t be philosophically difficult. Human beings aren’t fucking football teams. You don’t have to choose one and then defend absolutely everything they do because the other side must necessarily be wrong. We’re not toddlers having a tantrum here, this was Substack, it’s supposed to be a bit more high-brow than the cesspit that is X.

Yet the conversation repeatedly collapsed into exactly that. If Arday was guilty, Cofnas was innocent. If I questioned Cofnas, I must therefore be defending Arday. If I wasn’t defending Arday, then why was I questioning Cofnas? Fuck me, round and round we went. I was almost dizzy with the circle jerking of it all.

And gradually I realised this was becoming more interesting than the original argument. Because I wasn’t really learning anything new about Nathan Cofnas. None of them has anything of any value whatsoever to add. I was learning about the ecosystem around him.

Someone accused me of being a Nazi. They really did, though it was one of those that also claimed the National Socialists, are the same as Socialists. Yes that old chestnut. They also managed to get Mao and Stalin involved in the mix. I mean I should have quit and gone to bed at the “Nazis were socialists because it’s in the name” discussion, which is always a reliable sign that an internet argument has reached the point where everyone should probably go to bed.

There was something about a mysterious “uni party”. They had to be a Reform voter, to be trotting that Farage line out. Apparently there was a wider plan. I’m still not entirely sure what the plan was.

At some point I realised I’d been doing this for hours.

It’s stupid o’clock. I’m sitting here looking at my phone. The original discussion about academic conduct has disappeared somewhere over the horizon and one bloke has apparently reached the stage of replying “Waah!” and “HELP!” repeatedly to things.

Thirty years of trolling and even I was beginning to think:

Mate. You’ve got to give me something to work with. And that’s when the evening became reflective rather than combative. Because what had I actually experienced?

Not a scientific social experiment. Let’s not be ridiculous. Though it felt like I’d stumbled into some twisted experimental study of human behaviour. I didn’t randomly sample Cofnas’s readership. I didn’t conduct interviews. I deliberately walked into the comments underneath a controversial man’s Substack, challenged him in front of people sympathetic to him and then started taking the piss when they came for me.

Selection bias doesn’t really begin to cover it. So I’m not drawing conclusions about everyone who reads Nathan Cofnas. That would be intellectually dishonest. I did use the term “intellectually” a lot, as a hint that a smattering of it in their replies would be a nice change, but to no avail. The whole thing was a confuse mess, in their part.

But I’m not going to pretend what happened was meaningless. Because ecosystems reveal themselves through what they tolerate, what they reward and what their inhabitants instinctively reach for when challenged.

That’s what stayed with me. Not that people insulted me, I get insults all the time, they’re never very original. I do wish people would put more effort in, and usually request that they do. But overall, I couldn’t give a shit about that.

What stayed with me was where they went. Those dark places, that speaks volumes about their minds, and how they think. And throughout all of this, the people doing it seemed absolutely convinced that they were demonstrating how unreasonable I was to question the culture surrounding Cofnas.

That’s the bit I can’t quite get over. They thought they were winning. Perhaps that’s the strange thing about ideological ecosystems generally. Once you’re inside one, behaviour that looks extraordinary from outside can become completely ordinary within it. The language shifts. The boundaries move. Things that would once have made you stop become another joke, another meme, another little signal to everyone else that you’re on the correct side.

And when somebody from outside walks in and says, “Hang on, what the fuck is this?”, the outsider becomes the problem. Maybe that’s why trolling remains interesting to me after thirty years. For all its stupidity, trolling disrupts certainty. It introduces a little bit of chaos into systems people have built around themselves.

Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes everybody laughs. And occasionally the mask slips.

I went into Nathan Cofnas’s Substack because I wanted to challenge something he’d written. I stayed because I became fascinated by what appeared around him. I’m not going to pretend I behaved impeccably. I didn’t. I was sarcastic, provocative, rude and occasionally childish. I gave as good as I got and, whenever possible, considerably better.

That’s what I do. But I didn’t put the racism there, or the suicide taunts. I didn’t make anybody call a dead man a coward. I didn’t make anyone turn the death of a Black academic into “the black lost” and “the white won”. They brought that themselves.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the entire evening was that almost everybody doing it seemed completely convinced they were proving my criticism of the culture surrounding Cofnas wrong. I don’t think they were. No, I know they weren’t.

I think they were showing me around the radicalised extremist ecosystem that Cofnas and his ilk exist inside.

Further Reading

Why was Jason Arday in my newsfeed for weeks before I realised what was happening?

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas, the British press, and what happens when one man becomes everybody’s story.

Jason Arday had been sitting at the edge of my newsfeed for a couple of weeks. I kept seeing his name. Another story about him, then another, then another. Enough that I remember wondering why the fuck this one academic kept appearing in the news. But I was busy. I was digging around Reform and Farage, Turning Point UK, Trump and MAGA, while writing a book about Christian nationalism in America. The usual relentlessly cheerful contents of my kitchen table. Arday remained somewhere in the background, one of those stories I knew felt odd without ever stopping long enough to work out exactly why.

Then he died.

Suddenly all those headlines I had been half-registering came back at once. That was the moment I thought: what the actual fuck had I been watching? Because I knew this hadn’t been one plagiarism story that appeared, was reported, and disappeared. I’d been seeing Jason Arday constantly. His name had followed me around the news for a couple of weeks. And I felt bad. Not because I could have done anything, or because I have some ridiculous idea that I should personally investigate every injustice occurring on the planet, as much as a social justice warrior I may come across as, but because something about it had bothered me while it was happening and I hadn’t followed that instinct.

So I went back. And the deeper I’ve gone into this, the angrier I’ve become.

There is another reason this story got to me. On a vastly smaller scale, I know what it feels like to be underneath a pile-on. I’ve had social-media mobs descend on me in their hundreds, particularly when I was writing about AI and challenging some of the absolute bollocks, myths and misinformation circulating around it. I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people tell me to kill myself. One person went as far as describing how they wanted me to do it, telling me I should livestream my own death so they could watch. If you’ve never experienced that peculiar sensation of opening your phone and finding a crowd of complete strangers discussing how much they hate you, I sincerely hope you never do.

I’ve experienced the other version as well, where social media isn’t the beginning of it. The press is.

Years ago, I was walking to a 24-hour supermarket in Hull in the early hours of the morning. It was summer, I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, I had a nice golden summer tan, and a group of lads on bikes came towards me. They racially abused me, called me a “fucking Paki”, tried to intimidate me and threatened me. Now, I’m a white British bloke. Apparently in the dark, with a tan and a Hawaiian shirt, they’d decided otherwise. It would almost be funny if what they were doing hadn’t been so fucking ugly. And it’s not the first time some racist knuckle draggers have decided I’m not ethnically a pasty faced pure bred gammon.

I’d previously worked alongside the police and understood why hate incidents need reporting. They need the intelligence. If a group of lads are riding around racially abusing and threatening people, somebody needs to know, particularly in a multicultural area, like I live in, where the next person they target may actually be the person they think they’re targeting. So I reported it. That was all I intended to do.

Then it leaked to the press.

The Hull Daily Mail contacted me. I already knew them because I’d been in the local press plenty of times through my work and various projects. Their coverage was fine. They put what had happened into the context of my work with the Afro-Caribbean Centre, Open Doors refugee project and Hull Unity, the multicultural event that followed the Brexit vote. The Hawaiian shirt inevitably became part of the story because local newspapers fucking love a detail like that. And they had a stock photo of me in one, from a community arts project I’d done, that they’d covered.

Then it was syndicated.

I woke up and my face was at the top of Google News. The story had gone national. It stayed there for about two days and suddenly people who had never met me, around the nation, knew nothing about me and had no idea why I’d reported the incident were telling me exactly what kind of person I was. Abuse, trolling, threats, ridicule. I even ended up on LBC with Nick Ferrari after initially refusing to go on. He appeared to want a nice little story about police time being wasted. Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t checked particularly carefully who he was interviewing. When the conversation didn’t go where he wanted it to go, I was cut off mid-sentence.

I got through it. I’m pretty resilient psychologically and, more importantly, it eventually went away. But I remember the feeling. That sense that suddenly the world is looking at you. You know intellectually that it isn’t actually the whole world, but your nervous system doesn’t give much of a shit about that distinction when every screen you open contains another stranger talking about you.

That experience is part of the reason Jason Arday’s story bothers me so much. Mine was tiny by comparison.

Because once you put the available media-monitoring data together, the scale of what happened to Arday is fucking staggering.

249 stories. Or 289. Either number is insane.

NewsCord counted 249 substantive UK press pieces about Jason Arday between 24 July and 14 August 2026. A separate analysis by communications professor Steven Barnett produced a figure of 289 stories across a similar 22-day period. Those figures should not be casually collapsed into one another because the methodologies and counting universes appear to differ. So 249 is NewsCord’s figure. 289 is Barnett’s.

Look at the outlet breakdown NewsCord reported. The Times and Sunday Times: around 44 pieces. Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph: around 43. Daily Mail and MailOnline: around 38. The Spectator: 21. Guardian and Observer: around 19. Express: around 12. Add the Times, Telegraph, Mail, Spectator and Express together and you get roughly 158 pieces, around 64 per cent of NewsCord’s entire 249-item corpus, generated by five overwhelmingly right or centre-right newspaper groups and publications.

Stop thinking about 249 as a number for a moment and think about the period involved.

Three weeks.

Jason Arday was an academic facing serious questions about his work. He wasn’t the Prime Minister. He hadn’t started a war. He wasn’t running for office. He hadn’t been convicted of anything. There were legitimate questions about plagiarism, citation, claims made about his life and academic record, and those questions were absolutely legitimate subjects for journalism. Some of the material being raised was substantial and some of it predated this entire media storm.

But 249 articles in 22 days?

Forty-four from one newspaper group?

Forty-three from another?

Twenty-one pieces from The Spectator in roughly three weeks?

At some point the interesting journalistic question stops being simply what did Jason Arday do? and becomes why the fuck were so many people so extraordinarily interested in Jason Arday?

That is the question I should have asked when I kept seeing him in my newsfeed.

Before Nathan Cofnas

There is an important part of this story that has to be got right because getting it wrong would make everything that follows weaker.

Nathan Cofnas did not invent concerns about Jason Arday’s academic work.

Questions had been raised years earlier. In 2023, academics including Dave Harris and Martyn Hammersley raised concerns about apparent textual overlap in Arday’s published work. Journals made corrections. Cambridge dealt with complaints. Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his doctorate, examined concerns about his thesis. There was also an attempted Times Higher Education investigation in 2025, reportedly involving a substantial dossier, which never became the national media event that July 2026 would become.

That’s important.

The interesting thing about Cofnas isn’t that nothing existed before him. It’s that something changed after him. On 21 July 2026, Cofnas published a Substack post titled “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.”

Just read that title carefully.

Not Questions About Academic Integrity at Cambridge. Not Evidence of Plagiarism by Professor Jason Arday. Before you’ve read a fucking word of it, you’ve already been told what the story means.

“DEI Fraud” says it all. And it got worse from that point.

Cofnas assembled allegations about Arday’s academic work, including material that had already been questioned elsewhere, alongside other evidence and comparisons. But he also supplied an interpretation. Arday wasn’t simply an academic whose scholarship should be scrutinised. He became evidence in an argument about race.

Cofnas wrote that Cambridge had:

“grabbed a random black person with an unvetted fairytale backstory”

and questioned whether the institution’s position effectively meant:

“the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards”.

There is the pivot.

One academic becomes all Black professors.

One man’s alleged academic misconduct becomes DEI.

Whatever you think about the underlying allegations against Arday, neither plagiarism nor poor citation requires an argument about Black academics as a group. Race doesn’t somehow leap naturally out of a footnote on an academic paper. Somebody has to put it there.

Three days later, on 24 July, the Telegraph published:

“Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row.”

And away we fucking go. Let the witch-hunt commence. Queue the pile-on.

Watch the story change

This is where the chronology matters more than any amount of moralising from me.

As I said, concerns about Arday’s work existed before Cofnas. They had been raised with institutions, examined in specialist contexts and, in the case of the attempted Times Higher Education investigation, had come close to wider publication. They had not produced anything remotely resembling what happened next.

Cofnas published on 21 July.

The Telegraph broke nationally on 24 July. The Times followed. The Mail, Independent and others picked it up. The Spectator began what became an almost industrial production line of Arday material. The story moved from reporting allegations to analysing his biography, his career, his childhood, his achievements, his public persona and what his appointment supposedly said about British universities. It began to move from a story about one man, to Black academics as a group, to thinly veiled bigotry towards all Black British people.

The evidence gathered in the research repeatedly places Cofnas’s material somewhere near the beginning of that public chain. Some later articles explicitly named him. Others quoted or linked his work. Others used evidence and examples he had publicly assembled. In still other cases, chronology and similarity suggest a relationship but don’t prove one. Those distinctions matter. Shared politics isn’t proof that somebody copied somebody else, and similar language isn’t automatically evidence of transmission.

But you don’t need to manufacture a conspiracy to see an information cascade.

In fact, a coordinated conspiracy would almost make this less interesting.

A pile-on doesn’t require an editor somewhere issuing orders to everybody else. It requires attention. One outlet finds a story that works. Another wants its version. Somebody finds another angle. A columnist smells blood. Somebody else writes about the reaction. A broadcaster discusses the newspaper story. People share the broadcast clip. Another columnist writes about what people are saying online. Suddenly the reaction to the story becomes another story.

Nobody needs to coordinate it because everybody can see what is getting attention.

And Arday was getting attention. A fucking lot of it.

The Spectator is where the mechanism becomes almost impossible to miss

Twenty-one pieces in 21 days.

That’s the reported figure, and unlike some of the larger outlet totals, at least 21 substantive Spectator entries across the period. Think about that editorially.

Even if Jason Arday had committed every piece of academic misconduct alleged against him, how many separate things could one publication conceivably need to tell its readers about him in three weeks? In fucking weekly publication, not a daily!

By 31 July Toby Young was writing “Professor Arday is the gift that keeps on giving.” Gareth Roberts followed with “Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday.” The magazine ran “The fantastical truth about Jason Arday.” John Power produced “Fact check: the many claims of Jason Arday.” Owen Matthews wrote “Why my father would have seen through Arday’s nonsense.” Peter Wood gave us “Jason Arday and the Dukes and Dauphins of DEI.” Julie Burchill joined in. Other writers followed.

Read those titles again and notice how far we’ve travelled from examining copied passages in academic work. This is no longer simply reporting.

Arday has become content.

Worse, he has become useful content. A character through whom writers can talk about whatever they already wanted to talk about: DEI, progressives, universities, students, merit, race, “wokeness”, Cambridge, the supposed gullibility of liberals. This was an excuse for the knives to come out, and these disgusting vultures to pick at the corpse of a man’s career. Little did any of us know what was coming for Arday.

That is what happens in a pile-on. The original alleged offence gradually becomes less important than the symbolic value of the person accused of it.

Jason Arday was no longer just Jason Arday.

He was becoming an argument. An argument about race.

And the argument was absolutely about race

This is the part people will inevitably try to wriggle away from, so let’s be precise about it.

Mentioning that Jason Arday was Black is not itself racism. Mentioning that he had become Cambridge’s youngest Black professor is not automatically racialising a story. It was a prominent part of his public biography and one reason he had received media attention before any of this happened.

The problem is what came next.

Once the discussion moves from did Jason Arday plagiarise? to what does Jason Arday tell us about diversity hiring?, race isn’t biographical anymore. It’s explanatory.

Once it moves from Arday’s scholarship to standards among Black professors, it has gone further still.

And Cofnas’s own language leaves precious little ambiguity about the intellectual route being offered. “Random black person.” “Black professors.” “Racial diversity.” Standards. Merit. DEI.

The research into the coverage found that this framing became particularly common in commentary as the story developed. The press started using Cofnas’s framing of this as a race issue. The examples themselves are plentiful and the direction of travel got worse with each new article.

Arday’s alleged misconduct became evidence against DEI. Then against diversity hiring. Then against the supposed lowering of academic standards. And sometimes against Black academic representation itself. That isn’t me inserting race into the story after the event.

Race was already there in the fucking headlines. And I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like for the Black community of this country.

Who was feeding this thing?

Look again at where the greatest concentration of coverage came from.

The Times and Sunday Times. Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. Daily Mail and MailOnline. The Spectator. Express.

That group accounts for roughly 158 of NewsCord’s 249 pieces.

That does not mean every one of those articles was hostile. It doesn’t mean every journalist working for those publications shared the same politics. It certainly doesn’t prove that every reporter was “politically motivated”. Editorial orientation and individual motive are not the same thing.

But when the question is where the sustained ideological amplification came from, the pattern matters.

The research found the most aggressive culture-war interpretation clustered heavily within right and centre-right publications and commentators. The Spectator is the cleanest example because its output is so concentrated and its framing so explicit. Telegraph commentary repeatedly connected the affair to diversity and university standards. Mail columnists joined in. Right-leaning commentators carried those interpretations onto broadcast and social platforms.

Meanwhile, straightforward reporting elsewhere doesn’t cancel that out. The Guardian reporting on Arday doesn’t somehow make a Telegraph polemic cease to exist. BBC reporting doesn’t neutralise a Spectator column. The relevant question isn’t whether publications across the political spectrum mentioned him. It’s who kept the machine running? Who kept finding another angle? Who kept turning one professor into a referendum on DEI?

And who kept giving the story another day’s oxygen after the previous day’s revelation had already been reported?

That matters because repetition does something

This is where my own experience comes back in.

When I woke up to find myself splashed across national news sites, I didn’t sit down and perform a sophisticated media-content analysis. I saw my own fucking face everywhere.

That’s what saturation does. One hostile article is an article. Twenty hostile articles don’t feel like twenty discrete acts carried out by twenty unrelated people. They all arrive at once inside one human head. The recipient experiences the aggregate.

That is why the absence of coordination doesn’t make a pile-on imaginary. Nobody has to say, “Right lads, everyone attack him at nine.” Hundreds of people can independently contribute one tiny piece of hostility while one person receives all of it.

I know that feeling from social media too. The person telling you to kill yourself may have written one comment that day. Perhaps it took them twenty seconds. Then they went and made a sandwich.

You receive that comment alongside another hundred. That’s the asymmetry. Every participant experiences themselves as one voice.

The target experiences a mob.

Then the newspapers hand the crowd a script

This is where the movement from mainstream media into social media becomes important, although it is also where the available data I could collate becomes less complete.

We don’t have access to some magical database containing every X post, Threads reply, Facebook comment, Reddit discussion, TikTok and YouTube interaction involving Jason Arday during those weeks. Anyone pretending to have a complete figure from public searches is selling you bullshit.

What we do have is a minimum observed picture.

Prominent journalists and commentators shared the stories. News organisations pushed their articles through social accounts. Discussions appeared on Reddit. Cofnas continued posting, some 35 posts on his Substack profile alone. Commentators repeated the DEI framing. Search interest rose around major moments in the story, particularly the first national coverage, Cambridge’s investigation and Arday’s resignation, and then, overwhelmingly, following news of his death.

The important thing isn’t pretending we can count every person involved.

It’s watching that language travel, those loaded words spread.

The newspaper headline becomes the social-media caption. The caption becomes somebody else’s argument. The argument becomes a quote-post. The quote-post generates replies. The replies create engagement. Engagement increases visibility. Then the fact that everybody is talking about the story becomes evidence that the story deserves still more coverage.

Press feeds social. Social feeds press.

And somewhere in the middle of that loop is an actual human being reading what the world is saying about him.

Was the coverage disproportionate?

This ought to be the easiest part of the argument to test because “a lot” isn’t a useful standard. The obvious comparison is other British academic-integrity scandals.

So I had a look at potential comparisons, but this is also an area where I want to be particularly careful because some initially suggested cases aren’t as simple like-for-like as I could make them, if I wanted to fudge this.

What survives the comparison is the broader point: documented academic misconduct, including cases involving serious institutional findings, ordinarily does not generate hundreds of national press items in three weeks alongside leaders, columns, personality profiles, biographical investigations, broadcast discussion and culture-war commentary.

That doesn’t prove race explains the difference. But it fucking stinks of racism all the same.

Arday had other qualities that made him unusually newsworthy. He was at Cambridge. His rise had been remarkable. His biography had itself attracted substantial publicity. He had been celebrated as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor. His account of being autistic and non-verbal during childhood was central to his public story. The allegations extended beyond a single citation problem into questions about elements of that biography. His resignation created another major news event.

All of those things matter. Because, as anyone who regularly reads my writing knows, I talk about nuance, complexity, that life doesn’t fit into the neat boxes the outrage machine likes to try and put them into.

Anyway, those aspects of Arday’s life journey explain some of the attention. But they don’t explain away what the coverage itself became. Because if simple newsworthiness were the whole story, we would expect a great deal of reporting about Arday. What we actually got was a great deal of reporting plus an ideological argument about race and DEI.

Those are different propositions. And the second one is sitting there in literal black and white.

The person underneath it

On 5 August, Cambridge announced an investigation into concerns surrounding Arday. Arday resigned. In his resignation statement he wrote of “relentless accusations” and said they had taken a “profound toll”. He described reaching “the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”.

Those words are difficult for me to read after going through all of this.

Not because they were an early indicator of what happened later. We can’t make that claim. This is one place where the evidence has to stop us, however angry we are.

Arday was found dead at his home on 14 August. Police described the death as non-suspicious and a coroner’s file was opened. On the evidence assembled for this piece, I do not have an authoritative public finding establishing suicide or establishing a cause of death. So I am not going to write that Jason Arday took his own life as though that has been formally established. Nor am I going to claim that newspapers killed him, or Cofnas killed him, or social media killed him. I have in my angrier moments on Threads, said such things. Here is my more calm and reflective space.

So I have to state that the evidence doesn’t give me that conclusion. What it does give me is Arday saying, while he was alive, that the accusations were taking a profound toll on him.

His family subsequently described a campaign of sustained abuse.

And we have a substantial body of psychological research showing that sustained adult bullying, workplace mobbing, public humiliation, online harassment, ostracism and reputational attack are associated with serious psychological harm. The literature does not allow us to take a population-level association and use it to diagnose the private mental state of one man. It certainly doesn’t allow us to perform a psychological autopsy from my kitchen table.

It allows us to understand why his words should have mattered.

“Profound toll.”

“Limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.”

Perhaps somebody should have fucking listened.

Because this is the bit I can’t shake

I keep coming back to my own ridiculously smaller experience.

That morning when I woke up and found my face everywhere.

That horrible little sensation when you open one site, then another, then another, and you’re there again. Your name and face plastered under a red-top header. People you’ve never met have opinions about your character. They know why you did something. They know what you think. They know what sort of man you are. Except they don’t know you at all. All they have is a flattened simulacrum of you. A media invented entity that looks like you, it has your name, but that’s it.

And mine lasted days. Imagine weeks. Imagine your professional reputation being dismantled alongside it. Imagine national newspapers investigating your childhood. Imagine columnists turning you into a joke.

Imagine discovering that you aren’t merely being accused of academic wrongdoing anymore. You have become evidence in somebody else’s argument about whether people who look like you deserve to occupy spaces like Cambridge.

Imagine opening social media after that.

I don’t need a psychological paper to tell me that would fucking hurt.

The psychological papers are useful because they tell us that the instinct isn’t sentimental. Sustained public humiliation and harassment can cause serious harm. But Arday himself already told everybody that this was hurting him.

That’s what makes the continuation of it so difficult to stomach.

And this is why “pile-on” matters

The word can sound melodramatic unless we define what we’re talking about.

For me, the useful definition isn’t simply lots of criticism.

It’s saturation.

It’s volume combined with repetition, persistence and expansion. It’s when the original subject ceases to provide enough material, so the scrutiny moves outward. Work becomes biography. Biography becomes personality. Personality becomes ideology. One allegation produces multiple articles. One article produces commentary about the article. The commentary produces public reaction. The reaction becomes another article.

By that measure, what happened to Jason Arday looks very much like a pile-on.

The arguments became culture-war content. And culture-war content travels beautifully online. None of this requires a conspiracy. It barely even requires intention.

That’s what frightens me about it.

So what the fuck do we do about it?

I don’t have a neat legislative answer sitting here beside my coffee.

And I’m suspicious of anyone who does.

I don’t want politicians deciding which newspapers are allowed to criticise people. I don’t want legitimate investigative journalism chilled because somebody powerful can claim they’re being “piled on”. If an academic has plagiarised, investigate it. If a politician has lied, expose them. If a businessman is stealing money, chase the bastard down the street with the evidence.

Journalism is supposed to make powerful people uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean the press can simply shrug when journalism turns into saturation.

There is a difference between holding somebody accountable and turning them into a national spectator sport. There is a difference between reporting new information and commissioning the ninth columnist to have another fucking kick because the previous eight pieces performed well. There is a difference between investigating an individual’s academic conduct and using that individual as a weapon against an entire racial group.

And when somebody at the centre of that storm publicly says they are reaching the limits of what they can endure, that should mean something.

Maybe the answer lies partly with editors. Maybe there are questions for IPSO and the wider regulatory framework. Maybe media law has failed to catch up with an ecosystem in which a newspaper story is no longer just a newspaper story but the first stage of a potentially enormous networked attack. Maybe platforms need to think much harder about the way outrage and mass participation are rewarded.

I don’t pretend to know the complete answer yet.

I know the current answer isn’t good enough.

Because this will happen again.

Different person. Different accusation. Different ideological excuse.

The outrage machinery doesn’t care.

I wish I’d looked sooner

That’s the thought I keep returning to. I saw Jason Arday appearing in my newsfeed.

Again… Again… Again… And I noticed it.

Not enough to investigate, but enough that something registered. Why am I still seeing stories about this bloke?

Now I know.

The available monitoring data says hundreds of pieces were published in a matter of weeks. A remarkable concentration came from a relatively small group of publications. The Spectator alone produced at least 21 substantive Arday items. An existing academic-integrity controversy was dragged into public view and explicitly framed through DEI and race. That framing spread through sections of the press and commentary ecosystem. Arday increasingly became something larger than the allegations against him, a symbol through which people fought an ideological battle about diversity, merit and Black academics. The story then travelled through social media, where the distinction between journalism, commentary, mockery and abuse becomes very thin indeed.

And while all this was happening, Jason Arday said it was taking a profound toll on him.

Nine days after his resignation, he was dead. I cannot tell you from the evidence available to me what directly caused his death.

I can tell you what happened before it. That’s what this piece is about. What lead to his death, which is different from what directly caused his death.

Not a conspiracy. Not a claim that Arday’s academic work was beyond criticism. Not an attempt to make legitimate questions disappear because their subject subsequently died.

It’s about scale. It’s about repetition. It’s about what happens when reporting an allegation turns into a feeding frenzy.

And it’s about race because the people driving the racial argument made it about race themselves.

The record is there. The articles were published. The headlines remain. The dates remain. The language remains. The volume has been measured. We don’t need to invent a pile-on after the event. It left its own fucking paper trail.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable thing I’ve learned from going through all of it is that I saw part of that paper trail being laid in real time. I watched those stories drift through my newsfeed and thought there was something strange about how often this man’s name kept appearing.

Then I carried on scrolling. Most of us probably did.

That may be the final mechanism in how a pile-on is built. Not simply the people writing it, sharing it or shouting underneath it, but the millions of us who become accustomed to seeing the same human being publicly dismantled, one perfectly ordinary headline at a time, until the extraordinary quantity of it stops looking extraordinary.

It shouldn’t. And after Jason Arday, I don’t think we get to pretend we haven’t seen how the racist outrage machine works.

Further Reading

Dismantling Nathan Cofnas: The Hereditarian Revolution Will Be Fact-Checked

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

Part I: Nathan Cofnas, You Have My Attention

Nathan Cofnas came onto my radar because of Jason Arday.

Until a few days ago, Cofnas was just another name floating around the strange little world where people spend an extraordinary amount of intellectual energy trying to prove that racial inequality is really about genetics. Then Arday died, I started looking properly at what had happened before his death, and Cofnas stopped being an abstract academic curiosity.

I should get something straight at the beginning, because this is going to matter later. There were legitimate questions about Jason Arday’s academic work. I’m not going to pretend otherwise simply because I despise the bloke who eventually went after him. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday his PhD, had already investigated plagiarism allegations and did not uphold them as research misconduct, concluding that the problems it examined could amount to honest or reasonable error. Later scrutiny produced further evidence, including extensive similarities between Arday’s thesis and earlier work, and Cambridge eventually announced a new investigation after saying it had received additional information. Arday denied wrongdoing and resigned shortly afterwards.

That all matters before we get into this. If Nathan Cofnas found evidence of plagiarism that previous investigations had missed or interpreted differently, then that evidence deserved examination. Academic integrity does not cease to matter because the person pointing at the problem happens to be a bit of a wannabe little fascist cunt. (And yes there is a few expletives littered through this piece I’ve purposely left in, I’m not writing an essay for academic peer-review here.)

If I am going to spend this essay accusing Cofnas of making claims his evidence cannot support, I can hardly begin by doing precisely the same thing myself. to him. This is a calm, and slightly sweary investigation into what Cofnas believes, and reveals through his academic works.

That said, Cofnas didn’t simply investigate Jason Arday’s scholarship.

On 21 July 2026 he published a piece called DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge, subtitled University refuses to investigate DEI star’s plagiarism. It went well beyond presenting passages from a thesis and asking whether they had been properly attributed. Cofnas scrutinised Arday’s extraordinary life story, his childhood, his academic career, his sporting and fundraising claims, and the story that had grown around his appointment at Cambridge. Some of those questions subsequently became subjects of wider journalistic investigation (read: witch-hunt) too.

But then Cofnas made the move that interests me most, and lead me down this path. Because Jason Arday was no longer merely Jason Arday. He became an argument about Black academics as a group. The kind of unfounded leap, it turns out, that Cofnas loves to make. His whole academic career seems to be based on making such leaps, and that is what I have spent time doing, finding those gaps in his work where he makes racist leaps into the abyss of bigoted academic bullshit.

Cofnas described Cambridge as having selected a “random black person” who ticked “identity and ideology boxes”. He invoked IQ while arguing that Britain surely contained Black people capable of doing serious sociology. And then he asked whether Cambridge was effectively making the case that “the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards”.

Read that last bit again.

An allegation concerning the academic integrity of one man has somehow become a question about whether maintaining academic standards is compatible with having Black professors.

Why?

If Jason Arday plagiarised, investigate Jason Arday. If Cambridge failed to conduct proper due diligence, investigate Cambridge. If people ignored warning signs because they were frightened of accusations of racism, establish that with evidence and investigate that too.

But what have Black professors as a group got to do with it?

That question is why I’m writing this essay.

Because once I started reading Cofnas rather than merely reading about Cofnas, the Arday piece stopped looking like an isolated choice of language. Cofnas has spent years developing an argument about heredity, intelligence, race and inequality. He calls himself a hereditarian. He has explicitly argued that under what he considers a genuinely colour-blind meritocracy, Black representation in elite institutions would collapse. His 2024 A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution predicted that Black students would constitute about 0.7% of Harvard under his model and that the proportion of Black professors would approach zero. The revolution in the title isn’t my description of his project. It’s his.

That changes the question I want to ask about Jason Arday.

I cannot tell you what was inside Nathan Cofnas’s head when he began investigating him, and I’m not going to pretend that I can. Cofnas targeted Arday because he was Black. I can say that, as Cofnas is obsessed with race. What I cannot establish that Cofnas alone directly caused Jason Arday’s death. Arday’s family have described the sustained abuse and scrutiny he experienced and the terrible toll it took; his death was treated by police as unexpected but not suspicious. Those facts are serious enough without me manufacturing another one. There are a lot of people, potentially with the blood of Arday on their hands.

I can’t make the leaps it would take to accuse a whole group of academics, the mainstream media and social media ghouls, of directly causing Arday to take his life. I can have an opinion on it, I can make that leap, but as you will see, doing so would make me as bad as Cofnas. I have to be forensic here, with what I say, with the evidence in front of me. What I can examine is what Cofnas chose to write once Arday was in his sights. And there I don’t need to climb inside his head because he wrote his twisted argument down for all to see.

One Black professor’s alleged misconduct became material for a wider argument about DEI, Black professors and academic standards.

So I started reading. And, Christ, there is a lot to read. I wonder sometimes why I do these things to myself. It’s the kitchen table philosopher in me, just needs to know.

Cofnas is an academic philosopher. He has worked at Cambridge and now works at Ghent University. He publishes academic papers. He writes extensively about hereditarianism and race. His arguments travel through an ecosystem of academics, publications and organisations interested in race, intelligence, genetics, DEI and what they variously describe as forbidden questions that polite academia refuses to confront.

That last bit is important, because I have no interest in answering Cofnas by saying some questions are simply too offensive to ask. Fuck that. Ask the question. I mean, my whole postmodern philosophical make up is, to question everything. So that has to include even the uncomfortable questions, and “uncomfortable questions” is where Cofnas exists, or so he thinks he does, painting himself as some revolutionary thinker, asking the questions no-one else dare.

So lets start to engage with his worldview. If there are genetic differences between human populations that significantly explain observed differences in cognitive test scores, as Cofnas claims, investigate them. If our understanding of intelligence is wrong, challenge it. If DEI policies rest upon empirical assumptions that don’t survive scrutiny, demonstrate it. If decades of researchers in genetics, psychology, sociology and anthropology have missed something because everybody is frightened of being called racist, then produce the evidence and overturn the consensus. That’s how scholarship is supposed to work. Test those boundaries.

But the same rule applies in the other direction.

You don’t get to call something controversial science and thereby exempt it from scientific scrutiny. You don’t get to move from heritability within populations to genetic explanations between populations without demonstrating the bridge. You don’t get to turn population averages into judgements about individuals, uncertain causal hypotheses into decimal-point predictions about Harvard, and then those predictions into a political programme, all the while demanding that everybody else admire your willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Cofnas should have put his ego away on all this.

Because some of us might follow the evidence too.

I should probably introduce myself at this point. I’m not a geneticist. I’m not a psychometrician. I’m not sitting in Cambridge or Ghent with a research fellowship and a departmental page. I’m some bloke sitting at a kitchen table with a couple of bits of embossed paper from the university just up the road from me, a coffee that’s now gone cold, a longstanding suspicion of people who use intellectual complexity to disguise simple bullshit, and I have access to the same published scientific literature Nathan Cofnas does.

And yes, I think he’s a cunt.

That’s not my argument against him. It’s merely something I’ve concluded independently. The argument starts now.

Nathan Cofnas wants a hereditarian revolution.

I’m going to fact-check and dismantle his racist fucking revolution.

Part II: Let the Cunt Speak

Before I start dismantling Nathan Cofnas’s argument, I want to do something he might not expect from someone who has already called him a cunt several times. I want to give him the strongest version of it. If I’m going to let him fall on his own academic sword, I have to let him wave it around for a bit first.

Not because I owe his ideas any particular courtesy, but because there is absolutely no satisfaction in beating up a straw man. If this essay is going to conclude that Cofnas has built a political project on claims the evidence cannot carry, then it needs to deal with what he actually argues, not the easier version his opponents sometimes attribute to him.

And the starting point is not particularly controversial.

Intelligence varies between individuals. Whatever arguments we might have about precisely what IQ tests measure, performance on cognitive tests predicts some important educational and occupational outcomes, and individual differences in cognitive ability are partly heritable. Cofnas didn’t discover any of that. You can find perfectly mainstream behavioural geneticists saying it without subsequently announcing a racial revolution.

The trouble begins with what Cofnas wants to do next.

Cofnas argues that average differences in measured cognitive ability between racial or ancestry groups are not simply products of environment, history, poverty, discrimination or culture. He believes genetic differences between populations make a substantial contribution. This is the position generally described as hereditarianism in the race-and-intelligence debate, and Cofnas embraces the description himself. It isn’t something his enemies have stuck on him.

From there, the argument gets considerably more ambitious.

If persistent differences in educational attainment, occupational outcomes and representation are partly consequences of inherited differences in cognitive ability, Cofnas argues, then a society committed to the assumption that racial groups should produce roughly equal outcomes has misunderstood what it is looking at. When equal outcomes fail to materialise, liberals search for discrimination, structural racism, unequal opportunity or institutional bias. Cofnas thinks they are systematically refusing to consider another possibility: perhaps some of the disparity is the predictable result of genetically influenced differences between populations.

That is the intellectual bomb he thinks hereditarianism drops into the middle of modern progressive politics.

And it explains why he is so obsessed with DEI.

Cofnas does not merely object to badly designed diversity schemes or bureaucratic excess. His argument goes deeper. He thinks the intellectual foundations beneath much of the modern equality project are wrong. In A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, he argues that defeating individual DEI programmes achieves little while the underlying taboo against hereditarian explanations remains. Cut off one tentacle, in his formulation, and the “DEI monster” simply grows another.

Hence the revolution he wants against it.

This is not merely Nathan Cofnas asking to be left alone in a laboratory to investigate an unpopular hypothesis. He wants the hypothesis to escape the laboratory. He wants it to change how influential people understand racial inequality. He talks explicitly about changing elite opinion, breaking the taboo surrounding hereditarianism and creating the intellectual conditions in which institutions can abandon policies based upon assumptions of group equality.

He is trying to force through deep societal structural changes in how we view race.

If Cofnas were merely saying, we don’t yet know whether genetics contributes to observed average differences between populations and scientists should be allowed to investigate the possibility, I’d have considerably less to write about. That’s a research question. An uncomfortable one, certainly. A question with an appalling historical pedigree and enormous potential for political abuse, absolutely. But science doesn’t get to declare a question unaskable because previous generations produced monstrous answers to it.

Cofnas goes further.

He thinks he already knows enough to start drawing consequences.

That is how we arrive at Harvard.

In his 2024 essay, Cofnas tried to imagine what elite American institutions would look like without race-conscious preferences. Under what he describes as a genuinely colour-blind system based upon academic qualifications, he calculated that Black students would constitute about 0.7% of Harvard students. Follow the same logic into academic recruitment, he argued, and the proportion of Black professors at Harvard would approach zero.

Think about what has happened there.

We’ve travelled from the entirely ordinary observation that intelligence is partly heritable to a prediction about the racial composition of one of the world’s most selective universities.

There are quite a few bridges in between.

For Cofnas to get from one end to the other, he needs more than evidence that genes influence intelligence. He needs good evidence that the particular average differences he is discussing are substantially caused by genetic differences between the populations concerned. He needs those population categories to be biologically meaningful enough for the comparison he wants to make. He needs the measurements he is using to capture the relevant characteristics sufficiently well. He needs the environmental contribution to those observed differences to be understood well enough to separate it from the genetic one. And then he needs his population-level findings to tell us something useful about the distribution of individuals competing for places inside an exceptionally selected institution.

Only after all that can we begin discussing what any of it means for “merit”.

Cofnas nevertheless presents the broad direction of travel with remarkable confidence. Remove affirmative action and DEI, allow meritocratic sorting to operate, and the racial composition of elite institutions changes dramatically. Black representation falls. The disparity isn’t evidence that the resulting system is racist because, in the hereditarian account, unequal representation can simply reflect unequal distributions of relevant traits.

And here we reach something fundamental about his argument.

Cofnas is not saying every Black person is less intelligent than every white person. That would be idiotic even on his own racist premises because population distributions overlap enormously. Nor, as far as I can establish, is he advocating compulsory sterilisation, racial segregation or some Nazi breeding programme. Cofnas may look like Himmler, but he isn’t yet heading up some population cleansing project. If we’re going to dismantle what the man actually believes, there’s no point attaching things to him that he can point at and wriggle away from.

His argument is subtler than that, which is precisely why it deserves proper examination.

He is saying that average population differences matter, that genetics substantially contributes to some of them, and that refusing to acknowledge this has distorted our understanding of social inequality. Once that distortion is removed, he believes institutions can stop trying to manufacture demographic outcomes that the underlying distribution of ability would not naturally produce.

That’s where “race realism” stops being merely descriptive.

Because what Cofnas calls realism carries a political implication: perhaps the inequality you thought required explanation or correction isn’t evidence of injustice at all.

Perhaps that’s just what the distribution looks like.

And if you accept that proposition, quite a lot follows. Affirmative action begins to look not like an attempt to correct unequal opportunity but an attempt to force equality onto naturally unequal populations. DEI becomes not merely annoying corporate bureaucracy but an institutional mechanism for denying biological reality. Persistent racial disparities cease necessarily to point towards discrimination because hereditarianism offers an alternative explanation for them.

You can see why Cofnas thinks this is revolutionary.

You can also see why Jason Arday became so useful to the argument.

If you already believe elite institutions are maintaining levels of Black representation that a genuinely meritocratic system would not naturally produce, then finding a Black professor whose academic record raises serious questions can very easily become something larger than a story about one professor. Suddenly he can be presented as evidence of what happens when institutions prioritise identity over standards. Suddenly the individual becomes an example of the system.

We will come back to that.

For now, I want to leave Jason Arday out of it and give Cofnas exactly the terrain he asks to fight on.

No accusations of secret Nazism. No argument that genetics cannot influence intelligence. No pretending human populations are genetically identical. No claim that an idea becomes scientifically false because racists might enjoy hearing it. No hiding behind the word “offensive”.

Just the evidence.

Because the entire hereditarian revolution rests upon one enormously important step that is remarkably easy to smuggle past the reader.

Intelligence is heritable within populations. Therefore observed average differences in intelligence between populations are substantially genetic.

Hang on, Nathan.

Can we see your workings on this?

Part III: Fine, Nathan. Show Me the Genes.

This is where the argument has to stop being provocative and start being difficult.

Nathan Cofnas wants us to believe that genetics makes a substantial contribution to average differences in measured intelligence between racial populations. Not merely that this is possible. Not merely that it deserves investigation. His wider argument about DEI, meritocracy and racial representation requires the genetic explanation to be doing some serious work. Otherwise the revolution has been announced before anyone has established what caused the fucking problem Cofnas claims there is.

So let’s begin with something Cofnas is perfectly entitled to point out: intelligence is heritable.

Depending on the population, age, environment and measurement being used, studies routinely find a substantial heritable component to individual differences in cognitive ability. Nobody needs to hide from that. Genes influence brains. Brains are biological organs. It would be astonishing if genetic variation played no role whatsoever in differences between people’s cognitive characteristics.

But heritability has a very specific meaning, and this is where the trouble starts.

When researchers estimate the heritability of intelligence within a particular population, they are asking how much of the variation between individuals in that population, under those environmental conditions, is statistically associated with genetic variation. They are not measuring how much of a person’s intelligence was “caused by genes”, and they certainly aren’t automatically establishing why the average of one population differs from the average of another.

The distinction sounds technical until you use an example where nobody has an ideological dog in the fight.

Height is highly heritable. Yet average human height can change substantially across generations without the population undergoing some enormous genetic transformation. Nutrition, childhood disease and living conditions can move the average while individual differences within each generation remain strongly heritable.

There is no contradiction there.

High heritability within groups simply does not tell you, by itself, what causes a difference between group averages.

This isn’t some desperate loophole invented by sociologists to escape genetics. It’s basic quantitative genetics. Robert Plomin, American-British psychologist and geneticist, renowned for pioneering research in behavioral genetics, has repeatedly emphasised the importance of separating genetic influence on individual differences from explanations for differences between populations. Heritability is population-specific and environment-specific. Change the environment and the estimate can change too.

So when Cofnas points to the heritability of intelligence as support for hereditarian explanations of racial differences, I ask the following:

Now show me the evidence for the between-population causal claim.

And that’s considerably harder.

Modern genetics can identify genetic variants statistically associated with educational attainment and cognitive performance through genome-wide association studies, or GWAS. These studies scan enormous numbers of genomes looking for correlations between genetic variants and measured traits. What they have revealed is not an “intelligence gene”, nor a handy little bundle of cleverness alleles (alleles: two or more alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation and are found at the same place on a chromosome) waiting to be counted by race. Cognitive traits are extraordinarily polygenic. Thousands upon thousands of variants appear to contribute tiny effects, interacting with one another and with environments across development.

Researchers can combine those associations into polygenic scores, attempting to estimate part of an individual’s genetic propensity towards a trait.

This is impressive science. And I learnt something, researching genetics for this.

Polygenic scores work best in populations genetically similar to the populations from which the original GWAS data were derived. Their predictive power frequently declines when transferred between ancestry groups. Allele frequencies differ. Patterns of linkage disequilibrium differ. Environmental contexts differ. The statistical relationships discovered in one dataset do not simply become universal biological measuring sticks that can be carried around the planet.

This portability problem isn’t a minor inconvenience. It goes directly to what Cofnas wants to know.

If your instrument changes predictive performance when you move between populations, you need extraordinary care before using it to explain why those populations differ.

Then there is population stratification.

Imagine a genetic variant happens to be more common in one geographical or ancestry group than another. Now imagine those groups also differ systematically in education, wealth, neighbourhood, exposure to pollution, discrimination, nutrition or any of the approximately seven million other things human societies have managed to distribute unequally. A genetic association can pick up some of that structure unless researchers control for it extremely carefully.

Modern GWAS methods are designed to reduce these problems. Researchers know about them. The methods have become vastly more sophisticated.

But “we have methods for dealing with a problem” is not the same sentence as “the problem has ceased to exist”.

This is why population geneticists such as Graham Coop and Molly Przeworski have warned against making sweeping claims about differences between populations from polygenic scores. The science is developing rapidly, but our ability to detect genetic associations within populations is considerably better than our ability to use those associations to explain complex differences between populations.

David Reich is useful here. Reich has been one of the people pushing back against an overly simplistic version of the claim that human populations have no meaningful genetic structure. They plainly do. Human history involved migration, separation, mixing, bottlenecks and selection. Genetic ancestry is real, populations can differ statistically in allele frequencies, and pretending otherwise because you’re frightened about the politics doesn’t make good science.

But recognising population structure does not magically validate “race realism”.

The familiar racial categories used in politics and everyday life are not neat biological boxes. Genetic variation is clinal, overlapping and shaped by complicated histories of migration and admixture. Two people socially classified as belonging to the same race can have substantially different ancestry profiles. Populations can be genetically distinguishable without that giving us discrete natural racial kinds corresponding neatly to “Black”, “white”, “Asian” and the rest of the census form.

This distinction matters enormously when somebody wants to move from genetic ancestry to social racial categories and then from those categories to intelligence.

You cannot begin with a messy historical population structure, pour it into a handful of socially constructed racial buckets and then act surprised when somebody asks what precisely your biological variable is.

And then we have the environment.

This is sometimes presented in these arguments as though “environment” means whether somebody had enough books in the house as a child. It is vastly more complicated than that. Prenatal health, maternal stress, nutrition, toxins, infectious disease, sleep, education, poverty, neighbourhood conditions, family resources and countless developmental experiences can affect cognitive outcomes. Some environments correlate with ancestry because human societies have histories. Those histories include slavery, segregation, migration, discrimination, geographical clustering and huge differences in accumulated wealth.

Genes and environment aren’t two independent sliders sitting on opposite sides of a mixing desk either. They interact. Genetic propensities can influence the environments people seek or receive. Environments can alter how genetic differences are expressed. Development is a process, not a spreadsheet with one column marked GENES and another marked EVERYTHING ELSE.

The Flynn effect should make anyone claiming simple biological inevitability particularly cautious. Average IQ-test scores increased dramatically across many populations during the twentieth century, far too quickly to be plausibly explained by genetic evolution. Whatever precisely produced those gains, and researchers still argue about the mixture of causes, they demonstrate something rather important: population-level cognitive-test performance can move substantially through environmental and cultural change.

Again, none of this proves that genes contribute nothing to differences between populations.

I want to keep saying that because it is exactly the point. And this is complex cutting edge science we’re looking at, and I don’t want to lose our focus.

The environmentalist cannot legitimately look at uncertainty and announce victory any more than Cofnas can.

Perhaps genetic differences contribute something to some observed population differences in cognitive performance. They might. Science is allowed to answer questions with we don’t yet know. Indeed, one of the most intellectually respectable things science does is refuse to manufacture certainty simply because politics would quite like an answer by Tuesday, or Wednesday now, this has taken me longer to research and write than I expected.

But look at what that does to Cofnas’s argument.

To sustain the political confidence of the Hereditarian Revolution, he needs much more than the proposition that a genetic contribution is possible. He needs evidence capable of distinguishing genetic from environmental explanations for the particular between-population differences he wants to explain. He needs measurements that travel reliably across ancestry groups. He needs to control population structure. He needs to establish that the social racial categories doing political work in his argument correspond adequately to the genetic populations doing scientific work in the evidence.

And after all of that, he still has to tell us how large the genetic contribution actually is.

Where is that number?

What percentage of the observed Black-white difference in measured cognitive performance is caused by genetic differences between those populations?

If the hereditarian revolution rests upon genetics substantially explaining the disparity, this isn’t some irritating detail I’m asking for because I enjoy footnotes. It’s the fucking load-bearing wall of his whole argument.

Current genetics cannot give Cofnas that answer with the confidence his wider argument requires.

And this is where I think the rhetoric of “race realism” does a great deal of work. Realism makes the alternative sound like denial. Cofnas gets to stand on the side of genes, biology and uncomfortable truths while everyone else apparently closes their eyes and chants that human beings are identical.

But that’s a false choice.

I don’t have to deny genetics to reject Cofnas’s inference. I don’t have to pretend populations have no genetic structure. I don’t have to claim intelligence isn’t heritable. I don’t even have to insist that every observed population difference must be entirely environmental.

I only have to ask him to demonstrate the proposition upon which his revolution depends. I’m not trying to catch him out. I’m asking for the science.

And at the moment, after all the GWAS, twin studies, polygenic scores, population genetics and psychometrics, the responsible answer to the specific question Cofnas needs settled is still maddeningly unspectacular:

We don’t know.

Nathan Cofnas is perfectly entitled to believe future evidence may vindicate the hereditarian hypothesis. If you want to believe in glitter farting rainbow unicorns, crack on, people have the right to believe any shit they want. You’re even entitled to investigate it. What Cofnas, in this case, isn’t entitled to do is treat the anticipated result of that investigation as though it has already arrived.

Because once you remove that borrowed certainty, something rather awkward happens to the revolution Cofnas is so certain on.

The genetics doesn’t tell us Nathan Cofnas must be wrong.

It just doesn’t tell us he’s right. The very foundations of everything that comes after aren’t there as Cofnas would like. He has built his whole argument on shifting sands.

Part IV: The 0.7% Trick

Now we get to one of the numbers Nathan Cofnas seems particularly fond of, because nothing gives an argument the appearance of scientific authority quite like a number with a decimal point.

0.7%.

That, Cofnas argues, is roughly what Black representation at Harvard would fall to under a genuinely colour-blind admissions system based solely on academic qualifications. Follow the same logic through the academic pipeline and, he says, the proportion of Black professors at Harvard would eventually approach zero.

It is an extraordinary claim. Not simply because of the conclusion, but because of the confidence implied by the precision. Not one per cent. Not “substantially lower”. Not even “probably very low”. 0.7%. It looks measured. Calculated. Scientific. It looks like a serious number, with meaning and significance.

So let’s look at what the number actually does.

Cofnas’s calculation starts from observed differences in academic measures between racial groups and asks what representation would look like if admissions were determined by those measures without racial preferences. As a modelling exercise, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about that. Give a model assumptions about distributions, thresholds and selection criteria and it will give you an answer.

The problem begins when the answer starts doing jobs the model never established.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Cofnas’s 0.7% prediction perfectly described what would happen if Harvard selected applicants solely according to the academic variables in his model. What would that prove?

It would show that given those variables, their present distributions and those selection rules, the resulting class would contain very few Black students.

That’s it. It would not establish why those distributions exist. It would not establish that the difference producing them is genetic. It would not establish that the measures used constitute some complete and objective quantity called merit.

And it certainly would not establish that the resulting racial distribution represents what nature intended before DEI came along and started fucking with it.

Yet that is precisely where the wider hereditarian argument wants to take us.

Cofnas wants the reader to look at an observed difference in cognitive or academic performance and understand it through a substantially genetic explanation. But we’ve just established that contemporary genetics cannot tell us with the confidence he requires how much of the relevant between-population difference is genetic.

So the 0.7% cannot solve that problem.

A model cannot turn an uncertain causal premise into a certain causal conclusion merely by producing a precise number at the other end. You can calculate bullshit to twelve decimal places. It’s still bullshit to twelve decimal places.

There is another problem, though, and this one goes deeper than genetics.

What exactly does Cofnas mean by merit?

It is one of those wonderfully convenient words that sounds self-explanatory until somebody asks you to explain it. If Harvard admits the people with the highest test scores, is that merit? School grades? Academic competitions? Intellectual originality? Capacity for research? Creativity? Persistence? Curiosity? Leadership? The ability to contribute something nobody else in the room can contribute?

Harvard itself does not simply admit the highest scorers and never has. Elite universities construct cohorts using numerous criteria because academic potential isn’t a single number waiting patiently inside somebody’s skull to be discovered by an exam.

Cofnas is perfectly entitled to think universities should use narrower criteria. But that’s a normative argument about what universities ought to value, not a discovery made by genetics.

And even test performance itself doesn’t descend from heaven untouched by circumstance.

Take two equally capable children. Give one excellent schools, private tuition, financial security, educated parents with time to help, quiet space to study and the expectation that university is simply what people like them do. Give the other underfunded schools, housing insecurity, family poverty, fewer educational resources and years of accumulated disadvantage.

Then test them at eighteen. The result is real. Nobody has fiddled the score.

But what exactly have you measured?

This is where Amartya Sen becomes useful. Sen spent a great deal of his work attacking simplistic accounts of equality precisely because resources, opportunities and human capabilities aren’t interchangeable. Two people can possess apparently similar formal opportunities while having radically different actual capacities to turn those opportunities into outcomes.

You don’t need to adopt Sen’s entire philosophical framework to see the problem for Cofnas. Observed achievement is the product of ability developing through circumstances. You cannot simply read backwards from an outcome and announce that you have measured an individual’s natural endowment.

Stephen Jay Gould raised a related warning in his criticism of intelligence testing: the danger of reification, taking an abstraction produced by measurement and treating it as though it were a concrete thing. Whatever one thinks of all Gould’s arguments, and plenty of his historical and scientific claims have themselves been disputed, that particular philosophical warning remains useful.

We measure performance on a set of cognitive tasks. We construct a statistical factor from correlations among those performances.

Then, if we aren’t careful, somewhere along the journey “intelligence” stops being a statistical construct describing patterns in performance and becomes a little quantity of biological worth apparently sitting inside the person.

Add race and the mistake becomes considerably more dangerous. Because now we’re dealing with population averages.

This point ought to be painfully obvious, but apparently it needs saying. An average tells you something about a distribution. It does not tell you where any particular individual sits within it.

Imagine two populations whose average cognitive-test scores differ. Their distributions can still overlap enormously. There will be individuals in the lower-average population who score above most individuals in the higher-average population, and vice versa.

So what possible use is the racial average when Nathan Cofnas is standing in front of an individual Harvard applicant?

He has their application. He can measure the individual.

If the principle is genuinely meritocratic individualism, race becomes informationally redundant at precisely the moment the actual decision is made. Assess the applicant’s achievements, abilities and potential. The population average cannot improve the judgement when you possess direct evidence about the person standing in front of you.

If you want to judge individuals, then judge individuals.

And this creates a strange tension inside the hereditarian argument. Cofnas attacks DEI for treating people as members of racial groups rather than simply as individuals, while simultaneously constructing an enormous intellectual apparatus explaining why the average characteristics of racial groups should change how we understand their collective representation.

Apparently racial categories are crude and unjust when institutions use them to remedy disadvantage, but suddenly scientifically illuminating when Nathan wants to explain why there should be fewer Black people at Harvard.

You cannot have individualism only on the convenient half of the argument.

There is a still deeper problem with merit, though, and this is where John Rawls strolls into the room and makes the whole thing considerably more uncomfortable.

Suppose we grant Cofnas far more than the evidence currently warrants.

Suppose intelligence is highly heritable. Suppose we eventually discover that some of the average difference between populations really is genetic. Suppose we could measure everyone’s innate cognitive endowment with extraordinary accuracy.

Why would that make the resulting inequality deserved?

Rawls’s answer was essentially: it doesn’t.

Nobody earns their natural endowments. You didn’t work hard in some celestial waiting room to select your genome before conception. You didn’t deserve the parents you were born to, the brain you inherited, the country you arrived in or the social circumstances that developed whatever capacities you happened to receive.

The natural lottery is precisely that: a lottery.

This is devastating to the lazy version of meritocracy because it separates two ideas that are constantly muddled together: selection and moral desert.

There may be perfectly sensible reasons to select a more capable surgeon rather than a less capable one. I would quite like the person cutting into my brain to have demonstrated some aptitude for the task. But it does not follow that the surgeon possesses greater human worth, morally deserves vastly greater life chances, or somehow earned the biological capacities that helped them become capable of surgery in the first place.

And if Cofnas wants genetics to play an even larger role in explaining differences in achievement, the Rawlsian problem gets worse for him, not better. The more inequality is attributable to inherited natural endowment, the less it can plausibly be described as something people earned.

There’s a lovely irony buried in that.

The hereditarian wants genetics to explain more of the outcome because that supposedly rescues inequality from accusations of discrimination. But every extra ounce of inequality transferred from social circumstances to genetic luck makes the resulting hierarchy less obviously connected to moral desert.

Cofnas can still argue that institutions should select according to ability. That’s a perfectly coherent argument. But he cannot smuggle in the additional proposition that whatever distribution emerges from that selection is therefore just.

Science, genetics, IQ didn’t tell him that. He has left empirical science and entered political philosophy, whether he admits it or not.

And this is what bothers me about the 0.7%.

Not the calculation itself. Calculate whatever hypothetical admissions system you like. Models can be useful precisely because they expose the consequences of assumptions.

It’s what Cofnas wants the number to signify that matters.

The decimal point creates an illusion that we’ve travelled all the way from genetics to meritocracy and arrived at an objective racial distribution produced by nature itself. When really we’ve taken present measurements, embedded them inside a particular model, selected a particular definition of merit, applied particular admissions rules and generated an output.

Then the politics begins.

Should universities care only about present measured attainment? Should they consider potential? Should they compensate for unequal opportunity? What social purpose should an elite university serve? What kinds of inequality should a just society tolerate? Does natural talent generate entitlement? What obligations do institutions have when historical injustice affects present opportunity?

You cannot answer any of those questions with a polygenic score.

And you certainly can’t answer them with 0.7%.

Nathan Cofnas has given us a number.

He hasn’t given us a moral philosophy.

Part V: The Family Tree He Chose for Himself

One of the standard complaints whenever hereditarianism is discussed is that critics reach for the history of eugenics because they cannot defeat the modern science. Mention Francis Galton, forced sterilisation or Nazi racial hygiene and somebody will immediately accuse you of guilt by association.

And sometimes they’re right.

Nathan Cofnas is not responsible for something Francis Galton wrote in the nineteenth century. He doesn’t become a Nazi because the Nazis were interested in heredity. Even if I personally think Cofnas has a bit of a Nazi whiff to him. The fact that a scientific idea has previously been embraced by appalling people doesn’t make the idea scientifically false.

So I’m not interested in playing that game.

The history matters for a different reason. Cofnas hasn’t wandered accidentally into a field that happens to have an unfortunate past. He explicitly presents himself as part of an intellectual tradition. He discusses its major figures, defends parts of their work, criticises others, and wants to rehabilitate hereditarianism as a respectable way of understanding human inequality. He wants to semantically sanitise the evils of the past.

This isn’t a family tree I’ve constructed to embarrass him.

It’s the family tree he chose for himself.

And it starts, inevitably, with Francis Galton.

Galton was Charles Darwin’s cousin, a formidable Victorian polymath and the man who coined the word eugenics. He was fascinated by heredity and convinced that characteristics including intelligence and ability ran strongly through families. From that observation came a political idea: if desirable characteristics were inherited, society should encourage the people possessing them to reproduce.

This is worth slowing down over because it establishes a distinction that gets mangled constantly. Hereditarianism and eugenics are not identical things. Hereditarianism is broadly a claim about the importance of inherited differences. Eugenics is a programme for acting upon beliefs about heredity to alter the composition of a population.

You can believe traits are heritable without wanting the state anywhere near anybody’s reproductive organs.

That distinction matters because if I simply call Cofnas a eugenicist and move on, I’ve made his rebuttal for him. As far as the evidence I’ve examined establishes, Cofnas does not advocate compulsory sterilisation, racial breeding laws or the coercive reproductive programmes historically associated with eugenics.

Fine. But that doesn’t make the intellectual history disappear.

Galton’s project was built around a series of propositions that would become extraordinarily persistent: mental characteristics were substantially inherited; populations differed in the distribution of desirable characteristics; social outcomes reflected those differences; and society was making a mistake when it ignored biological inequality.

The politics changed over time. The underlying questions survived.

In Britain, Galton’s ideas developed into a eugenics movement involving figures including Karl Pearson. In the United States, researchers and campaigners such as Charles Davenport, Henry Goddard and Madison Grant pushed hereditary explanations of intelligence, poverty, criminality and supposed social degeneration into politics. Intelligence testing became entangled with arguments about immigration and national quality. Eugenic sterilisation laws spread across American states.

And this history wasn’t simply a collection of cranks operating outside respectable society. That is precisely what should make us uncomfortable. Eugenics occupied universities, scientific institutions, philanthropic organisations and government. Its advocates had data. They had measurements. They had journals. They had statistical techniques. They had pedigrees and intelligence tests and institutional authority.

They also had enormous confidence.

The problem was not that every observation they ever made was fabricated. The problem was what they thought their measurements entitled them to conclude about enormously complicated human beings and societies. Poverty became hereditary deficiency. Educational performance became innate capacity. Social categories became biological populations. Statistical differences became hierarchies. And hierarchy became policy.

There is a pattern there worth remembering.

After the Holocaust, the word eugenics became understandably toxic, but research into intelligence and heredity did not disappear. Nor should it have. Genetics didn’t become morally unacceptable because racists had abused it. Intelligence remained a legitimate subject of psychological research, and behavioural genetics continued developing increasingly sophisticated ways of investigating individual differences.

But the race-and-intelligence argument survived too.

Arthur Jensen became one of its central postwar figures. His 1969 article asking how much educational interventions could raise IQ argued that genetic differences might contribute substantially to the Black-white IQ gap in the United States. The reaction was explosive, but Jensen continued defending hereditarian explanations for group differences for decades.

Then came Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve in 1994, which brought intelligence, class, race and social policy roaring back into public argument. Again, the important thing for our purposes isn’t to pretend every empirical claim in that enormous book was automatically false because its politics were controversial. It is that the same underlying question had returned: to what extent do inherited differences in cognitive ability explain persistent social inequality?

Around that mainstream controversy sat considerably uglier figures.

J. Philippe Rushton argued for sweeping racial differences across intelligence, sexuality, personality and reproductive behaviour. Richard Lynn produced international IQ datasets and racial hierarchies that have subsequently been subjected to devastating criticism over sampling, methodology and data quality. Both became important figures in hereditarian literature while also maintaining associations that make attempts to present this history as politically innocent rather difficult.

And Cofnas knows all of this.

In fact, one of the more interesting things about him is that he has been willing to criticise people within the tradition rather than simply defending everybody on his side. He has written critically about Richard Lynn. He has attacked what he regards as bad arguments within racial hereditarianism. He has also written extensively about Kevin MacDonald, another deeply controversial figure associated with evolutionary arguments about Jews, and has rejected important parts of MacDonald’s work.

That matters because Cofnas isn’t simply swallowing a century of race science whole.

He’s trying to clean it up.

Strip away the shit science. Reject the obvious cranks. Distance hereditarianism from white nationalism. Keep the propositions he thinks survive. And then make those propositions respectable again. That is a far more interesting project than simply shouting “eugenics” at him. Because it forces us to ask what exactly survives after Cofnas has performed the intellectual renovation.

The answer is recognisable. Intelligence is substantially heritable. Populations differ in average measured intelligence. Those differences may be substantially genetic. Those differences help explain unequal social outcomes. Attempts to produce equal racial representation therefore risk confusing biological inequality with discrimination. And society should become willing to organise its understanding of inequality around that possibility.

We are not in Galton’s laboratory anymore. Cofnas is not proposing that clever people should be bribed into producing more babies. We are not in an American sterilisation board deciding who is “feeble-minded”. We are certainly not in Nazi Germany.

But neither have we arrived on another intellectual planet.

There is a clear historical continuity in the attempt to use inherited differences in mental ability to explain social hierarchy. And that means Cofnas has inherited an absolutely enormous burden of proof.

And this is where I find the phrase “race realism” particularly irritating.

It performs a lovely little rhetorical trick. Call yourself a realist and your opponents become fantasists before the argument has even begun. You’re the brave person accepting biological reality while everyone else is apparently hiding behind comforting egalitarian mythology.

But every generation of scientific racism thought it was being realistic. Thought it was following the evidence. But history teaches us to be extremely careful about the distance between a measurement and the social story somebody wants that measurement to tell.

And there is another reason the history matters. Cofnas presents the suppression of hereditarianism as part of the problem. He thinks the association between hereditarian research and racism has made academics frightened to investigate questions that might undermine egalitarian assumptions.

There is some truth buried inside that complaint. Scientists should not falsify or suppress findings because the political implications make them uncomfortable. Academic conformity exists. Taboo subjects exist. Researchers are human beings and institutions can behave defensively.

But there is a breathtaking arrogance in treating historical caution as though it arose from nowhere. People are wary of racial hereditarianism because we have already watched supposedly objective measurements of human difference travel from laboratories into social hierarchy and from social hierarchy into public policy. Repeatedly.

That doesn’t mean Cofnas must be silenced. As much as many of us would like to silence him. It means he doesn’t get to demand that everybody forget the previous fucking century before reading his shite on Substack.

And here’s the crucial distinction. I cannot prove Cofnas’s scientific claims wrong by pointing at Galton, Jensen, Rushton or Lynn. Nor can Cofnas prove them right by rescuing whatever parts of their work he thinks survived criticism.

The science still has to stand independently. We’ve already examined that.

What the history gives us instead is context for the political leap Cofnas is attempting. The hereditarian tradition has never remained comfortably confined to the observation that human beings differ. Again and again, arguments about inherited ability have escaped into arguments about who succeeds, who fails, who deserves assistance, who belongs in elite institutions and whether inequality represents injustice or merely nature taking its course.

Which brings us directly back to Nathan Cofnas.

Because he isn’t merely defending the right to investigate hereditarian hypotheses.

He called for a hereditarian revolution. And revolutions, inconveniently, are not scientific hypotheses. They are programmes for changing the world. And that’s the scary part of what he is pushing.

So now that we’ve established what the science can currently support, and where this particular intellectual tradition came from, we need to ask the question Cofnas cannot answer with an IQ study.

Even if I gave you the genetics, Nathan, what the fuck gives you the politics?

Part VI: The Hereditarian Revolution

For the sake of argument, I’m going to give Nathan Cofnas considerably more than the science currently gives him. Let’s imagine that tomorrow somebody produces evidence strong enough to settle the question we’ve just spent several sections examining. Genetics really does explain a significant proportion of some observed average differences in cognitive ability between human populations. The methodological problems have been overcome, the environmental confounders have been satisfactorily separated, the population comparisons stand up and Cofnas finally gets to sit back with the enormously satisfied expression I imagine he has been practising for years.

Fine. He was right. What does that actually tell us about how society ought to work?

This is the point at which the Hereditarian Revolution stops being a scientific argument and becomes a political one, and Cofnas doesn’t get to pretend otherwise. A genetic finding can tell us something about the origins of human variation. It cannot tell us whether affirmative action is just, whether universities should compensate for unequal opportunity, whether immigration policy should favour particular characteristics, whether an unequal racial distribution within an institution is socially desirable, or what obligations people have towards those who happened to draw a less advantageous ticket in the genetic lottery. Those aren’t genetics questions. They’re questions about values.

David Hume noticed this little problem nearly three hundred years ago. Philosophers would spend pages describing how the world is and then, almost imperceptibly, start telling everyone how it ought to be, without explaining how they’d crossed the gap. It remains a remarkably effective bullshit detector because no amount of additional information about nature can manufacture a moral instruction on its own. Somewhere between the description and the prescription, somebody has inserted a value judgement.

That’s exactly where Cofnas’s revolution gets interesting. He can establish every genetic proposition he wants and Hume will still be sitting there asking what happened in the fucking gap.

Suppose, for example, that two children are born with substantially different cognitive capacities and we somehow know that the difference is overwhelmingly genetic. Forget poverty, education, discrimination and every environmental complication for a moment. Give them identical childhoods if you like. Neither child selected their genes. Neither earned the brain they received. Yet if we allow Cofnas’s language of natural ability and merit to slide too easily into our politics, we risk treating the eventual hierarchy between them as though nature has somehow made a moral judgement.

John Rawls saw the problem immediately. Natural talents are morally arbitrary. Intelligence may be useful, valuable and something institutions have perfectly legitimate reasons to select for, but you didn’t fucking earn the genes that helped produce it. You didn’t queue before conception and select the premium cognitive package because you’d worked harder than the other sperm. Whatever abilities nature handed you were luck before you did anything with them.

And that creates a rather lovely problem for hereditarian meritocracy. The harder Cofnas pushes genetics as an explanation for unequal outcomes, the more of those outcomes he attributes to something nobody earned. Genetics might help explain why somebody possesses an ability. It cannot transform possession of that ability into moral desert.

There is nothing contradictory about wanting the most capable surgeon to operate on you while also refusing to believe that surgeon is a more valuable human being than the cleaner emptying the bins afterwards. Selection for a particular role and moral worth are completely different things. Somewhere in our endless worship of “meritocracy”, we’ve become remarkably good at pretending otherwise.

The same muddle sits underneath Cofnas’s attack on egalitarianism. When he challenges the idea that groups are equal in ability, he is talking about an empirical proposition. But liberal equality has never required the obviously absurd belief that everybody possesses identical abilities. We already know individuals differ enormously. Some people can understand quantum mechanics and some of us stare suspiciously at the instructions for flat-pack furniture. Yet we shouldn’t respond by giving the theoretical physicist more value, they might be utterly incapable of reading IKEA’s idiot proof building instructions.

Moral equality is not empirical sameness.

That distinction matters because otherwise Cofnas gets to present hereditarianism as some devastating discovery that blows apart the foundations of equality. It doesn’t. I can accept every human population contains variation, accept that genetics contributes to individual differences, even provisionally grant Cofnas his desired genetic contribution to group averages, and still find absolutely nothing in those facts telling me that one human being consequently deserves fewer rights, less dignity or less concern from society.

So where is the revolution?

This, I think, is where Cofnas’s project becomes much more politically revealing than the endless argument over IQ. The real power of hereditarianism isn’t that it gives us another fact about intelligence. It’s that it offers another explanation for inequality.

If a group is underrepresented at Harvard, Parliament, Cambridge or anywhere else, we naturally ask why. Perhaps opportunity was unequal. Perhaps wealth matters. Perhaps education matters. Perhaps discrimination matters. Perhaps the selection process itself privileges particular backgrounds. Perhaps cultural factors play a role. Perhaps genetics contributes something too. Human societies are complicated enough that several of these things can be true simultaneously.

But change the explanation and you change the politics.

If inequality is primarily produced by unfair barriers, then removing those barriers becomes a political objective. If instead inequality can be presented as the predictable expression of inherited differences, the same disparity begins to look less like something society produced and more like something society merely revealed. What previously demanded correction can be redescribed as the natural outcome of meritocratic sorting.

That is where the argument about DEI becomes much bigger than DEI.

Cofnas isn’t simply annoyed by diversity training or badly designed university admissions schemes. He wants hereditarian explanations admitted into the way elites understand racial inequality because once you change that explanation, you change what institutions think they are responsible for fixing. The political usefulness of hereditarianism lies precisely in its ability to say: perhaps this disparity isn’t evidence of injustice at all.

IQ is the crowbar. What Cofnas wants to prise open is the entire liberal understanding of racial inequality.

And now we hit the problem that bothers me most about his “revolution”. The politics is running ahead of the evidence.

Cofnas isn’t waiting for population genetics to solve the causal problem before announcing the political significance of its answer. The answer is already doing work in his worldview. He has already imagined what Harvard should look like when the supposedly false assumptions of egalitarianism are removed. He has already connected hereditarianism to DEI, meritocracy and elite racial representation. He has already announced the revolution while the central scientific question underpinning it remains unresolved.

That is not a minor sequencing problem. If you’re going to use a controversial scientific hypothesis to reinterpret racial inequality across an entire society, establishing the hypothesis first seems like a fairly fucking modest request.

And even if the evidence eventually vindicates him, we’re straight back where we started, because science still hasn’t answered the political question. Imagine Cofnas’s preferred colour-blind system produces exactly the Harvard he predicts. Black representation collapses. The genetics is established. The model works perfectly.

We would know how the outcome arose. We still wouldn’t know whether the outcome was just.

Nature doesn’t provide political instructions. It provides circumstances. Human beings decide what to do about them. Disease is natural. Disability is natural. Genetic disadvantage is natural. Much of civilisation consists of looking at things nature has handed us and deciding we’d rather interfere.

So Cofnas can have his hypothetical genetic victory and it still doesn’t get him across Hume’s gap. If he wants to abolish policies, redefine merit, change institutions and persuade society to regard certain inequalities as natural rather than unjust, he has to defend those choices as political and moral propositions.

He doesn’t get to hide them inside the genome.

And that’s the fundamental problem with calling this a hereditarian revolution. Heredity can tell us something about where differences come from. A revolution tells us somebody wants to do something about them.

Those are two entirely different arguments.

Even if you’re right about the genes, Nathan, you still haven’t proved a fucking thing about justice.

Part VII: How the Revolution Travels

Calling something a revolution implies rather more than publishing a paper and hoping somebody reads it. Nathan Cofnas knows this. A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution is interesting precisely because he understands that winning an academic argument is not enough. Ideas change politics when they reach people with influence, when they acquire institutions and publications around them, and when something once considered beyond the pale becomes respectable enough to discuss over dinner with people who have money and power.

Cofnas is remarkably explicit about this. His strategy is aimed at elites. Change what influential academics, journalists, intellectuals and political actors are prepared to believe about heredity and inequality, and eventually the institutions they inhabit begin to change with them. You don’t need to convince everybody. You need enough of the people who decide what everybody else gets to argue about.

Which means it is worth looking at the little ecosystem in which these ideas are already circulating.

One obvious node is Aporia, the online magazine devoted to subjects including human biodiversity, behavioural genetics, intelligence and what its contributors regard as questions suppressed by mainstream academic culture. Cofnas has written there and has been part of its intellectual orbit alongside figures including Emil O. W. Kirkegaard and Noah Carl. These aren’t random names appearing together because I’ve typed “race and IQ” into Google. They write for overlapping publications, discuss one another’s work, appear in the same conversations and participate in a recognisable attempt to establish hereditarian ideas as legitimate intellectual inquiry.

Kirkegaard is particularly important because his role extends beyond writing. He has been closely involved with the Human Diversity Foundation, an organisation supporting research into human individual and group differences, alongside American entrepreneur Andrew Conru. HDF has funded researchers working in areas including behavioural genetics and intelligence. This is where the ecosystem begins to look less like a handful of academics shouting unpopular things on the internet and more like infrastructure. Research costs money. Conferences cost money. Publications need somewhere to publish. Careers need networks. Ideas survive far more easily when institutions exist to support them.

That observation does not require a conspiracy theory. In fact, conspiracy thinking would make this section considerably weaker. People with similar intellectual interests forming organisations, funding research and promoting one another’s work is not sinister evidence of a secret cabal. It’s how intellectual movements have always operated. Environmentalists do it. Socialists do it. Libertarians do it. Free-market economists do it. Universities themselves are enormous networks for producing and circulating ideas.

The interesting question is therefore not whether the network exists. Of course it fucking exists. The question is what it is trying to normalise, and where those ideas travel next.

Noah Carl is useful here. Like Cofnas, Carl became the centre of a Cambridge controversy involving research on race, intelligence and immigration. His fellowship at St Edmund’s College was terminated in 2019 after an investigation, although the circumstances and institutional findings were different from Cofnas’s later case. Carl subsequently continued working and publishing within this alternative intellectual ecosystem. The point isn’t that Carl and Cofnas agree about absolutely everything. They don’t need to. What matters is that researchers whose work has become institutionally toxic in parts of mainstream academia now have other publications, organisations and audiences through which that work can continue circulating.

And this is where the language of censorship becomes extraordinarily useful.

If mainstream institutions reject the work, rejection becomes evidence of the taboo. If academics protest, the protests demonstrate that hereditarian questions cannot be discussed. If a university disciplines somebody, the disciplinary action becomes another example of ideological capture. The movement can therefore convert institutional hostility into part of its own origin story: these are the questions they don’t want you to ask.

Sometimes that complaint will be justified. Universities are perfectly capable of behaving cowardly, politically and inconsistently. We’ll deal properly with Cofnas’s own academic-freedom argument in the next section.

But as a method of building an audience, being forbidden is fucking fantastic.

It turns an obscure argument in behavioural genetics into some intellectual samizdat. The reader isn’t merely learning about IQ. They’re being invited into the room where the dangerous truths are supposedly kept.

Then there is money.

This is where we need to keep our feet firmly on the evidence, because wealthy technology figures appear repeatedly around the broader New Right and it becomes extremely tempting to draw a thick black line between every person who has ever occupied the same conference programme.

Peter Thiel is the obvious example.

There is evidence of contact between Kirkegaard and Thiel, and Kirkegaard has described attempting to interest wealthy people in research concerning genetics and intelligence. There have also been reports that he recommended researchers including Cofnas and Noah Carl to Thiel. That is interesting and deserves investigation.

What it does not establish is that Peter Thiel funds Nathan Cofnas.

I haven’t found evidence strong enough to say that, so I’m not going to say it.

That distinction is exactly what this essay has demanded of Cofnas from the beginning. Proximity isn’t causation. A meeting isn’t funding. A recommendation isn’t a payment. Ideological overlap isn’t organisational control. If I start drawing connections because they make the story more exciting, Nathan would be perfectly entitled to point at the methodological hypocrisy.

The documented story is interesting enough without embellishment.

There is a small but increasingly organised intellectual world dedicated to rehabilitating hereditarian arguments about intelligence and human populations. It has researchers, writers, publications, funding organisations and routes into wider conservative and anti-DEI conversations. Cofnas participates in that world while simultaneously arguing that hereditarianism needs to move beyond its marginal position and convert elites.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a political-intellectual strategy.

And it matters because ideas do not need to arrive in government carrying the name of the academic who first articulated them. Intellectual transmission is usually messier than that. An argument moves from a paper into a magazine, from the magazine onto a podcast, from the podcast into a think-tank conversation, from there into the language used by a political adviser, and eventually somebody announces a policy whose genealogy is almost impossible to reconstruct cleanly.

This is where I need to resist disappearing down another rabbit hole, because there is a much larger network here involving the American New Right, anti-DEI politics, wealthy technology figures and conservative institutions, and I’ve been investigating that separately. It deserves its own treatment. Trying to squeeze the whole fucking thing into Nathan Cofnas’s essay would turn this into War and Peace with polygenic scores.

For our purposes, the important point is narrower.

Cofnas has correctly understood something about political change. You don’t begin by winning an election. You begin by changing what the people who eventually influence elections, institutions and policy regard as intellectually possible. Today’s outrageous proposition becomes tomorrow’s controversial proposition, then the proposition worthy of debate, then one side of a respectable disagreement, and eventually something a politician can say without anybody remembering when it entered the room.

That doesn’t mean Cofnas’s hereditarian revolution will succeed. It doesn’t mean everyone in this ecosystem shares his politics. It certainly doesn’t establish that some billionaire is sitting behind a curtain directing the whole thing.

It means Cofnas has a theory of how ideas acquire power, and there is already an infrastructure capable of carrying his ideas considerably further than an academic journal.

Which brings us to a rather important question. What happens when universities, students or other academics decide that ideas like these are so corrosive that the people promoting them should no longer have institutional platforms?

Here, irritatingly enough, Nathan Cofnas and I are going to agree about something.

He gets to say it. I hate to say it, but he gets to say it. Bury ideas and they don’t simply disappear, they still remain. Let those ideas be spoken, and we end up right here, with me dismantling them.

Part VIII: Yes, Nathan, You Get to Say It

Here comes the bit where I probably disappoint anyone hoping this essay ends with me demanding Nathan Cofnas be forbidden from speaking, thrown out of every university and made to spend the rest of his career explaining his hereditarian revolution to an empty room.

No. As I said at the end of the last section, he gets to say it.

That isn’t particularly difficult for me because I don’t believe freedom of expression exists only for people whose ideas I find pleasant. Cofnas should be allowed to argue that genetic differences contribute substantially to racial differences in measured intelligence. He should be allowed to publish the evidence he thinks supports that argument, criticise DEI, challenge prevailing academic assumptions and tell anyone prepared to listen that egalitarianism has got human variation catastrophically wrong. If universities are places where difficult ideas are supposed to be examined, banning the difficult ones because they make everybody uncomfortable rather defeats the fucking purpose.

There is a serious academic-freedom issue buried inside the Cofnas story, and pretending otherwise would weaken everything I’ve written so far. Cambridge itself investigated complaints arising from his controversial writing and concluded that his conduct did not breach university rules. Emmanuel College separately terminated his college affiliation, a decision Cofnas challenged in court. The fact that I think his arguments are poisonous doesn’t require me to pretend those institutional questions were simple. They weren’t.

Nor do I think science should operate by moral referendum. If somebody eventually produces compelling evidence that a proposition I find politically revolting is nevertheless true, my revulsion does not get a vote in the dataset. You don’t defeat bad science by making certain conclusions administratively impossible. You defeat it with better evidence, better methodology and better arguments.

This is where some of Cofnas’s critics make life unnecessarily easy for him. If the response to hereditarianism becomes simply these ideas are racist and therefore nobody should investigate them, Cofnas gets exactly the battlefield he wants. He no longer has to defend every inference in the genetics because the argument becomes one brave dissident academic versus an institution terrified of forbidden knowledge. Suddenly the question isn’t whether Cofnas can demonstrate genetic causation of group differences. It’s whether you’re allowed to ask.

Fuck that. Ask. But once you’ve asked, you don’t get to complain when somebody checks your workings.

Academic freedom protects the inquiry. It does not guarantee that the inquiry is good. Free speech protects your right to make an argument. It does not confer scientific validity upon the argument because somebody tried to shut you up. Losing a position does not make your hypothesis true. Students protesting against you do not make your statistics more accurate. Being called racist doesn’t improve the portability of a polygenic score.

Martyrdom is not peer reviewed.

This distinction becomes particularly important with Cofnas because censorship is woven into the story he tells about hereditarianism. The taboo itself becomes evidence of the need for the revolution. Researchers are frightened to discuss genetic group differences, institutions enforce egalitarian orthodoxy, and academics who challenge it risk their careers. There are genuine questions here about institutional conformity and the boundaries of academic freedom, but none of them settles the underlying scientific dispute.

You can be censored and wrong. You can be persecuted and wrong. You can be the only person in the room saying something and still be talking absolute bollocks.

The history of science contains heroic dissidents who eventually overturned established thinking. It also contains an immeasurably larger number of people who thought they were heroic dissidents and were simply mistaken. “Everybody says I’m wrong” is not evidence that you’re Galileo. Sometimes everybody says you’re wrong because they’ve looked at your workings.

And I don’t want Cofnas silenced for another reason. I want the argument visible.

I would much rather have A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution sitting there in public where we can read it, quote it, examine its assumptions and follow its politics than have the same ideas circulating privately beneath a layer of martyrdom and mystique. If Cofnas believes Black representation at Harvard would collapse under his preferred system, I want him to publish the calculation. If he thinks hereditarianism transforms how we should understand racial inequality, write the fucking argument down.

Then the rest of us can inspect it. That is, after all, what he demanded for Jason Arday.

Cofnas believed academic work should withstand scrutiny regardless of the status of the person who produced it. He examined Arday’s thesis, compared passages, questioned claims and argued that institutions had failed to investigate properly. Whatever we ultimately conclude about the manner in which he pursued Arday and the ideological conclusions he attached to that case, the underlying principle is difficult to dispute.

Scholarship does not acquire immunity because its author has a prestigious title.

Quite right, Nathan. Neither does yours.

That is why I haven’t spent this essay demanding his dismissal. I’ve spent it reading him. I’ve taken the heritability argument seriously enough to examine what heritability actually establishes. I’ve looked at the population genetics rather than declaring genetics racist. I’ve taken his Harvard prediction apart rather than simply gasping at the number. I’ve followed the intellectual ancestry of his argument while distinguishing hereditarianism from historical eugenics. And I’ve even granted him his desired genetic conclusion to see whether the politics he builds upon it logically follows.

That’s what intellectual freedom looks like when it isn’t merely a slogan used to protect the person currently saying the controversial thing.

Everybody gets it. Including the critic.

Cofnas doesn’t get to demand fearless scrutiny of DEI, egalitarianism, intelligence research and Black academics, then expect his own hereditarian revolution to be handled with kid gloves because people have previously tried to shut him up. If anything, the opposite follows. If these ideas are as important as he says they are, if they really could overturn how we understand race and inequality, then the evidential standards should be fucking ferocious.

So yes, Nathan. Publish. Speak. Research. Argue. Offend people. Challenge orthodoxy. Ask questions everybody else thinks are dangerous.

I will defend the principle that allows you to do it. But freedom of speech has a wonderfully inconvenient second half.

I get to answer back.

And now we’re going back to Jason Arday. Because after all this talk about evidence, individuals, racial averages, merit and academic scrutiny, I want to look very carefully at what Nathan Cofnas actually did when the academic under his microscope happened to be Black.

Part IX: Jason Arday: What Did Cofnas Actually Do?

So we come back to Jason Arday.

And I want to be particularly careful here, because there is a temptation to make this part of the story much simpler than it actually is. Cofnas attacked Arday, Arday was Black, Cofnas holds the views we’ve just spent eight sections examining, therefore the whole thing was simply a racist witch-hunt. Neat. Satisfying. Also intellectually lazy.

There were serious questions about Arday’s academic work and public biography. Liverpool John Moores University had previously investigated allegations concerning his PhD and did not uphold them as research misconduct, regarding the problems it examined as capable of being honest or reasonable errors. Later scrutiny uncovered further material, including more than 100 passages in his thesis reported as resembling an earlier Brunel University thesis, while separate questions emerged about claims in his CV and public life. Cambridge eventually announced a fresh investigation after receiving new information, and Arday resigned. He denied plagiarism.

So if Cofnas found evidence that deserved investigating, then it deserved investigating. I’ve said that from the beginning and I’m not going to suddenly become less interested in academic standards because acknowledging it makes my argument slightly less convenient.

What interests me is what Cofnas did with it.

His July 2026 article, DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge, begins by questioning Arday’s extraordinary biography before moving into a detailed attack on his scholarship. Cofnas presented examples he considered plagiarism, questioned Arday’s scholarly methods and argued that Cambridge had failed to investigate credible allegations properly. He also acknowledged limits to what he could prove about some of Arday’s biographical claims and said he would therefore concentrate on the scholarship.

There is an argument there that can stand or fall on evidence. Put the theses next to one another. Compare the passages. Examine citations. Check the institutional response. Ask whether normal academic standards were applied. That’s scrutiny, and after everything I’ve said about Cofnas’s own academic freedom, I’d be a fucking hypocrite if I objected to him doing it.

Then he gets to the section entitled “Free Speech and DEI”, and something changes.

Arday stops being simply an academic accused of misconduct and becomes an example of what Cofnas believes about race, merit and universities.

Cofnas writes that there are more than a thousand Black people in Britain with IQs above 140 who would be capable of serious work in sociology of education. Think about that sentence in the context of everything we’ve just examined. Nobody needed an IQ distribution to determine whether Jason Arday had plagiarised. Nobody needed a racial comparison. The scholarship was sitting there waiting to be checked.

But Cofnas brings race and IQ into the room himself.

Then he goes further. He says Cambridge could have found a qualified Black professor if it wanted a role model, but instead chose what he calls a “random black person” with an unvetted backstory. He says Arday was hired because he ticked “identity and ideology boxes”. And finally comes the sentence that, for me, changes the entire character of the piece. Cofnas asks whether Cambridge is effectively saying that “the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards”.

There it is. Not Jason Arday. Black professors.

This isn’t me rummaging around in Cofnas’s subconscious looking for racism. I don’t need to know what he secretly felt about Arday. I don’t need to speculate about motive. I don’t even need to establish that he originally investigated Arday because he was Black.

I’m looking at the argument Cofnas chose to publish. If Arday plagiarised, that tells us something about Arday. If Cambridge failed to investigate properly, that tells us something about Cambridge. If Cambridge appointed him partly because it wanted to improve Black representation, that raises perfectly legitimate questions about its recruitment process.

None of those propositions logically gets you to “the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards.”

What the fuck have Black professors as a group got to do with one particular individual who happened to be Black?

And after the previous eight sections, we can see exactly why that move matters. Cofnas has already told us elsewhere what he thinks Black representation at elite universities would look like under his preferred version of meritocracy. In A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, he predicts that it would collapse dramatically. His wider project argues that DEI conceals differences in ability, that egalitarian assumptions distort institutions and that racial disparities should be understood partly through hereditarianism.

Then along comes Jason Arday. One individual whose record genuinely contains things worth investigating. And Cofnas turns him into a racial exhibit.

That’s the problem.

It doesn’t magically make the plagiarism allegations false. This is important. Cofnas could have been right about every questionable passage he identified and the racial generalisation would remain completely unnecessary. In fact, conceding the strongest possible case against Arday makes the problem clearer. Suppose Jason Arday was an appalling scholar. Suppose every serious allegation were eventually substantiated. Suppose Cambridge’s appointment process was catastrophically incompetent.

We would have demonstrated the failure of Jason Arday and Cambridge’s appointment process. We still wouldn’t have learned anything about the academic competence of Black people, as Cofnas attempts to do.

Yet Cofnas makes precisely that leap. The individual case becomes evidence in his pre-existing argument about DEI. Arday’s alleged inadequacy becomes something Cambridge supposedly accepted because it wanted a Black professor. Then Cambridge’s treatment of Arday becomes grounds for asking whether Black professors themselves are compatible with standards.

We’ve seen this intellectual manoeuvre before in this very essay.

Take something observed about an individual or population. Attach a causal explanation to it. Then allow the explanation to expand until it is carrying a much larger political conclusion.

Cofnas is remarkably demanding about the direction in which everybody else generalises. He objects to disparities automatically being attributed to racism. He objects to institutions treating racial identity as informative about individuals. He objects to racial preferences precisely because he believes people should be judged according to individual merit.

Then he finds one Black academic he considers spectacularly unmeritorious and starts talking about Black professor as a group.

You cannot demand individualism on Monday and start extrapolating from Jason Arday to Black academia on Tuesday. Actually as I said earlier, it’s Wednesday morning now. This has taken me a lot longer to write than I imagined.

And the language matters too. “Random black person” isn’t the language of somebody reluctantly forced by the evidence to discuss race. Neither is introducing the estimated number of Black Britons with IQs above 140. Cofnas deliberately locates Arday inside his wider theory of racial ability and DEI. The academic-integrity case becomes a vehicle for an argument he was already making.

That is what I mean when I describe the treatment of Arday as racialised. I don’t need to invent a private motive for Cofnas because the racialisation occurs openly in the text.

And then Arday died. This is where absolute precision becomes non-negotiable.

I have found no evidence establishing that Nathan Cofnas directly caused Jason Arday’s death. The Metropolitan Police described the death as unexpected but not suspicious. Arday’s family have said that years of public scrutiny and abuse had taken an enormous toll on him, and his death has provoked a much wider argument about racism, media treatment and institutional responsibility. Those are serious matters, but they do not provide a causal chain from Cofnas’s keyboard to Arday’s death, and I will not manufacture one. That would make me as bad as he is.

Tens of thousands subsequently gathered in Trafalgar Square for a vigil organised by Stand Up to Racism. The event commemorated Arday and included speeches, performances and a minute’s silence; reporting put attendance at about 30,000. Cofnas, however, described the gathering as an “anti-Cofnas hate rally” and publicly suggested that if he were in London there was a real possibility he would be murdered. I have seen no evidence establishing an actual murder threat against him arising from the vigil. A subjective fear may be sincerely held, but sincerity does not convert fear into evidence.

Which is almost painfully appropriate after everything we’ve been discussing.

Evidence matters. Causation matters. The difference between what you can demonstrate and what you believe matters. That’s what following the evidence actually looks like when you don’t already know where you want it to end.

But I can read Nathan Cofnas’s own words.

And when I do, the thing that stays with me isn’t the plagiarism analysis. It is the moment when an individual Black academic becomes an argument about whether universities can maintain standards while employing Black professors.

Cofnas wanted Jason Arday scrutinised as an individual.

He should have afforded Black academics the same courtesy.

Because after all the genetics, IQ distributions, hereditarianism, meritocracy and revolutionary rhetoric, we arrive back at the simplest intellectual rule in this entire fucking essay.

If your evidence concerns one man, your conclusion had better concern one man.

Jason Arday was not a racial sample to prove Cofnas’s theory.

Part X: The Revolution Has Been Fact-Checked

Well, Nathan, I’ve read it.

Far too fucking much of it, frankly.

I’ve read the papers, the arguments, the hereditarian stuff, the race stuff, the IQ stuff, the grand pronouncements about meritocracy and DEI. I’ve followed the science behind it, gone backwards through the history and forwards into the politics. I’ve spent considerably more time thinking about polygenic scores than any normal human being should have to endure without financial compensation.

And after all that, the strangest thing about Nathan Cofnas isn’t how shocking his argument is.

It’s how much bigger he thinks it is than it actually is.

Strip away race realism, strip away the rebel-academic pose, strip away the delicious thrill of saying the thing supposedly nobody else is brave enough to say, and underneath it all sits an unresolved scientific question carrying an absolutely enormous amount of political luggage.

That’s it.

There are questions about genetics and intelligence worth studying. Study them. There are questions about population differences worth investigating. Investigate them. If the evidence eventually produces conclusions I dislike, tough shit. Reality has never required my permission.

But you don’t get to fill the gaps in what we know with what you already believe and then call yourself the realist in the room.

That’s been the problem running through this whole thing. Cofnas is constantly getting ahead of himself. The science raises a question and Nathan is already halfway to Harvard explaining what its Black faculty should look like. An individual academic faces legitimate questions about his work and suddenly we’re discussing Black professors and racial IQ. A hypothesis becomes a worldview, the worldview acquires a political programme, and before anybody has nailed down the first fucking premise we’ve got ourselves a revolution.

And perhaps that’s why Jason Arday matters so much to this story.

Cofnas could have stayed with Arday. He could have examined the work, challenged the claims, criticised Cambridge and demanded answers. Some of those questions deserved asking. But he couldn’t leave it there. Arday had to become evidence of something bigger. An individual Black man became Black academics as a group. Academic standards became DEI. An individual became a whole race.

Nathan supplied that part.

Which tells me rather more about race realism than another twenty pages arguing about heritability ever could.

I’ve deliberately given Cofnas more room in this essay than I instinctively wanted to. I’ve taken arguments I find morally repellent seriously enough to ask whether they’re actually true. I’ve refused easy accusations where the evidence doesn’t support them. I’ve defended his right to investigate the very ideas I’m attacking. I’ve even granted him assumptions for the sake of argument just to see whether the rest of his politics survives.

That’s because if you’re going to dismantle somebody’s ideas, you don’t get to cheat.

And this is where I return to the thing that amused me when I first decided to write this. Nathan Cofnas is the professional academic here. I’m not.

I’m some bloke sitting at his kitchen table in Hull with a couple gold embossed degree certificates, a fresh pot of coffee brewing, an internet connection and an extremely well-developed intolerance for bullshit. Cofnas gets fellowships, universities, conferences, publications and international attention for thinking about this stuff. I wandered into it because I saw what he’d been saying about Jason Arday, thought who the fuck is this cunt?, and started reading.

That was the beginning of this essay.

Several thousand words later, I still think he’s a cunt.

There. Peer reviewed.

But whether Nathan Cofnas is a cunt was never an academically interesting question. I had that one sorted before the kettle boiled. The interesting question was whether, underneath all the provocation and all the confidence, his big idea actually worked.

And that’s where I’ve ended up almost disappointed.

I expected something formidable. Something horrible, perhaps, but horrible in the way that a genuinely powerful argument can be horrible because it forces you to reconsider something you desperately don’t want to reconsider.

I didn’t find it.

I found some legitimate science. I found some interesting unanswered questions. I found a great deal of certainty sitting where the science remains uncertain. And I found a political philosophy repeatedly trying to pass itself off as the inevitable consequence of biology.

Most of all, I found a man demanding that the rest of us become brave enough to question our assumptions while showing remarkably little interest in questioning the assumptions carrying his own argument.

So I’ll leave Nathan with the standard he wanted applied to everybody else.

Nothing is sacred. No idea gets protected because people have built careers around it. No proposition becomes true because challenging it is uncomfortable. No academic gets immunity because he has letters after his name, a university affiliation or a sufficiently impressive bibliography.

You wanted the taboo broken, Nathan. Consider it broken.

Your ideas are on the table. We’ve had a proper fucking look at them.

And I don’t want them censored, suppressed or hidden away. Quite the opposite. Leave them right there exposed to the daylight where everyone can see them, question them, test them and pull them apart.

Because after all the talk of forbidden truths and hereditarian revolutions, perhaps the greatest indignity you can inflict upon an idea that considers itself dangerous is simply to examine it closely and discover that it isn’t very good.

The revolution will not be censored.

The revolution will be fact-checked.

Further Reading

From Race Realism to Reform: The academics, donors and political operators connecting Cambridge, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

Jason Arday’s death should not be turned into somebody else’s political prop.

That needs saying first, because there is already a temptation to make the story tidier than the evidence allows. Professor Arday died on 13 August, little more than a week after resigning from Cambridge amid renewed allegations about plagiarism and aspects of his academic record. His family subsequently described years of sustained abuse and said the latest campaign of misinformation had become too much for him. People close to him have spoken about the devastating effect the loss of his career and reputation was having on his mental health.

None of that gives us licence to say Nathan Cofnas killed Jason Arday. It does not give us licence to say Cambridge killed him, or the newspapers killed him, or that some shadowy cabal sat around a mahogany table and engineered the whole thing.

There is no evidence for that. And in these pieces I research and write, I can only work with the evidence, the facts, and hopefully still reveal a network beneath the news that needs examining.

Arday’s death has forced attention onto the people who were attacking him, and once you start looking carefully at one of the most prominent of them, Nathan Cofnas, you very quickly discover that you are no longer looking at one unpleasant academic with some grotesque ideas about race.

You are looking at a complex network of academics and political figures. Not a secret society. Not a single organisation. Not a conspiracy in which everyone receives instructions from the same Bond villain stroking a cat in in a big black leather chair.

Something rather more mundane, and therefore potentially more powerful.

A network of academics, publications, donors, think tanks, legal campaigners and political operators. They do not all believe the same things. They do not all work together. Some would reject the views of others completely. But they do overlap. They publish one another. They appear at the same conferences. They recommend one another to wealthy patrons. They sit on one another’s boards. They defend one another’s right to speak. And, eventually, some of them end up helping to write policy for political parties.

That last bit matters. Because one end of this story contains people discussing genetic differences between races. The other contains Nigel Farage, and Reform.

And between those two points are considerably fewer degrees of separation than I expected.

Nathan Cofnas and the “hereditarian revolution”

Cofnas is useful because he is unusually frank.

A lot of modern hard-right politics arrives wrapped in euphemism. “National preference.” “Academic freedom.” “Meritocracy.” “Civilisational confidence.” “Demographic change.” “Restoring standards.”

Cofnas dispenses with much of the wrapping.

He describes himself as a “race realist” and hereditarian. He argues that average differences between racial groups in intelligence and other characteristics have substantial genetic causes. He opposes affirmative action and DEI programmes, and he believes mainstream conservatism cannot defeat what he calls “wokism” without first persuading elites to accept his view of racial difference.

He calls the project a “hereditarian revolution.” Again, not my phrase. His.

In perhaps his most notorious passage, Cofnas imagines a genuinely colourblind American meritocracy and predicts that Black representation at Harvard would collapse. Black professors, he writes, would approach zero. Black people would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside sport and entertainment.

There are ways of debating affirmative action. There are ways of debating merit, social mobility, educational inequality and admissions policy.

“Almost no Black people would make it on merit” is certainly one of the more revealing contributions to the genre.

But the really important part of Cofnas’s writing is not simply what he thinks about Black intelligence. It is what he thinks should happen next.

Cofnas talks explicitly about winning over elites. His argument is that changing laws is insufficient because institutions will remain governed by people who believe in racial equality. What has to change, in his view, is the intellectual consensus itself. A new counter-elite must be built. Universities, media and other institutions must be persuaded to accept hereditarian explanations of racial inequality.

He approvingly quotes a political formula that runs from winning arguments, to winning elites, to winning regimes. That is not somebody idly wondering about IQ statistics. That is a political strategy.

And it is worth being very precise about what Cofnas is not, because precision makes the rest of this story stronger.

He is not a Christian nationalist. He is culturally Jewish and secular. He has publicly rejected white nationalism and antisemitism, and has defended Israel. He does not appear to belong to an extremist organisation, nor does the evidence show him advocating political violence.

Indeed, part of Cofnas’s project appears to involve rescuing hereditarianism from precisely the people who make it impossible to sell.

He has criticised neo-Nazis, antisemites and white nationalists within the broader race-realist world. The problem, from his point of view, is not that biological racial hierarchy is morally toxic. The problem is that too many of the people associated with it are so obviously toxic that respectable elites will not listen.

So the project becomes one of rehabilitation. Remove the swastikas. Add footnotes, and get your hate speech peer-reviewed.

The race-science ecosystem

Cofnas is not operating alone. Around him sits a cluster of researchers and writers concerned with intelligence, genetics, racial differences and what is sometimes called “human biodiversity”.

Names recur. Emil O. W. Kirkegaard. Noah Carl. Bo Winegard. Richard Hanania.

There is also Aporia, an online publication which became an important home for arguments about hereditarianism, intelligence and race. And behind some of these projects sat something more tangible than internet debate: money.

The Human Diversity Foundation, established in the United States, became a significant funding vehicle for research and media associated with race and intelligence. Investigative reporting established that American technology entrepreneur Andrew Conru provided more than $1 million to the organisation. After being confronted with evidence about what some of the network had become involved with, Conru withdrew his support and said the project appeared to have moved away from the non-partisan academic research he thought he was supporting.

That is important because it demonstrates something which is too often missed when this material is dismissed as a collection of strange men arguing. There is infrastructure, researchers, publications, podcasts, conferences, grants, patrons.

This does not prove that everyone funded through this ecosystem is a racist or shares Cofnas’s views. It does mean these ideas are not simply floating around without institutional support.

But then we get to Peter Thiel.

Enter the billionaire

Peter Thiel appears repeatedly when you start mapping the modern intellectual right.

Thiel is not simply a wealthy conservative donor. He has spent years cultivating intellectual movements and political figures, supporting contrarian thinkers and searching for alternatives to liberal democracy’s prevailing assumptions.

Most famously, he became an extraordinary political patron of JD Vance. Thiel backed Vance professionally and then poured $15 million into supporting his 2022 Senate campaign.

That relationship is not conjecture. It is one of the defining financial relationships in modern American conservative politics.

But Thiel also appears on the edges of the race-science story.

According to investigative reporting, Emil Kirkegaard met Thiel in 2019. Kirkegaard subsequently said he recommended Nathan Cofnas and Noah Carl to Thiel as researchers whose work might interest him.

That is the evidence. There is no evidence that Thiel subsequently funded Cofnas. There is no evidence that he funded Noah Carl. There is no evidence that Peter Thiel secretly bankrolls the modern race-realist movement. But somebody within the race-science ecosystem meeting one of the most influential political billionaires in America and recommending Cofnas and Carl to him is not meaningless either.

It is a connection. And connections is what this piece of research I’ve done is about. And Thiel connects elsewhere in this story much more directly.

To JD Vance. And to James Orr.

James Orr is where this becomes British politics

If Nathan Cofnas is the intellectual starting point of this investigation, James Orr may be the most politically consequential person in it.

Orr is a Cambridge academic in philosophy of religion and a major figure in British National Conservatism. He has spent years building relationships across the Anglo-American right.

He is close to JD Vance. He has been described as Vance’s British intellectual guide or “sherpa”. Their relationship is personal as well as political. Vance and his family have stayed with Orr. Orr has praised Vance publicly and moved within the same National Conservative circles.

Orr also has his own relationship with Peter Thiel. At the Mathias Corvinus Collegium’s 2025 summer festival in Hungary, Orr interviewed Thiel on stage. Then in early 2026 Orr hosted Thiel at Cambridge for a series of talks known as the Antichrist Lectures.

Whatever else one thinks about that title, you have to admire the total absence of subtlety. So now we have a documented route:

Kirkegaard meets Thiel and recommends Cofnas and Carl.

Thiel becomes the decisive financial patron behind Vance’s political rise.

Vance is closely connected to James Orr.

Orr himself hosts and interviews Thiel.

And then James Orr goes to work for Nigel Farage.

Not metaphorically. Not in the vague sense that he writes articles Farage might have read. Orr became a senior adviser to Farage and subsequently Reform UK’s Head of Policy.

That is the point where this stops being merely a story about strange ideas travelling through universities. The ideas have reached somebody whose job is helping shape the platform of a political party seeking government in Britain.

Orr’s other world

Orr is interesting precisely because he is not Nathan Cofnas.

He is not a race scientist. I have found no evidence that Orr believes Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. I have found no evidence that he supports Cofnas’s hereditarian programme.

Drawing that line without evidence would be intellectually lazy and journalistically reckless.

Orr belongs to a different ideological tradition. National Conservatism. Post-liberalism. Christian conservatism. A politics which argues that liberal individualism has weakened nation, religion, family and social cohesion, and that government should actively restore those things.

Orr speaks about a “politics of national preference”. He has praised Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He has advocated a British equivalent of America’s ICE immigration agency. He takes deeply conservative positions on abortion and national identity.

He also sits inside an extraordinary collection of organisations.

The Edmund Burke Foundation, associated with the National Conservatism movement.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which brings together major figures from the international religious and cultural right.

The Free Speech Union.

The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation.

The Centre for a Better Britain.

Different organisations. Different purposes. But Orr provides the bridge.

And some of those bridges lead directly to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

The Hungary connection

The Mathias Corvinus Collegium is one of the most significant institutions in Orbán’s intellectual ecosystem. It is heavily supported by assets provided by the Hungarian state and has been used to cultivate conservative intellectual networks internationally.

James Orr has appeared at MCC events.

The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, where Orr has been a director, has reportedly received more than £500,000 from MCC, representing the overwhelming majority of its funding during the relevant period.

Again, we need to resist the seductive stupidity of the conspiracy diagram.

Receiving money from an Orbán-connected institution does not mean Viktor Orbán phones James Orr every Tuesday morning with fresh instructions. It does mean substantial Hungarian-backed money has helped sustain organisations within the same British National Conservative ecosystem that Orr occupies.

That is relevant.

Particularly because Orr now writes policy for Reform UK.

The Free Speech Union bridge

There is one particularly interesting institutional crossover between Orr’s world and Cofnas’s.

The Free Speech Union.

The FSU, led by Toby Young, supported Nathan Cofnas during his dispute with Emmanuel College after the college terminated its association with him over his writings. The FSU framed its involvement as a free-speech issue.

There is no evidence that the organisation endorsed Cofnas’s hereditarian views. Defending somebody’s right to say something is not the same as agreeing with what they said. But James Orr sits on the FSU’s advisory council.

Which means we now have another institutional intersection.

Cofnas enters the FSU ecosystem because of his race-realist controversy.

Orr sits within the same organisation while simultaneously operating in National Conservative circles. Orr then becomes Reform’s policy chief.

That does not prove Cofnas’s racial ideas travelled into Reform.

It proves the networks overlap.

Which is what I’m attempting to show here, how all these people connect, in a growing global network.

Centre for a Better Britain

The clearest bridge into Reform is the Centre for a Better Britain.

Orr chaired its advisory board before moving directly into Farage’s operation.

Leaked documents reported in the British press described the organisation as being in direct contact with Reform UK and Nigel Farage. Its financial backing reportedly came from two significant Reform donors, David Lilley and Mark Thompson.

So here the chain is not ideological inference.

It is organisational. Reform donors fund a policy organisation. James Orr chairs its advisory structure. The organisation communicates directly with Farage. Orr then becomes Farage’s adviser and Reform’s head of policy.

That is about as direct as political influence gets. The Centre describes its mission in terms very similar to Orr’s own rhetoric: post-Brexit, pro-nation, pro-sovereignty and built around what he calls national preference.

Reform’s subsequent platform has increasingly emphasised similar themes: aggressive immigration restriction, opposition to DEI, stronger nationalism and major institutional confrontation.

We should not claim Orr personally invented every Reform policy that resembles something he has previously advocated. We do not have the internal documents to prove that. But neither should we pretend the appointment of an ideological intellectual as Head of Policy has nothing to do with policy.

That would require its own impressive feat of cognitive dissonance.

Where Christianity fits, and where it doesn’t

This investigation began with a suspicion that we might be looking at a network of Christian nationalist academics pushing racial theories. The evidence does not support that, but it does show that there is a network of hard right conservative academics that have political influence and ties in the UK, USA and into Europe.

So to recap, what we can and can’t say. Cofnas is not a Christian nationalist. Noah Carl is not meaningfully part of a Christian nationalist project. Kirkegaard is not best understood through religion. The race-realist side of the network is largely secular and obsessed with genetics, intelligence and heredity.

The National Conservative side is different.

James Orr, Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher and others draw heavily from Christianity, post-liberal political theory, national identity and arguments against modern liberalism.

JD Vance’s Catholicism is increasingly important to his worldview.

Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism is rooted in a religious understanding of nationhood, but Hazony is Jewish, which rather complicates the lazy habit of labelling every traditionalist movement “Christian nationalism”.

The most accurate picture is not one ideology. It is overlapping ideologies with common enemies.

Liberalism. DEI. Multiculturalism. Immigration. Universalist ideas about equality. Political influences in contemporary university. The administrative state, and the belief that institutions should remain politically neutral.

They disagree about why these things are wrong. They may diagnose them differently, but they have a remarkably similar list of targets.

Jason Arday

And then we return to where this started.

Jason Arday.

The allegations concerning his academic work did not originate entirely with Nathan Cofnas, and the subsequent evidence cannot simply be wished away because Cofnas holds appalling views about race.

Liverpool John Moores University had previously investigated allegations concerning Arday’s PhD and did not uphold plagiarism charges, attributing problems to honest and reasonable error.

Cambridge initially defended Arday strongly. Then new material appeared. Cofnas publicised alleged textual overlaps. The Times conducted its own examination. Other newspapers investigated further questions about Arday’s academic work and biography.

Cambridge announced a new investigation. Arday resigned. He denied wrongdoing.

Days later, he was dead.

We do not know what the outstanding investigations would ultimately have concluded.

We do know his family says he had suffered years of abuse and that the latest campaign had become unbearable. We know people close to him described a man devastated by the destruction of his reputation.

And we know that one of the people driving renewed scrutiny was an academic who has publicly written that, in a genuine meritocracy, Black people would disappear from almost every elite occupation outside sport and entertainment.

That does not invalidate evidence Cofnas produced. He’s not a stupid man, he maybe a dangerous man, but he knows his game. Facts do not become false because the person presenting them is vile. But neither does it make Cofnas’s worldview irrelevant when examining his sustained interest in one of Britain’s most prominent Black academics.

Motivation and evidence are different questions.

Both deserve scrutiny.

The mistake is looking for a conspiracy

The easiest way to discredit this entire subject would be to claim that Peter Thiel secretly pays Nathan Cofnas to develop racist theories which James Orr then whispers into Nigel Farage’s ear. That’d be a neat connection to make, but as it stands now there is no direct evidence for that.

There is no evidence Thiel funded Cofnas, or Reform UK is controlled by the Human Diversity Foundation through James Orr. There is no evidence that James Orr endorses racial hereditarianism. Or any evidence of a central committee coordinating any of this.

There does not need to be.

Modern political movements rarely operate that way. This is something my investigations are showing, a pattern of flexible networks.

One person funds a research foundation. Another edits a magazine. Somebody recommends a researcher to a billionaire. The billionaire finances a politician. The politician befriends an academic. The academic builds institutions and conferences. A free-speech organisation provides legal support when somebody in another part of the network gets thrown out of a college.

A think tank takes money from political donors. Its chairman joins a political party. Ideas that once lived in obscure journals start appearing in mainstream political language.

Nobody has to issue orders. They only have to keep opening doors for one another.

And that is the part worth watching

The most disturbing thing I found during this research was none of this is a secret. It is all out there, to be found online, openly in public. Nathan Cofnas publishes his racial theories openly. The Human Diversity Foundation’s financial backing became documented. Peter Thiel’s support for JD Vance is public record. James Orr’s relationship with Vance is discussed openly. Orr interviewed Thiel in Hungary and hosted him in Cambridge.

James Orr’s positions in National Conservative organisations are public. His involvement with the Centre for a Better Britain is public. That organisation’s links to Reform and Reform donors have been reported. And Orr is now Head of Policy for Reform UK.

There is no hidden chamber. There is an ecosystem.

That may be harder to dramatise than a conspiracy, but politically it is much more interesting. Because conspiracies require coordination. Ecosystems only require compatibility.

And what links these people is not that they all agree about race, Christianity, genetics, democracy or even capitalism. It is that different sections of the hard right have discovered they can help one another dismantle the liberal institutions they all dislike for different reasons.

The race realist wants to destroy egalitarian assumptions. The post-liberal wants to destroy liberal individualism. The National Conservative wants to restore national hierarchy. The anti-DEI activist wants to capture institutions.

The billionaire wants political and intellectual alternatives to the existing order.

The populist party wants policy, personnel and money.

Nobody needs to agree on everything. They only need to agree on what has to go. And now some of the people who spent years debating how to replace that order are no longer merely writing essays about it.

They are advising governments. Funding politicians. Building institutions.

And, in Britain, helping write the policies of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

That is not a conspiracy theory.

It is considerably more ordinary than that.

Which is precisely why we should be paying attention.

Further Reading

The Farage Money Web: Tether, Cottrell, millions in unexplained political finance, and the road that keeps leading back to El Salvador

Stop the Boats, Start the Bullshit

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

When Does a Riot Become Terrorism: The uncomfortable question raised by Thetford

The World’s Smallest Violin for Britain’s Biggest Victim

The Ann Widdecombe Case and the Mechanics of Narrative Collapse

Bin Face vs Frog Face - Special Report: Clacton 2026 Candidate Assessment

The Political Obituary of Nigel Farage (We Hope)

Nigel Farage: The Billionaire’s Man of the People

The Fall of Nigel Farage: The Pint-Man Prophet Finds the Bar Tab

Farage’s Brexit Betrayal Myth Is Just the Same Old Con in a New Hat

Farage Is Not Demanding Democracy. He Is Demanding Advantage.

Farage vs the Evidence: A forensic dismantling of the “two-tier Britain” narrative

How Do You Bring Them Back?: The Outrage Machine, the Failure of Politics, and the Working-Class Case for Reason How do you bring them back?

The Tide Is Coming In: Migration Is History Coming Home

Don’t Let Them Turn Henry Nowak Into a Race War Poster

Is Britain Turning Far Right, or Is the Megaphone Just Too Loud?

Fear, Freedom, and the Emotional Architecture of Politics

Democracy, Populism, and the Death of the Nation-State

Reform UK and the Cult of the Outrage Machine

Normalising Hate: The Political Decay of Post-Brexit Britain

Exposing the “Grooming Gangs” Myth: White British Men and the Truth About Sexual Abuse in the UK

The Big Lie vs The Big Truth: Who Really Abuses Women and Children in the UK

Debunking Common Myths About Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in the UK

There is a point in any investigation where the individual stories stop looking individual. The net starts to close, and the web of lies and deceit starts to reveal itself.

For months, the financial stories surrounding Nigel Farage and Reform UK have arrived separately. A £5 million personal gift here. A millionaire donor there. A convicted fraudster paying for staff and security. Money moving through somebody’s mother. A mysterious loan to Richard Tice. Cryptocurrency. Offshore gambling. Montenegro. Tether. El Salvador.

Taken one at a time, each can be explained, disputed, denied or dismissed as somebody else’s business. Put them on the same table and the picture becomes rather harder to ignore.

That does not mean there is a conspiracy. It does not mean Nigel Farage is secretly taking instructions from cryptocurrency billionaires, or that Reform UK’s policy towards El Salvador was written in some smoke-filled room by Tether executives. After digging through the relationships, I cannot find evidence establishing either of those things.

What I can find is a remarkably small network of people whose money, businesses and political relationships repeatedly intersect around Farage and Reform UK.

So I did some deeper digging into Reform, Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, the backers and the El Salvador connection, to see where the dots connect, like I did with my deep dive into the network behind Turning Point UK, UKIP and Nick Tenconi, my piece Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?

And once you start following the intersections, you eventually arrive in El Salvador, again and again. Which is too often for it to be a coincidence.

The £5 million question

Christopher Harborne is one of the most important people in Nigel Farage’s political life, despite being considerably less famous than the man whose politics he has helped finance.

Harborne is a British businessman and cryptocurrency investor who became a substantial shareholder in Bitfinex and its sister company Tether. Delaware court proceedings have described him as holding roughly 12% of both companies, while making clear that he was a minority shareholder rather than an executive running their day-to-day operations.

He is also an extraordinary political donor.

Across the Brexit Party and Reform era, Harborne has supplied Farage’s political project with millions of pounds. The Sunday Times currently describes him as having given Reform £12 million, in addition to the £5 million he transferred directly to Farage himself in April 2024. Other reporting puts his cumulative support for Farage’s parties considerably higher when earlier Brexit Party donations are included.

That £5 million is where the story becomes particularly interesting.

Farage says it was an unconditional personal gift. Harborne’s lawyers say it was made with no expectation of anything in return. A document was apparently produced saying precisely that.

Fine. Sounds like they’re really covering their arses on this. Then came another detail.

According to senior Reform sources who spoke to The Guardian, Farage had told colleagues only weeks earlier, in March 2024, that returning to frontline politics would cost him roughly £1 million a year in lost earnings.

On 5 April, Harborne suddenly transferred £5 million to him.

That does not establish a deal. It does, however, create a perfectly legitimate question about what the money was really for.

Farage has variously talked about security, lost income and the entirely personal nature of the gift. He has insisted that because he was not an MP when he received it, he had nothing to declare.

Parliament’s standards watchdog disagreed sufficiently to investigate the matter. That inquiry resumed after Farage returned to Parliament following his self-triggered Clacton by-election.

The £5 million therefore sits in a strange space. We know who paid it. We know who received it. We know the date. We know what Farage had reportedly been saying about the financial cost of returning to politics shortly beforehand.

What we do not have is evidence of a quid pro quo. That distinction matters enormously. Because the next part of the story is the murky world of cryptocurrency.

Farage discovers the virtues of private digital money

Harborne’s fortune is deeply connected to Tether, one of the most powerful businesses in cryptocurrency.

Tether issues USDT, the dominant dollar-linked stablecoin. Unlike Bitcoin, whose price can rocket or collapse dramatically, a stablecoin is designed to maintain a fixed value. USDT is intended to stay worth one US dollar.

That makes Tether enormously important to the crypto economy. And it makes government-backed digital currencies potentially important to Tether. If central banks issue their own digital money, private stablecoins could face a very different competitive and regulatory landscape.

Which brings us back to Nigel Farage.

Farage has become an outspoken opponent of a British central bank digital currency, generally known as the digital pound or, rather unfortunately, “Britcoin”. He has personally pressed Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey on cryptocurrency regulation and the digital-pound project. Bailey later said he would have postponed one meeting had he known at the time that Farage’s £5 million gift from Harborne was under investigation.

Again, there is no evidence Harborne instructed Farage to do this. Farage may simply believe what he says he believes. Politicians and donors frequently share ideological interests. That is, after all, one reason wealthy people donate to politicians in the first place.

But the alignment exists.

A politician receives extraordinary financial backing from a substantial shareholder in one of the world’s dominant private stablecoin businesses, then becomes an energetic opponent of a potentially competing state-backed digital currency.

That does not prove corruption. It absolutely merits scrutiny.

And then Tether moved house.

Welcome home

On 13 January 2025, Tether announced that it was relocating its headquarters to El Salvador.

The company had obtained a Digital Asset Service Provider licence there and planned to establish its first physical headquarters in the country. CEO Paolo Ardoino told Reuters that he and other senior figures would also relocate personally.

President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele was delighted.

His response to Tether was wonderfully concise:

“Welcome home.”

El Salvador had spent years positioning itself as the world’s great national cryptocurrency experiment. Bukele made Bitcoin legal tender, courted crypto investors and constructed a regulatory environment deliberately intended to attract digital-asset businesses.

Tether was an enormous prize. So by January 2025, one side of our network looked like this:

Christopher Harborne
→ major Tether shareholder
→ Tether
→ El Salvador

The other looked like this:

Christopher Harborne
→ millions of pounds
→ Nigel Farage and Reform UK

Those are both documented. What happened next is where things become considerably more curious.

El Salvador enters Farage’s prison policy

One important correction emerged while checking the research behind this piece.

Reform’s El Salvador prison proposal did not suddenly appear in August 2026.

Farage had already publicly proposed sending serious offenders to overseas prisons, explicitly including El Salvador, in July 2025. The Financial Times reported the policy on 21 July that year.

That matters.

It means the idea has a longer paper trail than the current reporting initially suggested. It also gives us a clearer chronology.

Tether announced its move to El Salvador in January 2025.

The Trump administration began transferring Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison in March.

Then, in July, Farage publicly named El Salvador as somewhere Britain could send prisoners.

By August 2026 the proposal had become considerably more developed. Reform said it had already held talks with El Salvador, and party chair Lee Anderson was preparing to travel there to discuss the scheme.

This chronology actually cuts both ways.

It makes the simple “Reform suddenly invented El Salvador because Tether is there” theory weaker. There is an obvious independent political inspiration: Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele had already demonstrated the idea publicly.

But it leaves another question completely unanswered.

Who opened Reform’s talks with the Salvadoran government?

That is the missing link. And nobody appears to have publicly established who did make the introduction either. And that is a question worth pursuing.

Especially because we have not finished with Harborne and Cottrell.

Not remotely.

Enter George Cottrell

George Cottrell has been orbiting Nigel Farage for a decade.

He worked with UKIP, became close to Farage and was arrested in the United States in 2016. He ultimately pleaded guilty to wire fraud and served time in prison. Afterwards he established himself in Montenegro, where his world increasingly involved cryptocurrency, gambling, wealthy clients and politics.

Meanwhile his relationship with Farage continued.

Reporting has described Cottrell paying for or arranging staff, security and accommodation connected with Farage’s political operation. The Sunday Times investigation described three members of Farage’s social-media operation being recruited and paid, alongside security and housing support.

Farage has described Cottrell as a friend.

Cottrell has never been listed as a conventional large Reform donor.

Which makes what happened with his mother rather interesting.

The money that went to Mum

In 2024 Fiona Cottrell made substantial donations benefiting Reform UK. Nothing inherently unusual there. British citizens are allowed to donate money to political parties, provided the legal requirements are met.

Then journalists followed the money backwards.

According to financial-industry sources cited by The Guardian, George Cottrell transferred $2,047,693 into his mother’s bank account.

Those payments arrived in three chunks.

And each arrived shortly before Fiona Cottrell made major political donations.

The Guardian reported that one $1.4 million transfer arrived before Fiona gave £1.075 million to Britain Means Business, an organisation controlled by Reform deputy leader Richard Tice. Other transfers of more than $300,000 preceded her direct donations to Reform.

The timing ranged from roughly 24 to 72 hours.

Bankers asked Fiona where the money had come from. She reportedly told them it came from George. The money then moved into British politics.

That does not automatically mean George Cottrell illegally donated through his mother. The legal question is who was the true donor.

A person may receive money legitimately from somebody else and later independently decide to make a political donation from their own assets. But if money is supplied specifically so that another person can donate it on the supplier’s behalf, British political-finance law becomes extremely interested indeed.

The police became interested too.

The Metropolitan police have been investigating the £500,000 in direct Reform donations made by Fiona Cottrell as part of an inquiry into whether donation restrictions were circumvented.

George Cottrell’s lawyers have maintained that his mother made her own political decisions.

There is therefore a disputed question of intent.

There is considerably less dispute about the money having moved.

And Richard Tice appears in the banking records

The Cottrell trail does not stop with Farage.

In December 2024, George Cottrell transferred £78,100 to Tisun Investments, a company associated with Reform deputy leader Richard Tice.

Tice says it was an ordinary commercial loan connected with property and unrelated to politics. The money was subsequently repaid. But bankers scrutinised the transaction and it was among payments reported under the UK suspicious-activity reporting system.

A suspicious activity report is not evidence that a crime occurred. Banks file them precisely because they are required to flag transactions that merit further examination.

Still, by this point our supposedly separate stories are becoming rather crowded.

Harborne funds Farage and Reform.

Cottrell supports Farage.

Cottrell transfers millions to Fiona.

Fiona donates to Reform and to a Tice-controlled organisation.

Cottrell separately lends money to Tice’s company.

And then another business appears.

Tether.bet.

The other Tether

This part requires care because the name is a trap.

Tether.bet is not known to be owned by Tether Limited.

Anyone calling Tether.bet “Tether’s casino” is currently making a claim the evidence does not support. But the connections and coincidences are too great to ignore. What we do know is interesting enough without making anything up.

Tether.bet was an offshore gambling operation serving wealthy gamblers, including customers in Britain. It reportedly offered extremely high betting limits and operated without a Gambling Commission licence permitting it to serve the British market.

And two familiar names appear around it.

George Cottrell.

Christopher Harborne.

The Sunday Times investigation published this weekend reports that Cottrell was a significant figure around Tether.bet and that millions connected with the operation reached him. Cottrell disputes the characterisation of him as an operator and says his relationship with the business was simply that of a customer who knew its owner.

Then there is the payment chain.

British customers were reportedly directed to make and receive payments through Fispay, a UK company owned by Mowbray Jackson, another figure within Farage’s wider circle.

Fispay in turn made and received payments using IFX. And IFX is wholly owned by Christopher Harborne. However, Harborne and IFX say Harborne does not participate in the company’s management or operations.

Sure, ownership of a company does not mean personally knowing every transaction it processes. But it means the diagram has acquired another line:

Tether.bet
→ Fispay
→ IFX
→ Christopher Harborne

while separately:

Tether.bet
→ George Cottrell
→ Nigel Farage

and:

Christopher Harborne
→ Nigel Farage / Reform

That is no longer speculation.

Those relationships are reported and, in several parts, supported by corporate records.

What remains unproven is what they mean collectively.

Then Tether.bet disappeared

And then suddenly last week Tether.bet shut down.

Visitors were told the brand was no longer operating and customers with balances should request withdrawals. That happened while journalists were examining its UK operations and connections.

Again, chronology is not causation. But something stinks in all this.

I have found no public regulator statement saying the Gambling Commission ordered the closure, and no evidence demonstrating that the Sunday Times investigation caused it.

The temptation in a story like this is always to fill blank spaces with the most exciting possible answer. As much as I want to, the fact is the blank spaces between the facts are interesting enough.

One of the most important unresolved questions is who actually owned Tether.bet.

Another is exactly what Cottrell’s role was.

Another is why a gambling platform using the name of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency companies could operate for years without any documented corporate relationship to that company.

And then there is a photograph.

Post-Lockdown Lunch

Farage, Harborne and Cottrell were photographed together at lunch in London in July 2020.

That meeting is real, we have the photographic evidence. What we can’t establish is what was said at that meeting. There are no minutes. No contract. No corporate document I have seen says: this meeting created the gambling business.

So we leave the line dotted. That is what an investigation is supposed to do. But the connections are mounting up all the same, we just haven’t established the smoking gun yet. But circumstantially, the whole shit show stinks to high heaven.

What we actually know

Strip away all the excitement, all the political tribalism and all the desire to yell “gotcha”, and the underlying structure is still extraordinary.

Christopher Harborne is a major financial supporter of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Harborne holds a substantial minority interest in Tether.

Tether relocated its headquarters to El Salvador.

Farage received a £5 million personal gift from Harborne shortly after reportedly telling Reform colleagues that returning to politics would require roughly £1 million a year.

Farage subsequently became a prominent opponent of the Bank of England’s digital-currency plans.

George Cottrell has provided significant financial and practical support around Farage.

Cottrell transferred more than $2 million to his mother shortly before she made large donations benefiting Reform.

Cottrell separately lent £78,100 to Richard Tice’s company.

A gambling operation called Tether.bet served British customers without a UK gambling licence.

A company owned by Harborne sat in its reported payment chain.

Cottrell was closely connected to the operation according to investigative reporting, although he denies being an operator.

Tether.bet has now shut down.

And Reform UK wants Britain to enter into a prison arrangement with El Salvador, where Tether is headquartered.

Those are the facts currently on the board.

And what we do not know

Here is where I disappoint anyone hoping for the final scene from a conspiracy thriller. I cannot establish that Christopher Harborne told Nigel Farage what to say about cryptocurrency.

I cannot establish directly that Tether had anything to do with Tether.bet. I cannot establish that George Cottrell controlled Tether.bet. I cannot establish that Harborne, Cottrell or Tether introduced Reform UK to Nayib Bukele’s government.

I cannot establish that Reform’s El Salvador policy was designed to benefit Tether.

And I cannot establish that the millions of pounds flowing around this network represent anything unlawful beyond the matters already being examined by authorities.

That does not make the investigation a damp squib. Quite the opposite. Because journalism is not supposed to begin with the answer and reverse-engineer the evidence until it fits. Too many mainstream media outrage machine outlets do that these days, so I have to stick to the facts I can find.

The uncomfortable reality though is more interesting.

Nigel Farage has built his political operation around a remarkably concentrated group of wealthy supporters. Some of those supporters have complicated international business interests. Some of their money has travelled through unusual routes. Some transactions have concerned bankers enough to be reported to the authorities. Police and parliamentary regulators are examining parts of that financial landscape.

One of Farage’s biggest benefactors owns a significant chunk of the world’s dominant stablecoin business. That business moved to El Salvador. Farage has challenged British policy in a way potentially advantageous to private stablecoins. His party wants a commercial relationship with El Salvador.

And another offshore enterprise, carrying the Tether name but with no proven corporate relationship to Tether itself, has now pulled Harborne and Cottrell into the same story through its payment network.

You do not need to invent a conspiracy.

The documented network is already worthy of scrutiny.

Follow the introduction

There is one question I keep returning to.

Not “Did Tether order Reform’s El Salvador policy?” There is no evidence for that. Not “Did Harborne buy Farage?” There is no evidence establishing that either.

The useful question is much smaller.

Who introduced Reform UK to the government of El Salvador?

Reform says talks have already happened. So somebody made contact. Somebody knew whom to call. Somebody arranged the conversation.

Perhaps the answer is completely mundane. A diplomat. An adviser. A Reform staff member following the Trump precedent. Perhaps the Salvadoran government itself approached them.

If so, fine. Establishing that would actually remove one of the most intriguing possible connections in this story.

But until that answer exists, the line remains open. And there are rather a lot of lines of enquiry already open here. The money around Nigel Farage does not move in straight lines. It moves through donors, businesses, friends, relatives, private gifts, companies, loans and offshore jurisdictions.

That alone does not make any of it corrupt. It does make one thing increasingly difficult to argue, as Nigel keeps trying to shrug it off, the net is closing, and the money web is revealing itself.

And the more you look into it, the more it looks like Reform, Farage and even Tice’s hands are far from clean in all of this. We will see how the many on-going investigations into them play out.

Further Reading

Stop the Boats, Start the Bullshit

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

When Does a Riot Become Terrorism: The uncomfortable question raised by Thetford

The World’s Smallest Violin for Britain’s Biggest Victim

The Ann Widdecombe Case and the Mechanics of Narrative Collapse

Bin Face vs Frog Face - Special Report: Clacton 2026 Candidate Assessment

The Political Obituary of Nigel Farage (We Hope)

Nigel Farage: The Billionaire’s Man of the People

The Fall of Nigel Farage: The Pint-Man Prophet Finds the Bar Tab

Farage’s Brexit Betrayal Myth Is Just the Same Old Con in a New Hat

Farage Is Not Demanding Democracy. He Is Demanding Advantage.

Farage vs the Evidence: A forensic dismantling of the “two-tier Britain” narrative

How Do You Bring Them Back?: The Outrage Machine, the Failure of Politics, and the Working-Class Case for Reason How do you bring them back?

The Tide Is Coming In: Migration Is History Coming Home

Don’t Let Them Turn Henry Nowak Into a Race War Poster

Is Britain Turning Far Right, or Is the Megaphone Just Too Loud?

Fear, Freedom, and the Emotional Architecture of Politics

Democracy, Populism, and the Death of the Nation-State

Reform UK and the Cult of the Outrage Machine

Normalising Hate: The Political Decay of Post-Brexit Britain

Exposing the “Grooming Gangs” Myth: White British Men and the Truth About Sexual Abuse in the UK

The Big Lie vs The Big Truth: Who Really Abuses Women and Children in the UK

Debunking Common Myths About Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in the UK

The argument began with a simple refusal.

Education is not schooling.

That sounds obvious once said plainly, but it is one of those truths a whole society can misplace for generations. We have treated school as if it were the natural container of education, as if learning becomes serious only when enclosed by timetable, uniform, classroom, attendance code, assessment grid and the grim little machinery of institutional measurement. We have confused the building with the act, the process with the purpose, the grade with the person, the system with the life it claims to serve.

And because of that confusion, we keep trying to repair the wrong thing.

Every few years, Britain announces another educational fix. More rigour. More discipline. More phonics. More maths. More academies. More behaviour policies. More inspection. More aspiration. More skills. More accountability. More technology. More ministerial phrases arranged into a shape that briefly resembles thought. The machinery is adjusted. The vocabulary changes. The deeper assumption remains untouched.

Children go to school.

School delivers education.

Education is measured.

The system continues.

But what if the assumption itself is the problem?

What if the crisis is not simply that schools are underfunded, overtested, overstretched, unequal, punitive, narrow, exhausted and increasingly asked to absorb every social failure produced elsewhere, though all of that is true enough? What if the deeper crisis is that we have allowed one institutional form to monopolise the meaning of education?

That is the question this essay has tried to hold open.

Not as a glib attack on schools. Not as a sneer at teachers. Not as a fantasy in which children educate themselves through vibes, broadband and a table full of craft supplies. The best teachers are often the last human force resisting the deadening logic of the system they work inside. They build relationships where policy builds categories. They notice children whom data merely tracks. They keep humour alive in places where bureaucracy would happily laminate the soul if it improved compliance.

This is not an argument against teachers.

It is an argument against making teachers defend a structure too narrow for the educational work now required.

The school has become overloaded because so much else has been stripped away. Youth services, libraries, adult education, public space, community support, mental health provision, local culture, civic trust. Schools are asked to compensate for broken social infrastructure while being judged as if children arrive untouched by poverty, housing, hunger, trauma, digital life, family stress, racism, disability, loneliness or the low hum of national exhaustion.

Then, when children struggle, the system names the child.

Disruptive.

Absent.

Low ability.

Not engaged.

Behind.

At risk.

Excluded.

The labels may sometimes describe something real, but they rarely ask the deeper question: what kind of educational world did this child enter, and what did it make possible or impossible?

Ivan Illich warned us about institutions that define need and then present themselves as the solution. Schooling did exactly that. It taught us to believe that education is something delivered by authorised institutions, in authorised spaces, according to authorised sequences, measured by authorised outcomes. Learning outside that frame became informal, secondary, supplementary, enrichment, hobby, life experience. Nice, perhaps. Not quite official.

But human beings do not learn only officially.

They learn in streets, kitchens, parks, buses, bedrooms, workshops, care homes, libraries, shops, gardens, online spaces, youth clubs, community centres, arguments, friendships, work, grief, boredom, failure, repair, play and the strange accidental moments when the world breaks through the programme. Illich understood the educational power of the unplanned. Colin Ward understood that children read and remake the city long before adults give them permission. Paulo Freire understood that education must help people read the world, not merely decode approved texts about it. Dewey understood that education is life itself, not preparation for life. bell hooks understood that liberation requires the whole person to enter the learning space. Holt understood that children often learn more about fear, evasion and performance from school than any curriculum document is willing to admit.

These thinkers do not give us a finished model.

They give us permission to stop mistaking the current one for destiny.

The Education Resource Centre is one attempt to imagine what comes after that permission.

Not a school with beanbags.

Not a youth club with better Wi-Fi.

Not a library rebrand.

Not alternative provision in a nicer font.

Not an edtech showroom where children are quietly handed over to platforms while adults congratulate themselves on modernity.

An Education Resource Centre is a public learning commons. A civic institution built around the understanding that education is self-actuated, supported, social, practical, intellectual, digital, emotional, democratic and lifelong. It gathers resources, but understands resources broadly: books, tools, workshops, studios, kitchens, digital labs, AI systems, mentors, peers, elders, archives, gardens, questions, histories, community problems, expert knowledge and lived experience.

It asks a different first question.

Not, “What lesson are you in?”

But, “What are you trying to understand, make, solve, practise, repair, question, express or become?”

That question changes everything.

It changes the learner from passive recipient to active participant. It changes the adult from commander to facilitator, without removing expertise or authority. It changes assessment from exam worship to evidence of growth. It changes community from backdrop to curriculum. It changes AI from cheating machine or corporate saviour into one tool in the commons. It changes inclusion from retrofit to design principle. It changes education from childhood processing to public infrastructure.

The model is not anti-structure.

That accusation must be buried properly. Education Resource Centres would need more intelligent structure, not less. Safeguarding. Core skills. Literacy. Numeracy. Direct teaching. Specialist support. Portfolios. External moderation. Qualifications. Formal pathways. Professional facilitators. Community governance. Clear entitlements. Rigorous evaluation. Strong public funding. AI ethics. SEND expertise. Family support. Serious training. Public accountability.

Freedom without scaffolding reproduces inequality.

Support without freedom reproduces schooling.

That is the hinge.

Self-actuated learning does not mean leaving learners alone to discover themselves while adults hover nearby composing grant reports. It means learning activated from within the learner and supported from around them. It means curiosity, interest, anger, skill, need, place, identity and question become starting points, not endpoints. The facilitator’s job is to widen the room. Gaming opens into code, narrative, ethics and probability. Cooking opens into chemistry, culture, health and budgeting. A local housing problem opens into politics, statistics, planning, law and journalism. Music opens into maths, history, technology and emotion. A bike repair opens into mechanics, sustainability, design and care.

Relevance begins the journey.

It does not limit the destination.

That distinction is crucial, especially for working-class learners and marginalised communities. Too often, education systems offer the poor a smaller education dressed up as practicality. Life skills instead of philosophy. Employability instead of history. Behaviour repair instead of intellectual depth. Basic competence instead of beauty. The Education Resource Centre must reject that. Every learner has the right to powerful knowledge, difficult knowledge, abstract knowledge, practical knowledge, creative knowledge, civic knowledge, and the kind of knowledge that makes them harder to manage.

That is why inclusion sits at the heart of the model.

Not as a separate department.

Not as a laminated policy.

Not as the heroic labour of a SENCO trying to hold back the tide with a spreadsheet and a half-hour meeting.

Inclusion means designing from difference. It means understanding that there is no standard learner, only systems that pretend there is one because administration finds variety inconvenient. It means sensory-conscious spaces, flexible time, assistive technology, direct support, trauma-informed relationships, high expectations, multiple forms of assessment, family trust, specialist provision and dignity. It means not making children prove distress before the environment adapts. It means seeing the learner who does not fit not as the problem to be solved, but as the test of whether the system deserves to exist.

If an Education Resource Centre only works for the confident, articulate, already-supported learner, then it has failed.

The measure is the anxious learner. The autistic learner. The dyslexic learner. The young carer. The excluded learner. The bored learner. The angry learner. The traumatised learner. The gifted but institutionally allergic learner. The learner who has been told, explicitly or quietly, that education is not for them.

Can the model make a place for them without lowering the ceiling?

That is the test.

Assessment must follow the same logic. Exams may remain where useful, but they cannot remain the organising religion of childhood. A grade can be useful. It can also be absurdly small. It cannot show the whole learner. It cannot show process, reflection, collaboration, contribution, recovery, revision, teaching, making, caring, questioning or the moment a young person begins to believe their own mind has weight.

Portfolios, exhibitions, peer review, mentor feedback, practical demonstrations, written work, oral defence, formal qualifications and public contribution together give a richer picture. They show learning in motion. They make it harder for AI to replace thought because the learner must explain process, choices, mistakes, evidence and development. They allow literacy and numeracy to be protected without reducing all education to test preparation. They honour the fact that real competence often appears through doing, revising, explaining and contributing, not merely through sitting silently under timed conditions.

The grade pins.

The portfolio moves.

And education is movement.

The evidence does not give us a finished national ERC system. It gives us something more honest: the components are already alive. Peer tutoring works when structured. Metacognition matters when taught properly. Collaborative learning works when designed well. Makerspaces can develop practical and creative capacities. Reggio Emilia shows the pedagogical power of environment, documentation and civic respect for children. Hellerup shows how architecture can embody different assumptions. Big Picture Learning shows advisory relationships, projects, exhibitions and internships can structure serious personalised learning. Democratic schools show that young people can participate in governance. Libraries, Idea Stores, DOKK1 and public makerspaces show that learning infrastructure can exist beyond school. AI research suggests potential when tools support rather than replace thinking.

None of this proves the whole model.

It does prove the model is not fantasy.

The organs are alive. What is missing is the public body to hold them together.

International comparison makes the same point in another way. Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Reggio Emilia, South Korea, each teaches something different. Trust matters. Digital public infrastructure matters. Architecture matters. Documentation matters. Civic culture matters. Seriousness about learning matters. But performance is not the same as human flourishing. A system can produce results and still wound the people inside it. A system can credential people without genuinely educating them. A system can appear successful because it has become very good at measuring what it already values.

The lesson is not that Britain should copy anyone.

The lesson is that education systems are choices.

Britain has made choices too. High-stakes accountability. Market logic. Inspection pressure. Narrowing measures. Weakening public infrastructure. Treating adult education, youth work and libraries as expendable edges. Expecting schools to fix what social policy damages. Treating technology as either threat or procurement opportunity. Reducing community knowledge to enrichment. Treating children as future workers before they are present citizens.

These choices can be unmade.

Or, more accurately, better choices can be built.

That building must begin carefully. Not with revolution by press conference. Not with abolishing every school and hoping Tuesday discovers a pedagogy. It begins with pilots, places and proof. A serious Education Resource Centre in a real community. High-status, publicly funded, professionally staffed, democratically governed, properly evaluated. Start where need is great, but do not create second-class provision. Build with the community, not on it. Use existing civic spaces where possible. Connect libraries, colleges, universities, youth work, adult learning, digital access, workshops, family support and local expertise. Give every learner a named facilitator and a learning plan. Protect core skills. Offer qualifications. Build portfolios. Publish evidence. Learn from failure. Build again.

Hull would be one place to imagine this, not as a site of deficiency, but as a city dense with memory, humour, struggle, culture and local intelligence. But the model could grow elsewhere too, shaped by place. The point is not to clone. The point is to create a national framework for local learning commons.

A country serious about education would not ask only how to improve schools.

It would ask what public learning infrastructure the twenty-first century requires.

Because the future we are sending young people into is not stable. AI is transforming knowledge work. Climate crisis is reshaping place. Misinformation is corroding public life. Work is insecure. Communities are fragmented. Mental health is strained. Democracy is brittle. Loneliness is rising. The old promise that school leads neatly to job, stability, citizenship and belonging now looks increasingly like a brochure from a country that no longer exists.

In that world, children need more than schooling.

Adults need more than memories of schooling.

Communities need more than underfunded institutions trying to survive.

We need places where people learn how to learn again. Together. Across age, background and ability. With books and tools, screens and gardens, arguments and archives, kitchens and studios, data and stories, AI and human judgement, formal knowledge and local memory. Places where practical intelligence and academic knowledge meet without one patronising the other. Places where young people are not processed but known. Places where adults can return to learning without shame. Places where older generations are not discarded. Places where community problems become shared inquiry. Places where education is not a corridor to the labour market but a practice of freedom, competence, contribution and democratic life.

That is what Education Resource Centres could be.

Not perfect.

Not easy.

Not cheap.

Not immune to bureaucracy, capture, failure, stupidity, political cowardice or the British instinct to turn every good idea into a pilot scheme with a logo and no heating.

But possible.

And possibility matters.

Because one of the most damaging things a failing system does is shrink imagination. It teaches people that the current arrangement is the only serious arrangement. That every alternative is naïve. That every radical proposal is childish. That realism means accepting managed decline with better branding. That the best we can do is repair the machinery, oil the gears, adjust the sorting mechanism and hope fewer children fall through before the next inspection cycle.

No.

Realism should begin with reality.

The reality is that schooling, as currently designed, is too narrow for the educational, social and civic tasks being demanded of it.

The reality is that teachers cannot keep absorbing the failures of wider society while being blamed for the results.

The reality is that children learn in the world, not only in classrooms.

The reality is that communities hold knowledge the system wastes.

The reality is that exams measure some things and distort others.

The reality is that AI will change learning whether institutions are ready or not.

The reality is that inclusion cannot be built as an afterthought.

The reality is that public learning infrastructure has been weakened precisely when we need it most.

And the reality is that education is too important to leave trapped inside one inherited institutional form.

The school was one way of organising education.

It does not have to be the last.

If Britain is serious about learning, it must become brave enough to imagine education after school.

All essays in this series sit inside Radical Education, an archive for rethinking learning beyond the limits of schooling, obedience, exams, and institutional imagination.

I deliberately left this one alone until after the Clacton by-election.

Nigel Farage published a Substack article during the Clacton campaign, and I didn’t want a forensic rebuttal getting muddled up with the election circus. Well, the circus has packed away, Nigel has got the job back that he resigned from, the parliamentary investigation into his £5 million gift can get moving again, and I can finally return to the article itself.

And Christ, there is a lot to unpack.

The clever thing about Farage’s piece is that it isn’t made entirely of lies. That would actually make it easier. Instead, it uses real crimes, real criminals, real security concerns and real failures of the asylum system, then stitches them together into a story the evidence simply does not support.

The method is simple. Find the most appalling individual cases you can. Put them one after another. Remove every denominator. Remove every comparison. Remove every inconvenient fact about the wider population. Then tell the reader that these cases reveal what “these men” are like.

That is not statistics. It is a horror anthology with a political manifesto stapled to the back.

Farage begins with the story of a man stabbed to death in France and claims the suspected killers had fled across the Channel among 165 people in one enormous dinghy. There really was a 165-person crossing on 23 July. It was, at the time, the largest recorded single-boat crossing, although it has since been surpassed by one carrying 230 people. But the murder connection was reported as a suspicion, with the alleged killers believed or feared to have boarded the boat. I cannot find evidence that this has subsequently been established as fact by French or British authorities.

Notice the trick immediately. An allegation becomes the opening scene. The uncertainty disappears into the prose and the emotional conclusion arrives before the evidence has put its trousers on.

Then come the criminals.

Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai is real. He murdered 21-year-old Thomas Roberts in Bournemouth. He had previously been convicted in absentia of two murders in Serbia and had lied about his age when he arrived in Britain. It was a catastrophic failure of the system and an appalling crime. Fayaz Khan really did threaten Farage and was jailed for five years. Three asylum seekers really were convicted over the horrific rape of an incapacitated woman on Brighton beach. Those victims deserve something rather better than becoming props in anybody’s immigration campaign.

But after establishing that individual asylum seekers have committed terrible crimes, Farage quietly swaps the subject.

We are no longer talking about Abdulrahimzai or Khan. We are suddenly talking about “these men”, then “the criminals arriving in Britain”, then the “violence and chaos” supposedly being imported from whole countries.

That’s where the argument falls apart.

If I gave you the most gruesome murders committed by British-born men during the past five years, one after another, and then concluded that British men were inherently dangerous, Nigel would quite rightly call me a lunatic. You cannot establish the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of people by arranging notorious offenders in a row like mugshots.

And the awkward problem for anyone trying to prove Farage’s broader claim is that Britain does not even produce the comprehensive offender-by-asylum-status dataset you would need to make it. The Office for National Statistics was specifically asked for figures on asylum seekers accused of rape and violent or sexual assault and replied that it does not hold that specific offender data.

So Farage cannot demonstrate from national crime statistics that asylum seekers as a group are more criminal than everybody else. Instead, he demonstrates that some asylum seekers are criminals.

Well done. Some vicars are criminals. Some MPs are criminals. Some policemen are criminals. I wouldn’t recommend building immigration policy by wandering through the Old Bailey shouting, “LOOK, ANOTHER ONE.”

He next tells us that more than 75% of small-boat arrivals are adult men. That one is broadly true. Official Home Office statistics show that since 2018 around three-quarters of small-boat arrivals have been adult males. The broader category of detected illegal-route arrivals is currently about 71% adult men.

Then he immediately poisons his own accurate statistic by adding that some of the remaining people will really be adult men pretending to be children.

How many? He doesn’t say. What percentage? No idea. Evidence? Not supplied.

It’s a lovely little Farage flourish. Start with a number that can be checked, then sprinkle an unquantified suspicion over whatever remains.

He also says around 200,000 people have crossed in small boats since 2018. Again, broadly correct. But notice what disappears from the picture. Almost all small-boat arrivals historically have claimed asylum, and the people arriving are disproportionately from countries including Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Somalia. In the year ending March 2026, those were the five largest nationalities arriving by small boat.

Those are not exactly nations famous for their abundance of peace, liberal democracy and functioning institutions.

Farage’s next exhibit is the asylum-hotel crime figure. This one is particularly instructive because the underlying reporting does contain something worth discussing. An investigation found 339 residents of 105 asylum hotels had appeared before courts in the first six months of 2025, involving offences ranging from theft and violence to sexual offences. Nobody serious should shrug at that. Crimes should be investigated, offenders prosecuted and, where the law permits after sentence, foreign offenders removed.

But the same reporting calculated the number as around one person in every hundred residents of those hotels and noted that the crude rate of court appearances was lower than that of the wider population. There are obvious demographic complications in comparing the two groups, but it certainly does not establish Farage’s sweeping claim that asylum accommodation is stuffed with roaming predators.

He gives you the numerator. He forgets to bring the denominator.

Funny how often that happens.

Then we arrive at Iran, where Farage has found something genuinely serious and somehow still manages to overcook it.

Three Iranian nationals really were charged under the National Security Act with allegedly assisting Iran’s intelligence service and preparing or facilitating serious violence. They had entered Britain irregularly over a period of years, by routes including small boats and a lorry. Those allegations are extremely serious and absolutely justify questions about vetting and national security. The men deny the charges and the proceedings remain subject to the criminal process.

There have also been credible reports that British authorities believe Iran has attempted to exploit irregular migration routes for covert operatives. Given the wider Iranian state threat to Britain, nobody sensible should wave that away.

But Farage then performs another magic trick.

Three charged men become evidence that “for every terrorist we catch, you can be assured that another one has slipped through the net.”

Can I? That’s a very precise-sounding assertion for something accompanied by absolutely no number whatsoever. One caught equals one escaped. Apparently.

Why not two? Why not seven? Why not 0.14?

This isn’t intelligence analysis. It’s Nigel’s Terrorist Buy-One-Get-One-Free offer.

If MI5 possesses evidence that every identified hostile-state operative implies another unidentified operative has entered by small boat, then by all means publish it. Farage doesn’t. He simply tells the reader to be “assured” that his imagination has the same evidential status as an intelligence assessment.

Then there is Ceuta.

The recent events there were extraordinary. Tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the tiny Spanish enclave during a chaotic mass movement, many subsequently returning or being returned, and people died. Spain and Morocco have been dealing with an enormous humanitarian and security crisis.

Farage takes this event in North Africa and announces that it proves an “invasion of Europe, and an invasion of Britain.”

Britain is approximately 1,200 miles away.

Most of the people who entered Ceuta subsequently went back into Morocco. Thousands remain, and Spain is processing removals and asylum cases. There is no evidence that tens of thousands of those people are now marching north with Dover programmed into Google Maps.

But “complicated migration crisis in a Spanish enclave with most participants returning to Morocco” doesn’t quite have the same Wagnerian thunder as INVASION OF BRITAIN, does it?

And that word, invasion, does enormous work throughout the article.

An invasion is a military act. It has an aggressor, an objective and organised hostile force. The people crossing the Channel include refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, trafficking victims, people without valid claims, criminals and, potentially, hostile-state operatives. It is precisely because the population is mixed that governments have borders, screening, asylum procedures, intelligence services, police and courts.

Calling the entire movement an invading army allows Farage to erase every distinction between an Eritrean fleeing persecution, a Sudanese refugee, a smuggler, a rapist and an Iranian intelligence operative.

They’re all just the invasion now. Very convenient.

That framing becomes downright absurd when he gets to the Royal Navy.

Farage says Reform would detect every boat, intercept it, transfer everybody aboard to a safe vessel and take them back to France.

There is a tiny problem called France.

You cannot simply decide that another sovereign country will accept hundreds or thousands of people deposited on its coastline because Britain has announced a new policy. Returns require a legal and diplomatic framework. Britain already has a returns agreement with France under which some small-boat arrivals can be returned in exchange for people entering Britain through a controlled legal route. That agreement exists precisely because returns require French consent.

Farage knows this, which is why halfway through announcing his “straightforward” solution he suddenly starts hoping Marine Le Pen’s political allies win power in France.

Excellent. The straightforward British border-control plan depends on the result of next year’s French election.

Nothing says “taking back control” like outsourcing your immigration policy to French voters. And if France doesn’t cooperate? Farage tells us not to worry because he doesn’t believe French forces would fire on Royal Marines.

Just contemplate where his argument has arrived.

We began with “stop the boats”.

Within a few paragraphs we are discussing the reassuringly low probability of armed confrontation between British and French forces because Nigel would like to deposit people on French territory without an agreed mechanism for doing so.

The Royal Navy itself has legal obligations at sea. Ships have duties to rescue people in distress, including under the international law of the sea, and coastal states have corresponding responsibilities in territorial waters. You cannot turn those obligations off because somebody has written STOP THE INVASION on the mission folder.

More importantly, France is already intercepting boats and returning people. French maritime authorities have stopped boats at sea repeatedly this year, while French police have disrupted launches, seized equipment and arrested smugglers. Small-boat arrivals were down around 43% between January and mid-July compared with the same period in 2025, despite Farage writing as though everybody in France is standing on the beach waving them through.

That reduction may not last. Migration is volatile and weather, enforcement, European migration flows and smuggler tactics all matter. But it creates another problem for Nigel’s narrative.

At the precise moment he is announcing that Britain is undergoing an ever-intensifying invasion, the number of people crossing has fallen substantially compared with last year.

Meanwhile smugglers have adapted by using fewer but vastly larger boats. The average number of people per vessel has risen enormously, and we’ve now seen boats carrying 128, 165, 173 and finally 230 people. That’s dangerous and it demands policy. It also demonstrates something Farage never seems terribly interested in: border enforcement changes smugglers’ behaviour rather than making human movement disappear by ministerial decree.

Then he dismisses safe and legal routes because, he says, they would simply bring more people here.

And there lies the philosophical core of the whole piece. Farage doesn’t merely object to people arriving illegally. He explicitly says he doesn’t want them arriving legally either.

Because for most refugees there is no general British “asylum visa” they can apply for at an embassy abroad. Britain has specific humanitarian schemes, resettlement programmes and sponsorship routes, but they are limited and targeted. UNHCR has repeatedly pointed out that irregular arrival is often how people seek protection because an asylum applicant does not usually possess a neat government-approved route from persecution to Heathrow arrivals.

The Refugee Convention itself recognises this reality. Article 31 protects refugees in specified circumstances from penalties simply because they entered a country irregularly.

You can absolutely argue about how broad Britain’s asylum obligations should be. You can argue about safe-country rules, removals, detention, processing, international agreements and how many refugees Britain should accept.

But stop pretending “come legally” is the answer if your next sentence is we don’t want you coming legally either.

That’s not an argument about the route. That’s an argument about the refugee.

And perhaps the ugliest sentence in the entire piece is tucked almost casually among all the statistics and murder cases:

“Leopards don’t change their spots.”

Think about what he has just done there. He has selected criminals from a population and then reached for a phrase meaning inherent character cannot change.

Not those particular criminals. “The criminals arriving in Britain.”

Then he keeps widening the lens until “violence and chaos” from foreign countries are supposedly being imported into our streets and schools.

This is why I waited until after the election to dismantle the article. Because beneath all the boats and figures and lurid crimes is the political technique Farage has perfected for decades.

Take a real problem. Find its most frightening examples. Strip away proportion. Collapse asylum seeker, illegal entrant, criminal, terrorist and foreign agent into one silhouette.

Call the silhouette an invading army.

Then offer a beautifully simple solution which turns out, on examination, to require French consent, international agreements, maritime law, functioning asylum procedures, enormous detention capacity and, apparently, a favourable French election result.

There are serious problems with Britain’s asylum system. People who have no right to remain should be removed more efficiently. Dangerous offenders should not be wandering around because government departments failed to exchange information. Age assessments must work. Intelligence screening matters. Smuggling gangs need dismantling. Nobody should have to pretend otherwise simply because Farage talks about the subject.

But fear doesn’t become evidence just because you type it angrily.

Three Iranian defendants do not prove every boat contains terrorists. A collection of horrific crimes does not establish the criminality of an entire migrant population. A crisis in Ceuta does not mean Britain is being invaded. A 75% male statistic does not prove the other 25% are lying. A French state which is already intercepting boats has not become an “extension of the smuggling gangs”. And the Royal Navy cannot tow human beings into another sovereign country by the power of Nigel’s confidence.

Farage’s article begins with murder and ends with the Navy.

Everything between those two points is designed to make you frightened enough that you stop asking what the numbers actually show.

Unfortunately for Nigel, I rather enjoy asking.

And now the election is over, I have plenty of time to focus on every nasty little move Nigel makes.

Further Reading

Who Is Behind Turning Point UK?: Nick Tenconi, UKIP and the network bringing American-style Christian nationalism into British politics

When Does a Riot Become Terrorism: The uncomfortable question raised by Thetford

The World’s Smallest Violin for Britain’s Biggest Victim

The Ann Widdecombe Case and the Mechanics of Narrative Collapse

Bin Face vs Frog Face - Special Report: Clacton 2026 Candidate Assessment

The Political Obituary of Nigel Farage (We Hope)

Nigel Farage: The Billionaire’s Man of the People

The Fall of Nigel Farage: The Pint-Man Prophet Finds the Bar Tab

Farage’s Brexit Betrayal Myth Is Just the Same Old Con in a New Hat

Farage Is Not Demanding Democracy. He Is Demanding Advantage.

Farage vs the Evidence: A forensic dismantling of the “two-tier Britain” narrative

How Do You Bring Them Back?: The Outrage Machine, the Failure of Politics, and the Working-Class Case for Reason How do you bring them back?

The Tide Is Coming In: Migration Is History Coming Home

Don’t Let Them Turn Henry Nowak Into a Race War Poster

Is Britain Turning Far Right, or Is the Megaphone Just Too Loud?

Fear, Freedom, and the Emotional Architecture of Politics

Democracy, Populism, and the Death of the Nation-State

Reform UK and the Cult of the Outrage Machine

Normalising Hate: The Political Decay of Post-Brexit Britain

Exposing the “Grooming Gangs” Myth: White British Men and the Truth About Sexual Abuse in the UK

The Big Lie vs The Big Truth: Who Really Abuses Women and Children in the UK

Debunking Common Myths About Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in the UK

I have been doing quite a bit of serious work lately. Proper research. Money trails. Christian nationalism. Project 2025. The cult machinery around MAGA. All the dark stuff. All the “sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and quietly wonder whether civilisation has maybe eaten a bad mushroom” stuff. Not Andrew Tate, we’re in The Matrix type stuff, more a “Dude, I am trippin’ my tits off right now” vibe.

So today I wanted something lighter.

Not less political, obviously. Everything is political when the most powerful man on Earth keeps saying things that sound like they were assembled by toddler with fridge magnets. But lighter in the sense that sometimes you do have to step back from the horror, read a collection of Donald Trump’s most stupid quotes, and allow yourself the simple democratic pleasure of taking the piss.

Indy100 has pulled together a list of 52 of Trump’s stupidest lines, and I have done the public service of reading them so you don’t have to. Not all fifty-two, because even I have limits, and because there are only so many times a human brain can absorb the phrase “windmills are driving whales crazy” before it starts looking for a quiet place to lie down. I’ve lived the nightmare of bad local spoken word nights, I still have flash-backs to awkward words juxtapositions. But Trump takes it to a different level.

So I picked my favourites.

Not the most evil. Not the most dangerous. Not the most historically important. Just the ones where Donald appears to leave the known world entirely and wander off into that little orange dream-space where geography, maths, science, medicine, foreign policy and the English language all stand around looking embarrassed.

Let’s start with Spain.

Donald Trump apparently claimed Spain was a BRICS nation. Spain. The country in Europe. Spain of tapas, flamenco, paella, Real Madrid, Barcelona, NATO membership, the European Union, and absolutely no known involvement in the founding acronym of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

And the beautiful thing is not just that he was wrong. Donald being wrong is not news. Donald is wrong with the dependability of gravity. The beautiful thing is that he said it with that Trumpian confidence, that “I alone have just discovered geography” glow. He even added something along the lines of, “Do you know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out.”

Yes, Donald. We did figure it out. That is the problem. You didn’t figure it out.

This is what he does. He explains things he does not understand to people who do understand them, then acts as if their confusion is caused by their ignorance rather than his. It is not a mistake. It is a whole personality structure wearing a red tie. He doubles down of dumb. That’s dumb, with a “b”. But we’ll get to that later.

Then there is the drug-pricing quote, where he claimed prices could come down by “1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 per cent.”

This one is special because it is not merely stupid. It is mathematically impossible in a way that feels almost artistic.

A 100 per cent price cut takes something to zero. That is it. That is the bottom of the lift shaft. A 1,500 per cent price cut would mean the pharmacist hands you the tablets, gives you your money back, pays your mortgage, sends your mum some flowers, and apologises on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.

But Donald does not use numbers as numbers. He uses them as noises. Big noises. Manly noises. Tremendous noises. A number is not there to measure anything. It is there to make the sentence look like it has muscles. Big numbers. Manly numbers. Donald sized numbers.

So a normal politician might say, “We reduced costs.” Donald says, “One thousand five hundred per cent,” because in his head bigger is always truer, even when maths itself is standing nearby with a migraine and a nosebleed.

Then we have paper straws.

Donald says paper straws “explode.”

Not bend. Not collapse. Not go soggy. Explode.

Somewhere in the deep personal trauma archive of Donald J. Trump, there is clearly a paper straw incident. A moment. A wound. A betrayal. Perhaps he once tried to drink a Diet Coke through one, it softened slightly, and from that day onwards environmental policy became personal. The paper straws were out to ruin Donald’s life.

A paper straw did not perform masculinity correctly in front of him, and now the whole planet has to suffer.

This is the absurdity of it. The world is burning, seas are rising, democracies are collapsing, billionaires are strip-mining the future, and Donald is standing there like a toddler in a McDonalds declaring war on biodegradable drinking tubes because one of them got damp, and ruined his sucking experience. It’s okay Donald, you suck massively, no-one sucks like you, people, important people, they look at you Donald, with tears welling in their eyes, and say, you suck Donald.

Moving on, we come to the whales.

“The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

Obviously.

That word is doing so much work it should be paid overtime. There is no argument. No evidence. No marine biology. No serious environmental analysis. Just Donald looking at offshore wind and deciding that whales are psychologically distressed by turbines.

In his mind, somewhere beneath the waves, a whale psychiatrist is presumably saying, “I’m afraid it’s the windmills again.” A pod of whales is sitting in a support group, trying to process renewable energy. One of them has started smoking. Another can no longer listen to Fleetwood Mac without wailing.

This is what happens when a man builds his worldview out of golf-course planning disputes and cable news graphics. Windmills annoy Donald, therefore they must be evil. And if they are evil, they cannot merely produce clean energy in a way he finds visually displeasing. No, they must also be driving whales mad, ruining television, lowering property values, killing birds, stealing wind and possibly teaching dolphins about communism, through the medium of low vibrations.

Then there is the election claim. Donald said he probably won all fifty states.

He won thirty-one.

Now, I am not a trained American electoral scholar, but I do know that thirty-one is not fifty. Even in Britain, where our democracy was clearly designed by a drunk aristocrat trying to make sure nobody normal understood it, especially not the unwashed masses, we can still count to fifty.

But Trump does not lose in his own mind. He is not capable of it. If Donald loses, the world has made an administrative error. The ballots are wrong. The judges are wrong. The states are wrong. The maps are wrong. The machines are wrong. The dead Venezuelan communists are wrong. Everyone is wrong except the man who looks at a defeat and announces it was actually a clean sweep because his feelings have certified the result. I mean is numbers are pliable in Donald’s world of maths, statistics have no chance. The percentage sign % is just something Donald adds to numbers to make them sound powerful.

That is not politics. That is a toddler declaring he won Monopoly because he likes hotels, while stuffing as many as he can up his nose.

Then came possibly the most Trumpian definition of a ceasefire ever attempted.

A ceasefire, according to Donald, can mean shooting “in a more moderate manner.”

Ceasefire. Cease… Fire… Oh for fuck’s sake Donald.

The word is doing everything it can to help him. It has arrived with instructions built in. It is not a difficult diplomatic term buried inside a treaty. It is two plain words standing there in a high-vis jacket waving little flags, with “STOP KILLING PEOPLE” emblazoned across it.

And Donald still gets to: “shooting, but politely.”

Moderate shooting. Civilised bombing. Missiles with manners. A lovely little peace process where everyone keeps firing, but perhaps with a softer tone and better lighting, and an armour tipped apology delivered with every bomb dropped.

It is foreign policy as explained by a man trying to negotiate with a toaster.

Then we have spelling, where Trump announced that most people do not know the word “dumb” ends with a B.

Most people do know that, Donald. Just because you just worked it out, doesn’t mean it’s a revelation to the rest of us that learned that when we were in first grade.

Children know that. Teachers know that. People who once glanced at a cereal box know that. The silent B in dumb is not ancient forbidden knowledge handed down by monks. It is not the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is primary school spelling bee, ironically.

But this is another little window into the Trump mind. He discovers an ordinary fact late in life, mistakes his own delay for public ignorance, then announces it as if he has cracked the code of human language.

“Most people don’t know dumb ends with a B.”

Yes they do, Donald. Most people with a brain also know Spain is not BRICS, a ceasefire means stop firing, and paper straws do not detonate.

Oh and, there is no “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

This one sounds like a diplomatic emergency falling down the stairs.

Japan is not the Islamic Republic of Japan. Iran is not Japan. These are not niche confusions. This is not mixing up two obscure subcommittees at a trade conference. This is confusing a major East Asian country with a Middle Eastern Islamic republic while somehow remaining the person allowed to speak on behalf of American foreign policy.

Imagine being the aide in the room. Imagine having spent your morning preparing briefing papers, regional maps, military notes, threat assessments, trade figures, pronunciation guides, and then the President opens his mouth and invents halal Tokyo.

At some point the adults in the room must just stare at the carpet and wait for the sentence to end.

Then we get “I love the inflation.”

Now, this is a man whose entire act depends on blaming inflation on everyone else. Migrants. Democrats. China. Windmills. Electric cars. Paper straws. Judges. Postal ballots. Whales. Possibly Spain joining BRICS.

And then out comes: “I love the inflation.”

It is magnificent. It is like an arsonist launching a campaign called Big Fan of Fire.

Of course his defenders will explain it. They always explain it. He was joking. He was being sarcastic. He meant something very sophisticated about macroeconomic pressure. He was speaking in coded genius. You simply do not understand the eleven-dimensional chess of a man who thinks a ceasefire is moderate shooting.

No. He said the stupid thing. Again. He does it almost daily.

Then he claimed people call him the president of Europe.

No they do not.

I can help here, as someone sitting on this side of the Atlantic. Nobody in Europe calls Donald Trump the president of Europe. Nobody is walking out of a meeting in Brussels saying, “Thank God the orange emperor has spoken.” Nobody in France is putting down a croissant and whispering, “At last, Europe has a leader.” Nobody in Germany is updating official documents to reflect the new continental arrangement under President Spray Tan.

This is imaginary nickname syndrome. Trump write himself autobiographical fan fiction in his head, then quotes it as diplomacy.

Then there is Maine lobster.

Donald said you had to go to Japan to get a Maine lobster.

A Maine lobster. From Maine. Yes that place on the USA famous for lobster.

This is such a beautifully stupid sentence that it almost becomes poetry. Maine lobster, famous mainly for being from Maine, apparently required trans-Pacific travel until Donald personally reopened a geography book, and thought of food.

And finally, there is the golden dome and the “SS Abraham Lincoln.”

This one has everything. War. Gold. Ships. Missiles. Wrong terminology. Big strong man noises. The smell of a half-remembered action film being narrated by someone eating KFC chicken off a silver tray in the War Room under the White House.

Trump talks about a golden dome over America because of course he does. In Donald’s mind, safety must be gold. Defence must be gold. Buildings must be gold. Toilets should probably be gold. The country itself, if it is lucky, might one day be covered in a massive gold lid like a casino butter dish.

Then he talks about the Abraham Lincoln and calls it the “SS Abraham Lincoln,” because why learn naval terminology when you can simply make sounds with authority?

This is the thing that still gets me. It is not just that he gets things wrong. It is the confidence. The full-body confidence. The absolute absence of shame. A normal person mispronounces something and feels a small internal collapse. Donald misnames a ship, rewrites a war, invents a dome, moves Spain into BRICS, turns ceasefire into moderate shooting, and walks away believing he has once again improved reality.

And that is why these quotes are funny, but not only funny.

They are funny because they are absurd. They are funny because the most powerful man in America often sounds like someone reading half a headline while falling asleep in a golf cart.

But they are also revealing.

This is not ordinary stupidity. Ordinary stupidity can be humble. Ordinary stupidity can learn. Ordinary stupidity can say, “Oh, I got that wrong.”

Trumpian stupidity is different. It is stupidity with power, with applause, with sycophantic staffers, with nuclear codes. Stupidity with a fanbase trained to treat every correction as an attack and every error as secret wisdom.

That is the cult bit. Not simply that Donald says ridiculous things. Ridiculous people say ridiculous things all the time. There are men in pubs across the world right now explaining that speed cameras are a covert Russian communist surveillance plot and that oat milk is lowering testosterone.

The danger is that Donald says ridiculous things and millions of people immediately gather around the ridiculous thing to protect it. So we get the pushback against reality, that Spain is BRICS because Donald said so. Drug prices can fall by 1,500 per cent because Donald said so, he knows his numbers. Windmills are upsetting whales because Donald said so, he’s like Dr. Doolittle, he talks to the animals.

A ceasefire can involve shooting because Donald said so, and Donald wrote The Art of War. Well someone ghost wrote The Art of The Steal, but it was going to be called The Art of War, if that ancient Chinese bloke hadn’t stolen Donald’s title.

And don’t forget he probably won all fifty states because Donald said so. That is not politics. That is reality being asked to kneel, and swear an oath never to question Donald.

So yes, laugh at him. Please laugh at him. Mockery is not a distraction from authoritarianism. It is one of the ways we puncture it. These people want majesty. They want fear. They want flags, gold, eagles, motorcades, anthems, uniforms, giant letters, giant numbers, giant lies.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is point at the emperor and say:

Spain is not in BRICS, you ridiculous orange tit.

The China Election Lie Is Not About 2020

WHITE TRASH FUTURE: How America Became the Dystopian Sci-Fi Films It Once Warned Us About

WHITE TRASH HOUSE: How Trump Culture Drags America To The Lowest Common Denominator

The Myth of the Self-Made Nation: How Individualism Only Ever Worked Collectively

The Messiah Complex: When Leaders Start to Believe the Myth

The False Prophet: How Trump Became a Belief System

We Invented Culture, You Turned It Into Crass Consumerism: Britain Is a Civilisation. America Is a Franchise.

THE ROAD TO CIVIL WAR: How Far Down It Is America Already?

The Uncomfortable Truth: TRUMP CAN’T FINISH THIS TERM

No serious version of this argument begins with abolishing every school by Monday.

That may be emotionally satisfying in certain moods, especially after reading another education policy announcement written in the dead language of managerial confidence, but it would be ridiculous. Educational systems involve children, families, workers, communities, qualifications, laws, safeguarding, transport, meals, buildings, unions, local authorities, colleges, universities, employers, and the thousand invisible routines that hold ordinary life together. You do not throw all of that into the air and hope it lands in a more progressive shape.

That is not radicalism.

That is negligence with a slogan.

The task is not to smash the existing system overnight. The task is to build a credible alternative beside it, test it properly, learn from it honestly, and expand it where it works. If Education Resource Centres are to become a serious public model, they need to begin through pilots. Real places. Real learners. Real staff. Real communities. Real evaluation. Real problems. Real mistakes. Real revisions.

No fantasy.

No brochure.

No “transformational learning environment” launch event where everyone stands near a plant wall and pretends the procurement process was spiritual.

The first principle is simple: begin where the current system is already failing too many learners, but do not build a second-class provision for children the mainstream system wants to remove.

This distinction is vital.

There is a moral case for beginning in areas of high need: communities with high absence, high exclusion, SEND pressure, youth disengagement, poverty, weak public infrastructure, low adult skills, poor digital access, and limited cultural provision. These are the places where a richer public learning commons could make the greatest difference. But if the first ERCs are framed as places for “problem children,” the model will be poisoned from the beginning.

It must be high-status.

It must be properly funded.

It must be visibly better resourced than the provision it replaces or supplements.

It must not be alternative provision with a nicer sign.

That means the first pilots should be positioned as civic learning centres for whole communities, with dedicated pathways for young people, families and adults. They should be open to everyone, but with targeted support for learners most poorly served by the school system. The message should not be: this is where you go when school has failed you. The message should be: this is the new public learning infrastructure your community deserves.

That matters politically and psychologically.

People know when they are being given leftovers.

Working-class communities, deprived communities, marginalised families and excluded young people have had enough of being offered pilot schemes on temporary funding and then blamed when miracles do not emerge from a room with broken blinds and a part-time project worker. If this model begins, it must begin with seriousness.

Hull would be an obvious place to imagine such a pilot, not because Hull is deficient, but because it carries the exact mixture of history, deprivation, community knowledge, humour, neglect, pride, post-industrial identity and civic potential that this model is designed to recognise. Hull is a city with stories in its streets. Docks, fishing, industry, migration, poverty, resilience, culture, damage, survival, creativity, suspicion of outside narratives, and a deep local intelligence that rarely appears in policy language without being flattened into statistics.

An Education Resource Centre in Hull would not import a model from elsewhere and drop it into the city like an educational shipping container.

It would begin by asking Hull what it already knows.

Who are the local historians? The artists? The retired dockers and factory workers? The youth workers? The nurses? The carers? The musicians? The community cooks? The coders? The small business owners? The campaigners? The grandparents? The college tutors? The university lecturers? The librarians? The people who know the estates, the buses, the youth services that disappeared, the buildings that closed, the stories that never made it into the official archive?

That asset mapping would be the first stage.

Not as a token consultation exercise where local people are invited to share views that will later be summarised into three bullet points and ignored by a steering group. As the actual foundation of the centre.

The pilot process should begin with a community learning audit.

What educational resources already exist?

What spaces are underused?

Which young people are not engaging with school?

What support do families need?

What adult learning needs are unmet?

What skills exist locally but are not being passed on?

What community organisations are trusted?

What public buildings could be repurposed?

What digital access gaps exist?

What formal qualifications are most needed?

What local problems could become learning projects?

What histories need documenting?

What practical skills are disappearing?

What cultural work is already happening but under-resourced?

This matters because an ERC is not simply built out of policy. It is built out of place.

The second principle is to use and connect existing infrastructure before building from scratch. Britain is full of underused civic buildings, half-closed libraries, empty retail units, struggling community centres, college spaces, old schools, youth buildings, church halls, council properties, university outreach spaces and high streets that look like they are waiting for either regeneration or the final trumpet. Some spaces would need major investment. Some would be unsuitable. Some would be perfect.

The pilot should map buildings as educational assets.

A former library could become the reading, digital and family learning core.

A college workshop could support technical and vocational learning.

An empty high-street unit could become a public studio, repair café or youth media lab.

A community centre could host intergenerational learning and adult education.

A university could provide research support, mentoring and evaluation.

A park, allotment, river, estate or local business district could become part of the curriculum.

The ERC does not have to be one building, although a strong physical centre matters. It could be a hub-and-network model: one main public learning commons connected to satellite spaces. This may be especially important in rural or dispersed areas, but even in cities it makes sense. Learning should not be trapped in one building. The centre coordinates the ecology.

This would also help with cost. We do not need to begin by commissioning architectural fantasies with atriums, inspirational staircases and consultation-friendly glass. Start with civic reuse. Invest properly. Upgrade buildings. Make them beautiful where possible, because deprived communities are too often given functional ugliness and told to be grateful. But do not wait for a perfect new campus before the idea can begin.

A serious ERC pilot could begin in a reimagined library, college wing, youth centre, or combined civic building.

The key is not the novelty of the building.

The key is the learning ecology inside and around it.

The third principle is multidisciplinary staffing.

An ERC pilot cannot be staffed like a school, and it cannot be staffed like a youth project. It needs a blended professional team. At minimum, the core staff should include:

qualified teachers with subject expertise;

learning facilitators or advisers;

youth workers;

SEND specialists;

literacy and numeracy specialists;

digital and AI learning specialists;

librarians or information professionals;

workshop and technical staff;

creative practitioners;

mental health or counselling-linked professionals;

family support workers;

community development workers;

safeguarding leads;

assessment and portfolio coordinators;

administrative and operational staff who are respected rather than treated as furniture with passwords.

This is not a luxury list. It reflects the reality of the model. If we want education to be inclusive, community-rooted, practical, digital, reflective and safe, we need adults with the relevant expertise. The current system too often expects teachers to cover every social function while simultaneously improving exam outcomes and remembering to update the spreadsheet before Thursday. That is not sustainable.

The ERC redistributes adult work.

Teachers are still central, but they are not alone. Youth workers bring relational practice. Librarians bring information literacy. Community development workers bring local knowledge and trust-building. SEND specialists help design access. Technical staff make workshops safe and rigorous. Artists and makers bring practice. Digital specialists support AI and media literacy. Family workers connect learning to home realities. Facilitators hold the learner’s pathway.

This staffing model is not cheap.

Again: good.

Cheapness is not a virtue when the expensive version of failure is already everywhere.

The fourth principle is that every learner should have a named facilitator and a learning plan.

This is where the model becomes practical rather than atmospheric. A young person entering the ERC would not simply drift through options. They would be known. Their facilitator would work with them and their family, where appropriate, to develop a learning plan that includes core skills, interests, support needs, formal qualification aims, project work, wellbeing, peer learning, community engagement and portfolio development.

The plan would not be a bureaucratic cage. It would be reviewed regularly. It would adapt. It would include learner voice. But it would ensure direction.

A learner’s week might include direct literacy support, a science seminar, independent research, a community history project, a bike repair workshop, peer tutoring, AI-assisted revision, quiet reading, a maths session linked to budgeting, mentoring with a local craftsperson, portfolio review, physical activity, and a public presentation rehearsal.

Another learner might have a more structured route toward GCSEs or Functional Skills, with additional pastoral support and a smaller peer group.

Another might be working toward university access through extended reading, writing workshops, seminars, research projects and formal exams.

Another might be on a vocational and practical route involving workshops, employer placements, technical qualifications and reflective documentation.

The point is not that every learner’s programme becomes entirely bespoke chaos.

The point is that the centre offers multiple structured pathways through a shared learning commons.

The fifth principle is to build core learning entitlements.

Critics will rightly ask what every ERC learner is guaranteed to receive. The answer must be clear. Every young learner should have entitlement to:

literacy and numeracy development;

digital and AI literacy;

scientific understanding;

cultural and historical knowledge;

creative practice;

physical wellbeing;

civic education;

practical skills;

ethical reasoning;

community participation;

self-regulation and metacognitive development;

access to formal qualifications where needed;

pastoral and safeguarding support;

portfolio assessment;

peer and intergenerational learning;

quiet study, direct teaching and project-based learning.

This is not a narrowed curriculum. It is a widened one.

But widened does not mean vague. Each entitlement would need progression frameworks. Not the deadening kind where every human act becomes a measurable micro-outcome, but enough clarity to ensure that learners are not missing essential knowledge or skills. A learner should not spend three years doing interesting projects and emerge unable to read confidently, calculate accurately, verify information, write clearly or explain what they have learned.

The sixth principle is partnership with formal education routes.

ERCs should not become isolated islands. They must connect to colleges, universities, apprenticeships, employers, awarding bodies, libraries, arts organisations, health services, youth services and local authorities. These partnerships ensure progression, accreditation, specialist input and credibility.

A local college might deliver accredited vocational modules.

A university might support research methods, evaluation, mentoring and access pathways.

Libraries might support reading, archives and information literacy.

Employers might offer placements, but under strong ethical guidelines so learners are not treated as free labour with a reflective journal.

Arts organisations might support exhibitions and performances.

Health services might connect to wellbeing and public health learning.

Local authorities might connect civic learning to planning, environment, housing, transport and democratic participation.

The ERC becomes the hub that organises access.

This is especially important for learners from families without social capital. Middle-class families often build these networks privately. They know someone who knows someone. They arrange work experience, tutoring, mentoring, museum visits, internships, trips, applications, references. The ERC should make that network public.

Opportunity should not depend on who your parents can email.

The seventh principle is public assessment and external moderation from the start.

The pilot must not wait until year three to wonder how learning will be recognised. Assessment should be designed before the doors open. Each learner should build a portfolio. The centre should offer formal qualifications. There should be public exhibitions of learning. Peer and mentor feedback should be structured. Facilitator reviews should be regular. External moderators should review samples of work. Colleges and universities should help validate standards. Learners should leave with evidence that travels.

This is crucial for credibility.

A radical model without credible assessment will be dismissed.

A credible model without radical depth will be absorbed back into the old system.

The eighth principle is democratic governance.

An ERC cannot claim to be community-rooted while being governed like a distant academy trust. Local governance should include learners, families, staff, local residents, community organisations, local authority representatives, further and higher education partners, and relevant public services. It should have real decision-making power over priorities, partnerships, evaluation, use of space and community access.

There should be learner assemblies with actual influence. Family forums that do more than complain into a void. Community review meetings. Public reporting. Transparent budgets. Clear safeguarding oversight. Mechanisms for challenge.

This will be messy.

Of course it will.

Democracy is messy. Anyone who wants clean decision-making can always try monarchy, though reviews have been mixed.

The ninth principle is evaluation that measures what matters.

A pilot must be evaluated rigorously, but not through the narrow lens of conventional school performance alone. Evaluation should include:

engagement and attendance;

literacy and numeracy progress;

qualification outcomes;

portfolio quality;

learner wellbeing;

SEND access and support;

family engagement;

progression into further education, higher education, apprenticeships or work;

reduction in exclusions or severe absence among participating learners;

learner agency and confidence;

peer learning quality;

intergenerational participation;

community use of the centre;

adult learning outcomes;

digital inclusion;

staff wellbeing and retention;

safeguarding quality;

community impact.

Both quantitative and qualitative evidence are needed.

Numbers matter. Stories matter. Portfolios matter. Case studies matter. Longitudinal tracking matters. Community testimony matters. External evaluation matters. Learner voice matters.

The evaluation should ask not merely whether the ERC produces conventional outcomes, but whether it produces outcomes the conventional system struggles to recognise: renewed engagement, restored confidence, practical competence, civic participation, intergenerational trust, adult learning, local problem-solving, and the capacity to keep learning.

This does not mean avoiding hard data.

It means using better data.

The tenth principle is phased implementation.

A first ERC pilot might begin with a limited cohort of young people and wider community provision, rather than trying to replace all schooling immediately. For example:

Phase One: community audit, governance formation, building preparation, staff recruitment, partnership development.

Phase Two: open adult learning, digital access, family learning, youth workshops and community projects to build trust.

Phase Three: enrol a first cohort of young learners, perhaps including those at risk of exclusion, persistent absence, or disengagement, but not exclusively so.

Phase Four: expand pathways into qualifications, apprenticeships, higher education access and community enterprises.

Phase Five: evaluate, revise, publish findings, and begin additional pilots in different contexts.

This avoids the trap of grand national rollout before the model has learned how to walk.

But it also avoids the opposite trap: endless small pilots that never become policy because everyone is waiting for perfect evidence while the existing system continues harming children at scale.

Pilots should have expansion built in.

Not guaranteed expansion regardless of evidence, but a clear route from evaluation to scaling.

The eleventh principle is legal and policy alignment.

In England, children must receive suitable full-time education, but this does not legally have to happen in school. That distinction opens space for alternative models, though a full ERC system would require legislative, regulatory and funding changes. A pilot might operate through local authority commissioning, alternative provision, elective pathways, partnership with existing schools, post-16 provision, or special project status. Over time, the law would need to recognise ERCs as a legitimate form of publicly funded education.

This is where careful policy work matters.

Attendance rules would need adaptation.

Safeguarding responsibilities must be clear.

Funding formulas would need redesign.

Inspection frameworks would need to understand the model.

Qualifications access must be protected.

Transport and meals must be included.

SEND duties must remain strong.

Data systems must track learners without reducing them to institutional categories.

Staff contracts and professional status must be secured.

In other words, the policy architecture has to match the philosophy.

Otherwise the old system will quietly strangle the new one with forms.

The twelfth principle is professional training.

ERC facilitators need a recognised training pathway. This cannot be improvised. It should draw from teaching, youth work, community development, inclusive education, social pedagogy, safeguarding, project-based learning, digital and AI literacy, portfolio assessment and democratic education.

Universities, colleges and professional bodies could develop postgraduate certificates, apprenticeships or professional qualifications for ERC facilitation. Existing teachers could retrain or specialise. Youth workers could develop educational assessment skills. Librarians and community educators could join multidisciplinary pathways. The profession should have status, pay and progression.

If the facilitator role is underdefined, the model will fail.

If it is underpaid, it will become exploitation.

If it is treated as less professional than teaching, the model will reproduce the hierarchy it claims to replace.

The thirteenth principle is not to let private technology capture the model.

AI and digital access are essential, but ERCs must not become shopfronts for edtech platforms. Public procurement must be ethical. Data protection must be strict. Learners should understand how tools work. Open-source and public-interest tools should be explored where possible. AI should support learning, not monitor children into submission. The centre should teach critical use, not platform dependence.

This will be a major political fight. There is money in education technology, and wherever there is money, someone will arrive with a demo, a dashboard and the dead eyes of scalable disruption.

The ERC must keep technology in its place.

Useful.

Powerful.

Subordinate.

The fourteenth principle is that ERCs should generate local curriculum without becoming parochial.

Each centre should develop learning projects from local conditions: housing, flooding, transport, history, health, food, environment, work, culture, migration, public space, technology, local democracy. But every local project should open outward into wider knowledge. Hull’s docks open into empire, trade, labour, migration, ecology and global capitalism. A local flood opens into climate science, engineering, insurance, politics and inequality. A community kitchen opens into chemistry, nutrition, culture, agriculture, economics and care.

The local is the doorway.

Not the prison.

This matters because critics will worry that community-rooted education limits horizons. It should do the opposite. It should begin where learners stand and then show them how that place connects to the world.

The fifteenth principle is honesty about transition.

Not all schools will become ERCs immediately. Some may evolve gradually. Some may resist. Some may remain conventional for a long time. Some families may prefer traditional schools. Some learners may need specialist provision. Some rural areas may need different models. Some parts of the system may be hybrid for years.

That is fine.

The philosophical aim is to end the monopoly of school as the assumed centre of education. The practical path may involve plural transition. Schools could become partner institutions. Some could transform into ERCs. Some could share campuses. Some could send learners for part of the week. Some could integrate ERC principles internally. Some could eventually dissolve into broader learning commons.

The shift does not have to be theatrical to be radical.

The deepest revolutions are sometimes administrative at first, which is a terrible sentence but occasionally true.

The sixteenth principle is narrative.

This matters more than policy people like to admit. If Education Resource Centres are described badly, they will fail before they begin. The public must understand what they are and what they are not.

They are not anti-teacher.

They are not anti-knowledge.

They are not chaotic.

They are not only for excluded pupils.

They are not schools with beanbags.

They are not online learning centres.

They are not youth clubs.

They are not austerity replacements.

They are public learning commons.

Places where children, young people and adults access knowledge, skills, mentors, technology, practical workshops, community projects, formal qualifications, support and democratic participation.

The public story has to be clear:

Education should belong to the whole community.

Young people should learn through agency and support.

Teachers and facilitators should work in richer professional roles.

Older generations should pass on knowledge and learn in return.

AI should be a public learning tool, not a private shortcut.

Qualifications should open doors, not define childhood.

Communities should be resourced, not pathologised.

This is not lowering standards.

This is taking education seriously enough to rebuild it.

The seventeenth principle is political courage.

At some point, pilots, evidence, governance and careful language are not enough. A society has to decide whether it believes education can be different. Britain has become very good at describing crises and very poor at imagining alternatives proportionate to them. We tinker because tinkering feels responsible. We reform because reform sounds serious. We announce because announcement is cheaper than rebuilding. We commission reviews because reviews create the illusion of movement while everyone waits for the next minister to arrive with a new logo and the same old furniture.

An ERC pilot would require courage because it says the school model is not sacred.

That will unsettle people.

Good.

Some things need unsettling.

But courage should not mean recklessness. It should mean seriousness. Build one properly. Fund it properly. Staff it properly. Evaluate it properly. Let the community shape it. Let learners speak. Let teachers and youth workers design with researchers, not be ordered from above. Publish the failures. Fix the problems. Compare outcomes. Build the next one better.

That is how it begins.

Not with a national revolution announced from a podium.

With a place.

A building, or a network of buildings, in a real community.

A group of learners who need something different.

A staff team trusted to practise education rather than merely deliver schooling.

A public commitment to learning across generations.

A portfolio system that respects growth.

A workshop where practical intelligence has dignity.

A library where knowledge is open.

A digital lab where AI is used critically.

A kitchen where food becomes curriculum.

A civic space where young people learn democracy by doing it.

A community archive where memory becomes evidence.

A facilitator who knows the learner well enough to say: start here, but do not stop here.

If Britain wanted to begin, that is where it would begin.

Not by asking how to repair the school system for the hundredth time.

By building the first serious Education Resource Centre and asking a better question:

What happens when education is treated not as a compulsory institution, but as public learning infrastructure?

That question deserves an answer.

And the only honest way to answer it is to build, test, learn and build again.

All essays in this series sit inside Radical Education, an archive for rethinking learning beyond the limits of schooling, obedience, exams, and institutional imagination.

I started looking more closely at Turning Point UK because I have spent a long time studying Christian nationalism in the United States, long enough now to recognise the way it works even when the language shifts. The details change from country to country, but the underlying structure is familiar. Christianity becomes bound up with national identity. Liberalism is recast as moral decline. Immigration is treated not simply as a policy question but as a threat to the character of the nation. LGBT rights, feminism and secularism are folded into a wider story about cultural collapse, and politics becomes less about ordinary disagreement than about restoring a supposedly lost moral order.

Turning Point USA sits firmly inside that American ecosystem, so its British counterpart was an obvious place to look. The first question was straightforward enough: how deep did the relationship really go? Was Turning Point UK simply borrowing the American name, style and political language, or was there a deeper organisational or financial connection running beneath it?

That sent me into Companies House filings, Electoral Commission records, American non-profit accounts, archived websites, company histories and the sort of paperwork that makes you forget what day it is. I expected, if I am being truthful, that the investigation might eventually turn up a financial trail. Perhaps some direct American money, perhaps something more structured between the organisations.

It did not.

I found no evidence that Turning Point USA secretly funds Turning Point UK or its nearest political party UKIP, no clear financial pipeline from the American Christian right into British electoral politics, and no document showing that the British operation is directly controlled from the United States. What emerged instead was less dramatic, but in many ways more revealing: a small British network of people, companies and political organisations whose relationships become much clearer once you stop looking only at the public-facing brand.

At the centre of that present-day network sits Nick Tenconi.

UKIP has publicly described Tenconi as both its leader and chief operating officer of Turning Point UK. That single overlap tells us more than any speculative diagram ever could. It is a direct bridge between an activist organisation with roots in the American Turning Point movement and a registered British political party. Once you follow that bridge backwards, the wider structure begins to appear.

Turning Point UK did not emerge independently in Britain and then happen to discover that Charlie Kirk was already using the same name in America. Its origins were explicitly transatlantic. The British organisation launched in 2019 as a UK counterpart to Turning Point USA, borrowing the name, political model and much of the wider culture-war style. George Farmer was one of the key figures in that launch period, and Farmer’s relationship with Candace Owens connected him directly into the American Turning Point world at a time when Owens was one of the most recognisable figures in that ecosystem.

That does not mean Farmer and Owens are sitting somewhere today secretly directing Turning Point UK, and there is no evidence to support that sort of claim. Their importance is historical. They show the political environment in which Turning Point UK was created and the direction from which its early model came. George Farmer belongs to the organisation’s American-facing origins. Nick Tenconi belongs to what it has become.

The more interesting question, then, is what actually sits behind the Turning Point UK name today.

On the surface, Turning Point UK looks straightforward enough. It has a website, social-media accounts, memberships, donation links, merchandise and activists. Beneath that, however, the legal structure is less obvious.

Turning Point UK’s privacy material identifies Media & Activism Ltd as the company behind the operation. Companies House records place Oliver Anisfeld at the centre of that company’s formal control. Anisfeld therefore occupies a very different position from Tenconi. Tenconi is the public political figure, while Anisfeld sits around the legal and corporate infrastructure.

Anisfeld has interests in other media organisations too. That does not automatically drag those organisations into the same political project, and it would be misleading to describe everything he touches as part of some Christian nationalist machine. What it does show is that the corporate structure behind Turning Point UK is connected to a wider media world rather than existing in complete isolation.

Then came one of the more revealing moments in the investigation, and it began with what looked like a boring website mistake.

Turning Point UK’s privacy notice points to Media & Activism. Its terms and conditions, however, name Stand Up Media Ltd, while appearing to use Media & Activism’s company number. The company name points one way, the registration number another.

The most likely explanation is mundane. Someone copied or adapted a legal template and failed to change every detail. Websites are full of these mistakes.

The interesting part is what the mistake revealed.

Stand Up Media is not some random company left behind in an old template. It is a real communications company controlled by Jack Ross, another senior figure associated with Turning Point UK.

What appears to have been a routine website error had inadvertently exposed another company connected to the same political network.

That does not prove that Stand Up Media is secretly funded by Media & Activism, and it does not establish that the two companies operate as one entity. I found no invoice, contract or payment record proving that. But it raises an obvious question: how did the name and address of a company controlled by another senior Turning Point UK figure end up in Turning Point UK’s own legal terms?

The answer may still be entirely ordinary, but the mistake matters because it shows how much of the structure most supporters would never normally see.

Once the names are placed together, the organisation becomes easier to understand. Oliver Anisfeld controls Media & Activism. Jack Ross controls Stand Up Media. Nick Tenconi occupies a senior role within Turning Point UK while also leading UKIP. These are separate people with distinct roles, but the same small group keeps appearing across activism, media, communications and party politics.

Ross and Tenconi also appear together outside the immediate Turning Point structure. Ross founded the Vans Without Borders aid initiative, and Tenconi travelled to Ukraine with the project. Tenconi has publicly described Ross as a friend. There is nothing sinister about humanitarian work, and I am not suggesting otherwise. The relevance is simply that this is not a relationship inferred from two names appearing on the same website. There are real working and personal connections running through the group.

That is what makes the word network useful here. It describes what the evidence actually shows without pretending there is some secret command structure sitting above it all.

The financial side of the investigation was less explosive.

I spent a great deal of time going through UKIP accounts because one large category of income initially looked potentially significant. Around £174,000 stood out, and at first glance it was the sort of figure that makes you wonder whether something interesting is hiding inside it.

Most of it turned out to be bequests. Dead people had left UKIP money.

Not quite the international dark-money revelation I had imagined.

That matters because when the evidence produces a boring explanation, the boring explanation has to win. I found no public record showing Turning Point USA paying UKIP, Media & Activism, Stand Up Media or Tenconi’s own company. I found no evidence that Tenco Training was being used as a political financial vehicle, and no document proving that Media & Activism paid Stand Up Media.

There are still things the public filings do not explain. Media & Activism’s accounts include a £21,100 investment whose destination is not identified in the available filing, and its net assets moved significantly between reporting periods. UKIP’s accounts also contain substantial contractor and agency expenditure without publicly naming every recipient.

Those are legitimate questions, but they are not proof of misconduct. The more accurate description is that parts of the financial picture remain opaque. There is little to no public transparency. That’s the take away here.

Public filings tell us enough to know that money moves through these organisations, but not enough to reconstruct every relationship between them. We cannot currently say whether Stand Up Media provides paid services to Turning Point UK, whether UKIP has purchased services from people connected to the Turning Point network, whether Tenconi is paid by Turning Point UK through one of these entities, or whether there are shared resources such as staff time, media production or data.

Those questions remain open. And more deeper investigation into their finances will need to be done. However with what I did have, deeper I went, the more obvious it became that the most interesting part of the story was not financial at all.

It was Nick Tenconi himself.

Before his current political prominence, Tenconi’s public background was in fitness. His company, Tenco Training Ltd, dates back to 2014 and appears from the filings examined to have remained a small operation. His earlier work included personal training, coaching and boxing.

There is no evidence that Tenco Training itself is part of a political operation. It shares a registered address with Stand Up Media, but that address appears to be associated with an accountancy practice. Still another connection. Two small companies using the same professional address is not evidence of a secret headquarters, but it is more than a coincidence that they do share the same address..

The more interesting question is how the man behind what on paper looks like a failing fitness business became the political figure he is now.

During this investigation, I was contacted by someone who knew Tenconi personally before his rise through Turning Point UK and UKIP. I am keeping that person anonymous. Their account is useful because it describes a version of Tenconi that existed before the present political persona, but it remains one person’s recollection. Where I have not been able to verify the details, I am not presenting them as fact.

The Tenconi they remember is strikingly different from the man now speaking in the language of Christianity, nationalism and cultural collapse. They described someone who “projected as worldly but everything was a veneer”, politically reactionary and anti-woke even then, but not especially knowledgeable. Over time, they remember him becoming increasingly drawn to a more performative style of masculinity built around bodybuilding, boxing, cigars and a consciously harder public image.

Their personal judgement of him was considerably harsher. They described insecurity, financial difficulties, periods of living with his mother and housing problems. I have not independently established those claims, and I am not going to turn anonymous recollection into established fact simply because it is colourful. But I have no reason to disbelieve my source, even if I don’t have direct access to Tenconi’s background before he became a figure in the hard right Christian nationalist movement in the UK.

One detail is particularly interesting, though. The source remembers Tenconi as an atheist. While today Christianity sits at the centre of his public political identity.

There is nothing inherently suspicious about that. People change. People convert. Someone being an atheist at one point in life and Christian later proves nothing about the sincerity of their faith.

The relevant question is not whether Tenconi privately believes in God. The relevant question is what happens when Christianity becomes fused with his politics. And is his Christianity just part of the whole grift, the whole narrative of pushing Christian nationalism here in the UK.

His present public persona increasingly pulls together Christianity, nationalism, immigration, traditional masculinity and a wider story about cultural decline. That combination is where the resemblance to the American Christian nationalist ecosystem becomes harder to ignore.

Christian nationalism is not simply Christians having political opinions. Christians are entitled to political views like anyone else. The defining shift comes when Christianity stops being merely a faith and becomes part of the definition of the nation itself. The country is imagined as properly Christian. Secularism becomes decay. Minorities become evidence that the national character is being lost. LGBT rights and feminism are folded into a story about moral disorder, and political opponents are no longer simply wrong but part of the process by which the nation has supposedly been corrupted.

That machinery has become brutally effective in the United States.

Britain is different. Our relationship with religion is different, our political institutions are different and our culture is different. American Christian nationalism cannot simply be copied and pasted into Britain unchanged.

It has to be translated. That is where Turning Point UK becomes particularly interesting.

American rhetoric about “woke ideology” fits comfortably into Britain’s existing culture wars. Christian national restoration can be reframed as the recovery of a supposedly lost Christian Britain. American border panic translates easily into British panic about asylum seekers, Muslims and multiculturalism. Arguments about traditional masculinity blend naturally with hostility towards feminism, LGBT rights and progressive social politics.

The accent changes, but the political grammar remains recognisable.

Turning Point UK’s own trajectory reflects some of that shift. The organisation launched with a strong emphasis on the familiar American campus model: universities, free speech, student activism and supposed left-wing bias. The version operating today is much harder to understand simply as a student conservative organisation.

Tenconi has become increasingly visible in street demonstrations and culture-war confrontations around drag events, gender politics, immigration and nationalism. He has appeared within the same wider protest ecosystem as figures including Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox and Paul Golding.

That needs careful handling. Appearing at the same event does not make everyone members of the same organisation, and sharing a platform is not proof of shared command or membership. But repeated proximity still tells us something about where political alliances and overlapping audiences are forming. And how the hard right, anti-immigration and politics of division and hate in the UK overlap each other.

Back to Tenconi and his move into UKIP. That is where the story becomes much more important. Turning Point UK is an activist organisation. UKIP is a registered political party. Tenconi bridges the two.

There is no evidence that Turning Point UK has formally taken over UKIP, and nothing in the public record establishes that Media & Activism, Oliver Anisfeld or Jack Ross secretly control the party. That does not need to happen for political ideas and methods to move between organisations. But they are so closely aligned, the key figures involved have such a relationship, that to all intents and purposes they’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.

People carry politics with them. They bring their contacts, their media relationships, their language and their understanding of what the political battle is supposed to be about.

Tenconi matters because he occupies both worlds.

On one side is an organisation created directly from the American Turning Point model. On the other is a British political party. Around him sits an increasingly explicit mixture of Christianity, nationalism, anti-immigration politics, traditional masculinity and culture-war activism.

That is why, after all the financial digging, Tenconi became more interesting than the balance sheets.

He is the point where the network meets electoral politics.

Seen as a whole, the structure is surprisingly compact. George Farmer belongs to the launch period and the original American connection through Candace Owens and Turning Point USA. Oliver Anisfeld sits around the formal corporate infrastructure through Media & Activism. Jack Ross sits within the communications and organisational layer through Stand Up Media and his wider work around Turning Point UK. Nick Tenconi now occupies the political junction between Turning Point UK and UKIP.

None of that requires a secret hierarchy.

Modern political influence does not always work through one organisation sitting neatly above another. It often moves through overlapping companies, media projects, campaign groups, activists and political parties, with the same individuals appearing in different places and carrying ideas between them.

That is what makes these networks difficult to see if you examine every organisation separately.

After all this research, I cannot tell you that Turning Point USA secretly finances UKIP. I cannot tell you that Tenco Training is being used to move political money. I cannot tell you that George Farmer still controls Turning Point UK, or that every person who appears beside Tenconi belongs to one coordinated movement. I also cannot establish every claim made to me about Tenconi’s earlier private life.

Those limits matter, because I only operate with the facts and evidence I have. I have to, to counter the fake news and the misinformation that pours out of the hard right in this country. I have to ethically stand above them, and the sensationalism of the mainstream media, the media bias, the whole mainstream shitshow of lies and political agenda. I have to have journalistic integrity, wherever my investigations lead me.

What I can say is that Turning Point UK emerged directly from the American Turning Point ecosystem, that its public brand sits on top of a corporate structure most people will never have examined, that an apparent error in its own legal pages revealed another communications company controlled by another senior figure, and that the same small group of people repeatedly appears across activism, media and political organisation.

Most importantly, the man publicly identified as Turning Point UK’s chief operating officer now leads UKIP.

I began this investigation wondering whether American Christian nationalism was being financially pumped into Britain. Perhaps money will eventually form part of the wider picture, because there are still things the public records do not show. But concentrating entirely on cash risks missing the more ordinary way political movements spread.

Ideas do not need to arrive with a cheque attached to them. They move through people, organisations, media platforms and political parties, changing slightly as they go and adapting themselves to the country that receives them.

American Christian nationalism was never going to arrive in Britain unchanged. It had to be filtered through British history, British resentments and British politics.

Turning Point UK is one of the places where that process can now be seen.

Nick Tenconi is standing at the point where that activist world meets electoral politics.

I went looking for a hidden pipeline. What I found was a network sitting largely in plain sight. And one we should all be wary of expanding, as this Christian nationalist hard right ecosystem grows in the UK, the more it gets a foothold, the harder it will be to defeat.

Further Reading

When Does a Riot Become Terrorism: The uncomfortable question raised by Thetford

The World’s Smallest Violin for Britain’s Biggest Victim

The Ann Widdecombe Case and the Mechanics of Narrative Collapse

Bin Face vs Frog Face - Special Report: Clacton 2026 Candidate Assessment

The Political Obituary of Nigel Farage (We Hope)

Nigel Farage: The Billionaire’s Man of the People

The Fall of Nigel Farage: The Pint-Man Prophet Finds the Bar Tab

Farage’s Brexit Betrayal Myth Is Just the Same Old Con in a New Hat

Farage Is Not Demanding Democracy. He Is Demanding Advantage.

Farage vs the Evidence: A forensic dismantling of the “two-tier Britain” narrative

How Do You Bring Them Back?: The Outrage Machine, the Failure of Politics, and the Working-Class Case for Reason How do you bring them back?

The Tide Is Coming In: Migration Is History Coming Home

Don’t Let Them Turn Henry Nowak Into a Race War Poster

Is Britain Turning Far Right, or Is the Megaphone Just Too Loud?

Fear, Freedom, and the Emotional Architecture of Politics

Democracy, Populism, and the Death of the Nation-State

Reform UK and the Cult of the Outrage Machine

Normalising Hate: The Political Decay of Post-Brexit Britain

Exposing the “Grooming Gangs” Myth: White British Men and the Truth About Sexual Abuse in the UK

The Big Lie vs The Big Truth: Who Really Abuses Women and Children in the UK

Debunking Common Myths About Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in the UK

A few days ago, I watched what was happening in Thetford and called it domestic terrorism on a Threads post.

Straight out. No caveats. No legal hedging. No carefully balanced language designed to give me somewhere to retreat later. I saw mobs targeting homes they believed contained asylum seekers, people attempting to get inside, property being damaged, police officers being attacked and frightened residents having to be moved for their own safety, and I called it what it looked like to me.

Domestic terrorism.

The post went ballistic. Lots of people agreed with me. And then I sat with it.

Because lots of people agreeing with me doesn’t make me right. Outrage isn’t evidence, and however strongly I might feel about something, or how many people agreed with me, my anger doesn’t get to rewrite British law.

I’d used an incredibly serious and incendiary term, so I wanted to know whether I could actually defend it.

Was what happened in Thetford terrorism?

Not, did it look like terrorism? Not, was it terrifying? Not, were the people responsible behaving like violent racist thugs?

Was it terrorism according to the law?

So I did something social media isn’t particularly good at encouraging us to do.

I slowed the fuck down.

I got out the Terrorism Act 2000. I went through what happened in Thetford. I looked at Britain’s history of extreme-right terrorism, at organisations we’ve already proscribed, and at previous cases where Counter Terrorism Policing has had to decide whether far-right violence crossed that line.

I was perfectly prepared to discover I’d overreached. I don’t think I did. My instinct was, that I’d called it. But if I didn’t test it, I’d be as bad as the misinformation morons that litter all our feeds. In fact though, having gone through it all, I think what happened in Thetford should be treated as suspected domestic terrorism and investigated with that seriousness. Why? Well let’s slow it down and break it down.

Suspected is the key word here. It’s not the same as declaring anyone guilty of a terrorism offence. It isn’t calling for convictions without trials, and it certainly isn’t me conducting criminal proceedings from my kitchen table.

It means something much simpler. I think there is enough here for Counter Terrorism Policing to start asking questions.

And I think those questions need to go considerably further than Thetford.

What happened in Thetford?

Before getting anywhere near terrorism legislation, we need to separate legitimate political protest from what actually happened.

You can oppose immigration. You can oppose asylum policy. You can oppose the government’s plans to accommodate asylum seekers in your community. You can protest outside Parliament, a council building or a government facility. You can march, write to your MP, shout yourself hoarse and vote for whichever politician promises to solve it.

That’s politics.

What happened in Thetford crossed into something else.

Over several nights, properties believed to contain asylum seekers were deliberately targeted. More than 100 protesters were involved. People attempted to enter homes. Property was damaged. Police officers were assaulted. One officer was struck with a rock, another was bitten and another spat at. People inside targeted properties had to be protected and asylum seekers were ultimately moved for their safety.

These weren’t Home Office buildings. They weren’t council offices. They weren’t the structures and institutions that are legitimate things to protest against. They were people’s homes. That’s the line that was crossed.

And there was another detail that immediately bothered me.

There was a list.

Addresses linked to asylum accommodation had circulated online before properties were targeted. That matters, because it introduces something beyond a spontaneous protest becoming violent.

It introduces targeting. So what happens when we put all of that against the actual law?

What does Britain call terrorism?

The popular idea of terrorism is considerably narrower than the legal one.

Say terrorist and most people immediately construct a picture. Bombs. Guns. Organised cells. Balaclavas. Decades of politics and news coverage have also conditioned us to associate the word with particular religions, ethnicities and foreign conflicts.

The Terrorism Act doesn’t define terrorism according to what the person committing it looks like.

Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides the test. In broad terms relevant here, the conduct must involve things such as serious violence against a person, serious damage to property, endangering life or creating a serious risk to public safety. It must be designed to influence government or intimidate the public or a section of the public, and it must be undertaken for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

That’s the framework. Now put Thetford beside it.

There was violence and property damage. Police officers were assaulted and attempts were made to enter homes.

Whether every incident meets the precise legal threshold of serious violence or serious damage isn’t something I can determine. That’s precisely the kind of thing investigators and prosecutors determine from evidence.

But there is plainly conduct there to examine.

Then we get to intimidation.

The Act doesn’t require the entire population to be frightened. It specifically refers to intimidating “the public or a section of the public.”

Who was being targeted in Thetford?

Asylum seekers.

Not randomly selected residents. Not whoever happened to be standing nearby. Properties were being targeted because people believed asylum seekers lived inside them, and some of those people ultimately had to be moved for their own safety.

I can’t know the intention of every person standing in those crowds. Some may have gone purely to protest. Some may have followed others. Some may have intended violence. Criminal responsibility is individual, and those distinctions matter, if we’re dispassionately going to examine this.

But when members of an identifiable group are located in their homes, crowds arrive, people attempt to enter and the occupants have to be moved somewhere else for their own protection, asking whether that section of the public was being intimidated isn’t stretching the Terrorism Act.

It’s reading it. It’s matching facts again legislation.

Then comes ideology.

Being anti-immigration isn’t terrorism. Being racist doesn’t automatically make somebody a terrorist. Protest against asylum policy isn’t terrorism. But again, there is a legal line.

But what happened in Thetford didn’t materialise in an ideological vacuum.

The unrest arose from anti-asylum mobilisation. Properties believed to contain asylum seekers were specifically targeted. The Guardian reported far-right involvement and people referring to asylum seekers as “invaders”.

So again, the relevant question is straightforward.

Were particular acts of violence and intimidation undertaken for the purpose of advancing a political, racial or ideological cause?

I think there is more than enough here to justify finding out. And I think we all know the answer to that one. Even before any investigation, there is sizable politically motivated anti-immigration ecosystem out there, that is becoming more and more threatening in it’s rhetoric and it would appear, actions.

Anyway we return to those addresses, that list circulating online. As that is key.

Where did the list come from?

This may ultimately prove extremely important.

We know information identifying properties associated with asylum accommodation circulated online. We know properties were subsequently targeted.

What we don’t currently know is where that information originally came from. There are rumours and allegations circulating about that. I’m deliberately not repeating them because rumours aren’t evidence. Perhaps somebody painstakingly assembled the addresses from information available publicly. That seems unlikely.

But that’s something investigators need to establish.

Because imagine, purely hypothetically, that an investigation discovered the addresses came from somebody with privileged access to them. That’s where the internet rumours have gone. A leaked list feels most likely, but that still isn’t evidence.

But let’s imagine evidence showed that a person supplied them knowing or intending that they would be used to identify asylum seekers for intimidation or violence.

Suddenly the evidential picture changes dramatically.

You potentially have the advance identification of a particular group of civilians, deliberate provision of their locations, subsequent targeting of those locations, ideological motivation, intimidation, violence and property damage.

And if, hypothetically, whoever supplied that information happened to be connected to a certain political organisation, that would create another set of questions.

It wouldn’t make that organisation immediately responsible. Political affiliation isn’t collective guilt. A handful of supporters or members of any political party committing crimes doesn’t make the party responsible for those crimes.

The question would be how deep the connection went.

Was somebody acting independently? Were other members involved? Were political or organisational networks being used? Did officials know anything? Was anybody facilitating or encouraging what was happening?

Those aren’t allegations. They’re questions.

And saying those connections haven’t been proved is not an argument against investigating them.

Finding out whether the connections exist is what an investigation is for.

Britain already knows what far-right terrorism looks like

This isn’t unexplored legal territory.

In December 2016, National Action became the first extreme-right organisation proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Britain.

The Home Office described it as a neo-Nazi organisation whose propaganda repeatedly featured extreme violence. Crucially, the government also cited its promotion and encouragement of terrorism after the murder of Jo Cox when concluding that it was “concerned in terrorism”.

National Action was not the end of the story.

Britain subsequently proscribed other extreme-right organisations and networks, including Sonnenkrieg Division, Feuerkrieg Division, Atomwaffen Division and The Base.

Then there is Terrorgram.

Terrorgram is particularly interesting because it challenges the old image of what a terrorist organisation has to look like.

It is an online transnational extreme-right network. The government’s assessment says its leadership coordinated propaganda intended to radicalise people, encouraged terrorist violence and distributed instructional material. The Home Office concluded that it was both preparing for and encouraging terrorism.

I’m not saying Thetford is the same as National Action. I’m not saying whatever loose networks existed around the disorder constitute a connection to Terrorgram. I’m certainly not saying any mainstream political party is a terrorist organisation.

The comparison is about something much more fundamental.

Britain has already accepted that extreme-right ideology can produce terrorism.

Indeed, the government’s own counter-terrorism guidance explicitly recognises extreme-right-wing terrorism as a category.

So when ideologically motivated far-right violence occurs, there is no principled reason the terrorism framework should suddenly become unavailable simply because the people involved don’t resemble the terrorists we have been culturally trained to imagine.

Dover shows us how this should work

There is an even better precedent because it shows what investigation actually looks like. In October 2022, a man threw crude incendiary devices at an immigration centre in Dover.

Counter Terrorism Policing became involved.

They didn’t begin with a predetermined conclusion.

Investigators spoke to witnesses, recovered evidence and examined digital devices. From that investigation they established an extreme-right motivation and concluded that the attack had been motivated by terrorist ideology. They also found no evidence that the perpetrator had been working with anyone else.

That’s important. They didn’t prove terrorism and then investigate it. They investigated it to determine whether it was terrorism. And that’s exactly the distinction I’m making about Thetford. And I think it meets the legal threshold, that it should be investigated as such.

Thetford isn’t happening in isolation

This is where I think we need to widen the lens.

Thetford isn’t the first time Britain has recently watched far-right or anti-migrant mobilisation move from rhetoric and social media into real-world intimidation and violence.

During the 2024 disorder, a list containing dozens of immigration centres and advice organisations circulated online amid threats of far-right action. Thousands of police officers were deployed and immigration lawyers feared their workplaces would be attacked.

This June, addresses were again circulated online during racist disorder in Belfast. Families from minority communities described being terrified as homes and businesses were targeted.

Now we have Thetford.

At some point, treating every eruption as a completely isolated incident becomes inadequate.

Someone needs to start connecting the dots.

And yes, I think that means examining political rhetoric too.

Up to and including Nigel Farage.

Words don’t exist in a vacuum

This is where people will immediately start shouting that I’m blaming Nigel Farage for a riot. I’m not. I want to, I do personally think he is responsible for a lot of the hate and violence happening in this country. But, whether I want it to be or not, if somebody throws a brick while wearing a Reform T-shirt, Nigel Farage isn’t legally responsible for the brick.

That’s not how responsibility works.

But neither should political rhetoric receive some magical exemption from scrutiny when we’re examining how extremist environments develop.

Farage has publicly called for “pure, cold rage” as part of his political rhetoric. There is also a separate, documented pattern in the way he has interacted with far-right audiences online. A Guardian investigation, found some damning evidence of Farage’s connections to far-right extremism online, and his use of Cameo. Cameo is a platform where members of the public pay celebrities and public figures to record personalised video messages. Farage made thousands of these paid videos. In one, commissioned for a man convicted of violent disorder during the 2024 far-right riots, Farage told him his 16-month sentence was “absolutely outrageous”, said he had “been through the mill”, urged him to “keep believing in the right things” and finished by saying, “I’m with you as well.”

The same Guardian investigation found another paid Cameo video in which Farage unknowingly promoted an event organised by leaders of Diagolon, a Canadian far-right extremist group with neo-Nazi associations. He was also found to have repeated or alluded more than 20 times to the anti-immigration slogan “If in doubt, kick them out”, a phrase used at Tommy Robinson rallies and protests against asylum accommodation. Farage’s spokesperson said the videos were made in good faith, that he did not necessarily know who the recipients were, and that they should not be treated as political endorsements.

That makes the reason for including it much clearer: the point is not that Farage knowingly endorsed neo-Nazis. The point is that his rhetoric repeatedly travels through, overlaps with, and is consumed within the same far-right political ecosystem we are asking investigators to examine.

Farage has also publicly condemned political violence at other times.

What I am interested in isn’t simply what a politician later says they intended.

I’m interested in what audiences hear.

Political rhetoric has always exploited ambiguity. A politician can use language carrying enormous emotional force while retaining enough literal distance to say afterwards that anybody interpreting it violently misunderstood them.

Perhaps they did.

But when supporters repeatedly interpret political messages through a language of invasion, betrayal, rage, enemies and existential threat, and some of those people subsequently move from keyboards to streets, the relationship between rhetoric, networks and action becomes a legitimate subject for investigation.

Not assumption. Investigation. Look at the communications, the networks. Look at who organises demonstrations, how information moves between groups. Look at where these target lists originate. Look at whether apparently separate outbreaks share activists, organisers, channels or political connections.

And if there is no meaningful connection?

Good.

Establish that.

But don’t refuse to look because following the evidence into mainstream politics might become uncomfortable.

Connect the dots

This is ultimately where my position has landed.

I don’t know where the Thetford address list originated.

Find out.

I don’t know whether people targeting those houses were connected only through loose social-media networks or through something more organised.

Find out.

I don’t know whether the same networks or individuals connect different episodes of far-right violence around Britain.

Find out.

I don’t know whether any politician’s rhetoric can be evidentially connected to particular organisers or particular acts.

Find out.

That’s what Counter Terrorism Policing is capable of doing in a way that journalists, campaigners and people sitting at kitchen tables aren’t. Follow the communications. Establish the relationships. Determine intent. Separate coincidence from coordination and rhetoric from instruction.

Then follow the evidence wherever it goes.

So, was I wrong?

That’s what I set out to discover.

I called what happened in Thetford domestic terrorism.

Then I questioned myself. I read the legislation. I looked at the known evidence rather than the rumours. I looked at Britain’s history of extreme-right terrorism. I looked at National Action and Terrorgram. I looked at Dover and how Counter Terrorism Policing actually determines whether extreme-right violence crosses the terrorism threshold.

And after all of that?

I still think Thetford should be treated as suspected domestic terrorism.

I think there is enough evidence to take that possibility seriously.

That doesn’t mean arresting everybody involved as terrorists. It doesn’t mean banning political organisations because some of their supporters behave appallingly. It doesn’t mean starting with a conclusion and forcing the evidence to fit it. It means investigating what happened with sufficient seriousness to determine whether the statutory terrorism threshold was crossed.

And I think the investigation should follow the networks surrounding it.

The violence. The organisation. The addresses. The online groups. The political connections. The rhetoric. The people moving information between the online world and the street.

Where those connections don’t exist, say so.

Where they do, follow them.

Because Britain has already accepted that extreme-right terrorism exists. We already have legislation designed to identify it. We already have police whose job includes investigating it.

What we cannot do is reserve the word terrorism for people who conform to some comfortable stereotype while repeatedly treating ideologically motivated violence from the far right as merely another riot that somehow got a little out of hand.

I began this with an angry Threads post. I questioned it and I checked myself. I went looking for reasons I might have been wrong. I haven’t found enough to make me withdraw what I said. I’ve found enough to think somebody with considerably greater investigative powers than me should start asking the same questions.

Take the politics out of it. Take my opinion out of it.

Put the evidence on the table. Put the Terrorism Act beside it.

Connect the dots.

Apply the test.

Further Reading

The World’s Smallest Violin for Britain’s Biggest Victim

The Ann Widdecombe Case and the Mechanics of Narrative Collapse

Bin Face vs Frog Face - Special Report: Clacton 2026 Candidate Assessment

The Political Obituary of Nigel Farage (We Hope)

Nigel Farage: The Billionaire’s Man of the People

The Fall of Nigel Farage: The Pint-Man Prophet Finds the Bar Tab

Farage’s Brexit Betrayal Myth Is Just the Same Old Con in a New Hat

Farage Is Not Demanding Democracy. He Is Demanding Advantage.

Farage vs the Evidence: A forensic dismantling of the “two-tier Britain” narrative

How Do You Bring Them Back?: The Outrage Machine, the Failure of Politics, and the Working-Class Case for Reason How do you bring them back?

The Tide Is Coming In: Migration Is History Coming Home

Don’t Let Them Turn Henry Nowak Into a Race War Poster

Is Britain Turning Far Right, or Is the Megaphone Just Too Loud?

Fear, Freedom, and the Emotional Architecture of Politics

Democracy, Populism, and the Death of the Nation-State

Reform UK and the Cult of the Outrage Machine

Normalising Hate: The Political Decay of Post-Brexit Britain

Exposing the “Grooming Gangs” Myth: White British Men and the Truth About Sexual Abuse in the UK

The Big Lie vs The Big Truth: Who Really Abuses Women and Children in the UK

Debunking Common Myths About Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in the UK